All of my life I have been drawn to film. My mother always loved to tell the story of the time that she took me to see my first full feature filmâI was only three years old. She was especially amazed and proud of how I behaved, recalling that I was so entranced with the main feature that I stood up in my seat totally transfixed for the entire film. All my life I have also been fascinated with family stories. I loved to hear my grandmother tell me tales from her youth in England and the early days in Australia. I would spend hours poring over her old photosâI was insatiable. In addition to my love of verbal stories, I have also been an obsessive reader. By grade eight I had read all the books available to me in the school library. I attribute this love of reading to my mother who, as an avid reader, introduced me to all the classic writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Emile Zola, Jane Austen and so many more. My mother was also an ardent filmgoer. I think she saw every Hollywood film ever made and considered herself a worthy critic and judge of film quality, so from a very early age I developed a real love for film, which also spawned a passion for acting. While pursuing these passions, I also developed a love of learning and studying, and excelled academically at school. Already by an early age Iâd experienced a real pull between my creative drive and academic pursuits. At secondary school, because of my academic ability, I was guided into the sciences with a prospective career in medicine or law, little heed was paid to my protestations at this career path, and my desire to pursue the stage or filmmaking was disregarded. Moreover, I was steered away from studying art as it was considered unsuitable for clever students. It was deemed a waste of time as this study did not help significantly in gaining access to university. My school was not fortunate enough to have drama or media classes so I had to pursue my dream of acting outside of school hours. In my final year of high school, I decided to drop the sciences in favor of the humanities and when considering university entrance, rather than apply for the more prestigious academic courses, I enrolled in creative arts, drama and film production, much to many peoplesâ horror and disbelief. In Australia, such creative arts have always held a somewhat lower status than the sciences as a field of endeavor and prestige.
While studying at university I was initially daunted by the technicalities presented by filmmaking but as I progressed, my love of this art developed and I chose to pursue this path rather than an acting career. Upon graduating I began directing documentaries for a government film unit. I just loved this work; however I was always plagued with an inner need to satisfy my thirst for knowledge and academic endeavors so, while working as a filmmaker, I studied part-time in art and film history and theory. However, even in this pursuit there emerged a sense of contradiction and conflict for meâwhat was more important, the practice or the theory? Where would I be most happy? Eventually I became an academic filmmaking teacher, which I discuss in greater detail in Chapter 3 of this book. Even in this role I was reluctant to identify as an academic, instead, I always preferred to think of myself as a filmmaker. It was through the process of my practice-based Ph.D. that I started to feel more comfortable with my academic status. It is this struggle that forms the heart of this bookâa struggle that is of great concern to many practice-based researchers. I have asked fellow practice-based research colleagues how they identify themselves when meeting people for the first time and how they explain what they do. Many prefer to identify themselves as artists or practitioners rather than as academics even though they are high-level researchers.
I had two main purposes in mind when writing this book. On one hand I wanted to discuss and share my journey toward becoming a filmmaking researcher, and on the other (and as equally important) I wanted to explore and share my practice of passion, which has been devoted to creating images that are a response to my main research question: How does a filmmaker create images that elicit memories in a viewer? In writing this book Iâve also had a primary audience in mind. Firstly, my audience is practitioners (particularly filmmakers because thatâs what I know best) who find themselves working in the academy and are either afraid or skeptical of academic research and who are reluctant to lose their status as filmmakers/practitioners. They often fear the tag âPeople who can do people who canât teach.â As Wilson 1 suggests, âart could never be totally constrained by its âivory towersâ, actual or imagined,â artistic researchers who enthusiastically pursue their practice in close compliance with traditional scholarly research models or non-arts objectives may alienate themselves from their identity as an artist. They may be left with a feeling that such work is stuck between a rock and a hard place; it is neither valued by wider audiences nor by research communities. Also, I am writing for students approaching practice-based, post-graduate research and who may feel that denser texts are more difficult to navigate and would find a personal story useful and reassuring.
I have always adopted a personal approach to writing about my research by using first-person tense to tell a story. By doing this, I aim to be authentic and open and hope that my story will resonate with my readers and encourage them on their way forward. At the same time, I want to share my creative work with other practitioners and academics who are also involved in memory work or who use memories as a focus of their practice. In order to tell my story, I explore a range of sources. I draw on work that has been published before and reworked for this book as well as newly written material. This book offers a fresh look at the various practice-based research projects I have produced and I revisit them to consolidate common themes that have emerged over the past decade or so. Some of the material presented here has been used as the basis for journal articles, but I have combined and re-presented the material in a fresh way for this book. (These previous articles are noted and acknowledged where necessary.) I also draw on the voices of other practice-based researchers, academics, artists and filmmakers who have influenced me greatly over this journey. I have arranged the chapters in a loose chronological order that demonstrates how my research projects have developed and led to the next iteration. They also may be read out of order as each chapter is relatively self-contained and has its own list of references.
In Chapter 2, I begin by offering the reader a summary of the historical emergence of filmmaking research, a subset of screen production research. âScreen production research has been loosely defined as the study of the creation of audio-visual works that are disseminated on or with screens. The term âscreen productionâ has emerged through Australian scholarship, elsewhereâ for example, it is known as screen or media practice, filmmaking or video production. As in other creative disciplines, screen production draws on creative practice research enquiries that are described in a number of different ways, including practice-led research, practice-as-research, practice-based research and research-led practice.â 2 It is the practice-based research that I am concerned with. I contextualize this and situate the practice-based researcher within the current university setting. I then go on to present definitions of practice-based research that appear in the literature, which I suggest can be quite confusing and are indeed predicated on what constitutes research. I discuss the debate around whether film work can be considered as stand-alone research or whether it needs to be supported by the written response and what form this written response could take. Filmmaking as research definitions have been slower to emerge than the more general arts-based research, which has been led by art, music and performance. I then proceed to discuss my own approach to practice-based research and the way I have come to adopt the methodologies that I use, particularly autoethnography and narrative inquiry. In order to do this, I explore my journey from practitioner to researcher and how this has emerged and developed. I discuss my early introduction to Schön and reflective practice that provides the core of much practice-based research. Chapter 2 does not portend to be definitive but is rather an overview. I suggest that readers who want to delve further into this area may wish to consult the references I have supplied in greater depth.
In Chapter 3, I call upon the work of a significant author on filmmaki...