Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen

Towards Counter-Cinema

Series: 

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen produced some of the most influential writings in film theory, such as Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and Wollen’s The Two Avant-Gardes. In the same period, the pair made six films together. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Towards Counter-Cinema is the first book-length study of their work. Moving across Mulvey and Wollen’s writings and films, it situates their work in a detailed account of the shifting conjunctures in which it was generated. Traversing psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism and semiotics, it draws on extensive archival research to present an in-depth study of these theorist-filmmakers and the wider field of 1970s British "counter-cinema".
Copyright Year:
2026
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ISBN:
978-90-04-75208-5
Publication:
16 Feb 2026
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Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-75207-8
Publication:
19 Mar 2026
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Nicolas Helm-Grovas is Postdoctoral Fellow at Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), Berlin. His writing has appeared in publications such as Oxford Art Journal, Radical Philosophy, Trafic: Almanach de cinéma, New Left Review: Sidecar, and in various edited collections.
Acknowledgments
List of Figures

Introduction
 1 Film Theory, Theorist-Filmmakers, Theory Films
 2 (Objective) Alliance
 3 From Notes and Manifestos to Afterthoughts and Retrospects

Part 1 Elements of Counter-Cinema



1 Models
 1 Post-’68 Contexts
 2 The Soviet Model
 3 Women’s Work: Past and Present
 4 Counter-Cinema as Counter-Form

2 Metalanguage, Theory Film, Scorched Earth
 1 Semiotics and Realism, or Eisenstein contra Metz
 2 Semiotics of the Avant-Garde
 3 Feminism/Psychoanalysis
 4 Scorched Earth, or Film as Ideology Critique: Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons

Part 2 The Autonomous Space of Counter-Cinema



3 For an Avant-Garde Break
 1 Counter-Cinema as Counter-Institution
 2 The Destruction of Pleasure and the Pleasure of Destruction
 3 A Materialist Theory of Cinema and Materialist Cinema of Theory

4 Counter-Cinema as Feminist Cinema
 1 Feminism and Melodrama
 2 Feminism and the Avant-Garde
 3 Social Reproduction, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Unconscious: Riddles of the Sphinx

Part 3 Leaving Counter-Cinema



5 From Complex Seeing to Afterthoughts and Retrospects
 1 The Nightmare of Independent Film
 2 Factography, Interpellation and the Biography of the Subject: AMY!
 3 Once More on Semiotics, Realism and the Avant-Garde
 4 Reconsidering Godard, Reconsidering Visual Pleasure
 5 An End of an Era Movie: Crystal Gazing

Conclusion: On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time

Bibliography
Index
This book is particularly relevant for researchers and students in film, media, art history, and cultural theory.
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