Items where Subject is "Cultural History"

A partir de la década de 1970, numerosas mujeres latinoamericanas comenzaron a utilizar el cine como forma de expresión artística y herramienta política realizando documentales que visibilizaron y denunciaron formas de opresión que, hasta ese momento, habían permanecido en el ámbito de lo privado. Como señalan Traverso y
Wilson, la bibliografía sobre el cine documental de la región es escasa (2014) y, a pesar de los esfuerzos por incluir documentales hechos por mujeres, se centra en el cine realizado por hombres.1 Con el objetivo de contribuir a la re-historización del cine latinoamericano desde una perspectiva de género, este artículo propone tres aproximaciones al cine documental hecho por mujeres de América Latina entre 1975 y
1994 a través del análisis de una selección de documentales.

Amidst the UK higher education strikes, Lorena Cervera and Isabel Seguí codirected #PrecarityStory, a short documentary that exposes the increasing precarisation of academic labour at universities. Released in 2020, the film follows a working day in the life of Isabel who, at that time, was a cleaner, researcher, and teacher at the same British elite institution. This is a (self-consciously) performative documentary (Bruzzi, 2006) inspired methodologically by the transmediatic form of Latin American testimonio, where an individual subject stands for a community and the film is an activist artefact in which ‘reality’ is managed creatively to further the political agenda of the filmmakers. This chapter explores the complexities of this approach in which a filmmaker and an empowered film subject join forces to challenge an exploitative workplace and interrogate the mode of production of collaborative cinemas.

Following recent endeavours that have unearthed women’s cinema and reclaimed its contribution to film history, this video essay revisits the filmography of the Colombian feminist film collective Cine Mujer (1978–1999). Narrated by three of its members—Eulalia Carrizosa, Patricia Restrepo, and Clara Riascos—through semi-structured interviews that intersect the personal, professional and political, this short film also reuses Cine Mujer’s archive. Its purpose is, one the one hand, to contribute to restoring its legacy and, on the other hand, to reframe and resignify its images within women’s ongoing battle for equality.

From the 1970s, Latin American women began making documentary films with clear political intents. These films shed light on the precarious conditions that characterized women’s entry to the workforce and other labour struggles, on reproductive rights and women’s role in production and reproduction, and on the inevitable questioning of identity that results from migration and displacement. However, the historiography of Latin American cinema continues to ignore the legacy of these filmmakers. This thesis acknowledges and re-signifies women’s documentaries and reclaims their contributions to film history. Moreover, it provides a new lens through which to revisit the history of Latin American documentary while also adding to the scholarship on Latin American women’s filmmaking through both theoretical analysis and creative practice. In the written component, I propose three approximations to the study of Latin American women’s documentary cinema between 1975 and 1994. To do so, I have curated a selection of nine documentaries produced during these decades that illustrate some of the thematic interests, modes of authorship and production, and formal strategies and aesthetic devices employed by women filmmakers. Ultimately, I contend that this corpus of work was produced during a formative moment for women’s and feminist cinema. The analyses of these films have informed the making of the creative component. The short documentary Processing Images from Caracas traces the archive of activist, filmmaker, and photographer Franca Donda and the film collectives that she was part of, Cine Urgente and Grupo Feminista Miércoles. It also shows how Latin American women’s documentaries and other relevant materials that could make up an archive of women’s and feminist cinema are at the brink of disappearance and foregrounds the urgent need to create such an archive.

This article contextualizes and characterizes the Venezuelan feminist film collective Grupo Feminista Miercoles. Founded by Venezuelan Josefina Acevedo and Italians Franca Donda and Ambretta Marrosu, among others, Grupo Feminista Miercoles (1979–88) produced the documentary Yo, tu, Ismaelina (‘I, you, Ismaelina’) (1981) and the videos Argelia Laya, por ejemplo (‘Argelia Laya, for example’) (1987), Eumelia Hernandez, calle arriba, calle abajo (‘Eumelia Hernandez, up and down the street’) (1988) and Una del monton (‘One of the bunch’) (1988), and participated in several activities organized by the Venezuelan women’s movement. On the one hand, this article pays attention to both the cinematic and political contexts that allowed the emergence of this collective, with a focus on the influence that Italian cinematic and feminist ideas had in these contexts. On the other hand, it also provides formal analysis of the collective’s filmography and explores how feminist ideas and praxis are deployed in its films. The overall aim of this article is to restore the contributions of Grupo Feminista Miercoles to both Latin American political cinema and transnational feminist cinema.

