Supervisor: Dr Michael Witt
Gillian
McIver received her PhD from Roehampton University in the Media Culture and
Languages department, specialising in Art History and Cinema Studies. Her area
of research addresses the relationships between cinema, material culture and
art history in visual culture and retinal communication. Her current research
looks at Egyptian cinema, and she is working on the idea of abstraction as
visual language in cinema practices.
Her PhD
examined the historical film and its relationship to art history and visual
storytelling. ‘When investigating the artistic representation of historical
events. I noticed the tension between the accepted rhetorical mode for history
(accurate, neutral and detached) and art’s passionate and emotive accounts. We
can call these two approaches the realist and the sublime. My research
demonstrates how art and cinema use this tension to engage audiences but also
to pass on values and ideological positions.’
Gillian
McIver is the author of Art History for Filmmakers: The Art of Visual
Storytelling (Bloomsbury 2016).