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Serge Guilbaut: Of course I want to start from the beginning and the beginning it seems to me was Oxford, or even before.
Peter Wollen: Before. Childhood, let’s begin with childhood.
SG: I’ll give you a chance to explain the source of this extraordinary career that you have been involved in. You mentioned being in boarding school and having some kind of interesting youth that formed your character. And then if you can bring us to Oxford and explain what was the atmosphere in Oxford in particular and the people that you met there. This would give us an idea of the next move and the interests and the connections that you got out of that education. So, how was your education?
PW: I went to a lot of schools but my ideas didn’t begin to crystallize until I was at boarding school, where I was sent because my family was moving around all the time, so boarding school takes care of that, you’re shifting from place to place. Looking back on it you might as well begin with my family because that is where the really primeval influence begins. My parents were socialists, militantly socialists, and pacifists. But my father in particular was also extremely interested in art. He had a big bookcase with a glass front so that all the books were protected, and it locked with a key and on Sundays he would let you unlock it and take out a big art book and look at it. So things begin with that. When I was at boarding school you were allowed out sometimes to go into town as a special privilege and I remember buying the Surrealist Manifesto in French. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, it’s an edition that has a magnifying glass in it, because the print is very small so you couldn’t read it, so it had this magnifying glass attached with a kind of ribbon to the book. I remember I founded a little group at school called the Dada Existentialist Wedge, and we had pathetic Dadaist Existentialist meetings and events. All these sorts of childhood and school events and influences are formative, yet you tend to forget about them, and then when you start thinking back you can see the beginnings of what happened later.
SG: What was the atmosphere in your school, you said you had a Dadaist group and an Existentialist group. That was shocking in those days?
PW: Dada Existentialist! It was not so shocking—it was regarded as eccentric and it was simply distrusted. It was written on my school report that: "He is in danger of becoming an intellectual." So naturally when I read that I thought ok, that’s what I’m going to be. This was in the 1950s!
SG: So once you were an intellectual what happened?
PW: Then I went to Oxford, and you know what happens at university, you meet like-minded people from different backgrounds. Basically, I regard my education at Oxford as really coming from my peers, from other students. I learned much more from my peer group and they had much more influence on me than anything my official tutors said or did.
SG: In those days did you have a major at school, did you have a rounded education?
PW: No, I just did English Literature, technically, that’s what I got my degree in. It was this strange Oxford system whereby you sat in a room with your tutor, as he was called, with one other person, so there were two of you at a time and every second week you would have to write a paper and read it out loud to the tutor, who would comment on it and ask you questions. That was it, that was the formal education. The actual education, as I said, took place in discussions with other people, other students, who were there, students who had the same interests. It was there that I first really became interested in film. It was at Oxford that I met many of the people with whom I later worked, years and years afterwards, and it is also where my political ideas began to crystallize.
SG: Do you mean the Suez affair?
PW: That’s right, Hungary and Suez were the two big political events.
SG: Do you mean at Oxford people were talking about that? That was the end of the old world in a sense?
PW: That’s right. People went out to Hungary, I remember, and you could say that it was the beginning of a new generation.
SG: Did you talk to your dad about this, your socialist dad?
PW: He was naturally opposed to Suez because he was a pacifist and he was against all military enterprises. And the same with Hungary. And then at Oxford I fell in with people who were really interested in film. There was the group of people who founded Movie Magazine, which they started while at Oxford, and another group of people, many of whom were French, such as Patrick Bauchau, Ariane Mnouchkine, Martine Franck, people who I met while I was there, people who were already well aware of the Cahiers du Cinéma, the French "New Wave," all that. So my interest in film began to take shape.
SG: So you were also writing a lot at Oxford right? That was part of the importance of the education that you received? To write quickly, write well?
PW: Yes, because you had to write these essays every second week and read them aloud.
SG: Did you want to do something with that?
PW: You learn these skills. Basically what I learned at Oxford was journalist skills, how to write something fast to a deadline, something that you felt you could read out loud.
Scott Watson: Did your interest in film at this time take the shape of wanting to make a film? Or to develop and enter film criticism?
