Affective Cinema: Experimenting with Feelings of Meaning

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2019.17 | Issue 2 | September 2019

Pavel Prokopic

University of Westminster

Abstract

Affective Cinema is an AHRC-funded practice research project in film, informed by art cinema, experimental film traditions, film theory and philosophy. The outcomes of the research are films that combine aspects of cinematic style, nuances of performance and elements of chance. When all these attributes align in an unpredictable way, a feeling of meaning can be produced: a moment of cinema that is engaging and captivating without trying to tell a story or communicating something specific or intentional through the film. The research thereby aims to expand the potential of the cinematic form by producing experimental film structures in which this feeling of meaning can be identified, and by testing and developing methods that can lead to its emergence. The research also seeks to unite the practice and theory in a unique way – bringing the theory directly into the practice through a poetic voice-over. This submission to IJCMR represents a new version of Affective Cinema, one that was designed especially for the MediaWall at Bath Spa University, and which was exhibited between March 26–April 5 2019.

Affective Cinema is the 2019 winner of our MediaWall Award, our annual award in creative media research that aims to provide researchers with an opportunity to produce, curate and disseminate creative media-based research for a unique platform and audience.

Research Statement

Affective Cinema is a practice research project in film, informed by art cinema and experimental film traditions, and by conceptual fields derived from film theory and philosophy (specifically film ontology, and the philosophy of Deleuze, Bergson and Barthes). Rather than through narrative, the film is structured on the basis of affective significance – an original concept identified in various moments from the history of cinema, and subsequently developed through the project. Affective significance is a sense of meaning that is felt before it can be thought: it eludes language, and transgresses the boundaries of traditional knowledge and (inter-subjective) communication. Affective significance is produced by chance being captured and revealed on film, in combination with stylistic aspects and decisions that do not coherently assimilate these flashes of contingency into the film’s ordinary signification, but instead amplify their nonhuman origin in the real outside of the human world of reason, concepts and understanding. Through experimenting with film performance, and its ability to expose the nonhuman nature of the moving body as the real (below the human surface of intention, self-control, subjectivity, and meaningful gestures), the sense of affective significance can be amplified, when combined with the aforementioned aspects of style and chance.

Affective significance, as a concept embodied in the practice, relies on the unique ability of film to directly capture and expose reality – in movement – while employing style that prioritises the aesthetic potential of the moving image over seamless impression of (fictional or documentary) reality through the process of defamiliarisation. In this way, film gives rise to a direct, indexical imprint of the chaotic, unpredictable movement of reality – capturing a trace of the nonhuman basis of reality – making this image (and sound) of reality still, yet also capturing something of the fundamental temporality of reality. The moving-still nature of film allows for the direct imprint of the real to be aesthetically and temporally manipulated. No other established medium or art form can do that. This attribute of film represents its unique creative (and philosophical) potential; it is a way in which film contributes something entirely new to the world.

The research expands the potential of cinema by producing experimental film structures in which affective significance can be identified. Furthermore, it contributes to the ontological understanding of film by defining the conceptual field surrounding affective significance, but also by uniquely testing and applying this knowledge through practical exploration, and by expressing it through the practice directly. The poetic voice-over, which accompanies the Affective Cinema piece, loosens the linguistic format of the conceptual field and aligns it instead with the affective structures of the project, while using the meaning of the words to illustrate and illuminate the conceptual field of affective significance in an abstract, connotative correspondence with the images. Through intimate, close voice recording, and in creating points of resonance between the male and female voices by doubling up and synchronising the separately recorded speech (split between the two stereo channels), a balance is struck between the signifying nature (and the meaning) of the words and their affective impact as sound. In this way, the voice-over becomes an inherent part of the aesthetic/affective film structure – akin to music – rather than a mere rational account or explication of the theoretical basis of the project. At the same time, the singular unity between the affectively significant moving images, the affective/intimate sound of the voices and the meaning of the words creates a new kind of non-rational insight into the philosophical basis of the project that simply could not be expressed through language alone. Ultimately, therefore, the piece poses the fundamental, overarching question: ‘What makes film a unique form of art?’

Because the real is not in itself controlled, orchestrated or designed by human beings (as fundamentally opposed to the constructed reality of fiction and language), the impossibility to fully control reality has to register on film, if it is based on an indexical, photographic image (rather than animation or computer-generated imagery). And it is when something is (or appears to be) markedly originating in reality without human control and intention – by chance – that film can bring attention to it, by revealing it, by amplifying it, by abstracting it, even if (and especially if) it concerns a subtle aleatory arrangement that could have easily appeared insignificant (or entirely invisible) to the naked eye perceiving it directly. In the way film captures an unpredictable arrangement of reality as a still, permanent image (a sequence of still images); it gives rise to this very contingent arrangement as chance. If this moment of chance – as a particular sliver of space and time – was visible in quite this way only to the camera (or if only the privileged view of the camera revealed it), then this amounts to saying that this moment of chance has only ever existed as image, that the moment of chance arrangement in reality is inseparable from the still image. It is the moment of capture and framing where this aleatory arrangement originates as a singularity and as significance – as a mark of the very point of contact between becoming and being. In the shadow of human intention, chance becomes film’s nonhuman intention. This also results in a particular effect in the case of film performance, because the ‘privileged view’ film gives of reality unlocks in the body a sense of meaning and importance beyond intention and communication. It reveals to the human viewer – in a nonhuman way – the inherent, pre-verbal significance of the human body of the other.

As Bergson explains in Creative Evolution (1944), the real (the world as it is beyond the human realm of language, concepts and cognition) is an incessant flux, a constant flow of movement, becoming. We do not really ever see this movement of the real, because the basis of the intellect is to grasp the world conceptually as still. Even our understanding of movement (of an object moving from point A to point B) relies on conceptually stilled and abstracted space and time. While being part of the movement of the real (becoming within the real), we are only able to consider the world as still, through fixed concepts, language, and, most importantly, through seeing things as both permanent and carved out from the constant, undivided flux of reality. According to Bergson, film corresponds with the conceptual stillness of the mind: it is a still representation of movement, which nevertheless moves (appears to move), just like our impression of conceptually still reality. The relevant Deleuzian concepts essentially mirror this division between stillness and movement: the human world of language, concepts, subjectivity, being, versus the nonhuman world of impersonal, undifferentiated intensities and becoming.

Affect, defined by Deleuze and Guattari (1994) as the ‘nonhuman becoming of man’, thus very much dovetails with the realm of movement, in a useful opposition to emotion, which is instead a conceptualised, habitual form of affect. For the concept of affective significance, it is important to consider that the camera, despite being a human invention and mostly under human control, has itself a nonhuman view of reality, because of its automatic, mechanical capturing of light entering the lens in a given moment in time. In this way, it contains a still, indexical imprint of the becoming of reality (18 or more times a second), and through the replaying of this movement (the illusion of movement of the film apparatus) it reanimates what I refer to as the ‘echoes of real movement’. The echo of real movement can be described as a particular sense of significance derived from a completely singular event or occurrence – a moment of chance or serendipity, the encounter with the radically new that eludes representation. Barthes’ ‘third meaning’ (1977) describes precisely this echo of real movement when he studies specific still frames removed from a film. However, as this practice research project seeks to demonstrate, it is precisely the element of the illusion of movement in film that makes the echo of real movement resonate within the moving-still structures of film – stirring autonomous affects within the film itself – where Barthes’ concept of third meaning is destined to merely resonate within the mind of the attentive ‘reader’ of the still image.

