In this new collection of essays on the cinema, 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 film. Provocative essays discuss the work both of established auteur directors such as Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock as well as the filmmaking careers of such experimental moviemakers 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.

Paris Hollywood suggests new approaches to thinking about film and many unexpected connections between film studies and the history of such strangely related activities as espionage, psychoanalysis, dance, architecture, anthropology, Stalinism, love of speed and digital technology. Wollen's book is based on the premise that there are no fixed ways of writing about the cinema but, rather, a plethora of paths leading in very different directions, each contributing to a new understanding of the 20th century's major art form.

Peter Wollen is Chair of the Department of Film, Television and New Media at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was cowriter with Mark Peploe of the original script of Antonioni's film The Passenger, and has himself directed a number of films. His previous film books include Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, now in an expanded third edition, and Raiding the Icebox. His Paris, Manhattan: Writings on Art and Raiding the Icebox are also available from Verso.

 Publication
Cloth: June 2002
Paper: December 2002

314 pages

Cloth
ISBN-13: 978 1 85984 671 1
US$60 / £40 / CAN$87

Paper
SIBN-13: 978 1 85984 391 8
US$20 / £13 / CAN$29