Cine Mujer was the name of two feminist film collectives, one founded in Mexico (1975–1986) and the other in Colombia (1978–1999). Sharing the same name but with no ties between each other, these collectives produced films that provided different representations of women, politicized personal experiences and domestic spaces, and promoted processes of consciousness-raising. Broadly, this article looks at the Cine Mujer collectives as part of a larger phenomenon that, although informed by second-wave feminism and the New Latin American Cinema, can be better understood within the singular complexity of Latin American women’s movements. Specifically, it analyses two documentaries, Cosas de mujeres (1978) and Carmen Carrascal (1982), produced by the Cine Mujer collectives in Mexico and Colombia, respectively. Drawing on Laura Marks’ work on hybridity, excess, and haptic visuality, this article explores the relation between modes of production and representation in these films and positions them as emblematic examples of a formative moment in Latin American feminist documentary. By emphasizing the emotional and sensorial appeal of these films, this article also attempts to expand what is understood by political cinema.

This article contextualises and characterises the history and film production of the Colombian feminist film collective Cine Mujer, and analyses how its collective and collaborative practices challenged auteurism. From 1978 to the late 1990s, Cine Mujer produced several short films, documentaries, series, and videos, and acted as a distribution company of Latin American women’s cinema. Its twenty years of activity possibly make it one of the world’s longest-lasting feminist film collectives. Yet, its history is largely unknown in Colombia and abroad. Thus, the question that motivates this article is related to how to inscribe Cine Mujer in film history without uncritically reproducing the methodologies that cast a shadow on women’s cinema. Throughout its trajectory, Cine Mujer transitioned from being an independent cinematic project interested in artistic experimentation to a media organization that produced educational videos commissioned by governmental and global institutions and often targeted at marginalised women. Based on interviews conducted with some of the Cine Mujer members, the Cine Mujer’s catalogues, and its films and videos, I organise Cine Mujer’s corpus of work in three main modes of production that disrupt the role of the auteur and the centrality of the director.

Franca Donda (Italy, 1933-2017) was an activist, filmmaker, and photographer who lived in Caracas for most part of the second half of the twentieth century. During these decades, she made several short films with the Venezuelan collectives Cine Urgente/Urgent Cinema (1968-1973) and Grupo Feminista Miércoles/Wednesday’s Feminist Group (1979-1988). Throughout her life, she also took thousands of photographs of women across Latin America. However, her work has received little scholarly attention, and her archive has not been properly preserved. This article demonstrates the importance of protecting the legacy of Donda, Cine Urgente, and Grupo Feminista Miércoles. To do so, it explores Donda’s multifaceted identity and outlines the production of the two collectives. It maps, locates, and assesses the conditions of some of the materials that could comprise their archive. And it reflects on issues of positionality and briefly describes the transmedia project that is emerging from this research.

Bajo el título donda-doc: Documenter les Femmes et les Féministes par la photo- graphie documentaire. L’exemple de Franca Donda au Venezuela, este proyecto pretende arrojar luz al legado de Franca Donda a través de la producción de varios artefactos culturales desarrollados a partir de su archivo. En este texto ofrecemos, en primer lugar, una breve biografía de Franca Donda, prestando especial atención a su producción cinematográfica y fotográfica. Y, en segundo lugar, ahondamos en el compromiso feminista de su trabajo fotográfico.

This special section within the issues 61 of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media was co-edited by Lorena Cervera Ferrer, Sonia Kerfa, and Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto. All the articles included in this special section were peer-reviewed. Moreover, this section also includes book reviews and an edited transcription of the roundtable that took place at the conference 'Cozinhando Imagens, Tejiendo Feminismos. Latin American Feminist Film and Visual Art Collectives,' from which this section emerged.

The appreciation or reception of materials can create a positive or a negative reaction in the user and an individual’s understanding of materials comes from their own experiential knowledge, influence of others, and cultural perception. The condemnation of the overuse of plastics materials and their impact on the environment when they become waste has, understandably, meant that today the cultural perception of plastics is largely that they are cheap, rubbish, throw away - all bad news. This position of negativity has been reached because we currently see the mismanagement of plastics waste as it blows about in the wind; we see it as rubbish in our streets, and as detritus in the oceans. However, our relationships with the material family, over the time they have existed, have had a varied and turbulent history with different perspectives generated by different people at different times. This article will briefly explore ‘a’, rather than ‘the’, history of the use of plastics with the aim of putting the current societal relationship with them into context.

The use and misuse of plastics in design have been the bedrock of turbulent relationships between consumers, manufacturers, and the material family. It has been acknowledged that culturally we, in the West, have had a deep, long-lived, yet ambivalent relationship with plastics as the materials have been seen as both a bringer of utopian ideals as well as a cheap alternative to nobler natural materials. Today, those relational connections have become diametric with individuals loving plastics because of what they can be made into, and those who hate them for the very same reason. This chapter will explore the historical comprehension of designed objects made of plastics, based on the notions of identity and authenticity, the acceptance of new materials, the ideas of cultural perception and taste, and the general understanding, or lack thereof, of manufacturing processes.

