Cinema and Television History Research Institute partnerships and collaborations

The Institute places considerable importance on external partnerships and public engagement events, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Impact is high on the agenda, and our research has been disseminated to a wide audience via broadcasting, the press, on-line publication, social networking sites, commercial DVD notes, public talks, and the staging of open events with non-academic partners.

Events

The annual UK Asian Film Festival (Leicester) is run by Monia Acciari in partnership with the BFI, Tongues on Fire, Phizzical, Arts Council England and Film Audience Network.

Laraine Porter is Director of the long-running BFI British Silent Film Festival held at our partner cinema, the Phoenix Arts Centre, Leicester.

Ellen Wright has appeared on the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire show as part of ongoing debates about the treatment of women in Hollywood on- and off-screen, and on BBC Radio’s Good Morning Scotland paying tribute to Joan Crawford. Ellen has a regular podcast on the intersections of women, bodies and performance and sexuality.

De Montfort University Heritage Centre mounted a year-long ‘Monsters of Hammer’ exhibition (attracting 6,000 visitors), followed by an exhibition (by Matt Jones, Steve Chibnall, Laraine Porter and Stuart Hanson) about the history of cinemagoing in Leicester. In collaboration with the Cinema Museum, London, Monia Acciaria organised the exhibition “Restoring India” to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Indian and Pakistani independence.

CATHI’s resident film-maker Ulrike Kubatta screened her documentary She Should Have Gone To The Moon (2012) at the Phoenix Cinema. She puts on regular screenings there as part of the DocHub@DMU.

Claire Monk produced a global hit podcast (almost 1,400 plays from Latin America to Iran) on the Oscar-winning queer-cinema hit of 2017, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, for the Phoenix cinema, Leicester.

CATHI associate Neil Brand, celebrated silent film pianist, author and presenter of the BBC series Sound of Cinema: The Music That Made the Movies, showcased ‘1918: At Home, At War - Films, music and stories celebrating 100 years since the end of WW1’ at the New Walk Museum, Leicester.

At the Royal Albert Hall in London CATHI scheduled a five-event ‘Peter Whitehead Residency’ as part of the RAH’s ‘Summer of Love Revisited’ season in 2017. This was followed, in Spring 2018, by a season of screening events on the 1960s’ counterculture at the Regent Street Cinema, London.

 

Archives

 

Since 2010, CATHI has been pursuing a policy of building up its archival resources as both a base for scholarship and a platform for public engagementThe archives have been used imaginatively to stage multi-media performance events on public stages and attention-grabbing exhibitions. Through our partnerships with DVD releasing companies, we have also been able to ensure wider circulation of films made by the subjects of our archives and publicised the fruits of our research activity. For further information about our collections, contact the Director of Archives: Prof Steve Chibnall

CATHI currently has 12 special collections, which have either been donated or offered on long-term loan. More are in the process of acquisition. The five most significant permanent collections are:

The Michael and Tony Klinger Archive - on long-term loan since 2022 from producer, Tony Klinger.  The papers of his father, producer Michael Klinger, were catalogued in 2012 as part of an AHRC-funded project at UWE, led by Professor Andrew Spicer.

The Hammer Script Archive – donated 2012 by Hammer Films and augmented by a number of related collections. Catalogued and digitized

The Sir Norman Wisdom Collection – donated 2015 (the centenary of Wisdom’s birth) by Richard Dacre. Catalogued.

The Peter Whitehead Archive – donated 2016 by Peter Whitehead and including a Penny Slinger special collection. Largely catalogued and partially digitized.

The Cinema Museum’s Indian Cinema collection, loaned to DMU in 2018, making it the first UK university to hold a permanent Indian Cinema archive. Partially catalogued.

The Palace Pictures/Scala Productions Archive - on long-term loan since 2019 from producers Nik Powell and Stephen Woolley. Partially catalogued.

These archives collectively comprise over 100,000 items including films, sculptures, pottery, paintings, posters, props, scripts, manuscripts, books, magazines, correspondence, publicity materials, audio tapes, diaries, production files, press clippings and photographs.

Collaborations

Alongside our partners at the Phoenix Cinema, since 2015 CATHI’s archival holdings have led to additional collaborations with:

Network Distributing – the release, or forthcoming release, of Peter Whitehead, Hammer and Norman Wisdom films on Blu-ray and DVD.

Powerhouse Films – the release of Hammer films on Blu-ray by its Indicator label

CATHI also works closely with the Media Archive of Central England (MACE) in its role as collaborative partner in the Midlands4Cities AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership (see below).

Following a donation of a large collection of silent cinema music from the Light Music Society, Laraine Porter is working with University of Bristol Dept. of Music to set up a research project investigating the cinema music industry between 1910 and 1930.

Vicky Ball is working with the Midlands-based archive Kaleidoscope to provide data on the women who worked in British television drama in the roles of writers, producers and directors. As part of the BBC Connected Histories project (University of Sussex) she is also contributing to a special edition of their website on women at the BBC.  Most recently, Vicky Ball has made a notable contribution to the BBC 100 Voices project on the changing representation of women (entitled ‘Social Revolutions’).

Claire Monk’s interview with actor James Wilby, star of James Ivory’s affirmative gay Edwardian drama Maurice (1987) was published as part of the film’s first-ever Blu-ray release in 2017. The BFI's UK Blu-ray was released in 2019, Prof. Monk contributing to the extras package. 

Monia Acciari is a ‘Visiting Professor’ at The English and Foreign Language University and at Osmania University (Hyderabad, India). She is also working in collaboration with Cinecitta’ Holdings and Claudio Sorrentino Global Dubbing on her AHRC project on Dubbing and Subtitling Bollywood in Europe.

Pier Ercole’s European Cinema Audiences project held launch events in Bari (Italy) at the Apulia Film Commission, and in Ghent (Belgium) at the Film Fest Gent, as well as in Gothenburg (Sweden) and Rotterdam (Netherlands).

 

 

Sue and Laraine Porter are working, respectively, on the archival histories of Leicester Film Society and the Phoenix Art Centre.

 

Laraine Porter has contributed an interview to the extras package of the DVD & Blu-Ray of Downton Abbey - A New Era (2022) on which she was credited as 'Film Historian' for her expert advice on the transition to sound film in Britain.

Justin Smith is leading an AHRC-funded project in partnership with the British Library and DMU Special Collections to create a digital genetic edition of Andrew Davies' 1994 BBC adaptation of George Eliot's Middlemarch.

Our research partnerships and archival collections continue to support and inspire a range of innovative post-graduate and post-doctoral projects. Since REF2014 we have supervised 20 PGRS to completion. More than half have gone on to successful academic careers.