Filmmaking Practices Research Articles

Screenwriting, Industry, and Power. Review of Steven Maras Scenariul De Film. Istorie, Teorie Și Practică

The review explores the translation and significance of Steven Maras’s Screenwriting: History, Theory, and Practice into Romanian, emphasizing its relevance within the global academic and filmmaking landscape. Maras’s theoretical approach, influenced by Foucault and cultural studies, offers insights applicable beyond Hollywood, including to Romanian filmmaking practices. Despite differences between Hollywood and Romanian cinema, Maras’s work prompts critical reflection on power dynamics, institutional influences, and the visibility of screenwriters. It aids teaching by focusing it towards understanding screenwriting as a blueprint for production, highlighting the industrial dimensions of the craft.

What sits, what sticks: moving into lived, disruptive, co-produced filmmaking practices in literacy classrooms

ABSTRACT This article examines two ethnographers’ fieldwork with young people applying co-production film-making methods and three ways to approach youth-led filmmaking work for researchers and educators. Implicit to our argument is a belief, based on several multimodal projects, that filmmaking consolidates literacy skills and gives young people a more expansive, lived, and at times disruptive sense of literacy learning. In this special issue focusing on research into children’s language, literacy and literature, we give readers a way to take forward a living literacies approach to film work in 3–13 literacy teaching and learning.

Conformação narrativa em <i>Longa Despedida</i>

The following article discusses the aesthetic configurations involved in the cinematic construction of The Long Farewell (1971), directed by Kira Muratova. The objective is to position the film within the concepts of modern cinema and auteur cinema. To complement this, the methodology incorporates film analysis and research on creative processes, allowing for the concretization and emphasis of thought elements from the material and practice of filmmaking. To achieve this, historical trends and components of mise-en-scène are analyzed, together with testimonies and interviews of those involved in the creative process, resulting in two parts: the first part dedicated to gathering data on historical events, and the second part aiming to analyze the stylistic principles in an attempt to understand them as the authentic imaginative thought of the filmmaker.

Dreamers of the Day and the Living Archive of 1990s Lesbian Cinema in Canada

In this article we reflect on our experiences researching and curating a Canadian lesbian feature film, Dreamers of the Day (1990, dirs. Patricia Rivera Spencer and Philip Wood). We explore how a community-driven approach to archival research is necessary for investigating low-budget lesbian films such as this, and in turn, should inform accompanying curatorial practices. When screening lesser-known queer films, the community networks necessary to their creation and then later for their preservation tend to be overlooked in favor of celebrating the accomplishments of an individual director. If curators of queer film focus exclusively on the finished product and exhibit only remarkable films, they risk missing works that speak to queer filmmaking practices and the importance of these histories to queer community-building. To counteract these investments, we instead consider how strategies of collaboration can inform filmmaking, research methods, and curatorial practices, illuminating the relational networks that make queer art possible.

Collaboration in documentary filmmaking and its discontents: Reflections from the field

AbstractCollaborative practice can sometimes be flawed and exploitative. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork within an Indian Muslim women's organization, my article examines the co‐creative practice and its pitfalls and what it ultimately reveals about reflexivity and the politics of (self)representation. I discuss how my attempt at making a collaborative/co‐authored film project with my research participants became difficult to realize in its theoretical and methodological intent, for the collaborators inevitably fall across different positionalities and accesses to power. Rather than succeeding at co‐writing the film, the experience revealed how the power dynamics can be even more pronounced in collaborative filmmaking practice.

Past Forward: Holocaust Testimony in Documentary Film

Abstract This paper addresses the use of oral history sources in my practice of documentary filmmaking as a second-generation Holocaust survivor. It examines how the filmic documentation of oral history sources can reflect aspects of testimony, memory, and postmemory, as they are theorized in the field of Holocaust Studies. In my film “Past Forward: Journeys to Transnistria,” I document the challenge of relating an intergenerational and cross-cultural story while preserving historical accuracy. Filmed in Ukraine in 2002, it tells the story of my mother, a child-survivor of the Romanian Holocaust. Through oral testimony, the film captures my mother’s survival story as she tells it to me and later to her granddaughter who documents it for a history school project. It then retraces my mother’s journey between 1941 and 1944 from her hometown of Dorohoi, Romania to Transnistria as it was called then under German-allied Romanian occupation. Survivor’s testimony combined with onsite witness interviews, and an archival military map, were used to trace the story of a little Jewish Romanian girl who survived the journey to Transnistria. Recently available archival sources have further validated her story. It has also contributed to locating the film within the broader context of the Holocaust in Ukraine.