In order to understand the relationships individuals have with plastics today, it is useful to understand how people related to those materials in the past. After the restrictions of the Second World War with rationing touching many aspects of consumption, society of the 1950s was encouraged to consume products to aid economic growth, to maintain jobs, and improve lifestyles (Hine, 2010). Disposability and the notion of using something once and then throwing it away grew to become a sign of wealth and cleanliness, consumers were encouraged to use disposable products for their efficiency and to avoid contamination. The ideas of purification and convenience encouraged the development of ethical justifications for the use of disposable items (Hawkins, 2006). The link between cleanliness and single-use packaging is strengthened by the act of throwing away the wrapper (Lucas, 2002); the ecological consequences were not, at that time, contemplated (Fiell and Fiell, 2009). The popular understanding that plastics are low value and therefore disposable has been built up over a history of misuse of long-lived materials for short-lived products. This paper will explore the value placed on plastics through and exploration of their uses and misuses, their consumption and significantly their conspicuous non-consumption, and how we deal with them at the end of their useful life.

The creative turn within geography has seen a number of returns to the artists’ studio as a site for exploring the vital, immanent, and affective relations that form these spaces of creative practice. Where interviews, observations, collaborations, with artists have directed attention to the non-representational, this paper approaches the studio as both a scene, and an atmospheric staging. Taking up broader discourses around the scenographic, it argues that scenes not only take account of the durational and compositional construction of studio spaces, but can be understood as a form of training and attunement through which participants are enrolled in the joint composition of studio atmospheres and registers. It directs attention to the agency that these compositions have in the production of the studio imaginary.

In Theodor Adorno’s writing the term “natural history” has quite a different meaning to its usual scientific usage. Adorno’s idea of natural history aims at reconciling, in form and in content, the opposing forces of nature and history with the aim of overcoming the division of natural being and historical being that Adorno considered to be the central problem of critical social theory. Through sprawling installations the French contemporary artist Pierre Huyghe creates new forms of interaction between natural systems and artificial constructs. Huyghe’s body of work is submitted to interpretation through Adorno’s dialectic of nature and history to establish the relevance of both Huyghe’s practice and Adorno’s thought to the conditions of the Anthropocene.

To mark the centenary of the signing of the armistice and the end of the First World War, the Shrine Trustees are pleased to present Flowers of War. Artists and jewellers Kirsten Haydon, Elizabeth Turrell and Neal Haslem have created this beautiful and reflective commemorative wreath using hundreds of floral emblems from battlefields around the world. Inspired by those found on those same battlefields and the native flowers of those countries and all of the Allied nations who fought alongside Britain in that war. Our guest speaker Professor Paul Gough, will speak to us about his presentation, ‘Seeds, soil, saplings, Reflections on the Flowers of War and Peace’. (Introduction by Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne CEO Dean Lee)

Once heralded as a ‘fortress built by Nature for herself... a moat defensive to a house…’ our island is slowly unravelling. Across political, social and economic dimensions, Britain is beset and besieged. ‘Our scepter’d isle’ is fast fraying at the edges.

Politically, these have been intense years. A tortuous and messy divorce from Europe is being tested daily at customs posts on the land and across invisible lines on the high seas. Once a totem of English authority, the White Cliffs of Dover have become irreversibly politicised. One faction regards them as unassailable battlements, while a rival party deploys their sheer white slopes as a vast projection screen to beam forlorn messages of loss to our European neighbours. North and south along the coastline, our Channel beaches have become the landing sites for waves of refugees seeking solace and security after perilous voyages from war-ravaged homelands.

Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979) was a British painter, muralist, illustrator, teacher, and writer whose career spanned more than six decades. Recognised during his lifetime as one of the leading artists of his generation, his reputation has long been overshadowed by his more famous brother, Stanley. Yet Spencer’s fascination with landscape and his ability to capture everyday life in rural England led to the creation of some of the most poignant artworks of the interwar period.

Drawing on a newly discovered archive of personal letters, notebooks, and diaries, this illustrated biography tells Spencer’s story for the first time. Bringing together his major paintings, drawings and illustrations, many never before seen, the book greatly expands our understanding of Spencer. It reassesses his status within twentieth-century British modernism and the revival of the landscape tradition, as well as the important role he played in the reinvigoration of public mural painting. Spencer is also reappraised as one of the most successful art teachers of his time, and his extensive influence on the lives and careers of many twentieth-century artists is explored in detail.

