Current documentary writing 2022

 In Press: Book chapter: ‘The enigma of film: memory film: a filmmaker’s diary‘, Constructions of The Real: Intersections of Practice and Theory in Documentary-Based Filmmaking, (eds.) K. Munro et al., Intellect Books Series: Artwork Scholarship: International Perspectives in Education, 2022.  

Grading the Super 8, Christina Sparrow, National Film & Sound Archive, 

                                                                                Ngunnawal (Canberra) 2016.

This chapter is written from within the production process of memory film: a filmmaker’s diary, currently in post-production and crowd sourcing via DAF:

Composed entirely of my own super 8 filmed between 1976-2003, acquired and digitised by the National Film and Sound Archive in 2016-17. It is a film poem about history, time and impermanence inspired by the tradition of the Japanese Death Poets, who wrote their poetry about the transience of life (jisei: ‘farewell poem to life’) as a gift to their children – a legacy of beauty and insight gathered over years. A textual layer of the film reflects my earlier documentaries and the politics of each era: Maidens (1978), For Love or Money (1983), To the Other Shore (1996) and Island Home Country (2008); these four documentaries all utilised Super 8 from my Archive. The process, and the film itself, reflects not only an essayist approach, but at times, it is a meditative text – keenly linked to both an art practice and a lay Buddhist meditation practice. The film's production process, supports my essayist–meditator’s approach – an approach not driven by narrative, story and character, but rather by an intuitive process, form evolving through practice – ideas developing through the materiality of image and montage – supported by an innovative use of music and sound design as the film’s major structuring device. 

In Press: Book chapter: ‘“We are not dead”: Decolonizing the Frame’ –  First Australians, The Tall Man, Coniston, First Contact and their predecessors.(ed.) E. Blackmore et al., The  Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Film. 2022.

Bullfrog and family, Coniston (2012)

As the settler nation state of Australia continues to colonize Aboriginal people on the territories and waters that the British crown illegally possessed in 1788 what kind of contribution can film and media works make to decolonization? This article discusses several documentary films and series (with foundational films from the 1970s) that take on the decolonizing challenge: Blackfella Films’ historical series First Australians (Perkins & Cole 2008), their investigative documentary The Tall Man (Krawitz 2011), their reality TV series First Contact (Sharkey & Weekley 2014), and Coniston (Batty & Jupurrurla Kelly, 2012), produced by PAW Media and Rebel Films. These programs have been produced across different modes and genres, with varying degrees of collaboration between their creative principals and Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal participants. In this chapter I suggest that these projects influence both their participants and audiences (television, educational and online networked communities). In their analysis of racism and the long-term consequences of interminable colonizing by the settler state, these documentaries move viewers to ‘step outside the colonial dome of thinking’ (Everett 2008).