About

I’m Andy Birtwistle. I am a human born during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and I’m a filmmaker, writer and researcher.

My research explores the creative, cultural and political possibilities of sound in art cinema, avant‑garde film and sonic arts. I am the author of Film Sound Modernism (British Film Institute, 2025), a study of how filmmakers around the world have used sound to articulate the experiences and conditions of modernity, and Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video (Manchester University Press, 2010), which has become a key reference in film sound studies. My writing has appeared in journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Visual Culture in Britain, Popular Music, The New Soundtrack, Resonance, Echo, Journal of Sonic Studies, and others, as well as in edited collections on Taiwanese cinema, experimental film and sound design.

For many years I taught film at Canterbury Christ Church University, where I now serve as an Honorary Senior Research Fellow.

Alongside my research I am a filmmaker and sound artist. My creative work focuses on sound, media history, analogue formats, and the pleasures of things that dismantle themselves. I like forms, textures, structures, styles, silences, humour, self-reflexivity and the occasional long drift.

The Analogit Organisation is the umbrella under which I gather the various strands of my practice: films, cassette works, writing, and now a blog called Fully Jazzed. This site brings those things together. If you find something here that interests you, that’s excellent. If not, well … it takes all sorts.