This paper considers the relationship between site, memory and fine art practices, as viewed from the perspectives of a practitioner informed by the discourses of commemoration and the aftermath of conflict. Through an exploration of art works derived from encounters with displaced spaces, peripheries and edgelands, Gough situates his practice – and that of several selected artists – as a conversation between “place”, “space” and the geopolitical. Artists have long employed the notions of ambiguity, transition and the hybrid in their work.

Framed within the discourses of liminality and aftershock, practitioners have explored various strategies to address rites of in-betweenness to evoke a sensation of transition and displacement. To explore these ideas, Gough posits a number of his artworks as ‘provocations’, and draws attention to other contemporary artists and practitioners similarly drawn to the aftermath of constructed places and re-constructed histories. The paper draws upon two suites of Gough’s work each addressing aspects of the aftermath, and each to a degree addressing issues of transgression. The first is a series of site-specific photographs take on the decrepit and abandoned British army bases in former West Germany where Gough’s family was garrisoned during the Cold War.

They speak of an abjectness and blankness tempered by the depth of familial association. The second suite of practice use frottage, rubbings and photographic collage, to assemble a cycle of triptych forms drawn from prolonged site visits to the sites of twentieth century battle in Turkey, France, Belgium and Macedonia: locations richly associated with transgressive military intervention and now comprised of preserved terrain, military cemeteries and rhetorical topography that has long informed Gough’s practice.

The special authority invested in the war artist and the image had become denuded by the mid-1980s. Although an independent artist working to commission, Peter Howson’s work in the Balkans was considered to have crossed the line that distinguished between impersonal witness and overzealous artist. Unlike William Orpen’s impartial rendition of gross personal violation, Howson was deemed to have become both judge and jury, an advocate not an artist, corrupted by circumstantial evidence rather than remaining vigilant as an uncorruptible viewer. For his part, Howson was clear that the terms of engagement had fundamentally changed since the Great War: it was no longer simply about what could be seen or not seen, but also what was known and could not be denied.

Reflecting on a tour of the Western Front trenches in 1916 the writer Reginald Farrer suggested that it was in fact wrong to regard the ‘huge, haunted solitude’ of the modern battlefield as empty. ‘It is more’ he argued, ‘full of emptiness… an emptiness that is not really empty at all.’ Contemporary artists, poets, and composers seized upon the concept of a crowded emptiness, of gaps, pauses and silences that were in fact crammed with resonance, populated with overwhelming memory.

This paper and film screening considers the phenomenology of aural emptiness and its manifestation during remembrance and repatriation ceremonies. It focusses on a short film by Kate Davies ‘The Separation Line’ which is a montage of 14 repatriation events held at Royal Wootton Bassett between 2007 and 2011. The film lasts precisely 9 minutes and 50 seconds, which is the temporal length of the town’s High Street, lined on either side by mourners maintaining an unsteady silence.

"Fortunes of War evolved through an enquiry led (pre-internet) approach that focused on a Lamarkian preoccupation with the potential impact of an environment on collective and individual behaviour. The intention was to create anticipatory photographic images. A ‘retention vanish’ approach to composition placed the emphasis on framing the subject of the image from the perspective of the distraction and not the scene. Through this an attempt was made to counter pre-occupied states of mind, circumventing a censorship of expectation relating to the form of both the work itself and significantly that of its maker."

Erratically embellished with sprayed stencils, logo-rich stickers, elaborate murals, and unintelligible doodles, our urban environment overflows with irreverent and unlicensed imagery.

Classic New York freehand and wildstyle graffiti has evolved, adapted, and atomised into a democratic and divergent forms of visual expression that is captured under the nebulous term ‘street art’. ‘It is characterised’, states curator Riika Kuittinen, ‘less by a visual style than by an approach to transmission: it is unfiltered visual communication, fluidly moving across the derelict buildings,bus shelters and hoardings of cities across the world.” Armed with attitude of irreverence, equality and freedom, it is in fact a new genre that mutates and morphs at the rate of a viral pandemic. Lacking a common aesthetic, street art, a term loathed by classic wall ‘writers’ speaks loudly to a passing population, even if it remains entirely obscure to most.

The exhibition asked a number of questions about the evolution of graffiti into ‘street art’, and more recently into ‘urban art’, by way of the alleyway and backwall. Where do such images truly belong now: in the alleys of our urban centres or on the white walls of the gallery? Can they belong in both? What happens when the urban calligraphy of tags and stencils is subsumed by the auction
house, and why do we feel a sense of loss when the raw energy of street art, of urban writing, is absorbed by the mainstream media, and effectively tamed. Why is that some of the best illicit art of the street is promptly ripped off the wall, taken out of its context, seized into private hands. In effect moved from the public wall to
behind a pay wall.

