Tilda Swinton, in one of her first film roles, played the robot. In a tribute to Mr. Wollen published by the film website IndieWire, she said “Signs and Meaning” was “the first seminal book I read about film that actually made sense while bopping you to bits with its braininess and taking the engine of cinema completely apart in front of you while making you even more excited to jump in and go racing about in it just as soon as you possibly could.”

Peter Wollen was born on June 29, 1938, in Woodford, northeast of London. His father, Douglas, was a Methodist minister, and his mother, Winifred (Waterman) Wollen, was a homemaker who became a teacher. Mr. Wollen was educated largely at the Kingswood School, a boarding school in Bath, an effort by his parents to give him some educational stability — his father was moved to a new assignment every few years.

His parents were socialists and pacifists, and Mr. Wollen was thinking heady thoughts early.

“I founded a little group at school called the Dada Existentialist Wedge,” he said in the 2001 interview, “and we had pathetic Dadaist Existentialist meetings and events.”

“It was written on my school report that ‘he is in danger of becoming an intellectual,’” Mr. Wollen added. “So naturally when I read that I thought, ‘O.K., that’s what I’m going to be.’”

He earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature at Oxford in 1959. His interest in film coalesced at the university, fueled by a group of friends who were following French New Wave cinema.

After graduating he lived in Paris for a time, absorbing more cinema, and traveled to Tehran before returning to England. There he began writing for New Left Review, which was run by people he had known at Oxford.