PW: At that time I wasn’t thinking at all about making films. I was going to see a lot of films. It was a time when the first New Wave films were appearing, the first films by Bergman and Truffaut, so that’s what I was seeing. Shortly after I left the university I went to Paris and saw a lot of the New Wave films there. So my interest in writing about films came just after I left the university, and once again I was one of a group of friends, this time in Paris, some of whom were the very same people I’d known at Oxford. Patrick Bauchau, for instance, who already knew Andrew Sarris and Eugene Archer from New York. My own developing interest in American film owed a great to Sarris and Archer. You could trace the influence back to the letter which Eugene Archer, who was then in Paris, sent to Andrew Sarris in New York. Eugene Archer had been a film critic for the New York Times. He wasn’t the main critic—that was Bosley Crowther—but he did the second string films. And then he got a Fulbright to go to Paris and one of things he was interested in doing after he got to France to meet people from the Cahiers. Another was to see a lot of French films—New Wave films. He wrote a letter back to Andrew Sarris which began "Who the hell is Howard Hawks." Because suddenly he had found all these French critics talking about Hitchcock and Hawks. Sarris became interested and out of that came the notorious special issue of Film Culture which provided a ranking of American film-makers. It was the first English-language adaptation of the Politique des Auteurs, So again, the influence came from France but, in a weird way, it arrived in London partly via New York.
SG: What was the situation for film in England after the second work war. From what I know, the industries had a lot of problems in Italy and in France because of the Burns accord and because there was a sort of quota on American films and so on. So the French industry was pretty damaged, in England as well, but they still continued to produce interesting films in England, in France not that great, less interesting, but still they have a pressure on the industry by this quota system. What kind of movies then, were produced in England? Because if you looked toward France, why? What was not exciting in England, that you were looking somewhere else?
PW: English cinema was dominated by figures from previous generations. The English directors were David Lean who’d been around for twenty years, or more, or the Ealing comedy film makers. British cinema had kind of survived but it was becoming dated and fatigued by the end of the fifties and its at that time you got the "angry young men" filmmakers, the generation of Lindsay Anderson and John Schlesinger, refugees from McCarthyism like Joseph Losey, and so on. It was a particularly important time for British Cinema.
SG: When did you start to write about, not film theory, but film criticism, is that what you were doing at that time?
PW: No, that came a little bit later. The first film criticism I wrote was under the name of Lee Russell, in New Left Review. After I left Oxford, I had been to Paris, and that was at the time of the beat hotel period, A Bout de Souffle and all that. After that I came back to England, and then I went to Tehran, just because a friend of mine was driving out to Tehran and he wanted someone to go with him, so I went. When I came back I started writing for the New Left Review. This was a magazine which had originally been founded by an older generation of people, the generation of people like Edward Thompson Raymond Williams and Richard Hogart. But then a new generation appeared and took over, most of them coming from Oxford, people I had known such as Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Alexander Cockburn, and others. When I returned to England they said "Why don’t you write something for us about Iran?" So I wrote a piece about Iran. The first things I wrote for the NLR were about contemporary politics. But I was interested in film and Perry Anderson, who was the editor, wanted the magazine to be modeled on something like Les Temps Modernes, and he wanted cultural coverage as well as political coverage. France again! So the idea came of writing about film and that’s when I did my first film pieces, under the name of Lee Russell.
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Catalogue to accompany the exhibition
organized by Peter Wollen and Mark Francis
touring to Paris and Boston, 1989-1990
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SW: Why did you choose that name?
PW: Lee, that was one of the pen-names William Burroughs had used—right? William Lee! Russell probably came from Bertrand Russell. I don’t know, something like that!
SG: By why did you have to have another name?
PW: Because you can’t write about a lot of different topics under the same name because, if you do, people won’t take you seriously. You have to have different identities if you write about different things.
SW: So what were you resuming your name for?
PW: Actually I didn’t use my name at all, I just used different pseudonyms.
SG: How many identities did you have?
PW: I can’t remember, not that many.
SG: Can you explain a little bit around the New Left Review. What I’m interested in is what were the kind of possibilities at that time? It is a political magazine, some cultural issues come in, was it stifling, was it difficult to write about culture, you could do what ever you wanted, or, like in Les Temps Modernes, it was not easy to discuss cultural issues? It was not that open, they had all kinds of problems with writers like Sartre. So how was it, how did your see your role?
PW: Well, as I said, I had these friends and influences coming from Oxford and New York and Paris, so that "auteur theory," as it was called in England, was the logical thing for me to pursue. But I wanted to give it a twist which would make it appropriate to the context, which was the New Left Review. Looking back, the major influence comes from Cahiers du Cinéma. The other big influence was Lucien Goldmann. In the way the Cahiers critics described it, auteurs had a specific style of filmmaking, but the way I saw it, they had specific world-view, and that concept—"world-view"—came from Goldmann.
