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Image – Movement – Story Supported by Journal of Media Practice and MeCSSA, Practice Network, hosted by the Practice as Research Group in the Department of Media, Culture and Language at University of Roehampton, and organised by Jeremy Bubb and Paul Antick, Image – Movement – Story is a one-day symposium that examines the relationship between the production, distribution and consumption of still and moving image-based projects supported by institutions of Higher Education.
The symposium is held in Duchesne Building at University of Roehampton and will consist of 20 panel-based presentations, several screenings and a roundtable discussion.
8.30 – 10.00 Registration & Coffee Du.001 & Foyer 9.15 – 10.00 Opening & Keynote – Professor Erik Knudsen,
University of Salford Lecture Theatre. Du.004 10.10 – 11.15 Panel 1 – Trans-disciplinary Documentary Film Lecture Theatre. Du.004 11.15 – 11.45 Coffee & Screenings Du.001 11.45 – 1.00 Panel 2 – Topographies of War & Conflict Lecture Theatre. Du.004 1.00 – 1.50 Lunch & Screenings Du.001 1.50 – 3.00 Panel 3 – Disruption, Context, Representation Du.101 1.50 – 3.00 Panel 4 – Appropriating the Archive Lecture Theatre. Du004 3.00 – 3.20 Coffee & Screenings Du.001 3.20 – 4.20 Panel 5 – Researching the Archive Du.101 3.20 – 4.40 Panel 6 – Film and Ethnography Lecture Theatre. Du.004 4.20 – 5.00 Coffee & Screenings Du.001 5.00 – 6.00 Roundtable: The Act of Killing (DocWest,
University of Westminster) Lecture Theatre. Du.004 6.00 – 6.10 Closing statement Lecture Theatre. Du004 6.10 – 6.45 Drinks reception Du.001
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Keynote Chair: Jeremy Bubb, Senior Lecturer in Digital Film & Video Production, University of Roehampton
Professor Erik Knudsen, University of Salford
Abundance and Media Practice Research
Media practice research is maturing and slowly finding its place and identity within the broader academy. Government, through the instruments of its major funding bodies, increasingly recognises the importance of cultural industries, including media, as significant contributors to Gross Domestic Product and is taking a greater interest in media practice research. Simultaneously, the digital revolution, and the subsequent diversification and democratisation of media practice and dissemination, has created a world of media abundance and complexity. On the one hand this era of abundance and complexity enables new diverse opportunities; while on the other hand, new types of repression are coming to the fore. Individuals, entrepreneurs, open source communities and commercial companies are all involved in research and development leading to innovations in the theory and practice of media. This presentation will seek to explore, and challenge, with reference to my own research practice, what the role of the university based media practice researcher is in such a world of abundance. This issue is increasingly important in the context of the growing emphasis on impact in research funding strategies. What impact does our academy based research have? Is it of good quality and what do we mean by quality? Does our system of peer review lend itself to driving up standards of originality and rigour? What difference does it make to the nature of our research for this research to be taking place within the academy? Are we able to
compete in terms of innovation, originality and significance with research and innovation taking place in the wider media communities? The purpose of the presentation will be to set a broad context to the range of papers being presented at the Image – Movement – Story Symposium.
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Panel 1: Trans-disciplinary Documentary Film Panel Chair: Professor Nick Higgins, Director of the Creative Media Academy, University of the West of Scotland.
Alastair Cole, University of Edinburgh
An Eye on Language: a presentation of a trans-disciplinary documentary film based research project situated in linguistic anthropology
This presentation will address the opportunities, challenges and practicalities of engaging in research in linguistic anthropology through documentary film based research. The presentation will relate to, and feature clips from the 75 minute creative documentary film based research project English Came by Boat (WT), filmed in Zambia over 12 months in 2011/2012 and currently in the final stages of editing for completion in late 2014. The project focuses on the dilemmas of language and education in multilingual Zambia, a country with 72 languages, and only one official language – English, spoken at home by only 1.7% of the population. Through the window of a rural grade one primary school class and their embattled young urban teacher, the research aims to academically and creatively address the ideological and practical complexities that surround language use, education within a multilingual Southern Africa nation.
The project is academically situated within linguistic anthropology, specifically engaging with literature in the subfields of linguistic ideology, multilingualism, modernity and the linguistic anthropology of education. The presentation will present the methodological and theoretical approach of the project, highlighting the opportunities and challenges that a practice based structure has given the research.
It will further focus on its engagement with a traditional field of humanities that has an established ethnographic tradition for research, and possibilities that such trans-disciplinarity affords a practice based project.
www.tonguetiedfilms.co.uk
Richard Hanrahan, University of Edinburgh
Acting the Clown: Performance Art, Activism and the Body
How can I change the world? This is the central question of my project, albeit somewhat reduced – and one which can be answered in myriad ways even outside of academic circles. Researching through documentary film, as well as live performance, the project focuses on the issue of engaging a wider audience with complex, subversive ideas of political change and agency.
The question “how can I change the world” is contemplated in this project in a number of ways. Firstly, it hopes to deal with the problem of recuperation, an idea explored through the work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International (as well as other avant-garde groups) in which actions that are at once revelatory become benign, where acts of defiance become complementary to, and not against, the system they hope to challenge.
