Film Curation [MSc] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last spring, ten minutes into a programme of local amateur films at the library where I work, a woman in the second row said loudly, "That's my auntie's close." Nobody shushed her. Within a minute three other people were naming shops, a dance hall and a tram stop, and the screening became something closer to a conversation. Afterwards I realised I had chosen those films, ordered them and written the short introduction, yet the most valuable part of the afternoon came from the audience. That tension between preparing a programme carefully and leaving room for viewers to bring their own knowledge is why I want to study film curation at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree was in History, and film entered it almost by accident. For my dissertation I wanted to write about working conditions in Dundee's jute mills in the 1950s, and a tutor suggested I look beyond written records. I spent several weeks using the public viewing facilities of a national moving image archive, watching company promotional films alongside home movies shot by mill workers on holiday or at works outings. The contrast became the centre of my argument: the commissioned films showed orderly machinery and smiling supervisors, while the amateur footage, often shaky and underexposed, showed noise, crowding and people who clearly knew one another well. I learned to read catalogue records critically, noticing when a date was estimated or a location guessed, and I began to see that how a film is described shapes what later researchers think it can tell them. My dissertation received a first, and it left me with more questions about archives than about mills.

Since graduating I have worked full time as a library assistant. Most of the job is ordinary and I value it: issuing books, helping people with online forms, untangling the photocopier. Two years ago I proposed a monthly afternoon film club for older readers, many of whom had stopped going to the cinema. I handle the practical side, from checking licences for public screening and testing the borrowed projector to arranging chairs so that wheelchair users are not stuck at the back. I have programmed classic features, a season of Scottish documentaries and the local amateur films that prompted that recognition. Attendance has grown from six regulars to around twenty, and I now keep a notebook of what people say about the films, because their memories often add details no catalogue holds.

To understand the field more widely I have been reading Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace, in which Paolo Cherchi Usai, David Francis, Alexander Horwath and Michael Loebenstein discuss, in conversation form, what institutions owe to the films in their care. Their disagreements about access versus preservation, and about what is lost when a film is encountered only as a digital file, made me reconsider my own club, where convenience means I almost always show digital copies. I would like to study these questions properly rather than through occasional reading on my lunch break.

Outside work I cycle, mostly long, slow routes along the Tay, and I play in a fairly unsuccessful pub quiz team. The quiz has taught me something useful: people enjoy obscure knowledge most when it connects to something they already recognise, which is not a bad principle for programming.

I hope a postgraduate course will give me grounding in the history of film exhibition, the ethics and practice of archiving, and the skills to programme for audiences beyond a library meeting room. I am particularly interested in how amateur and regional collections can be presented so that they are seen as more than nostalgia. I bring research experience with moving image material, a practical record of running screenings for a real audience, and the patience that comes from a public-facing job. I would like to build on all three.