The problem of peer review in screen production: exploring issues and proposing solutions

ABSTRACT

With traditional academic work, the process of peer review is seemingly clear – work is refereed as a way of gatekeeping ideas and research contributions, to ensure it is not publicly available until it has passed a test of rigour, originality, clarity and significance to the field. Those with assumed knowledge of the discipline are the said gatekeepers, tasked with assessing the work on the basis of disciplinary knowledge and general research expertise. This often rests on the notion that the research and knowledge are made explicit in the writing. This is problematic for non-traditional academic work, such as screen production and media art, because a key value in this kind of work is the ability to communicate implicitly and differently from what can be articulated within the parameters of written, academic language. This tension between implicit and explicit knowledge claims has been one source of difficulty for evaluating and therefore rewarding creative practice research. In this paper, we draw on a recent gathering of screen production academics, the two-day Sightlines: Filmmaking in the academy festival and conference, to help us discuss the complexities of peer reviewing screen production works for the academy, and to help us point towards possible solutions. We focus specifically on where and in what form the articulation of research might happen to assist the peer reviewing process, where the common approach is to write a research statement that makes explicit the methodologies undertaken and the new knowledge being claimed. This has incited some protest from within the screen production community: for example, how do we account with language for the very thing that is in excess of language, the contribution that finds its unique place outside of language and within the moving image? We therefore also discuss the dialogic relationship between art and writing, and the kinds of relationality that might be created to help make room for the ‘in-articulable’. In short, how research and new knowledge in a screen work might be illuminated, and how an academic peer might therefore evaluate it. We conclude by discussing an approach we are currently taking to develop an online, refereed publication for screen production works, the Sightlines Journal, in response to both the current literature on the topic and the gathering of discipline academics. Given the various contexts in which these questions arise in relation to screen production research (during the writing of a PhD, in the examination process, and in professional environments), we address them accordingly as individual yet interwoven discussions driven by the shared need to find workable solutions to recurring problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Screen production research
• creative practice research
• film-making
• screenwriting
• peer review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Smiljana Glisovic is an early career researcher in the field of documentary and poetic forms in audiovisual installation. Her other academic interests are in creative practice research, specifically in the field of screen production. Her creative practice engages with text, moving image and performance. She works sessionally at RMIT University in the School of Media and Communication.

Dr Leo Berkeley is a senior lecturer within the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. He also has considerable experience as an independent filmmaker, having written and directed the feature film, Holidays on the River Yarra, which was an official selection for the Cannes Film Festival in 1991. His current research and production interests are in the practice of screen production, low and micro-budget filmmaking, improvisation, essay films, community media, mobile media and machinima. See leoberkeley.com for more details.

Dr Craig Batty is Associate Professor of Screenwriting at RMIT University. He is author, co-author and editor of eight books, including Screenwriters and Screenwriting: Putting Practice into Context (2014), The Creative Screenwriter: Exercises to Expand Your Craft (2012) and Movies That Move Us: Screenwriting and the Power of the Protagonist’s Journey (2011). He also has interests in creative practice research and research degree supervision.

Notes

1. This can result in the added problem of screen practitioners with a lesser research profile having fewer opportunities to be promoted and appointed to research leadership roles.

2. We received over 40 submissions in total from the UK, US, France, Finland and Japan. Amongst the Australian submissions we had academics from UTS, La Trobe, Macquarie, VCA, Flinders, Griffith, Curtin, ANU, UNSW and RMIT.

3. For more on these topics, the web page http://aspera.org.au/news/Sightlines presents a series of short interviews from the event.

4. See his book, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances.

5. Of pure language Benjamin says:

All supra historical kinship of languages rests in the intention underlying each language as a whole – an intention, however, which no single language can attain by itself but which is realised only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure language. (74)

6. Some publishers of audio-visual research set limits on the length of works that can be screened that can limit the depth and complexity of the work exhibited. Sightlines conference consciously decided not to set any limits of length.

7. As examples, see koganoda.com; Understanding Art House The Wolf of Wall Street: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3fzFUs-hYM; The Role of Landscape, Nature and Environment in War Films: https://vimeo.com/34857818).

8. These examples are: Screenworks, Journal for Artistic Research, Journal of Creative Work, Audiovisual Thinking, Media Object, IM Journal, NMEDIAC, New Scholar and Altitude.

9. This includes guidelines to reviewers that are underscored by language that leaves their own guidelines up for debate. For example: ‘please take into account whether or not the submission contains a description of the question, issue or problem that is explored, and if not, if such an omission matters' (JAR, n/d, our emphasis).