Bristol Fashion: Reclaiming Cary Grant for Bristol – Film Heritage, Screen Tourism and Curating the Cary Comes Home Festival

This article re-examines Cary Grant’s star persona arguing that the importance of his Bristolian identity has been under-appreciated. Through a detailed discussion of attempts to promote his Bristolian roots including the biennial Cary Comes Home Festival (established 2014), the article argues that these activities have encouraged a re-evaluation of Cary Grant’s star identity, increased understanding of his importance to Bristol’s screen heritage, and helped promote film tourism to the city. The article outlines the history and development of the festival, critically reflecting on the curatorial practices that underpinned them. It is informed by three main interlinked theoretical areas: star studies; the literature on fan practices of cinematic tourism and pilgrimage, and festival studies. It analyses the ways in which expanded cinema programming provides opportunities for decentering the understanding of Grant’s persona as a Hollywood star, by exploring the festival’s programming of immersive cinematic experiences in locations that were significant to his Bristolian identity. The article also examines the impact of the festival’s role in relocating Grant within Bristol, the ways in which it has enhanced the city’s sense of its cinematic heritage – including achieving UNESCO City of Film status in October 2017 – and the ways in which Bristol has become a living archive through which and in which Cary Grant’s star persona is constructed and circulates, which has helped promote film tourism to the city today.

The Effects of Digital Technologies on Expanded Cinema in the Age of Liquid Modernity: Drowning and Surfacing in the Expanded Seas of the Digital Cinema

<p>This thesis is submitted as one part of a three-part Masters program: it is accompanied by two creative praxis: a short film and video installation. The thesis itself mirrors the creative elements of the praxis and should be read in that light. It consists of writing and formatting style not usually found in academic writing. The font and formatting changes are designed to facilitate the reader’s experience and recognition of various points of view personified within. ...</p>

The Effects of Digital Technologies on Expanded Cinema in the Age of Liquid Modernity: Drowning and Surfacing in the Expanded Seas of the Digital Cinema

<p>This thesis is submitted as one part of a three-part Masters program: it is accompanied by two creative praxis: a short film and video installation. The thesis itself mirrors the creative elements of the praxis and should be read in that light. It consists of writing and formatting style not usually found in academic writing. The font and formatting changes are designed to facilitate the reader’s experience and recognition of various points of view personified within. ...</p>

Mobile Moving Image Culture & Smartphone Filmmaking Past, Present & Future

Over the last decade, smartphone filmmaking evolved from an underground and art house into an egalitarian filmmaking practice and moving-image culture. In an international context mobile, smartphone and pocket films can provide access to filmmaking tools and technologies for a new generation of filmmakers. Max Schleser will review the developments and directions in mobile, smartphone and pocket filmmaking through the International Mobile Innovation Screenings (www.mina.pro). During the last ten years, he curated the screening and smartphone film festival, which captures and celebrates smartphone films about communities and cities from around the world. Mobile, smartphone and pocket filmmaking expands the tradition of experimental filmmaking, expanded cinema and documentary making. Smartphone filmmaking facilitates experimentation. This presentation will outline how early mobile filmmaking aesthetics still resonate in contemporary smartphones films and documentaries that screen at major festivals such as Berlinale or Festival de Cannes. Furthermore, mobile moving image aesthetics now influence filmmaking more generally. As Creative Arts research in screen and digital media, Max Schleser’s research projects are also disseminated via non-traditional research outputs. He applies practice-led research to examine novel film forms and formats. His creative practice focuses on filmmaking and curation. Max Schleser has demonstrated how mobile media can drive social innovation in interdisciplinary research projects. To establish a conversation on mobile media's potential for transdisciplinary research, he co-edited Mobile Media Making in an Age of Smartphones and Mobile Story Making in an Age of Smartphones. His monograph, Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory & Practice will be published by Bloomsbury in September 2021.

Expanded Poetry and the Beat Generation

This essay explores the interdisciplinary poetics of California poet ruth weiss through the lens of expanded poetry, a legacy of Gene Youngblood’s theory of expanded cinema, Encarnacion-Pinedo frames “expanded poetry” as a useful tool to use in the classroom to understand weiss’s integration of the written word, visual image, and musical sound.

Performing Moving Images

Performing Moving Images: Access, Archive and Affects presents institutions, individuals and networks who have ensured experimental films and Expanded Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s are not consigned to oblivion. Through a comparison of recent international case studies from festivals, museums, and gallery spaces, the book analyzes their new contexts, and describes the affective reception of those events. The study asks: what is the relationship between an aesthetic experience and memory at the point where film archives, cinema, and exhibition practices intersect? What can we learn from re-screenings, re-enactments, and found footage works, that are using archival material? How does the affective experience of the images, sounds and music resonate today? Performing Moving Images: Access, Archive and Affects proposes a theoretical framework from the perspective of the performative practice of programming, curating, and reconstructing, bringing in insights from original interviews with cultural agents together with an interdisciplinary academic discourse.

Conclusion

The conclusion argues that while expanded cinema might seem radically opposed to conventional, popular, and mainstream cinema, it nonetheless attempts to articulate and specify the aesthetic qualities that define all cinema. This parallels a trait of conventionally made avant-garde/experimental films; the assertion of cinema’s nature and essences, which constitute all forms of cinema regardless of how different one kind of film appears from another. The conclusion also draws upon the notions of the “essentially cinematic” explored across the book to counter theoretical arguments against such specificity positions (e.g. medium specificity) that have been advanced by critics and scholars in the worlds of cinema and art. The conclusion argues that these anti-specificity positions are overly simplistic, and that expanded cinema represents a more nuanced and sophisticated notion of what a medium specific theory—or work of cinema—can be.

Cinema Expanded

Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia is a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision of the concept of expanded cinema, placing it in the context of avant-garde/experimental film history rather than the history of new media, intermedia, or multimedia. The book argues that while expanded cinema has taken an incredible variety of forms (including moving image installation, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light shows, shadow plays, computer-generated images, video art, sculptural objects, and texts), it is nonetheless best understood as an ongoing meditation by filmmakers on the nature of cinema, specifically, and on its relationship to the other arts. Cinema Expanded also extends its historical and theoretical scope to avant-garde film culture more generally, placing expanded cinema in that context while also considering what it has to tell us about the moving image in the art world and new media environment.