Pea Arts About

In May 2012 I introduced a screening of Elles (dir. Malgorzata Szumowska, 2011) at the Queen's Film Theatre in Belfast and led a discussion afterwards. An uncomfortable topic, particularly in a place awash with religious conservatism, the film follows a seasoned journalist played by Juliet Binoche as she works on a story about young women, mostly students, choosing to enter sex work. It was a strange time for me. After months of intensive job hunting post-PhD (graduated December 2011) I had just landed a minimum-wage part-time job in a shop. Oh the relief that something had worked out. I was desperate by this stage, and what I was prepared to do to survive had been very much on my mind.  Marion Campbell who was then QFT's Education & Outreach Officer had me doing quiet few introductions that year. She was looking out for me and I didn't appreciate her enough. I became so wrapped up in the academic career path that I lost sight of the other types of opportunity she opene...

Bertha Dochouse has become a major source of access to documentary cinema for me and I’m sure many others since much of our lives moved online. As things open up in the UK, Bertha continues to stream exciting documentaries from all over the world. Concentrating on a short few weeks at a women’s dorm at a rehabilitation detention centre in Tehran, Sunless Shadows (dir. Mehrdad Oskouei, 2019) shown on their website last week was right up my alley.  Having spent a chunk of my PhD looking at women’s imprisonment, the experiences of women and girls as what many think of as perpetrators continues to fascinate me because the stigma is so much greater when crimes are committed by members of a sex/gender that is supposed to be caring, nurturing, demure and passive. It is all the more shocking when that crime is murder. Sunless Shadows focuses on a group of young women who passed breaking point and took the life of an abusive man in their lives. The film is shaped around autonomous v...

I wanted to highlight my latest lecture video about Shirley Clarke because she's a film-maker who represents a lot of what I feel is my unfinished business in film studies. I had so wanted to research her in depth and some day visit the UCLA archives of her work. Never say never, I guess, but I'm sure there are people working on her and doing a fine job of progressing what scholars such as Lauren Rabinovitz initiated in redressing the shameful marginalising of Clarke's work in film histories. I use plural histories here because she crossed the too-oft gate-kept boundaries of documentary, social realism, experimental, independent and avant-garde cinemas. I find her work utterly fascinating, and I've only been able to see a little of it first-hand. It has galled me since I learned of Clarke (after my own formal film education I might add, and from my mentor Dr Des O'Rawe who was doing his own 'decolonising' of his knowledge and teaching, which he passed onto m...

I keep thinking about the film Happiest Season (dir. Clea DuVall, 2020). So much of it struck me, and, apart from briefly outlining some thoughts with a friend, I haven't had much chance to talk out all the things about it that still tick over in my mind. I rented it back in December in preparation for a podcast discussion about it the next day, which the prospective guest postponed, and I never heard back. I have an open-door policy on this: folk are welcome and invited, but I will not chase them. Being someone with more authority than me on the film's most prominent subject matter, I didn't feel I had the standing to talk it through on the podcast by myself, and this person had so much to say on Twitter that I knew it would have made for a lively and informative discussion. Ach, these things happen, and I was keen to watch the film anyway because I've always liked DuVall as an actor and had a feeling she'd be a great storyteller too.  I very much enjoyed every asp...

    A recent discovery in my growing self-awareness has been learning that within my broad love of cinema and art one of my favourite sub-genres is the art documentary. By that I mean documentaries about the art world, market, artists and practices rather than artists' films that are documentary in nature, although I'm partial to those too. The latter have often fuelled my research and teaching, but as a form of relaxation and more gentle learning, I do love a good doc telling me something about art and artists. It is a way of seeing that to which I typically do not have access because the works are hidden away in private collections or galleries I'll never get to visit. But far beyond mere interest and information, Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, written and directed by Halina Dyrschka and available to view now via Modern Films , simply blew me away. Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist born in 1862 who made paintings substantial in size and sum and kept meticulous note...

At the end of February, I resigned from my lecturing post at University of Salford where my job and life had been made impossible largely by two senior women colleagues. In early March, I moved back to Newcastle upon Tyne, a city which has become home since I moved there from Belfast in August 2014. In a later post, I will reflect on my academic experiences and how my fraught relationship with the academy – but not research – has come to an end. For now, I am focusing on recovery and looking onwards. Spending International Women’s Day (8 th March) in a positive, safe and supportive space celebrating women and cinema was an ideal beginning to the healing process. The day was facilitated and hosted by Newcastle University’s Research Centre for Film (full schedule on its website here ). It involved an impressive breadth and diversity of film work and practitioners, sparking discussions on the women working on the periphery of industrial production, and inventive approaches to pres...