The MediaWall presentation of this project at Bath Spa University was a good opportunity to experiment further with the structure, while retaining its original, horizontal format. The MediaWall is an architectural scale portrait gallery consisting of thirty 55” screens providing a canvas 7.5m high and 4m wide, occupying the triple height atrium space of Commons building at Bath Spa’s Newton Park campus. The way in which shots can coincide simultaneously in this three-way vertical split-screen format increases the complexity of the moving structure, giving rise to a new singularity as affective significance. The vertical split-screen unifies the work perceptually as a single body, minimising the separation (of attention) between the individual frames. Within this unified, vertical field, an additional dimension is introduced into the editing sequence, complicating its temporal flow, and leading to the production of new affects.

References

• Barthes, R (1977) Image Music Text. Fontana Press.

• Benjamin, W (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

• Bergson, H (1944) Creative Evolution. New York: The Modern Library.

• Deleuze G and Guattari, F (1994) What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press.

• Del Río, E (2008) Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

• Doane, M A (2002) The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

• Shaviro, S (1993) The Cinematic Body. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Affordances (and Potential Pitfalls) of Documentary as Research:

The Creative Process of Australian Screenwriter Jan Sardi

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2019.18 | Issue 2 | September 2019

Mark Poole

RMIT University, Melbourne

Abstract

This article examines the creative process of prominent Australian screenwriter Jan Sardi (Shine, Mao’s Last Dancer, Love’s Brother, Moving Out) through the use of documentary production as a research methodology. The increasing acceptance of creative practice research within the academy has led to increased interest by scholars in the research capabilities, affordances and potential pitfalls of documentary production. I will draw upon my own extensive documentary production experience as well as my recent research in completing a practice-led PhD to offer some observations about the advantages and disadvantages of this form of research. The research adopted a case study methodology to investigate Sardi’s creative process on four feature films, and comprises a 70-minute documentary investigating the prominent Australian screenwriter’s process. The documentary enables Sardi’s own testimony about his creative process to be foregrounded, and includes corroborating data in the form of comments from his collaborators, such as the producers and directors from within his field. Documentary production also enabled the inclusion of the final output of Sardi’s screen work to be investigated through the inclusion of excerpts from the four completed films. This article explores the issues raised by documentary production as research, including the perspective taken by the researcher towards the subject in an overtly subjective stance rather than attempting a more objective point of view. The article also discusses the rationale for the selection of documentary production as a research method for this study, reviews the usefulness of documentary production as a research tool, and offers some conclusions.

Introduction

This article offers a number of observations about the affordances (and potential pitfalls) of using documentary as a research tool that I have gleaned through the production of a 70-minute documentary on the creative process of an Australian screenwriter entitled Jan Sardi: A Screenwriter’s Creative Process.

My research enquiry focused upon the creative process of one particular screenwriter in order to establish what it is that this screenwriter does to write a screenplay that is successfully produced as a feature film. I chose to consider the work of Jan Sardi for this study since he has been extremely prolific in Australia over a lengthy career in both film and television drama, having written ten produced feature films and numerous hours of quality television, and his work has been rewarded by a number of Australian and international awards.

As will be discussed below, I chose to produce a documentary as a method of investigating Sardi’s creative process primarily in order to foreground the screenwriter’s own description of their work. This approach assists to redress an imbalance where particularly in the field of feature film production it is the voice of the director and the actors that is heard, and the screenwriter’s testimony is rarely heard or seen. Yet there is widespread acknowledgement that a feature film’s critical success is based upon the underlying screenplay.

Research Method

The field of screenwriting is replete with voluminous commentary about what makes a successful screenplay and how a screenwriter might create one. This commentary includes both ‘how to’ manuals and academic writing. Much of this analysis is predicated upon a close reading of completed films as texts that have been produced as the outcome of the screenwriting process, and also an analysis of those screenplay drafts and associated papers (such as outlines, treatments and pitch documents) that are available. There is much less analysis of a screenwriter’s own narrative about the creative process they employed to write a screenplay. The research method of producing a documentary to investigate Sardi’s creative process enabled the screenwriter to speak for himself about his work and he has approached the challenge of screenwriting.

The selection of the films to be included in my documentary represented a process of curation based on my assessment of the most relevant of Sardi’s output for this research. Of his ten produced features, I found that there was space for only four works to be included. I therefore narrowed the research to four films: Moving Out (1983), Shine (1996), Love’s Brother (2004) and Mao’s Last Dancer (2009). Shine (1996, directed by Scott Hicks) was included because that film achieved the most critical acclaim, including an Academy Award nomination, and also took more than $100 million worldwide which was a significant figure for a low-budget Australian film. Mao’s Last Dancer (2009), directed by Bruce Beresford was also selected since it is a successful adaptation of a well-known book by Li Cunxin, and was also successful at the box office in Australia, taking more than $15 million. Love’s Brother (2004) was included since that film was written and also directed by Sardi, and therefore he had a great deal of control over the film’s realisation, and featured Giovanni Ribisi, an internationally recognised actor. Initially I had not planned to include Sardi’s first feature film Moving Out for this study, but during the editing phase I realised that Moving Out was in a sense where Sardi’s initiation into the domain of screenwriting had begun, when he had transformed from being a teacher to a full-time writer. Moreover, that film drew upon Sardi’s Italian background and his experiences growing up Italian in inner-urban Melbourne, tropes that recur in his later works.

Sardi has written a number of other feature films, including most notably The Notebook (2004) directed by Nick Cassevetes; however this film was excluded from this study as it was made in the United States rather than Australia, and I wanted to focus on screenwriting within the Australian domain. Sardi has also written a number of outstanding works for television, including The Secret River (2015, directed by Daina Reid), which he co-wrote with longtime colleague Mac Gudgeon, but his television work was also excluded from this study as the process of writing for television differs significantly from that of film writing.

Theoretical framework

The study employed the systems mode of creativity proposed by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1999, 2014) as a theoretical framework that understands the creative process as a dynamic interaction of the creative individual, the field and the domain. The Creative Individual is represented in this model by the person or artist who is creating the work being investigated, in this case screenwriter Jan Sardi. The Field is comprised of those screenwriters, directors, producers, screen agency personnel and film critics who operate within as producers and gatekeepers of feature film production. The Domain is the store of creative work within a society that has been accepted as valuable within that society by the gatekeepers in the field. The three components of the model – the individual, the field, and the domain – overlap and interact in a complex and dynamic fashion.

The central tenet of Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model is that it is not sufficient for a creative individual to produce a work of quality by itself, but that work must be made real and produced in the world and also recognized as being of worth, in order for it to be deemed ‘creative’. So in the case of screenwriting, a writer must have a work accepted for production by a producer and director, and that work must be completed as a feature film, and then accepted into the domain through a successful release, acceptance by audiences and acclaim by critics and awards judges. As Csikszentmihalyi (2014: 47) has said:

We cannot study creativity by isolating individuals and their works from the social and historical milieu in which their actions are carried out. This is because what we call creative is never the result of individual actions alone.

The Research Process

The research process of making a documentary involves two main processes: the production process where interviews are conducted, and post-production where the material is sifted, analysed and structured into a cohesive shape. Arguably, there is an initial pre-production process where currently available material about the subject is gathered, as background for the interviews. In practice this is an iterative process as the editing phase inevitably points to gaps in information and knowledge that triggers the need for more background information and more interviews. When commencing the making of this documentary about Sardi’s work I already possessed a great deal of information since I have known him for many years, and for example recorded on audio a session where he spoke about the writing of the screenplay for Shine in 1996. So one of the tasks I completed initially was transcribing that audio session, so that I could better understand Sardi’s creative process.

The production phase commenced with a number of interviews I undertook with Sardi that formed the spine of my research as a primary source. The interviews conducted with Sardi and his collaborators were informed by the principles and practices of oral history; as Leavy has stated: ‘oral history is a method of collecting narratives from individuals for the purposes of research’ (2011, 4) and ‘[o]ral history is an effective method for gaining in-depth knowledge from participants’ (ibid., 5). Sardi is a good interview subject, relaxed and willing to share his stories of how his screenplays were created. Interviews with Sardi’s collaborators were also undertaken, with these collaborators commenting on their participation in a particular film project, and the research often draws from multiple interviews with the same subject.

