Sightlines Journal, Issue 6: 2024

Welcome to the sixth issue of Sightlines: Filmmaking in the Academy Journal.

This issue of the Sightlines Journal presents a diverse range of screen production research, showcasing the innovative and thought-provoking work being done by practitioner academics in the higher education sector across Australia, the UK and North America. With documentary, experimental film, animation, interactive, installation and screenwriting submissions, these projects demonstrate the breadth of work occurring under the umbrella of screen production research.

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This issue features 13 diverse works with 2 screenplays included alongside 11 projects present as videos. These submissions highlight the importance of making and practical experimentation in driving knowledge production for our discipline. From exploring the performativity of memory through computer-generated animation to examining the nature of grief through sound and memory, these works demonstrate the unique insights that can be gained through hands-on engagement with screen production practices.

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Each work has been peer reviewed by two, and in some cases three, academic peers from the screen production discipline. The editorial team is extremely grateful for the contributions of these peer reviewers who are crucial to the ongoing work of validating academic screen production as a discipline and field of research.

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The format for submissions has been adjusted slightly for this edition, with the word count for research statements increased to 1500 words, up from 500 words in previous issues. We made this adjustment based on feedback from reviewers and submitters with the intention to allow more space for creators to present evidence in support of their arguments and share the insights from their research. We continue the practice of publishing reviews alongside the creative work and research statements. Including researcher responses to the reviewers’ comments adds to the dialogic nature of the process and is an opportunity to ensure clarity in the research findings.

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CURRENT WORKS

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Alastair Hagger’s script for a 4-part television drama series follows the protagonist Dick Turpin, the notorious English criminal highwayman. It taps into the zeitgeist of revisioning of history in popular culture, with the international success of The Favourite, Bridgerton and Australia’s The Great. 

Ferroequinology by Alex Nevill is a cinematic exploration of railroad photography, following two artists across America as they capture the essence of locomotives, passengers, and slow travel. This documentary not only showcases years of collaboration with photographers but also contributes to screen production research by innovatively depicting artistic processes and embodying theoretical investigations into the shared histories of cinema and railroad technologies.

Ataa Alsalloum and Monika Koeck’s evocative video, Uprooted Syrian Heritage Resettled in the UK: Making a New Home, presents testimonies of diaspora Syrians and how these misplaced multicultural communities are adapted to new homeland spaces, exploring the transformation of nostalgic memories. 

Showcasing participatory documentary production as an effective tool for storytelling and social impact, Earthship Freo from Michelle Johnston and Mignon Shardlow, tells of a Fremantle community living sustainably in abandoned houses. The film documents the eviction and demolition of the squatters' residences alongside the activists' struggle against the Department of Main Roads as they tried to preserve stands of endangered, indigenous trees.

In Questioning Creative Practice Human Research Ethics, Catherine Gough-Brady asks how filmmakers can represent research ethics through visual and auditory language. Beginning with her own archive of “orphan images”, she unpacks the relationship between the researcher and the researched through the filmmaking process. 

Cecilia Stenbom explores everyday driving through the lens of the road movie in her moving image installation work, Radio Off. By capturing mundane driving experiences and reimagining them as an alternative road movie, the project offers a critique of automobile culture and challenges the romanticization of road journeys.

Exploring the complexities of motherhood and the intersection of personal and professional life, Emma Piper-Burket's short film, Gather(ed), taps into her research interest in how personal documentary  filmmaking exposes 'precarious states of being'. Drawing on techniques of assemblage, the film is a touching and valuable addition to the corpus of self-reflexive filmmaking.

Jayalakshmi Garrabost’s Dance of the Seasons articulates the cultural links between climate change and Indian cities through the medium of dance, bringing a fresh perspective of the dichotomies and interplay between urbanisation and the traditional Bharatanatyam arts.

Built around a flexible, nodal structure, Queer Representation Matters by Natalie Krikowa is an online documentary that explores the historical and contemporary issues of queer representation in screen media. By examining harmful tropes like ‘bury your gays’ and ‘cancel your gays’, the project advocates for more inclusive and authentic portrayals of LGBTQIA+ individuals in media narratives.

Exploring how computer-generated animation can be used to visualise memories and their affective truths, Nico Meissner’s documentary, Last Seen: Katie Kelly, asks how we ‘see’ in our mind’s eye and how does memory ‘look’. The film focuses on Katie Kelly, a visually impaired Paralympian, and uses animation to bring her last sighted memory to life.

An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It was nominated for the Best Animated Short Academy Award in 2023. It uses self-reflexivity and absurdist humour to deconstruct the filmmaking process and explore deeper philosophical concepts. Through its meta-narrative and protagonist Neil's journey of realisation, the film cleverly reimagines Plato's allegory of the cave in the context of animation, prompting viewers to contemplate the nature of reality, perception, and the creative process itself.

Bird Sounds is an ingenious short film that explores grief through the lens of sound and memory, following an acoustic ecologist's journey to process his son's death via soundscapes and recordings. The film not only delves into the deeply personal experience of loss but also serves as a cinematic experiment in narrative construction, pushing the boundaries of how sound can evoke visual memories and blur the lines between past and present, subjective and objective experiences in storytelling.

With the screenplay, Wild Camping, Suzy Miller reflects on the cinematic aspects of a text that is written for the screen. This involves a consideration of universal themes, genre and ‘connection through containment’, this pertaining to the way that a sparsity of language in the screenplay text might engage the reader as a ‘co-conspirator’. 

A challenge for our discipline lies in developing the infrastructure that will enable creative practice research to be searched, cited, and extended. Sightlines: Filmmaking in the Academy is our ongoing contribution to seeking ways to rise to that challenge. We are grateful for the support of the ASPERA community as submitters, peer reviewers and audiences for the Sightlines journal and conference. We encourage you to watch, read and think on the works presented in this issue and hope that they may spark for you ideas of future directions for your own research journeys.

Thanks to Hannah Brasier for her meticulous work preparing this issue for online publication.