The Rise of Cinematic Santri in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: Figure, Field and the Competing Discourse

This article examines the past decade’s cinematic rise among young pious Muslims (santri) affiliated with Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia’s largest traditionalist Muslim group. It focuses on the social actors, the fields of cultural production, and the competing discourse central to this rise. Its main argument frames the santri’s turn to cinema as symbolic of various changes and continuities in multiple sectors of NU society’s life. It then situates the fields and discourses of the santri’s cinematic practices in the broader set of power relations, consisting of different, at times conflicting, identities and interests that come with being pious Muslims in public domains. To the extent that the efficacy of filmmaking practices and technologies has enhanced the rivalrous inclination of Islam in the post-Suharto Indonesian public sphere, the article offers an insight into the relationship between image-making practices and the politics of representation in a Southeast Asian Islam context.

The making of All That Is Buried: dialog, chronotope and decoloniality

ABSTRACT This article argues for the utility of Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theories in developing dialogic and decolonial filmmaking practices. Using the example of our research-led documentary film, All That Is Buried, we challenge traditionally hierarchical structures of film production in which primary authorship lies with the Director/Producer, by implementing dialogic methods of co-creation between filmmakers, researchers and participants. We explain how Bakhtin’s work on dialogism, chronotope, transgredience, polyphony and participative thinking provides the production and filmic tools and methods to host the distinct and equal voices of the South African creatives featured in the film – Zizipho Bam, Sindiswa Busuku, Haroon Gunn-Salie, and Dizu Plaatjies – maintaining throughout a sense of shared and equal investment in the project, and ethical responsibility to the collective. All That Is Buried shows the four participants discussing their work, ideas and experiences as they move between their homes, places of work, sites of inspiration, and artistic installations in and around Cape Town over the course of a day. In both process and product, we demonstrate how our co-creative methods support, and are supported by, practices of decolonial filmmaking, and provide a model useful and replicable for capturing Arts and Humanities research on film.

UNDERSTANDING COLLABORATIVE DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING PRACTICE AS A METHODOLOGY FOR EXPLORING PARTICIPANT PERSPECTIVES OF PLACE IN AREAS OF LOW SOCIAL MOBILITY

Documentary filmmaking practitioners have long engaged with socio-political narratives within a given society, and whether as a tool for creative exploration, aesthetic engagement, an ethnographic methodology or to greater understand the form of the medium itself, documentary filmmaking practice has demanded increased recognition from within the academy during the 21st century. It is, however, only in more recent developments of thought that serious consideration has been given to documentary’s potential to engage collaboratively with participants in an active and meaningful manner. This paper aims to frame emerging trends in documentary filmmaking within the context of collaborative practice methods, establishing how such methods can be used to engage participants with creative explorations of the relationship between people, place and the socio-political. Taking the phenomena of low levels of social mobility in the North Midlands (Social Mobility Commission, 2017) as a case study, I have been engaging with my own practice as a documentary maker to produce original filmic work with the aim of contributing towards debates currently taking place within the academic study of the medium. My research over recent years has attempted to interrogate the creative, theoretical, practical, and ethical challenges faced by the socially engaged documentarian producing work within the contemporary context of the field. Through examining my own ongoing research alongside that of others in the field, I propose that documentary filmmaking practice could, and perhaps should, re-align the focus and consideration of its impact to include participants, not just audiences, by engaging with methods of co-production and active collaboration. In doing so, practitioners can begin to engage with, and challenge, the established notion of an inherent imbalance of power within the participant/practitioner relationship (Nash, 2012), with the aim of moving towards a more meaningful collaborative engagement.

