Film, Media and Culture
Our Film and Media staff specialise in European cinema, European and British popular music, and the interface between tourism, heritage and the media, and Marxist critique.
Our staff have been awarded a number of British, American and European Research Fellowships by such bodies as the AHRC, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and, the Polish History Museum, the Polish Film Institute and the Austrian Cultural Institute. We are often called upon for peer review by funding organisations, major academic publishers and leading academic journals.
- European cinema (Prof. Ewa Mazierska)
- Film and Marxism (Prof. Ewa Mazierska)
- Popular music, heritage and tourism (Prof. Ewa Mazierska, Dr Peter Atkinson, Georgina Gregory)
- Tribute Bands (Georgina Gregory)
- Popular Music and Gender (Georgina Gregory)
- Manchester Music Scene (Georgina Gregory)
We are demonstrably committed to extending the reach and significance of our research beyond the bounds of academia, as witnessed in:
- Ewa Mazierska’s public lectures on Polish and other Eastern European cinemas in the BFI, the Polish Film Archive and various international film festivals, including GoEast in Wiesbaden
- Ewa Mazierska’s public lectures on Falco in Wiener Neustadt in Austria
- Ewa Mazierska’s advisory roles and curatorship of the film retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard’s films at Wroclaw Film Festival
- Georgina Gregory’s book Send in the Clones reviewed on Radio 1 Arena programme
- Georgina Gregory’s work on tribute entertainment featured in European arts magazine The Word.
- Georgina Gregory invited to act as consultant for forthcoming David Hughes’ documentary film (Playing Tribute).
- Dr Peter Atkinson contributed papers at the 2007 Anglo-American conference in London and at the Sense of Time and Place history conference in Liverpool in the same year.
Ewa Mazierska’s publications include:
- From Self-Fulfilment to Survival of the Fittest: Work in European Cinema from the 1960s to the Present (Berghahn, 2015)
- Work in Cinema: Labor and Human Condition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
- European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory, Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Mazierska’s work was translated into nearly twenty languages, including French, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Estonian and Serbian. She is principal editor of a Routledge journal, Studies in Eastern European Cinema.
Dr Peter Atkinson’s publications include:
- Peter Atkinson (2015) ‘The Sons and Heirs of Something Particular: The Smiths’ Manchester Aesthetic, 1982-1987’, in Regional Aesthetics: Mapping UK Media Culture, London: Palgrave MacMillan.
- Peter Atkinson (2015) `Abbey Road Studios, tourism and Beatles heritage’ in Relocating Popular Music, ed. By Ewa Mazierska and Georgina Gregory, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Peter Atkinson (2011) 'The Beatles on BBC Radio in 1963: The "Scouse" Inflection and a Politics of Sound in the Rise of Mersey Beat'. Popular Music and Society, Vol 32, No.2.
- Peter Atkinson (2011) 'Poetic licence: Issues of signification and authorship in British television verse-documentary, 1986–96. Studies in Documentary Film, Vol 5, No.1.
- Peter Atkinson (2010) `The Beatles and the broadcasting of cultural revolution, 1958-1963' in Fifty Years with the Beatles: The Impact of the Beatles on Contemporary Culture, ed. by Jerzy Jarniewicz and Alina Kwiatkowska, Lodz: Lodz University Press.
Georgina Gregory's publications include:
- Gregory, Georgina, (2015) ‘Days of Futures Past – Temporal Travel in the world of Tribute Entertainment’, Journal of European Popular Culture (accepted for publication August 2015)
- Gregory, Georgina, (2015) ‘Morrissey: Relocating Mancunian Melancholia’, in E. Mazierska, and G. Gregory, Relocating Popular Music, London: Palgrave
- Gregory, Georgina (2014) “Mandonna – Reifying Hegemony and Shunning Resistance with ‘Camp Lite’”, in Re (defining) Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture, ed. by Justyna Stepien, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
- Gregory, Georgina (2012) Send in the Clones: a Cultural Study of the Tribute Band, Sheffield: Equinox
- Gregory, Georgina (2012) “You Can Make Me Whole Again: Popular Music Tributes Embodying the Reunion.”, Journal of Popular Music History, Vol. 7, No. 2
- Gregory, Georgina (2012) ‘Transgender Tribute Bands and the Subversion of Male Rites of Passage through the Performance of Heavy Metal Music’ in Journal for Cultural Research, Volume 0, Issue 0, pp.1-16
- Gregory, Georgina (2012) ‘Take That: Dancing the Rhetoric of Post-Fordist Masculinity’, Porte Akademik, Journal of Music and Dance Research, Volume: 3, pp: 22-31
- Journal Article: Gregory, Georgina (2012) ‘Stairway to Heaven: Grieving, Loss and Popular Music’, International Journal of the Humanities, Vol. 9. Issue 10, ISBN-13: 978-1612290621
From November 2015, an internal ‘University of Central Lancashire Music Research Group’ was set up. The Group’s steering committee consists of:
- Niall Scott
- Ewa Mazierska, Les Gillon and Tony Rigg
The purpose of this network is facilitating communication and collaboration between all staff in UCLan interested in music. The Group met several times in the last academic year and in 16-17 May 2016 organised its first event: a 2-day conference ‘Future of Music’. It brought together experts from the world academia and the music industry for the inaugural, two-day Future Sound Music Conference Activities at the Preston Campus included;
- Day 1 - Two keynote speeches and the presentation of a further 15 academic papers.