Herein you will find a fascinating variety of material. The ways we perceive the landscape, and what it means to us, reflect the diversity of our humanity… From the slums of Beijing to the rich urban spaces of Barcelona, from the Malvern Hills to the Green Belt – landscape in poetry, planning and art – you will be captivated.
Merrick Denton Thompson, OBE. Former President of the Landscape Institute

In spite of the long-lived and ongoing trade in plastic flowers, they are scarcely mentioned in books on plastics and in accounts of the history and craft of artificial flowers. This chapter considers the cultural, historical and commercial value of plastic flowers. In its consideration of the presence, popularity and provocative nature of plastic flowers, notions of taste and different attitudes towards plastics and plastic flowers, it draws on the views of designers, key manufacturers, academics and professionals associated with design, horticulture and floristry. It argues that plastic flowers have and continue to make, an important contribution to design and culture, even though they can disgust as well as delight.

The Flock! exhibition explored the diverse and dynamic uses of flock. It provided an understanding of the applications, benefits and important qualities and uses of flock through the exploration of an array of historical and contemporary flocked objects. The exhibition explored how flock is used across a variety of contexts, including interior design, publishing, and fashion design. It addressed the importance of flock as an important process and surface treatment that is widely used. Importantly it explained that flock is a distinct process and outcome that is not to be mistaken as velvet or referred to just as a ‘fuzzy’ surface.
The exhibition provided visitors with an understanding of flock and how and why it continues to endure and appeal.

This paper aims to explore the concepts of student-centred, experiential, problem-based and enquiry-based learning through the critical consideration of On Trial a specific case study example of a particularly successful approach to learning that celebrates what Finkel (2000) calls teaching with your mouth shut.

The discussion explores how the format, language and dynamics of the courtroom drama are used as the context and vehicle to secure deep learning through dynamic role play where the tutor is the silent witness.

This article considers how this learning experience harnesses popular culture to help students engage with tough academic issues and wider ethical concerns relevant to their specialist discipline. It explores the challenges and nuances of such learning and considers the reasons for its success and popularity with both learners and fellow teachers.

This article relates to the ongoing research of a UK National Teaching Fellow.

This chapter considers objects as powerful pedagogic tools and examines how they can facilitate student-centred, experiential and active learning. This study reports key research findings, based on students’ critical and reflective evaluation of their object-based learning, and provides evidence that objects provide active learning experiences that can engage learners, enrich learning and energise teaching.

The study considers how students develop their engagement with objects and how they can explore individual preferences through the appraisal of objects’ form and function. The discussion considers how mundane objects can generate valuable and memorable pedagogic experiences, notably when studied away from the museum and placed in the context of the students’ classroom. Objects can present complex, challenging conundrums which students, through their interrogation of examples, can interpret, take meaning and make sense of. Students’ hands-on engagement with objects can inform and inspire their thinking and design making.

In particular the toilet brush - a necessary prosaic design – is considered as a valuable pedagogic implement: it can encourage students to critically analyse its social, historical, cultural, economic and technological relevance and worth. The discussion evidences that objects can generate deep learning opportunities as items stimulate curiosity and critical and analytical investigation, debate and evaluation. This chapter explores the challenges and nuances of using such learning objects and considers the reasons why certain designs prove to be successful learning aids and are popular with both learners and tutors. This study presents a specific pedagogic approach that offers potential for cross-discipline adoption and adaptation.

This unique exhibition, the first exhibition of its type, explored flock and the extent of its use across a range of contexts. The exhibition brought together for the first time numerous historical and contemporary examples of flock in its exploration of flock's sumptuous, tactile surface finish. The exhibition explored flock's rich history and importantly its contemporary relevance and importance.

The exhibition showcased artwork and design objects produced by artists, designers and many of the leading international flock manufacturers. The exhibition gained a The Textile Society Award and was successfully supported by the Arts Council England-Grants for the Arts, and the European Flock Association. The exhibition was accompanied by Flockage: the symposium that featured presentations by leading flock specialists and design academics. The exhibition was extended by four months owing to popular demand and resulted in Hardie being invited guest speaker at the Flock Association of Europe conference in Berlin, 2009.

