This week, Film Notes presents a lightly abridged version of Peter Wollen’s “Knight’s Moves,” on the occasion of the publication of Arrows of Desire: Selected Writings 1963–2002 (Verso, 2026), edited by Kodwo Eshun, Oliver Fuke, and Nicolas Helm-Grovas. In this essay, first published in 2002 (Public, no. 25), Wollen revisits the intertwined histories of art and film avant-gardes, drawing on his experience as a critic and filmmaker. He reexamines the aesthetic divisions within experimental and artists’ cinema and emphasizes the role of artistic communities and screening spaces in sustaining formal experimentation, returning throughout to counter-cinema’s political ambitions.
From the essay:
“Experimental film,” “Pure Film,” “Underground film,” “Co-op film,” “Avant-garde film,” “Counter-cinema” ... How distant all these terms seem from the vantage point of today, how dated, how nostalgic, how difficult to explain. I am afraid that, to make sense of them, I shall have to be shamelessly autobiographical, to go back over forty years or more in order to puzzle out the complex and confusing ways in which the theory and practice of avant-garde cinema developed and changed.
... The history of experimental film is broken and diverse—rather, as in Viktor Shklovsky’s image, it proceeded by knight’s moves, going forward much of the time but always obliquely, sometimes aggressive, sometimes defensive, according to a strategy which was always difficult to define and second-guess. There are, however, some constants. Experimental film did not develop in an artistic vacuum; as well as its contrasts and connections with the commercial cinema, experimental film also had connections and contrasts with the other arts—painting, of course (itself a visual art), as well as music (another time-based art), and even poetry, particularly “imagist poetry,” but also “typographic poetry.” In particular, the influence of painting and music often pushed experimental film towards animation as a working method and abstraction as a goal—Eggeling, Richter, Fischinger, McLaren, the Whitney brothers, and many, many others.
... I entered these debates in the Seventies, shortly before I first began to make films myself, in partnership with Laura Mulvey. The articles I wrote then were designed to justify the feature film format as a viable way of making an experimental film with a political argument. In fact, we made two feature-length films: theirst—Penthesilea—made in Evanston, Illinois, in 1974, and the second—Riddles of the Sphinx—made in London, England, in 1977. Both Penthesilea and Riddles of the Sphinx were structured in segments without any continuity editing. The segments were rather like long chapters and were designed both to tell a story, schematically at least, and to raise a number of political issues, particularly feminist issues.
... In 1974, when asked which filmmakers most interested me, I replied, “Straub, Godard, Joyce Wieland, Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton for Zorns Lemma, Jackie Raynal for Deux fois.” Then I added, “I’m more interested in Hitchcock than before.”
