[7][8] Wollen joined the British Film Institute's education department in the late 1960s, at the behest of its director, Paddy Whannel, who had been impressed by his work.
In 1976, Robin Wood contended, "Peter Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema is probably the most influential book on film in English of the past decade.
Acknowledging the influence of Jean-Luc Godard's Le Gai savoir (France, 1969), Wollen intended the film to fuse avant-garde and radically political elements.
The resulting work is innovative in the context of British cinema history, although its relentlessly didactic approach did not make for mass appeal.
For Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), Wollen and Mulvey obtained a BFI Production Board grant, which enabled them to work with greater technical resources, rewriting the Oedipal myth from a female standpoint.
(1980), commemorating Amy Johnson's solo flight from Britain to Australia, synthesises themes previously covered by Wollen and Mulvey.
[citation needed] Wollen's only solo feature, Friendship's Death (1987), starring Bill Paterson and Tilda Swinton, is the story of the relationship between a British war correspondent and a female extraterrestrial robot on a peace mission to Earth, who, missing her intended destination of MIT, inadvertently lands in Amman, Jordan during the events of Black September 1970.