Arrows of Desire

A new anthology of uncollected writings by Peter Wollen, cultural critic, avant-garde filmmaker and curator of paradigm-shifting exhibitions.

This collection, the first of three new volumes, brings together unpublished and inaccessible writings on counter-cinema, anti-imperialist politics and revolutionary Mexican art. Playful, theoretically rigorous and historically precise, Peter Wollen’s writing reinvented criticism as a formally experimental practice indexing the intellectual, political and artistic histories of the twentieth century.

Arrows of Desire presents texts on Eisenstein and Godard alongside essays and interviews tracing developments in film and video from the 1970s to the 1990s. It tracks the political energies running through Wollen’s filmmaking and writing on global politics and culture in relation to Iran, Indonesia, Palestine, Aden and Zanzibar. Wollen’s rereading of the avant-garde extends into expansive projects linking Mexican muralism, Native American abstraction and US abstract expressionism. These essays and proposals demonstrate his commitment to contesting the dominant histories and geographies of modernism and modernity.