Dr. Kath Dooley, Curtin University
Professor Craig Batty, University of Technology Sydney
Phillipa Burne, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne
Dr. Bettina Frankham, University of Technology Sydney
Dr. Margaret McVeigh, Griffith Film School, Griffith University
This special issue of Refractory features a collection of ten articles that began life as presentations at the 2018 annual Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (ASPERA) conference, held at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, from June 27 to 29. The conference theme of ‘Screen Interventions’ asked presenters and attendees to consider the ways in which screen production can be used to ‘intervene’ in wider cultural, social and political ideas and debates. For example, how might interventions be made with, by and/or for the screen; what interventions have already taken place in screen production, education and research? Over the course of the three days, these questions were explored by a community of practitioners, scholars and other industry professionals, with ongoing conversations highlighting the successes and challenges for the discipline.
In the background of the ASPERA conference, the year of 2018 has seen considerable cultural and social change for the screen industries at both a local and a global level, as well as continued technological upheaval. Notably, the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault that began in late 2017 has continued to gather steam, bringing the experience of female screen practitioners into the spotlight. The new awareness that this movement fostered has led to a number of local interventions aimed at improving female participation rates and experience, such as the establishment of the Screen Australia ‘Gender Matters Taskforce’, a group of 17 high-profile screen industry leaders assisting in the achievement of gender equality in the screen industry. This subject was taken up by a panel of female academic and industry representatives at the ASPERA conference, who considered ‘Gendered Interventions in Industry’. Panelists questioned the experience of female students at universities while also considering the interventions that film and media schools can make to help achieve more effective gender-equity.
Also notable in 2018, is that the Australian screen industry responded to uncertainty bought about by a parliamentary inquiry into the sustainability of the film and television industry by launching the ‘Make it Australian’ campaign. Led by four major industry guilds – Screen Producers Australia, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the Australian Directors Guild and the Australian Writers Guild – the campaign called for the reform of local content rules to include digital platforms alongside traditional broadcasters, for increased government funding for film and television producers and for the modernisation of production incentives. An open letter to parliamentarians, published on March 26, was signed by leading industry practitioners, including director Tony Ayres, who delivered a keynote presentation at the 2018 ASPERA conference. This letter outlined the need for government intervention to prevent Australian stories from disappearing amidst a glut of overseas content.[1]
As Australia’s peak body for screen production research and education, ASPERA continues to strengthen and promote the discipline by interrogating and reporting on a range of issues, such as measures of research quality and excellence. At the 2018 conference, members of ASPERA’s Research Sub-Committee presented a panel titled ‘Exploring a new era of screen production research: Laying foundations for engagement and impact’. This session questioned how the creative practice researcher might frame and measure their research as a product with economic, social and other benefits. This discussion follows on from a Screen Production Research Engagement and Impact Symposium held by ASPERA at the University of Technology Sydney in late 2017. This event mapped practitioner assumptions about the nature of engagement and impact against Australian Research Council (ARC) measures. A report on this symposium can be found in the most recent edition of Studies in Australasian Cinema.[2]
Other attendees at the 2018 ASPERA conference responded to the conference theme by presenting research that highlighted interventions in screen production practices, approaches to research and pedagogy. For example, practitioner scholars interrogated their methods of creating character in screen works, and on a related note, explored the function of screenwriting as a means of social intervention. Ethical aspects of documentary production and representation were discussed, with some presentations exploring issues surrounding gender and/or cultural identity. Digital effects and the 360-degree virtual reality medium were examined in a session focusing on technological interventions.
The articles featured in this special issue evidence the breadth of work that is currently being undertaken by screen production researchers. The collection opens with “Filmmaking Research Network: Surveying films, peers and creative practice”, an article in which Susan Kerrigan and James Verdon report upon and analyse the work of filmmaking researchers across 24 countries. The Australian/UK based Filmmaking Research Network conducted an online survey collecting qualitative and statistical data about filmmaking researchers’ activities in 2017. The qualitative results, which are interrogated by the authors, detail what can be learnt about the activities and capacity of the screen production sector that operates within the academy. This useful overview of activity is followed by two creative practice case studies. Christine Rogers’s article, “Putting the ghost back in: Making rich meaning in video work”, presents her journey towards the creation of John Arnett – Five Properties, a screen work that addresses issues of cultural identity by exploring the New Zealand properties that her great-great-grandfather John Arnett bequeathed to his children in 1895. Rogers outlines her working methodology of autoethnography, and also discusses how the notions of hauntology and post memory informed the creation of her work. On a related note, Joseph Grogan’s article “Finding my story: Exploring cultural identity in Ten Canoes to inform my PhD screenplay about my Kiribati birthplace” discusses the writing of an original screenplay with a focus on the script development process. The author looks to the critically acclaimed Australian film Ten Canoes (de Heer and Dijigirr) as a reference point for the exploration of indigenous cultural identity. Grogan notes the film’s style of storytelling, and its presentation of language, landscape and ritual, which have emerged as key parallels that inform the writing of his screenplay project.
