Film screening and discussion
In 2011, the team from the large project
The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image undertook a nationwide tour of universities where they talked about the film
Robinson in Ruins
and other outcomes of their research project to academic and public audiences. The tour stopped in Nottingham in June 2011 when the Impact Fellowship Directorate organised an evening screening of the film and accompanying Q & A with film-maker Patrick Keiller and Professor Nick Alfrey from the University of Nottingham at the independent Broadway Cinema in the city. A panel discussion and workshop was held the following day in the School of Geography.
Panellists:
Patrick Keiller’s films include London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997), a study of the UK's landscape and economic geography that was extended as a book in 1999. Other publications include contributions to The Unknown City (2000), Re:CP (2003) and Restless Cities (2010). The Dilapidated Dwelling, a feature-length documentary, was completed in 2000. Keiller studied architecture at University College London and fine art at the Royal College of Art. Since 1974 he has taught and lectured in schools of fine art and architecture and universities in the UK and abroad.
Doreen Massey is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the Open University. She has worked for many years on issues of space, place, cities and globalisation. In particular she has argued for the need to reconceptualise both space and place, and for the political relevance of so doing. Her most recent books are For Space (Sage, 2005) and World City (Polity, 2007). She is a founding editor of Soundings: a journal of politics and culture.
Patrick Wright is a Professor at the Institute of Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University and a Fellow of the London Consortium. He is the author of On Living in an Old Country (1985 & 2009), A Journey Through Ruins (1991 & 2009), The Village that Died for England (1995), Tank: the Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (2000), and Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War (October 2007). He was co-curator of Tate Britain’s exhibition of Stanley Spencer’s work in 2001, and has more recently been involved with Tate Britain and three regional galleries on a series of interconnected exhibitions concerned with British art. His most recent book, entitled Passport to Peking: a Very British Mission to Mao’s China, was published in October 2010.
Matthew Flintham is an artist and writer living in London. He studied fine art at Central Saint Martin’s, cultural studies at the London Consortium and recently completed his PhD at the Royal College of Art. His current research, 'Parallel Landscapes', studies militarised sites, airspaces and danger areas in the United Kingdom. It addresses issues of military land use and expropriation, notions of invisible and overlapping boundaries, and examines broader issues of British militarism in the landscape.
Discussants:
Nick Alfrey is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Nottingham. His research specialisms are in English and French Romantic art, JMW Turner, the visual culture of landscape since 1800 and contemporary British painting. Nick was the Primary Investigator on the Landscape and Environment network Land art and the culture of landscape.
David Matless is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Nottingham where he directs the MA in Landscape and Culture. His books include Landscape and Englishness (1998) and his new book In the Nature of Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads will be published by Blackwell in 2011.