ABOUT

Muriel.tinel-temple@roehampton.ac.uk

insta: muriel_tineltemple

I am Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton, having previously taught at Birkbeck, University of Westminster and University of Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle.

I have significant experience in designing and leading Film Production programmes at UG and PG level.

I sit on the Executive Committee of NAHEMI, and in this context I am co-organising a student film competition, A Few Minutes for the Planet, in partnership with UK Green Film Network, BAFTA-albert and Green Film School Alliance.

I am on the editorial board of the journal Short Film Studies, and I am a full member of the International Moving Image Society (IMIS). 

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

I have years of experience in designing and teaching a wide range of film studies and innovative cultural practice modules integrating practice and contextualisation in an engaging and creative way. 

I have taught key analytical, theoretical and historical modules, as well as more advanced level modules on ‘Documentary’, ‘Alternative Film Cultures’, ‘Experimental Filmmaking’ and ‘Forms of Screenwriting’. I have designed or developed critical practice modules such as ‘Working with Film Sound’, ‘Working with Found Footage’ and ‘Audio-Visual Criticism’, which provide an effective and stimulating opportunity for students to understand archival resources, develop their sense of creative agency, and produce video essays.

At Roehampton I am also responsible for the BAFTA ‘albert’ educational partnership which trains students in sustainable filmmaking practices and encourages them to develop stories about their relationship with the environment.

ONGOING RESEARCH

My main field of expertise is the self-portrait in film and moving image, which was the subject of my thesis and of my first book: Le Cinéaste au travail: autoportraits (2016). I then co-founded a research group exploring issues of self-representation in visual culture, and this led to the collection From Self-Portrait to Selfie: Representing the Self in the Moving Image (2019), which I co-edited and in which I published a chapter focused on self-portraiture in early experimental video.

In this regard, I have been invited to curate and present programmes on experimental self-portraits for the LUX in London, for Light Cone in Paris, and for the V-A-C foundation in Moscow. Furthermore, I have published ‘Found Footage and the Construction of the Self: Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD and Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream’ (2021), in which I analyse two first-person essay films employing only found footage, thus seemingly at odds with the usual autobiographical form.

A second theme of my research has been the relationship between film and television, either in terms of TV commissioning works by filmmakers or in terms of TV programmes that represent cinema as cultural labour. In relation to the former, I have carried out archival research at INA and participated in several conferences, notably about the TV work of Chantal Akerman and Jean Eustache. Regarding the latter, I have studied archives of film-related TV programmes such as Cinéma, Cinémas, discussing the way cinema was represented by TV in the 1980s, when French cinephilia was very influential but also mourning the ‘death’ of cinema. 

My most recent research interest focuses on mediated landscapes and eco-cinema, stemming from the work of the artist Jacques Perconte, about whom I organised an event in June 2022 and gave two papers in 2023. This work has led me to extend my research to the notion of eco-narrative and eco-biography, and I am now pursuing this path as practice-based research with the Centre for Research in Arts and Creative Exchange (CRACE). During a workshop run by the IMPRINT collective I made an audio-visual experiment, Time Trees, in which I explore my connections to dead trees in my neighbourhood, blurred with reminiscences of photos of nature taken by my late father. 

In the context of the ‘Workshop on Videographic Criticism’ held at the University of Middlebury in June 2025, I developed a personal video essay, Grieving Trees, exploring the links between trees and grief in cinema.