Arrows of Desire Book Launch + Friendship’s Death

To celebrate the publication of a new anthology of Peter Wollen's texts, Arrows of Desire: Selected Writings 1963–2002, there will be a screening of his solo feature film Friendship’s Death (1987) and a conversation with the book's editors, Kodwo Eshun, Oliver Fuke and Nicolas Helm-Grovas, moderated by Erika Balsom.

There will be a short reception with books available for purchase from 7pm. The conversation with the book’s editors will take place in the cinema at 8pm.

Arrows of Desire, the first of three new volumes, brings together unpublished and inaccessible writings on counter-cinema, anti-imperialist politics and revolutionary Mexican art. Playful, theoretically rigorous and historically precise, Wollen’s writing reinvented criticism as a formally experimental practice indexing the intellectual, political and artistic histories of the twentieth century. The book presents texts on Eisenstein and Godard alongside essays and interviews tracing developments in film and video from the 1970s to the 1990s. It tracks the political energies running through Wollen’s filmmaking and writing on global politics and culture in relation to Iran, Indonesia, Palestine, Aden and Zanzibar.

It also presents texts relating to Wollen’s film, Friendship’s Death, adapted from his science fiction story, published in Bananas, Emma Tennant’s literary magazine, in 1976. Starring Tilda Swinton as an alien android from Procyon, who lands in Amman, Jordan, days before the events sometimes referred to as ‘Black September’, the film and short story are, in part, informed by Wollen’s experience as a political journalist, writing on global politics for New Left Review and International Socialist Journal. The texts presented in Arrows of Desire illuminate the film and testify to Wollen’s enduring commitment to anti-imperialist politics.

Friendship's Death, dir. Peter Wollen, United Kingdom 1987, 78 min., 15