Inspirational for their writing on avant-garde cinema, this was Mulvey and Wollen’s first step into directing their own form of Counter Cinema. Inspired by Heinrich von Kleist, and by the examples of Godard and Rainer, Penthesilea is a film in five equal chapters. Each uninterrupted sequence relates to different media: a mime version of Kleist’s play, a spoken text, the theme of Amazons depicted in various artforms, silent film and feminism, and finally tv and video.