Wollen was born on June 29, 1938, in Woodford, northeast London, to Douglas and Winifred Wollen. Douglas was a Methodist minister and Winifred was a teacher. Peter attended a Methodist boarding school, Kingswood School, in Bath, Somerset, England. In 1959, Wollen graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in English literature. In 1968, Wollen married noted film theorist and his partner in filmmaking, Laura Mulvey. They divorced in 1993 and soon afterward he wed writer and artist, Leslie Dick. He had a son from his first marriage and a daughter from his second. Wollen died of Alzheimer's disease on December 17, 2019, from which he had suffered for many years.
Academic career
By the mid-1960s, Wollen was writing for journals such as the New Left Review under the pseudonym of Lee Russell. Through a bit of self-reflexivity, Wollen interviewed himself as Lee Russell in 1997. Wollen joined the British Film Institute's education department in the late 1960s, at the behest of its director, Paddy Whannel, who had been impressed by his work. Wollen explained, "One of the basic goals of the education department was to support anyone who wanted to teach film in schools or universities. And one way to support them was by publishing books which they could use in class." Subsequently, the BFI created a series of film books titled, "Cinema One," and Signs and Meaning in the Cinema was the ninth book released under that banner. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema's initial publication in 1969 was followed by a revised edition, with a new appendix, just three years later. It quickly gained traction in the burgeoning film-studies world of the 1970s. In 1976, Robin Wood contended, "Peter Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema is probably the most influential book on film in English of the past decade." And the book has continued to wield influence decades later—having been released in a fifth, "silver" edition in 2013. In a Sight & Sound poll in 2010, Signs and Meaning repeatedly cropped up—leading critic Nick Roddick to exclaim, "If there is one book to rule them all, it is Peter Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. The revised and enlarged edition of 1972 is the most concise, lucid and inspiring introduction to thinking about film ever written."
Filmography
Wollen's first film credit was as cowriter of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, and he made his debut as a director with Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons, the first of six films cowritten and co-directed with his wife, Laura Mulvey. The low-budget Penthesilea portrayed women's language and mythology as silenced by patriarchal structures. Acknowledging the influence of Jean-Luc Godard's Le Gai savoir, Wollen intended the film to fuse avant-garde and radically political elements. The resulting work is innovative in the context of British cinema history, although its relentlessly didactic approach did not make for mass appeal. For Riddles of the Sphinx, Wollen and Mulvey obtained a BFI Production Board grant, which enabled them to work with greater technical resources, rewriting the Oedipal myth from a female standpoint. The deliberately ahistorical AMY!, commemorating Amy Johnson's solo flight from Britain to Australia, synthesises themes previously covered by Wollen and Mulvey. In Crystal Gazing formal experimentation is muted and narrative concerns emphasised. Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, a short film tied to an international art exhibition curated by Wollen, and The Bad Sister, a drama based on a novel by Emma Tennant, were the final projects on which Wollen and Mulvey collaborated. Wollen's only solo feature, Friendship's Death, starring Bill Paterson and Tilda Swinton, is the story of the relationship between a British war correspondent and a female extraterrestrial robot on a peace mission to Earth, who, missing her intended destination of MIT, inadvertently lands in Amman, Jordan during the events of Black September 1970.
