Miranda Pennell, November 2014

I think of recreating my experience inside the archive and my encounter with images for another viewer.  The film is to some extent a dramatisation of my research process.  

I am approaching the writing of my thesis through the practice. I want to connect the insights produced through the practical research process, and also attend the way those insights were produced and interpreted. I want to foreground experience – of the researcher in the archive and of the imagined viewer.  Here I focus on a section about The author as an Actor in History.  This writing is an early draft, a beginning about where research begins. I presented this at Goldsmiths alongside 3 sections of my film which reworks the photographic archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (BP).

The text is unreferenced but owes something to Cecelia Sayad's Performing Authorship: self-inscription and corporeality in the cinema (2013) and to Michel Certeau's The Writing of History (1988).

Finding a body in the archive

Historic time consists only of a past, whose chief claim to superiority is that we’re not part of it.

Hollis Frampton (Jenkins, 2009), Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity

I have been rifling around inside the photographic collection of the BP archive for sometime, making lists, making notes, finding things, getting lost, losing the plot, keeping going. There is a medium through which so many incongruous and anachronistic archival materials are filtering, which requires indexing. After all that digging-around and sniffing-out, there remains a body that needs to be exhumed, whose evidence needs bringing out into the light. The body is there all along, shadowing my search, yet for various reasons, I don’t pay attention until it becomes impossible to step around it. I reach an impasse and cannot find the thread that that will connect all the different shades of grey within the incongruous, sprawling photographic worlds I have set aside. I cannot begin.

I decide to make records of my presence in the archive – for example the fact of me sitting here, looking for signs of where the trouble all began, wondering what it is exactly that these pictures are telling me, going through the motions of what I think the real historians on the other desks are doing.  Immediately the digital registration of voice and gesture roots my retrospective glance in the here and now.  Now, the history I seek-for gains a lively future, by means of my encounter with it in the present tense.

This beginning, this ‘now’ avows the very conditions, the possibilities and the limits of a search for that ghost, that historical other. By making my presence (and my present) felt, the stage on which the past is to be performed is brought into view. I am suddenly more than ready to begin. I have begun.

Having trespassed momentarily across the frame of representation, I find I have crossed over into the film I am making,  and it becomes apparent that I too am a historical character among all the others who are the subject of my enquiry. Although still inside the archive, I am simultaneously inside a bungalow in SW Iran in 1936 – but now endowed with the vantage point of a historical actor, from which I can freely address the other historical actors – not on equal terms, but as a restless researcher who inadvertently got stuck inside her own film. Neither completely inside nor completely outside the time of the document in which I invest my imagination, I occupy a space that moves endlessly between. From my newly avowed vantage point, I can describe this movement between, and with that description emerges the articulation of the site of production of historical meaning - the place where a particular person, with her own history, encounters objects, fragments of a past and becomes bound up in that history. And how that meeting place becomes the story she tells about the stories we tell about the past, about all that is known, and all that is part of the unknowable beyond.

Life starts to bleed into research, present into past, subjective experience into the historical record, personal memory into imperial history, the extra-filmic into the filmic.  However this realisation quickly turns to anxiety, because I wonder, who is this ‘I’ and where will this lead her – and  me?

UPCOMING EVENT: Miranda Pennell presents extracts from her new film

Friday 7th November
10.30am in Media Research Building, Screen 3, Goldsmiths

My research on the visual archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) asks how colonial archives can be reconfigured to construct new and productive critical histories. 

My approach to reworking archival fragments focuses on the intersection of imperial history and personal history, mixing photographic documents from an official, corporate archive with those from a personal one. But the research also generates and incorporates new photographic and textual documentation in the process, as part of its narrative.  I use the moving image not only as a container but as an activator of colonial photographs. I show how the artist’s reflection on, and narration of a process that reconfigures archival fragments, can elicit an active, engaged history of the post-colonial present.

The practical research sheds light on a cluster of theoretical issues around the nature of our engagement with archival documents, with still and moving images, and with the temporal category we call 'the past'.On Friday I will talk about some questions that I am currently grappling with - about problems to do with the writing of history, the writing of a PhD thesis and the place of the researcher/artist in this process.

