 we're getting fantastic numbers coming aboard. So I think we should start. So I just want to say to everyone, welcome. My name is Mark Houghton, the director of studies at the Paul Mellon Center, just hosting this event. And just to say that for those of you who don't know the PMC, we're a research center that supports research and distributes research on all aspects of British art from the medieval period right up to the contemporary. So please explore our website. We've got a fantastic events program coming up over the next two months of which this is a part. There are lectures, there are films, there are podcasts dealing with subjects ranging from Hogarth in the 18th century right up to topics like today's. So just before I introduce our speakers, Rachel and Will, I think I'll just want to talk a bit about our housekeeping. Will, so if we can just move on to the next slide. Yeah, so just to say that you've been automatically muted when you join a seminar. And so you can only communicate verbally if we unmute you, which can happen during the Q&A session that we'll be having later on. The talk that Will and Rachel will be giving will last around, and it's a conversation between them, will last around 30 to 40 minutes. And then we'll have 20 minutes or so for questions when we invite you to ask questions. And there are two ways of doing this. One is to use the virtual raise hand button. And if we spot you raising your hand, then we'll be able to unmute you and you'll be able to ask your question directly to Will and Rachel. Otherwise please use the Q&A box to ask and write your questions. And I'll pass them on to Will and Rachel as well. Then if you're having any problems or any comments you want to make and send us news about where you're watching this and any thoughts you've got, please use the chat box. But the questions that you'd like to ask again, we really encourage you to ask them is the Q&A box. The session will be recorded and no photos should be taken, please. And then it goes without saying that any offensive behavior will not be tolerated. And as it says there, attendees can be removed from the webinar by the host, but of course, we are not expecting to do that. So I said welcome and welcome to this event about which we're really excited here. Now all of you I hope will have had the chance to watch a film that we've been promoting and showcasing Stephen Dwaskin's films, Shadows and Light, the photography of Bill Brand. And that served as a prelude to this discussion, this conversation that's going to be taking place this afternoon between on the one hand Rachel Garfield who's a professor and an artist at Reading and professor of fine art at Reading University and someone who's a great expert on Dwaskin and is running a major HRC project on Dwaskin at the university at Reading. So it's wonderful to have you with us, Rachel, bringing all your expertise and knowledge to the conversation. And also we're really delighted to welcome Will Fowler who's curator of artists moving image at the BFI. And someone we've been in conversation with for a couple of years now about all the ways in which the PMC and the BFI can collaborate on showcasing some really interesting works of British cinema and artist moving image. And Rachel and Will will be talking both about the film that I hope all of you have had the chance to watch or you'll have the chance to watch over coming days but also about Dwaskin himself and about his position in the world of artist moving image practice. And so as I said, it's a conversation and I'd like very much to turn over to the two of you to kick us off and then I'll return again as it were in 30, 40 or so minutes to start asking questions or to get the question session going. So, Rachel, Will over to you. Okay, well, thank you very much. It's really great to be here and to be able to, well, we can't really speak to you as such but we'll be getting some questions at the end. And I was quite excited just now to see someone saying that they were clocking in from Cornwall because I'm actually a Cornish boy. So I grew up and found that. So that's a nice thing for me personally. So I'd like to thank again, Mark Hallett, Ella Fleming, Anuid and Jenny Convoy from the Cornwall Center for collaborating with the BFI and Reading University in organizing this and also for inviting Rachel and myself to present this session today. I'm really pleased to be here as I had a long abiding interest in Stephen Dwaskin's films and I was responsible for acquiring his original negatives and other film materials for the BFI National Archive during Steve's lifetime. I'm also connected to the Dwaskin Academic Project which we'll perhaps hear a bit more about a little bit later. And I think this is an interesting event which makes for a series of connections or parallels not least or perhaps primarily because the Paul Mellon Center is devoted to the study of British art. And this film was very much conceived as a kind of educational document if a rather unusual one, as you'll know if you've had a chance to watch it. The fact that Rachel and I have a conversation about it also reflects something of the film's core shape. It being about both the photographer Bill Brandt and the filmmaker Steve Dwaskin and their relationship and their creative conversation. I'm also aware that this film is perhaps some respects quite a curious object and even an unfamiliar one in its shape. Like many films, it feels like an artifact which we can approach from numerous different perspectives and yet even still it retains some distance from us partly perhaps because of the changing context, platforms and funding strategies that it's passed through and been involved in. And also Steve Dwaskin died in 2012 and Bill Brandt died in 1983. So that creates a further set of distances but I wouldn't want to at the same time suggest that it's for the alienating just that perhaps it's a different type of film that we might be used to. Even some perhaps some of the films we might even see in a gallery in some respects. In terms of finance and production it was realized within the documentary strand of the Arts Council's film funding portfolio. So it was perhaps as a way of reminding ourselves a little bit about what it is if it is a documentary and artist documentary if we prefer that larger descriptor. I mean very basic terms what is this from document perhaps. So just to remind people you may have seen the film or you may be thinking about watching it later or maybe you saw it last week but just to just give you a little bit of a reminder of some of the things that covers and perhaps its tone and shape. So the film presents a series of photographs as objects importantly includes quotes from different theorists