Tag Archives: BIMI

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Films with a Mission: Medical Films from the Catholic Mission Archives – 11 May 2019

Films with a Mission

Medical Films from the Catholic Mission Archives

1930s-1960s 

Saturday 11 May 2019, 1.00pm  – 5.00pm.

Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image

Gordon Square Cinema

43 Gordon Square

London WC1H 0PD 

Films with a Mission, for its third screening event, will extend its focus this year to films on medical subjects from the Catholic missionary archives. The films were widely circulated and exhibited on their release and over subsequent decades, not only in Ireland and Britain, but also across the US. The afternoon symposium will explore some of the key issues and questions in historically assessing missionary film archives. It will discuss how we can gain new perspectives in understanding the motivations, reach and transnational impact of these productions on local and global audiences.

Screening rarely shown films from the Irish Film Institute (IFI) and the British Empire and Commonwealth collection at Bristol Museums, the symposium will discuss how Catholic medical orders used film to promote medical research and hospital practices. These films are part of a broader emergence of educational film at the time. They are significant for their involvement of filmmakers trained in documentary film in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s.

Amongst the films shown will be:

Visitation: the Story of the Medical Missionaries of Mary (Andrew Buchanan, 1947, 60 mins) about the medical work of a women’s religious order: the Medical Missionaries of Mary, at their mission in Nigeria, Africa;

Aran of the Saints (London Catholic Film Society, 1930s, 21 mins) made on the island of Aran, Ireland, by the Missionary Sisters of the Divine Motherhood, and produced by the London Catholic Film Society, after the release of Robert Flaherty’s film Man of Aran (1934);

Ecce Ancilla Domini  (FMDM,1950s; 54 mins) a recruitment film about the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of the Divine Motherhood (FMDM), Ladywell, Surrey, at their medical and educational missions in Northern and S. Rhodesia (Zambia, Zimbabwe), Nigeria, Singapore and Malaysia.

Speakers include: Dr. Emma Sandon, film historian and Dr. Carmen Mangion, historian of women religious, at Birkbeck, and they are joined by independent researcher, Edel Robinson, who catalogued the films in the IFI archive, and Isabelle Smyth, Writer in Residence, Medical Missionaries of Mary.

This event is run in collaboration with the Christian Missions in Global History seminar group, Institute of Historical Research, University of London; and supported by the Birkbeck Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund.

To book on Eventbrite please follow the link:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/films-with-a-mission-tickets-60371587042

The full timetable and programme of screenings and presentations for the afternoon will be released shortly.

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Call for Proposals: Art at the Frontier of Film Theory: the Work of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen

Art at the Frontier of Film Theory: the Work of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen.

A student-led symposium: Saturday 29 June 2019

Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and the Essay Film Festival is inviting proposals from doctoral students for a one-day student-led symposium about the work of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. The symposium will be the culmination of a programme of events dedicated to Mulvey and Wollen, taking place at Birkbeck from 22 March to 24 May 2019.

The programme is in three parts: an exhibition entitled “Art at the Frontier of Film Theory” which, according to the curators, Oliver Fuke and Nick Helm-Grovas, “uses the gallery space to refract the work of Mulvey and Wollen through the prism of art”; a retrospective of Mulvey-Wollen’s collaborative films, including Riddles of the Sphinx, and Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons; and a series of public talks and workshops on topics such as “Film as Theory” and “Feminist Film Curating”. Information about the exhibition, the film season, and the public talks, is available from the CHASE website and from the website of BIMI and the EFF.

The symposium will take place on Saturday 29 June 2019, in Birkbeck Cinema. This is more than a month after the end of the programme, and therefore the idea of the symposium is to provide a space for critical reflection and debate, with a certain detachment from the programme itself.

Proposals are now welcome from doctoral students wishing to engage with any aspect of this programme of events, or indeed with aspects of the work of Mulvey and Wollen which are not covered by the programme.

