Professor François Penz

• Urban cinematics  -  best example of this strand is Cinematic Geographies of Battersea – a large AHRC funded project  for which I was the PI in collaboration with the Survey of London (English Heritage) and the University of Liverpool (2011 – 2013).   Using the location of Battersea in South London as a case study, the project examined how the area has been portrayed in films over the 20th century with a view  to track down its evolution and transformation.  The approach enabled us to excavate the successive cinematic strata accumulated over the urban fabric, making visible the emergence of the modern city and its subsequent transformations since the year 1895. See: Cinematic Urban Geographies. (New York : Palgrave Macmillan 2017)  

• A cinematic approach to everyday life and architecture:   Film constitutes the most comprehensive lived in building data in existence – a largely ignored and untapped resource.  Fiction films in particular  are ‘equipment for living’ and can be construed as a form of practice of everyday life.  I have compiled the first cinematic encyclopedia of architectural spaces and building elements (doors, windows, stairs etc) - see: Cinematic  aided  design - an everyday life approach to architecture [Routledge 2018]

• The museum of the future:  over the years I have been researching how new technologies, at the intersections of material and digital culture, open the way for new forms of museum spectatorship, making our cultural heritage more interesting and engaging as well as reaching new audiences.  The idea of the museum and my work on cinema, architecture and the city have some fundamental overlaps as we can assign a museographic function to film that has unwittingly preserved and archived the world around us.   A key recent project in this strand is the Virtual San Pier Maggiore project  - The digital repatriation of Florence’s Renaissance past and the  future of 3D visualization for cultural heritage – with Dr Donal Cooper from the History of Art Department in Cambridge. Our digital reconstruction was on display at the National Gallery part of the exhibition “Visions of Paradise: Botticini’s Palmieri Altarpiece” that opened November 2015 and lasted until March 2016. See: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/visions-of-paradise. 

OTHER RELATED PRACTICE BASED RESEARCH ACTIVITIES

Venice Biennale 2021 Film Studio:

 https://www.marinabaysands.com/content/dam/revamp/ASMrevamp/textures-of-the-city/Screen-Zine-Pavilion-Oct%20-LQ.pdf

CineMuseSpace Exhibitions - Shanghai, Nanjing, Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridge

• 2017- 2020: Principal Investigator for an AHRC grant [value £460’000] CineMuseSpace: A Cinematic Musée Imaginaire of Spatial Cultural Differences [2017-2020]: https://www.cinemusespace.arct.cam.ac.uk
• 2015:  Cambridge Humanities Research Grants Scheme Research & National Gallery [with Dr Donal Cooper] Virtual San Pier Maggiore: The digital repatriation of Florence’s Renaissance past and the future of 3D visualisation for cultural heritage http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/visions-of-paradise
• 2011 - 2013  Cinematic Geographies of Battersea: Urban Interface & Site-Specific Spatial Knowledge - an AHRC grant - in collaboration with English Heritage, University of Liverpool and Edinburgh (PI:  Prof François Penz  Value:  £200’000)