Film director and artist Ken McMullen  (1948, UK) was born in Manchester and is now based in London. Trained as a fine artist, he continues to work as an interdisciplinary visual artist, collaborating with physicists and contemporary philosophers such as Jacques Derrida. McMullen works intuitively and visually, yet his well-researched films are grounded in philosophy, history, psychoanalysis and literature. He has also had significant involvement in collaboration between art and science. He is Professor of Film at Kingston University.  

Ken McMullen, Resistance, 1976
Video
90’
Performed by: Stuart Brisley, Marc Chaimowicz, Ian Kellgren, Lesley Pitt, Anna Koply, Arnold Linken, Elizabeth Richardson.
Courtesy  of the artist and LUX, London

The 1976 film Resistance by English director Ken McMullen, combines fragments of archival material drawn from the history of the French Resistance with footage shot during a week-long workshop which Chaimowicz took part in. Its participants continuously rehearse and analyse their performances in an attempt to merge elements of their personalities with predetermined roles. Though the resulting film only addresses the Resistance obliquely, it faithfully reconstructs the traumas suffered by Resistance fighters and their tendency to describe their pasts in terms of ready-made mythologies.