Interviews by this researcher were based upon extensive research conducted prior to the interview, although open-ended questions allowed the subject to lead the discussion beyond the parameters originally envisaged, in accordance with oral history practice (Fontana and Frey, 1994: 365). The researcher was therefore actively engaged in the process as a collaborator working with the interviewee. It is understood that the oral history provided by participants is based upon fallible memory and represents an inherently subjective account. As Linda Shopes (2011: 452) has suggested: ‘Interviews record what an interviewer draws out, what the interviewee remembers, what he or she chooses to tell, and how he or she understands what happened, not the unmediated ‘facts’ of what happened in the past.’

This is relevant to this research since filmmakers are often interviewed about their work during the marketing and screenings of a film, and they may truncate or summarise their stories about production through repeatedly being asked the same questions by different interviewers during the film’s release. What’s more, my understanding of screenwriting as a practitioner enabled me to extend and develop these interview responses beyond the subject’s initial ‘summary’ position. Although I attempted to ask open-ended questions and avoid interrupting the answers, the interviews with Sardi were often more like conversations than formal interviews since I was very familiar with his work. Indeed, in one interview the camera operator suggested that he record my voice as well as Sardi’s, an offer I declined, since I knew I wouldn’t want to include my comments in the final film.

Researcher Melinda Banks has reported that using oral history methods to interview American professional screenwriters represented a useful method of gathering knowledge about those writers’ creative process since they are adept and practiced at explaining and telling stories about their work (2014: 546). As Banks has commented: ‘I have observed workers at a studio, and I find that the work of writers lends itself well to conversation rather than observation’ (ibid., 546). Banks’ research found that American professional screenwriters were eager to articulate their stories. Screenwriters contended that the histories of the projects they had worked on had usually been told by directors, producers and actors rather than by screenwriters, and they welcomed the opportunity to provide testimony from the writer’s perspective (ibid., 548).

Sardi’s descriptions of his own creative process were neither unbiased nor objective since he was constructing a narrative about himself. Sardi’s commentary was subjective and projected a favourable representation of his work, and his statements about his creative process are essentially unverifiable. However, his comments were cross-referenced with his collaborators about what occurred during the editing of the documentary. As Nichols (2010: 7) has suggested, a documentary is often regarded as being in some way ‘objective’ and related via the semiotic notion of ‘indexicality’ to be somehow ‘real’ or based upon an objective reality. This is a view less often adopted by a filmmaker whose position at the epicenter of the production makes them well aware of the inherently subjective nature of filmmaking. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a filmmaker to retain an ‘objective’ viewpoint whilst making choices about what is filmed, how it is filmed and how it is presented within a film. My role as a researcher on Sardi’s creative process is not ‘objective’ in the sense that I have had a professional association with Sardi for many years as a screenwriting peer, as well as through our association within the Australian Writers’ Guild. As such, I was aware of his extensive feature film track record, his many significant television credits and his status as the President of the Guild. However, in order to conduct this research in as objective a manner as possible I did not screen the documentary for his comment or provide him with the accompanying research materials until after the research process was concluded. This ‘arms-length’ approach came at the cost of gaining feedback from Sardi during the documentary’s development.

The interviews were conducted using the services of a professional camera operator who also recorded the sound, freeing me as the researcher to focus upon the questions asked and Sardi’s answers. This eliminated the need to consider technical issues such as framing, focus, white balance and audio levels. The camera operators were people I have worked with extensively in my professional career as a documentary filmmaker, and so we were able to function by using a sort of ‘shorthand’, for example the camera operator would give me a nudge if I waved my arms in front of the lens. I trusted the camera operator (Vlad Bunyevitch or Walter Repich) to make appropriate creative decisions and I did not need to check the vision by looking at a monitor, and that trust was justified by the resulting footage that was captured.

The Editing Process

As mentioned above, editing is a central method of organising, juxtaposing and interrogating the material gathered about Sardi’s creative process and determining what new research was required. Over a three-year period editing progressed from ingesting the initial interviews and ordering them along the timeline to a final process of refining the documentary. The interviews were initially assembled under content headings and keywords and ordered according to these subjects. As well as his internal writing processes concerned with devising and developing ideas or selecting a suitable work to adapt into a film, Sardi also discussed his collaborative working relationships with directors Michael Pattinson, Scott Hicks and Bruce Beresford, and producer Jane Scott. One striking feature of Sardi’s work is how he has been involved with the production of these films well beyond writing the screenplay. For example, Sardi discussed how he had assisted the producers of Moving Out to raise the finance for the film in order to get it made, sharing in the tasks of calling lists of doctors and lawyers to ask if the production team could send them a prospectus to elicit an investment. It is rare for a screenwriter to be involved in raising production finance alongside the producers, and this attests to Sardi’s willingness to collaborate with his colleagues within his field.

Once all the materials had been placed upon the editing timeline in a rough cut order, I realised that I needed to conduct further interviews with Sardi’s collaborators, including directors Bruce Beresford and Michael Pattinson, and Sardi himself who was interviewed for a final time late in the research journey, to clarify some of his earlier comments.

In the contemporary environment access to editing software is ubiquitous through the Adobe Suite, and I used Premiere Pro to edit the material. The process of editing a documentary offers a method of ordering the research findings, dividing the timeline into segments according to the aspect of Sardi’s creative process being discussed and the particular film under consideration. As well as the interviews I conducted, I incorporated other materials that were available, including the DVD ‘making of’ reels that had been released with each of the films, and also interviews that had been conducted by others, such as by David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz for the SBS Movie Show. Although the DVD interviews were obviously constructed to ‘sell’ the film, and therefore provided a positive spin on the filmmaking process, there was much valuable material that was directly relevant to Sardi’s creative process. For example, Scott Hicks, who directed Shine and is given a ‘story by’ credit, discussed his collaboration with Sardi and what he saw as Sardi’s contribution as a screenwriter.

While oral history projects sometimes publish entire interviews so that other researchers can revisit the original data, this study has used the documentary form as a means to juxtapose different interview subjects’ commentary upon Sardi’s creative process, and also to distil the material into its most significant parts, and issuing each interview separately would not have achieved this outcome. As Ritchie (2003: 203 has suggested, oral historians publish summaries of interviews and include excerpts from them, and that is similar to the editing process undertaken in the production of the documentary. The video editing process utilised for this documentary production is more akin to the work of a historian than that of an oral history researcher; the video editor sifts through the material much like a historian considers documents in order to interpret and synthesize the evidence (see Frisch, 1990: 84).

The practice of documentary production differs significantly from that of oral history in that the aim of oral history is to document people’s recollections and memories as accurately as possible, whilst in contrast, the intention of a documentary production is for the filmmaker to offer an interpretation of events that must of necessity by partial and selective. The oft-cited definition of documentary as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’ by John Grierson in 1926 (see Kerrigan and McIntyre, 2010: 111) alludes to the fact that a film represents a filmmaker’s subjective interpretation of events rather than an objective representation of reality.

One consideration of the editing process was the appropriate length of the final documentary and its audience. The primary audience for this documentary was myself as the researcher, since the documentary was constructed as a research tool that enabled me to analyse and comprehend Sardi’s creative process. A second audience is deemed to be a wider group of scholars and practitioners interested in the subjects of screenwriting (particularly in Australia), the work of Jan Sardi, the process of creativity, and the use of documentary as a research tool. As a consequence of these considerations the film was restricted to 70 minutes in length, and editorial decisions needed to be taken to cull the available materials. As well, in order to find an audience, the film needed to be visually interesting and engaging, and this precluded the inclusion of large chunks of text or pages of a screenplay. As Frisch (1990: 83) has commented:

to work on documentaries is to make the audience a far more explicit dimension of consideration than in scholarly writing; a … documentary text must not simply express historical content and ideas, it must also communicate this material – and communicate it to specifically imagined audiences.