Indigenous filmmaking practices: healing in times of climate crises

The psychological impacts of the climate crisis and its triggers can have long-lasting consequences for public mental health. Many indigenous communities have an in-depth understanding of these impacts, and some of their filmmakers have depicted them through their audiovisual work. By challenging colonial perspectives, these indigenous filmmakers offer invaluable insights into how communities might navigate into adaptation and recovery to cope with the challenges brought about by climate change. Unfortunately, audiovisual work has often been overlooked in climate-related disaster studies despite its significant contributions. Drawing on community-based feminism and the decolonial turn, I sought to explore the healing practices employed by communities in Upper Xingu, Brazil, through the practice of indigenous filmmaker Takumã Kuikuro. To achieve this, I drew on audiovisual analysis of Takumã Kuikuro’s documentaries and records (short videos) from the decolonial panorama. Additionally, I conducted semi-structured interviews with the filmmaker and three members of the People’s Palace Projects, who have worked closely with Takumã, culminating in a validation meeting. I highlight three key findings for this article: (i) healing through rituals as esthetic and ethical-sacred practices within the territory, (ii) bodies in collectivism, and (iii) cascading effects on healing audiences: weaving networks from reciprocities. In seeking a discussion of the findings, I contend that there is an inextricable bond between the community-based healing responses to the climate crisis shown by Takumã’s lenses and the Politics of the Bodies proposed by the Colombian philosopher Laura Quintana, allowing us to frame the decolonial understanding of healing as a political and collective action both within and with territories. Therefore, placing the indigenous cinema as a source of knowledge will enable us to bring community-based discussions that disaster risk reduction has neglected due to its embeddedness in epistemic injustice, from which at-risk communities have been predominantly seen as incapable of knowing their geographies. The rituals and collaborative practices grounded in reciprocity demonstrate forms of adaptation in which mental health becomes a collective responsibility woven into nature at its core.

‘One Eye for Worship and One Eye for Entertainment’: Engaging with Islam in Hyderabad’s Production Locations

Hyderabadi cinema or Deccani cinema refers to films produced in the South Indian city of Hyderabad in the Deccani language, and the Muslim-dominated region of the city serves as its narrative centre. Combining interviews and field notes from ethnographic data, this piece reflects on the perspectives of Muslim filmmakers in Hyderabad on their everyday practices of Islam and filmmaking. In the Indian context, where language acts as an adjective for film, these Deccani films are produced in a language similar to Urdu, which is popular among various Muslim communities in South India. Too small to call an industry, this production culture developed in close proximity to the Telugu film industry, one of the leading film industries in India, which has its capital placed in the same city of Hyderabad. Based on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between December 2021 and November 2022, this article takes the reader to Sensation Insomnia, a movie theatre in Hyderabad that acts as a major production location for multiple low-budget films made after the pandemic. While travelling through production locations with Siraj Ahmed, one of the leading producers and exhibitors of Hyderabadi cinema, and conversing with some actors and crew members from Hyderabadi films, in this fieldwork piece, I try to understand how they view their Muslimness and their engagement of film production as Muslims in the context of Islamic principles and everyday acts.

Reconfiguring the use of video in qualitative research through practices of filmmaking: A post-qualitative cinematic analysis

The article shows how film can disrupt human-centred discourses about the use of video technology in qualitative research. Inspired in particular by Deleuze's film philosophy, a detailed analysis of an “ordinary” event in an early-childhood institution gestures at some of the possibilities that the manipulation of technology can offer. Filmmaking practices, such as framing, tracking, speed changes, reverse motion and use of sound, shape what counts as “data” and offer alternative modes of analysis that include more-than-human bodies. These playful techniques draw attention to how video technology can play a democratising role in qualitative research by paying more attention to the digital, the sensory and the visual and relying less on language as the mode of enquiry. Grounded in post-qualitative approaches of performativity, we indicate the radical implications of the ontological and epistemological paradigmatic shift in agency and causality when disrupting anthropocentrism in qualitative research.