Franca Donda (Italie, 1933-2017) s’est initiée à la photographie avec le photographe américain Paul Strand et s’est impliquée dans les cercles culturels de la gauche italienne. Si elle et son mari, le photographe Paolo Gasparini ont vécu quatre ans dans la Cuba révolutionnaire, c’est à Caracas que Donda a passé la majeure partie de sa vie. Avec d’autres femmes engagées, Donda y a contribué à la diffusion des idées féministes en créant de nouveaux récits filmiques et photographiques. Ses photos représentent aussi bien la lutte des féministes latino-américaines que la vie quotidienne des femmes de la classe ouvrière et des communautés indigènes, dans divers pays d’Amérique latine. Elles constituent des archives absolument uniques et pratiquement inédites qui peuvent être versées à l’histoire des femmes au Venezuela
et à l’histoire du féminisme en Amérique latine.

Plastics have now been our most used materials for over fifty years. This book adopts a new approach, exploring plastics’ contribution from two perspectives: as a medium for making and their value in societal use. The first approach examines the multivalent nature of plastics materiality and their impact on creativity through the work of artists, designers and manufacturers. The second perspective explores attitudes to plastics and the different value systems applied to them through current research undertaken by design, materials and socio-cultural historians. The book addresses the environmental impact of plastics and elucidates the ways in which they can and must be part of the solution. The individual viewpoints are provocative and controversial but together they present a balanced and scholarly un-picking of the debate that surrounds this ubiquitous group of materials.

This paper will expand on insights unearthed during a practice-led PhD recently undertaken by the author at University of the Arts, London. The research project is investigating illustrated skateboard deck artwork in order to identify the distinct visual aura the skateboarder conjures within popular culture. Skateboard deck artwork is a kind of illustrated vernacular, principally developed in California during the 1970s and 1980s, to market skateboard products. The imagery is distinguished by thematic concerns aimed at young adult skateboarders. A practice-led investigation will reveal the origins and function of this persistent illustrated language. This approach will rely upon the author’s prior experience as a professional illustrator and arts educator to illuminate the significance of visual aesthetics, thereby offering a new lens to survey skateboard’s resilient visual culture.

Throughout the twentieth century architectural models served as the miniature playgrounds in which the future of Britain’s built environment was imagined, and in drawing from the evidence provided by those models today, this book considers how architects, planners, and civil engineers thought about that future by presenting a history of yesterday’s dreams of tomorrow, told through architectural models.

Focused not on the making of architectural models but rather the optimistic and utopian visions they were made to communicate, this book examines the possible futures put forward by 120 models made by Thorp, the oldest and most prolific firm of architectural modelmakers in Britain, in order to reveal a century of evolving ideas about how we might live, work, relax, and move. From depictions of unbuilt city masterplans to those of seemingly ordinary shopping centres and motorways, the models featured trace a progression of the architectural, social, political, technological, and economic influences that shaped the design of Britain’s buildings, transport infrastructure, and its towns and cities during a century of relentless change.

Illustrated with over 130 photographs, this book will appeal to academics and historians, as well as anyone with an interest in architectural models and the history of Britain’s twentieth century built environment.

'Lost Islands: inventing Avalon, destroying Eden' is a monograph published by Heart of Albion Press in 2008. It asks whether narratives of place can affect not only our perception of actual locations, but also our treatment of them: whether imaginary geographies can have real world consequences.

In this interdisciplinary examination of the cultural history of islands, the author draws upon folklore, mythology, literature, popular culture, and environmental science to delve into humanity’s long fascination with islands. Drawing upon extensive field research undertaken exploring islands off the coast of Britain (Iona; Lundy; Bardsey; Isles of Scilly; Isle of Man; Holy Island; St Michael’s Mount; Isle of Wight; the Western Isles), which included a week’s solo writing retreat on the tiny Bardsey Island off the tip of the Llyn Peninsula, northwest Wales; as well as archival research pouring over early accounts of explorers; the experiential research as a professional storyteller enthralling audiences with tales of magical islands; and the latest climate science on the impact of Global Warming on sea levels and migration; Lost Islands attempts to understand our collective fascination with islands, real and imaginary. The way we have tendency to narrativize islands, projecting our desires and fears upon them (a tendency with antecedents back to the earliest of literature, such as the immramas of the Celtic saints), show that the island can be an act of the imagination as well as a geographical fact. Interweaving an erudite analysis with personal embodied anecdote, the text challenges the islandization of disciplines and traditions. A study of the littoral and the liminal, the monograph adopts a hybrid style blending the creative and critical to bring alive the ‘threshold’ quality of such places, sometimes described as ‘thin places’. The result is a kind of palimpsest of different texts and modes of thinking, and as such Lost Islands (illustrated throughout by the author’s own photographs) is research ‘for’ islands as well ‘through’ and ‘into’ them, via a creative-critical practice (Frayling, 1993).

The Hidden Stories app delves deep into the untold history of Leicester’s Cultural Quarter, bringing the area to life through poetry, plays and narrative non-fiction.

