Ken McMullen (film director)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Ken McMullen (b. 31 August 1948, Manchester) is an award-winning film director and artist living currently in London. His feature films are distributed worldwide, his documentaries broadcast extensively and his art works exhibited in leading contemporary art galleries in Europe, The United States and the Far East. McMullen's films are grounded in philosophy, history, psychoanalysis and literature. McMullen's exhibition Signatures of the Invisible brought together artists and scientists working at CERN, the European particle physics facility near Geneva. His other work includes filming conversations with leading physicists at Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre, which he describes as "making a diary of the transition in human culture" because he believes physics is arriving at another shifting point. His latest work Arrows of Time is a radical new form of cinema consisting of 40 interchangeable elements that deal with literature, philosophy, and contemporary physics. These elements are combined in a different order for each showing. This work premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in April 2007.
Selected filmography
- Ghost Dance: a journey into beliefs and myths surrounding the existence of ghosts and the nature of cinema.
- 1871: a period film about the rise and fall of the Paris Commune in 1871.
- Zina: comparable to a twentieth century Antigone, the titular daughter of Leon Trotsky discusses memories of her life and her father with the Berlinian psychotherapist Professor Kronfeld.
- Partition: set in the turmoil surrounding the transfer of political power in British India from British to Indian hands and the partition of the subcontinent into The Dominion of Pakistan and The Republic of India in 1947.