In order to progress the film during its construction, I consulted with a number of colleagues to gauge the accessibility and clarity of the film. This proved invaluable and their input has enabled me to refine the production. This process included presenting excerpts of the documentary at international and local conferences, including the Screenwriting Research Network Conference in London in 2015.

As well as grappling with the testimony of Sardi and his collaborators about his creative process, I included the final outcome of his work in the form of excerpts from the four feature films. It is a definite affordance of documentary production as a research tool that Sardi’s comments about his screenwriting can be juxtaposed with the final result, the completed film. This is significant for this study since Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model stipulates that a work can be deemed creative only if it is recognised by the field and therefore admitted into the domain (1999: 315). In that regard the completed films are relevant as the final outcome of Sardi’s creative process; they also serve as a reminder that Sardi’s screenplays facilitated the production of these films.

Excerpts from the films were chosen to present scenes that illustrate Sardi’s screenwriting process, including scenes that are representative of the film itself (demonstrating the screenwriter’s use of visual metaphor) and scenes that underpin or illustrate Sardi’s comments about his writing processes. For example, a scene in Love’s Brother that depicts the making of the first espresso coffee in the rural town is included as it demonstrates Sardi’s investigations of Italian-Australian themes and their centrality to his oeuvre. Scenes were also selected in order to provide a sense of the film’s overall narrative arc, and in so doing, to represent the outcome of Sardi’s creative process. The documentary production therefore offered a useful means of conveying the power and drama of Sardi’s writing as it was realised as a completed film.

The editing of a documentary production is a complex process, and documentary filmmaker and academic Michael Rabiger has suggested it is not especially well understood by non-practitioners: ‘Documentaries are largely created through intelligent editing, an alchemy that works magic and miracles. Few understand this until they take its long, exploratory journey for themselves’ (2015: 229). Indeed, the editing process on this project took place over several years and involved numerous revisions and transitions from assembly to rough cut over that time. My experience as a professional filmmaker was extremely useful for this process. It was over the course of the editing process that the answers to research questions were arrived at and the film was ‘found,’ sifting through all the interviews, panel discussions and excerpts from the films in order to examine Sardi’s process as a creative screenwriter.

Situating Sardi within his Field

The systems model of creativity posited by Csikszentmihalyi places considerable emphasis upon the need for a creative individual to gain the support of their collaborators, colleagues and gatekeepers in order for his or her work to be admitted into the domain (2014: 52). The documentary is an appropriate format to portray Sardi interacting with his colleagues and collaborators within his field and functioning within his public/industrial sphere in order for his work to be accepted into the domain of screenwriting. For example, Sardi is witnessed collaborating with cast and crew when working on Love’s Brother, interacting with his colleagues at the Shine 20th Anniversary screening in the foyer of The Astor Cinema in Melbourne and discussing the progress of the shoot in China on the set of Mao’s Last Dancer with director Bruce Beresford. This portrayal of Sardi operating within his field makes a useful contribution to knowledge about the screenwriting process, particularly since writers are rarely seen undertaking these sorts of activities. It also underlines the systems model’s emphasis on this interaction within the field as an essential element of the work of a successful screenwriter.

Sardi’s significant collaborations with producer Jane Scott is also documented in the film. Unusually for a screenwriter, Sardi sought funding to travel to the Sundance Film Festival where he pitched his idea for Love’s Brother to Scott as they revelled in the attention they had gained by the success of Shine. Sardi’s friendship with Scott and their mutual respect has facilitated their creative partnership on three feature films, and he secured her trust sufficiently for her to invite Sardi to undertake the key creative role of director on Love’s Brother.

Affordances of the Documentary as Research

The production of a documentary as a research method has proved useful in foregrounding the testimony of the writer Sardi himself articulated about his screenwriting process. Whilst over recent years there have been some screenwriters who have spoken in their own voices about their work, such as the online ‘Academy Originals’ series, no Australian screenwriters have been included in such work. This is a real gap in the field since directors and actors have traditionally spoken about the writing process, and the strengths and weaknesses of screenwriting, but generally not the writers themselves.

The key outcome of this research was the clarity with which it became obvious how much Sardi’s creative process had to do with collaborating with directors and producers in his field. For example, Sardi explained how he became a screenwriter after pitching an idea for a film to director Michael Pattinson at a social gathering, and developed that idea over numerous drafts over several years, working with the director, whilst he was still a teacher. This represents a stark contrast to the conventional notion of the screenwriter who labours in isolation for years, developing and refining a screenplay before eventually showing it for the first time to potential directors and producers to seek their feedback. However, despite this collaborative approach the documentary has also illustrated via footage of the screenwriter labouring in his shed at the back of the garden, how ultimately the process of writing is a solitary pursuit where there is no substitute for refining and honing the screenplay until the draft is completed.

The documentary form was also useful in juxtaposing Sardi’s commentary about his creative process with those of his key collaborators, such as the directors, producers and actors with whom he has worked. This juxtaposition allowed for a vivid portrayal of the creative process, and also dramatises the collaboration process that a writer is required to undertake until a film is complete. For example, a sequence in the documentary describes how Sardi and director Bruce Beresford worked on Mao’s Last Dancer and debated how to address the problem of opening an Australian film with around forty minutes of content in the Chinese language. Sardi explained that he structured his screenplay in chronological order to preserve a sense of continuity of the film’s dramatic arc, but having done that he knew that it could be restructured out of temporal order and retain the dramatic integrity that was required. This sequence offers an audience a vivid depiction of the sorts of interactions between writer and director that occur within the field of screenwriting, and are rare in other studies of such interactions. (Beresford was also interviewed for this film).

Using documentary as a research tool also portrayed Sardi at work in his cabin at the rear of his home in Eltham, Melbourne. This footage was reconstructed (since the presence of a camera and film crew does not enhance a screenwriter’s creative process). Sardi allowed this filming to occur in the location where he labours on his screenplays, and despite the constructed nature of this footage, it provides a useful visual representation of the challenge faced by the screenwriter. The footage displays Sardi’s professional setup: his MacBook Air, Final Draft software, his use of music to accompany his work, and the way Sardi looks out through a horizontal slot window onto a forest of gum trees while contemplating his work. The documentary form also shows Sardi’s use of index cards to structure his screenplays as well as showing the board where he pins such cards for his latest project that is visible beside his desk. This footage provides a valuable opportunity to witness a screenwriter at work, and serves as a reminder that an observer is restricted to an external view of a screenwriter’s creative process, as the interior process must remain hidden from view.

The documentary form was also useful to visually depict Sardi’s Italian milieu by including footage of the Island of Elba in Italy. Sardi’s parents were born on the island and he travelled there in 2001 to accept honorary citizenship of the township of Capoliveri. This footage is significant since Sardi’s Italian heritage and background is an important component of his identity as a creative individual. What’s more, Sardi’s Italian-ness has informed his thematic interest in stories concerning migrants/migration and outsiders. (Mao’s Last Dancer is concerned with the story of a young Chinese boy plucked from a remote village and transplanted to a ballet school in Beijing, and Shine tells the story of David Helfgott who is arguably pushed to the margins of society through his mental illness.)

