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Film as Research: recent collaborations with the Derek Jarman Lab

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Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

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A triple bill of research-led films from the Derek Jarman Lab: The Plastic Phoenix (about the now-defunct Bakelite Museum), Aerial Bodies (about female barrage balloon operators) and Submerged Reliquary of a Kentish Saint (about Derek Jarman’s archive). 
 
 
Are you interested in using film in your research? The Derek Jarman Lab works with students and academics at Birkbeck and beyond to make research-led films. These can have a variety of functions, from facilitating a new angle on your research topic through audio-visual exploration, to increasing public engagement with a project.  Join us for a triple bill of recent examples: The Plastic Phoenix (about the now-defunct Bakelite Museum), Aerial Bodies (about female barrage balloon operators) and Submerged Reliquary of a Kentish Saint (about Derek Jarman’s archive). There will be discussion between the collaborators and an opportunity for questions.

Bartek Dziadosz is an essayistic filmmaker and media lecturer. He is a director of the Derek Jarman Lab, a film production hub and research centre at Birkbeck, University of London. Bartek collaborated on 'The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger' (2016) and directed ‘The Trouble with Being Human These Days’ (2013). He teaches media practice and cultural studies.

Lily Ford is a filmmaker and historian, and deputy director of the Derek Jarman Lab. Her PhD was on the history of flight in the 1920s and she has made two research films in this area, Aerial Bodies (2022) and Dear Ella (2020). She’s worked with academics and artists to make several films including Chasing the Revolution: Marie Langer, Psychoanalysis and Society (2021) and A Humbrol Art: The Paintings of George Shaw (2018). She produced the feature-length documentary The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016) which premiered at the Berlinale Film Festival.

Fiona Candlin is Professor of Museology at Birkbeck, and director of two large-scale multi-disciplinary research projects, ‘Mapping Museums: the history and geography of the UK sector’ and ‘UK Museums in the Pandemic’. She has spent a lot of time driving round the UK in a camper van to visit small independent museums and to meet their founders; travels that informed her last two books, Stories from Small Museums (Manchester University Press 2022) and Micromuseology (Bloomsbury, 2016). In 2018 she worked with the Derek Jarman Lab to make The Plastic Phoenix, which documents the closure of the Bakelite Museum.

Eleanor Myerson is the Parker library early career research fellow at Corpus Christi college Cambridge. Her work on Jarman’s medieval blood aesthetics has been published in postmedieval journal and her essay on Jarman’s archives and reliquaries is forthcoming in GLQ. These articles were researched and written in dialogue with this film, which was produced using funds from the Wellcome/ISSF grant. 

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