Secondly, the question is seen within the context of a generation caught in a state of perceived political apathy. Born into a nihilist vacuum in which there can be every meaning and yet none, where all avenues of possibility are available and yet the doors to each remain unequivocally locked, our generation finds itself lost. We are torn apart by feelings of frustration at ageing institutions that attack the
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change that we are perceived to represent, yet are simultaneously identified as politically disinterested whenever we approach rejecting them. While around us every facet of society is restructured and challenged by political ideology, economic imperatives and drastic technological shifts, we are left behind with little chance to critique our situation instead being silenced by it, saturated by new forms of networked media that both invigorate and suffocate our spirit through the warm embrace of spectacle. What world is there left to change? How can you try to change the world when it's already changing without you? And who, or what, can claim control? The project attempts to return meaning to the gesture of the individual, to re-imagine personal significance and agency.
What emerges from the study is a documentary that follows my attempts to address these questions through stand-up comedy – the medium best suited to my personal form of expression – and to engage real audiences with genuinely subversive ideas. Using ideas gleaned from Butler, Foucault, Rancière and Derrida, the performance developed the complex theories of French post-structuralist philosophy into an entertaining and engaging piece of stand-up that involved “clowning up” – literally masking as a clown – and which questioned the role of, and our relationship to, the media. Due to the nature of stand-up comedy, close proximity to the audience provided a more meaningful outlet for research, but also a genuine sense of danger; far more than other art forms permit. The comedian must constantly contend with, and overcome, the possibility of failure. It is in this space, where the performer must openly engage, that these ideas can really be brought to account.
Aside from using documentary as a tool for practice-based research, which permits a new kind of intimacy with academic material, an important aspect of this project was the use of the camera as
a means to interrogate documentary itself. With any attempt to bring post-structuralist theory into practice, a certain level of complexity and self-reflexivity is inevitable; here, it is performativity which is taken to its extreme as the boundaries of reality and performance in the final film are entangled, and the notion of documentary reality are brought into question.
Yasmin Fedda, University of Edinburgh
A Tale of Two Syrias
This illustrated presentation is based on PhD practice based research conducted and filmed in Syria in 2010, and then edited and written over 2011/12 after the current uprisings and conflict began. The film portrays two very different experiences of life in the restricted world of authoritarian Syria. Boutros, a Christian monk in Mar Musa monastery, seeks to achieve change through his religious activities, whilst Salem, an Iraqi refugee living in Damascus, begins to find life in exile intolerable. Through intimate portraits of diverse yet related lives the documentary seeks to contribute to new understandings of the possibilities for agency and identity within the constraints of Syrian authoritarianism in 2010. This presentation will reflect on the relationship between documentary practice, peace-building and the evolving Syrian context. Exploring the theme of political agency within the Syrian setting, the practice based research raises issues concerning political visibility and creative documentary practice.
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Panel 2: Topographies of War & Conflict Panel Chair: Dr Pablo Romero-Fresco, Reader in Audiovisual Translation & Filmmaking, University of Roehampton
Ian Wiblin, University of South Wales & Royal College of Art
Still / Moving Memory: documentary forms and their quiet subversion in Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin’s The View from Our House
This presentation is based on an experimental documentary, The View from Our House, that I made together with Anthea Kennedy. The film is seventy-six minutes long and was premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2013). Its British premiere was at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in February 2014. The film is constructed from digital video and imagery derived from Super 8 film and still photographs.
The starting point for the making of The View from Our House was a particular memory recounted by Anthea Kennedy’s elderly aunt, Erika Koch (Erika was a young Jewish photographer in Nazi-era Berlin – and sometime assistant to the Bauhaus photographer, Otto Umbehr (Umbo)). Erika told us, quite coldly and out of the blue, that she remembered hearing screaming coming from a “concentration camp” close to where she had lived in Berlin in the early 1930s. We discovered, close to Erika's former house in the garden suburb of Tempelhof, a collection of old military barrack buildings and learned that one of these had been used, not as a concentration camp but as a (Nazi) SA prison where people were tortured and murdered. Shooting on location in Berlin, our intention with the film was to make a piece of work that built out from this single memory, and site of
memory. We wanted, primarily through the film’s images, to reclaim in the surfaces of the present, a personal sense of history. The resulting film includes sequences of images (most often shot with a static camera) formed from our collections of particular subjects – the motivation for our collecting triggered by Erika’s memory, details gleaned from her diaries and notebooks, and our own direct experience of place.
It is through the methodology and process of collecting and collection that the film engages with notions of objectivity and distance. On a simple level, the formulation of imagery within our film echoes the basic process of shooting, shifting from one identified location to the next, creating one shot after another – accumulating images. The often lengthy duration of such sequences in the film reflects this emphasis on the process of collecting (and on reaching, or achieving, a point of completion for the collection). I'm interested in how, for us, this loose methodology came into being – and why we chose to apply it in the ways that we did. I'm interested too in: how the film's different sequences, all of which might be read as collections, relate to each other, in terms of their form and their typological characteristics; how these sequences, typological or otherwise, may have been informed by examples of still photography, and how movement within such sequences operates in relation to stillness.
The film’s fragmented construction and its second-person address, attempt to effect for our subject, Walter Benjamin’s “Tiger’s leap” – pulling Erika’s largely unacknowledged past into the present. Rather than implying authority superficially through the construction of a linear narrative, the film’s form is instead built on repetition and restatement (achieved through the ordered and reordered collections and recollections of both images and words) to both invoke and question objective modes of recording. The form of the film is thus
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instilled by our emphasis on collection (and on the image’s status as a record of what it depicts) – but rather than compiling and constructing a reliable and objective document, we have employed this loose methodology to create an open and questioning work speculatively constructed around the fragility of a single memory.