One major finding of this use of documentary as a research methodology has been the discovery of the usefulness of the DVD releases of the films that contained valuable interviews with key creative collaborators, such as the directors and producers Sardi worked with on those projects, as well as other relevant content such as commentary from film reviewers. The testimony of cast members was highly relevant to Sardi’s creative process as a screenwriter, since a primary role of the screenwriter is to create characters and dialogue that the actors can utilise to evoke an effective screen performance. Whilst this DVD material has been produced for the purpose of promoting the film and is therefore not objective in its testimony, it nevertheless offers valuable material not available by other means (for example, comments by USA actor Giovanni Ribisi about Sardi’s work on Love’s Brother which describe Sardi’s sense of rhythm in his screenplays).

Potential Pitfalls

Despite the affordances of the use of documentary production as a research tool described above, there are a number of potential pitfalls that should be considered before a researcher embarks upon a similar approach. The first potential pitfall is the requirement for the researcher to possess, or obtain, a range of skills in both production and post-production techniques, if they are working by themselves as I was. In addition, some physical hardware is required, including a powerful computer ideally with dual monitors. More significantly, the researcher must function as a film editor, which is a complex task necessitating the ability to understand sophisticated editing techniques such as the use of rhythm and pacing. If the researcher is deficient in these abilities or does not have the time or interest to acquire them, a professional editor can be engaged to fill that gap, but this has obvious implications for the project’s budgetary requirements.

Despite the relative accessibility of production equipment and editing software in the present day (unlike previous eras when the ability to record video of professional quality required expensive equipment and qualified personnel) a video practitioner must still possess a set of production skills to undertake research by documentary production. I was able to take advantage of professional skills acquired working as a filmmaker, including a number of years spent working at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as a producer/director, and the associated skills I have developed over many years in documentary making and editing. Other researchers could acquire the skills to record usable interviews, but this requires a degree of technical proficiency in addition to the ability to engage with an interview subject, gain their confidence and respect and ask appropriate questions. A researcher can also utilise the skills of paid technicians to fill those gaps, but that requires appropriate funding.

A second potential pitfall of this approach is the time required to complete a documentary production, particularly when the researcher is completing the majority of the work, as opposed to a fully budgeted production where a crew can work more rapidly, and an editor is paid to refine the film. Editing a documentary to a professional standard is time-consuming and potentially expensive, depending upon the eventual outcome required. In the case of the Sardi documentary this was deemed a film for the purposes of research, and therefore there was no need for broadcast quality sound post production or colour grading. In addition, the fact that the Sardi documentary is 70 minutes in length, in order to consider the four film projects, resulted in a lengthy post production process.

A third potential pitfall is that Sardi’s testimony about his own creative process is neither unbiased nor objective since he was constructing a narrative about himself. Sardi’s commentary was subjective and projected a favourable representation of his work. However, these comments have been cross-referenced with other people’s about what occurred during the editing of the documentary. Moreover, the materials included in the documentary production have been gathered over a twenty-year period (from the first audio recording at the National Screenwriters’ Conference in 1997 to the final interview with Sardi in 2016), which attests to the consistency of his testimony.

Conclusion: Key Findings on Sardi’s Creative Process

The final version of the documentary was structured by using Csikszentmihalyi’s headings of Creative Individual, Field and Domain, in order to consider Sardi’s creative process in developing the screenplay for each film within that framework. A key finding was the extent to which Sardi’s creative process is informed by his close collaborations with his field, particularly the producers and directors with whom he has worked. For example, with Shine, Sardi met with concert pianist David Helfgott and director Scott Hicks prior to working on the screenplay, and there is a scene in the documentary where Sardi talks to Helfgott during this research. The film also includes footage of Sardi collaborating with director Bruce by attending the production shoot on location in China for Mao’s Last Dancer. This research has found that Sardi’s creative process includes his ability to form and maintain strong and ongoing collaborations with the directors and producers with which he has worked, and this has been a central reason why he has been successful in having ten feature film screenplays produced, an outstanding output in a small production territory like Australia with an average output of only thirty-one feature films per year (Screen Australia, 2017) that struggles to compete with the economic and cultural hegemony of Hollywood.

The film shows Sardi describing his creative process in evaluating an idea for a feature film before commencing the writing, such as the way in which he and producer Jane Scott both read Li Cunxin’s autobiography Mao’s Last Dancer and debated its merits as the basis for a film, and then discussed how to approach the author with a view to gaining the rights to make the film. Sardi’s use of index cards to work on the structure of a film is depicted, and his method of formulating the emotional spine of a story before he commences a draft. He has identified the film’s theme and its emotional spine as his ‘map and compass’ that he uses to work through the draft and find the film, avoiding the use of the conventional three-act structure as a sort of strait-jacket that can result in an audience second-guessing the writer.

In summary, this research-documentary on screenwriter Jan Sardi has proved useful in furthering knowledge about the practice of screenwriting, especially from the perspective of the writer. This article has offered some insights into the potential affordances and pitfalls of the use of documentary as a method that this study has found. The major affordance of using documentary as a research tool for this project has been the ability to hear directly from the screenwriter about the creative process, and it is therefore appropriate to conclude with a quote from Jan Sardi offering advice to beginning writers and alluding to the struggles that any writer must overcome:

Find something that touches you, that you just have to work on. Because it’s going to be so hard, and you’re going to get so many knockbacks, and some days you’ll think ‘why am I doing this? Why do I bother?’ If it’s a great story that means something to you, that’s the answer (quoted in Poole, 2017).

Note

The commercial release of Jan Sardi: A Screenwriter’s Creative Process is currently being negotiated for 2019.

Acknowledgement

This article was first presented at the 2018 Australian Screen Production, Education & Research Association (ASPERA) conference, Melbourne, 27-29 June.

References

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Contemplative Photo-collage in Media Studies Pedagogy

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2019.19 | Issue 2 | September 2019

Kevin Healey

University of New Hampshire

Abstract

This project demonstrates an arts-based photo collage exercise developed in the context of an undergraduate seminar on Contemplative Media Studies at the University of New Hampshire. While it is readily adaptable for non-educational contexts, the primary goal of the exercise is to slow down, interrupt, and move beyond students’ habitual patterns of social media-based news consumption. By integrating both analog and digital arts-based elements, the exercise serves as a type of counter-practice to the ideological biases of commercialized digital media systems. The news content featured in this demonstration involves a family of asylum-seeking Honduran refugees who were caught in a tear-gas exchange with U.S. Border Patrol agents in Tijuana, Mexico in November 2018. A primary goal of this project is to critically reflect upon the limitations of news reporting and consumption in the context of the digital economy. A secondary goal is to develop new, more embodied and/or material ways of producing and disseminating fact-based content. By integrating arts-based and contemplative methods, these exercises enhance mindful news consumption by moving beyond the binaries of the personal and the collective, the mind and the heart.

Introduction

This project demonstrates an arts-based exercise developed for use in a classroom setting with undergraduate majors in Communication and Media Studies. The exercise falls under the general umbrella of Contemplative Media Studies (CMS), which I have defined elsewhere as the application of contemplative practices and principles to the critical analysis of media content, technologies, and institutions (Healey, 2015: 7). In this case, students engage in a contemplative photo collage exercise, the goal of which is to reorient their perspective on social media-based news consumption. The arts-based elements of the exercise are clear (primarily photography, collage), and as is generally the case in arts-based research (ABR) they serve as a way of using artistic processes to understand experience (see Leavy, 2018: 3-4). What makes the process contemplative is that, beyond catalyzing understanding of an issue via artistic techniques, it aims also to cultivate a particular form of self-awareness that contemplative scholars call ‘critical subjectivity,’ which involves ‘noticing and re-seeing habitual ways of being’ (Kinane, 2019: 8). Perhaps more importantly, it explicitly affords opportunities for forms of character development (empathy, compassion) that have distinctly transformative social potential (Komjathy, 2015: 16). Insofar as contemplative practice engages creativity for the purpose of personal and collective transformation (see Kinane 2019: 8, 13), there is great potential in integrating contemplative and arts-based research. With troubling or disturbing news-reported images as their starting point, an intended outcome of this particular exercise is to move beyond habitual forms of news consumption that tend to leave undisturbed, if not reinforce, the political-economic status quo that gave rise to such images in the first place.

