The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin's Personal Cinema

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.

Stephen Dwoskin (1939-2012) was a groundbreaking experimental filmmaker who was and continues to be acclaimed throughout Europe for his technical and formal innovation. He was also a pioneer as filmmaker with disabilities, and as an activist for the rights of people with disabilities. However, in Britain his work remains largely unknown. This research and digitisation project will reinstate Dwoskin's legacy as an artist and animateur in British independent film through multidisciplinary work on his archive, which will be future-proofed for new generations of artists, film-goers, and researchers. The project will also establish a forum for younger artists to know and be inspired by his work to support and further their own careers and the development of their visual language.

Beneficiaries will include:

1. The British Film Institute (BFI), which will be enabled to archive Dwoskin's work in digital form, enabling greater access to his work for researchers, filmmakers and artists, and those with a general interest in British filmmaking. As well as increasing accessibility, the project will future-proof the Dwoskin film collection. It is anticipated that the project will also significantly reduce the costs involved in the distribution and viewing of his films. As caretakers of Dwoskin's film work, the BFI will be central to developing his international legacy, particularly from filmmakers, artists and researchers in France, Germany and Switzerland.

2. LUX (formerly the London Film-Makers' Co-Op), which is actively seeking to raise the profile of Dwoskin as a founder of the LFMC and as a key figure within the international experimental film movement, giving him a central place in the full story of experimental film. The pilot Dwoskin Award and Residency scheme will create a legacy for his artwork and establish a forum for new artists to know his work, as well as greatly enhancing the artists' profiles and career trajectories, and those of future artists in subsequent Dwoskin Awards. Through the greater dissemination and enhancement of Dwoskin's work, LUX will be enabled to restore a breadth to the vision of what is possible in art and film practice within the auspices of the organisation, ensuring the legacy of one of their founding artists. The publication by LUX of an edited collection on Dwoskin, including material from the archive, will serve the same end.

3. New artists and filmmakers. There will be a significant impact on the artists and filmmakers selected to participate in this project, as they will receive a significant boost to their careers that will be fostered by LUX. Their work will be show-cased by LUX and the BFI to an influential audience, as well as to the wider film-going public. They will work collaboratively and open a working forum with similar up-and-coming artists which will influence the development of the legacy of Dwoskin's works. The aim is to make the Dwoskin Award an annual event therefore cementing the legacy on future artists and filmmakers.

4. Archivists, particularly those responsible for digital collections, will also benefit from this project as it will open up possibilities for archivists to consider how they can meet the challenges of retrieving, storing, and presenting digital records - a challenging new frontier in the humanities. The new approach developed in this project offers the opportunity for archivists to change their archival procedures to better future-proof, preserve, and make accessible digital records.