The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin's Personal Cinema

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Stephen Dwoskin (1939-2012) was an internationally respected experimental filmmaker. He was also a pioneer as a filmmaker with disabilities, having contracted polio in childhood. His large and varied output ranged from underground shorts to feature-length narratives, from essay films to video diaries. Appropriately, it was commissioned, presented, and collected internationally, by institutions spanning the art world, cinema, and broadcasting, including the British Film Institute and Channel 4 in the UK, Anthology Film Archives and the Museum of Modern Art in the US, ZDF and Arsenal in Germany, the Centre Pompidou in France, and the Cinematek in Belgium. His archive was deposited at the University of Reading's Museums and Special Collections in 2013 by Rachel Garfield, the executor of his estate.From his arrival in London on a Fulbright scholarship in 1964, in parallel with his filmmaking career Dwoskin quickly became a key motivating force in the development and creation of an infrastructure for the production and dissemination of independent film. In 1966 he helped found the London Film-Makers' Co-Op (now LUX), went on to teach film at the Royal College of Art, and was the author of a major overview of the independent cinema of his time, Film Is...: The International Free Cinema, published in 1975. He also had a role in founding the Other Cinema, a key London venue for the cinematic avant-garde of the 1970s.Dwoskin's oeuvre is indelibly marked by his experience of disability and illness, entwining questions of personhood and the struggle for independence, both physical and professional, with profoundly existential investigations of sexuality and sexual difference. Famously, it was in part through conversations with Dwoskin, and through exposure to his early films, that Laura Mulvey came to articulate the notion of the 'male gaze' in her seminal 1975 Screen article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', an early draft of which actually included a discussion of Dwoskin's films. Despite his seminal importance, Dwoskin's complex 'personal' aesthetic has largely been omitted from subsequent accounts of the era, in favour of the formalist 'structural' film championed by the theorists and filmmakers of the later LFMC. This project aims to provide a corrective to the dominant narrative, from which Dwoskin and other non-structural filmmakers, filmmakers with impairments, female filmmakers, and filmmakers of colour have historically been excluded. Dwoskin's presence unsettles established readings of British artists' moving image. The opportunity to assess critically a comprehensive archive of over one hundred boxes of papers and photographs, and twenty hard drives, chronicling not only Dwoskin's life and work, but also the global network of individuals and institutions which made up the experimental film milieu between the 1960s and 2010s, is significant. Our project, through a combination of qualitative and practice-based research methods, and through new approaches drawn from the emerging fields of digital archiving, digital forensics, and data exploration, will directly benefit artists, film and art scholars, and curators. In the process of opening up the Dwoskin archive, digital and physical, it will originate a prototype methodology for the study of the humanities. It is a timely critical intervention intended to develop Dwoskin's legacy at a moment when the histories of British and global artists' moving image are being written. In addition, the project marks a crucial point in the development of Dwoskin's legacy as an artist, especially as a beacon to many artists with physical impairments. The project's research is therefore also recuperative: it will challenge cultural perceptions about the creative leadership potential of people with impairments in the wider world, and reinvigorate creative practice and scholarship on and around art and disability.