This presentation will, through its discussion of methodology – its implementation and quiet subversion – reflect on how theory has informed the practice of the film's making.
Helen Bendon, Senior Lecturer in Film, Middlesex University
Raising Stories – Museum narratives around the Dornier 17
Working in lens-based and locative media, Helen Bendon’s practice is anchored around intimate narratives: often understated or tacitly conveyed, and the visual exploration of the relationship between physical and psychological space. This paper is based on a partnership project between Middlesex University and the Royal Air Force Museum (RAFM). Since 2012 Bendon has been part of a team at Middlesex University working in partnership with the RAFM on the first phase of an exhibition and media strategy for raising the Dornier Do 17 – a WWII German Bomber from the Goodwin Sands in Kent. The aircraft, thought to be the only Dornier Do 17 surviving WWII, was raised by the RAFM in June 2013 and is now being stabilized at the conservation centre at RAFM Cosford. The focus of the partnership has been to engage Museum visitors through the stages of the process from the lead up to the lift through to the plane arriving at the Museum at Hendon for permanent display in the Battle of Britain Hall.
The Raising of the Dornier project presents questions around presenting a ‘difficult’ artefact and creating reflective affordances for audiences (both physical and virtual). This presentation looks at the role creative interventions can play in the telling of complex difficult histories in the museum environment to transform the visitors that engage with them.
Jeremy Bubb, Senior Lecturer in Digital Film & Video Production, University of Roehampton & Sarah Kogan, Artist
Parallel Perspectives: Mapping an Archive of The Great War
‘How does a project mature? It is obviously a most mysterious, imperceptible process. It carries on independently of ourselves, in the subconscious, crystallizing on the walls of the soul, It is the form of the soul that makes it unique, indeed only the soul decides the hidden ‘gestation’ period of that image which cannot be perceived by the conscious gaze’
Andrei Tarkovsky Time within Time, 1975
Changing the Landscape is a multimedia visual arts project created by artist Sarah Kogan, supported by the Arts Council of England and The National Lottery. Sarah will present a profoundly personal exploration of the cataclysmic destruction wrought by the First World War and inspired by an archive of over 150 unpublished daily illustrated letters and photographic postcards written by her great uncle Barney Griew, a map maker and scout who died in The Battle of the Somme. Changing the Landscape will culminate in an
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exhibition in 2016, the Somme’s centenary year, in London and include a specially commissioned multi-screen video installation by independent filmmaker Jeremy Bubb. The film will provide discrete access to the archive and reflect, document, and embody a creative response to the collection which details Rifleman Griew’s journey from Hackney, London, to the battlefields of Northern France.
The separate presentations by the two artists will investigate the comparative relationship between film and two-dimensional artworks. They will consider issues of time, image, story and movement through the parallel, but divergent approaches and scrutinize the significance of interdisciplinary practice in relation to representations of archival material, personal narrative and images from the First World War. The session seeks to highlight the importance of creative practice in researching past events and its capacity to present a range of new and innovative readings within a contemporary context.
Sarah Kogan will reflect on her use of a multitude of media: abstract and figurative painting and drawing, photography, new technology, text and archival material designed to capture the multiplicity of viewpoint present in Barney Griew’s daily letters and images. This will be viewed in relation to both a historic and contemporary perspective; each narrative maintaining its own and distinct thread, as if seen through the monoscopic sight-lines of a rifle.
Jeremy Bubb will discuss the implications for narrative in relation to accessing events of the past through a gallery film. The construction of history through story, use of multi-screen and the mediation of narrative through visual means will also be examined.
Sarah Kogan is an artist and educator based in the East End of London currently developing Changing the Landscape, an Arts Council of England and National Lottery funded multimedia arts
project to mark the centenary of The Battle of the Somme in 2016. She is also a Lecturer on Art of Psychiatry, Bethlem Royal Hospital & SLAM NHS Foundation Trust.
Jeremy Bubb is a filmmaker, Senior Lecturer in Digital Film and Video and Chair of PaRG, University of Roehampton London.
Changing the Landscape: mapping an archive, a blog by Sarah Kogan on Oxford University’s WW1 Centenary website: http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/space-into-place/changing-the-landscape-mapping-an-archive/
Changing the Landscape’s website: http://www.changing-the-landscape.com
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Panel 3: Disruption, Context, Representation Panel Chair: Alexandra Sage, Senior Lecturer in Film & Television Studies, University of Roehampton
Inga Burrows, University of South Wales
Practice as Research in a Fictional Landscape
This paper re-traces the steps taken on a research journey that has yet to reach its destination point. The quest is to merge two hitherto unrelated worlds of television Soap and contemporary art practice. The artist; the catalyst in this mission to fuse two cultures together, situated within her residency studio, hosted by Welsh language soap opera production Pobol y Cwm. The series now in it's 40th year is produced by BBC Wales for S4C and was up until very recently broadcast five days a week, with an omnibus edition on Sundays. (From June the drama will be broadcast 4 days a week, the omnibus axed.) Entitled Pobol Prism, the residency occurs inside the fictional town of Cwmderi, but outside of the screen drama. When not on call Actors are invited by the artist to take part studio activities designed to stimulate dialogue between artist and character/actors that will bring to light potential ideas for artworks. Artworks that manifest in some dimension the actor's subjective relationship to their fictional presence. Many of the actors have played their character continuously for a decade or more, as one might assume identities blur, the Soap studio environment fertile context for playing with identities.