The Prospect of Art-Science Interplay in Filmmaking as Research: From Abstract to Implicit Film

Abstract The neuroscientific and psychological use of fiction films for clinical and academic research is growing. However, artistic research using insights from these fields to advance the filmmaking practice is still in its infancy. Expanding on the author’s previous Leonardo publication proposing the use of scientific hypothesis formation for overcoming filmmaking uncertainty, this artistic research explores the feasibility of integrating scientific findings of abstract and ambiguous image perception to create a novel abstract filmmaking method. This research aims to revive the classical abstract film genre into an implicit cinematic experience.

The Creative Film Practices of Amanda Strong and Rhayne Vermette

In light of their current doctoral studies in the areas of film and Métis history, Jessie Ray Short proposes a theoretical framework for Métis Film Studies. Considering the work of Métis filmmakers Amanda Strong and Rhayne Vermette, as well as briefly exploring their own filmmaking practice, Short explores the ways in which Indigenous Storywork might be effectively be tailored and applied to the understanding of Métis film.

Introduction: ‘Different (Everyone is So)’: conceptualisations of Russian and Russophone queer cinema in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT In the introduction I conceptualise cinematic narratives of difference and queerness, and the ways in which the queer lens has been used in contemporary Russian and Russophone cinema to interrogate cultural politics, identity and belonging. I also demonstrate how a queer optic facilitates discussions about the complexity of the terms ‘Russian’ and ‘Russophone’ vis-à-vis other cultural identities and queer subjectivities, emphasising the transnational, poly-cultural nature of Russian culture, with queer individuals playing an important role in de-colonising ‘Russia’. In particular, I discuss spaces and geographies of queer experience in relation to new centres and practices of filmmaking in the RF. I showcase the diversity of queer cinematic expressions, pointing at the ways in which the canon of Russian cinema could be revised. The interdisciplinary, multi-scalar analysis interrogates a range of discourses – academic, film criticism, media and politics – and phenomena such as cultural industry and institutions, cultural politics, sociology of queerness, and technology. Making use of a number of examples, I put forward a vision for a theory of contemporary Russian and Russophone queer cinema which expands the knowledge of (world) queer cinemas and (queer) world cinemas.

Making “Women's News”: French Feminists of la Femme nouvelle (1934–36) and the Newsreel Magazine Actualités féminines

Abstract This article demonstrates how the interwar French suffragist organization la Femme nouvelle used the platform of the newsreel to make political claims through its collaboration with Pathé’s newsreel magazine Actualités féminines or Women's News. Through the filming of their political actions and educational segments edited together in their newsreel compilation film, Le film de la Femme nouvelle (dir. la Femme nouvelle, France, 1935), the suffragists, led by Louise Weiss, frame themselves as essential workers, fearless political actors, and perfect housewives. These contradictions reveal a strategic manipulation of their gender identity to obtain the vote at all costs. Newsreel making provided the feminists an avenue for political claimsmaking beyond electoral politics. These filmed accounts of their actions give the spectator a sense of being present at the event, which is missing from written accounts of la Femme nouvelle's history. Through this aesthetic liveness, achieved through camera placement and staging in crowd scenes, the suffragists were able to portray themselves as vital political actors. One such filmed protest from 12 May 1935 provides a compelling account of their filmmaking practice, in which the activists march on la place de la Bastille in chains, then break their chains and put them in a bonfire. The French Revolution, referenced by this action, was a popular analogy for the Left, as seen in the film La marseillaise (dir. Jean Renoir, France, 1937). Le film de la Femme nouvelle is significant because it allows for an alternate, feminist history of political filmmaking in the period.

