NEWSLETTER
Spring 05
A successful
international conference, Off-Screen
Spaces: Regionalism and Globalised Cultures, held at the Portrush
campus of the University of Ulster 28-30 July 2004, marked the climax
of the Centre’s Regionalism project. This was convened by Martin McLoone,
Associate Centre Director who also heads up the research strand on the
history of film, television and photography in Ireland at the Centre
for Media Research at University of Ulster. Keynote speakers included
John Tomlinson on ‘Globalisation and Cultural Identity, Ien Ang on ‘Changing
Meanings of Asia and Asianness in Contemporary Global Culture’, and
Toby Miller on ‘The People of the United States Cannot be Trusted: Globalised
Hollywood 2’. Among the speakers, Sylvia Harvey and her research team
from Lincoln, Margaret Dickinson and Kathrein Guenther, gave a presentation
on ‘Getting Films to Audiences: Aspects of Regional and National Policy
and Practice in the UK’, based on their Centre project on policy. The
conference included a screening of Irish filmmaker Desmond Bell’s latest
documentary Rebel Frontier, about Irish and Finnish opposition to US
involvement in the First World War, and a presentation by Pat Loughrey,
Director, Nations and Regions, BBC on ‘Local Identity in the Global
Village: the BBC’s Regional Policy’. REWIND
is a major AHRB funded research project on British artists’ video of
the 1970s and 80s, intended to document and collect interviews with
all the significant figures from this important movement. Based at Duncan
of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee and at
the Centre for Art Research Technology and Education (CARTE), University
of Westminster, it is directed by Professor Stephen Partridge – himself
a distinguished pioneer video artist, now Associate Dean of Research
and Enterprise at University of Dundee – with Dr Jackie Hatfield as
its research Fellow, based at CARTE. Recognising the synergy with various
Centre projects and resources, notably the British Artists’ Film and
Video Study Collection at Central Saint Martins, REWIND has sought links,
and Ian Christie is chairing its Advisory Committee. Broadway Cinema,
Nottingham 7-10 April Super
8 transformed: Obsessive Becoming (1995) by Daniel Reeves, to
be shown at Film Begets Digital
REPORTS
REWIND
UNSPOOLS
FORTHCOMING
FILM
BEGETS DIGITAL
Birkbeck 26 February
NOTTINGHAM
GOES EUROPEAN
This year’s
Nottingham British Silent
Cinema Festival takes a look across the Channel at Britain’s relations
with the continent before 1930. Among the featured filmmakers will be
E A Dupont, responsible for some of Britain’s key silent-to-sound films
of 1927-30. A second Centre-sponsored
‘collegium’ will allow research students to join the delegates and
take advantage of the international expertise that Nottingham regularly
attracts. A Franco-German-UK panel will debate the impact of Europe’s
1909 attempt to meet the challenge of American cinema – does that sound
familiar?
Following
the successful Films Beget Films event held at the Royal College of Art
in November 2002, there has been an aspiration to stage a sequel. This
will finally happen, in the shape of Film Begets Digital at Birkbeck on
26 February, co-organised by Ian Christie, Mark Nash of Central Saint
Martins and Al Rees of the RCA, following a postgraduate training day
on practice-based research in the audiovisual and digital field on 25
February.
Among the presentations will be Patrick Keiller, showing selections from
his DVD version of his City of the Future project; Laura Mulvey on the
implications of the shift from celluloid to digital for spectatorship;
Steven Ball presenting new artists’ work which processes film into digital
forms; Malcolm Le Grice on his own experiences of the transition from
analogue to digital; and and Ian Christie on how digital has transformed
the perception of pre-cinema media...