Suggested Reading: Jaimie Baron (2014)  'The Archive Effect' in Projections Volume 6, Issue 2, Winter 2012: 102–120

Shared visual ethnography

Presentation by Christine Douglas
3rd October, Goldsmiths


My PhD applies the theories of shared visual anthropology and the methodologies of shared visual ethnography to explore experiences of breast cancer. Nine individuals diagnosed with breast cancer within the past 3 years (of the research starting) were given cameras and invited to film whatever was important to them for a period of 3 - 6 months (actual filming times have been 4 - 18 months). I was not present during filming unless invited into the frame. The research material has been edited into 9 individual films in collaboration with the participants. An installation of the films will take place early 2015.

Determining the theoretical framework and content for my final chapter has been (and continues to be) a lengthy and iterative process.

Referencing Jean Rouch’s assertion that: “No matter whether the story is plausible, no matter the camera or the mike, or the director, or whether a film was born or not, more important is what happened around the camera…” [V/O La Pyramid Humaine 1959] my final chapter theorises processes interior to the films within the context of the research encounter and the wider culture that envelopes the disease. I theorise how each participant has interpreted the research and related to their camera, and the process of audio-visual inscription. Within this framework, I also evaluate what the participants prioritised in the absence of a researcher-led thematic or interview based methodology,  and what questions these issues and the “open” research position raise.

There are 3 key areas I will address on Friday:
1. Cecilia Sayad’s book Performing Authorship has made me think again about how to frame the process of the participant’s audio-visual inscription.  In analyzing the films it interesting to read their inscriptions as performance and to analyse what shape it takes.
2. The filmmaking process as therapeutic - strong but conflicting evidence has emerged from my research.
3. I struggle to write in the first person and to be reflexive beyond an analysis of how I have influenced the knowledge produced in the research but even that has been difficult, largely because I regard writing, whether subjectively or objectively, about vulnerable individuals who are ‘identifiable’ (and not anonymised as is the norm in health/medical research) as an ethical minefield. In addition in my reflexive writing I revert frequently to empirical statements to clarify my arguments  - the ‘I’ of my writing soon morphing into (for me, I am ashamed to say the reassurance of) theoretical norms and also I cannot shake off the belief that expressing how I feel about ‘me’ and breast cancer (which I have not been diagnosed with) is self indulgent in a way that undermines my deep respect for what the participants have been through and continue to experience. Aspects of my work and writing though do (very consciously) revert and conform to a what might be regarded as a ‘scientific’ framework - for example my desire for a reproducible, repeatable methodology, and how I have situated myself in relation to the participants. So is there an undefendable gap - or is it an interesting tension?

Next session: Friday 7th November at 10.30am in MRB Screen 3, Goldsmiths.
Filmmaker Miranda Pennell presents her work using the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) Archive.

First meeting of Autumn term

WELCOME BACK!

The first meeting is on
Friday 3rd October @10.30am
Media Research Building, Screen 3, Goldsmiths

Chrissie Douglas will be presenting her participatory video project.

UPCOMING EVENT: Sheffield Fringe, 6th - 14th June 2014

Samuel Stevens (University of Westminster), Miranda Pennell (University of Westminster), Stephen Connolly (University of Kent), Daniel Mann (Goldsmiths, University of London), Minou Norouzi (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Sheffield Fringe is an artist-led curatorial project exploring the intersection of art &
documentary practices through screenings, talks, exhibitions and research,
presented in partnership with Openvizor, Diversity Art Forum and Goldsmiths
University of London. Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Full programme available at:
http://sheffieldfringe.com/programmes/year-2014/

UPCOMING EVENT: Work in progess screening - Everything | 27 min | VHS, Hi8, DV

Minou Norouzi
Friday 13th June, 10.30am - 1pm at Goldsmiths, MRB Screen 2

© Minou Norouzi

Everything is an adaptation of a short story by Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. The inner monologue of a man talking in very existentialist, philosophical terms about fatherhood, parenting, childhood, his woman, is the fictional foreground to real life taking place in an assemblage of home footage.