- Day 2 - Two keynote speeches and three symposiums with 20 accomplished industry figures and representatives from key music institutions
The assembly of experts included distinguished academics and researchers from both the UK and overseas including;
- Professor Michael Huber from the Vienna-based Institute of Sociology of Music
- Dr Rupert Till, esteemed academic and author
- Owen Hatherley, journalist and author
- Professor Ewa Mazierska, professor of contemporary cinema at UCLan
- Dr Niall Scott, senior lecturer in ethics at UCLan
The panels were designed to feature expertise covering the main areas of the contemporary music industry, including entrepreneurial thinkers, representatives from key institutions, artists, managers, and people working at the cutting edge of the digital music environment. Areas discussed included current practice, challenges being faced by the music industry, the future creation, consumption, dissemination and monetisation of music.
Industry contributors included Nicola Spokes, Marketing Director for Ministry of Sound Recordings, Alison Lamb from So/ Silva Screen recordings, CEO of Ditto Music Matt Parsons, entertainment industry lawyer Rudi Kidd, Paul Quirk from the Entertainment Retailers Association (E.R.A.), Head of Music UK ILR Group David Dunne, royalty expert Daniel Jones from PRS for Music, Matt Wanstall from the Musicians Union, the Editor in Chief and Technical Editor for Sound on Sound Paul White and Hugh Robjohns, celebrated musicians and producers Aziz Ibrahim, Graham Massey, Zed Bias, et al.
Another initiative of the MRG is a research project on popular music in Blackpool. This project is led by Ewa Mazierska, Peter Atkinson, Niall Scott, and Les Gillon, with two research assistants: Kamila Rymajdo and Colin Appleby. Its purpose is to establish the advantages and disadvantages of producing and performing music in Blackpool, the dynamic of different scenes and the role of music in Blackpool’s economy and its image.
Our events are listed on A University of Central Lancashire blog, UCLan Film and Media.
- Dr Niall Scott (nwrscott@uclan.ac.uk)
- Prof Ewa Mazierska (ehmazierska@uclan.ac.uk)
- Dr Les Gillon (lgillon@uclan.ac.uk)
- Tony Rigg (trig@uclan.ac.uk)
Read our full Call For Papers document
We invited papers that addressed the relevance of Marxism to aspects of contemporary film and other forms of moving image. We encouraged abstracts from film historians, film practitioners and all sorts of amateurs interested in the intersection between Marx’s thought (and other Marxists, such as Benjamin, Bloch, Lefebvre, Deleuze, Rancière, Badiou, Hardt and Negri, and Harvey) and film. We understand film broadly, including all forms of visual culture that project movement, including television, documentary, music video, games and animation.
2nd Marx at the Movies Conference - Marx, Cinema and the Present DayUNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL LANCASHIRE, 1 -2 JULY 2015
Keynote Speakers
Dr. William Brown, Roehampton University Dr. Eva Näripea, Film Archives of the National Archives of Estonia/Estonian Academy of Arts
The first Marx at the Movies (2012) conference led to the producing of two books which were presented during the conference.
These are:
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Marx and the Moving Image: Revisiting History, Theory and Practice
and
(Berghahn, 2015) Marx and Film Activism: Screening Alternative Worlds
Conference Organisers:
Prof. Ewa Mazierska, University of Central Lancashire Dr. Lars Kristensen, University of Skövde The Film, Media and Culture research team participated with colleagues from Journalism, MIS and Photography in the School’s third international research symposium in July 2014.
Cultural Translation in Popular Music Conference, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, 12-13 April 2013 (Part of the LIFE! Festival in Preston)
Popular music is known for its hybrid and transcultural character. It feeds on earlier styles, cultural artefacts and different art forms and travels from country to country. At the same time, it also affects other art forms, such as cinema and advertising. The conference sought to discuss the role of cultural translation in the production, dissemination and reception of popular music, in both a historical and theoretical context. The conference agenda included the following:
- Music videos
- Rockumentary
- Cover versions of popular songs
- Tribute bands
- International careers of pop singers
- The use of classical music in pop song
- Cross-cultural performance
- Fashion and costume associated with music
- Popular music in advertising
The Marx at the Movies conference, March 2012, University of Central Lancashire, Preston and the Marx at the Movies Forum.
The Marx at the Movies forum is a platform to discuss the interface between Marxist thought and the moving image. The forum developed as a follow-up to the Movies conference, and was set up by Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen. Both Ewa and Lars are interested in the relationship between Marxism and a variety of subjects, such as representation of work and the condition of neoliberal capitalism and postcommunism.
- Ewa and Lars invite those interested in this area to send relevant blog-posts, video links or writings. In particular, they welcome opinions about the place (actual and intended) of Marxism in the studies of the moving image and of the importance of the moving image in the advancement of Marxist thought.
- If you want to join their mailing list, please email Ewa Mazierska.
- Prof. Ewa Mazierska
- Dr. Peter Atkinson
- Dr. Fazila Bhimji