The back-story of the residency began with an open call from Artangel, an organization responsible for producing Rachel Whitread's House, Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave. The Artangel brief was to
dream up a project that could be produced; with the support of Artangel, in places where art has not been seen before. My proposal was to become artist-in-residence in Coronation Street. The proposal was declined, nevertheless I decided to persue a version of the idea directly to Ynyr Williams the producer of Pobol y Cwm, he kindly agreed to host the residency, as part of the series 40th anniversary celebrations.
Over the past four months of visiting the fictional town of Cwmderi I have tested a number strategies for drawing actors/characters into contemplation of what contemporary art practice might mean to them as characters and actors. The Pobol Prism project is only alive when dialogue takes place between actors and artist.
The first of these strategies collected data on the characters’ sensory experiences, their sense of smell, their visual sense. Actors were asked to complete The Cwmderi Eye Questionnaire, a series of questions designed to encourage actors to reflect their character's experiences of visual pleasure. Exploring the sense of smell, characters sampled a range of natural and processed fragrances to identify bespoke soap fragrances that evoke the essence of character. Other ideas have included exploring the expressive possibilities of recycling used scripts, and experimenting with folk dance as a form of subversive collective expression. The works created by the Actors/Characters will be exhibited at the g39 gallery in Cardiff in October 2014. The intention of merging the two cultural realms of Soap on the box and Art in a warehouse is to aerate debate the value and values of both sites of artistic production.
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Jenn Feray, Lecturer in the School of Creative Technologies, University of Portsmouth
Turning up the Heat in Swaziland: Tackling ‘techno-aversion’ in female television production students
Successive studies have shown that women are under-represented in technical areas of professional film and television production. According to a recent Skillset Employment Census (2012), just 13% of camera operators in UK creative media industries are women. The reasons for the occupational gender disparity are the subject of on-going debate. But as University Film and Television Production courses become increasingly popular, perhaps they can play a role in helping to redress the balance. This paper looks at a small-scale study at Portsmouth University investigating female attitudes to technical roles in production, considers some of the reasons women give for avoiding the ‘hands-on’ jobs, and evaluates an all-female field trip to Swaziland that attempted to tackle such ‘techno-aversion’. It asks what can we learn about supporting students of both genders who may feel intimidated by technology.
A group of 51 final year students studying film and television production at Portsmouth University (2013), were surveyed to determine attitudes to production roles and to see if there was any difference based on gender. The results showed many of the female students opted for directing or producing their graduation film – a documentary of approximately 15 minutes. But just one female from the cohort took on the role of prime cameraperson, an indicator of significant, demonstrable camera competence. Yet a number of females reported being interested in camerawork when they started University. One possible explanation for this drop-off may lie in the fact that students self-select production roles in their project groups. The girls often defer to the greater ‘enthusiasm’ of the boys resulting
in the technical jobs being dominated by males at an early stage in the course. What begins as reticence soon becomes entrenched ‘techno-aversion’ in females, often by the second year. By their final year, many female students report they lack confidence or are even ‘scared’ of production technology (camera, lighting, audio recording etc.).
Does this really matter? Perhaps females simply prefer not to do camerawork? Initial research interviews with television industry professionals (primarily in factual programming) suggest that with the advent of digital technology and constant downward pressure on budgets, there is increased emphasis on production multi- skilling. Consequently now even junior researchers are expected to have broad technical skills, and in particular be competent on camera. So having the confidence to shoot, even at a basic level, is crucial to employability. A ‘learned’ aversion to technical roles potentially puts female graduates at a distinct disadvantage in securing entry-level jobs in broadcast television production.
The foundations of these attitudes to technology in females may in part be laid down in early life or be attributable to sociological and cultural influences. So can pedagogic practice in HE support female students to move beyond and rewrite the stereotype? A one-off project helped address some of the issues by giving three female Portsmouth production students (two final year; one second year) the opportunity to go to Africa to shoot a documentary under the supervision of a professional female film-maker.
The film is about ‘Tools for Life’, a charity project in which four novice female carpenters travelled to Swaziland to teach a group of HIV-affected rural women some basic woodworking skills. The film students documented the scheme working under real world pressure and conditions. They lived and worked with the subjects of their film
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in a woman-centred environment. Most importantly, they shot it themselves, having previously avoided technical roles at University. The case study looks at how the experience impacted on their practice, their confidence levels, and crucially, their employability. And for the second year student, how her engagement and approach to technical roles changed when she returned to complete her final year.
For the students, the experience in Swaziland was instrumental in changing their attitude to technical practice. This paper seeks to identify the combination of factors that may have contributed to the positive outcomes, to pinpoint what proved less effective, and asks how this approach might be adapted and applied elsewhere to benefit larger numbers of students – male and female alike.
Greg Bevan, Lecturer in experimental media and multiplatform production, Aberystwyth University
Nothing But Shadows – Collage Documentary and the Residue of Family Trauma
I define collage as a collection of disparate, unconnected elements, each with its own set of signifiers and codes, removed from their original contexts and assembled to create an alternative composition with a new meaning. The textural quality of materials can vary significantly, and can constitute little more than scraps with frayed, cut or torn edges. Deriving from the French word ‘to glue’, much of the process of compiling collage documentary relies on impulse and randomness, rearranging images, sounds and sequences in much the same way as a collage artist (or child) assembles and
reassembles their materials into numerous combinations before deciding on the final arrangement and gluing them to the canvas. The materials used in collage are often highly charged with personal, social, psychological, political and ideological implications; this suggests an alternative and, perhaps, more appropriate way for documentary to explore disparate memories, experiences, thoughts and emotions, particularly where evidence or testimony is absent, inadequate or unreliable. The production of all documentaries, regardless of formal method, is based on the selection, juxtaposition and manipulation of elements that refer and signify; and, by foregrounding the practice and principles of collage, how can the formal language and thematic terrain of documentary be extended?
