BIOGRAPHY

Ken McMullen is a Film Director and Artist living currently in London. His Feature Films are  distributed world wide, his Documentaries broadcast extensively and his Art Works exhibited in leading contemporary art galleries in Europe, The United States and the Far East.  His recent art work 'Skin Without Skin' was awarded 'The Prize for the Outstanding Work' in a major International Exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Bejing, June 2001. 

He is currently in negotiation on a number of Feature Film projects and is shooting a new series of Video Installations for exhibition in London and Tokyo in 2002. Art works such as 'Skin Without Skin', 'Dark Time', 'Piranha Particle', and 'Roman Lead' are scheduled for major exhibitions in Geneva, Paris, Lisbon and London in the next 18 months. Whilst his primary studio is in London he has been working in the CERN Prototype Workshop in Geneva and in a borrowed studio in Lisbon. 

Ken McMullen holds a Research Professorship with the London Institute and Lectures on Cinema and Fine Art practice in London, Paris, Lisbon and Bejing.

A Major Online Gallery; Articgallery.com is going live in December 2001 with an Exhibition of his recent Art Works. At present only a preview page is available.

Ken McMullen is an artist who became a filmmaker, and his films are both cinematic and painterly. He works intuitively and visually, yet his well researched films are grounded in philosophy, history, psychoanalysis and literature. 
Jeannie Mah. Splice Magazine, Canada
Tribute to Ken McMullen film director AFI Los Angeles Film Festival.
Los Angeles Film Festival Programme

British Director Ken McMullen is one of the most original and surprisingly undervalued filmmakers in the world. Like his compatriots Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman, he is a painter who swapped his brush for the camera. And like them he has created a completely unique style of film-making. In the best sense of the word, his films are 'theatrical'. He, has as the British Council noted in their tribute, "a strikingly original visual style-elegant, evocative carefully composed and glowing with colour."
Major retrospectives include Los Angeles and Washington in 1991, The National Film Theatre, London 1993, Dinard Festival, France (1996) .

 

"Our secret auteur" 

Derek Malcolm, The Guardian.

The McMullen retrospective was the major surprise. The critics Jean-Max Causse and Jean-Marie Rodon called his work "brilliant, unusual, intelligent and disturbing" but it's restlessly experimental nature has not stood it in good stead in Britain, despite the fact that each film has eventually gone into profit. His best known film is Zina, which evokes the tragic life of Zina Bronstein, the daughter of Trotsky and was more successful than Derek Jarman's Caravaggio at the box office. During the last few years, he has made R, the BBC film on Rembrandt, Lucky Mana 45 minute documentary on Lindsay Anderson and the last filmed interview with Derek Jarman. He has also mounted two stage productions and continued to paint and teach.
The New frontier
Action Gitanes, Paris..
Action Gitanes' move towards contemporary cinema, "The new frontier", is simply a logical expression of continuity. The cinema is a dynamic art and extends itself by remaining faithful to its essence. Film-makers such as Ken Loach, Abel Ferrara or Martin Scorcese are the direct heirs of directors like John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock or Jean Renoir. You can't have one without the other as Action Gitanes has done its best to demonstrate over the past thirty years. In view of this it seemed urgent and important to put right an injustice by offering French audiences a chance to discover the work of British film-maker Ken McMullen. By presenting five hitherto unreleased films we invite audiences to follow an initiatory journey through a brilliant, unusual, intelligent and disturbing body of work: or to put it in a word, important. In addition these films are the work of a film-maker who is inspired by the history and the philosophy of France. Ken McMullen is an exceptional person. A body of work of this importance cannot leave film lovers indifferent. 

Painting Steel, open air studio,winter, 2000

Piece de 'Resistance'
Cork Festival Tribute

The London based director was initially a painter, trained at the Slade film School before gradually moving into the world of cinema. Accordingly his films are imbued with a strong visual sense: there is, for him, a link between creating a film set and creating a painting.
But McMullen's cinema is much more than pleasing or strong images or visuals - it is informed and underlaid with a considerable philosophical background. But, he is quick to add, that background does not or need not exclude an audience - that knowledge of information is not essential to enjoyment of his work. This year's festival in Cork,  has a special focus on his work. Tomorrow afternoon Ghost Dance is to be screened while Resistanceand Being and Doing were scheduled for today. His latest and largest work, Zina, a work based on the real life experience of Trotsky's daughter, is premiered in Ireland this evening in the Opera House at 6.00pm.
Work is underway on a number of other projects at present including "a gangster-type" movie, and the work next
in line


  has an Irishman in a central role. The film is set in the Paris Commune of 1870, and has as reference points the Fenian Movement and the Manchester Martyr.
While he feels strongly about the content and the method of his work, it is in fact open to varying interpretations and "is not didactic. I'm not interested in preaching." he says. 
Ken McMullen: Cinema=ART+ DECONSTRUCTION
By Jeannie Mah Splice Magazine
Extract

Since I last saw Ghost Dance and Zina , Ken McMullen has been one of my favourite directors (up there with Antonioni, Godard, Paradjanov), so Ken's visit to Regina in late September thrilled me. With my heart on my sleeve, I offer a few moments from the week long event.

Ken McMullen is an artist who became a filmmaker, and his films are both cinematic and painterly. He works intuitively and visually, yet his well researched films are grounded in philosophy, history, psychoanalysis and literature. "Tarkovsky referred to film as sculpting in time. it's painting in time, for me.' He encourages his students to study paintings to learn about composition and lighting. "Go sit in front of a Rembrandt for two hours; it takes about that long to see what is there." Ken spoke of his affinity with other painters who became filmmakers, such as Derek Jarman who was at the Slade, and was the subject of a portrait film, called There we are John. Ken has also worked with performance artists Joseph Beuys and Stuart Brisley, and others who use the body as the fundamental form of expression. The synthesis of historical and contemporary art with cinema produce films that are pictorially stunning and intellectually challenging.

Ken McMullen is the master of the long take, and an excellent example of this is 1867, a film based on the Manet painting The Execution of the Emperor Maximillian. the eighteen months in which Manet painted the four versions of the painting is portrayed in an 11 minute take which uses the whole of a 1000 foot reel of film. Ken deconstructs time and space within a Bazinian Realism which reaches beyond the present, so that tightly choreographed camera movements work to speak of social history and cultural memory. He refers to the long take as a negotiation of technical and dramatic realities. "The long take is something I am very drawn to, like material that I am playing with. It is organic; it is quite intriguing, it can imply time. The slowness of the take draws on anxiety. It plays with the off-screen, and the camera movement allow mystery, so a conclusion is reached through a whole series of contradictions."