Here is a selection of events and projects from recent years. For a full list look here.
Fair Dealing
The Fair Dealing programme at Birkbeck was a month-long series of events on copyright and fair dealing as it affects academics and practitioners working with the still and moving image, in November 2017.
Thinking and writing about images is innate to academic practice in the humanities and beyond, as is disseminating this criticism and analysis as a research output. But academics and practitioners commenting on visual material often find themselves in a difficult or expensive situation when it comes to reproducing the images themselves. Reproduction rights and license fees can be prohibitive to publication or exhibition. While amendments to the Copyright Act in 2014 both expanded and introduced new scope for ‘fair dealing’ copyrighted material without permission, there are as yet very few precedents to show how such defences are being enforced. This leads to a climate of uncertainty for authors, both of books and of audiovisual works, who must often operate in this grey area of copyright law in order to make their research public.
By bringing together academics, practitioners and stakeholders this conference aimed to facilitate frank discussion and clear pathways for future research practice and dissemination in the humanities. The issues raised have an impact on any researcher working with material created by third parties, from a PhD student seeking to publish an article containing artworks or diagrams, to a lecturer using a film excerpt in a presentation, to an academic or filmmaker conducting a critical reading of another work. In this digital age, when both materials and platforms are easy to access, what is the correct approach to reproducing material responsibly?
VISIT THE WEBSITE WITH PODCASTS FROM ALL EVENTS
Introduction to Fair Dealing conference, Lily Ford from The Derek Jarman Lab on Vimeo.
Hidden Persuaders Project
Between May 2018 and July 2019 we will be running a series of filmmaking workshops for sixth-formers from selected North London schools participating in the public engagement stage of the Wellcome-funded Hidden Persuaders project. Working closely with a team led by Professor Daniel Pick we are delivering 8 three-day courses for about 80 students from Camden School for Girls, Acland Burghley School and Parliament Hill School, who are going to learn about the cold-war concept of brainwashing and the history of techniques of behavioural change used in advertising, while making visual essays about those topics. Films created during the workshops will be screened at Birkbeck Cinema and then used in further outreach activities related to the Hidden Persuaders project.
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ONLINE ARCHIVE OF RESOURCES ABOUT PERSUASION AND ADVERTISING
[password available upon individual request]
Faces of John Berger
A celebration of John Berger on screen and page. 70 readers, scholars and collaborators of John Berger gathered at Birkbeck Cinema to discuss his work on page and screen, in a symposium organised by the Derek Jarman Lab with AICA-UK and the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image.
Meshes Network
Meshes Project is a series of practice-focused seminars during which fillmakers interested in the essay format discuss their work, exchange ideas and share knowledge.