This paper will include a selection of clips from the film Dim Ond Cysgodion (Nothing but Shadows), an experimental collage documentary about inter-generational conflict, the transference of knowledge and ideologies, the struggle for language and individuality, the conflict between facts and imagination and the development of an independent authorial and personal voice.
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Panel 4: Appropriating the Archive Panel Chair, Professor Michael Chanan, University of Roehampton
Susan Pui San Lok, Reader in Fine Art, Middlesex University
Faster, Higher
Faster, Higher (2008) was originally commissioned to coincide with the Beijing Olympics. This five-screen work includes montages of Olympic archive material and rarely-seen Chinese documentary footage spanning the last century, interwoven with filmed sequences shot by the artist in the areas around the London 2012 Olympics site. Despite China’s voluntary self-exclusion from the Olympics between 1948 and 1980, and the avowed apolitical idealism of the Games as a global brand, Faster, Higher finds commonalities in the visual and cultural rhetoric of distinct bodies of archival material, and resonances between notions of nation, sport, patriotism and physical endeavour. The work explores questions of spectacle and its construction, and tensions between collective identity and solitary commitment. Opening with the rituals and symbols of national ceremony and international unity, flags jostle along a succession of parades, and processions are punctuated by the release of doves and balloons. Colour bars and countdowns signal a different kind of 'standard' or ‘universal’ language, implicating the entwined histories of the Olympics and the moving image, as well as archival points of entry. The Olympic rings are echoed through clocks, archers’ targets, lassoes, and gymnasts’ hoops, while the ascent of pole-vaulters, mountaineers, balloons and lanterns invoke the movement’s motto: citius, altius, fortius.
Faster, Higher (2008) was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and the British Film Institute. Supported by Arts Council England. Citius, Altius (2012) is a single-screen version of the work, commissioned for the Samsung Olympics Media Art Collection.
www.susanpuisanlok.com
Reece Auguiste, Assistant Professor in Film Studies, University of Colorado
The Archives Structuring Presence in Practice Based Documentary Media
This paper proposes that the ontology of the archive carries with it a structuring presence that can reconfigure the epistemic systems of the documentary film form and that it can be used in practice based research as a legitimate form of inquiry and critical pedagogy.
The use of archival materials – moving images & photographs – are not only structuring tropes in the construction of historical narrative as is evident in the films Night and Fog (2011) and Nine Muses (2011), but that the archive offers practiced based researchers the opportunity to utilized it to either augment their written research or to replace the written dissertation with visual documentary media that carries the same epistemological weight as the written word.
Reece Auguiste is a filmmaker, curator, essayist and a founding member of the critically acclaimed Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC). His work with BAFC traversed the medium of tape-slide, photography, film and video. He is the director of the award winning films Mysteries of July and Twilight City and was the co-founder of the Memphis Film Forum and The Memphis International Film Festival. His
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curatorial work extended to the National Civil Rights Museum, BluesFest and The Midlands Arts Center. His publications have appeared in Framework, Cineaction, Undercut, and in book anthologies such as The British Avant-Garde Film 1926-1995 and Dark Eros.
Paul Antick, Senior Lecturer in Photography, University of Roehampton
Smith at Batang Kali: Letter B to Cohen
The documentary-fiction project Smith at Batang Kali: Letter B to Cohen is the story of a man’s failed attempt to establish a conceptual and narrative bridge between two found ethnographic and historical accounts.
Account #1 is an examination undertaken by a fictional amateur anthropologist called Willing, and an equally fictional photographer called Smith, of the aftermath of the actual massacre, by British soldiers, of 24 Chinese Malay agricultural workers at the Sungei Remok rubber plantation near Batang Kali in Malaya in 1948.
Account #2 is another examination undertaken by Willing, of the contents of a photograph album compiled in Singapore, Malaya and London, between 1951-1953, by a fictional British soldier called Cohen.
The photographer Smith is the subject of Willing’s on-going research project into the ways in which Smith ‘copes in difficult environments and challenging situations’.
Cohen is Smith’s father.
For more information on the Batang Kali massacre and the on-going attempts by Malaysian activists to persuade the British government to hold a public enquiry into the circumstances of the massacre, and its cover-up, see: http://batangkalimassacre.wordpress.com/
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Panel 5: Researching the Archive Panel Chair: Dr Mark Riley, Senior Lecturer in Photography, University of Roehampton
Reuben Knutson, Department of Theatre, Film and Television, Aberystwyth University
Re-enacting re-enactment: Gathering utopian images of the past, present and future from a 1970s Welsh landscape
This paper presents a doctoral research project (now in its final year) that engages with re-enactment strategies, and asks how practice-based research can represent the past in the present. My focus is the Preseli Hills, in North Pembrokeshire, a site of countercultural, back-to-the-land practices in the 1970s, where individuals and communities moved from urban to rural spaces in order to fulfil their dreams and experiment with modes of anti-capitalism, archaic forms of spirituality, alternative modes of community, and return to ‘nature’, amidst a politically sensitive landscape. The history looked back to ‘traditional’ values and practices for inspiration, in order to move forward with revolutionary intent.
