Spotlight on Professor Michael Stewart

This week the spotlight is on Professor Michael Stewart, Vice-Dean (Enterprise), UCL Social & Historical Sciences.

What is your role and what does it involve?

I am Chair of the UCL SLASH Board for Enterprise and Knowledge transfer and Vice-Dean (Enterprise) in UCL Social & Historical Sciences. For my sins I also founded and run the Open City Documentary Festival, which is now in its fifth year. And, of course, I teach! But for me these roles are all expressions of one and the same thing - an attempt to open the university up to new influences, to bring some of the brilliant research and thinking that is done outside the academy to within our walls.

The festival, which attracted 4,000 people to UCL and our external venues last year, provides a wonderful chance both to see some of the finest filmmaking in the world, but also to explore the big issues of our time in conversations connecting our staff, students, people from the professional world of media and all those interested members of the public who hunger for these occasions.

This year we've slightly changed the format, taking almost all our events out of UCL into cinemas across London. Partly that reflects our growing kudos in the film exhibition world. Picturehouse Central - with a dedicated documentary cinema - and the beautifully restored Regent's Street Cinema (NB UCL - where is our equivalent bijou arts venue?!) have been urging us to give them our films. And partly we're moving out because we think we'll reach bigger and more diverse audiences this way.

The opening gala though will be in our own Bloomsbury Theatre: Sam Klemke's Time Machine - an extraordinary film tying the flight of the Voyager craft into deep space with the life of Sam Klemke who in 1977 began obsessively filming and documenting his life on film. It's a freewheeling look at time, memory, mortality and what it means to be human - one more great night out with Open City!

For the first time too we are running a series of Faculty Galas, all at the Regents Street Cinema - a short walk from Oxford Circus tube: there will be a UCL Engineering one on Thursday 18 June; a UCL Bartlett one on Friday 19 June; and for the SLASH one on the Saturday, a remarkable film of the explosive Gore Vidal-William Buckley debates in 1968. All programme details and booking information can be found on the Open City Documentary Festival website.

How long have you been at UCL and what was your previous role?

I came here in 1996, I think, from LSE, where I had been a part time ESRC research fellow working with very entrepreneurial Romanian shepherds, who had been making huge amounts of money smuggling petrol across the Danube into sanctions-locked Serbia...

At the same time, I was working part-time as an independent film producer. The last film I made was about justice in the aftermath of dictatorship or mass political violence looking at Rwanda, Bosnia and East Germany. I still remember the former education minister of Lower Saxony apologising on screen for his (by then bitterly regretted) decision to purge the schools of all former members of the East German Communist Party. He had realised that he killed the minnows and let all the fat fish off the hook.

Tell us about a project you are working on now which is top of you to-do list?

Well, right now top of my to-do list is to advertise a mini-festival - Documenting Ukraine Two Days of Cinema and Debate - which I am running on 16 and 17 May at the Frontline Club, with UCL SSEES experts on the panels and some extraordinary modern and archive films. We end with Dziga Vertov's rarely seen masterpiece Year Eleven, shot in 1928 in the now war-torn Donbas region of Ukraine, and will have the world premiere of a lyrical new score. All details of the event are on the Open City Documentary Festival website.

But the project that is going to take up most of my time in the next few weeks is to get a research summer school up and running in Newham, exploring the question: what sort of university should UCL create on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park? We've talked lots about engaging with Newham and good work is being done, but after this week's town hall about the Olympic Park, a number of us feel that we need to come up with a much clearer and more radical vision of the whole project. The summer school would be the forge in which we do that… UCL colleagues really need to get engaged in this - Stratford will change the way we work and, while it will make lots of things possible, we need to be in this together.

What working achievement or initiative are you most proud of?

All the work we are doing to bring practical film training into UCL and the link-up with the Open City Documentary Festival.

I am really incredibly lucky. There aren't many universities in the world where someone like me - I was a senior lecturer then - can create a documentary film festival and not be told that this is nothing to do with the core mission of the institution. On the contrary, here I have had nothing but support from the faculties and Deans who really get the idea that we need to go back to basics in terms of what a university is and what its role is in the society, in the city in which it is based.

UCL is an extraordinary place to work in and everything I have achieved so far has been thanks to the culture of innovation it fosters.

What is your favourite album, film and novel?

My children mock me for my musical tastes. But right now I seem to be playing Jonathan Dove's exquisite song cycle The Passing of the Year more than once-a-week. The delicacy of his composition is unrivalled in Britain today. And the soaring melodic lines take my breath away. His musical roots are so diverse - in folk song, in early church and in 20th century British music - I think he's just the best. I defy you to hear his terrifying Who killed Cock Robin? on this album and not feel your heart stop a beat.

I hope that in the future we have composers, poets and artists in residence - I'd have him any day!

My film - well there's only one. It has to be Godfather Part Two - even writing the title makes the hairs on the back of my neck tingle. The whole sweep of American 20th century history is there and all set inside the tragedy of a single family. It's the most wonderful film about commercial society, about kinship and loss. And, of course, with a score to die for.

As for novels - well there are so many. Here's a really short one - Isiah Berlin's faultless translation of Turgenev's ecstatic novella First Love. I read it as a student at LSE in a rush in the old Shaw Library, and then read it straight through again without getting up from my chair. But I guess right now my favourite novels are the Patrick Marber quintet that Edward St. Aubyn has given us. There are hundreds and hundreds of pages of prose with not a single false note or broken line. And the story takes you to the darkest, coldest places of the heart before leaving you strangely purged and cheering on its unlikely hero.

What is your favourite joke (pre-watershed)?

I heard Luc Bondy tell this but it's an old joke - all the best jokes are Jewish…

A Jew is shipwrecked on a desert island. 10 years later, a passing ship notices his campfire and stops to rescue him. When the captain comes ashore, the castaway thanks him profusely and offers to give him a tour of the little island. He shows off the weapons he made for hunting, the fire pit where he cooks his food, the synagogue he built for praying in, and the hammock where he sleeps. On their way back to the ship, however, the captain notices a second synagogue. "I don't understand," the captain says, "Why did you build two synagogues?" "Oh," says the Jew, "that's is the synagogue I never go to."

Who would be your dream dinner guests?

John Dee, the magus and mathematician, Audrey Hepburn and Martin Scorcese - there'd be fireworks!

What advice would you give your younger self?

Like yourself more and you'll be kinder to others too.

What would it surprise people to know about you?

Well I don't know if it will surprise anyone, but I'm the descendant of a line unbroken to my grandfather of Scottish Presbyterian preachers going right back to the 18^th Century. It makes reading Edmund Gosse's Father and Son an even more uncomfortable experience.

What is your favourite place?

A house in a clearing in the woods at the foot of the Montagne Noir in the Languedoc. There's a stream running through the garden and a tree house high in the oaks. It lies just at the border of two climate zones - the cool of what is the very southernmost tail of the massif central and the heat of the Languedocian plain. If you climb to the top of the track, the massive chain of the Pyrennees stretches out before you and on a clear day, I imagine I can see the Pic du Midi d'Ossau hundreds of kilometres away. It brings out the inner Scottish peasant in me - only without the rain and the midges.