Martin Brady

German and European cinema (in particular Brechtian, materialist, and difficult films); literary adaptation; documentary cinema; intermediality; foraging; disability and performance; brutalist architecture; Joseph Beuys; the prohibition of images in film, painting, and music.

Dr Brady has published on film (the literary adaptations of Straub-Huillet, Michael Haneke's Benny's Video, Robert Bresson, experimental film, literary adaptation, GDR documentarists Barbara and Winfried Junge, Kafka films, Adorno and cinema, Brechtian cinema, Edgar Reitz's Heimat 3, Downfall, the documentaries of Ulrich Seidl), music (Arnold Schönberg and film), literature (Paul Celan), Jewish exile architects (Berthold Lubetkin and Ernö Golodfinger), and the portrayal of thalidomide in film and performance.

A book on the collaborative films of Wim Wenders and Peter Handke, co-authored with Joanne Leal, was published by Rodopi in 2011. An article on foraging in the works of Stifter, Handke, and Beuys was published in 2012, a chapter on Anselm Kiefer appeared in 2013 and recent in 2014/15 he has published on GDR children's films, Elfriede Jelinek, Paul Dessau and Straub-Huillet.

He has translated Victor Klemperer’s  LTI, Alexander Kluge’s Cinema Stories (with Helen Hughes), co-translated Kluge and Negt's History and Obstinacy (with Hughes, Richard Langston and others) and works as a freelance translator for film.

Current research projects include: Joseph Beuys; brutalist architecture; Paul Dessau and Bertolt Brecht; the "BRD Trilogy" of Straub and Huillet.

Born in London, Martin Brady studied German and Art History at St Andrews University. After two years at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich on a DAAD scholarship he wrote his PhD thesis at King’s College on the Heinrich Böll adaptations of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. He began teaching at Kings in 1986 and has taught at the Royal Academy of Music and Royal Holloway and Bedford New College. He works freelance as a translator and interpretor (for Michael Haneke, Alexander Kluge, Ulrich Seidl and others), has programmed and introduced films at the Goethe-Institut London and in Manchester, Cambridge, Glasgow, Plymouth, Ipswich, Chichester. He is also active as a visual and performance artist.