Biography

Helen Hughes is currently a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of Arts at the University of Surrey. She is researching and writing a book on Environmental Documentary Film in the twenty-first century, exploring the use of documentary film for environmental activism as well as the representation of communities as situated in particular environments. As part of her research she is considering the impact of social theory, concept art, and land art on approaches to documentary filmmaking. She is particularly interested in the emergence of aerial photography and satellite imaging from its scientific uses and its contrastive use in popular communication with close-ups and low-angled cinematography.

After studying German and Linguistics at University College London, Helen Hughes wrote her PhD, The Bureaucratic Muse on the relationship between bureaucracy and literature in Austrian prose fiction referring to: the writer, landscape painter, pedagogue and conservationist Adalbert Stifter; the writer and insurance lawyer, Franz Kafka; the writer, database manager and cybernetics expert, Oswald Wiener; and the writer, playwright, sometime court reporter and farmer, Thomas Bernhard. 

She was a lecturer in German at the University of Surrey from 1994 to 2002 when she worked with the Association of German Studies, organizing a series of conferences on German Film with the Goethe-Instituts in London, and Glasgow. Some of the papers from these conferences were published in an edited volume entitled Deutschland im Spiegel seiner Filme, Modern German Studies 1, CILT, London, 2000. She also wrote articles and chapters on German-language film, analyzing works by Valie Export, Volker Schlöndorff, and Andreas Voigt, developing a particular interest in the documentary films of the former German Democratic Republic. She extended her interests beyond German-language cinema through comparative work on representations of landscapes in Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac and Adalbert Stifter's Witiko, and on Kafka adaptations.

In 2002 she was promoted and became the programme director for the BA in Culture, Media and Communication and was briefly Head of Department before moving to the Department of Dance, Film, and Theatre in 2008 where she now leads the Film Studies programme and the Surrey Documentary Group. 

Research Interests

I am currently working on the issues that arise out of the use of documentary film in raising environmental awareness.  

I am also interested in documentary more generally, particularly in contemporary Austrian documentary and the documentary of the former GDR or DEFA documentary.

I am interested in philosophy and film and the exploration of philosophy in avantgarde and experimental filmmaking.

Research Collaborations

Helen Hughes has worked extensively on German-language film with Dr Martin Brady (King's College London).

She has also collaborated with Dr Ute Wölfel (University of Reading) on representations of gender and the workplace in DEFA documentary film.

In 2008 she collaborated with Kate Lawrence and Stuart Andrews on a project with the Surrey Ion Beam Research Centre performed during British Science Week.

Publications

Helen Hughes, (2012) 'Extreme long shots: The visual rhetoric of climate change documentaries' in Climate Change Communication and the Transformation of Politics, Petersen, T. R., Carvalho, A. (eds), Cambria Press: New York (forthcoming)

Helen Hughes, (2011) 'Humans, Sharks, and the Shared Environment', in Environmental Education Research 17(6) (forthcoming)

Martin Brady, Helen Hughes (2011) 'Import and Export: Ulrich Seidl's Indiscreen Anthropology of Migration' in New Austrian Film, von Dassanowsky, R. and Speck, O.C. (eds) Berghahn, New York, Oxford, 207-224 

Alexander Kluge, Essay ‘Hortus Conclusus’ in the Serpentine Gallery catalogue Peter Zumthor: Hortus Conclusus: Serpentine Gallery Pavillion 2010, translated by Martin Brady and Helen Hughes
http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2011/09/peter_zumthor_hortus_conclusus.html

Alexander Kluge, 'Seven Love Stores' in The Paris Magazine 4, June 2010, 79-91, translated by Martin Brady and Helen Hughes

Helen Hughes, Ute Wölfel, (2009) 'Women in the Workplace and the Development of DEFA Documentary Style' in Glossen 29 http://www2.dickinson.edu/glossen/heft29/Artikel29/Hughes-Woelfel.html

