The films of Hitchcock, Welles and Godard; the aesthetics of photography and the technology of cinema; art and revolution in Russia and in Mexico; the avant-gardes in film and in painting-these are among the many topics of Peter Wollen's essays. Interwoven with fictional treatments of such themes as memory, dream, sexuality and writing, they compose a remarkable, perhaps unique, volume. These "readings and writings" are informed by Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and the history of art itself. Their concern is with signification: with the ways in which meanings are produced in dominant art forms and with the counter-strategies by which these meanings may be questioned or dislodged, in the practice of politically and aesthetically radical alternatives. A concluding retrospect reviews the political, intellectual and aesthetic avant-garde currents of the fifteen years over which these texts were written, outlining some perspectives for oppositional art today.

In this new collection of essays on film, all written over the last ten years, Peter Wollen explores an extraordinarily wide range of topics, stretching from an analysis of 'Time in Film and Video Art' to a study of 'Riff-Raff Realism' in British films. There are provocative discussions of the works of established auteur directors such as Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock and of the film-making careers of such experimental movie-makers as William Burroughs and Viking Eggeling, the dadaist pioneer of abstract film. The collection also includes fascinating studies of a number of film classics, such as John Huston's Freud, Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Other essays deal with the relationship of film to the other arts, such as dance and architecture, and explore the interaction between film and anthropology. This is not a theoretical book but it is one that suggests many new approaches to thinking about film and many unexpected connections between film studies and the history of such strangely related activities as espionage, psychoanalysis, Stalinism, love of speed and digital technology. Full of fascinating new insights, Peter Wollen's new book is based on the premise that there are no fixed ways of writing about film but, rather, a plethora of paths leading in very different directions, each contributing to a new understanding of the twentieth century's major art-form.

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen co-write and co-direct this 1970s avant-garde feature. The film follows the struggles of middle-class mother Louise (Dinah Stabb) and her young daughter Ana (Riannon Tise) as they live in a patriarchy. Their story is interlaced with a depiction of Greek mythical hero Oedipus's encounter with the Sphinx who ruled over Thebes by forcing travellers to answer a riddle, killing those who responded incorrectly.

Raiding the Icebox is a kaleidoscopic review of the avant-garde and radical subcultures of the twentieth century, and explains how the most powerful artistic statements of the era redrew the line between high and low art. Beginning with an analysis of the role of Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet, Wollen argues that modernism has always had a hidden, suppressed side which cannot easily be absorbed into the master-narrative of modernity. Wollen reviews the hopes, fears and expectations of artists and critics such as the Bauhaus movement, as fascinated by Henry Ford's assembly line as they were by the Hollywood dream factory, concluding with Guy Debord's caustic dystopian vision of an all-consuming "Society of the Spectacle." Finally, Wollen chronicles the emergence of a subversive sensibility as he explores some of the unexpected new cultural forms which non-Western artists are taking as modernism enters into crisis at the beginning of a new century: reversing the rules of the game and raiding the icebox of the West.

Kathy Acker was one of the most original, subversive and influential writers of the late 20th century. Known variously, and notoriously, as a consummate postmodernist, feminist, post-punk and plagiarist, her oeuvreover a dozen novels and novellashas inspired a generation of writers and artists. Lust for Life is the definitive collection of essays on Acker's inimitable work, including Peter Wollen's elegiac primer, widely considered the best introduction to Acker, and Avital Ronell's erudite meditation on friendship and mourning. Together these essays by scholars and writers reveal Acker's profound and innovative project, and the ways in which fiction can penetrate the heart of political and cultural life.

In this stunning new collection of texts on visual art, Peter Wollen explores an extraordinary range of topics, from an analysis of "Global Conceptualism" to a mind-bending study of "Magritte and the Bowler Hat", from Gerhard Richter to provocative texts on the work of artists such as Victor Burgin, Frida Kahlo, and Derek Jarman. Other essays deal with the relationships that have developed between visual art and other media, including one on the convergence of art and fashion, and another that explores the role of art and film in creating the American myth of the West. The collection also includes a study of Situationist attitudes to art and architecture, reflections on the relation between art and technology, and an essay on Museums and Rubbish Theory.