2018-2020 Circulating Cinema. The Moving Image Archive as Anglo-German Contact Zone.
Led by Professor Erica Carter (King’s College London: KCL), with co-investigators Dr Martin Brady (KCL), Dr Annie Ring (University College London: UCL) and Dr Elizabeth Ward (University of Hull), Circulating Cinema explores the uses of the transnational archive as a resource for the retrieval, curation and dissemination of Anglo-German film heritage. The project uses as its primary material media artifacts that register traces of transnational connectivity between Germany and the Anglophone world. In seven interconnected sub-projects, academic researchers come together with British and German students, cultural practitioners and lay audiences to explore archival holdings that register the traces of a shared Anglo-German media history. The project augments existing work on German cinema within European and Hollywood film networks with innovative research on German connections across colonial and postcolonial Anglophone cinemas, focusing in particular on India and West Africa.
Institutional partners are Profs Dr Hermann Kappelhoff and Michael Wedel, Cinepoetics Center for Advanced Film Studies, FU-Berlin; and Prof Dr Sonia Campanini, Institut für Theater- Film- und Medienwissenschaft, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt-am-Main.
Project affiliates are Julia Eisner and Laura Lux (PhD Students, KCL); Maxwell Jones (PhD student, University of Cambridge); Dr Eleanor Halsall (Project Postdoctoral Fellow, King’s College London); Dr Franziska Nössig (King’s College, London) and Dr Leila Mukhida (University of Cambridge).
Full details of subprojects here.
2017 Radioactive Documentary
Helen Hughes at the University of Surrey is carrying out a research project into non-fiction film representations of nuclear power in the UK and Germany. The project draws on archive holdings at the British Film Institute (London), at the Bundesfilmarchiv (Berlin), and at the German National Library of Science and Technology (Leibniz Universität Hannover). The International Uranium Film Festival, the visitor centre for Hinckley Point B and the Uranium Mining Museum in Schlema (in German), provide contemporary exhibition contexts for the study.
The project is funded by a BA/Leverhulme Small Grant.
2015-16 Promoting German Studies in the UK (DAAD London)
In 2015, the GSSN won generous funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to support the development of its activities as a research network and public engagement platform. The GSSN has since organised two symposia, Screening Work (University of Cambridge 2015) and Living Pasts, Moving Present (King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London, UCL). The network has also collaborated on film talks at the British Museum, the BFI, the Barbican, and the Cinema Museum London; worked on a series of schools events for autumn 2016; and laid the groundwork for further collaborative research on the Anglo-German archive and expanded film heritage.
2014 Building German-language cinema’s Third Machine: Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 Impact Case Study
In 1982, the film theorist Christian Metz conceptualized film commentary as a `third machine’ of meaning production that functions alongside industry and film text to structure cinema audience response. The GSSN’s activities are designed, in the spirit of Metz, to help shape Anglophone discourse on, and reception contexts for, German-language film. In 2014, the GSSN formed part of a REF impact case study presenting the project’s first results.