Emotional and Informational Gatekeeping

In the era of cable television and social media, following the news may be easier than ever from a strictly informational standpoint. But U.S.-based research shows that the public feels conflicted about the process of news reporting and consumption. Survey respondents say that most topics get plenty of coverage, and over half say it is easier to keep up with news today than five years ago (Purcell et al., 2010). Yet 70% agreed that the amount of news and information available is ‘overwhelming.’ Roughly half say social media had little impact on their understanding of current events, while about a third say its impact is positive and half as many say it is negative.

Within those numbers, there are interesting variations by political affiliation and age: Democrats and younger people, for example, generally have a more positive impression of social media’s impact on their understanding of news. At the same time, researchers suggest that the public’s overall trust in the news ecosystem is increasingly fragile as tech companies disrupt traditional flows of information and position themselves as powerful informational and editorial gatekeepers (see Sivek, 2018: 126). This sense of distrust is one contributing factor to the widespread influence of fake news and propaganda during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.

In fact, the affective dimensions of news consumption are especially complex in the era of social media. First, for a number of business and legal reasons, social media companies like Facebook downplay or deny their role as news and information gatekeepers. They prefer to frame themselves rhetorically as technology companies, and quite specifically not as media companies. Second, even as they avoid responsibility for their role in the news media ecosystem, they move aggressively to develop strategies and techniques for tracking and influencing users’ emotions. Emotion analytics, or sentiment analysis, is a flourishing field that aims to translate users’ emotional states into data that can be aggregated and processed, usually for commercial purposes (i.e. selling advertisements) (Wright, 2009). Third-party services and platforms themselves seek to understand how users feel about each other, about themselves, about news events, and about commercial products (Kennedy, 2012: 435).

The history of such forms of analysis precedes the era of Web 2.0 and social media, and can be used for the public good. ‘Affective computing’ has been employed, for example, as part of a range of services to enhance autistic persons’ ability to recognize emotions in others (Sivek, 2018: 126). More often, though, commercial companies leverage sentiment analysis to nudge users toward certain behavior or patterns of thought and engagement. Facebook might, for example, want to provide targeted advertising based on a users’ current mood; or it might want to favor emotionally positive content in a user’s News Feed to encourage more sharing, more ‘likes,’ or other forms of engagement.

To be clear, I am not advocating for an artificial separation of news and emotion, in the name of some outdated notion of objectivity. It is important to recognize and appreciate the affective dimensions of news consumption and civic engagement. In fact, there are a range of scenarios within which users, tech companies, and news agencies can and should engage current events with both heart and mind, emotion and reason. As Sivek notes, ‘legitimate journalists use emotional imagery and narratives often to help audiences understand the significance of news topics’ (2018: 130).

Unfortunately, and especially in the absence of well-established ethical guidelines and governmental regulation, the dynamics of social media do not favour the virtues of judiciousness, thoughtfulness, or compassion. Instead they favour aggressively-engaged vices such as tribalism and hyper-partisanship, along with special forms of civic disengagement that Draper and Turow (2019) call ‘digital resignation.’ The affective ecology of social media (in conjunction with the commercial interests of cable news and broadcast radio) amplifies whatever latent or manifest partisanship already exists on the ground. This makes social media a ripe field for the creation and dissemination of propaganda. As Vaidhyanathan (2018) argues, the real scandal of Facebook’s role in the 2016 U.S.

Presidential election is not that it was hacked against its will by malicious trolls, but that it was in fact used precisely as it was designed to be used –most worryingly by Russian operatives who wished to foment partisan rancor, confusion, and distrust in the American news media. American-based companies like Data Propria are already gearing up for targeted political campaigns in the build-up to the 2020 election.

As influential gatekeepers of news and media content, the problem with social media is twofold. First, platforms can be used with malicious intent to manipulate public sentiment via fake news and disinformation. Second, the same platforms can be used with arguably benign or ‘neutral’ moral intent (i.e. commercial success), but with impacts no less troubling. The second problem is arguably more insidious than the first, if we care about news consumption as the cornerstone of democratic life and meaningful civic engagement, and not simply as a commodity to be sold to advertisers in the digital market. When news consumption is reduced to ‘engagement’ via likes, retweets, comments, etc., we lose meaningful engagement in favor of the fleeting experience of moral sanctimony or performative morality. In this way, as theologian Walter Brueggemann argues, the ‘ethos of consumerism’ amounts to a programme of ‘achievable satiation’ – one which appeals to our moral sensibility but is ultimately ‘concerned only with self-satisfaction’ and as such tends to leave the political status quo intact (2001: 41-42).

Even if we bracket egregious cases where social media companies or third parties aim specifically to manipulate user sentiment, typical patterns of social media news consumption fall within certain parameters of behavior and affect. Companies like Facebook want to encourage ‘engagement’ of the sort that can be neatly packaged and sold to advertisers. More time on an app, and more interactions with the app (likes, shares, posts, etc.) are a top priority. Facebook researchers have sought specifically to understand how they might encourage positive user emotions by tweaking content algorithms, presumably because users who feel good will stay engaged and share more. But negative emotions, at least from the standpoint of data collection and time spent online, are equally valuable if not more so than positive ones – anger, fear, and contempt reveal just as much about us, and are often more engaging (consider how often people get stuck in a comment-thread argument from which they cannot easily escape).

While extreme emotional states may be good for engagement, companies do well if users reach a relatively stable plateau of mindless scrolling and low-level interaction. Critics have compared this habitual form of interaction to the ‘narcotic-like properties’ of slot machines, where for example someone might sit for hours pulling the handle of a slot machine (Schulson, 2015). The moment of peak excitement (jackpot) may never come, but the expectation that it might is enough to sustain the flow of coins from the gambler’s pocket to the casino’s owners. In either case – the extremes of tribal, partisan engagement and the addictive slot-machine repetitiveness –the user experiences a degraded form, if not a mere simulation of, social agency. By design, users do not understand (and in fact cannot understand, given the opaque nature of proprietary code structures) how platform algorithms are designed to limit or nudge their emotions and behavior.

In this sense, the rhetoric of executives like Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg, who describe Facebook as a forum for authentic self-expression, rings hollow (see Healey and Potter, 2018). Such rhetoric is misleading at best, if not intentionally obfuscating. In fact, Draper and Turow (2019) argue that companies deploy this kind of misleading rhetoric precisely to encourage among users an attitude of resignation toward the dark underbelly (surveillance, lack of data privacy, aggregation and commodification of data) of the platforms they otherwise enjoy.

While young people (e.g. undergraduate students) are exposed to plenty of news, and while they may express a positive regard for the role of social media in aiding their understanding of current events, research shows that emotional and cognitive responses to news usually occurs without students’ awareness. Younger viewers only recognize the level of exposure upon reflection, and then realize that they do not process news consciously (Sivek, 2018: 131; see also Klurfeld and Schneider, 2014). Consider Sivek’s description of the most common user behavior on social media:

It would seem that even scrolling quickly through social media feeds laden with emotionally provocative content could contribute to a users’ affective conditioning regarding news stories and newsmakers, thereby altering over time the user’s judgment of them. Representation of emotion, whether words or images, may only be subliminally perceived during such scrolling, yet still affect audiences’ evaluation of information (2018: 129).