SG: I ask because the Cahiers and people working for the Cahiers, or even the New Wave in France, were attacked by the Left, as being too auteur.
PW: Yes, but it was eclectic, because you also had Domarchi, who was Marxist, and a professor of philosophy, and who wrote an essay which I remember vividly "Marx Would Have Loved Minnelli." I recommend that one to you. That was in Cahiers du Cinéma. In Cahiers du Cinéma there were people to the right, like Godard (at the time) or people who didn’t have any politics at all, but there were also people like Domarchi who could be on the Left and still write for Cahiers du Cinéma. It wasn’t monolithic.
SG: What else did you write for the New Left Review? Did you have a long career with them?
PW: I’m still writing for them now but that’s because they re-launched the magazine.
SG: At that time though, in the late 50s, early 60s.
PW: At that time I was doing the cultural coverage for New Left Review. I was writing mainly about film but I was also commissioning other people to write about other things—literature and art and music. That led to a lively debate about the Rolling Stones, which took place in the NLR!
SW: What were the terms of that debate?
PW: Were you for them or against them basically. Were you for the Rolling Stones or the Beatles? Or for Ornette Coleman! We didn’t only cover film. Music was as important as film.
SG: It was a new kind of generation?
PW: Yes, there was a real gap between the two generations. Perry had seized power by a kind of coup d’état and got rid of all the previous generation, so obviously he had to create his own group to maintain the magazine and the core of that group consisted of people who had been to university with him, of which I was one.
SG: Was the influence of America very strong in those days, did you continue to correspond with New York? Because you talk about the Rolling Stones, did the magazine look toward the new generation coming up, the post-beatniks, early hippies and so on? Were they concerned about this, were you?
PW: Yes in a way. I wouldn’t say New Left Review was particularly concerned with the Counter culture. It wasn’t in any sense a hippie journal, you couldn’t think that! Nor were the Rolling Stones a hippie group. So I wouldn’t put it that way. Generally speaking the Review was prepared to write about, and thereby implicitly support, the new cinema, the new music, including popular music, new writing (including writing from many other countries) and so on. It was called New Left Review and "new" was part of its identity.
SG: At the same time that I was mentioning the end of the beatniks, Ginsberg continues to express himself through the beginning of the hippie culture, and also the Rolling Stones are connecting with a new generation, and in France as well. So I’m trying to make this connection between what’s going on in the streets of New York, or Los Angeles. But also from the late 50s, in Paris, we also have a kind of empowering group, that we called the Situationists. So how do these three cities, three different types of urban cultures, get together in some form? Because it seems like you are right in the middle of all this. How does this happen?
PW: England was in a particular position, because it is fairly easy from England to go to Paris, and this is also when the first cheap trans-Atlantic flights began. It doesn’t seem that long ago, but in the 1950s it was really very difficult to get to America. You had to go to Luxembourg, then to Reykjavik, and then you went on to the United States. And then suddenly there were these planes that flew straight across the Atlantic. So there was much more connection and contact. As you were saying, the Beat Generation—Burroughs, for example, had already been in Paris. But then Burroughs decided to move to London and was living in the Empress Hotel and then he moved into Duke Street. And Ginsberg actually came through Oxford while I was there and gave a reading of "Howl." Later he came back again. He had gone out to India with Orlowsky, and then returned again through London. Corso was in London too. I used to live in a squat in the next room to Corso. But by then he was a junkie. He used to play Berlioz’s Requiem Mass at the wrong speed all the time, which drove me mad with irritation.
SG: It is interesting that you had a possibility to go to Tehran so you go to Tehran and then you come back, because it seems the beginning of your career was like a kind of travelogue. A lot of people in those days actually weren’t looking for themselves. It was easy for you because you had several personalities so you could go all over the place and try to find yourself . . .
PW: That’s right, there were different things in different places depending on where you went. But they all sort of interlock in various ways. On the face of it Cahiers du Cinéma and the Beat generation and New Left Review seem like completely different enterprises. Looking back on them you can see there was more in common between them. They were three very different aspects of a big cultural change that was taking place in several countries simultaneously.
SW: What was your involvement with the Beats of Paris?
PW: I happened to be there when they were there. You know George Whitman’s bookshop? I supported myself when I was in Paris by working in the bookshop. In return for sitting there while peoeur, which was just around the corner from the bookshop. So these people were in Paris and I just sort of blundered into that world.
SW: Was Brion Gysin around?
