Doctoral Researchers Film Screening

The Graduate School Film Screening showcases the creativity and diversity of a selection of our CREAM (Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media) doctoral researchers.

Responding to the Graduate School Festival 2022 theme Look Up and Look Beyond, the films deal with matters of temporality, embodiment, materiality, ecological practice, and social ecologies.

PROGRAMME:

Siting Cinema

Julie Marsh
2022, loop.
installation

Siting Cinema is a research project that ‘performs’ the cinema space through a film installation made in Regents Street Cinema. The cinema is first filmed using a 360-degree rig, recording every detail of the architectural site. The pre-recorded film of the auditorium is then projected onto the cinema screen and the same rig is used to track the movement of the recording device. The projected image has two roles: one to locate (anchor the audience within the cinema space) and the other to disorientate (see the cinema space in a new way). Siting Cinema forces the viewer to actively look, engage and experience the physical site of the cinema auditorium.

Part One

Twisting Metal With Earth

Harry Meadows
2020, 10 mins 06 secs
Apple ProRes 422 HQ, 1920×1080

Twisting Metal with Earth explores how weather stations can be useful beyond their function as mechanical sensors. It suggests the potential to also act as an aesthetic interface with the hyperobjects of big data and global climate. The video’s animated characters are voiced by interview recordings from couples discussing their experience of weather. One interviewee collected and shared data from his own weather station, others gave more experiential accounts. From the characters, a conversation emerges that blurs the boundaries between global systems and local experience. Mechanical climate sensors and plants are discussed by the characters as useful objects to think through large and complex topics.

Nita Harvey Archive: Casting Film

Ellen Nolan
c.1933, 1 min 24 secs
.mp4

Drawing from the Nita Harvey archive, (London, 1928-38) and using feminist film/photographic theory to underpin my approach, I aim to re-map the archive to create an innovative counter-hegemonic discourse about femininity, experience, and objectification in 1930s Hollywood, arguing for the significance of this hidden history. Courtesy of The Nita Harvey Archive.

Nita Harvey Archive: Floating Images

Ellen Nolan
2022, 1 min 03 secs
.mov

This piece explores my familial and artist relation to The Nita Harvey Archive, the making process and my attempt at re-looking, re-enactment and embodying female experience and objectification using the archive as object.

THE RISK SISTERS

Dellores Laing
2022, 3 mins 51 secs
.mp4, 1920×1080

THE RISK SISTERS interrogates altered orthodox space and place by disrupting the online Pathé newsreel ‘Roulette Fashions’ with a counter chronology, lexicon and sound score. This traversing and reassembly of oppressive boundaries is made manifest within an unexpected space of fashion, London’s infamous gambling haunt The River Club. Infiltrated by The Rahvis’ 1963 couture collection, virtual space therefore becomes the medium for counter patriarchal narratives. Here, feminist practice creates hybrid environments where
dislocation and reimagined place proves fundamental to
the marginalised and silenced subject, the Rahvis Sisters.

Discussion and Q&A

Following the screening of these four short films, there will be a response by Joshua Oppenheimer followed by a Q&A session with the three film makers. This will be chaired by George Clark and Camille Waring.

Part Two

The Way It Behaves

Megan Carnrite
2018, 3 mins 22 secs
.mov, 1280×720

The Way It Behaves is a short performative video art piece concerned with bodily autonomy and the materiality of the corporeal form.

Triple Exposure

stav B
2021, 2 mins 26 secs
16:9

This is a plot of a resurrection and a new discovery. The narrative is altered with the pink ribbon: Passage to ash, blood and water. Trailing, wandering and looking for the legend of Eanswythe, the princess who became a nun. Where are her bones resting? Where can her whispers be heard? Where can her aura, a slither even, be seen? A tale of a legend.

Biting Cheek Beyond the Sea

stav B
2022, 3 mins
16:9

A solitary voyage, far and beyond the horizon of existing possibilities.

War Crimes for Likes

Manisha Ganguly
2019, 15 mins 08 secs
Youtube upload, 1080

Using a combination of open-source and traditional investigative methods, journalist and filmmaker Manisha Ganguly exposes how war crimes committed in the Libyan civil war, such as the desecration of bodies, extrajudicial killings of civilians, and mutilation of bodies of POWs, are being shared on social media platforms like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter to incite violence. The film directly identifies the members of the Libyan National Army’s special forces committing these crimes and tracks down its survivors in exile. The evidence is then presented to executives at Facebook for a response.

IMPORTANT: This film contains extremely graphic violence, war and death. It is not suitable for children.

Discussion and Q&A

Attendees are then invited to join us for a reception in the cinema bar.

The Doctoral Researchers Film Screening is part of the Graduate School Festival 2022