The app operates via locative technology that triggers fragments of writing at specific locations; the texts are effectively connected with the location and history they are exploring, with content being unlocked as the user moves around the area.

Each text is displayed differently within the app, taking advantage of the framework to emphasise the ideas being presented by the writers and reflecting the concept of hidden stories.

Hidden Stories was commissioned by Phoenix and developed by Cuttlefish Multimedia as part of Affective Digital Histories, a research project investigating how communities change with urban decline and regeneration. The five pieces of creative writing used in the app were commissioned and edited by Corinne Fowler, director of the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing. To find out more visit affectivedigitalhistories.org.uk.

It is well known that, despite his close engagement with cinema, Gilles Deleuze was less concerned with animated film, being somewhat dismissive of its capabilities. In recent years, however, a number of attempts have been made – most notably by William Schaffer, Thomas Lamarre and Dan Torre – to construct Deleuzian positions in animation theory. This article outlines some of these approaches, whilst engaging critically with Torre’s writings. In particular, it foregrounds Torre’s neglect of the post-structural, political dimension of Deleuzian thought through an examination of the concepts of faciality, the close-up, and relation as they occur in Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy. This is in part facilitated through a comparison of Stuart Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) – a work directly addressed by Torre, and Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) – a work which he largely passes by. It is claimed here that, despite a number of apparent similarities, the animations of Cohl and Blackton express a radically divergent series of ontological commitments. Cohl offers the audience an experience of chaotic, mutable, relational complexity that revels in its incoherence, whilst Blackton presents a series of more straightforward set pieces, dwelling for the most part upon object-centric representational form. The tension between representation and becoming that occurs between these works is employed to facilitate a critical engagement with Torre’s process-cognitivism. It is suggested that Torre’s work, though exceptional in its pedagogic value, is likewise expressive of this tension, and that in its effort firstly to combine a series of process-philosophical and cognitivist ideas, and secondly to unpack the radical ideas of Deleuze through the more conservative philosophy of Nicholas Rescher, it runs the risk of falling back into a quasi-Kantian philosophy of generality and representation.

Independent filmmaking is often faced with difficulties. For the team behind San Sabba, the issue resided in the invisibilities embedded in the film’s location: a concentration camp within the city of Trieste. This article will explore how and why the writer and director of San Sabba considered Trieste as an archive of multiple histories, memories, and postmemory due to the historical findings the film is based on, and how silenced history informed a phenomenological examination of what a landscape can add to the collective memory. Linking other locations in the city, which contribute to the elucidation of stories and histories deprived of public attention, this article analyses the historical data and considers the ontological qualities of the landscape as an archive where dominant narratives impact the understandings of present and past identities.

A work on silenced history, life writing and auto ethnography focused on divisions created by barriers and borders. The three sisters confront their childhood after spending decades apart in culturally and politically diverging countries. For all of them, one moment in life determined everything that followed.
Narrated with the use of archival material and photos saved from the work of time, the film enters into the private memories of three girls now in their lated 80s, and unveil the dramatic impact of societal rules and history in itself of these unusual women.

While addressing the question of screenplay textuality, this Special Issue takes a close interest in the ‘media thickness’ of the screenplay in its textual form. In doing so, we wish to contribute to the exploration and affirmation of scenaristic processes as both cultural and intermedial practices, as in general, screenwriting and screenplays are indeed to be considered at the crossroads of different artistic, mediatic and social fields. This is a flexible editorial posture and assumed as such, one which above all aims to consider the constitutive plurality of given textual practices, not only in terms of conceptual and social anchoring, but also of styles, modes and languages.

Alongside South India’s rapid urbanisation, the early decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed the arrival of new digital technologies and social media platforms in India, opening new possibilities for performance on a mediatised urban and global stage. In a wave of popular performance practices emerging around 2011–2, Bengaluru (as with other cities across India) became the site to a host of flash mobs staged in urban spaces and filmed for online publics. This chapter examines the flash mob performance trend of that era in relation to national discourses of ‘New India’as an example of forms of cultural practice characterised by an ‘aesthetics of arrival’ in globalising India.

Film Talks is an edited collection of unique conversations on experimental cinema from a range of eminent and emerging film and video makers. The book represents a contemporary snapshot of the ways in which experimental cinema is perceived by its practitioners, often in relation to other art forms, moving image culture at large and wider social issues. It is an invaluable guide for those keen to immerse themselves in the insights and perspectives that only artists can offer.