The use of archival home video depicting friends and family, using multiples of him, the child, and woman, whilst telling one couple's story, hints at something of a universal 'family condition’. The unauthorized use of privately collected video and the 'misplacing' of 'real' image onto a fictional canvas raises questions about the objectification of our real life selves, though day-to-day cataloging.

UPCOMING EVENT: Assemblage as a tool to explore Artists Cinema

Stephen Connolly
On Friday 6th June, 10.30am - 1pm at Goldsmiths - MRB Screen 2

© Stephen Connolly

Phenomenological and embodied approaches to cinema propose parallels between the perceptive and expressive agencies of camera and audience, as exemplified by the work of Sobchack and Laura U Marks. However, this paradigm lacks conceptual tools for exploring the manifest visual and aural in cinematic representation.

This practice-based PhD explores the concept of ‘assemblage’ for the analysis of artists’ cinema, informed by Deleuze and Actor Network theory and operationalized in a moving image work exploring material aspects of spatialisation in a US city. This presentation will report on the practice based hinterland of this approach using short moving image extracts; progress in applying it to the object of investigation with short moving image extracts; and explore elements of the theoretical approach.

http://experimenta2013.tumblr.com/tagged/stephen-connolly

PANamericanGEA by Jandy CSG

Ximena Castillo Smyntek
Friday, 14th March 2014 10.30am-12pm, Goldsmiths MRB Screen 3

© Ximena Castillo Smyntek

Ximena Castillo Smyntek (Jandy CSG) is a practice-based PhD candidate in Latin-American Cultural Studies and Screen Studies from the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester, England. She has a Master's in Spanish Language, Literature and Culture from Syracuse University, NY, USA. Also, she has a Maestría in Communication and Audiovisual Industries in the Iberoamerican Region from the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía, La Rábida, Spain. In addition, she holds a certificate in General Radio & Television production from the Radio Nederland Training Centre, The Netherlands. She has belonged to the Audio-Visual (AV) PhD group at Goldsmiths University since 2013. She has shown her video work in different conferences, festivals and galleries in the USA, Chile and the UK. Her current video ‘PANamericanGEA’ is part of her current PhD research work "The role of the mass media in contemporary Chilean film...”

The video ‘PANamericanGEA’ explores the journey of a man called "Ben" as a metaphorical reflection on identity formation. Ben through the interaction with the mass media, such as the radio, Internet and television, becomes more aware of the complexity that some identity terms (Hispanic, Latino, etc.) have in relation with their historical past. This is a story that expresses the hope for a better integration in the Americas.

Her present research analyses the use of the language of the mass media as a protagonist within the diegesis of selected contemporary Chilean films, including her own video research practice. It examines the use of the mass communication language as an artistic and dramatic expression as well as a narrative and filmic device. This study, based on different theories and critiques, examines how a film can use the speech of the mass media as a language beyond the persuasive.  It demonstrates how the mass media could become a protagonist, which can create an impact in the mind of those who are exposed to it. This interaction could allow one to find alternatives that originate ways of expression and open avenues for the development of marginalized or silenced voices that could be subjects of an oppressive system.

Conceptualising the Mediation of Subjectivity in Documentary Film Practice – A Case Study of the Cinematic Portrayal of Blindness

 Catalin Brylla, Friday 14th February 2014, 10.30am-12pm, Goldsmiths, MRB Screen 3

The objective of this practice-based research project is to explore methodologies that facilitate the mediation of subjectivity through documentary film. Wayne (2008) identifies three essential functions of documentary practice: research practice, critical practice and creative practice. According to these, my proposed methodology suggests three different stages of mediation for the filmmaking process: mediation in a critical context, mediation of the encounter, and mediation through film form. For each stage I use cross-disciplinary methods, based on representation, anthropology and audience reception.

