Peter Wollen notebook elevates unfinished admin
A Peter Wollen notebook in the BFI archive contains lists on films, haircuts and diabolical doctors. It confirms that a to do list becomes scholarship if nobody crosses anything out for fifty years.
Wollen was a theorist, filmmaker and curator. His notes jump from Pierrot to Tate Modern with the confidence of a browser carrying seventeen tabs and one warning that memory is low.
One page gathers sinister doctors from cinema. Another considers haircuts. Together they capture modern intellectual life, where mortality, aesthetics and whether a fringe means something fight for the same line.
A shopping list awaits critical reappraisal
“These pages reveal a restless critical mind,” said Daphne Biro Smudger, Curator of Important Margins. “My own list reveals milk, batteries and a troubling commitment to crisps.”
The archive also keeps Wollen’s essays, scripts and teaching notes. The lists feel especially intimate because every great thinker eventually writes a noun, circles it twice and trusts tomorrow’s self to decode it.
Visitors can trace connections across film history. Office workers can also take hope from ‘emails, dentist, apocalypse?’ which may yet earn climate control and a catalogue number.
The BFI calls the notebook an insight into a wide ranging career. Three abandoned planners in a kitchen drawer have now asked for legal representation and a temperature controlled case.
The margin becomes the main event
Wollen’s scattered notes now sit as a record of an extraordinary mind. Everyone else’s scattered notes remain evidence that the council tax letter has been put somewhere safe.
Read the real story: The BFI feature on Peter Wollen’s colourful notebook lists.
