Lectures & Events

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 ...

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 m...

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 pri...

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 wit...

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 realitie...

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 ...

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 wa...

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 cultur...

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 ...