clues extracts from Alice through the looking glass. There's model performances we've seen a number of different spaces that includes and evokes different personalities. There are bodies and connections going back and forth through time. And importantly I think as it says at the very beginning it's about creating it's about looking at atmosphere and creating atmosphere and perhaps looking at the atmospheres that Bill Brandt's photographs evoked. It's quite stark in its aesthetics. It presents and explores Brandt's work and suggests ways to think about it rather than say laying out his biography and producing experts to interpret his photography. Something also notable is that it stars or features Kazifani Tutti a self a significant figure in underground art and music and I think we'll get on to her a little bit later. And so really I mean having sort of laid it out and thought about the session and introduced the film a little. I'm going to sort of broadly lead the session I suppose it's sort of in between me leading it and us having a conversation but we'll sort of see how it goes. I think that's sort of roughly the shape. But I wondered if Rachel if you could tell us a bit about Stephen Dawson's background in film and where he might be coming from in a broad sense with this particular piece. But perhaps before that you could say a bit about your relationship to Steve Dawson and his work so the fact that you yourself had a kind of a rapport and some kind of working relationship to and perhaps in some ways like Stephen Bill Brand did. Yeah, I mean in that sense it's quite interesting to be talking about a film that's about an intergenerational conversation between artists because I feel that that baton was sort of carried on in some ways through me and the relationship Steve had with many younger artists. And so I got to know Steve in the mid-1990s like artists often do through someone else. You meet someone, we hit it off very quickly and you know in bucks and all sorts of conversations about art to life and everything as one does. So I was, I was, you know, I had a close friendship with Steve probably from the mid 90s. So I actually saw some of the work particularly the later works being edited over his shoulder. He'd show me, you know, lots of drafts like he did other artists that he was close to. We made a film together like, you know, he did with other artists. He filmed some of my films. He designed a catalogue of one of my exhibitions. So there was very much a kind of dialogue between us. And I really wish I'd have taped some of those conversations that we had because he was extremely erudite about film. And he started life as a graphic designer really. I mean, as he often said that his generation, there wasn't film school, there wasn't a space for them to actually to be filmmakers in a way. So he trained as a graphic designer in a general arts degree in New York. I mean, famously he was taught by Joseph Albers. And I think you can definitely see Albers influence on his work and his visuality and his graphic design. I think he used a lot of block colours. Yeah, I mean, and it was very much part of a 60s aesthetic as well. So he was a very celebrated graphic designer in New York at the time. And he was like one of the Madison men that Mad Men is writing about really. He was also involved in the design of the text, for example, for West Side Story as well as doing a lot of book covers and so forth. And he carried on being involved with graphic design throughout his life in fact. And there are some designers who only know him as a graphic designer rather than a filmmaker. And there are many filmmakers who don't know that he was a graphic designer. So it's kind of really interesting this. And he was part of the generation that very much saw himself as an artist. So it didn't matter whether he made films, painted, wrote, drew, you know, and he did all those things. There were all expressions of his artistic, kind of creative outlet, if you like. So he came to the UK on a Fulbright scholarship in 1964 as a graphic designer. He was only gonna come here for a year or maybe two. He had a teaching post through that at London College of printing as it was called then LCP. It's now called LCC and it's part of the University of the Arts London. And it was in fact in that setting that he met Rolf Brandt, who is also an artist in his own right or was an artist in his own right. And the brother of Bill Brandt. And he kind of says in his diaries that he was, you know, Rolf Brandt was one of the few people that he did actually hang out with and go to lunch with while he was teaching because I think he was attracted to him because he was very much a European artist and, you know, they came from a similar kind of provenance of, you know, Rolf Brandt had been in Dessau, like Bill Brandt, they'd been, you know, involved and they knew the Bauhaus. And Steve threw, I guess, the lineage of Albers and so forth and some of the people hanging around in the underground in New York in the 50s and 60s. He felt in some ways much more in tune with that kind of continental approach than he did with the kind of British sensibility if one can characterize these things in such a kind of fixed way. But I think certainly Steve felt that. And I think that that was also maybe an affinity with Rolf and Bill Brandt as well, that kind of sense of English, but not English kind of thing. So, yeah. Can I just interrupt? Very briefly, I mean, it's worth saying, I can't speak to the whole Brandt family, but I think it's interesting that Bill Brandt was, as you say, quite an international figure. He had come from a Russian background, but had been born and grew, initially grew up in Germany and then had moved to the UK. So he himself had a, you know, and I guess Steve Daweskin had, correct me if I'm wrong, he had sort of Eastern European heritage before he was in America and Jewish heritage as well. So this sense of a kind of, this international perspective that you're talking about, but kind of being in the early 60s or in the 60s in the UK and having this kind of mixed interesting very rich background. Yeah, and Steve had a Russian Jewish background as well. You know, his grandfather fought in the Odessa uprising, for example, which is kind of quite an interesting provenance. And his father was a garment worker in New York. So I think, yes, that sense of kind of transnational sensibility, I can see how they might have related to that. I think there was also, in terms of Bill and Steve, I mean, Steve was unfortunate enough, I guess to have Polio as a child at the age of nine, and he lost the use of his legs. And he spent quite some time as a young man and a teenager in hospital because of that. And certainly, Bill Brown