I will think through the way my approach to re-enacting such an epoch integrates history and theory through practice. I will use audiovisual references to show how I am working through a process of creating material from archive films and photographs, oral history testimonies, and group events, to construct a re-enactment event with a re-enacted history; and how my role, as artist-ethnographer, affords a position with which to gather abandoned objects, experiences and practices and consider the possibilities they might still contain.
Reuben is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD at Aberystwyth University. Previously, he worked in Bristol, producing films and live events individually, and as part of the artist duo ‘Artic’; and was working for the national arts organization ‘Axis’ presenting work, critique and discussion with visual artists, critics and curators.
Andrea Mariani, University of Udine
Notes on the Italian Cinema Sperimentale.The International Scientific and Travel Documentary Film Exhibition and the Shaping of a Film Culture in Italy (1936–1939)
My presentation will focus on the two editions of the International Scientific and Travel Documentary Film exhibition (Concorso internazione di cinematografia scientifica e turistica) hosted by the city of Como (Northern Italy) in 1936 and 1937 (the event was blocked in 1939). This event assumed an outstanding role in the long and complex process of the renewal of the Italian Cinema during Fascism. It even clashed with the second and third edition of the International Venice Film Festival. The Concorso internazionale di cinematografia scientifica e turistica brought to the fore a peculiar and growing interest in the amateur and substandard film practices, seen as the major and most innovative ways to the renewal of the Italian Cinema, during the Thirties. The substandard film practice they referred to, was thought as a peculiar kind of “experimental” practice (they called it “Cinema Sperimentale”) rather than an amateurish practice: as to say, a strategy that would have allowed an easier interaction between different disciplines and different medias, as well as a deepest exploration of the possibilities of film technologies. Tourism, scientific
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culture and architectural culture merged into the organization of the two editions of this exhibition. A regular international substandard documentary film contest was accompanied by an interactive Film History exhibition, into the elegant and prestigious scenery of Villa Olmo, onshore of the Lake of Como. Film History and Substandard Film Practice were perfectly integrated into an innovative form of exhibition planned by the rationalist architects of the city, with the collaboration of the young cinephiles of the Fascist University Film Club (what they called the CineGuf film-club). Supported by archive documents, rare photographies of the film history exhibition and some film I recently recovered and restored I will discuss the dialectics between the “experimental” and “minor” film practice and the “major” cinema (the Venice Film Festival) within the renovation of Italian film culture during the Fascist Ventennio.
Andrea Mariani is concluding his PhD at Università degli Studi di Udine. His PhD topic is the Italian amateur and experimental cinema movement of the Cineguf (the Fascist University Film Club Movement) equipped and sustained by the Fascist regime. He is a NECS – European Network for Cinema and Media Studies member and AIRSC member (Italian National Film Historians Association).
Dr Julia Peck, University of Roehampton
James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey publications and the absent stop motion photographs
James Balog, director of the Extreme Ice Survey and dedicated to documenting the melting of some 200 glaciers, has successfully
raised awareness of climate change. The stop motion photographs his team has produced, which have featured in the documentary film Chasing Ice (Jeff Orlowski, 2012), has demonstrated the significant reduction of ice on the surface of the earth over a relatively short period of time. Yet these photographs sit within his larger body of output that relies upon the conventional aesthetics associated with Balog’s time at National Geographic. The publication Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers (2012) focuses on the visual wonders of ice formations and include a few ‘before and after’ photographs from the stop motion sequences. In contrast, his earlier book Extreme Ice Now (2009) takes a stronger campaigning approach, albeit without substantially drawing upon the full potential of the stop motion ‘before and after’ sequences.
This short paper will argue that Balog seems encumbered by his visual training and context, and fails to realise the critical potential of his stop motion work. This perhaps says something about the hegemony of the publishing contexts (National Geographic and Rizzoli art publishers), the expectations of his audience and his own desire to be recognised as an artist. Using Buell’s argument (2004) that audiences have learned to look at representations of environmental apocalypse, and live with them in an uneasy and partial way, Balog’s output will be shown to be a partial and necessarily incomplete response to the effects of climate change on glaciers.
Dr. Julia Peck is Senior Lecturer in Photography at University of Roehampton. Her photographic work has been exhibited in the UK and she has contributed images, articles and reviews to Next Level, Source, History of Photography and Journal of Australian Studies; she co-edited the Photography, Archive and Memory special issue of photographies (2010).
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Panel 6: Film and Ethnography Chair: Dr William Brown, Senior Lecturer in Film & Television Studies, University of Roehampton
Dr. Dafydd Sills-Jones, Aberystwyth University
Seitsemantoista: Documentary Film and Cultural Encounter
In 2013, the author spent an 8 month research leave period in Finland, where he encountered a culture that felt more like his own that that of his native Wales. This was to do with a conjunction of myth, landscape and politics, and how these elements played out in a Helsinki suburb. But the question remained of how to represent this experience, and whether the practice of representation would bring the author closer to an understanding of a peculiar ‘feeling for Finland’. Neither the deliberate naivety of observational cinema, nor the heightened symbolism of the essay film could do justice to this paradoxically alienating and familiar experience. What was required was a mode of investigation and communication which held Jean Rouch’s ‘cinema sincerité’ at its heart, but which could also provide space to meditate on the connections between landscape, memory, poetry, politics and history.