My case study looks at the representation of blind characters, and how these can bypass existing stereotypes that stigmatise blind people as “the other”. I focus specifically on embodied experience through filming interactions with spaces and objects.

www.catalinbrylla.com

 

© Catalin Brylla

The Contradictions of Hybridity: Re-reading the Visual Representation of Hybridity in Visual Art

Nina Mangalanayagam, Friday 10th January 2014, 10.30am - 12pm, Goldsmiths, MRB Screen 3

© Nina Mangalanayagam

My research and practice takes its starting point in the personal. It came out of the frustration of not finding artworks and theory resonating with my personal experience of having conflicting narratives, being a mix between a white and a black parent. And also by the difficulty making photographs on this experience, without falling into a metalanguage of hybridity. My research contributes to a re-reading of hybridity in photographic art, where the racial Hybrid is involved in a complicated struggle between its histories as both coloniser and colonised.

My practice involves placing myself in situations and locations within my cultural and familial structure to reflect on my position. The main focus is on how other people’s perception of me influences my relationship with others. I expose how internal contradictions mirror external cross-cultural complications. My presentation focused on We call her Pulle - a three screen video installation in progress on my experience returning to Jaffna in Sri Lanka, the childhood place of my father. For most of my life, I had no access to this place due to the civil war. Having only visited once before my memory and image of the place is partly imagined through stories from my father and from the Western society I grew up in. My process includes deconstructing my idea of the past, while simultaneously attempting to re-construct it from the ruins and traces I find. The video focuses on my relationship to my aunt, Pulle, and her house.

The final piece aims to contest ideas of origin, stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and question assumptions and attitudes that I have brought with me from my background. I expose how the hybrid also needs to assess their presumptions and stereotypes of others.

www.ninamanga.com

January 2014: Making history,  CAB 2014 - Colombo Biennale, Sri Lanka

June 2013: Land/Home, Michealis Galleries, University of Cape Town, South Africa        

Patients as Authors [working title]

Christine Douglass, Friday 15th November

I am applying the theories of shared visual anthropology and the methodology of shared visual ethnography to produce collaborative films with 9 individuals who have had a breast cancer diagnosis. My practice seeks to position patients as active producers of knowledge by facilitating a framework for them to “structure their view of the world - their reality - through film” (Sol Worth 1997: 7). It addresses the constraints of knowledge produced by a singular authorial view through the presentation of the individual perspectives and aims to capture the experience of having had a breast cancer diagnosis in a language that is not sanctioned. Equally though I don't want to promote a trope of victimology. My practice challenges the hegemonic epistemes used in clinical research to explore illness experiences. Cameras were 'handed over' to patients for 6+ months, the resultant footage has been collaboratively edited and will form a gallery installation in December 2014.

Worth, S., Adair, J. (1997). Through Navajo Eyes. An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology. Revised edition. Albuquerque. University of New Mexico Press.

Still: TB 2012

 The next presentation is with Tom Tlalim, 10.30am, Friday 13th December 2013 in MRB Screen 3.

Documentary - Intimacy - Migration

Marianne Hougen-Moraga,  Friday 11th October

My research takes its point of departure in my own film-project, which focuses on migration and long distance relationships (including all kinds of relationships from couples to parent-child relationships) and how the feeling of longing for someone and eventually somewhere creates another kind of long-distance intimacy than when being together.

By looking on my own moving image practice, I explore how I can achieve an audiovisual intimate aesthetic through different kinds of approaches as e.g. a confessional approach, close-ups and recorded conversations done on video calls by the characters themselves.

I am recording with four characters and aim at recording with at least five more. The recordings are planned to end up as a one hour non-fiction film.

Film as an Archive for Still Images: strategies for activating colonial memory

Miranda Pennell, Friday 31st May

My research explores the possibilities of film as an archive for assembling and animating colonial still images.  I hope to show how the merging of still and moving images bears on the perception of time and of history, collapsing the disconnections and separations that enable the colonial past to be kept at a safe distance. My research proposes a formal means for inviting the colonial past to be felt in the postcolonial present. 