In addition to the subliminal nature of affective conditioning, the temporal pressures on content (constant need for news ‘scoops,’ up-to-the-second personal updates, etc.) has been shown to ‘reduce the opportunity for analytic deliberation… allowing affective considerations free rein’ (Sivek, 2018: 129). Her point is that the dynamics of social media favour not a balanced integration of heart and mind, but a mindless provocation of emotion by means opaque to users, and for purposes that are arguably at odds with users’ best intentions and interests. Again, my argument here is that, contrary to the explicit declarations of people like Zuckerberg and Sandberg, agency and authenticity is not at all what platforms like Facebook encourage or cultivate among users – unless we define an authentic life as one in which our every thought and emotion is posted online, captured for analysis, and sold to marketers.

Contemplative Art as Counter-practice

Once we recognise how commercial interests shape the dynamics of online content and behaviour, it becomes clear that the role of emotion in understanding and decision-making is an important element of any program of ‘media literacy.’ So, what is there to do? How do we move beyond ‘digital resignation’? As Draper and Turow suggest, trending hashtags like #DeleteFacebook are better seen as symptoms than solutions. Rather than rejecting social media how can we, as users and researchers, engage it on our own terms – or at least in ways that subvert the subliminal process of affective conditioning that Sivek describes?

To be clear, I am not positing artistic practice, however contemplative in nature, as the solution to the problems I’ve identified above. Meaningful transformation of the digital environment rests on a ‘three-legged stool’ of regulation, technology, and a broad shift in cultural norms (Draper, 2019: 218). Nevertheless, my argument here is that the path to such broad structural reform begins with, or at least includes as a constitutive element, the development of specific counter-practices – that is, exercises or rituals that upend habitual ways of thinking and acting, and which thereby open up possibilities for imagining alternate ways of being with and ‘doing’ digital media.

Insofar as they include a contemplative dimension, such practices enable what Bruggemann calls the ‘prophetic imagination’ – a mode of thinking and being that challenges established structures of authority. Rather than resignation, such imagination cultivates a radical hope (2001: 11). In her discussion of media literacy (and specifically news literacy), Sivek explicitly advocates for mindfulness practice as a tool for ‘increasing news consumers’ awareness of their emotions and reducing their “cognitive failures” regarding the information they see’ (2018: 131). ‘Assignments and exercises could encourage students’ awareness of news exposure and of their emotional responses to it, thereby encouraging further analysis of emotions spurred by provocative real or fake news content’ (Sivek, 2018: 132). What such exercises aim to cultivate is not simply knowledge about media institutions, or facility in media production, but what some Thai educators call ‘media wisdom’ (Sivek, 2018: 131). I adopt this phrase here because it captures the element of authentic agency I wish to cultivate among students.

Case Study: Other Lands Whisper ‘Maybe’

The video embedded below demonstrates a multi-step process that is easy to reproduce in a classroom or workshop setting. This demonstration takes as its starting point an image of Maria Lila Meza Castro and her three daughters. This photo, taken by Reuters reporter Kim Kyung-Hoon, captures the moment after U.S. Border Patrol agents used tear gas to disperse asylum-seekers at the border of Tijuana (Cunningham, 2018). It is the type of emotionally-laden image that one might encounter (e.g. while scrolling through a Facebook News Feed) without pausing long enough or purposefully enough for meaningful engagement. The steps in this collage process interrupt that habitual cycle of mindless and/or emotionally unreflective news consumption. Furthermore, as an arts-based method the exercise aims to ‘make conscious and to give clarity, form, and meaning to the human phenomena under investigation’ (Leavy, 2018: 596). Immigration is the subject at hand here, but other contentious or timely topics work just as well. Students should select an initial image and read any relevant news reports that provide necessary context for understanding its significance.

Step 1: Close-up Selection

Having selected a viral news image and having read contextualizing news reports, the first step in the collage process is what contemplative scholars call ‘beholding.’ This goal here is to replace a typical fleeting view with ‘a contemplative way of seeing.’ Beholding is a way of ‘being with images’ that includes attention to one’s emotional and physical responses to an image. The effect is to encourage ‘appreciation and relatedness rather than abstraction and distancing’ (Barbezat and Bush, 2014: 149-150).

As the video shows, in this step we take a moment to notice, and move beyond, the most striking and obvious elements of the image – in this case Castro and her daughters. With a colored marker, we notice and highlight other elements of the image that are meaningful, perhaps symbolic or metaphorical, but which are not as obvious. In this case, I have highlighted the shadows cast by the Castro family on the dusty soil. That area of the image also includes some of the whitish gas emitted by a tear-gas canister.

From a contemplative standpoint, beholding an image in this way helps us move beyond the abstract, linear thinking that typically accompanies reading news reports. ‘When we look at an image,’ Bush and Barbezat explain, ‘we see it all at once, as a whole’ (2014: 149). By discovering additional hidden elements of the image (hidden, that is, by habits of thought), we engage our emotional response to the image and question our conditioned responses. The creative element of choosing a close-up area creates a sense of agency, ownership, and emotional investment in the image that carries into the next steps of the process. In other words, we become involved (or, as we will explain later, ‘entangled’) in the event and its participants.

Step 2: Close-up Cut-out

As the video shows, I chose tear gas and shadows as a sub-element of the original image – objects with latent symbolism that both the artist and viewer can engage. Such symbolism may not always be easy to find, and it is not necessary to explicitly require such elements as part of the exercise. But one might ask, during or after the process, whether any symbolism is present. If so, it does lend additional meaning to the process. As Leavy explains, a symbol is ‘a very efficient carrier of vital energy, memory, knowledge, and experience’ (2018: 595).

In any case, in this step we print out an enlarged version of the close-up selection and then, using an X-Acto knife, cut out the figure elements from the background. While the first step involves an element of embodied engagement with the image, this step is important because it takes that engagement to another level. ‘The kinetic is considered to hold the embodiment of memory, the somatosensory orientation to our bodies in the world,’ Leavy explains (2018: 593). Here, we must slow down not only to cut the image neatly, but to avoid cutting into our own flesh. This part of the exercise heightens the potential for embodied, emotional, and sensory-based ways of knowing – known in ABR as aesthetic epistemology (Leavy, 2018: 592).

Step 3: Layering

Once the close-up section has been printed and the figure cut from the ground, we create a heightened sense of space by layering the cut-outs over the original image. In this case, I found a rectangular piece of glass that I removed from an end-table, and placed it on four wine corks. The cut-out pieces are about 1.5 inches above the original image. Other material variations would work just as well—children’s wood blocks, small wood stamps, etc. This part of the process requires some aesthetic judgment: What should I block from view? What should I reveal or partially reveal? Should I preserve the original orientation, or rotate it? There are two benefits to this step. First, it requires more active engagement and decision-making on the part of the artist. In this sense it responds to Sivek’s concerns about emotion, understanding, and decision-making in media literacy as described above. Second, it introduces a sense of ambiguity since it raises questions about the relative importance of different elements of the image. In other words, it represents visually the disruption of habitual patterns of news consumption described above as a primary goal of the exercise. Ambiguity is an important concept in ABR because it opens avenues of creative insight, encouraging a willing embrace of uncertainty about what we are seeing and our interpretation of it. On this point, Leavy draws an explicit connection to contemplative practices, since such practices also encourage embracing uncertainty as an avenue to transformation (2018: 594).

Step 4: Photography

As shown in the video, this step introduces opportunities to play with light and shadow (which in this case coincidentally relates to the symbolism of the close-up). The space between the raised cut-outs and the original image can be leveraged to create additional aesthetic comments on the relative importance of different aspects of the image. Moving a clamp light or adjustable desk lamp creates shadows of different intensities, sizes, and directions. The goal here is to be playful with light and shadow. Experiment, and take a good number of photographs for later viewing. Err on the side of abundant experimentation.