Film Talks: 15 Conversations on Experimental Cinema is a collection of unique conversations on experimental cinema, involving a range of international film and video makers from the United Kingdom, Europe and North America. The book represents a snapshot of the diverse ways that these practitioners have come to think about the field of experimental cinema, in relation to other art forms, moving image culture at large, and wider social issues. Film Talks: A Touring Programme of Experimental Cinema, a series of eight international screenings, is in two parts and features twenty-one 16mm films and video works by artists who feature in the book, drawing out new ideas and connections that span different visions of cinema.

Resemblance to Other Animals (16 mins, HD, 2019) is a memory work that considers locational effect and its recollection. Its key elements, images of encased taxidermy and a traveller’s voice, offer different temporal plains and positions. The images were shot in the Horniman Museum’s, London, natural history gallery and the recordings were inspired by work related travel, time away from home. These combined sensory streams, conjoined by narrative’s reason, suggest temporal and spatial complexity and the partialness of remembrance.

The Horniman Museum is a testament to the Victorian mania for collecting, which was also the time of the ‘memory crisis’ when Bergson, Freud, Proust and later Benjamin were proposing a new intuitive, individuated, understanding of memory. A museum collection creates history, a vision of the past, that is in itself a product of history. Resemblance to Other Animals juxtaposes this site with personal recollection, which relates a sense of place to identity and can challenge institutionalised positions, examining how this correlation can be conceptualised and represented.

This examination considers whether the artistic engagement with form and content can formulate a place of creative reckoning, were an imaginative exploration can occur and a different past can be discovered, and if these sensory and conceptual elements can create a memorious investigation that generates new readings.

Film is the ‘art of time’, and film and memory’s
generative affiliation is founded in this relationship.
This paper will examine how this mnemonic facility is
invoked through practice and how this in turn creates
memories.

The tension between narrative interests
and memory’s imperatives can form an axis of
experimentation and exploration. All films reference
memory, one way or another, however not all are
works of memory. Some films would evoke the idea
of memory but do not risk structural and psychological
instability whereas others consciously suggest
memory’s presence through offering more than one
temporal plain and other related signifiers.

The latter categorisation includes the films suchas
Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Resnais, 1963), Tren
de sombras (Guerín, 1997) and Appearances (Meter,
2000). In this work the correspondence of history and
form, narrative and memory relates and develops
subjective and cultural recollection.

These films relate a form of filmic hybridity that
emphasizes conceptual potentiality and will be the
focus of this study. This examination will consider how
these films’ account of memory’s evolving resonances
is an act of writing and re-writing, and how these works
produce new ways of seeing and thinking.

The global pandemic forced the film industry to adapt its practices. The primary driver of these changes was the economic imperative for production to continue. Similarly, film production courses had to deploy new methods to enable student films to be produced. Through this process new and often creative working methods were devised. This necessity for change also allowed for a critical reassessment of standardised industrial filmmaking - this emphasised that until this point there had been a general unwillingness to reflect upon the industrial production and educational norm, with its ecological unsustainability, exclusive practices and embedded hierarchies. So, the imposing of ‘restrictions’ in fact became an opportunity for creative discovery and to rethink practice related possibilities.

In this paper the authors will draw on their experience of teaching MA Film Practice, at Arts University Bournemouth, and the need to reimagine disciplinary engagement and devise new curriculum components. This process transformed restrictions into ‘creative parameters’. It also focused the course’s practice based research ethos and enhanced the student reflexive and reflective development. These innovations are now embedded in the course’s structure and have facilitated a departmental debate concerning ‘standardised’ working methods (copying historical normative models), and how we can foster a more inclusive and inventive learning environment.

Further to this, the graduating students, now emerging reflective practitioners – more socially, ethically and conceptually aware – can potentially affect new standards and approaches to film production, and in doing so promote original and diverse work, as well as embracing inclusive and ecologically sustainable methodologies. This paper will consider the instructiveness of this academic innovation and its potential to inform future film practice.

It is now accepted that current film production practices are unsustainable and new formulations need to be found that address the climate crisis. The issue’s primary reporting is concerned with industrial film productions, which is undoubtedly important, but this top down approach needs to be balanced with more inclusive and imbedded solutions. Therefore, a pedagogic perspective, which considers whether learning initiatives can influence production methods, is timely. This article proposes that through this engagement alternative practices can be developed.

Drawing on previously unpublished company archives, this book considers Marks & Spencer's contribution to British – and, since the 1970s, international – fashion. Rachel Worth discusses how, from the 1920s, the company brought fashion to the high street, offering well-designed clothing at affordable prices. She analyses the unique ways in which the company democratised fashion, arguing that its pioneering role in the development of new fabrics, the employment of designers as consultants and its marketing and promotional strategies have changed the ways in which we understand and consume fashion.

This book received Arts and Humanities Research Council Funding (AHRC).