John Ellis

John Ellis (born 23 May 1952) is a British former TV producer and professor of media arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Ellis studied English at the University of Cambridge 1970-3 and at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at University of Birmingham 1973-6.

He was an editorial board member of Screen from 1974 to 1984.

Ellis's work concentrates on television and related media.

From 1978 to 1982 he taught Film Studies at University of Kent at Canterbury.

In 1982 he joined Simon Hartog and Keith Griffiths to form Large Door, the company that bid successfully to make Visions, a magazine series on world cinema for Channel 4 when it opened in 1982.

In 1982, he developed a medium theory approach, proposing that television's typical regime of spectatorship is that of the 'glance' rather than the more cinematic one of the 'gaze', and exploring the segmented and repetitive structure of TV programming.

The company produced two documentaries on the Cinema of China presented by Tony Rayns: Cinema in China (1983) outlined the history, hitherto scarcely known in the West; and New Chinese Cinema (1989) concentrated on the 'Fifth Generation.'

Large Door also produced:

Griffiths left the company in 1984, but Ellis and Hartog continued producing documentaries separately and together until Hartog's death in 1992.

Visions ran for three series until 1985.

As a leading producer, John Ellis was elected vice-chair of the producers' organisation PACT (1989–93).

He was also co-founded 'Spectre' a collective of filmmakers that included Simon Hartog, Anna Ambrose, Michael Whyte, Vera Neubauer, Thaddeus O'Sullivan, Phil Mulloy and Keith Griffiths.

Ellis was a visiting professor at Bergen University in the Media Studies department from 1991 to 2002.

In 1995 he joined the staff of the Media School at Bournemouth University, and became a professor in 1999.

Large Door made over 100 documentaries until it ceased production in 1999.

In Seeing Things (2000) he proposed the periodisation of television history into the three eras of 'scarcity', 'availability' and 'plenty', and applied the psychoanalytic concept of working through to television in the latter two eras.

He also examined the crucial role played by scheduling in the organisation of creativity in TV and of the TV experience.

Recently he has developed the concept of witness in relation to audio-visual material in a debate with, among others, John Durham Peters and Paul Frosh.

He joined the Media Arts Department at Royal Holloway University of London in September 2002.

He is now chair of BUFVC, the British Universities' Film and Video Council.

This work is extended in his Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation (2012) which applies an interactionist approach derived from Erving Goffman to the understanding of documentary.

He argues in addition that contemporary viewers, now thoroughly familiar with the processes of filming and being filmed, adopt a much more skeptical attitude to the 'factuality' of documentary and to the ethics of filmmaker-subject interaction.

His work on television history includes several articles on Channel 4; on critical issues including the construction of a canon of TV work; the importance of overlooked items such as interstitials; and decade-long involvement in the EU funded archival projects Videoactive and EUScreen

In 2013 he won a European Research Council grant of €1,600,000 for ADAPT a five-year study of the history of technology in TV broadcasting, concentrating particularly on the standard forms of production (both on film and on video) and the ways that these 'technological arrays' were adopted and brought into regular use.

Ellis's books include:

Ellis's articles include: