Lavinia Brydon (School of Arts) is launching an exciting new project to explore questions of location filming in the region. Working with Lisa Stead (Exeter), the project kicks off with the Chilham On Screen festival – a day of fun activities that seeks to understand the impact of location filming in the village.

The free open event will focus on sharing and exploring the memories and experiences of community members, young and old, who have seen film crews transform their homes and streets for some 70 years. Since Powell and Pressburger filmed their iconic A Canterbury Tale within the village, Chilham has hosted a wide variety of filmmakers and television crews, providing a backdrop for Jane Austin adaptations and playing host to TV shows such as Top Gear, Poirot and Miss Marple.

The day-long event, hosted at the village hall, will feature exhibition stands, film clips, a DIY location map, a children’s table and more, and tea and cake will be served throughout. The organisers are keen to record people’s memories and anecdotes from having a home or business turned into a film set, and encourage locals to bring along any photographs, autographs, newspaper clippings and other memorabilia that they may have gathered over the years. The project hopes to create a new resource for the community, charting people’s experience of the village through its screen histories.

If you have memories to share, or a passion for film – come along and join in!

Poster – CoS

There are now supporting documents available for the Beaches symposium, to be held in Whitstable, 21-22 September 2015. See Documents.

Informed by trains, journeying and the disconnect between looking at the passing landscape and hearing only the interior sounds of the carriage, the work by composer/artist Claudia Molitor – titled Sonorama  – is described as ‘filling the gap between the visual and sonic realities of train travel’.

Imagining the journey as the ‘score’, Claudia Molitor’s  cycle of works, collected interviews, readings and British Library archive material respond to the social history of the route. The tracks cover topics as diverse as visio-centricity, Roman history and hop-picking – all relating to a different point or area between London St Pancras and Margate.

The App, which features contributions from flautist Jan Hendrickse, poet Lemn Sissay, saxophonist Evan Parker and writer Charlotte Higgins, will be free to download at the App store from 19 June – 30 September 2015.

Claudia Molitor lectures at the University’s School of Music and Fine Art.

This is the website of the Critical Kent project at the University of Kent, an initiative bringing together researchers from all disciplines investigating aspects of Kent. Here you will find ongoing and archived research and updates on upcoming events related to Critical Kent, the Topographies Project and Reanimating England.