Cinema and Landscape

Speaker details
Professor Jonathan Rayner and Dr David Forrest University of Sheffield
Event contact
Anoushka Kulikowski (a.kulikowski@leeds.ac.uk) University of Leeds

Event resources

Download presentation (powerpoint)

Abstract

Following an international conference held in Sheffield and the publication of Cinema and Landscape in 2010, in 2011, staff from the School of English set out to explore the significance of the Sheffield landscape on film in a project supported by the University of Sheffield's Knowledge Transfer Rapid Response Fund. Dr Jonathan Rayner and Dr David Forrest worked with Key Stage 1 and 2 classes and teachers from two schools in the city (Holt House and Athelstan Primary schools), using films made in and about Sheffield alongside the school children's own images, films and narratives of the city’s landscapes.  The project's activities included: working with documentary images of the city showing how aspects of the Sheffield landscape have survived, changed or disappeared; encouraging visual literacy in the interpretation of moving images, in connection with the Sheffield Education department's ESCAL (Every Sheffield Child Articulate and Literate) initiative; and exploring how different groups recognize, narrativize and lay claim to their city's environments through drawings, photographs, storyboards and animated films.

 

Bio notes

 
Jonathan Rayner is Reader in Film Studies in the School of English, University of Sheffield. He is the author of The Films of Peter Weir (Continuum, 1998/2003), Contemporary Australian Cinema (Manchester UP, 2000), The Naval War Film (Manchester UP, 2007) and The Cinema of Michael Mann (Wallflower, forthcoming).
 
David Forrest is Faculty Project Officer for the Arts and Humanities and Honorary Research Associate in the School of English, University of Sheffield.  His research centres on contemporary British realism; the work of Shane Meadows; the British New Wave; the relationship between text and screen treatments of working-class themes and subjects; and social engagement projects involving visual literacy.