Wollen's first film credit was as cowriter of Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger" ("Professione: Reporter", Italy, 1975), and he made his debut as a director with "Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons" (1974), the first of six films cowritten and co-directed with his wife, Laura Mulvey. The low-budget "Penthesilea" portrayed women's language and mythology as silenced by patriarchal structures. Acknowledging the influence of Jean-Luc Godard's "Le Gai savoir" (France, 1968), 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.