Students with interests in any of the following fields may wish to put forward proposals: critical theory, feminism, sexual politics, film theory, experimental film, art practice, history of art, curatorial studies (art or film), cultural history, and others.

In addition to conference papers, the symposium will be open to presentations that take the form of video essays, sound compositions, visual studies, and other creative interventions in the debate around the legacy and contemporary relevance of the Mulvey-Wollen corpus.

We would also like to hear from CHASE students interested in taking an active role in the organisation of the symposium, and/or in the realisation of the actual programme as it unfolds – whether that be assisting with the preparation of certain events, or reporting on them in the form of written blogs or other forms of critical reflection (photography, video, sound).

Deadline: 22nd May – Expressions of interest and conference proposals should be sent to the following address, marked “Mulvey Wollen Programme”: bimi@bbk.ac.uk

On behalf of Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and the Essay Film Festival: Matthew Barrington, Leila Nassereldein, Michael Temple.

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The Essay Film Festival – starting Friday 22 March

The Essay Film Festival is back… starting on Friday 22 March with the opening of our first ever exhibition in the Peltz Gallery, Art at the Frontier of Film Theory: the Work of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, with extra screenings, workshops and conversations… please spread the word!

 

Now in its fifth edition, the annual Essay Film Festival, is a collaboration between Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, celebrating the diversity and creativity of those artists and visionaries who work in that unique zone between documentary and experimental modes of filmmaking.

 

This year’s programme features a range of bold and innovative works that cross terrain from Argentina to Hong Kong, Iran to Mexico, USA to Lebanon, Nigeria to UK, embracing themes as varied as cancer, childbirth, the Faust legend, urban decay, workers’ strikes, psychoanalysis, colonialism, natural history, and Finnegans Wake!

 

These films will challenge your perception of the world, your understanding of reality and your place within it; they will move you, surprise you, and inspire you.

 

How does film connect intimate personal choices to political commitment; the archived or forgotten past to the socially active present; the beauty of cinema to terror, injustice and despair? How does film engage with the real while questioning the established forms of film language? And how can film touch us, emotionally and viscerally, and yet maintain that vital reflective edge?

 

Directors Mania Akbari & Douglas White, Andrea Bussmann, Dora García, Christopher Harris, Mary Jirmanus Saba, Bo Wang & Pan Lu, Onyeka Igwe and Jessica Sarah Rinland, all utilise the essay film in different ways to explore these searching questions in this year’s Essay Film Festival.

 

The full programme for EFF 2019 can be found here.

 

Come and join us!

 

Michael Temple, Matthew Barrington, Kieron Corless, Catherine Grant, Janet McCabe, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Raquel Morais, and Laura Mulvey, on behalf of the Essay Film Festival

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The Short Films of Helena Solberg – Fri 8 February 2019 12:00 – 17:00

CILAVS, Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies, in collaboration with the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, BIMI

cordially invite you to

The Short Films of Helena Solberg

Brazilian director Helena Solberg’s earlier films are contemporaneous with Brazilian Cinema Novo but her work remains uncharted to most audiences. Following her recent retrospective in São Paulo, the aim of this event is to bring into view Solberg’s earlier documentary films, such as The Interview (1966), The Emerging Woman (1974) and The Double Day (1975).

 

Documentary film genre conventionally uses oral testimonies of personal experiences but Solberg’s use of women’s testimonies suggests the deployment of a feminist practice of storytelling as a way to expose and oppose specific instruments of power. Shot 50 and 40 years ago, Solberg’s subject matters and aesthetic choices make her films current and prescient.

 

A discussion with Dr. Patricia Sequeira Bras (Birkbeck) and Prof. Catherine Grant (Birkbeck) will follow the screening.

 

Fri 8 February 2019

12:00 – 17:00

 

Birkbeck Cinema

43 Gordon Square

London

WC1H 0PD

Entrance free but booking here necessary.

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Call for proposals: BIMI programme 2018/19 – deadline 18 June 2018

Call for proposals: BIMI programme 2018-19

Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) is currently planning its programme of events for 2018-19.

