Creative Process, Material Inscription and Dudley Shaw Ashton's Figures in a Landscape (1953)
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- v1q1w
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
10.5040/9781350160323.ch-008
- Book title
- Art in the Cinema: The Mid-Century Art Documentary
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Academic
- ISBN
- 9781788313674
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- October
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- ‘Creative Process, Material inscription and Dudley Shaw Ashton’s Figures in a Landscape (1953)’, contributes new knowledge and historical insights into a film increasingly understood as a canonic example of post-war arts documentary in Britain. Made through the British Film Institute’s new production initiative, the Experimental Film Fund, in 1953, this short experimental documentary portrait of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, presents her at work in her Cornish studio and juxtaposes her sculptures within the surrounding landscape. Reynolds situates this portrait of Hepworth in the cultural contexts of the period, arguing for its significance as a reflection of a transitional period in national culture and politics, as Britain sought to rebuild itself in the post-war period. Reynolds makes the case for the film’s alignment to pre-war models of modernism (Surrealism and Constructivism), both in the manner of its cinematography and embodied by Hepworth’s sculpture. She argues that the film rehearses a model of national culture increasingly out of step with more critical representations of contemporaneous culture, seen in Pop Art and ‘Free Cinema’ models of documentary filmmaking.
Taking new account of its authorial and production context, Reynolds’ chapter emphasises for the first time the role of the film’s director Dudley Shaw Ashton and further collaborators such as the popular archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, who produced the script, and the composer Priaulx Rainier who produced the highly evocative score. Her chapter unearths new research, and synthesises existing records, to posit the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of the filmmaking process, repositioning a work understood primarily in relation to Barbara Hepworth scholarship in the visual arts, and having received no prior attention in British film studies. Reynold’s original research contributes to burgeoning transnational scholarship on the arts documentary, apparent in its positioning in the anthology Art in the Cinema: The Mid Century Documentary (Bloomsbury, 2020).
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
