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John Ellis | |
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![]() John Ellis at 7 May 2010 conference. | |
Born | 23 May 1952 |
Occupation(s) | TV producer, professor of media arts |
John Ellis (born 23 May 1952)[ citation needed ] is a British former TV producer and professor of media arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. [1] Ellis studied English at the University of Cambridge 1970-3 and at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at University of Birmingham 1973-6. From 1978 to 1982 he taught Film Studies at University of Kent at Canterbury.
In 1982 he joined Simon Hartog and Keith Griffiths to form Large Door, the company that bid successfully to make Visions, a magazine series on world cinema for Channel 4 when it opened in 1982. Visions ran for three series until 1985. Griffiths left the company in 1984, but Ellis and Hartog continued producing documentaries separately and together until Hartog's death in 1992.
Large Door made over 100 documentaries until it ceased production in 1999. The company produced two documentaries on the Cinema of China presented by Tony Rayns: Cinema in China (1983) outlined the history, hitherto scarcely known in the West; and New Chinese Cinema (1989) concentrated on the 'Fifth Generation.'
Large Door also produced:
As a leading producer, John Ellis was elected vice-chair of the producers' organisation PACT (1989–93).
He was also co-founded 'Spectre' a collective of filmmakers that included Simon Hartog, Anna Ambrose, Michael Whyte, Vera Neubauer, Thaddeus O'Sullivan, Phil Mulloy and Keith Griffiths.
Ellis was a visiting professor at Bergen University in the Media Studies department from 1991 to 2002. In 1995 he joined the staff of the Media School at Bournemouth University, and became a professor in 1999. He joined the Media Arts Department at Royal Holloway University of London in September 2002.
He is now chair of BUFVC, the British Universities' Film and Video Council. He was an editorial board member of Screen from 1974 to 1984.
Ellis's work concentrates on television and related media. In 1982, he developed a medium theory approach, proposing that television's typical regime of spectatorship is that of the 'glance' rather than the more cinematic one of the 'gaze', and exploring the segmented and repetitive structure of TV programming.
In Seeing Things (2000) he proposed the periodisation of television history into the three eras of 'scarcity', 'availability' and 'plenty', and applied the psychoanalytic concept of working through to television in the latter two eras. He also examined the crucial role played by scheduling in the organisation of creativity in TV and of the TV experience.
Recently he has developed the concept of witness in relation to audio-visual material in a debate with, among others, John Durham Peters and Paul Frosh. This work is extended in his Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation (2012) which applies an interactionist approach derived from Erving Goffman to the understanding of documentary. He argues in addition that contemporary viewers, now thoroughly familiar with the processes of filming and being filmed, adopt a much more skeptical attitude to the 'factuality' of documentary and to the ethics of filmmaker-subject interaction.
His work on television history includes several articles on Channel 4; on critical issues including the construction of a canon of TV work; the importance of overlooked items such as interstitials; and decade-long involvement in the EU funded archival projects Videoactive and EUScreen
In 2013 he won a European Research Council grant of €1,600,000 for ADAPT a five-year study of the history of technology in TV broadcasting, concentrating particularly on the standard forms of production (both on film and on video) and the ways that these 'technological arrays' were adopted and brought into regular use.
Ellis's books include:
Ellis's articles include:
A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".
The Cinematograph Films Act 1927 was an act of the UK Parliament designed to stimulate the declining British film industry. It received royal assent on 22 December 1927 and came into force on 1 April 1928.
Beyond Citizen Kane is a 1993 British documentary film directed by Simon Hartog, produced by John Ellis, and first broadcast on Channel 4. It details the dominant position of the Globo media group, the largest in Brazil, and discusses the group's influence, power, and political connections. Globo's president and founder Roberto Marinho was criticised and compared to the fictional newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane, created by Orson Welles for the 1941 film Citizen Kane. According to the documentary, Marinho's media group engages in manipulation of news to influence public opinion.
James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester. He has written several books on the history of British popular culture, including work on cinema, television and comics.
Television studies is an academic discipline that deals with critical approaches to television. Usually, it is distinguished from mass communication research, which tends to approach the topic from a social sciences perspective. Defining the field is problematic; some institutions and syllabuses do not distinguish it from media studies or classify it as a subfield of popular culture studies.
Paul Rotha was a British documentary film-maker, film historian and critic.
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Mark Connelly is a professor and Head of the School of History, at the University of Kent in Canterbury, where he is both a military historian, and the Reuters Lecturer in Media History. Connelly specialises in the 19th Century and First World War.
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An ethnographic film is a non-fiction film, often similar to a documentary film, historically shot by Western filmmakers and dealing with non-Western people, and sometimes associated with anthropology. Definitions of the term are not definitive. Some academics claim it is more documentary, less anthropology, while others think it rests somewhere between the fields of anthropology and documentary films.
Cotton Queen, also known as Crying Out Loud, is a 1937 British comedy film directed by Bernard Vorhaus, and starring Stanley Holloway, Will Fyffe, and Mary Lawson.
Documentary News Letter was a magazine about documentary film founded by filmmaker John Grierson. The publication was developed as the wartime successor to World Film News, which ceased publication in 1938, and sought to promote a "documentary approach to everyday living." It published its first edition in January 1940, with an editorial board that consisted of Grierson, Paul Rotha, Basil Wright, Arthur Elton and Thomas Baird.
The Ever Open Door is a 1920 British silent drama film directed by Fred Goodwins and starring Hayford Hobbs, Daphne Glenne and Margaret Hope. It was based on the play The Ever Open Door by George R. Sims, a leading Victorian writer of stage melodramas. It was one of a number of Sim's plays to be adapted for cinema during the Silent era.
Nancy Nevinson was a British actress. She was born Nancy Ezekiel, one of four children of Reemah and David Ezekiel, members of the Baghdadi-Jewish community of Calcutta, India, during the Raj. The family moved to London in the 1930s, where Nancy trained at RADA and took the stage name Nancy Nevinson, which she retained after her subsequent marriage to Commander William Hoyes-Cock.
This is a list of reference works on documentary films.
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Karen Elizabeth Boyle, is Professor of Feminist Media Studies at the University of Strathclyde, previously she was professor of Feminist Studies at the University of Stirling, and before that was a lecturer in film and television studies at the University of Glasgow. She has published a number of articles on feminism, violence and pornography.
Stella Bruzzi, FBA is an Italian-born British scholar of film and media studies and currently Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College London.