Adam Kossoff
British filmmaker and artist
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Adam Kossoff is a British filmmaker and artist.
Early life and education
Kossoff was born in London. He gained a degree in film and photography at the Polytechnic of Central London (now University of Westminster) in 1980. In 2008 he was awarded his PhD with the dissertation "On Terra Firma: Space, Place and the Moving Image", by the Royal College of Art.[1]
Career
Kossoff began his career working as a playwright, with plays performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Soho Theatre and at Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Kossoff then worked in the film and TV industry for a number of years, writing and directing documentaries and drama films.[2] He made several films for Channel 4 including East Enders Against the Grain (1988), on the representation of the East End of London in film, Arm in Arm Together (1989),[3] about Anglo-Soviet relations and home front propaganda during World War II, and Turbulence (1992), starring Kelly Marcel and Cathy Tyson, that looked at the issue of family sexual abuse.
From 2004-2021, Kossoff was a reader in film in the School of Art at the University of Wolverhampton.[4] He has written for various journals[5][6] and edited books, mainly focusing on issues of praxis and technics in the work of Walter Benjamin and Bernard Stiegler.[7]
Kossoff has made experimental and essayistic films that have been screened at galleries and international film festivals:
- Moscow Diary (2012), filmed on a mobile phone, retraced the footsteps of Walter Benjamin's 1926-27 Moscow Diary.[8]
- Made in Wolverhampton (2012), narrated by Sean Foley, it explored the melancholic identity and the changing nature of place and space in an English post-industrial city.[9]
- The Anarchist Rabbi (2015), narrated by Steven Berkoff, focused on the East End haunts of German-born anarchist Rudolf Rocker.[10][11][12]
- One Or the Other (2017), an essay film looking issues around the homeland and the nation state in Israel and Palestine.[13]
- Through the Bloody Mists of Time (2020), narrated by Esther Leslie, uses a slowed down 9.5 mm film film of the 1937 Paris Exhibition featuring an imaginary voice-over dialogue between Walter Benjamin and Humphrey Jennings.
- Jackals and Arabs (by Franz Kafka) (2022) narrated by Mohammad Bakri.
- In The Loop of History (2020), an archival essay, is concerned with nationhood and history as myth in Israel-Palestine.