For this session I shall look at some of the ways the archive has been theorised.  My current practice re-organizes the visual archive of the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (BP). One of my immediate aims is to unravel the colonial construction of ‘Iran’, and of the British subject,  and to engage alternative readings of the company’s historical narrative. What are the techniques of seeing and knowing the world produced by the archive?  By which methods can these be grasped? And what kinds of knowledge or experience might a moving counter-archive hope to produce?

I will present a number of sequences from my film-in-progress, each sequence constructed either from an album of official company images or from the personal album of an employee. Each sequence seems to elaborate a way of seeing and of knowing the world. My film will act as an accumulation of different orders of such image-series, which I rework and reframe with other elements, including sound and voice-over.

*** Next meeting will be Friday 12th July 

AVPhD Group member's participation in Sheffield Fringe 14-15 June

Sheffield Fringe programme announced including "Urban Observations: In and Around Istanbul" curated by November Paynter with films by Köken Ergun, Didem Pekün, Annika Eriksson, Halil Altındere, Esra Ersen.
Saturday, June 15 at 12.00

http://goo.gl/yGe4W

Also showing Amanda Mc Dowell & Jennifer Fearnley's  programme in tribute to Michael Grigsby. Living on the Edge (1987) reveals the impact of the Thatcher era on three families, counterbalancing the exuberant Sheffield Media Unit archive (1984-89).


Saturday, June 15 at 4.30 pm

FLAMIN artist Charlotte Ginsborg’s Over the Bones launches Sheffield Fringe 2013, as the opening salvo of a curatorial mix tape that positions artists’ film as musical, selected by Minou Norouzi.
Friday, June 14 at 6.00 pm

Full programme details: sheffieldfringe.com
Image: Didem Pekün, "Of Dice & Men," 2013

OBJECT DOCUMENTARY: EVERYTHING

Project Title: Object Documentary

Minou Norouzi, April 2013

Through literary adaptation of Everything, a short story by Ingeborg Bachmann, using only personal archive and through themed curatorial presentations at Sheffield Fringe, this PhD by Practice research project titled Object Documentary surveys the relationship of contemporary artists working with documentary material today. The project questions what the ethical implications are of using actuality as object. It tries to keep an open, critical perspective on the positioning of documentary as material in art production - rather than simply as a genre as in film practice.

It investigates how far the ‘creative use’ of actuality can be taken in this context.

Looking at specific contemporary examples, including my own objectifying practice, the project also examines the relationship between audience and maker, placing audience interests and drives against the drive of artists.

The project occupies an intentionally oppositional space. Looking at deliberately questionable ethical practices, the project asks when and how it might be useful to objectify. 

minounorouzi.com

sheffieldfringe.com

Minou Norouzi, 'Everything', 2013. video still 

Of dice and men; production of subjectivity as reflected on essay film

Of dice and men; production of subjectivity as reflected on essay film

Presentation by Didem Pekun, 8 March 2013

On this session I will be presenting the introductory chapter of my practice-based PhD, which embarks from previous works and outlines the reasons for my positionality. 
The current project focuses on essay film and how it functions, if at all, as a platform for production of subjectivity. 

Text circulated:

Guattari, Felix "Subjectivities; for Better or Worse" in 'The Guattari Reader' ed. Gary Genosko, London: Blackwell Publishing, 1996: 193-204 

* The next meeting will take place on the 10th of May and Minou Norouzi will be presenting her work. 

Cross institutional presentation at "Poetics and Politics of Documentary Film" in Finland

The AVPhD Group will be participating and presenting a cross-institutional panel to the Research Symposium: Poetics and Politics of Documentary Film - Building Bridges between the Theory and Practice of Documentary Film  

April 22 - 24, 2013 Aalto University, ARTS, ELO Helsinki Film School, Finland

The Aalto University ELO Helsinki Film School (Department of Film, Television and Scenography, School of Arts, Design and Architecture) will host a symposium on the relationship between theory and practice in documentary film. The objective of the symposium is to build bridges between the practice and theory of documentary film.  The symposium seeks to find ways to “theorize within” film instead of “theorizing about” it. Theory can be understood as an active tool in catalyzing the new politics and poetics in the practice of documentary filmmaking.

http://sensate.tumblr.com/post/36586627091/research-symposium-poetics-and-politics-of-documentary

Theorising Practice, Practicing Theory

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Theorising Practice, Practicing Theory

A postgraduate training workshop

Tuesday April 23rd, 2013

Hosted by the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures and the Media, Culture & Language Forum at the University of Roehampton in London.

