Laura Mulvey on ‘Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons’
Peter’s and my shared love of Hollywood films had, from the earliest days of our relationship, been an integral part of our daily and our social lives. But in the early 1970s our attitudes and commitment to the cinema changed. The Hollywood studio system was, by then, a thing of the past and we began to discover new avant-garde and feminist experimental films: cinema as critique, film as a radical aesthetic for a radical politics. However, our actual move into filmmaking, the beginning of the Mulvey/Wollen collaboration, was more or less a product of circumstance or, even perhaps, chance. In 1972, Peter was invited to work in the Department of Radio, Film and Television at Northwestern University by Paddy Whannel (who had given Peter his first proper job at the BFI Education Department in the mid-1960s). Peter and Paddy’s relationship, professional and personal, had been founded on a mutual love of Hollywood cinema and I, although professionally marginal, had always been included in this cinephilic bonding. But with the changing times Peter’s interests and writing shifted towards counter-cinema, publishing his essay ‘Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est in 1972, and I began to write ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. At some point in 1973, Peter asked Paddy if he could teach an MA seminar on avant-garde film. Of course, Paddy agreed. But soon after, he said: ‘If you and Laura are so keen on the avant-garde now days, make a film yourselves. We have a whole cupboard of equipment here, not used in the vacation. See what you can do!’ Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons was made in response to this challenge.
Furthermore, living in Evanston, Peter and I were both cut off from our political roots in London. I had belonged to the History Group, a Women’s Liberation reading group, and helped out with the administration of the London Women’s Liberation Workshop. Peter was still on the Editorial Boards of Screen and New Left Review, but at a distance. 7 Days, in which he had been closely involved in the early 70s, had failed to survive. I sometimes think that, in that comparative political isolation (our son Chad, aged three, was, of course, with us), we turned to each other as though to found a minimal collective, a small filmmaking and study group, as it were. Our first film emerged gradually. It was rooted in our recent polemical writing, inspired by the new horizons of possibility offered by films of ideas and revolved around issues, thrown up by feminism, that directly challenged the cinema, its imagery and its modes of storytelling. The actual process began with research: reading and discussion around, for instance, Amazons in ancient Greek culture and beyond, the psychoanalytic implications of the Amazon figure and Kleist’s rewriting of the Penthesilea legend, an interweaving of myth and the historical realities of women in struggle… all producing endless notes, charts and conversations. The process of producing Penthesilea did not involve writing a script as such but, in keeping with Peter’s and my tendency to think through diagrams and patterns, the words grew out of the film’s evolution, through its various planning stages.
When we moved back to London, in late 1974, we found a new flourishing film cultural environment. Although the independent film movement had definitely been in the process of taking off when we left, it had gathered momentum. Having made Penthesilea, we not only arrived back home as filmmakers but also found a film culture that recognised the rationale for this work of feminist counter-cinema. It was this movement and this moment that gave a further impetus to Peter’s and my collaboration. I sometimes think that in other circumstances Penthesilea might have been a one-off oddity; but it became, in fact, a crucial stepping stone both for our further film production and for the further development of our ideas.
The first step in the composition of all our films (until The Bad Sister, that is) was to arrange the thematic material we had collected together into a structure, which was ultimately organised into a series of parts or sequences. In a sense, this represents an aesthetic of layering or ‘piling up’ of ideas and images; our ‘counter-cinema’ commitment to challenging the transparency and the horizontal flow of both language and cinema is extended to structure. Rather than ‘narrative or cinematic incident’ leading seamlessly from one to another, the structure accumulates and also makes visible its fissures and gaps.
In Penthesilea, the sequences are visually and thematically cumulative. The first, a simple registration of Kleist’s version of the story in mime, is complicated in the second. Here the camera’s autonomous movement, its ‘take’ on the space and the performance, is additional to Peter’s commentary on Kleist and the Amazon legend, already as he put it ‘a palimpsest and a maze’. In the third sequence, images of Amazons are layered across history and mythology. In the fourth, the layering takes the form of cinematic superimposition; the suffragette film What 80 Million Women Want (1913) is switched alternately from foreground to background with an actor who reads from articles written by the contemporary socialist feminist Jessie Ashley. In the final part, the previous four are played on stacked video monitors, filmed by a video camera that picks out and zooms in on each one until they are gradually displaced by an added ending.
Laura Mulvey, Introduction from Oliver Fuke (ed), The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Scripts, Working Documents, Interpretation (BFI/Bloomsbury, 2023)
Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons
Directors: Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen
Production Company: Laura Mulvey-Peter Wollen
Producers: Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen
Production Co-ordinator: Sharon Russell
Production Consultant: Dana Hodgson
Research Assistants: Judith Herren, Carol Laws, Guy Brett, Grier Davis
Screenplay: Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen
Photography: Louis Castelli
Video realisation of Episode 5: Evanston Percussion Ensemble
Set Decorator of Episodes 1 and 5: Jerry Stropnicky
Costumes of Episodes 1 and 5: Jeffrey Kurland
Titles and Animation: Don Lembeck
Choreography of Episodes 1 and 5: Bud Beyer
Sound: Larry Sider
Cast
Debra Dolnansky (herself/Penthesilea)
Michael Thomas
Jan Creighton
Jim Goode
Lisa Kephart
Pat Kerwin
Whit MacLaughlin
Kristine Nielsen
Brian Reich
Jerry Stropnicky
Ann Woodworth
Peter Wollen
Grace McKeaney
UK 1974
99 mins
Digital
The screening on Thu 6 Nov will be introduced by academic and writer Nicolas Helm-Grovas
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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