Few aspects of creative filmmaking are as shrouded in mystery as the work of the film editor. What do they do? How does it work? Film editors will usually say their art is intuitive – magic, instinctive, inexpressible. But this lecture explodes the myth that good editing is invisible, and reveals what goes on in the edit suite to save movies, tell stories and make thousands of bits of footage into coherent and compelling films.

British people and visitors to the UK still find themselves amongst the infrastructure created by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the 19th century. He changed the face of the British landscape with his ground-breaking projects including railways, bridges, tunnels, ships, and grand buildings such as the magnificent Paddington Station. He merged art with engineering and science and was a pioneer and a revolutionary. And he was brilliant. We'll look at the man, his background, his work, and his legacy.

This presentation traces NASA’s Space Shuttle program from its ambitious start to its final missions. Through de Vries’ 12-week film shoot at Cape Canaveral and Mission Control in Houston, this documentary offers exclusive footage from unprecedented access to the Space Shuttle, Endeavour—a privilege never before granted. Hear behind-the-scenes stories and delve into the missions and the individuals who made the Space Shuttle program a defining chapter in space exploration.

Ever since the emergence of the avant-garde in the second half of the nineteenth century, art and controversy – not to say, scandal - have often gone hand in hand. This wide-ranging and thought-provoking presentation will examine the complex reasons for this phenomenon, and in so doing grapple with important issues of freedom of expression, blasphemy, censorship and taboo.

The critic Herbert Read once famously described the group of avant-garde artists centred around Henry Moore in the Hampstead area of northwest London in the 1930s as “a nest of gentle artists”. When world events demanded, however, Moore was quick to put his art at the service of harsher realities. This lecture will trace an unfamiliar aspect of Moore’s oeuvre, from his response to the Spanish Civil War through his work as an official war artist during World War Two to his response to the Holocaust, the Cold War and the continued threat of atomic warfare in the 1960s.

Film production took off in Australia in the 1970s, a period that came to be known as the Australian New Wave. Meet Australia’s greatest living playwright and discover some of the stars in award-winning movies made during this exciting period of cinematic renaissance.

Pandora, Eve and Galatea have something in common – they were manufactured rather than born. This lecture looks at the original sources for the stories, and draws parallels between them before showing how ballets, operas and plays from Coppelia to My Fair Lady and The Winter’s Tale to Educating Rita have developed the theme of a creation that runs out of control.

With the help of the evocative photographs of Scott’s photographer, Herbert Ponting, and some of Edward Wilson’s watercolours, this session focuses on the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, in particular, the journeys by Scott and his rival, Amundsen to be first at the South Pole.

From the 1890s to the 1960s, Winston Churchill’s life was captured in countless photographs. A prolific writer and speechmaker, the definitive edition of his speeches alone runs to four volumes. A successful and enthusiastic artist, he produced some 500 paintings in over five decades. Churchill was a complex and sensitive man of many parts and interests – a discriminating contemporary, Kenneth Clark, wrote of him, “I have never been frightened by anyone except Churchill … he was a man of a wonderful and very powerful mind”. This lecture portrays the richness, diversity and achievements of Churchill’s life and character.

During the Edo period of rule by the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868), the arts of Japan gained in richness and diversity. With the rise of the merchant class and the growth of cities such as Edo (modern-day Tokyo), a new vitality was injected into traditional forms and an emerging middle-class culture gave rise to exciting developments in the visual and performing arts. This lecture will consider the arts of the period including castle architecture, golden screen painting, ukiyo-e prints, textiles, lacquerware, and netsuke, as well as the emergence of the flamboyant kabuki theatre.

The story of Roland Penrose, British Surrealist artist and biographer of Picasso, and Lee Miller, the American Surrealist photographer, who shot fashion and combat with equal talent, as seen through the eyes of their son Antony Penrose, who is also their biographer. We look at how their early lives formed their motivations and how they strove to use art to make the world a better place. The last decades of their life together were at Farley Farm, their home in Sussex which was frequented by many prominent Surrealist and Modern artists.