The Professor Sir Richard Trainor PhD Scholarships 2015-16
Project Title: Ecologies of Artists’ Moving Image Practice in the United Kingdom, 1966–2016
Partner Organisation: LUX
Extended deadline 20th May 2015.
King’s is now inviting applications for one of the Professor Sir Richard Trainor PhD Scholarships in the Department of Film Studies at King’s College London in collaboration with LUX. The scholarship will commence from October 2015 onwards and is open to new incoming PhD students only.
Project Description
2016 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the London Film-makers’ Co-op (LFMC), a pathbreaking organization that established a tradition for the production, distribution, and exhibition of artists’ moving image in the United Kingdom that remains vibrant today.
This scholarship will provide a timely opportunity for a PhD student to engage with this rich history by developing a doctoral research project that interrogates some aspect of the broad ecology of artists’ moving image practice in the UK from 1966 to the present. In particular, the studentship is intended to fund research that will move beyond methodological approaches based in monographic and/or textual analysis to instead engage with screen cultures, institutional histories, and/or modes of production, circulation, and display. The student will benefit from academic supervision at King’s in conjunction with support from LUX, the premiere arts agency for the support and promotion of artists’ moving image in the UK and the home of Europe’s largest circulating collection of artists’ film and video, formed in 1999 through the merger of LFMC and London Video Arts.
A PhD student supported by this scholarship will further enhance the existing collaborative relationship between LUX and King’s Film Studies, a department possessing significant expertise in the field of experimental and artists’ cinema. The student would be able to draw upon the wealth of knowledge and support offered by LUX and King’s Film Studies to produce a doctoral thesis engaging with issues of relevance to both the academic community and the community of practitioners engaged in this burgeoning field.
The student would also benefit from engagement with non-academic audiences and have access to an invaluable audiovisual collection and to important contacts in the field. The Department of Film Studies at King’s has been ranked the top department in the country to study film in the UK in the 2015 Guardian University Guide. The Department is located on the Strand Campus of King’s College London where the studentship will be based.
Supervisors:
• Lead Supervisor: Erika Balsom, Lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts
• Second Supervisor: Michele Pierson, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies
• Partner Organisation Supervisor: Benjamin Cook & Maria Palacios Cruz, LUX
Application documentation: applicants must complete and submit:
• a CV
• a 4000-word writing sample and a 1500-2000 word project proposal (see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/filmstudies/study/pgr/index.aspx for full details) • personal statement identifying which project they would like to be considered for explaining why they would be suitable
to [email protected] by 12pm (UK BST) on 20th May 2015. The subject line of the email should read RT Scholarship 1516.
Two academic references must be received by the deadline for the application to be eligible. Candidates are responsible for instructing referees to submit their references to [email protected] using the subject line RT Scholarship 1516.
Selection: Please note that as part of selection, short-listed candidates will be invited for interview.
Funding Details: The scholarship will provide an annual payment of £15,000 which can be used to cover tuition fees and/or living costs.
Length of Award: 3 years (PhD)
Ecologies of Artists’ Moving Image Practice in the United Kingdom, 1966–2016
Full Project description
Scope:
2016 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the London Film-makers’ Co-op (LFMC), a pathbreaking organization that established a tradition for the production, distribution, and exhibition of artists’ moving image in the United Kingdom that remains vibrant today. This studentship will provide a timely opportunity for a PhD student to engage with this rich history by developing a doctoral research project that interrogates some aspect of the broad ecology of artists’ moving image practice in the UK from 1966 to the present.
Aims:
Key aims of this studentship include:
– To provide financial and in-kind support to a doctoral student to engage in timely interdisciplinary research that will be of significant impact within the academic context and beyond. The student will receive rigorous academic training while also benefiting from the experience of working with an arts organization engaged in diverse forms of public outreach. The anticipated outcomes of the doctoral research will reflect this double emphasis, spanning traditional scholarship and activities aimed at nonacademic publics. This unique formation will offer the student excellent preparation for post-degree careers in academia and the cultural sector.
– To allow the student to receive skills training from LUX, the partner organization, through activities that may include but are not limited to: helping to organize symposia and talks; organising and/or curating screenings and exhibitions; and assisting the preparation of edited publications. These activities may pertain to the 2016 commemoration of the founding of the LFMC but are not restricted to it. In turn, LUX will benefit from the research-led activities the PhD student will undertake during the studentship.