Step 5: Digital Image Editing

In this step we return fully to the digital realm, having made a brief but meaningful excursion into the analog environment. While digital editing software can easy simulate the kind of lighting, shadow, and close-up effects created in the prior steps, it cannot create the embodied experience of printing, highlighting, cutting, etc. This step leverages the relative with which applications like Photoshop can manipulate colour, hue, and other aesthetic elements. This is helpful especially for students who have little or no experience with sophisticated image-editing software. Adjusting saturation, hue, brightness, and contrast is easy enough for inexperienced students, yet powerful enough to be an essential avenue for aesthetic expression for advanced users.

The video does not show the step-by-step process whereby I manipulated the photographs from Step 4. There are plenty of Photoshop tutorials online. Instead, the video shows the progression from original image to final collage, as captured at three or four key moments in the creative process. The examples in the video are not meant to be instructive but inspirational. Each student will have unique associations between colour, emotion, and content. The primary goal of this step is to use digital editing software as a tool to explore these associations, and to create a final edited image that best represents the artist’s engagement with, and reflection upon, the subject at hand. Several versions of the final collage are embedded with this essay. Two of these final pieces appear in Raw Art Review (Healey, 2019).

A Note on Musical Accompaniment

I composed the music accompanying this video through a process of poetic transcription, based on published interviews with Maria Castro. In summary, I copied and pasted all of Castro’s statements (translated into English) into a separate document, distilled these statements into a sonnet, and set the sonnet to music. This process is involved enough to warrant its own essay. Suffice it to say the process is emotionally engaging in a similar way to the collage exercise described here. I included the music as a background element in the video both to demonstrate the potential of this alternate form of ABR and to heighten the emotional intensity of the video demonstration.

Discussion

As noted above, both contemplative studies and arts-based research have a clear focus on ethics. Contemplative practice accomplishes more than stress-relief. It is transformational in terms of character development, which includes one’s being-in-the-world with others who matter. As Karen Barad notes, ‘ethics is about mattering, about taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are part, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities’ (quoted in Leavy, 2018: 639). The exercise described here aims to call attention to our entanglement with digital technologies, institutions, and content. We produce them, but they produce our subjectivities as well. The process is iterative and emergent in ways that are ethically fraught. Users, citizens, and technologists alike have a responsibility to question and actively participate in the ongoing formation of digital subjectivities. Neither resignation, nor complacency, nor naïve idealism are viable options for a sustainable future.

The theoretical approach taken here is one of ‘agential realism,’ which aims to move beyond the naiveté of empiricism, the essentialism of critical inquiry, and the self-indulgent irony of post-structuralism (Leavy, 2018: 635-636). As a framework for ABR, agential realism attends to the materiality of the world, the entanglement of artists and the materials they creatively engage. ‘The material also shapes the artist,’ as Leavy notes (2018: 643). Research does not simply describe reality. When it leverages emotion, it does not simply reproduce the artist’s ethical awareness in viewers. Research creates, or co-creates, multiple possible realities through the interaction of human and non-human agents (ibid., 637). In this case, those non-human agents include the paper we cut, the glass we balance on wine corks, the lights we clamp and adjust. Perhaps more importantly, they include the digital applications we use to discover and transform a viral image; the coded algorithms that select content for us while enabling us to share our own work. From the perspective of media studies scholarship, this type of integrated analog/digital process allows researchers and students to become entangled with media in ways that serve an ontological purpose – namely to envision, and generate, new modes of entanglement. The point is not to escape digital culture, but to become newly, differently entangled within it. Most importantly, the pedagogical goal here is to displace and subvert the gatekeeping power of the human engineers and business operators of digital platforms, as well as the material affordances of already-created, non-human platforms. In this sense, there is ‘an ontologically substantive performative aspect to our inquiries, a way in which our research designs and practices constitute the phenomena we study, and they in turn constitute us as subjects’ (Leavy, 2018: 643).

This theoretical approach within ABR is consistent with contemporary perspectives in science and technology studies. In ABR, the idea that material systems have their own agency – their own purposes with and against which we struggle as human designers and users – is like saying that a seed has its own agency and purpose. This does not mean that the seed is conscious, or that it has intentions toward which it strives. As Leavy explains, it means instead that it ‘organizes environmental materials into the general order of cherry tree’ (2018: 641). Not a specific tree of certain size or shape, but whatever tree-like form might arise from the particular soil in which it is planted, with the nourishment of whatever rains fall.

A similar perspective permeates science and technology studies, in both popular and scholarly forms. For example, in both The Inevitable and What Technology Wants, technologist Kevin Kelly argues that technical development has direction to it but is nevertheless unpredictable, generating unforeseen consequences as it emerges from, and interacts with, the human and non-human systems that surround it (Kelly, 2016; 2010). Similarly, and in a more academic vein of argument, Kentaro Toyama (2015) outlines a theory of ‘amplification,’ where the human context on the ground heavily influences the long-term impact of a newly-introduced technology.

For example, social media might be inevitable but not necessarily Facebook. The seed of digital network technology, planted in the unique soil of American commercial markets, has generated a unique fruit indeed. When that unique fruit, and its seeds, spread to foreign markets the process creates a whole new context of interaction and entanglement. The results often exceed or escape the original vision of the gardener/engineer, yet are consistent with the general ‘purpose’ of the technology. Indeed, whether the various fruits of social media are nutritious or poisonous to the quality of public discourse is a question that has only recently come into the forefront of public and legislative attention. Siva Vaidhyanathan (2018) argues that in Russia’s propaganda campaign during the 2016 election, Facebook was doing exactly what it was designed to do, despite the protests my Mark Zuckerberg and others about their intentions and the safeguards they implemented. The purpose of Facebook, and the way it acts as an agent in relation to other agents in the world, is too complex to be contained either within Mark Zuckerberg (or Facebook’s) conception of itself. To be sure, Zuckerberg’s philosophy has always exerted ideological agency in shaping the social media landscape. But Zuckerberg did not anticipate, nor does he or Facebook have a grip on, the interaction of Facebook with more nefarious ideological agents: racism, sexism, or ethnocentrism for example. Other stakeholders besides tech leaders –namely users and legislators – cannot assume the moral neutrality of social media. In this sense all stakeholders bear some responsibility in shaping our social media futures.

Conclusion

In this article and video demonstration, I have argued that contemplative, arts-based pedagogy can enable students (as future users, developers, and citizens) to exercise greater responsibility in shaping our socio-technical future. The collage-based work offered here aims to cultivate not just informational awareness, but empathy and compassion – an integrated engagement with news content that is too often lacking in the social media ecosystem. Whether such exercises are effective and successful depends not on how they are received as pieces of art. The point, in other words, is not for students to create ‘great’ works of art. It is the process that matters more than the product. As Leavy explains, at its best ABR ‘invites people to imagine new possible entanglements with the professions and social challenges of our day’ (Leavy, 2018: 644).

The exercise described here thus aims to answer Sivek’s call for a more nuanced definition of media and news literacy. Emotion has the ability to ‘lubricate reason’ in a way that is both wondrous in its speed and subtlety, and frightening in its potential to render us vulnerable to manipulation (Slovic et al. 2007: 1349; quoted in Sivek, 2018: 132-133). We need to develop special practices so that ‘when we see emotionally provocative news content and realize that emotional manipulation may be occurring, we can attempt to short-circuit that process and engage that information in a more cognizant manner’ (Sivek 2018: 134). My intent is for other researchers to adapt, modify, and share variations of this exercise and the products thereof – to plant the seed, so to speak, for other contemplative media scholars, knowing that its purpose will unfold in unexpected and inspirational ways that we cannot entirely anticipate.

Acknowledgement

This project is supported by Public Theologies of Technology and Presence, a research initiative based at the Institute of Buddhist Studies and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

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