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(Apologies for cross-posting)
11th April 2018
In the digital age, it seems that ever-growing numbers of people can and do make films. In this workshop, then, we shall discuss zero-, micro- and low-budget digital filmmaking, including how to do it and some of the pitfalls involved in it. What is more, I shall explore the relationship between making films and studying film, and how making films has informed my theoretical approach to film and vice versa. As film increasingly becomes not just an object of academic study, but increasingly an academic process in its own right, the workshop will in particular allow us to consider the role that digital technology plays in contemporary film culture, including its possible role in processes of participation and democratization.
Screening: Circle/Line (2017, 85 mins). Are you happy? This is the question that we ask people outside or near the stations of London Underground’s Circle Line. Circle/Line is, then, a documentary comprised of vox pop interviews with ‘everyday’ people – from the homeless to the hopeful, from the ambitious to the activist, from task-driven Londoners to tourists. Inspired by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s classic documentary, Chronique d’un été/Chronicle of a Summer (France, 1961), Circle/Line enjoyed its world premiere at the East End Film Festival in London in 2017.
William Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (Berghahn, 2013). He also is a maker of zero-budget films including En Attendant Godard (2009), Common Ground (2012), Selfie (2014), Circle/Line (2017) and This is Cinema (forthcoming). He is also currently co-writing a book on cephalopods and cinema with David H. Fleming called Kinoteuthis Infernalis: The Rise of Chthulucinema.