Constructions of the Real
Constructions of the Real (Book)
Intersections of Documentary-Based Film Practice and Theory
This book is a collection of writing by diverse global documentary and non-fiction filmmakers who explore theory through filmmaking. Their hybrid filmmaking practices bridge industry and the academy, questions binaries, builds new connections between theory and practice, and suggests a new turn to marginalized knowledges. 54 b/w illus.
Edition
Constructions of the Real features a wide range of writing from non-fiction and documentary filmmakers who undertake theoretically informed practice and think through making. These global filmmakers and writers straddle the divide between the academy and industry and they reflect on, interrogate and explicate their filmmaking practices in relationship to questions of form, content, and process.
The book is in four sections. The first is on intimate, first-person works where memory and identity are explored. The second features responses to and interventions in historical and dominant relationships to place. The third explores multivarious forms of essay films. In the final section, filmmakers discuss the precarity of non-fiction filmmaking in its form and financial rewards. This book is anti-colonial, in that it offers diverse new voices and new practices promoting hybridity and experimentation and makes claims for knowledges that fall outside of traditional scholarship. This book presents the silenced and the marginalized.
It engages with current debates about the role of creative scholarship and makes a claim for non-fiction filmmaking as a knowledge-making practice for revealing, critiquing, and interpreting the world.
Contributors include Kaveh Abbasian, Judith Aston, Nicholas Andueza, Elisabeth Brun, Joanna Callaghan, Gerda Cammaer, Philip Cartelli, Lorena Cervera, Jill Daniels, Kath Dooley, Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, Andréa França, Catherine Gough-Brady, Robert Hardcastle, Alex Johnston, Elizabeth Miller, Ros Mortimer, Kim Munro, Minou Norouzi, Stefano Odorico, Rebecca Ora, Sheersha Perera, Christine Rogers, Isabel Seguí, Jeni Thornley and Masha Vlasova.
Christine Rogers is a Pākehā/Ngāi Tahu filmmaker, scholar and textile artist whose work explores belonging and identity.
Kim Munro is a documentary maker and lecturer in digital media at the University of South Australia.
Liz Burke is a filmmaker and documentary producer who teaches producing at Swinburne University of Technology.
Catherine Gough-Brady is an award-winning documentary producer and director who explores the relational nature of filmmaking in her research.
List of Figures
Foreword
Judith Aston and Stefano Odorico
Thinking through Making in Non-Fiction Film
Christine Rogers, Kim Munro, Liz Burke and Catherine Gough-Brady
PART 1: THIS LENS MY EYE: FIRST PERSON, ETHNOGRAPHIC AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FILMMAKING
Christine Rogers
1. The Enigma of Film – ‘Memory Film: A Filmmaker’s Diary’
Jeni Thornley
2. Psychogeographical Choreography: On Filming Hand-Held
Masha Vlasova
3. Remaking Absurd Pictures
Rebecca Ora/rora
4. Creating/Recreating Memory: Cultural Menstruation Rituals through the Making of the Hybrid Documentary Big Girl
Sheersha Perera
5. Phantom Limbs and Failed Messages: A Phenomenological Provocation of First Person Film
Joanna Callaghan
6. Korimako and Macrocarpa Trees: Exploring Māori Experiences of Place through a Lens
Christine Rogers
PART 2: CONTESTED PLACES: FROM COLONIZATION TO CO-CREATION
Kim Munro
7. Interrogating Power and Unsettling Relations to Place in Documentary
Elizabeth Miller and Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz
8. Acclimations: Speculations on Making Documentary in the Climate Emergency
Kim Munro
9. In Search of Ambiguity
Philip Cartelli
10. Can Sound Be Used to Challenge the Colonial Legacies of Silent Archival Film?
Robert Hardcastle
11. Fraught Narratives, Archival Traces: Documentary Experiments in Carceral History
Alexander Johnston
PART 3: THE EXPANDED ESSAY FILM: THINKING WITH IMAGES AND SOUNDS
Liz Burke
12. Cinematic Aesthetics of Resistance: Reframing the Non-fiction Oppositional Film
Jill Daniels
13. Flaunting Artifice: Restaging History as Critical Fabulation in The Deathless Woman
Roz Mortimer
14. Tracing Yugoslavia: The Use of Narrative Time and Narrative Space to Re-Vision a Disappeared lieux de memoire (Memory-Site)
Mila Turajlic
15. The Creative Ti(d)es of Sea-Changes: Musings on the Making of an Eco-Avant-Doc
Gerda Cammaer
16. Weaving Fragments Together: Narrative and the Korsakow-Based Film
Liz Burke
17. The Expanded Essay Film: The Researcher-Filmmaker as a Topographical Thinker
Elisabeth Brun
PART 4: NOTICING THE FRAME AND THE FORM
Catherine Gough-Brady
18. Refugee Filmmaking: Finding Agency through the Lens
Kaveh Abbasian
19. Passeio Público: The Life of Images and the Irresistible Fascination of Archival Film
Andréa França and Nicholas Andueza
20. #PrecarityStory: Academic Casualization and Feminist Filmmaking
Lorena Cervera and Isabel Seguí
21. Exploring Viewer Positioning and Attention Cues in a Cinematic Virtual Reality Documentary: A Creative Research Project
Kath Dooley
22. Not Another Moment of Your Salvation: Documentary, Art Practice and Their Empathic Misadventures
Minou Norouzi
23. Three Questions: A Practitioner’s Approach to the Documentary Form
Catherine Gough-Brady
Notes on Contributors