also spent time in a sanatorium because of TB. So I think that there were quite a lot of crossovers. There was the international element. I think there was the kind of illness, the feeling maybe out slightly out of place. They were both very interested in surrealism. I think there was a very similar kind of artistic sensibility in many ways. And that was a really important kind of crossover. And Rolf Brandt was also very much aligned with the surrealist sensibility and interests. So I think there was a lot there. And Steve didn't meet Bill Brandt for quite some time. And Steve really wanted to meet Bill Brandt because he said that he'd been really influenced by him at art school and that he had known about his work and was really excited when he found out that Rolf was his brother. And he kept on saying, oh, please, I want to meet him, I want to meet him. But Bill Brandt was very shy. He didn't socialize that much with the art world from what I can tell. But... Could you, before we get to the term together, could you sort of very briefly maybe just give people some idea of what Steve Dawkins' films were like, maybe the kind of 60s films? Because in some ways, there are very short connections with the film that people would have seen, but there's also some quite distinct differences. And I think often when people think about Steve Dawkins' work, they kind of quite crudely think of the 60s work, which is only one part of it. But I think perhaps it'll be interesting to get some sense of what that stuff is like if you can sort of summarize it in some shape. I mean, maybe that's a bit of a... We could probably be here for a long time doing that as well. But I think... Or maybe just some sense of the range of his work leading up to this film, perhaps. Just something so we can get some people to get an understanding of what his film would be like. Yeah, I can probably sort of give a kind of arc, if you like, of his work. And he made around 50 films in his life. So his output was quite considerable, really. And his early films were very much underground films. I think he was very interested in Andy Warhol, for example, and who he knew. And his films were always about people one way or the other. He was very... I mean, even his early underground films were very different as well. But they often... The subject of them was often a woman. They were non-narrative, but they were about... They were about looking, they were about being. They were about trying to get into the mind and the emotions of the people that his films were looking at. So they were kind of psychological portraits, I guess. But they were quite... Often quite simply made, in a way. They were... So one of them, is it moment, was like a woman just on a bed. Just focused on her thinking, being there on a bed. So there was Dirty, which was a retake of another film where two women were together. He was often thinking about surrealist references. So he was very interested in Bataille. So of course the film Dirty. The name was taken after a Bataille novel, Blue of Noon. So he was... I suppose something they share with perhaps... I think what's really interesting about comparing them at one level is there's often, not always, but there's often either little or no editing in the circus films. Like they're just durational pieces. And they're about kind of confronting the viewer in some ways with sustaining and engagement with what's being seen. And where it's like Shadis Wright is... Has that sense of being grounding the viewer in the present moment, in some ways, and being aware of shaping and the lens, if you like, for the sense of... I mean, it's a boldly, very sophisticated piece of filmmaking which is very much a construction. I mean, no all constructions, obviously, at some level, but the editing and relationships and sound, like it's quite... They're a strong connection, but it is different. I think where it was very different was that with some of those earlier films, it was really about how do people behave in front of the camera and how... He was always very interested in the facade. He was very interested in existentialism. He was very interested in the real person and how you become the real person, who that might be. And so that fixed-frame camera that was a durational look was very much about finding the person. And there's a strong link with that with Shadows from Light, which is also about finding the person through the photography and finding the person through the context of the photographs. All the photographs were placed within a context. And as his films became later, he went through a period where he made a lot of feature films, but they were often about relationships, about people's relationships. They were in some ways more of a kind of narrative structure, if you like, than the earlier films, although probably not enough for many. And then as he moved much later into his work, again in the 90s and 2000s, he again became much more engaged with, I would say, surrealism and some of the tropes of surrealism and the kind of really trying to get inside the psyche of someone through the camera, if you like. But there was also a very much a focus on interiors, wasn't there, which I think is also something that you could see very strongly in Shadows from Light. Could you, I mean, just before we get a bit more into the film itself, could you, I'm quite interested in the sense of trying to explore people or get into their interiors, but then also his interest in some sort of collaborative approach to filmmaking, which is sometimes overt, but sometimes not always overt. And I think there's something interesting there in that I'd said at the beginning that we're in this very educational context and that the film was commissioned by the Arts Council to be a kind of educative document. And I've just got propped to hold up at this point that he was interested in education or about kind of establishing relations. And then his sense of what education might be more nuanced or dynamic than we might think of it in other contexts. But I just wanted to hold this book up, which Rachel knows very, very well. But this is a book from I think it's 1975 that Steve Dwaskin wrote about international experimental film or underground cinema. So we're calling it film is the international free cinema. And this was a time of like a real explosion of non-commercial, challenging, radical, formally adventurous, very diverse types of filmmaking that was going on all through Europe and in North America, many other parts of the world. And this is his book that he wrote. We're sort of trying to map what was going on. This was like a live phenomena, which he was trying to capture. So I thought that was interesting that he had this broad, he was