Dwoskin Is … Jewish

Dwoskin Is ... Jewish Rachel Garfield (bio) Stephen Dwoskin was an artist, filmmaker, writer, and key animator of the independent and experimental film scene in London, England, in the 1970s and 1980s. Best known as one of the founders of the London Film Makers Co-Op, Dwoskin worked across the borders and categories of film as well as those of art. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1939, he attended Parsons School of Art, working initially as a graphic designer on Madison Avenue in the late 1950s. He worked for CBS and was an art director for Industrial Design and Interiors Magazines. The titles for the film West Side Story (1961) were also designed by him, as part of the team set up by the lead graphic designer Saul Bass. In addition to his illustrious design career, Dwoskin began to make his own films, counting Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, and Ron Rice among his associates in the New York underground. In 1964, Dwoskin arrived in the UK, having won a Fulbright scholarship as a graphic designer. He continued to design and teach graphic design at the London College of Communication. He took up a Professorship of Film at the Royal College of Art until the department was closed down in the 1980s. Apart from the founding of the London Film Maker's Co-Op, Dwoskin is probably most remembered in the UK as the writer of the book, Film Is ... However, an artist who kept moving and developing new spheres of interest and communities, he also co-founded and later campaigned against closure of The Other Cinema. He was active in disability rights and taught at alternative educational setups such as the Antiuniversity in the 1970s. Like many filmmakers, Dwoskin [End Page 1] established ongoing collaborations; many of his lifelong friends had been students who worked with him on his films, such as Jill Daniels, who has written in this issue of Jewish Film and New Media. He partnered with experimental musicians, including long-standing collaborations with Gavin Bryars, Ron Geesin, and Alexander Balanescu. In addition, he worked with women actors who were powerful and important artists, such as performance artists Carolee Schneemann, Beatrice Cordua, Cosey Fanny Tutti, and German actress Carola Regnier, the granddaughter of Frederik Wedekind. In addition to painting, designing, and writing, Dwoskin's film production output was prodigious: by the time of his death in 2012, he had made over fifty films. Uniquely, Dwoskin's films themselves were heterogeneous and spanned the range of filmmaking practices. The films could be characterized through three broad periodizations. His best-known works in the UK are the early, underground-inspired movies from the late 1960s: works such as Alone (1963), Chinese Checkers (1964), or his most "structuralist:" Dirty (1965). The second period included funded feature films such as Dyn Amo (1972), Behindert (1974), and Central Bazaar (1976), notably commissioned by the German TV company ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen), Channel 4, and the British Film Institute (BFI). The films made from the mid-1990s onwards became more introspective and were made on digital video at his home in Brixton, England, where he relied on friends and small grants to complete them. These works, such as Night Shots (2006) and Oblivion (2005), were powerful, challenging, and explored states of mind and being, specifically his own struggles with embodiment, claustrophobia, and desire, informed by early influences Georges Bataille and Alfred Jarry. Other works are poignant or funny, such as the late works Some Friends (Apart)(2002) and Grandpere's Pear (2003), which belong more to an expanded documentary tradition where Dwoskin would distort, slow, and stretch the image to emphasize a fleeting moment of expression. These later works, in particular, have not been given much exposure or critical attention in the Anglophone world,1 although they are much celebrated on the continent for their cinematic innovation, particularly in France where Dwoskin's work has been championed by such writers as Raymond Bellour, Frances Alberra, and Nicole Brenez and included in film journals such as Dérive (2015)2 and Trafic (2004, 2010, 2012)3 as well as the publication Inside Out: Le Cinema de Stephen Dwoskin (2013).4 Like many of

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