Abstract
This collaborative project aimed to represent the embodied experience of grief in a fiction film by drawing on research, and on the personal and professional experience of all involved: academics; an artist; bereavement therapists and counsellors; and professional actors, cinematographers, sound engineers and other film crew. By representing grief in a more phenomenologically minded manner, the project sought to capture the lived experience of loss on screen while contributing meaningfully to the discourse on practice-as-research. Hay, Dawson and Rosling used a collaborative fiction film and participatory action research to investigate whether storying loss, and representing it through narrative, images and embodied movement, is therapeutic. Participatory action research was beneficial in facilitating changes in the co-researchers’ thinking, feeling and practice, and in enabling participants to inhabit multiple roles in a manner that expanded their disciplinary boundaries. However, while the project’s effect on some of the participants demonstrated the ways that creativity and meaning making can support adaptive grieving, it also revealed the risks of using participatory action research and fiction film to investigate highly emotive topics such as grief.
Highlights
Mainstream fiction cinema often relegates grief to a plot device, offering superficial depictions that fail to capture how it feels to grieve
By representing grief in a more nuanced and phenomenologically minded manner, the project discussed in Hay et al (2019), An Empathetic Realisation of Embodied Grief in Fiction Film, aimed to capture the lived experience of loss in a fiction film while contributing meaningfully to the discourse on practice-as-research
Funded by the Brigstow Institute, University of Bristol, UK, the project was a collaboration between two academics from the University of Bristol – Jimmy Hay from the Film and Television Department and Lesel Dawson from the English Department – and the artist, Natasha Rosling
Summary
Mainstream fiction cinema often relegates grief to a plot device, offering superficial depictions that fail to capture how it feels to grieve. Dawson was primarily concerned with the story and dialogue, whereas Hay and Rosling were attentive to the way that the film would look and sound These differences caused creative tensions in the early meetings, the collaborators moved slowly towards a shared vision of the film that would accommodate all their aims: the narrative remained, but it would be structured around (and expressed via) non-linear, abstract moments where the soundscape and visual content would capture the phenomenology of grief. Dawson and Rosling acted as both researchers and research subjects, integrating their experiences of loss into the film, and examining the impact this had on their grief and creative process This approach fits into the model of participatory action research, in which the impact is ‘embedded in research process’, rather than coming at the end of a project (Banks et al, 2017: 543). What if the film does not achieve what it hoped to achieve? What if the aims are not realized in the way that was intended? as with all practice-asresearch projects, it is the case that the process is as relevant and illuminating as the finished product
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