Screening

Screening | Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen
Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti
Saturday 30 September
2 – 4.30pm

For the second screening in the programme, Urgency and Possibility: Counter-Cinema in the 70s and 80s, Cooper Gallery presents two of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s collaborative films. The artists’ first film, Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons the artists’ and their documentary, Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti.

Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons traverses thousands of years to explore the image of the Amazonian woman in myth. The film questions the status of the Amazonian woman and the illusionary conventions of narrative cinema. The film explores the complexities of these questions, asking if the Amazonian woman is a strong female image or a figure derived from male phantasy?

Friday Kahlo and Tina Modotti is a documentary by Mulvey and Wollen on the exhibition of the same name that Mulvey and Wollen curated at the Whitechapel in 1982. The documentary reflects upon the exhibition, the lives and works of Kahlo and Modotti and the representation of women artists in film.

All screenings in the programme are free and ticketed. Please register on Eventbrite.

Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen, Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons, 1974
Colour 16mm transferred to digital
98mins
Courtesy BFI.

Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen, Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti, 1982
Colour 16mm transferred to digital
30 mins
Courtesy BFI

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Urgency and Possibility: Counter-Cinema in the 70s and 80s, is a two-week screening programme of the collaborative film works by widely influential film theorists and filmmakers Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. The programme, selected with Laura Mulvey, includes the artists’ experimental shorts, features and documentary, which instigated Counter-Cinema in the 1970s. These films are underpinned by the discourse of feminist theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis and leftist politics and an attempt to work against the formalist and ideological domination of Hollywood cinema.

See full programme screening times here.

Image credit: Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (production still), 1974. Image courtesy the artists and BFI.