Oliver J. L. Dixon

I began my academic career with a BASc Arts and Sciences degree at University College London graduating with a first and experience across a variety of disciplines including Philosophy, Anthropology, Film Studies and Psychology. I then moved to the University of Bristol where I completed an MA in Film and Television Studies with distinction. My prize-winning MA thesis produced a comprehensive history of the 1970s British film collective Cinema Action which I am currently developing for publication.

My Trinity College-OOC funded PhD research expands on this history of British film collectives in the 1970s and 1980s. Exploring collectives such as Berwick Street Film Collective, London Women’s Film Group, Sheffield Film Co-Op, Cinema Action and Black Audio-Film Collective, I will interrogate how such collaborative groups provided new social and aesthetic spaces of production, distribution and exhibition to shape cinema’s political possibilities in an era of emergent political groupings.

I am equally concerned with the work of film history and the afterlives of this period of British independent cinema. My research will investigate the re-emergence of such film collectives in recent galleries, retrospectives and publications asking both how the social and aesthetic functions of collectives shift in contemporary contexts and how these histories might help us shape future oppositional film cultures.

Alongside my academic work, I also intend to develop my film programming to present neglected works from this period of British cinema to new audiences and connect these works to wider political cinema cultures.

I can be contacted at: ojld2@cam.ac.uk