interested in these broader things beyond his own work. So that's where I just wanted to mention that. But could you say something about this kind of, his sense of collaboration, which maybe isn't always visible if you just watched some of the films, perhaps? Well, I mean, he collaborated with his students. As many people did, that was the kind of, one of the ways they taught how to make films was to have a collaboration. He collaborated with his friends to make films. I mean, I think making film is a collaborative medium, isn't it? And I think that certainly for experimental filmmakers or independent filmmakers, those networks that you form in order to make films are really important. So it's about relationships, making a film is about relationships and about forging those relationships. So Shadows for Light was made with some of his students. Most of his films were made with people he knew and people he met through other ways. So either it's through the art school, through the networks, through just talking to people and getting on with them. But you see people's names come up again and again in the films, in the film credits. And they are very much the community that he takes with him. And many of those are artists in their own right or filmmakers in their own right who make other works as well or who do other things. I mean, Cosy Fanny-Tutti's an obvious example, Carolee Schneyman was also in one of his films. Both of those are women who are well-known in their own fields as people who have really interesting and quite innovative art practices and other practices, particularly in the case of Cosy. And also coming from the underground as well, which the whole kind of ethos of the underground was about community and people finding expressions for their work through being part of a community. And there was also a way of, I mean, this is where Steve actually was kind of both inside and outside of a whole range of millions as well, because although he kind of, was an independent filmmaker, he was not against, he wasn't against worldwide distribution. He wasn't against kind of the structures of film distribution. So, and he wanted to be part of that as well. So some experimental filmmakers would very much not be a part of that network. So he worked for, you know, he made films for TV, he made films, you know. So- Well, this is something that I was- I feel like this is a very new community. Yeah. So I'm sorry to interrupt, something that struck me is that I imagine thinking about, again, sort of Dwaskin and Brand that they both had a kind of a personal approach and, you know, they both worked with reproducible mediums, which perhaps were difficult to monetize in traditional, in traditional fine art terms, but they also worked in kind of commercial art context. So, you know, you talked about how Steve was a graphic designer, and then he also made some film adverts with, he made, which was shown in some of us for the Olavetti typewriter, which occasionally comes up in our discussions. Really gets one for great, yeah. Yeah, which are really dynamic strident pieces of filmmaking and work. And then, you know, Bill Brandt was a kind of, I mean, a photo journalist is taking it too far, but, you know, he was a respected atmospheric photographer whose work appeared in magazines and in other contexts, whilst, and, you know, photography, when I'm not a photography photographer expert, but, you know, the kind of how that has existed has changed over time in the gallery in fine art context in the same way the film has. Yeah, it has, but again, only certain types of film though. And I think that Steve always straddled a kind of range of film models, if you like. And I think, you know, Bill Brandt did, I think that, you know, photographers have always had the commercial work and, you know, their personal work. And I think that, you know, Brandt, I think one of them, and we were going to talk a bit about this later, but, you know, one of the reasons that Steve focused on the nude in Shadows from Light was because Brandt told him that those nudes were the work that meant most to him because that was the work that wasn't commissioned, but that was his own personal work. And I think that, you know, there's a debate that I'm having with a PhD student and a colleague about Steve's graphic design work, which I think is amazing and it's really important graphic design work. But, you know, my colleague says, ah, but that was commissioned, therefore it doesn't have the same kind of value in his kind of canon, if you like, as his film work, which was a labor of love. But then, you know, what about the commissioned film work? Or I suppose, you know, that was those sort of love, they weren't, you know, it's degrees of commission. It is, because he was working in a structure where he was getting funding from different sources through the 1970s and working, getting money from Germany where there was an openness of a certain type of filmmaking, but it still would be existing within certain structures. And I mean, this film is interesting because, as I said at the beginning, it's a highly individualistic film. I mean, it's about the relationship and connects in those ways. And there was a collaborative approach, but it's very, you know, it's an unusual film, but it does, you know, formally or structurally, but long it is in this series of arts cancer documentaries, which ostensibly were made to be educational and sort of sold to television around the world. This was shown on channel four. But Steve didn't, I mean, Steve wasn't approached to do that film. Steve- Right, okay, well, that's interesting. Yeah, Steve saw that. So he saw that the arts council were commissioning artists to make films about other artists. And so he thought, aha, this is how I'm gonna make something or this is how I'm gonna get to know Bill in a different way. And so he asked him if he could make the film and he got Ralph on side first to convince Bill to make the film. So that's how that came about. And also, in fact, you know, even if you look at Bill Brandt's photographs, you know, even the commissioned photographs are heavily worked on. You know, he did a lot of burning in. He did a lot of touching up. You know, there was like, you know, they were artworks in their own right, even though they were commissioned. So I think that, you know, it's never that clear cut. I mean, for someone who works in a kind of independent way as an artist, they will put their stamp on whatever they do. And I think that's where even people who are commissioned have a kind of range of positions, if you like, in relation to their commission. So, and in fact, Steve found it harder and harder to get, you know, commissioned work as he got older. And he had a kind