Since its inception, BIMI has benefited materially and intellectually from the support of the University of Pittsburgh, and specifically from our collaboration with colleagues in the Film Studies Program in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. This collaboration has taken many forms, including faculty visits and student exchanges, but its principal manifestations are the annual Pittsburgh Lecture and the biennial BIMI-Pitt Research Workshop.
The annual lecture takes place in the Birkbeck Cinema every autumn term, and it has featured speakers such as Michael Witt, Neepa Majumdar, Adam Lowenstein, and Ben Ogrodnik, talking on topics ranging from audiovisual film history to early sound film in India, via contemporary horror and experimental film in the Rustbelt.
The BIMI-Pitt Research Workshop brings together faculty and research students from Pittsburgh and Birkbeck, who present their work-in-progress to each other and to an audience that includes invited guests from the broader London research and arts community. This workshop, whose general themes have been “Cinema and the City” in 2015, “Urban Change” in 2017 and “Displacement in Film and Visual Culture” in 2019 has led to several publications as well as conferences, film seasons, and longer-term collaborative research projects.
Resources
University of Pittsburgh Website – LINK
University of Pittsburgh Film and Media Studies Department – LINK
The 2014 Pittsburgh Annual Lecture – Michael Temple presents “Decades Never Start on Time”, an anthology of Richard Roud’s critical writings – LINK
Audio Cultures and the Transition to Sound in Indian Cinema, London, October 30, 2015. Recording of the 2015 Annual University of Pittsburgh Lecture, presented by Professor Neepa Majumdar – LINK
2016 Critical Quarterly Special Issue: Ben Wheatley, J.G. Ballard, and High‐Rise – LINK
Professor Adam Lowenstein: “A Detroit Landscape with Figures: The Subtractive Horror of It Follows”, The 2017 University of Pittsburgh Annual Lecture, Student Report – LINK
Professor Adam Lowenstein: “A Detroit Landscape with Figures: The Subtractive Horror of It Follows”, The 2017 University of Pittsburgh Annual Lecture, Recording – LINK
Recording of 2018 University of Pittsburgh Annual Lecture with Ben Ogrodnik: Film-as-Art: Excavating the Alliance of Art Museums and Experimental Filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s – LINK
2018 SCREEN Dossier, Architectural documentaries on British television- LINK
2018 Discussion with filmmaker and University of Pittsburgh Assistant Professor Robert Clift on his Montgomery Clift Documentary – LINK
2018 Interview with filmmaker and University of Pittsburgh Assistant Professor Robert Clift – LINK
2019 University of Pittsburgh Annual Lecture, From Animation to Martial Arts: Toward the Transcendence of False Movements LINK
2019 Emily Best – Limits of Cinema/Cinema Unlimited Conference, Pittsburgh, – LINK
Student Report on the 2019 University of Pittsburgh Research Workshop: “Displacement in Film and Visual Culture” – LINK
Student Report on “Young Voices @ EFF” project – LINK
Recordings from 2019 University of Pittsburgh Research Workshop: “Displacement in Film and Visual Culture” – LINK
Professor Catherine Grant – Recording of 2020 Pittsburgh Film and Media Colloquium on Exploring Audiovisual Intertextuality in the Video Essay – LINK
“Forging an Alternative Cinema: Sally Dixon, the Film Section, and the Museum-Based Media Center”
Benjamin Ogrodnik, 2019 Film History Article – LINK