"Without doubt, it is the best study of cinema published in English for years." —Cinema
"... a major achievement... drawing on the results of aesthetic inquiry—from Shaftesbury and Lessing to Jakobson and the formalists—in order to relate the cinema to wider areas of linguistic theory and theory of art." —Times Literary Supplement

Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, New and Enlarged Edition

Humor & Entertainment

Wollen, Peter

Movies

Indiana University Press

A revised second edition of the text, this work explores the way in which a new approach to the cinema can be combined with a new approach to aesthetics. The book is divided into three main sections: the first deals with the work of S.M. Eisenstein, both as a director and theorist of his art. The second concerns the auteur theory and investigates the recurrence of themes and images throughout a dirrector's career. The third section shows how the study of cinema can be considered as a province of the general study of signs.

Signs and meaning in the cinema (Cinema one, 9)

Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture

Arts & Photography

Texts by Peter Wollen, Greil Marcus, Tom Levin, Mark Francis, Elisabeth Sussman, Mirella Bandini, and Troels Anderson. These photographs, essays, drawings, and original texts document the rich agit-art legacy of the Situationist International, a group of European artists and writers who emerged from such avant-garde movements as COBRA, Lettrisme, and the Imaginary Bauhaus and from the breakup of surrealism to launch a strategy of art as cultural critique. The SI's attempt to transform everyday life through paintings, films, manifestos, posters, pamphlets, maquettes, acts, and agitations culminated in the 1968 student uprising in Paris and shifted the focus of the situationist platform from aesthetic concerns to political instigation. Elisabeth Sussman describes the significance of the SI exhibit at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art in the context of American Museums Mark Francis's introduction explains the background of the SI and is followed by a documentary section that includes translations of emblematic pre-situationist and situationist texts. The SI, prominent situationist artists, and their techniques are then examined and critiqued in five insightful essays. Peter Wollen looks at the SI in light of its paradigmatic attempt to marry art and politics. He evaluates the traditions that led to and from this moment of fusion and to its successes and its failures. Greil Marcus examines Memoires, a collaborative book project by the painter Asger Jorn and the writer and theorist Guy Debord. Marcus's close reading of the book's construction in which a series of clips or "appropriations" from mass media sources were splattered with paint, shows that it literally demonstrates the situationist technique of detournement the dislocation or "turning" of the everyday. Tom Levin focuses on the films of Guy Debord and on their relation to the Lettrist cinema and the American avant-garde cinema of the early 1960s. Two brief essays by Troels Andersen and Mirella Bandini respectively take up Asger Jorn's relationship to the SI and the 1956 Congress at Alba that laid the foundations for the formation of the SI. Co-published with The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and distributed by The MIT Press.

On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: Situationist International 1957-1972 (Inst of Contemporary Art, Boston)

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

Signs and Meaning in the Cinema

Secker Warburg

Signs and meaning in the cinema (Cinema one)

Thames and Hudson in association with the British Film Institute

Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies

Schocken Books

Forty Years after it first appeared, Singin' in the Rain remains one of the best loved films ever made. Yet despite dazzling success with the public, it never received its fair share of praise from the critics. Gene Kelly's genius as a performer is there for all to see. What is less acknowledged is his innovatory contribution as director. Peter Wollen has finally done justice to this landmark film. In a brilliant shot-by-shot analysis of the famous title number, illustrated by specially produced frame stills, he shows how skillfully Kelly binds the dance and musical elements into the narrative, and how he successfully combines two distinctive traditions within American Dance, tap and ballet. Scriptwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and indeed Kelly himself, were all under threat from the McCarthyism which menaced Hollywood at this time. The ethos in which the film was conceived could not long survive in the era of blacklisting. Wollen argues convincingly that Singin' in the Rain was the high point in the careers of those who worked on it.

Singin' in the Rain (BFI Film Classics)

British Film Institute

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

Verso

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Books by Wollen, Peter