Stephen Dwoskin Symposium

Stephen Dwoskin (1939-2012) was an internationally acclaimed filmmaker, director and producer. He worked in Warhol’s Factory, co-founded the London Film Makers Co-Op (now LUX) at Better Books as well as the Independent Filmmakers’ Association in the 1970s (an organisation that paved the way for Channel 4) and The Other Cinema. Inaugurating the opening of the Dwoskin archive at the University of Reading, this symposium will explore his historical importance as a key figure in independent film and his groundbreaking film work.
SCHEDULE
11.15am-11.30am WELCOME – Dr Rachel Garfield and Benjamin Cook
11.30am-1pm MORNING PANEL
Chair: Will Fowler, curator of artists’ moving image at the BFI National Archive, Dan Kidner, curator, writer and PhD candidate, University of Reading ‘To independent filmmakers: Stephen Dwoskin and “The International Free Cinema”‘;  Dr Lucy Reynolds, writer and researcher in artists moving image A Young American in London; Henry K Miller, Independent researcher, contributor to Sight and Sound The Lonely Crowd: Dwoskin, Durgnat, and the London Film-Makers Co-op
1pm-2pm LUNCH
2pm-3pm SCREENING: You, Me and Everyone We Know, curated by Will Fowler:
Some Friends (Apart) (2002) 25min
Me, myself and I (1967) 18min
Chinese Checkers (1963) 13min
3pm-3.30pm BREAK
3.30pm-5pm AFTERNOON PANEL
Chair: Dr Rachel Garfield, artist and Director of Postgraduate Studies at the University of Reading
Anthea Kennedy, filmmaker Approaching Dwoskin: getting to know the filmmaker, his camera and his films
John Bradburn, Lecturer at Staffordshire University The Camera as Philosophers Stone
Prof Patricia MacCormack, Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University, author of Cinesexuality Evanescent Flesh: The Bound and Unbound Body in Dwoskin
Biographies
John Bradburn is an academic, journalist and filmmaker from Birmingham. His research focuses around investigations of subconscious mental states within cinema. This has lead to papers on the representation of mental illness experience at the Royal College of Psychiatry, articles on American Occult Filmmakers as well as experimental film and sound work.
Anthea Kennedy studied fine art at Chelsea School of Art and Leeds Polytechnic and film at the Royal College of Art. Her films are concerned with history and memory and have been screened at international film festivals, galleries and other venues. She collaborated with Stephen Dwoskin as film editor and assistant director.
Dan Kidner is a freelance curator and writer. He was previously director of Picture This, Bristol (2011 – 2013), and co-director of City Projects, London (2004 – 2011). Over the past 10 years he has produced many artists’ films including Fulll Firearms by Emily Wardill (2011), Abyss by Knut Åsdam and The Empty Plan by Anja Kirschner and David Panos (both 2010). He has edited several books including most recently Working Together: British Film Collectives in the 1970s.
Henry K. Miller has written for the Guardian and Time Out, and is a regular contributor to Sight and Sound. He teaches film at the University of Cambridge and at Anglia Ruskin University. He is the editor of The Essential Raymond Durgnat, to be published later this year.
Lucy Reynolds is a writer, artist and curator of artists moving image. She presents talks on artists’ moving image at arts venues across the UK and runs the Moving Image pathway on the MRES: Art programme at Central St Martins School of Art. She has published extensively on artists’ moving image work, more recent articles include: ‘The Subject in Process: Material Equations in the Work of Carolee Schneemann and Annabel Nicolson,’ in Bridget Crone (ed) The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image, Picture This publications, Bristol, 2012 and ‘Maya Deren: Thresholds to the Imaginary’, International Journal of Screendance, Vol 3, Spring 2013. She is Features Editor of MIRAJ, the Moving Image Review & Arts Journal.
Organised by Rachel Garfield (University of Reading) and Benjamin Cook (LUX)