Knights Moves

Selected Writings 19662003
A new anthology of uncollected writings by Peter Wollen, film theorist, cultural critic and avant-garde filmmaker.
Knight’s Moves: Selected Writings 1966-2003 gathers texts exemplifying Peter Wollen’s deliberate disregard for received hierarchies between high art and mass culture, popular forms and the avant-garde. Taking up Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of the ‘knight’s move’ on the chess board – the simultaneous L-shaped movement characteristic of art and history – Wollen drew unexpected connections and exposed repressed affinities between areas of art, culture and politics commonly kept far apart. Bringing together nearly forty years of texts on the histories of dance and fashion with analyses of music video, graffiti, children’s toys, gardens, Happenings, Baroque spectacle and popular and avant-garde cinema, as well as a variety of materials related to Wollen’s realised and unrealised films and te