PW: Brion Gysin was around but Gysin had been in Paris much longer than the others and he was already kind of established. I did meet Brion Gysin but I didn’t like him.
SG: So, going back to the Situationists, when you were there had you heard about them already?
PW: No, I was unaware of them. They were still Lettrists, I guess, when I first went. Lettristes Revolutionaires.
SG: They were also publishing in Belgium, but they were not very well known, they were a very tiny group. So when did you start to . . .
PW: There was a little English Situationist group, Chris Gray, people like that. I knew Chris Gray. T.J. Clark, who I didn’t then know, was one of them, but he got expelled like everybody else. He likes to dwell on that.
SG: What surprised me is that all these interests of yours are involved in some kind of very extreme politics for the period. And then in 1969 you have this book that you publish which becomes like a bible for studies of film. How come, how does this happen?
PW: Well, I’ve already described how I became interested in film. Then I got a job at the British Film Institute in the Education Department, which was run by somebody called Paddy Whannel, who wrote a very good book with Stuart Hall early in the 1960s. It was a pioneering book in the field that later became known as "Cultural Studies." It turned out that he had read what I had written in New Left Review and he asked me, quite unexpectedly, if I would like to come and work with him at the BFI. So, I said "yes" and I went to work there. We were supposedly an Education Department, we held seminars, we published things, first pamphlets, then a series of books, the Cinema One series, which I ended up editing. That’s also the series in which Signs & Meaning was published. So I was editing the series and I commissioned myself to write a book. The purpose of the Education Department in the BFI was to launch film education in English schools and universities as a serious subject, alongside the other arts. Painting, literature, music—it was taken for granted that they would be part of the curriculum. So one of the basic goals of the Education Department was to support anyone who wanted to teach film in schools or universities. And one way to support them was by publishing books which they could use in class. So that was the context in which Signs & Meaning in the Cinema was written. There was also a French influence because already the journal Communication had been launched in France, where it introduced the ideas of semiology and structuralism. Gradually I abandoned Lucien Goldmann and moved over to something closer to these new ideas from Paris. They were central to my own thinking at the time.
SG: What was exciting about that? What was the difference?
PW: If people were going to teach film in schools and universities there had to be books, because you can’t teach a subject which no one has written any books about. And on the analogy of the other arts, there should be books which describe the history of what it is, and there should be books that are monographs, and there should be books that approach the subject seriously and more theoretically.
SG: But you could be theoretical without falling into structuralism. What I am asking is what was so fascinating for you in structuralism, that you thought could explain, or . . .
PW: I wasn’t that much of a structuralist. After all, the semiotic theory in Signs & Meaning comes from Charles Sanders Peirce and not from Saussure. In fact, I was critical of Saussure. But if I hadn’t been aware that all these French writers were writing about Saussure I wouldn’t have read Peirce and written about him.
SW: Later on there was a negative reaction to structuralism, say from Perry Anderson.
PW: Yes, Perry wasn’t interested in structuralism. Perry was interested in Levi Strauss but not the other aspects of structuralism, the linguistic or semiotic aspects.
SW: Was there a debate at the time, when you appeared with this film theory, from other people on the Left?
PW: Yes, but not about the issue that you’re talking about. Not about Saussure because I didn’t write about Saussure. And Perry, for example, didn’t have any problems with Lucien Goldman as an influence. The main debate that we got into was whether we needed film theory at all. And people like Lindsay Anderson, for instance, from the previous generation of critics too, would go beserk with rage at even the sound of a word like semiology. So again it was a generational thing, the 60s generation at war with the 50s generation.
SW: Was Frankfurt School film theory available at this time, were you interested in it?
PW: Who are you thinking of, Adorno?
SW: Kracauer?
PW: Kracauer was available. Benjamin came later. He was first translated in New York in Studies on the Left, sometime quite late in the 1960s. I read a number of those Studies on the Left and that’s the first time I really focussed on Benjamin. The Frankfurt people had gone to America, so it was through America that I came back to Europe, so to speak.
SG: What do you think the book achieved? Because it was important for everyone interested in Cultural Studies . . .
PW: My main aim in writing the book was to write it before I was thirty years old, and I did. It wasn’t until after it came out that I began thinking about what people’s response would be, when the response actually began.
SG: Then when people wrote about it . . .