Drawing on the work of Benjamin, Chomsky, Rouch, Bernstein and Berne, this paper examines a ‘practice-as-research’ case study of the processes and struggles involved when narrative documentary techniques meet those of the essay film in an attempt to represent a cultural encounter.
Dafydd Sills-Jones is a lecturer in media production at Aberystwyth University, specialising in media production studies, documentary practice, and European documentary film.
Professor Nick Higgins, University of the West of Scotland
Assembling Scottish Identity: The Northern Lights Documentary Project
The Northern Lights project was a mass participation documentary film project that invited members of the public to submit footage about 'their' Scotland as a means to create a unique national self-portrait. Fifty-five filmmaking workshops were held with groups whom traditionally might not engage with large scale arts and media projects. The result was 1500 individual submissions that in turn generated over 300 hours of video footage that became a 98 minute documentary portrait of Scots at a time when the very political future of the nation is in question. The final film was the first ever Scottish documentary to be released in a commercial cinema chain and has recently completed a tour on Scotland's mobile cinema.
Prof Nick Higgins, the producer and director of the project, will present clips from the feature film and explore the relationship between user-generated footage and the construction of Scottish identity in the context of a pre-Independence referendum Scotland.
www.wearenorthernlights.com [email protected]
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Fotis Begklis, University of Westminster
Exploring the potentials of using online interactive video in ethnographic films
Despite the democratization of digital media production and the radical advances in digital media practice, the nature and status of practice in a visual ethnographic research context remains uncertain, reflecting the difficulty of recognizing and defining ways in which new research fields and sites of knowledge are opened through new media practice research. In this presentation I will focus on the intersection between visual ethnography, digital media practice and network cultures, exploring the potential of online interactive video, presenting an alternative paradigm for ethnographic research and epistemological exploration. Examples of online interactive videos such as: “Clouds Over Cuba”, “Gaza-Sderot – Life in spite of everything”; “Havan/Miami”;"The Waiting Room"; “Out My Window”; “One Millionth Tower”; “Hollow”;“Aysénprofundo” will serve as my conceptual springboard. The angle of my presentation is methodological, and will provide an opportunity to see how the potentials of “re-mediating” visual ethnographic materials in a multimodal digital space, can create knowledge networks that potentially enrich the material and enhance knowledge transfer. I am interested primarily to present how the paradigm of ethnographic film shifts through the use of interactive online video and social media environments, allowing ethnographers to connect to global audiences with more immediacy.
I have spent the last twenty years making films, building interactive multimedia applications and teaching. I have deep interest in digital
media practice based research, particularly on how interactive video can be used in visual ethnographic research.
www.digital-ethnography.co.uk
Enrica Colusso, Senior Lecturer in Film, University of Roehampton
Ghost Town
Since the completion of her documentary Home Sweet Home (90min. June 2012) Enrica Colusso has been working on Ghost Town, the first chapter of a wider research project, an ongoing multimedia investigation of the transformation of cityscape over time designed to provide an innovative framework for developing new perspectives on urban experience.
Drawing on Michael Shanks’ notion of “deep-mapping” and Jesse Shapins’ theory and practices around urban representation, the project will take the form of an interactive "deep" map of the Elephant & Castle – an area of central London presently undergoing massive regeneration – and in particular of the Heygate Estate over the last hundred years and beyond.
Engaging with one of modernity's ruins – the Heygate Estate – Ghost Town proposes a journey of discovery bringing the participants into the heart of the process of urban and social transformation, providing an opportunity to meet its protagonists, critically engage with its traces and develop new perspectives on the modern environment we inhabit ultimately, we hope, empowering them to promote change and play an active role in our increasingly urbanized society.
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This initial chapter sets up the conceptual story space (by structuring content within a immersive environment users can spatially explore), introducing them to the idea of a story as a navigated, cognitive journey, as well as to the story protagonists.
The final project will combine the extensive video archives (over 200 hours shot over 4 years) created for Home Sweet Home with other data and archives relevant to the area – including the extensive photographic work of artist Eva Sajovis, content from the London Metropolitan Archives and the local Cuming Museum’s catalogue, open data about the area, and user-generated content to allow users to spatially explore the layers of memory, stories, and media latent within a single location.
Using the project as a case study the paper will explore the relationship between Narrative and Computational Structure (the design of interfaces which function as narrative devices) and engage with questions about the shifting nature of authorial agency seen from the perspective of the how the different roles involved in this new forms of documentary storytelling affect its creative dynamics.
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Roundtable Discussion: The Act of Killing (DocWest, University of Westminster) Chair: Jeremy Bubb, Senior Lecturer in Digital Film & Video Production, University of Roehampton
Discussants:
Michael Uwemedimo (co-producer, The Act of Killing, University of Roehampton),
Professor Erik Knudson (University of Salford),
Dr William Brown (University of Roehampton),
Iain Millar (The Art Newspaper),
Enrica Colusso (University of Roehampton),
Paul Antick (University of Roehampton).
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Screenings Throughout the day extracts from the following work will be screened in Du.001:
Levi Hanes, Huston School of Film & Digital Media, NUI Galway, Ireland
Shapes on Grey, 2014
Running time: 3’23” Director: Levi Hanes Cast: Levi Hanes
Shapes on Grey is a structural examination of narrative and meaning-making using preselected and randomized objects with the agent/maker attempting a compromised guessing game to what the image and colour combination will present. It was made with the intention of reducing a narrative video to its basic form and combining the reductions to see how they can inform each other. This performance to video was developed following research into Lev Manovich and Marsha Kinder’s database theory, Hannah Arendt’s role of the collector from her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, and Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes’ assessment of the role of the Author.
