In this talk, researcher and author of open access education website, Film Studies for Free, Catherine Grant shares her practice-led research into cinema. As Grant discusses, the ‘writing’ of the title refers to Grant’s practice of creating ‘video essays’: in her work she doesn’t write with words, but rather with images and sounds in the form of videos that interrogate their own form. She is interested in what happens when “rather than being distant [from your subject] you start handling it, touching it, pulling it apart and putting it back together again…”. Grant’s position as a ‘haptic researcher’ offers a vantage point from which to consider current approaches to live, as well as screen-based, dance research.
This talk was part of Crossing Borders 2016 and was presented in partnership with London Contemporary Dance School.
Learn more:
Film Studies for Free website
The Shudder of a Cinephiliac idea? Videographic film studies practice as material thinking (article)
Film studies in the groove? Rhythmising perception in Carnal Locomotive (article)
Book: Carnal Thoughts by Vivian Sobchack
Videos showed during the talk:
Video #1 REAR WINDOW Syncopated by Catherine Grant
Video #2 TOUCHING THE FILM OBJECT? by Catherine Grant
Video #3 EFFACE by Catherine Grant
Video #4 CARNAL LOCOMOTIVE by Catherine Grant
Catherine Grant teaches and researches Film Studies at the University of Sussex. She established (and continues to curate for) the open access campaigning website Film Studies For Free, and the Audiovisualcy video group, and is also founding editor of the academic digital publishing platform REFRAME. She is also part of the programming group of the annual Essay Film Festival (ICA/Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image).
Grant has published widely on theories and practices of film authorship and intertextuality, and has edited volumes on world cinema, Latin American cinema, digital film and media studies, and the audiovisual essay. A relatively early and prolific adopter of the online short video form, she is founding co-editor of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies. This peer-reviewed publication was awarded the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award of Distinction for 2015.
Bio as published in 2016.