PW: Then it became a bigger issue. But it was part of a whole strategy within the BFI. Very soon after that book came out the first serious film courses in universities were developed. As a result of that I was invited to teach in a university for the first time, so in that sense, it changed things radically for me, at least. The immediate reaction to the book was one of polarization. You got people who supported it— "about time too, now we have a proper book of film theory in England," and people who hated and loathed it —" what is all this garbage? We don’t need all this to understand and appreciate film!" It certainly created some controversy.
SG: And so, how did you deal with this?
PW: We went ahead and founded Screen magazine, which was a militantly theoretical journal. That also came out of the BFI Education Department.
SW: What year was this?
PW: 1969. The book came out in 1968 or 69 and Screen started the next year. The idea was to maintain this ongoing debate, or quarrel, that had been precipitated, by the book and by the series of seminars we held.
SG: You have two generations fighting, by the late 60s, and the new generation is stronger and has all their new magazines. What is the impact of 1968, the real break that happened in Europe? In England was it as powerful as it was in France?
PW: It had an impact in the sense that there were also a number of student uprisings in England as well, although interestingly enough, they were in art schools rather than in Universities. There were important uprisings at London School of Economics and at the University of Essex, but otherwise they were at Hornsey College of Art, Croydon College of Art. Croydon is the one that Malcolm MacLaren and Jamie Reid were at, the one that fed into punk. It had an impact at the time, but not nearly on the same scale they experienced in France or the United States. In some ways, it might be true to say that, in the long run, the cultural impact was greater than the political impact. As in a lot of other countries there was an anti-war movement and there were also student uprisings, but I don’t think there was anything special about what happened in England.
SG: The general critique that students were making in France, through lots of magazines, film magazines also, was they were repositioning themselves, were re-evaluating the entire cultural apparatus that was present in France. In England did you see the same kind of thing, or, is your book Signs & Meaning a result of this, or, is not really a part of this?
PW: The book came out just about the same time, May of ’68, but that was just by chance.
SG: I’m not saying that it was an influence but was it was part of the same kind of re-organization?
PW: In lots of ways it was part of a whole new program of thinking through cultural issues in a completely new way, one which infuriated the previous generation.
SG: So what was infuriating? What specifically, how did you plan that bomb?
PW: I’m not sure that I did. It’s in three sections, therefore three main things that I wanted to write about. The first section is about Eisenstein, and that has its own kind of history. The interest in Russian art of the immediate post-revolutionary period, not just Eisenstein but Tatlin, Malevich, the Lef Movement, Mayakovsky, that was already there. It began with Camilla Gray’s book, which came out at the beginning of the 60s, and Camilla Gray was in England. So my interest in Eisenstein came partly from that, but also because Eisenstein had a particular ambition of his own, which was to write a very personal and fragmentary aesthetics of the cinema. He also raised questions about film language, and these questions were on people’s minds at the time. So the first section of my book is on Eisenstein and it also related to the idea of a political cinema. Godard acknowledged Eisenstein’s role in that, in the idea of a radical, political cinema. The second section of the book is about auteur theory, and it was continuing the battle that had already been going on for a decade in the English-speaking world, at least, ever since Andrew Sarris and Eugene Archer’s special issue of Film Culture magazine at the end of the 50s in NY, which I already spoke about. The third section is about "language" and the semiotics of film—semiotics in the theoretical and speculative sense used by C.S. Peirce. What I was really doing in this section was differentiating and distancing myself from Christian Metz. Because I thought he was wrong. Because he followed the Saussurean path. Saussure is very interesting, etcetera, etcetera, and I understand why, if you are interested in language, you might be interested in Saussure and Hjelsmlev. But they were "pure" linguists. They studied language specifically in the realm of verbal language. And I thought the language of film was very different. it doesn’t have the same sentence structures. It doesn’t have tenses and moods and aspects. Film language simply does not operate in the same way that verbal language does. Subsequently, as a result of teaching in a linguistics department, I concluded that Saussure had been wrong in his whole approach. So I looked for another model and Peirce gave me another way of thinking about film "language." I realized I could use his semiotic categories—index, icon and symbol. The indexical corresponded to the realist aspect of cinema which Bazin and Kracauer had written about. Then there was the iconic, which referred to the pictorial aspect of cinema, cinema as images, which the Saussurean structuralist approach just didn’t deal with. And thirdly there was the symbolic aspect, cinema as meaningful discourse. In this area you could learn things from theorists like Metz, but their approach was by no means adequate as a general theory of cinema.
Peter Wollen was interviewed by Serge Guilbaut and Scott Watson on Saturday, January 13, 2001 in Vancouver
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