Saturday Seminars
William Fowler
Saturday 12 January 2013
FREE
3pm
William Fowler presents a talk, entitled
Jonas Comes to London! Special Relationships and the International Underground Film Festival of 1970, which takes the form of a story, heavily illustrated with pictures, paintings, newspaper cuttings and film stills. It's a tale about national identity in the counter-culture of the 1960s, American influence in London and what happened when Jonas Mekas first visited the UK and asked to be identified as Lithuanian, despite being a long-term New York resident and the most vigorous and vocal champion of the much admired New American Cinema. The UK experimental scene was looking to redefine itself, evolve and make greater links with other filmmakers in Europe at that time, and so perhaps was he. The story will unfold....
William Fowler is the curator of Artists' Moving Image at the BFI National Archive where he undertakes film restoration projects and co-programmes the BFI Southbank cinema strands, Essential Experiments and The Flipside. He presents films internationally and has written for a variety of publications, including
The Guardian,
Sight and Sound,
Eikon and
Framework. Previous archive-based curatorial projects have included
Gazwrx: The Films of Jeff Keen,
Here's a Health to the Barley Mow and
Visionary Landscapes - presented with
LUX. The DVD and film season
The Lacey Rituals: Films by Bruce Lacey (and Friends), which featured a brand new film by Nick Abrahams and Turner Prize-winner Jeremy Deller and was curated by William Fowler, launched at the BFI in July 2012.
No booking is necessary.
See more Past Talks
Jonas Mekas
Mekas with his Bolex in Lithuania 1971
© Jonas Mekas
