Artwork Scholarship: International Perspectives in Education Constructions of the Real

A wide range of new writing from non-fiction and documentary filmmakers who work in the rich space between the academy and industry. These global filmmakers and writers reflect on, interrogate and explicate their filmmaking practices in relation to questions of form, content and process. The authors included in Constructions of the Real are all researcher-practitioners, who theorise in and through their making using a range of practice-led and practice-based methodologies. This not only shows the complexity of the concept of practice as research in documentary filmmaking but also considers visual and interdisciplinary methods and approaches which help expand the scope of what we mean by documentary practice and, ultimately, by documentary overall. Constructions of the Real is divided into four sections, each with its own way of exploring documentary practice as research and of defining and redefining the wider context in which the ‘practice’ takes place. By focusing on the forms of knowledge production that emerge from these different approaches, platforms and perspectives, the book opens up important debates about documentary’s multiple facets and styles. 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.