of heyday, didn't he, in the sort of 70s and early 80s. And then it waned quite considerably. And many of the later films became very much kind of just made by himself, you know, with, you know, a couple of other people, because he couldn't get, you know, proper funding like he did at the time that he made Shadows from Light. So in some ways, this film is a bit of a midway career point in some ways. It's sort of almost exactly the halfway through this career in some respects. Could you, so maybe just say something a bit about his approach to the film and your own perhaps personal response to it and what do you think is going on in the film? Well, yeah. Open questions. So I'll give you a more direct shape to one, if you like. Well, I'm just kind of thinking of different ways that I, different things I'd say. I mean, obviously it's a mood film, you know, as you've already said, it's a film where he wanted to capture Bill Brandt's approach, which he had quite, he had an affinity with. He did want, the film got shaped slightly differently to his intention because Bill Brandt was quite ill by the time that he started making the film. So the initial intention was for Bill Brandt to be photographing Steve as he was making the film while Steve was making the films of his photographs. He's, you know, and the film was very much led by the photographs of Brandt and by this collection of works that was from a book, Shadows of Light. So, yeah. And I think it's a very moving, I was very moved by it. I was very moved by the kind of attention paid to the photographs. But, and there was something about the way that Steve created juxtapositions both between the photographs and between the photographs and the environment where he kind of both replicated but also challenged what the photographs were doing in some ways. And also, you know, he played with scale. They were both very interested in Alice in Wonderland. They were both very interested in this kind of parallel world that Alice in Wonderland created. And I think there is that sense of this sort of otherness in this piece. And it's kind of, it is quite a dark piece in some ways. And I think it is the sort of darkness of the absurd, if you like, or the darkness that is in kind of some Victorian novels like Alice in Wonderland. But it was quite gothic. I think it's quite a gothic piece. I mean, it's, the sense of kind of fragmented. I mean, it's like obviously gothic and sense of the aesthetics, the sort of high contrast, dark black and white, a sense of mystery and so on, but also the sense of fragmentation. So, you know, it's a colloid. There's a strange thing with both being about continuity and fragmentation. I think you're guided through these spaces and exploring this connection, but then there is also kind of collision and bits sort of either coming together or falling apart. So both in terms of what we hear being spoken, these different, almost sampling of different commentaries about photography and little bits about Pat Spielbrand or his views. And then, yeah, these collisions between the almost time as well, like the stillness and movement and sound and silence and these different components. It was also about the extraordinary in the everyday as well. You know, and in that sense, it was kind of quite, you know, modern and modernist because it was picking out the extraordinary in the everyday and even in that placement of placing these photographs within these domestic spaces was also about, you know, this is the person, this is their, because this is their context, if you like. So I think it was, it's a really interesting interplay between those different aspects. That's quite radical in a way, isn't it? Because it's sort of otherworldly yet domestic, which is perhaps the Alice metaphor in a way. So you've seen these sort of hyper-assessorised unusual images which have abstraction in them sometimes because of this camera that Bill Brent was using, but then you have these intrusions of domestic sounds so like the trees or the cars going by and being in a space. And that, I think that we've said this, that creates an uneasy or interesting tension somehow this everyday and otherworldly, which I guess is a surrealist thing, isn't it? Yeah, I was just about, I was waiting for that moment to say it, very much a surrealist. Yeah, the ass word. Yeah, and that, again, that interplay between the kind of the known world and the unknown world, you know, the interior and the exterior, the psyche and, you know, labour, for example. So I think, you know, and also that relationship, that question about what is real as well. And one of the things that I was really struck by when I watched the film again just the other day was the way in which, you know, he was questioning what is a photograph? What is the film? What is like reality? What is the reality of the reality in the way that you would start with a fragment of the photograph and zoom out. So then you became, at first you thought, oh, yeah, this is the film. And then you saw, oh, no, it's a photograph. And they said, oh, yes, it's a photograph in a house. But this is a film of the house with a photograph in the film. So there were these, this kind of layering of reality, which, you know, again, is very much a kind of, a generational interest in a way of that generation of artists who were engaged with issues around surrealism on the continent. And also in some ways out of step with, you know, maybe, you know, surrealism never really took off in this country in the way that it did, you know, on the continent. So, you know, and I found that that last section where Steve and, you know, Steve Dwaskin and Bill Brant were talking silently. You could hear him silent talking and seeing the interaction. That's what it's all about. That's what his films are always about is about the connection with other people. And that question of how knowable is the world? How knowable are other people? We can never really know them, but yet we strive for that connection nonetheless. And that's what making art is, is striving for that connection. And I think what's interesting in the film itself offers that, because I think you can engage, you can almost just have this quite dreamy, slightly distanced experience if you want to, or you can, you know, you can really like drill in and reflect on all these quotes and do what you said, like construct and deconstruct the space that's being set up and, you know, crumbled, or it's almost allowing you to have this very different levels of engagement, which I think is really interesting. And just when I was sort of thinking about the session, the session I was doing a bit of research and like struck me that, you know, this is quite, this is very much about encounter between