The special issue then moves from the subject of screenwriting as creative practice to two articles featuring analysis of the screenplay form. Firstly, Margaret McVeigh explores “Theme and complex narrative structure in HBO’s Big Little Lies (2017)”. Drawing upon narrative analysis and screenwriting theory, she explores how the themes of domestic violence and bullying are used to drive the narrative of the above mentioned ‘complex television’ series. In the article following, “O Quatrilho: The process of adapting a Brazilian period drama novel for the screen”, Clarissa Miranda interrogates interviews with the author of the successful novel Quatrilho (1985), José Clemente Pozenato, and with screenwriter Antonio Calmon, making reference to the concept of intersemiotic translation.
In the context of the previously mentioned #MeToo movement, the sixth special issue article by Sarah Stollman presents “The object’s gaze: Recalibrating gendered gazes in screen narrative in Riddles of the Sphinx and Awavena”. This article explores the functions and characteristics of a screen object, suggesting that an object gaze emerges as a result of the articulation of object details or its positioning on screen. With reference to Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), and Lynette Wallworth’s virtual reality work Awavena (2017), Stollman proposes the object’s gaze as an intervention that can destabilise the notions of a gendered gaze proposed by Mulvey in her seminal essay “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema”.
Moving from the subject of gendered gazes to gender representation, Natalie Krikowa’s article explores “Intervention as activism: Advocating queer female representation through independent film production”. The author notes that in recent times, the independent film production space has seen the release of several queer female relationship-themed films; however, very few of these were written, directed or acted by queer women. Krikowa analyses three recent independent releases that counter mainstream cinema’s representation of queer female relationships, questioning the impact that queer females in key creative roles have on the ‘authentic’ representation of queer female love and sex.
The next two articles explore recent developments in screen practice, noting interventions in production methods and collaborations. In “Exposed on screen: Real people’s stories, unscripted TV and the virtues of collaborative documentary filmmaking”, Steve Thomas reflects upon the ethics of documentary production in an age of reality TV and ‘unscripted’ broadcasting. He calls for a renewed acknowledgement that non-fiction filmmaking involves interactions between filmmaker and participants, and argues for a collaborative model that centralises participant agency. Further to the subject of collaboration, Dean Chircop examines the relationships between filmmakers and commercial partners in his article “The intersection of brand partnerships in Australian feature filmmaking’. While noting increased collaboration between Australian filmmakers and commercial brands, he explores the advantages, challenges and complex issues that surround various types of partnership, arguing that branding is an important potential income source to enable feature film financing.
Lastly, Chris Comerford’s article explores “Twenty-first century transhumanism: Adapting, franchising and participating in modern cyberpunk”. With reference to the recent television series Altered Carbon and Westworld, and to the feature film Blade Runner 2049, Comerford examines how contemporary interpretations of the cyberpunk genre function as a means to negotiate present-day anxieties. By interrogating the production strategies, cinematic language and creative influences apparent in these texts, he argues for cyberpunk’s ability to engage audiences in vital discourses about social, cultural, political and technological concerns.
In addition to these works, an additional six articles based on 2018 ASPERA conference presentations appear in the forthcoming issues 2 & 3 of the International Journal of Creative Media Research.[3] These articles, by scholars and/or practitioners Helen Gaynor, Catherine Gough-Brady, Phoebe Hart, Nico Meissner, Mark Poole and Katherine Putnam, complement the articles that appear in this Refractory special issue by providing further insight into creative production practices. As a mass of work, these 16 articles demonstrate the multi-faceted and dynamic nature of the discipline, which ASPERA is proud to encourage and promote. We hope that this collection of articles from the 2018 conference will make a significant contribution to the academy and beyond.
[1] See the ‘Make it Australian’ letter at https://makeitaustralian.com/news/open-letter
[2] This issue can be found at the following address: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17503175.2018.1539541
[3] See: https://www.creativemediaresearch.org/