Welcome to this special dossier on ‘Disruptive Narrative Practices’ for the Studies in Australasian Cinema journal. In contemporary screen culture and screen production, we are very familiar with the phrase ‘digital disruption’ which is currently going through exponential upheavals and disruptions with the recent widespread uptake of AI technologies. However, ‘disruption’ in cinema storytelling has a lineage as long as cinema itself. ‘Disruption’ in cinema’s forms and storytelling modes have pushed the boundaries of how narratives are constructed, presented on screen, and disseminated, throughout cinema’s history.
In the call for papers for this dossier, we were interested in examining disruption across the spectrum of traditional industry narrative frameworks and script development approaches. We invited essays on disruptive narrative practices in terms of diversity, the border of the factual and the fictive, concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity, intermediality in narrative projects, auto-fiction and the new uses of archival practices in screen forms. The essays selected for this dossier explore disruptions in multiple ways, in experimental films, feature films and television series.
In ‘Disrupting the Self: Fictive Dialogic Inquiry into Transformative Screenwriting Practices’, Louise Sawtell and Sue Cake weave the notion of disruption into the form of the essay itself. Drawn from conversations between them conducted on zoom and written up as a lively, informal interchange, the essay critically reflects on their personal experience of script development within the academy. They argue it provides a creative haven for writers to discover new possibilities and reinvent their voice free of the pressures imposed by prescriptive industrial practices.
Phoebe Hart brings a similar, personal approach to her essay ‘Playful Hybrids: Documentary Filmmakers Forging Disruptive Narratives’, in which she reflects on her teaching practice in relation to hybrid documentaries. The disruptive docufiction form, which merges fact and fantasy, throws up thorny questions for teachers and students alike: How do you balance creativity and ethics in a period deemed ‘post truth’? What are the practical and ethical challenges of doing so? In her paper, Hart outlines her approach to answering these difficult questions.
The theme of disruption and hybridity in documentary continues in Sean Maher and Sue Cake’s ‘Innovation in True Crime Series: Generic Transformations in Documentary Series’. The authors chart how streaming, bingeing, big data and content-based algorithms combined to create a new multi-episode documentary form within the true crime genre. This docuseries form employs narrative conventions from long series drama to ‘dramatize’ its storytelling, an innovation which has grown to influence documentary more broadly.
The distinctive voice of the essayist is heard in Felicity Collins’ ‘Like a Dream, Like a Visual Diary: When the Camera Stopped Rolling’. Collins' response to cinematographer Jane Castle’s archival documentary When the Camera Stopped Rolling (Castle, 2021) is deeply insightful and poetic. She argues that Castle’s work is a work of autofiction that actively disrupts the hagiographic biographical film form through the questions it poses and the way it layers a personal, professional, and political story of intergenerational struggle between mother and daughter creatives.
The authors of ‘Manifesto as Method for a Queer Screen Production Practise’, Stayci Taylor, Angie Black, Kim Munro and Patrick Kelly, are often surprisingly playful in their essay, but their intent is serious, challenging and completely original. Following in the footsteps of Lars Von Trier, Deepwell and others, the authors have collaborated to develop a new methodology for screen practice; a 14-step manifesto for ‘queering’ script development and screen production. The authors aim to disrupt dominant, heteronormative narrative models with their manifesto. It is a paper that will be cited widely for years to come.
We hope you enjoy this dossier on disruptive narrative practices.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.