CIRCE Research Projects

Circulating Cinema Research Projects

Circulating Cinema (CIRCE) uses as its primary material extraterritorial and ‘orphaned’ archival holdings: media artefacts and documents that register traces of transnational connectivity and illuminate lost or critically neglected aspects of Germany’s relations with the Anglophone world.

The moving image archive is seen in the project as a resource for an especially vivid reconstruction of transnationally shared historical experience. Scholars have suggested that the projection of archive film may generate in the audience the experience of a history that is no longer ‘a dormant organism….simply written about in the past tense,’ but ‘which actually and physically exists, imprinted into celluloid, within the present moment’. Film’s capacity to ‘register, represent and archive time and movement’ (Wood 2010) is drawn upon in this project in live events—screenings, talks, creative workshops—that are designed as fora for a collectively conceived research process with determinate academic outcomes (publications, online resources); as training platforms in archival methods for a rising generation of film, history and German Studies researchers; and as sites of public engagement with a selection of academic and non-academic publics in both local (physical) and global (virtual) space. 

STRAND 1: EXILE AND MIGRATION: FROM GERMANY TO THE ANGLOPHONE WORLD (AND BACK)

Global cinematic entanglements, Indo-German migrations (Dr Eleanor Halsall, King’s College, London).

Lotte Eisner’s exile correspondence: the case of Gerhard Lamprecht (Julia Eisner, KCL)

Below the Surface: Siegfried Kracauer’s unmade exile film (Dr Leila Mukhida, University of Cambridge)

STRAND 2: THE COLD WAR ARCHIVE: DEFA MEETS BRITAIN AND EMPIRE

Back in the GDR: Stanley Forman and ETV (Martin Brady and Franziska Nössig, both of King’s College London)

Cold war icon: Kwame Nkrumah between DEFA and British Film (Professor Erica Carter, King’s College, London)

STRAND 3: ARCHIVES OF TOMORROW

Archive Theory and Found Footage in Contemporary Screen Media Works (Annie Ring, University College London)

Archive researchers of tomorrow

(Elizabeth Ward, University of Hull)