The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin's Personal Cinema

斯蒂芬·德沃斯金(1939-2012)是一位享誉国际的实验电影制作人。作为一名残疾电影制作人，他也是一名先驱，在童年时感染了小儿麻痹症。他的作品丰富多彩，从地下短片到长篇叙事，从散文片到视频日记。恰如其分的是，它是由艺术界、电影院和广播界的机构委托、展示和收集的，这些机构包括英国的英国电影学院和第四频道、美国的电影选集档案馆和现代艺术博物馆、德国的ZDF和阿森纳、法国的蓬皮杜中心和比利时的Cinematek。2013年，他的遗产执行人雷切尔·加菲尔德将他的档案存放在雷丁大学的博物馆和特别收藏中。自1964年以富布赖特奖学金抵达伦敦以来，与他的电影制作生涯平行的是，德沃斯金迅速成为开发和创建独立电影制作和传播基础设施的关键激励力量。1966年，他帮助成立了伦敦电影制作人合作组织(现在的LUX)，继续在皇家艺术学院教授电影，并撰写了他那个时代的独立电影的主要概述，1975年出版的《电影是...：国际自由电影院》。他还参与创建了Other Cinema，这是伦敦20世纪70年代电影先锋的关键场所。德沃斯金的全部作品以他的残疾和疾病经历为标志，纠缠着人格问题和为独立而进行的斗争，包括身体和职业上的独立，以及对性和性别差异的深刻存在主义调查。著名的是，劳拉·马尔维在1975年发表的开创性银幕文章《视觉愉悦与叙事电影》中，部分是通过与德沃斯金的对话，以及通过接触他的早期电影，明确提出了男性凝视的概念，其中的早期草稿实际上包括了对德沃斯金电影的讨论。尽管德沃斯金具有开创性的重要性，但在后来对那个时代的描述中，他复杂的“个人”美学在很大程度上被省略了，而是支持后来LFMC的理论家和电影制作人所倡导的形式主义的“结构”电影。这个项目旨在纠正主流叙事，在历史上，德沃斯金和其他非结构性电影制作人、有残疾的电影制作人、女性电影制作人和有色人种电影制作人一直被排除在叙事之外。德沃斯金的出现扰乱了对英国艺术家移动形象的既定解读。有机会批判性地评估一个全面的档案，其中包括一百多盒文件和照片，以及二十个硬盘驱动器，不仅记录了德沃斯金的生活和工作，还记录了组成20世纪60年代至2010年代实验电影环境的个人和机构的全球网络，这一机会意义重大。我们的项目，通过定性和以实践为基础的研究方法的结合，以及通过从数字档案、数字取证和数据探索等新兴领域汲取的新方法，将直接使艺术家、电影和艺术学者以及策展人受益。在开放Dwoskin数字和实物档案的过程中，它将开创一种人文研究的原型方法论。这是一次及时的批判性干预，旨在发展德沃斯金的遗产，而此时英国和全球艺术家的移动图像的历史正在被书写。此外，该项目标志着Dwoskin作为艺术家遗产的发展的一个关键点，特别是作为许多身体残疾的艺术家的指路明灯。因此，该项目的研究也是休养生息的：它将挑战关于更广泛世界中残障人士创造性领导潜力的文化观念，并重振关于艺术和残疾及其周围的创造性实践和学术。

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.