In coming to the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS), I wanted to develop my craft in storytelling. With an acute awareness of the lack of female representation in film, I knew the film I would make would put female strength, agency and empowerment at the heart of the story. I didn’t know exactly what the project would be, but these thematic elements seemed to be at the core of all my prior work, and fundamental to my creative practice.
Much of my previous directing work had been focused on female representation. My music video, Monska (2020) for Sydney musician, C. R. Robin, aimed to explore the strength of young girls, depicting them in a way beyond the dominant mode. Moving away from representations of passivity, my work showed the young troupe performing a shadow-boxing routine. This performance involved jabs, uppercuts, hooks, elbow strikes, punches and kicks. For me, a marker of success of the project was knowing that this group of girls, who were between eight and twelve years of age, would leave knowing a suite of self-defense moves, including how to break an attacker’s nose. Monska screened at more than thirty festivals worldwide and in 2021 won the Women in Film and Television (WIFT) Audience Favourite Award (2021). Through this project, I discovered my interest in subverting the dominant modes of representation to allow for deeper exploration of character.
With a background in conceptual art and production design, visual storytelling has been highly significant to my practice. I have often gravitated towards works that depict strong visual worlds, particularly when used to reflect character interiority. Within most of my previous work, I have endeavoured to explore these interior states of mind. Monska (2020), for example, used a slowed frame rate and pulsing purple light to visually suggest the girls’ feelings of empowerment at the climax of the clip. Given my interest in the representation of the intangible qualities of subjectivity and emotion in film, and a desire to develop my craft in storytelling in this area, I sought to answer the following research question:
How can a director utilise filmic techniques to represent subjectivity and emotion in the depiction of a protagonist?
As the intersection of directing, writing, performance, cinematography, design, editing, sound and music, I was interested in the power of film to convey this character subjectivity. Under the Water (2022) posed a unique opportunity to explore this research question, allowing for creative risk-taking, exploration and experimentation as part of the process of learning and development.
As writer and director of the project, I was able to deeply explore the capabilities of film to represent subjective viewpoints. Narrowing the scope of my research to the experience of young women in the strange liminal time between childhood and adolescence, I focused on the filmic expression of internal worlds and mental states, including grief, fear and anger. While my own life experience was relevant to the story, my process began with researching the stories and experiences of other women. I explored websites that documented cat-calls women had experienced on the street, as well as She’sACrowd, which provided a mapping system for places where people had experienced gender-based violence.
In an interview, Leonore Addison (10 years old), discussed having rocks thrown at her by boys multiple times. She stated: “One time we were riding past, and we were waiting for them [to move] and one of them rushed up to us and threw a massive rock at us… They threw rocks and called us names” (Addison, personal communication, 2021). On asking her how she felt about this moment, she said: “I wanted to yell at them… but I didn’t” (Addison, personal communication, 2021). This feeling of repressed emotion and powerlessness was what I was hoping to explore in Under the Water, documenting a journey from a feeling state of repression to one of active emotion. Leonore continued by saying: “…they [the boys] do it anytime they want, so it’s kind of normal to us” (Addison, personal communication, 2021). I created the work drawing from these referential moments.
The final project, Under the Water, explored the experiences of 11-year-old Olivia, as she struggles with the abrasive behaviour of boys in her town, feelings of sadness at the loss of her mother and a sense of isolation and lack of guidance in her life. On finding a strange rock at the water’s edge, she starts to draw links between herself and the sirens in an old picture book. As the victim of roadside catcalls and violent slurs, she reaches her tipping point. Inspired by the wild and free behaviour of the sirens of the sea, Olivia takes the power she hasn’t yet been afforded. Centred around strong feeling states and with an intended ambiguity in its narrative structure, the project became a space for me to interrogate subjective realist filmic techniques.
In approaching this exegesis, I have used a combination of text, visual imagery and video in order to best convey my creative process. For this reason, I have deemed a website format to be most suitable, as it provides a level of interactivity in its design, in order to best represent my creative journey. This chapter, Introduction, explores my aims and intentions with the project, my creative background and practice-oriented methodologies. In the following chapter, Inner Worlds, Psychic Space and Emotional Landscapes, I explore the work of key theorists and practitioners Mathew Campora, David Bordwell, Adrian Martin, Eleftheria Thanouli and Bruce Kawin. The next chapter, Project and Process, forms a critical reflection on my experiences in creating subjectivity through the many and varied processes involved in the shoot. Loosely following the stages of development, reflections on approach to the production, concept development and script writing, production design, cinematography, rehearsals, the shoot, editing, sound and music are featured. Four scenes from the film are interrogated in the Analysis chapter, looking to the cumulative effects of the key filmic techniques used to enact subjectivity and emotion on screen. In the Conclusion, I have reiterated my creative process and learnings, looking at the unique ability of filmmaking to convey visual, aural and temporal modes of subjectivity. In making, Under the Water, what I discovered went far beyond my initial expectations. My results are detailed in the following pages.
INTRODUCTION
“Investigating art practice requires charting something of the ‘doing’ involved in the return movement from the unknown of the imagination, to the relative known of the artefacts or productions of artistic practice”
(Dallow, 2003, p. 50).
As a creative practice with no linear course, the process of making a film, as theorist Peter Dallow suggests, relies on the unknown of the imagination (2003). In order to interrogate this practice, documentation from the process can be charted, and an artefact can be analysed for evidence of learning. In approaching this exegesis, I have followed this approach; I have formalised documentation of my experiments, recorded outcomes and engaged in critical reflection in order to convey the practice-based learning I have undertaken. Using a constructivist approach to knowledge and learning, the primary content of my research is derived from the process of writing and directing the short film, Under the Water (2022). Drawing on the work of David Kolb (1984), theorist in experiential learning, my process has involved the practical experience of making the film, reflective observation of the creative processes throughout the stages of production, generalisations to explore hypotheses and active experimentation (pp. 37-38). I have used production practices to generate an artefact as research; experimentation, interviews and critical reflection as my main methods alongside secondary theoretical research. In this exegesis I have theorised that combinations of filmmaking techniques can be used to convey the subjective experience and emotion of a young, female protagonist. These include: symbolism and metaphor utilised at the writing stage, the use of embodied camera, ‘thought cuts’ as an editing technique, the use of non-diegetic sound to convey mood and musical composition to emote for absent characters.
To summarise, this exegesis reflects the notion of practice as research, utilising the process of making a film as evidence of creative practice, knowledge and learning. Through the systematic gathering of documentation throughout the process, I have reflected on the processes of ‘doing’ and ‘making’, which has broadened my understanding of filmmaking and its potential for subjective representation.
