Michael Klinger, the
role of the producer and the British film industry
in the 1960s and 1970s |
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Andrew Spicer was awarded an Arts and Humantities
Research Council grant for a two-year project entitled: ‘Michael
Klinger, the role of the producer and the British film industry in
the 1960s and 1970s’.
The project started in February 2010 and is being conducted by Andrew
and a full-time research assistant, Dr Anthony
McKenna. The project will archive, catalogue
and interpret the Michael Klinger Papers.
Summary
This project will catalogue and interpret the Michael Klinger Papers,
an extensive collection of material that documents the career of an
important independent British film producer whose contribution to
British film history has been almost entirely neglected. They are
an as yet unexplored and unknown resource that has been donated to
UWE by the producer’s son, Tony Klinger.
They contain information about aspects of film production that is
not normally available for inspection and analysis, including production
costs, film grosses, distribution rights, company profit and loss
accounts, legal disputes and censorship negotiations.
The project, which runs for two years from
1 February 2010 to 31 January 2012, is being conducted in partnership
with the School of Creative Arts, Film and Media at the University
of Portsmouth (Professor Sue Harper
and Dr Justin Smith)
and is linked to their AHRC-funded project on British cinema in the
1970s.
The project will be hosting a two-day international conference, 19-20
April 2011 at the Arnolfini, Bristol, which will debate the role of
the producer in British cinema. See ‘News
and Events’ for futher details
More information
about the project |
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Beauty
Visual Culture Research Group: Spring 2010
Lectures.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Get
it out with Optrex.
Spike Milligan Values
‘67
For over thirty years critical theory privileged
ideological issues of power, race, gender and class and was dubious
about the very concept of ‘beauty’. But there has been
a resurgence of interest in and discourse around the term. Dave
Hickey, for example, put an anti-academic
cat among the pigeons in 1993 with his Four
Essays on Beauty, cheerfully invoking the
democratizing energy of the art market’s taste for the beautiful.
Elaine Scarry
(2001) took a different tack, defending beauty by arguing for its
political efficacy in pressing us to a concern with justice. Wendy
Steiner (2001) brought a gendered awareness
to The Trouble with Beauty and Elizabeth Prettejohn
(2005), offering a theoretical overview, joins her in calling for
a nuanced reconfiguration of the field while Roger Scruton (2009)
wants a return to ‘universal values’.
The debate is on, brought into sharp focus by Dave
Beech’s recent anthology on the politics
of beauty (Beauty,
2009) which repositions it as a central concern for visual culture.
Following Ricoeur,
Beech calls for an ‘aesthetics of suspicion’ and highlights
the contemporary status of beauty as a contested category that can
reveal the ideological position of individuals and social discourse
as well as the tensions between them.
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Thursday
6th May OA2 6.30pm
Paul Allen
Beauty in practice
Through a reconsideration of Robert Adams’ Beauty
in Photography: Essays in Defence of Traditional Values (1981),
Paul Allen examines how a well-formed image of a world heritage site
is no guarantee of ‘pleasing’ viewing. He argues that
beauty in landscape photography is more complex than a perfect surface.
Paul Allen is programme leader of Photographic Practice at the Arts
University College at Bournemouth and a landscape photographer whose
work is concerned with questions of narrative, and the nature of the
photograph as academic knowledge.
Thursday 13th May OA2
6.30pm
Dr Elizabeth Prettejohn
Beauty Ancient and Modern; or, Why I am a Kantian
Why do we find the art of the past beautiful? The scholarly methods
of recent decades do not offer sophisticated ways of addressing this
question; in their emphasis on the differences among cultures and
cultural groups, they are unable to provide adequate analyses of how
artworks may communicate across cultural and temporal boundaries.
This lecture will take an extreme case, to ask how it is that we can
still find ancient sculpture beautiful. It will argue that the insights
of Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement
(1790) remain relevant for the study of the arts and humanities today.
Elizabeth Prettejohn is Professor of History
of Art at the University of Bristol. Her books include Beauty
and Art 1750-2000 (2005), Art for Art’s
Sake (2007), and The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites
(2000).
Thursday 20th May OA2
6.30pm
Dave Beech
Beauty,
Ideology and Utopia
Dave Beech is a London Based British artist and writer. He is a
member of the collective Freee (www.freee.org.uk).
A regular contributor to Art Monthly as well as periodicals such
as Untitled, Mute and First Condition, he has examined the legacies
of the avant-garde in essays such as ‘Art’s Detractors’,
‘Shock versus Awe’ and ‘The politics of Beauty’.
He teaches at Chelsea College of Art and is the co-author of The
Philistine Controversy (2002).
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