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Category: Film Strands

‘Fifth Cinema’: Theorising Refugee-Led Filmmaking, with Raminder Kaur and Mariagiulia Grassilli.

When: 15 October 2021, 18:00 — 19:30Venue: Online Book your place SCREENING + Discussion Les Sauteurs (2016), directed by Abou Bakar Sidibé, Moritz Siebert and Estephan Wagner. ‘Fifth Cinema’: Theorising Refugee-Led Filmmaking, with Raminder Kaur and Mariagiulia Grassilli. Raminder Kaur and Mariagiulia Gassilli describe ‘Fifth Cinema’ as: ‘a mobile, unstable, instantaneous, fragmented, displaced and hybrid bricolage. A “smart cinema”, owing to the prevalence of digital technologies, it exists in dispersed pockets. It is the expression of new creative modes’. In this discussion, we will unpack the idea of Fifth Cinema in relation to recent refugee filmmaking, asking what conceptual frames help us think through image making in the context…

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Reflections on the Screening of Mai Masri’s Frontiers of Dreams and Fears

by Biya Shadab On Friday, 13 November, 2020, Bertha DocHouse and the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) co-presented the Palestinian documentary Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001), an ideal introduction to the beautiful, meticulous works of Mai Masri, one of Palestine’s most distinguished filmmakers. This screening marked the launch of a book on Mai Masri and her films by Victoria Brittain. The screening was followed by a Q&A and discussion between Masri, Brittain and Birkbeck's Marina Warner. This documentary was shot over nine months and weaves together momentous events in the lives of two groups of Palestinian children – one in Beirut’s Shatila…

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Video recordings of the event “Remembering Channel 4’s Out on Tuesday: Queer Spaces in Public Service Television”, November 2019

Video recordings of the event "Remembering Channel 4's Out on Tuesday: Queer Spaces in Public Service Television", November 2019 2019 saw the 30th anniversary of the inaugural transmission by the UK’s Channel Four Television Corporation of the world’s first public service, free-to air broadcast television series aimed at what was defined at the time as a lesbian and gay audience. The channel’s ground-breaking Out on Tuesday (later OUT) series ran between 1989 and 1994 and set about giving new, often radical representation to diverse queer sexualities, cultures, experiences and histories on our TV screens. The series was the culmination of the efforts and canvassing by a lot of campaigners,…

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The Caribbean, colonialism, celluloid: Screening the films of the Victor Jara Collective

https://vimeo.com/430351100 A 16mm projection of a documentary about Guyana’s anti-colonial struggles, an anecdote about footage from that film being smuggled in a cricketer’s kit bag, and the film’s score played live on the flute—these were a few of the highlights a packed Birkbeck Cinema experienced at a presentation of the films of the Victor Jara Collective on the second of November last year. The screening of the films—the feature-length The Terror and the Time (1978) and the mid-length In the Sky’s Wild Noise (1983)—marked the first public event curated by the Twelve30 Collective, which had formed several months prior. Founded by Jonathan Ali and Lisa…

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Professor Catherine Grant – Recording of 2020 Pittsburgh Film and Media Colloquium on Exploring Audiovisual Intertextuality in the Video Essay

https://vimeo.com/408600292 On February 20, 2020, Interim Director of Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, Professor Catherine Grant, gave an invited talk at the University of Pittsburgh, in its Film and Media Colloquium series. Talk Abstract According to Mikhail Iampolski, intertextuality is a helpful concept for understanding processes by which allusions to other films or texts are used in filmic figurations; it can also guide us to explore the complex chains of associations that make up the energy and power of individual films. These are processes of making and seeing that are motivated by intertextuality - acts of "poiesis". So what would make more sense in…

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Video Recording of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image Event “Repetition and Variation: Video Essays as Comparative Film and Television Studies Methodologies”

We are very happy to publish recordings of the five sessions that comprised the BIMI/Corkscrew: Birkbeck Practice-Research Doctoral Training Group event Repetition and Variation: Video Essays as Comparative Film and Television Studies Methodologies that took place on October 12, 2019. Part One features Catherine Grant (Birkbeck) delivering an introduction to the event Part Two features a presentation by Patrick Keating (Trinity University) on his comparative video essay work (including Dietrich Lighting [https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/8_audio_visuals.pdf] and The Strange Streets of a Strange City: The Ambersons Montage [https://vimeo.com/245480946]) Part Three features two presentations on their comparative  work by Catherine Grant (Birkbeck) and Chiara Grizzaffi (IULM). The videos Catherine discusses are online: The Marriages of…

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21st Century Zilnik

Yugoslav-Serbian filmmaker Želimir Žilnik is one of the genuine legends of European cinema. Since his auspicious debut in 1969 with the film Early Works, which was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, the enfant terrible of Yugoslav New film has created an impressive body of work, remaining committed to his project of platforming the marginalised and interrogating the blind spots of socialist, post-socialist, and neoliberal Europe. With kind support from CHASE, this contemporary survey – the first even dedicated to Žilnik in the UK – focused on the urgency and vitality of his 21st century work, and celebrated his indispensable contributions…

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Emily Best – Limits of Cinema/Cinema Unlimited Conference, Pittsburgh, September 2019

Last June a call for papers went round the School of Arts from the Birkbeck Institute of Moving Image (BIMI) for Pittsburgh University’s annual Film and Media Studies Graduate Conference, taking place the following September. The theme of this year’s conference was Limits of Cinema/Cinema Unlimited? and of the suggested topics what stood out to me was ‘fantasies of unlimited cinema’. What, I thought, would happen if you removed the visual element of cinema and were just left with sound? For context, I’m a student in the department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, and my PhD focusses on the radio plays of Samuel Beckett.…

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In Memory of Thomas Elsaesser, film scholar and filmmaker extraordinaire

Everyone at Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image was very shocked and saddened to hear the news that Professor Thomas Elsaesser had unexpectedly passed away on December 4 while visiting China as part of his guest professorship in Beijing. Most of us involved in BIMI and the Essay Film Festival team had known Thomas for many years. He had also visited us at Birkbeck several times in recent years, to take part in academic events here, but also as a filmmaker accompanying his marvellous essay work The Sun Island when we screened it in the 2018 Essay Film Festival. In tribute to Thomas's life and…

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