Biography

Ken McMullen is a film director, visual artist and Anniversary Chair of Film at Kingston University London. McMullen’s approach to cinema is radical and investigative, demonstrating an artistic practice that unites film and philosophy.

His work is renowned for its striking visual innovations, its powerful evocations, which combine naturalism with reflective philosophical sequences, and for the psychological depth of performances.

He has produced and directed over fifty motion picture works including major international feature films which have had significant worldwide distribution.

He has worked with a wide range of British and international actors and cultural figures, such as Ian McKellen, Timothy Spall, Saeed Jaffry, Roshan Seth, Domiziana Giordano, John Berger, Derek Jarman, Joseph Beuys and Jacques Derrida, and his films have been screened and won awards at major international festivals, including Cannes (1871, Un Certain Regard, 1990) and San Sebastián (Zina, Special Jury Prize, 1985).

Honoree of the American Film Institute, The Art Film Institute Moscow and the Kanatica Film Directors Association of India, Ken McMullen continues working in new directions in both feature film and fine art along with series of documentaries.

At the end of the 60s, he enrolled at the Liverpool Art School where he was trained by prominent figures in history of European art, notably Heinz Koppel.

At the Slade School of Fine Art where he did his MA, McMullen crossed path with a number of artists, filmmakers and thinkers, from John Heartfield and Jean Renoir to Richard Hamilton or Yoko Ono. It is in this lively environment that he started making films in parallel with painting, studying history of cinema with Thorold Dickinson, the legendary founder of the Film Studies Department at the Slade.

He met Joseph Beuys at the beginning of the 1970s and collaborated with him on a series of three motion pictures installations shot in Dusseldorf between 1971 and 1972. These pieces, midway between cinema, sculpture and performance, were part of Beuys’ first major UK exhibition presented At Tate Britain in 1972.

Collaborative methods are integral to McMullen’s practice as testified by the documentary he also made in collaboration with Tadeusz Kantor in 1974, one of the rare glimpses of Kantor and his CRICOT2 theatre group in live performance.