This PhD by published work critically examines ten years of curatorial practice in the field of artists' film and video by the author. The aim of the thesis and publications is to question and challenge the contemporary integration of artists’film and video installation into the language of the visual arts, the context of the white cube and the privileged definitions of curatorial practice. This PhD also places these questions in a historical context, taking into account the early and often overlooked developments of artists’ film and video exhibition. This research was carried our through individual curatorial projects in the field by scrutinising specific constituent parts of artists’ film and video installation such as the screen, time, space, image, projection, site and audience. The curated exhibitions (the Projects) all took place at Ambika P3, a large postindustrial venue converted into a project space for this purpose in 2007. Each project manipulated these constituent elements and built on them in order to provide new artists’ commissions under the rigour of an experimental and research-led approach. Through this commissioning process, this research developed new collaborative models of curatorial practice, examined and identified key critical areas of curatorial and artistic practice which have been overlooked by critics, writers, curators and the public and proposed new forms of artists’ film and video exhibition. This testing of the boundaries of artist’s film and video installation demonstrated that both the history and context of the practice is engaged with a broad range of paradigms inherited from cinema, sculpture and site specific practice. Furthermore it established that curation is a collective practice engaging numerous participants according to the needs and requirements of each project. The projects revealed that a self reflexive and historically aware approach to curating artists’ film and video can deliver innovative and immersive works outside of the white cube, through an attention to materials, site and form. Through the publications and the commentary it is shown that a critical, collective and process based curatorial practice, attentive to context and its origins expands both the language and the power of the exhibited work.

This thesis investigates the potential of and prospects for mobile documentary filmmaking. As a result of practice-led research, the city film Max with a Keitai was produced on mobile camera phones for cinematic projection. The feature-length documentary portrays the contemporary Japanese megalopolis through the lens of a mobile phone and records the mobile filmmaking process. Simultaneously, the project experimented with mobile phones as viewing devices for ‘micro-movies’. Through curating an international mobile art exhibition and mobile feature film screening, the research explored the new mobile aesthetic from 2004 onwards, which is presented as the Keitai Aesthetic in this thesis. In the first chapters the thesis maps out the early mobile mediascape in the years 2004 to 2007 and analyses cinematic technology through user-based histories. Furthermore, the theoretical framework explores the city films of the 1920s and the concept of motion in film. Mobile filmmaking in the years 2004 to 2007 constitutes a return to non-linear documentary practices, such as interval theory (Dziga Vertov) and Ur-Kino (Hans Richter). The final chapters examine the new emerging mobile aesthetic in the research timeframe from 2004 to 2007 and further develop the argument that innovation in mobile filmmaking occurred, both in the domain of the gallery and the film-festival context before the media industry realized the potential of mobile media. The particular mobile resolution adds new elements to the emerging Keitai Aesthetic: the experience of location, notions of personal, immediate and intimate qualities. This research documents the alternative approach offered by the mobile-mentary (mobile documentary) and explores its potential as an intervention into the industry dominated discourse.

This thesis is a practice-led exploration of how science is represented in the documentary film. The practice part is a science documentary that deliberately eschews a number of key stylistic elements common to what may be called the ‘classic’ science documentary. The aim is not to arbitrarily restrict the filmmaker but rather to explore what sort of a documentary of science might be possible in the absence of certain features that, on the face of it at least, appear to be predicated on an out-dated positivism. The film, Hopeful Monsters: An Experiment, is not in itself an argument for these post-positivist ideas but an experiment that implicitly critiques the philosophical underpinning of the classic science programme. This written dissertation is designed, therefore, to make that critique explicit. It demonstrates, first, how the classic science documentary is indeed informed by an outdated view of the nature of science —the so-called ‘received view’—and second, it develops an alternative, ‘constructivist’ view of science in light of which the film, Hopeful Monsters is evaluated. The dissertation concludes that in its combination of documentary modes and its inconclusive narrative structure, Hopeful Monsters, succeeds in representing science and the scientific-self as distinctly different from the representation of science in the classic science documentary. Furthermore, this alternative representation is indeed consonant with a post-positivist, ‘constructivist’ view of the nature of scientific practice and of the experience of the scientist in carrying out his or her work.

This project explores first person DV documentary filmmaking practice in China in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Building on existing studies of first person filmmaking in the West, which predominantly analyse filmic self-representation on the textual level, this study addresses two themes: the film text as an aesthetic and cultural object that constructs a self; and the filmmaking as a practice and a form of social participation, through which individual filmmakers as agents actively construct representations of their own selves and their subjectivities. Focusing on the work of nine filmmakers, including Yang Lina, Shu Haolun, Hu Xinyu, Wu Haohao, and Ai Weiwei, I argue that these films illustrate the makers’ individual selves as multi-layered and conflicted, situated in complex familial and social relationships, and in the changing relations between individuals and the state. In addition, this practice can be seen as a form of provocative social participation in the era of ‘depoliticised politics’, that stimulates important individual critical thinking and helps to form a new kind of political subjectivity, to reconstruct political value and reactivate the political space in China. These films and the filmmaking practice not only reflect some aspects of the changing concept of individual self in contemporary China, but can be seen as a generative and constructive process, that further contribute to the changing constitution of the individual subject in China. Through close textual analysis of this body of first person films and this filmmaking practice, I demonstrate features of the complex changing relations between the public (gonggong) and the private (siren) space, between the collective (jiti) and the personal (geren), and between the individual (geti) and the party-state (dangguo) in post-socialist China. The project aims to contribute to current debates in the international field of first person filmmaking, and to studies of contemporary China.