Kayla Parker, Plymouth University
Making Glass; Glass
Running time: 5’ 5” Performer/animator: Kayla Parker
This practice-as-research mediates Luce Irigaray’s writing about the ‘feminine’ through close examination and ‘play’ with glass fragments found among the sand, pebbles, bladder wrack, and briny debris on Stonehouse Pool beach, Plymouth. Gathered intuitively, these objects are smoothed by the movements of the sea. Uncovered by the waves at low tide, the salty lozenges shine blue-white milk of magnesia, warm whey, pale colostrum, moss, strawberry juice, amber toffee, and clear hyacinth, in the low winter sunlight.
I locate materiality of memory, experience of place, and feminine pleasure in the liminal space of the strandline, between high and low water, at the intersection between the natural world and the urban environment. Through microscopic animation I manipulate the found objects to create a miniature ‘looking glass’, a ‘poetic text’ through which I may find a place for language of the body. I film using macro photography, manipulating the tiny objects and the digital camera with my fingers: touch and sight intertwine as I feel my way through the camera’s miniature dance in embodied time and space.
[email protected] www.kaylaparker.co.uk http://www.sundog.co.uk/
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Maren Hahnfeld, University for the Creative Arts (UCA), Farnham
Workers at the City Hall, 2013
Running time: 2’30”
Workers at the London City Hall is a Tape-Slide project. This short film consists of stills of the interior of the London City Hall with cleaners fading in and out of vision. A soundtrack of hovering, recorded by the cleaners themselves, accompanies these images. The cleaners are presented as phantoms, barely visible, yet present. Tidy, crisp images are juxtaposed with the messy recording of cleaning in progress. Economic migrants clean Britain's most important institutions. What are the implications on our collective conscience if the poor from around the world clean the buildings that define Britain as a democracy?
Nora Duggan, DAH (Digital Arts & Humanities), Huston School of Film & Digital Media, NUI Galway, Ireland
Quad, 2013
Running time: 20’
Quad (2013) is a 20 minute video projection for installation. Taking the historical Quadrangle building at NUI Galway, Ireland, as her subject, Nora compiled a series of digital photographs and videos over a twelve month period, primarily recording seasonal changes and the movement of light in and around the building and its surrounds. They were subsequently reconfigured in such a way that elements of stillness and movement coincide within a single frame.
In questioning how our experience of time can be reinvestigated through combined stillness and movement, the co-existence of two temporalities within one frame is vital to the work: In Quad images slide from stillness to movement and back again with no discernible separation point between the two states. The image cannot be read as entirely 'photographic' or 'cinematic', rather it stands on a precipice between the two. Here, time is understood to comprise a multitude of simultaneous temporal relations that expand and contract, existing not merely as past, present and future but as future pasts, present futures, and so on.
Rob Coley, University of Lincoln
Airminded
Running time: 18’30” Produced by: The Society for Ontofabulatory Research Narrators: Maria Richmond, Zakir Pir, and Shayla Motley
The English county of Lincolnshire has long been an experimental laboratory for new kinds of aerial warfare. Today it is home to the drone pilot, to the forces that remotely operate a fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, located in Afghanistan, from a quiet village location. Taking an essayistic form, this film chronicles a different experiment: a flight over the Lincolnshire landscape conducted by following an aerial chart of ‘enemy’ territory. By hijacking the county’s visual culture, AIRMINDED aims to seize upon a new electronic space in which the distinction between ‘here’ and ‘there’ is dissolved.
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Sally Waterman
In the Cage, 2007.
From Waste Land series (2005-2010) Running time: 3’ 33” Director/Performer/Editor: Sally Waterman Camera: Nick Turner
In the Cage is based on part two of T. S Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, with parallels drawn between Eliot’s troubled marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood and Waterman’s own experience of parental divorce. The title’s metaphorical image of imprisonment is evocative of a psychological wasteland, where the non-communication between the poem’s speakers is conceptually interpreted as a series of gestures that are performed by Waterman, entrapped between two pillars within a stage-like space. The ghostly actions of this anonymous figure, together with the unsettling silence of this ‘still movie’ emphasizes the elusive quality of Waterman’s self portraits.
www.sallywaterman.com
Tom Reid, University of Sussex
Symphonie Diagonale
Running time: 7’ Dir: Viking Eggeling, 1924 New musical accompaniment: Tom Reid (2013) Instrumentation: 3 mechanised digital pianos
Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1924) is one of the very first abstract films, and uses many devices derived from cinema’s
temporal component, such as polyphony and morphological evolution (R. Bruce Elder). My newly composed score begins with highly synchronised, analogous musical gestures. However, as the film progresses the music gains autonomy, as it reworks these gestures according to its own logic, whilst maintaining precise contact with the visuals. The result is a mutually revealing counterpoint and critical correspondence between the two media. I am keen to call attention to film as a mechanical process and interrogate human-machine polarities; hence my preoccupation with electronic timbres and modes of performance.
Acknowledgements Jeremy Bubb and Paul Antick would like to thank the following for their help and support: Joanna Callaghan (University of Sussex), MeCCSA Practice Network, Professor Cahal McLaughlin (Queen’s University Belfast), Journal of Media Practice, Dr. Michael Witt (University of Roehampton), Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures, Marta Kotwas (typesetting), and Lucy Dollman.
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