– To develop a framework for knowledge transfer and collaboration between King’s College London and LUX that engages with several of the priority areas of the Professor Sir Richard Trainor scholarship programme, including “museums, collections, and heritage,” “culture and the arts,” and “linking pasts and presents for the future.”
Methodology:
Traditionally, scholarship in artists’ moving image has tended to focus on form, style, and aesthetics, often taking a monographic approach. Questions of spectatorship and reception have been far less frequently pursued than in areas of Film Studies concerned with narrative feature films, perhaps because of the intense primacy accorded to the figure of the artist as creator in this field of practice. Even less interrogated are crucial matters such as institutional histories, modes of production, and practices of distribution, exhibition, and pedagogy. While the traditional methodologies are valuable indeed, they possess significant limitations that have led to persistent blind spots in the scholarly literature in these key areas. However, in line with a broader disciplinary shift away from textual analysis and towards the contextual study of screen cultures in Film Studies (cf. Acland, Casetti, Harbord, Lobato, Wasson), research on artists’ moving image practice is increasingly turning to new methodologies that allow for an interrogation of the complex ecologies that surround moving image practice. Tess Takahashi, for instance, has recently suggested “shift[ing] our gaze from medium-specific experimental works and the artists who made them to the screens on which the experimental work appeared,” while Michael Zryd has published pioneering work concerning the relationship between avant-garde film and the academy in the North American context, and Jonathan Walley has distinguished between artists’ cinema and experimental film as modes of production. Julia Knight and Peter Thomas’s Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image offers a meticulously researched account of distribution of artists’ moving image in the UK, while Erika Balsom (proposed primary supervisor) has examined the history of the sale of film and video on the art market. Such contributions exemplify the promise of bringing these new methodologies to bear on the subfield, but much research remains to be done. This studentship will provide support for a doctoral student to engage with questions of infrastructure, circulation, context, and display through a research project of his or her own devising.
As Takahashi puts it, “In reaching out to far messier and more material questions of display and circulation, the idea of ‘experimental film’ also opens up: what was initially considered obscure, difficult, and hermetic instead emerges as a rich site of community, movement, and exchange.” The LFMC adopted a model of integrated practice that brought together production, distribution, and exhibition within a single nonhierarchical, collective environment. In this way, it constitutes precisely the kind of “rich site of community, movement, and exchange” Takahashi mentions. In order to do justice to the historical actuality of this seminal organization, it is necessary to take up an interdisciplinary perspective that will bridge the histories of art, film, and culture to move beyond monographic approaches and shed light on the complex ecology of relations that makes artists’ moving image practice possible.
Timescale:
This studentship is well timed to coincide with the yearlong commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the London Film-makers’ Co-op that will be happening throughout 2016. The student will be able to assist in the planning and execution of these events in the early part of his or her PhD, providing a broad immersion in his or her field of study, before making use of the final part of the studentship to write up the dissertation research. It is anticipated that the student will face an upgrade committee after nine months of study (May 2016) and complete the degree within the normative time of three years (Summer 2018). Plans for dissemination: The main output of this studentship will be a traditional doctoral dissertation that will hopefully form the basis of an academic monograph. However, this studentship will also include numerous opportunities for a variety of other ways of disseminating this research throughout the award tenure, including but not limited to the curation of film screenings and exhibitions, public talks, and publications. The planned partnership with LUX will be crucial in helping the student to facilitate these activities.
References
Acland, Charles. Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
Balsom, Erika. “Original Copies: How Film and Video Became Art Objects,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 97–118.
Casetti, Francesco. “Filmic Experience,” Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 55–66.
Harbord, Janet. Film Cultures (London: Sage, 2002).
Knight, Julia and Thomas, Peter. Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image (Bristol: Intellect, 2011).
Lobato, Ramon. Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2012).
Takahashi, Tess. “Experimental Screens in the 1960s and 1970s: The Site of Community,” Cinema Journal 51, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 162–167.
Walley, Jonathan. “Modes of Film Practice in the Avant-Garde,” Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate and Afterall, 2008), 182–199.
Wasson, Heidi. Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
Zryd, Michael. “The Academy and the Avant-Garde: A Relationship of Dependence and Resistance,” Cinema Journal 45, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 17–42.
For more information please follow the link below or email Erika Balsom [email protected]
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/pg/funding/sources/rtprojects/RT-scholarship-advert-project-BALSOM.pdf
