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A course for artists, filmmakers, scholars, and anyone interested in how we engage with archives, cultural memory, and history through film. We’ll look at the creative strategies filmmakers have used to produce ethical reworkings of materials associated with our troubled pasts.

WHAT: We consider the problem of images and archives that dehumanise their subjects, as well as the creative strategies used by artists and filmmakers to produce ethical reworkings of materials associated with our troubled pasts.

WHERE: Online distance learning, take part in this class from your home with a computer/tablet.

WHO: Run by Miranda Pennell, an artist, filmmaker and teacher whose films often rework images from British colonial archives to reflect on contemporary situations.

WHEN: Monday 7th April – 26th May. Monday evenings, 7:00 – 9:00 PM (UK Time) 7 sessions. (Skipping Monday the 21st of April due to the Easter Monday Bank Holiday)

COMMITMENT: Flexible, optional extra readings within sessions.

HOW MUCH: General: £195.00 | Students/Concessions £185.00 | UCL Students: £175.00

BURSARIES: This course offers bursary places. Please see our Terms & Conditions.

DEADLINE TO SIGN UP: 3rd April 2025.

Students will gain an understanding of:

• Some contrasting attitudes to archival media, to audience reception, and to history.
• Key arguments around ethical conundrums and controversies surrounding image reuse.
• Creative approaches to re-using images associated with marginalised or repressed histories.
• How artists have used subjective or personal interventions to illuminate collective narratives.
• How accidental recordings and artefacts can energise historical questions.
• How revisiting fragments from the history of fiction cinema reveals larger social and political forces at work.
• Peer group explorations of found images

 

The practice of making new films from recycled fragments of old ones opens exciting opportunities for revisiting past events. Crucially, it also allows audiences to reflect critically on the histories of image-making. 

This course will explore the ethical questions that confront makers and audiences alike when recordings are ripped from their original context and re-appropriated to new ends. We consider the problem of archives that contain images that dehumanise their subjects, as well as the creative strategies used by artists and filmmakers to produce ethical reworkings of materials associated with our troubled pasts.

 

All sessions will be online and combine a lecture, screening, and group discussion. Optional further reading will be shared following each session.

 

1. Compilation, found-footage and other remix practices
   Taking a historical perspective, we’ll look at uses of archival material in film and video production to reveal divergent attitudes to audio-visual media, to audiences, and to history itself.

 

2. Towards an ethics of appropriation

We consider the radically shifting meanings of the recycled image fragment, from internet meme to archival film. What sort of ethical frameworks do we use when it comes to evaluating the creative use and misuse of film fragments? 

 

3. The perpetrator’s gaze: film as repair and resistance
   What creative strategies have filmmakers used to disrupt the way we see, when working with materials that dehumanise certain categories of person, while elevating and sanitising others? 

 

4. I am an actor in history
   How do our personal histories affect the stories we research? What happens when the archive marks us?  How do we, as artists, researchers or historians, negotiate our place within the archive and within history, while also approaching our work with rigour? 

 

5. Listening to images 

Unlike written documents, image and sound recordings sometimes contain unfiltered, uncensored information or ‘noise’ which exceeds the intention of the original filmmaker, and which resists full comprehension or interpretation. How have artists used the disruptive qualities of recordings to enrich perceptions of historical meaning?

 

6. Fiction’s unconscious 

Some artists and filmmakers have raided the history of fiction cinema, transforming fragments of fiction film into documents that speak to us of the social relations embedded in the experience of cinema. How does this work complicate our understanding of documentary and fiction? 

 

7. Questions of practice
   Students are invited (though not obliged) to present an image or image sequence for discussion. We will discuss the stories, opportunities and challenges that this material evokes. (This session may run on a little longer.)

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This course will be delivered via online distance learning, and students will require a computer or other internet connected device.

This course offers bursary places. Please check our Terms and conditions to see if you are eligible to apply.

If you still have other questions relating to a specific course or request, please get in touch with us via emailing shortcourses@opencitylondon.com

or call us at +44 20 3108 7586