Through The Bloody Mists Of Time
- Submitting institution
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University of Wolverhampton
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 1422
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- Forest Spring
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This documentary essay film had its World Premiere in the International section of DOKLeipzig (2019), one of the leading documentary film festivals. The DVD is distributed by LUX and the BFI.
The Whitechapel Gallery screened it online (2020), together with an interview with Kossoff and Esther Leslie. It was previewed at a screening and discussion at Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (2019) and reviewed online.
Through The Bloody Mists Of Time is an exploration and comparison of two seminal modernist texts, Humphrey Jennings’s Pandaemonium 1660-1886: The Coming of The Machine As Seen By Contemporary Observers (1985) and Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project (2002), highlighting their commonality and differences. Several authors, e.g. Esther Leslie, Kevin Jackson, have pointed out the connections between the two works, but none have explored this in any depth.
Jennings, the British filmmaker and Benjamin, the continental philosopher, sit on a cloud. They are watching a newsreel of the 1937 Paris World Fair (running in slow motion, emphatically machinic and archival) where the two might have met. They dispute on modernity, surrealism, technology, capitalism as a spectacle, national identity and relations between Britain and Europe. Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Jennings’s Pandæmonium prove to have similarities, history, the industrial revolution, technology but also differences; Jennings a British perspective and Benjamin a European one.
Following Kossoff’s other films which explore the moving image as an archival form that situates us historically and spatially, this work presents the fragmented, aphoristic aesthetic of Arcades Project and Pandæmonium. With reference to Adorno (2007), there is a disjunctive montaging of image and sound. The voice-over, written as a free verse poem, is drawn from the writings and biographies of Benjamin and Jennings.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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