the two of them and their two works, but also that it does follow on from other bits of writing and approaches looking and, you know, perhaps looking at photography in a kind of more reflective or theoretical shape again. So I just was, I sort of noted that Susan Sontag's on photography was written or published in 1977, and we hear a quote from that in the film, but I used to assume it's from that book, it's Susan Sontag. And then Camerle Cedar, The Berlin Bart, which was published in 1980 in the UK, and then John Berger with another work telling in 1982. But the other, the sort of more specific thing that struck me was that the BBC commissioned a series called Master Photographers, which was broadcast at the beginning of 1983, and one of those was on Bill Brandt. So it's interesting that there were two documentaries made about him in the same year, and then very sadly, he died at the end of the year, but it's quite a, it's quite a, it's quite a juxtapitional contrast. If you do get to see the BBC documentary because it highlights some of the, I mean, you're already very aware that there's something very special and unusual going on in Steve's film, but when you put it into relief against the BBC documentary, well, basically it's centered around someone interviewing Bill Brandt and looking at some of his pictures, and he clearly doesn't really want to be interviewed. So that's actually quite interesting. And he's quite, you know, he's elderly, so he doesn't want to talk at length or, you know, get into, and that's his mode as well. He resists, he resists the kind of interrogation that would, you know, ordinarily lead to. Well, one of the things that's unusual about Bill Brandt in some ways, from my experience of many documentary photographers, and also Steve, they shared this, was that, you know, although both film and photography rely on technology, you know, Bill Brandt wasn't actually interested that much in the technology. You know, he is, you know, very simple fixed lens camera, SLR, you know, and he, and Steve loved, you know, buying latest gadgets and trying them out, but he wasn't interested in the technology as such. He wasn't a techie and neither of them were. And that was completely peripheral to what they were trying to do. So it was very much, the technology was very much a means to an end. And of course, you know, famously Bill Brandt's photographs are very much kind of directed by what that camera could do in his work. So... And when you read about his practice, I think it's easy, and I made this assumption, looking, watching, show some light, is that there's this sort of contrast between the still image and him taking a picture, and then the photograph is put into time, which film, which is a durational medium, and this is this contrast, but actually, you know, Bill Brandt, you know, some of the films, some of his photographs were very long exposures, so his wartime photography, you know, moonlight, streets, short, like he says, up to 20 minute long exposures, and then often he'd do lots of work in the dark room, with the printing and things. So even these still images have very much a kind of durational relationship to them, they're not just these, you know, the kind of decisive moment kind of thing. So I thought that just to think about that, that his approach and this thing, which you almost set up to think about by watching the documentary, but there's more going on there with duration. Yeah, and also where Steve's work isn't, you know, that, I mean, the question of what is documentary is a whole other session really, isn't it? But, you know, Steve always railed against the some narrowness of the way people expected documentary to be. And, you know, those kind of divisions, again, didn't interest him, and I suspect they didn't interest Brandt either, but they both were engaged with making images that were about psychological spaces, you know, and therefore those other delineations, you know, were irrelevant really to their practice. There's lots more stuff I want to ask you about and to say, but I'm aware that we are getting close, we're getting approaching question time, and I thought that there's like a kind of final thing, ah, this is the deliverance, but this is, I don't know if you have my dog then, but this is the moment that mirrors the film that you may or may not see, where it's what's happening is located in space with extra details. Here's the answer, I just wanted to make sure, wanted to make sure that we, before we did get to the end that we did speak a little bit, there's someone that struck me watching the film is that there's, although it's very much a new piece, as we said, I was struck by the range of names that are listed on screen and quoted, and that we are, you know, there's kind of personalities, people like Susan Sonto have been mentioned as quoted, so there's all these kind of individuals who were evoked or mentioned at some points, but there's a certain opaqueness to the nudes that feature in the film, so they're sort of ever present moving through the space, but unlike a lot of these other people, they're not really identified, which is interesting because, you know, Cosi and Fanny Tutti being really actually a major figure, they're even particularly at that point as well, so, you know, and I guess, you know, the nude exists within a longer art history of painting, in which, you know, the nude is almost a sort of neutral or muse or some kind of body study, but I think, you know, here, according to some of the things that we've been talking about, there are perhaps other things going on, and, you know, the Dorsken's larger output address other things around the body and looking in desire, so I just, I don't know, I was wondering, could you say something about the con, what you might think be going on here? This is quite big, you know, this is, this again is a longer discussion, but I think it's something that, you know, it's important to reflect on. Yeah, I mean, I think there's lots of things going on. I mean, you know, on one level, Steve came from a discipline and a generation where to use the female body was part of the toolbox of your art practice, particularly someone who was very interested in issues around desire, issues around the body, you know, he also made work about his, where his own body was represented in quite an abject way often, so I don't think that he was very bothered by some of the critiques of his work later by some second-wave feminists, and obviously at that time, you know, ways of seeing was very, you know, starting to become very influential and then, of course, Laura Mulvey's text, a little bit later, visual pleasure and narrative cinema, you know, they both had an enormous impact on the way people