In the Thirties, Amy Johnson was a legend; the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia, she was the subject of newsreel stories, civic tributes and even a ballad written in her honor. In Amy!, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen combine newsreel, video, and dramatic biography to analyze the story of Amy Johnson, the myth and the reality. Central to the film is the issue of female heroism: what it means for the woman, and the threat it poses to the social order. "Amy's life implied that for a woman to become a heroine there's a transition to be made from the interior life to the exterior, into adventure, moving from a personal satisfaction to external achievement - literally a step from the feminine world into the masculine world. "But when she became a public figure she became an object of gaze, and that necessarily meant she had to be feminised again. Once she'd taken that step and become a public myth, she herself was turned into a woman again." --Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, from an interview in Time Out. Amy! continues in the direction of Mulvey and Wollen's two previous films, Penthesilea and Riddles of the Sphinx, which approach a radical aesthetic from the standpoint of feminism and issues of representation. A film scholar as well as a filmmaker, Peter Wollen is the author of "Signs and Meaning in the Cinema."

• Directed and Written by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. Photographed by Diane Tammes. Music by Feminist Improvising Group, Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex, Jack Hylton and his Orchestra. Video by Evanston Percussion Unit, Fantasy Factory. With Mary Maddox, Yvonne Rainer (voice), Jonathan Eden (voice), Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, and Students at Paddington College. (1980, 35 mins, color, Print from filmmaker)