We welcome proposals from researchers and students working in any discipline or field across the Schools of Arts, Law, SSHP, and Science.

We are very happy to work in collaboration with research centres and institutes at Birkbeck or at other institutions.

All our events take place in the Birkbeck Cinema, typically on Friday evenings 6-9pm and Saturdays 10-5pm.

We can show films in 16mm and 35mm, as well as a variety of digital formats.

We are especially keen to foreground film and other moving image material that is rarely screened in public.

If you would like to propose an idea for an event, please use the following form:

BIMI Call for proposals 2018-19 and send it to bimi@bbk.ac.uk – the deadline for submission is the 18th of June.

Looking forward to hearing about your ideas.

Michael Temple, Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, and Essay Film Festival

Matthew Barrington, interim BIMI Manager

Sign up to our newsletter: bimi@bbk.ac.uk

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Birkbeck_BIMI

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Birkbeck-Institute-for-the-Moving-Image-542278625939273/

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Call for proposals: BIMI programme 2018-19 deadline 18 June 2018

Call for proposals: BIMI programme 2018-19

Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) is currently planning its programme of events for 2018-19.

We welcome proposals from researchers and students working in any discipline or field across the Schools of Arts, Law, SSHP, and Science.

We are very happy to work in collaboration with research centres and institutes at Birkbeck or at other institutions.

All our events take place in the Birkbeck Cinema, typically on Friday evenings 6-9pm and Saturdays 10-5pm.

We can show films in 16mm and 35mm, as well as a variety of digital formats.

We are especially keen to foreground film and other moving image material that is rarely screened in public.

If you would like to propose an idea for an event, please use the attached form and send it to bimi@bbk.ac.uk – the deadline for submission is Friday 18 June.

Looking forward to hearing about your ideas.

Michael Temple, Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, and Essay Film Festival

Matthew Barrington, interim BIMI Manager

Sign up to our newsletter: bimi@bbk.ac.uk

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Birkbeck_BIMI

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Birkbeck-Institute-for-the-Moving-Image-542278625939273/

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FREE screening ‘KING OF THE BELGIANS’ at BIMI this Wednesday 21 February 2018

FREE screening ‘KING OF THE BELGIANS’ at BIMI this Wednesday 21 February 2018

On the eve of the ‘Focus on Belgian Cinema’ season at Ciné Lumière (French Institute, 22-25 February), BIMI is hosting an introductory event about Belgian film, including a FREE screening of King of the Belgians (Peter Brosens, Jessica Woodworth, 2016). You can BOOK here: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/events-calendar/focus-on-belgian-cinema-king-of-the-belgians

Two speakers, Wouter Hessels, film lecturer and cinema programmer at the Brussels Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema & Sound, and the film critic and author Louis Danvers, will each give a brief talk about contemporary Belgian cinema, and their presentations will be followed by a screening of King of the Belgians and a discussion chaired by Janet McCabe, director of the MA Film Programming and Curating at Birkbeck.

King of the Belgians is a road movie in which King Nicolas III (Peter Van den Begin), faced with a domestic crisis while on a state visit in the Balkans, embarks on a trip that awakens him to the real world. The movie has been selected for numerous film festivals and was described by Variety as “an enormously appealing mockumentary blending gently satirical humour with deeper underpinnings […] a delightful, surprisingly respectful ribbing of the incongruity of monarchy, Belgium and the Balkans”. Filmmaking duo Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth both come from a documentary background, and King of the Belgians marks a change in direction for them, as they explain in this interview about the film: http://cineuropa.org/ff.aspx?t=ffocusinterview&l=en&tid=3049&did=319853

This special event is organised with the support of Wallonie-Bruxelles International and Flanders House. For more information about the ‘Focus on Belgian Cinema’ season at the French Institute: https://www.institut-francais.org.uk/cine-lumiere/whats-on/festivals-series/focus-on-belgian-cinema/

Louis Danvers is a film critic living in Brussels, where he was born in 1955. He writes for Le Vif-L’Express, while also reviewing films for Telepro and for radio programs on RTBF. Co-founder of the film monthly Visions in the early 1980s, he is a long-time collaborator of the Royal Belgian Film Archive, and has written several film books, including Nagisa Oshima (Les Cahiers du Cinéma) and Brazil de Terry Gilliam (Yellow Now). He has directed documentaries about filmmakers, including Jaco Van Dormael and Abderrahmane Sissako. Under his real name, Michel Sordinia, he is the singer and songwriter of post punk cult band The Names, signed by Manchester’s Factory Records in 1979 and still active today.

