Friendship’s Death by Peter Wollen: a conversation for two

Picture of the movie Friendship's Death © BFI

 

Starring in The French Dispatch and Memoria, both in Competition this year, actor Tilda Swinton is also under the spotlight in Friendship’s Death, Peter Wollen's only solo feature film. A restored version of the science-fiction masterpiece presented by the British Film Institute as part of Cannes Classics, with the screening attended by the actor.

Better known for his academic writings (with "Signs and Meanings in the Cinema" among them) and as the co-writer of the screenplay for Antonioni's The Passenger, in Competition in Cannes in 1975, Peter Wollen also made a number of films, six of which he made with his then-wife, theoretician Laura Mulvey. Friendship’s Death was the only feature film he made alone.

Friendship (Tilda Swinton), a female extraterrestrial robot sent to Earth on a peace mission, accidentally lands in Jordan in the midst of the 1970s Black September civil war. She meets a jaded Scottish war correspondent (Bill Paterson), and takes shelter in a hotel with him. As the bombs fly, the cosy space of the hotel room becomes a cocoon in which the pair discuss life and existence, in a spiritual conversation that sways back and forth between politics, ethics, and philosophy. Alienation, existentialism, technology, war: the deep dialogue between these two beings from two different worlds spans the themes and ideas that Wollen held dear.

 

This almost prophetic sci-fi film was made in 1987. In it, Wollen sketches out an outline of questions that still haunt us today, notably the relationships between humans and machines. The 4K restoration of this weird and wonderful masterpiece of cinema brought to us by the British Film Institute in collaboration with the film's producer, Rebecca O’Brien, and head cameraman, Witold Stok, sheds a new, contemporary light on this classic film.