This postgraduate-led training event will explore practice-as-research and contemporary conceptions of the relationship between practice and theory in screen media studies (and related disciplines). Bringing together scholars and postgraduate students who are conducting, supervising and examining practice-as-research projects, this workshop will also serve to build and strengthen a network of scholar-practitioners.

Drawing on the experience of some of the leaders in the field, we will explore how the practice-as-research landscape is developing. Eight years after the launch of the AHRC-funded AVPhD (audiovisual PhD) initiative, what have we learned?

What are some of the common issues faced and approaches being taken? How do artistic and academic aims clash or converge; how are creative and critical concerns balanced? What other disciplines are we drawing from and what theoretical and methodological frameworks are we using? How do we understand audiovisual practice in a research context as distinct from other kinds of audiovisual practice?

We invite 20-minute paper proposals from postgraduates and researchers at all levels who are engaged in audiovisual practice-as-research. Please submit 300 word abstracts and a short biographical note to Holly Giesman at holly.giesman@roehampton.ac.uk by March 18th, 2013. 

Performing Documents Conference at Bristol University

Four members of the AVPhD Group (Heidi Hasbrouck, Amanda McDowell, Marianne Hougen Moraga and Didem Pekun) will be participating in the Performing Documents conference which will be held in Bristol University, 12-14 April 2013. The participation takes the form of a panel titled 'Performing the Self' and will be chaired by Dr. Tony Dowmunt. 

Performing Documents is a major collaborative research project which asks how we are dealing with the remains of Live Art today. Drawing on creative, curatorial and research strategies, this project stages a wide-reaching investigation into the problems and potential of performance and its documents. It will comprise a series of public events in 2012, culminating in a large-scale conference and exhibitionat Arnolfini in 2013.

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/performing-documents/

Picturing live war: frame, language, and technology by Sabine El Chamaa

The 8th of February 2013 meeting was a presentation by Sabine El Chamaa.

Abstract:

This practice-based PhD analyses 24/7 live war media coverage from the perspective of a citizen residing inside a city being bombed, by means of a film-based installation and a theoretical text. The argument of the text is that, intrinsic to the experience of contemporary wars waged by the US and its allies in the Middle East, there exists a space of co-liveness that remains absent from the scholarship that is critical of the rise of live war as ‘spectacle’. I have defined co-liveness, as the space inhabited by a citizen who is not involved in war in the function of a fighter, living the bombing of the city as both an embodied experience, as well as a mediatized live image. The research reveals the manner in which this embodied space, which is potentially political and ethical is made invisible by analyzing the rise of liveness (Telstar, 1961), and the politics of its framing where notions of peace and democracy are introduced as inextricably linked to the advancement of satellite technologies that enable the visibility of history in the ‘now’. Subsequent live war coverage (The first Gulf war in 1991 and the Iraq war in 2003 on CNN) equally formulate the confines of what can be considered “live” and “democratic” and thus “human” within a technological framework which consistently affirms the power of those who can bomb and film due to access to an aerial point of view/ of control. The practice component of the research is an installation where audio-visual, pictorial, and textual elements represent various “types” of frames that question the inherent limitations of any representation of war. In a playful and interactive space that refuses the notion of the “untouchable and museumized war images” no trajectory or map is provided. The public is asked to share their impressions in a round table discussion where co-presence lends to a renewed reading of the elements on display.

Mini Bio:

Sabine El Chamaa is a Lebanese Writer/Director, currently in her last year as an Audio-Visual Phd candidate. 

* The following meeting will take place on the 8th of March and Didem Pekun will be presenting her work.