Messy Knowledge-Making with Korsakow

This paper explores interactive documentary production's power dynamics and knowledge-making practices through the ethnographic case study of Christoph, a white media scientist and trained film editor from a Western European country. Christoph's research project, conducted as part of an international and multidisciplinary team, dealt with discourses surrounding a specific restitution case in an African country. The study focuses on Christoph's use of the Korsakow software to create an interactive documentary, examining the complexities he encountered in the field and his efforts to represent them in a powercritical manner. Throughout the production process, Christoph attempted to address power relations by making himself visible in the documentary and ensuring that his authorial influence remained minimal during the film's assembly. He employed a two-fold strategy that included acquiring shaky footage without a tripod and utilizing materials that might be deemed unusable in traditional production environments. Christoph's use of Korsakow as a tool for assembling his interactive documentary served to represent the complexities he found in the field. Despite Christoph's powercritical aspirations, he acknowledged the potential bias inherent in the keywording process, stressing the importance of actively pursuing powercritique as a practice. Korsakow, as an interactive and nonlinear tool, offered an experimental environment in which Christoph could explore alternative ways of filmmaking and knowledge-making. This environment facilitated the development of open, complex, and messy practices, challenging conventional filmmaking norms. This case study raises questions about the knowledge-making practices found in interactive documentaries and how they can inform visual research methodologies. Further research may delve into the methodological implications of these findings and the potential for interactive documentary software to serve as a laboratory for experimental filmmaking practices. By examining Christoph's use of Korsakow and his efforts to navigate power dynamics in creating an interactive documentary, this paper contributes to the broader understanding of knowledge-making in non-linear and interactive film environments.

Eden and Eastern European Ecocinema

The rise of the ecological point of view in Eastern European societies is undoubtedly one of the defining trends of the early 21st century, generating continuous changes in all fields of life, from agricultural production to consumption habits to contemporary visual culture. We are witnessing a gradual but large-scale cultural transformation, the understanding of which is a major challenge for contemporary academic research. In this paper, I will attempt to understand these changes in the field of film culture: I will examine to what extent the rise of the ecocritical approach is something new in Hungarian filmmaking, to what extent it draws on established film traditions, and in what respect it rewrites the established procedures and approaches of local filmmaking traditions. The starting point for my investigation is Ágnes Kocsis’s film Eden (Éden 2020), which can be considered as the first eco-feature-film in Hungarian. A comparison of Eden with Kocsis’s previous feature films highlights the cinematic effects and consequences of this new approach, as well as the way in which our changing understanding of the relationship between human beings and the biosphere may be transforming the practice of filmmaking.

Ecologies of Embodiment: Video Essays II

Dominique Rivoal, "The Shared Space of Hackney Marshes" (9:04). My aim as the filmmaker is to develop a somatically informed film-making practice, investigating how attending to soma while operating my camera, can further reveal aspects of relationality within the filmmaker and mover dyad and environment that contains us. // Daniel Portelli, "What the River Doesn't Say About Itself" (9:55). Along a river surrounded by branches and root systems of a mangrove forest, musicians drift on a boat performing music and engaging in eco-acoustical awareness, sensory activation, and perceptual openness. This video essay inquiries into the relationship between cinematic art and how we experience ecology. // Florian Goeschke, "Of Speeds and Slownesses: Co-composing with a Giant Snail" (6:18). The video essay reflects the process of co-composing with a giant snail. What began as a lecture in the context of an online conference for Artistic Research turned out to be a multi-layered phenomenon in dealing with the question of one's own time and temporality and that of another species. // Fani Kostourou and Takako Hasegawa with Theatrum Mundi and Dancing Architects, "Embodied Understanding of Spatial Transformation" (8:55). This is an excerpt montage from a longer film work documenting the choreographic movement research and spatial observation experiments that took place during Theatrum Mundi’s Movement Lisbon Lab in October 2021, to address Lisbon’s uneven and seemingly inaccessible urban landscape.

Documentary film practice at the Institute of Film and Television, Ghana: truth claims, oral histories and documentary strategies

This article explores a case study of how documentary film practice is taught at the Institute of Film and Television, Ghana. Drawing on the practices of its authors – themselves documentary film-makers and former students of the institute – we explore some of the contemporary challenges facing how we approach the theory and practice of documentary film-making in contemporary Ghana, including how our students might best approach contested conceptions of the truth, and how such notions of the truth may be articulated within Ghana’s living oral traditions.