Between seeing and knowing: Stephen Dwoskin’s Behindert and the camera’s caress
- Submitting institution
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The University of Reading
: A - Art
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory : A - Art
- Output identifier
- 66961
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and British Experimental Film in the 1970s
- Publisher
- IB Taurus
- ISBN
- 9781784537180
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2017
- 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 chapter offers the first reflective and critical reading of Stephen Dwoskin’s experimental film Behindert, (1974) examining its formal structure as example of innovative cinematic visuality, which combines minimalist, maximalist, and painterly formalist influences. I examine the film’s existential insights into the complexities of relationships; the challenge to the formation of subjectivity and questions around normativity through differentiation; complex embodiment and claustrophobia.
As a Jewish immigrant from the US, Stephen Dwoskin came to the UK in 1964 on a Fullbright as a successful graphic designer and film maker who went on to found the London Film Makers Co-Op (now LUX). However, by the 1980s UK critical interest in his work waned due to schisms and shifts in expectations of the artist and ideologies of representation. This chapter examines both the reasons for this and why a reassessment of Dwoskin is now pertinent. The case study in this essay is one of three feature films Dwoskin made in the mid 1970s, Behindert, commissioned by West German Television, is the most personal in its poignant depiction of the arc of a relationship, through the re-enactment of the film maker’s love affair with Carola Regnier. This published text is the first academic research in English into this important film and published in a high-profile publication by a world renowned film scholar, Mulvey, and important independent film maker, Clayton.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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