The first book-length study of the work of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, who produced some of the most influential writings on film theory.

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, essays and articles such as Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and Wollen’s The Two Avant-Gardes shaped film theory. In the same period, the pair made six films together. Moving across Mulvey and Wollen’s writings and films, the book 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”.