Wouter Hessels teaches film history, Belgian cinema and media studies at RITCS, Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema & Sound in Brussels. He also teaches at Vesalius College (Free University of Brussels) and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Since 2009, he has been the film programmer at the art house CINEMA RITCS in Brussels, and he also worked for the Royal Belgian Film Archive, and as a film expert for Flemish national television. He publishes regularly on art, media, film, education and politics, and he creates poetry-music projects, such as Brussels North–Brussel Centraal–Bruxelles Midi (2015-2016). He writes, teaches and performs poetry in Dutch, French, English, Spanish and Italian.

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BIMI/Vasari Digital Animation Series: Joey Holder and Candida Powell-Williams – Friday 2 February 2018 6.30pm

Vasari Digital Animation Series: Joey Holder and Candida Powell-Williams
Friday 2 February 6:30 – 9:00
In collaboration with the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology

Artists Joey Holder and Candida Powell-Williams both use animation to explore the relationship between digital and biological forms. Holder’s work considers the structures and hierarchies of the technological and natural worlds, and how these systems are constantly abstracted. Powell-Williams’ practice merges sculptural installations, performance and GIFs, using them to address the construction of identity through objects and memory.
Following screenings of work by both artists, Holder and Powell-Williams will discuss hybrids, molluscs, fantasy and the interplay between the digital and the corporeal in their work.

Joey Holder is a London based artist who received her BA from Kingston University (2001) and her MFA from Goldsmiths (2010). Her artistic practice and research spans video and multimedia installations both online and offline. Her work raises philosophical questions of our universe and things yet unknown, regarding the future of science, medicine, biology and human-machine interactions. Working with scientific and technical experts she makes immersive, multi-media installations that explore the limits of the human and how we experience non-human, natural and technological forms. Mixing elements of biology, nanotechnology and natural history against computer programme interfaces, screen savers and measuring devices, she suggests the impermanence and inter-changeability of these apparently contrasting and oppositional worlds: ‘everything is a mutant and a hybrid’. Connecting forms which have emerged through our human taste, culture and industrial processes she investigates complex systems that dissolve notions of the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’. GM products, virtual biology and aquatic creatures are incorporated into an extended web; challenging our perception of evolution, adaptation and change. By contrasting so-called ‘organic’ and ‘man-made’ substances and surfaces through a series of abstractions, she creates a world of manifold layers, none more unified or natural than the next. These hybridities may suggest a particular function or natural form but remain elusive through their odd displacement.

Recent

solo/duo exhibitions include ‘SELACHIMORPHA’, Photographers Gallery, London (2017), ‘Ophiux’, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2016), ‘TETRAGRAMMATON’, LD50, London (duo w/ John Russell) (2016), ‘Lament of Ur’, Karst, Plymouth (duo w/ Viktor Timofeev) (2015);

‘BioStat.’, Project Native Informant, London (2015) and ‘HYDROZOAN’, The Royal Standard, Liverpool (2014). Recent group exhibitions include ‘HYDROZOAN’ at the 7th Moscow International Biennale Of Contemporary Art, Russia (2017), ‘WALLPAPERS’ at New Forms

Festival, Canada (2017), ‘Designing Desire’ at FACT, Liverpool, UK (2017), ‘Alien Matter’, Transmediale, Berlin (2017), The Noise of Being, Sonic Acts, Amsterdam (2017), ‘Winter is Coming’, Georg Kargl, Vienna (2016), ‘The Uncanny Valley’, Wysing Arts Centre,

