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Rotha Conference Flyer Paul Rotha: Filmmaker, Author, Producer A three-day conference at the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds 8 to 10 September, 2011 Registration is now open at http://www.rothaconference.leeds.ac.uk Confirmed Keynote Speakers Prof. Charles Barr (University College, Dublin) Dr. Tim Boon (The Science Museum, London) Dr. Bert Hogenkamp (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) Prof. Nicholas Pronay (University of Leeds) Prof. Graham Roberts (Independent Scholar) Prof. Brian Winston (University of Lincoln) Screenings (on 35mm in our purpose-built cinema) Contact (1933) World of Plenty (1942) The Face of Britain (1934) A City Speaks (1947) The Peace Film (1936) The World Is Rich (1948) Today We Live (1937) No Resting Place (1951) The Fourth Estate (1940) The Challenge of Television (1956) Night Shift (1942) De Overval / The Silent Raid (1962) With some thirty personal films made between 1931 and 1962, BFI Awards at home, gold medals from the major European festivals and two Oscar nominations, Paul Rotha, (1907-84) was once recognised as a world renown documentarist. He was creatively involved in some 87 films, ranging from short information and educational films and documentaries of the Griersonian pattern, to full length ‘films of argument’ and ’true story’ semi-fictional feature films. Rotha was also an innovator, experimenting with new techniques and formats and at the close of the cinema documentary age, and he was BBC Television’s first Head of Documentary. Yet half a century later he is at best seen as a marginal character and very much in the shadow of John Grierson. This conference seeks to reappraise his broad and influential contribution to world film culture, and to examine his creative output across a long career which saw the transition from cinema to television based documentary. The breadth of Rotha’s activities as a director, producer and theoretician of the documentary and of film in general demand this reappraisal. There has been no systematic, extensive and scholarly consideration of Rotha in his own right, either as a filmmaker or as a writer. With a legacy that has been largely neglected since his death, Rotha only appears as a somewhat peripheral, faintly odd, figure in the standard histories of the British Documentary Film Movement. Yet many of his ideas and working practices were well ahead of their time and were well outside the Grierson-dominated mainstream. His place in the development of the documentary, in a new and broader theoretical, aesthetic and institutional framework, is clearly overdue for reassessment. It is also both timely and potentially fruitful in terms of further research, not the least because Rotha was ‘our archivist’ as Grierson remarked. He meticulously preserved an extensive collection of papers spanning the whole of the ‘rise and fall ‘of the British documentary and this archive ranks in importance alongside Grierson’s own papers. It is a major new source, now held in the USA, and has recently become fully available to researchers. As part of the conference we will be exploring elements of this new resource and opening up new perspectives on the man and the film world he inhabited, screening rarely seen works and examining his contribution as filmmaker, author and producer. Due to the capacity of our cinema, registrations for this conference are limited to 60. Therefore, please register as soon as possible to avoid disappointment! Early bird registration (until 15 August 2011) £200 full rate; concessions £50; one-day £100 Registration from 16 August 2011 £250 full rate; concessions £75; one-day £125 The full provisional conference programme, online registration by credit or debit card and information about travel to and accommodation in Leeds are now available at the conference website at www.rothaconference.leeds.ac.uk If you wish to register by post, please send a cheque payable at a UK bank. If you would like us to invoice you, please send an authorised purchase order on your institution’s headed paper. The address for postal registrations is: Ms. Liz Pollard Research Support Secretary Institute of Communications Studies University of Leeds Clothworkers’ Building North LS2 9JT United Kingdom Liz can be reached by telephone on +44 (0)113 343 5805 or email at [email protected] for any queries related to registration and payment. For queries related to the conference programme, please contact Leo Enticknap on +44 (0)113 343 5853 or [email protected]. .
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