Alexander Kluge, Cinema Stories , New York: New Directions, 2007 translated by Martin Brady and Helen Hughes

Martin Brady, Helen Hughes, (2008) 'Import and Export: Ulrich Seidl's Indiscreet Anthropology of Migration' in GFL 1/2008   100-122  http://www.gfl-journal.de/1-2008/brady_hughes.html

Martin Brady, Helen Hughes, (2006) “Downfall and Beyond”, Hitler Films from Germany” gfl-journal, No 3./2006 http://www.gfl-journal.de/3-2006/brady_hughes.pdf

Martin Brady, Helen Hughes, (2005) “Diese Deutschen, Diese Briten: Documentary Filmmaking in Newcastle and Rostock” in The Other Germany: Perceptions and Influences in British-East German Relations, 1945-1990 Band 52 des Schriftenreihe des ADAF, Wißner, Augsburg

Martin Brady, Helen Hughes, (2002) “Kafka adapted to Film” in The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, Preece, J. (ed), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 226-241 

Helen Hughes, (2001) “The Material World: A Comparison between Adalbert Stifter's historical novel Witiko and Robert Bresson's film Lancelot du Lac”, in Travellers in Time and Space: The German Historical Novel, Durrani, O. and Preece, J. (eds) Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York

Helen Hughes, (ed) (2000) Deutschland im Spiegel seiner Filme, Modern German Studies 1, CILT, London

Helen Hughes (1999) “Documenting the Wende: The Films of Andreas Voigt” in DEFA, A Retrospective, Sean Allan and John Sandford (eds), Berghahn, Oxford

Martin Brady, Helen Hughes, (1998) “German Cinema” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture Wilfred van der Will and Eva Kolinky (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Helen Hughes, (1997) “‘Die verschobene Antigone’ Böll's contribution to the film Deutschland im Herbst” in Böll on Page and Screen, Huber, Lothar, (ed) Dayton Review, vol.24, no 3, Summer 1997.

Helen Hughes (1997) “The Hand as Text and Image: On Valie Export's Körpersplitter” in Image into Text: Text into Image, Jeff Morrison and Florian Krobb (eds) Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York

Helen Hughes, (1996) “‘daß er jetzt ein Exemple statuieren werde’: on Thomas Bernhard's Exempel”, in German Life and Letters XLIX No.3, 373-386

Helen Hughes, (1995) “German Film After the Wende” in The New Germany: Social, Political and Cultural Challenges of Unification, Lewis, D, McKenzie J (eds) Exeter, Exeter University Press

 Martin Brady, Helen Hughes, (1994) “Death in Berlin: Reflections on Celan's DU LIEGST” in EONTA 2 (2) 12-15, 1994

 Helen Hughes, (1994) “visible bodies: introducing valie export's unsichtbare gegner”, in EONTA 2(1), 11-15, 1994

Teaching

Module Leader

Level 1 Film History

Level 2 Research in Film Studies

Level 3 Director Study (Werner Herzog), Green Film

Departmental Duties

Recent conference presentations

January 2007   ‘We Feed The World: Contemporary documentary films on the problem of food’(At the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies conference at Coventry University (MeCCSA))

July 2007         Panel on ‘The Cultural Politics of Food’ with paper ‘Beautiful Food: Representing the Gap between the Production and Representation of Food’ (At the conference Cultural Studies Now, University of East London)

April 2008       ‘Women in the workplace and the Development of DEFA documentary style.’ At the one day seminar: Made in the GDR: Visual Culture in the Other Germany at the Cardiff School of European Studies

June 2009        Panel on 'Points in and on space: Buildings, beaches and bothersome relatives'. Paper entitled  'Local Geography' at the Arts and Humanities Research Council conference Living Landscapes in Aberystwyth

March 2011 'Wild Animals and the Environmental Documentary Film.' At the AHRC network on 'The Cultural Framing of Environmental Discourse' in Bath http://cfoed.co.uk/143/hughes-wild-animals-and-the-environmental-documentary-film/