Cambridge (2015); BODY HOLES, New Scenario, online exhibition at the 9th Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Germany (2016), ‘Sunscreen’, online and at Venice Biennale (2015); ‘A Plague of Diagrams’, ICA, London, UK (2015), ‘#WEC- Whole Earth Catalyst’, The Composing

Rooms, Berlin, Germany (2015); ‘h y p e r s a l o n’, Art Basel Miami, USA (2014); ‘Vestige: The Future is Here’, Design Museum, London (2013) and ‘Multinatural Histories’, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Massachusetts, USA (2013).

http://www.joeyholder.com/index.php/2017/porphyrin/

Candida Powell-Williams lives and works in London. She graduated from the RCA, London in 2011. Selected exhibitions include: ‘Boredom and its Acid Touch’, Frieze Live (2017); ‘Tongue Town’, Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo; ‘Cache’, Art Night, London (2017); and ‘Coade’s Elixir’, Hayward Gallery, London (2014). In 2013 Powell-Williams was awarded the Sainsbury Scholarship at BSR, Rome. She is currently artist in residence the Warburg Institute London.

https://www.candidapowell-williams.com

Elizabeth Johnson is an Associate Research Fellow in the Vasari Centre for Art and Technology, Birkbeck

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BIMI: Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image – Autumn Term 2017

Here is the new BIMI programme of events for the autumn term: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/research/birkbeck-institute-for-the-moving-image/events

Regular thematic strands include ESSAY FILM, GUILT GROUP, DIGITAL ANIMATION, URBAN CHANGE, FRUITVALE FILM CLUB, CHILDREN’S FILM CLUB, PITTSBURGH LECTURE, and LUX ARTISTS’ MOVING IMAGE.

We’re launching this year’s programme and inaugurating our new CINEPHILES strand with a screening of SHOOTING STARS (Anthony Asquith, 1928) in 35mm with live piano accompaniment – preceded by drinks in the Cinema foyer.

Everyone is welcome and virtually all of our events are FREE!

Looking forward to seeing you in the Cinema.

Michael Temple & Matthew Barrington

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BIMI Internship: Deadline for applications 13 October 2017

The Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image is currently seeking 1 part-time intern for a period of one year to assist with the work of the Institute for 3.5 hours/week during term time, which equates to 30 weeks. Some flexible working is required including some evenings and weekends, but all working patterns will be agreed in advance.

The interns will work both independently and alongside the Director and the Manager of the Institute and will develop invaluable generic skills which will contribute to future academic careers.

Job Role includes:

  • Assisting with organising the Institute’s events, workshops and conferences.
  • Taking the lead role in updating and maintaining our website and archive of events.
  • Supporting current social networking and other electronic forms of dissemination to publicise events and the work of BIMI.
  • Event logistics – ensuring events run smoothly on the day including meeting and greeting visiting speakers and guests, setting up seminar rooms, loading any PowerPoint or images required etc.
  • Assisting with running the Institute’s blogs, including writing posts, conducting interviews and soliciting contributions from other event attendees and academics

Knowledge and experience required:

  • Some experience of event organisation
  • Familiarity with using social media as a promotional tool
  • Some experience of writing and/or editing blogs
  • A track record of being organised, punctual and having good time management
  • Good written and verbal communication skills

Salary: Grade 5 of the College’s London Pay Scale which is £28,633 pro-rata per annum.

These roles are only open to current Birkbeck PhD candidates or Masters students.

How to apply:

Please send a brief CV and a letter of application to Matthew Barrington: mbarri02@mail.bbk.ac.uk by 10am on Monday 13 October 2017. Interviews for the roles will take place shortly after.

Birkbeck is an equal opportunities employer and encourages applications from all candidates irrespective of their sex, race, disability, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief. Birkbeck is a member of the ‘positive about disability’ two ticks scheme and guarantees to interview all candidates who meet the essential criteria for the post.

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