William Brown
William Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of numerous essays on film and media culture, as well as the books Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude (Bloomsbury, 2018), Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (Berghahn, 2013) and Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (with Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, College Gate Press, 2010). He is the co-editor of Deleuze and Film (with David Martin-Jones, Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
Non-Cinema in particular was described by Jonathan Beller as ‘brilliantly introduc[ing] the concept of non-cinema as anti-thesis, remainder and emergent condition of a “post-colonial” world dominated and impoverished by the logistics of capital-cinema… The book is a significant theoretical elaboration and critique of the world-media system, that also collects and concentrates globally distributed, often liminal, instances of struggle, inspiration and liberation.’ Meanwhile, Akira Mizuta Lippit describes the book as ‘a brilliant speculative history of cinema acting out against itself, against every convention and institution of film. This masterpiece unfolds everywhere else, forming the contours of a cinema that is not one, but rather a series of interventions that articulate the deep values that forge a cinema in spite itself, a total cinema understood as the very limits of cinema, non-cinema.’
William speaks regularly about film and media culture at prestigious institutions like the British Film Institute (including as part of their highly-regarded Philosophical Screens team), the Whitechapel Gallery, the Wilkinson Gallery, having also been invited to give talks at universities across the world. He was a Visiting Associate Professor at New York University Abu Dhabi in 2017.
William also is the maker of numerous zero-budget feature films, shorts and music videos. His features include: En Attendant Godard (2009), which was named by Jonathan Rosenbaum as one of his Top 5 Films of 2009 in Sight & Sound magazine; Afterimages (2010), which was also mentioned in the Sight & Sound Films of the Year 2010; Common Ground (2012), which was part of the American Online Film Awards in 2014; China: A User's Manual (Films) (2012); Selfie (2014); The New Hope (2015); Ur: The End of Civilisation in 90 Tableaux (2015); Letters to Ariadne (2016); Roehampton Guerrillas (2011-2016) (2017); #randomaccessmemory (2017); Circle/Line (2017), which premiered at the East End Film Festival; The Benefit of Doubt (2018); Vlado and William (2018); and La Belle Noise, The New Hope 2, and This is Cinema (all forthcoming).
He writes about film and other issues on his blog https://wjrcbrown.wordpress.com/.
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