Object of the week: The colourful lists from Peter Wollen’s notebook
Influential film theorist and filmmaker Peter Wollen was a compulsive list-maker. His notebook contains fascinating lists on many themes, including this rundown of ’diabolical doctors’.
As the cover of this notebook suggests – with headings including ‘Pierrot’, ’#24 Haircuts’, ‘Space/Time Motion/Image’ and ‘Building the Tate Modern’ – its contents are varied and enticingly eclectic. It is one of many such notebooks in the papers of the hugely influential writer, theorist, filmmaker and curator Peter Wollen, held in the BFI National Archive alongside his published and unpublished essays, teaching and conference notes, scripts, production papers and much more.
Inside, the book includes notes on a wide array of topics, from digital technology to wigs and hairstyles in films, as well as myriad lists, including filmographies (of Jean-Luc Godard, Tilda Swinton, The Beatles, and Wollen himself) and thematic groups such as ‘mutated creatures’, ‘monsters’ and ‘diabolical doctors’ on film.
Wollen was a dedicated and compulsive list maker, a proponent of what Umberto Eco has described as “the irresistible magic” of the list. The making of lists was central to Wollen’s thinking and working practice, a form with which to gather and shape ideas. His collection of ‘diabolical doctors’ pulls together a medley of medics, diabolical and otherwise, its attempted chronology soon giving way to a rush of titles and ideas. It stretches from the murderous and criminal (Drs Caligari, Mabuse, No) to the more quotidian (the infinitely calm and most gentlemanly Dr Harvey of Brief Encounter (1945)) and the comic (Dirk Bogarde as Simon Sparrow in the Doctor in the House series).
The use of six different colours of ink helps to provide visual clarity, particularly when annotating titles with additional information, as with Near Dark (“a vampire western set in mid-western farm lands!”). Incidentally, its director, Kathryn Bigelow, was one of Wollen’s students at Columbia University in New York. His teaching influenced her first feature, The Loveless (1981), and the inclusion of one of her later films here neatly illustrates just one dimension of Wollen’s extensive and symbiotic impact across film history and culture.
As teacher, theorist and filmmaker, Wollen wore many, equally significant, hats. This range of activities and interests all fed into, and fed off, one another, much like his notebooks in which a dazzling multiplicity of ideas come together as one rich and multifaceted whole.
Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.