On 7th February 2015 I presented my paper The Anarchist Cinema, based on a chapter of my PhD thesis, at the inaugural conference of the Radical Film Network, entitled Political Cinema in the 21st Century. The conference took place at Birmingham City University.
Kelly Zarins of Leeds Trinity University wrote a conference report for the Alphaville Journal of Film and Screen Media. She reviewed and summarised my paper as part of the report. Here is what she wrote;
The “Conceptual and Political Approaches” panel was intended to provoke and share fresh thinking on practice-based techniques and their theoretical underpinnings. James Newton’s (University of Kent) paper “The Anarchist Cinema” argued that the corpus of scholarship on anarchist cinema is disparate, with key texts not having informed one another, resulting in a fracture in the trajectory of theorisation in this field. Hoping to bring these texts together in his thesis and to locate an “anarchism from within the audience”, Newton spoke of his findings from radical film screenings and festivals such as Exploding Cinema and the Bristol Radical Film Festival, where the mode of exhibition evokes a sense of anarchy, by facilitating audiences to view films in nontraditional contexts, such as pubs, community centres, radical bookshops and political squats.
From Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, Issue 9, Summer 2015
James Edward Newton 