The relationship between art, illusion and reality has been part of philosophical debate for centuries. With the increasing use of digital technologies in modern cinema, this debate entered a new dimension. This thesis aims to discuss the notion of illusions as a system of stories and values that inspire a culture similar to other grand narratives, such as mythology or religion. Cinema thus becomes the postmodern 'mythmaking machine‘ par excellence in a world that has increasing difficulties in creating unifying concepts and positive illusions that can inspire a culture and give hope. I will argue that illusions have always been a crucial element of culture, and my hypothesis is that they are not necessarily a sign of people‘s naivety or unconscious manipulationas has often been argued but a conscious choice, deriving from a longing for positive inspiration. This longing is particularly strong in times of ideological crisis, when other institutions fail to provide relief and guidance. This seems to be emphasised by the fact that in the last decade, at a time of deep ideological crisis, mainstream cinema has seen a significant revival of grand mythic epics. The thesis focuses on three key aspects: the area of belief, illusion and the creation of myths; the relationship between realism and illusion; and the possibilities of modern cinema in relation to these aspects. I chose to base my research project on continental philosophy rather than classic film theory or analytic philosophy in order to stimulate a new debate in film studies and philosophy that links traditional aesthetic concepts with contemporary thoughts on society and cinema. To begin with I draw on theories by Nietzsche, Kracauer and Deleuzeto unravel the interesting similarities in their works, such as the redemptive capacities of art and the acknowledgement that illusion/art/cinema is always closely related to the state of the society that produces them. This is then applied to recent Hollywood epics, namely The Lord of the Rings (P. Jackson, 2001-04), Troy(W. Petersen, 2004) and Avatar (J. Cameron, 2009). Here I argue that rather than being mere escapism, mainstream cinemacan have an important function in providing postmodern culture with important illusions, which is significantly facilitated by new digital technologies.The thesis concludes that these technologies present new creative opportunities for filmmakers and philosophers alike.

This practice-based research project explores the parameters of – and aims to construct – a new film language for a feminine écriture within a twenty first century avant-garde practice. My two films, Radio and The New World, together with my contextualising thesis, ask how new vernaculars might construct subjectivity in the contemporary moment. Both films draw on classical and independent cinema to revisit the remix in a feminist context. Using appropriated and live-action footage the five short films that comprise Radio are collaged and subjective, representing an imagined world of short, chaptered ‘songs’ inside a radio set. The New World also uses both live-action and found footage to inscribe a feminist transnational world, in which the narrative is continuous and its trajectory bridges, rather than juxtaposes, the stories it tells. Both the films and the contextualising written text flag the possibility of new approaches at the intersections between cinema, poetry, feminism and critical theory. Drawing on the work of a number of filmmakers, feminists, writers and poets - including Abigail Child, Scott MacDonald, Betzy Bromberg, Christopher MacLaine, Chris Kraus, Eileen Myles and others - I describe the possibilities of cross-pollination of media and approaches. Through interrogating the methodologies of feminist, independent, mainstream & experimental films, their use of protagonists, montage, mise en scene and soundtrack, I argue that my two films have developed new vernaculars, which offer the potential to constitute a new feminine écriture through a knowing revival of cinema as a form of exploratory language. In addition to the constituting force of the films themselves, questions of identity and the current and potential future of film are interrogated via the writings of such cultural theorists, philosophers and artists such as Svetlana Boym, Lauren Berlant, and Christian Marclay.

This practice-led research looks at the ways in which the colonial archive, and the colonial photographic archive in particular, can be reconstructed to produce new critical histories. The research argues for the potential of the moving image as a tool for re-staging colonial archives, as a means of generating responsible ways of looking at, and of engaging with our troubled collective pasts. In my practice I mix the photographic archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company(which became BP) with my family’s photographs from Iran, and with the documentation and narrativization of my encounter with both of these sets of materials, within the moving image. Through this process I address questions about the nature of the photographic archive and the search for historical meaning within it; the question of the researcher’s position within the archive and within the history she produces; and I investigate the affective power of colonial photographs within film and the experience of untimeliness which they produce. While addressing problems associated with the failure of photographic archives to offer access to any stable, transparent meaning, I show how engaging with slippages of meaning can produce other kinds of historical knowledge. But I also argue that attending to the impression of the ‘real’ produced by the colonial photograph as it appears within film, makes the past felt in the present tense, in ways that draw attention to the responsibility of being an onlooker in a situation of injustice. In addition I show how registering the place and time of the researcher within the new filmic archive in motion produces an effective means of imaginative time travel and a lively experience of history.