understood the nude and then they became a sort of embargo of studying the nude and drawing the nude in art schools because of this. So I think there's been this whole kind of history beyond that and it's interesting that that many people are returning to the body now in terms of making work and filming themselves and filming each other and all those kinds of things, but at that, certainly in the 1980s, that was kind of quite problematic, if you like. However, I think that it makes sense within the psychology of the film, if you like, and the construction of the film and one of the, you know, and as I said earlier on, one of the things that Steve was struck by was that Bill told him that those nudes that he did were very important, the most important for him. I think Steve was very interested in Bill Brant's news because they were, the body was distorted and as a disabled man, I think he was particularly interested in distortions of the body and what that might mean. And I think he was very interested in the relationship between the distorted body and the desired body and how Bill Brant managed to capture both those things. There was kind of an abjectness, there was a desiring, there was distortion. And some of us are breaking apart the body as well, like the kind of delineation between the body and the space being deliberately confused sometimes. Absolutely, so just one last thing on this. So his use of Cosy Fanny Tutti in the film as this muse, this kind of beautiful body kind of moving through, not only did he play with scale and the dwarfing of other bodies, there you go, but it was also about the juxtaposition between the distorted body and the beautiful body. So there were kind of questions being asked about what is beautiful in the body and how that operates. I know Mark is waiting and literally you're not in the wings and on stage with us now. I could read something short from Cosy Fanny Tutti, which she wrote to me, it's quite a short basic thing, but it might be something people might be interested to hear. Is that okay, Mark? Yes, yes, do that. Okay, so I'm getting a bit of echo now, so I'm sorry about that, I don't know if you're hearing that, but all I recall about working with Steve on the film is that I've not long given birth to our son. It was the first time my ship knew for anyone since I was four months pregnant. Also, he was incredibly careful about posing, really. So the image was in keeping with Bill Brant's work. Previously, he'd always insist on me being very free to improvise because she had previously been in another Stephen Dawson film, Silent Cry. So that was a new way of seeing Steve work. I have a couple of black and white pictures he gave me. I just realised that Chris and Cosy, that's her musical collaborative partnership she does, made a track called Silent Cry at one point and this was made for Petta or Peter, the treatment of animals and organisation. So just some kind of anecdotal reflections from Cosy, just to kind of make her present in a way in this discussion. Great, thank you, Will. Thank you, Rachel, so much for that. We could go on for hours or we could listen to you for hours because it's so fascinating. We could, actually. Yeah, no, so. And we have got some tasks to invite all those watching, those listening to send in a question to me and I'll pass it on through the Q&A or, alternatively, raise a hand and then I'll also be able to ask that you can be unmuted so you can ask your question directly. So please come in with questions. I mean, I'd like to kick off. It's so fascinating hearing about the context of this film, but I'd like to ask about whether you can also see it as a quite insecure and conservative film in some ways. In the sense that there's a kind of double insecurity, in the sense that it really, it feels to me as if, on the one hand, Brandt is wanting to be aligned with and see himself as aligned with a great tradition of modernist genius male artists stretching back to the Braque and the Picasso's that we see there. And then similar, and that's partly about the insecurity of photography as a fine art form at that moment. And then similar, almost then the insecurity of an artist's moving film image in relation to someone like Brandt and the status that photography had achieved. And so I was very struck by the fact that in some ways it kind of reinforced or wanted to try and reinforce a certain kind of modernist myth of the male fine artist and uses all the language of formalism, of the imagery of the nude, of abstraction to kind of reinforce that myth rather than in any way kind of critically, subjected to any kind of critical scrutiny. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think, because I think they, I mean, Steve was born in 1939. He trained in the 1950s. He wasn't, he critiqued, but he critiqued as a modernist. So what he was critiquing was in this film, for example, was the relationship between film and photography. He saw himself very much as a 20th century artist in the, as you describe him. And I mean, I made a film with it where we talked about this, about the difference between my generation and his generation of artists. But I don't think that was their aim to kind of critique who they were. I mean, I think that issue around kind of, the de-centred subject was something that kind of came a bit later. And although Steve read very well, I think that he struggled with that. I think deep down he felt himself to be an artist. Having said that, he didn't think that he had to be the male artist. I think that he was very supportive of women artists and he was very supportive of black artists and so forth. But I think that we can only expect so much of people of different generations. I get all the time asked about, what do I think about this anti-Semitic artist from the 19th century? And I'm like, well, it was the 19th century. So I think the, and Bill Brandt was even older. So I think that's my view, really. I think there's an interesting tension going on that there's a certain type of, there's an element of nostalgia going on in the film as well, I think. But then there's also something of trying to reckon with the image, a time of change in what the image was and it's increasing domesticization, and the arrival of home video and sort of channel four and things. So it's sort of looking back and forward in some ways. Like what does the image mean and these changing context? I think that's going on. I mean, I don't think Steve was, I don't think Steve felt insecure about the position of film in art because of the milieu that he came out of. So he was, you know, new Jonas Meekers, he knew Stan Brackage, he knew all these people who were warhol, he knew all these people who were really important filmmakers. And he was instrumental as one of the people setting up the London Filmmakers Co-op. So I think he felt very kind of, but I also think that they, both him and Bill Brandt, they wanted an audience but they also didn't, you know, it wasn't their main motivation. Like, I think there's this sort of ego struggle going on between being the great artist and having this great audience, but also actually choosing something that was relatively a kind of minority of minority interest and being true to their own vision, if you like. And that was there. Thank you. Yeah, thanks very much. I realize that Lynne Need wanted to ask, has raised her hands to ask a question. So I think Lynne, we can demute you and you can ask your question directly of Rachel and Will. Is that okay? Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah, thank you both so much. I was really happy now to see the film, to watch the film and your conversation has really opened it up further for me. So I kind of just wanted to offer some thoughts, really, as someone who's worked on Brandt and the female nude and thought a little bit about this really contrasty photography that Bill Brandt makes. First of all, I thought the Citizen Kane-Brandt-Dwaskin connection was really intriguing. And I thought you could almost riff on that for ages. But the thing that struck me, and I don't know if it's conservative little C, but I was surprised the extent to which the film was a kind of aesthetic mimesis of Bill Brandt's photographs. So the thing you think about with Bill Brandt is actually not documentary photography as such, but contrast, you know, dark, dark shadows and more than perhaps any other photographer in that period. And it seemed to me that Dwaskin was actually using the same aesthetic, which surprised me that he actually continued throughout the whole of the film doing that. And it made me feel that even the model performances, which kind of intrigued me, I thought they were curious in a way, was almost again a kind of mimesis of the making of the photograph, you know? So yeah, I think that's just the point I want to make, really, on whether you have any thoughts on this very sustained mimesis of the aesthetic of Brandt's photographs in the film. Yeah, I mean, I think Steve wanted to make it as an homage. He was a fan of Bill Brandt, and I think he was exploring Bill Brandt's approach and of through the film. So he was trying to, he was very consciously trying to make a film that was replicating Bill Brandt's aesthetic and doing what Bill Brandt does, and that was his approach to the film. So he was, and don't forget, he was a much younger artist. He was, I think, in his early 30s at the time. So I think for him, it was very much about, you know, looking at one of the masters, if you like, of his, and trying to kind of, it was almost like a transcription project, where he was really looking at what Bill Brandt was doing and thinking it through, I think, and he was very consciously doing that in the film. He wanted to portray Brandt's aesthetic and Brandt's approach in the film through its making. Well, did you want to add anything to that at all? Yeah, I guess that's stuff that maybe I would touch on over the course of the session, but I mean, I suppose, what can I say? Yeah, I suppose the sort of these blurred lines during figurative abstraction or the kind of more sensorial type of aesthetics, these kind of high contrasts, I think it is something that Rich that kind of resonates through. And I think that it's both a kind of homage to those styles and then also trying to do something different, I think. It's sort of trying to do two different things, perhaps. Or to raise some questions about that aesthetic and stress these, the kind of uniqueness of the object of the photograph, because of course, Brandt printed his own pictures and maybe changed each one. So kind of stressing the uniqueness of each one is something that perhaps comes through as well. Okay. There's a question that we have from James Hellings, which I'll repeat. He says that Kafka once famously said, we photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes. Do you think Brandt's photographs and Dwaskin's film could be considered in this light? And if so, what were they driving out of their minds? James asks. Well, sorry, I keep jumping in. Is that all right, Will? No, no, go for it. Yeah, no, nicely observed. I think that, I mean, for Steve, I can't really speak for Bill Brandt because I haven't studied him to the same extent, but I think for Steve, he was a disabled man who'd had a very difficult childhood because of his illness. And he suffered a lot of pain in his life. And I think that that produces darkness and I think the making art and discussing art and discussing things took him away from his sense of his own body and the pain that his body experienced. So yeah, I think that's, yeah. So I think that was kind of spot on. And I think he, yeah, he loved Kafka too. So thank you for putting that in the frame. Will, did you want to add to that at all, Will? Well, I was just going to say, I mean, it's similar thing to Rachel is that Steve Roskin was interested in the ideas of the monstrous and had this kind of gothic imagination that goes through the work and that opened doors and sinister spaces within the domestic milieu or something that he returns to later on, which have like almost sort of cocktail-esque or more kind of, they're not horror films, but have something about the home space as a kind of horror space or an unpredictable space. And so there's a preoccupation, I guess, is that thing, is it letting go or is it trying to get hold of and sort of do something with some sort of rejection to like process a horror moment or something? Think perhaps that that's, and the same could be said about, you know, photography, like grabbing hold of something, trying to seize it, but then also to kind of move on perhaps. So I don't know, there's different ways of thinking about that. Look, we could talk, as I said, for hours longer because it's such rich and fascinating material and all the questions and issues you've raised, both of you, we propel us forward into the evening very, very happily. But I've realized that time is up, so we have to draw things to a close right now. Thanks so much, Rachel. Thanks so much, Will, for introducing us both to the film and to this really remarkable filmmaker. And I think all of us will want to explore his output further and to find out more about your project, Rachel, which sounds so exciting. So many thanks to everyone for attending and please return to the next of our events very soon. Thanks very much. Thank you for inviting us as well. Thank you. Great. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.