AUP Film presents - Japanese Expanded Cinema Lecture + Presentation

AUP Film Presents a lecture and screening with scholar, programmer and curator Julian Ross on Japanese Expanded Cinema as part of our Insights in Cinema series that brings the best film scholars and filmmakers to AUP.

Expanded Cinema describes a form of practice that emerged in the 1960s involving the film projector being used as a performative instrument. Existing between film, performance and installation art, it questioned the conventions of the film-viewing experience by activating the inherent qualities of cinema usually neglected in commercial filmmaking. The presentation will introduce rare works from 1960-70s Japan that were a result of dynamic collaborations between artists, filmmakers and art centres (including radical discotheques!) and explore the ways in which they offer new insights into cinema as an art form.

Julian Ross is a scholar, programmer and curator.  He is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Westminster on a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. His PhD at the University of Leeds was on Japanese expanded cinema, a topic on which he co-curated a film and performance series at Tate Modern and International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). He is on the short film selection committee at IFFR.  He has curated additional film programmes at the Eye Film Institute/Amsterdam, the British Film Institute and the Anthology Film Archives. He has served as assistant curator for the touring programme on the Art Theatre Guild of Japan. His writing has appeared in Film Comment, Aesthetica Magazine and Post (MoMA).