The narratives presented in most film histories seem to ignore the essential material components of analogue film stock. Film matters focuses on material components of the film image – specifically colour, movement and sound – with the aim of telling a material history in a contemporary, ‘post-digital’ environment. The aim of this history is to show how film as a material has participated in the building of social and political realities that are still at work today. My practice-led research results in two videos on colour and a 16 mm film on movement and sound. In these works I practice alternative ways of history writing and telling that may not be written, but which leave their sediments in the materialities and projections of film. My research is embedded in a historical framework, but at the same time reflects upon the actuality of the political history of film. History and memory images are disassembled into their components in order to make visible that which the image does not show, but of which it is made. Setting out from this methodology, in Chapter 1 I research the representational and constitutional participation of these material components in film’s different temporalities. Through a close reading of several seminal films and moving image works I focus on the interplay between film, time and certain contexts of social and political structures, in order to understand how these are constructed along with material history. Chapter 2 explores movement, rhythm and physicality in the materiality of film. Setting out from the experimental set-up of the film Fugue (2015), the chapter analyses the relationship between physicality(of a body) and materiality (of the film) founded on movement. I claim that movement on film and movement of film produce involuntary side products, which become readable in film through dance-like movements and rhythms. I discover micromovements and habit-formation in both the movement of the film and the movement of the body and seek to read their political and transformative potential in situations in which they were joined, or when transitions from one to the other took place. In Chapter 3 I analyse the role of colour within film history and collective memory. Colour, as a chemical component of the film emulsion, has a temporal permanence, seeping into the grounds and bodies as chemicality, as toxic substance. Colour as a transtemporal figure is elaborated in the video Red, she said (2011), which focuses on Technicolor, looking at the colonising power of colour film by characterising the film emulsion as an autonomous actor within the rules and boundaries of cinematic space. The research into colour continues with Rainbow’s Gravity (2014) – a cinematic study of the production, use and employment of colour in the Nazi period and the politics of memory it entails. I found that in many historical cases colour can take on an active role in processes of memorisation. The thesis concludes in a reflection on the practice of working with a negative approach. In my search for forms of resistance within the moving image that interrupt constant reproductions of power and its representations, I detect the necessity of working with negativity in a processual way.

This PhD by Published Work comprises nine essays and a 10,000-word commentary. Eight of these essays were published (or republished) as chapters within my monograph Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies, which aimed to outline the contours of an alternative history of twentieth-century Bombay cinema. The ninth, which complements these, was published in an annual reader. This project eschews the conventional focus on India’s more respectable genres, the so-called ‘socials’ and ‘mythologicals’, and foregrounds instead the ‘magic and fighting films’ – the fantasy and stunt genres – of the B- and C-circuits in the decades before and immediately after India’s independence. Drawing on an extensive body of my own field research that has spanned more than three decades, the essays also indicate how the visceral attractions of these fantastical B- and C-circuit films migrated into Bombay’s mainstream A-circuit cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. The project draws on and analyses a variety of archival traces – from silent film fragments, shooting scripts, newspaper advertisements, memoirs, posters and publicity stills to full-length movies, gossip and my own ethnographic field-notes from the 1980s and early 1990s. The project’s central argument is that the B- and C-circuit ‘magic and fighting’ films were more significant than has previously been recognised: (i) they influenced the development of film form in India throughout the decades, and especially in the 1970s/80s ‘masala’ era; (ii) they engaged with modernity just as much as – but in different ways from – the A-grade socials in the pre- and early post-independence era. I conclude that alongside nationalist orthodoxies, this significant stream of Bombay cinema has always revelled in cultural hybridity, borrowing voraciously from global popular culture and engaging with transcultural flows of cosmopolitan modernity and postmodernity.

This thesis argues that landscape, place and the material image can be an emotional and narrative catalyst in the context of essay/documentary/art house films. It proposes the notion of the palimpsest-image as an orbit around three gravitational vectors: the relationship between place and space in film, the association of different art forms in the creation and interpretation of an image, and the simultaneity of discourses involving complex combinations of memory, history and imagination. Not necessarily present all the time, these three vectors interact, whether in the interpretation and organization of the theoretical discourse, or in the consideration of the practical work in its artistic and conceptual dimensions. The core research addresses the possibility of forming film geographies through the arrangement of film space and its interpretation of place. The theoretical framework draws on history, geography, art history, film studies and the work of contemporary filmmakers, photographers and painters. This framework is related to the practical research centred on a film made with images recorded in the seven capital cities of countries from the former Yugoslavia. These cities are a platform for two objective ideas: first, to discuss questions of identity, memory, history and place in the context of an imaginary city, Novi (2012-2015), portrayed as a spectral topography between past and present, symbolism and triviality; and second, to delineate a cinematic place that proposes the notion of film geography as a concept that surpasses the mere identification of geographic realism in films.