Critical Filmmaking: Creative Practice Research in the Screen Industries examines the emergence of filmmaking as a form of scholarly and creative inquiry within contemporary research culture. Bringing together current and former editors of Screenworks (UK), Sightlines (Australia), and the Journal for Artistic Research (Switzerland), the collection explores how moving-image practice operates at the intersection of screen production, critical reflection, and knowledge formation.
Focusing on the journals, dissemination platforms, and peer review systems that have shaped this developing field, the book offers a timely account of how critical filmmaking has evolved as both a creative methodology and a mode of academic research. Across discussions of fiction and non-fiction practice, experimental form, publication cultures, and research infrastructures, the contributors examine how filmmakers and practice-researchers use the moving image not simply to illustrate ideas, but to generate, test, and communicate new forms of understanding.
The collection pays particular attention to independently produced and research-driven screen works - often short-form, exploratory, and interdisciplinary in nature - that circulate through emerging scholarly and audiovisual publication ecologies. In doing so, the book maps the institutional, methodological, and creative conditions that have enabled critical filmmaking to gain increasing visibility within contemporary screen practice research.
Distinctive in its focus on dissemination and infrastructure as much as on creative work itself, Critical Filmmaking situates filmmaking within broader debates around artistic research, practice-based inquiry, peer review, and the future of scholarly communication. Combining reflective essays, editorial perspectives, and analyses of published works, the collection provides one of the clearest accounts to date of how moving-image practice functions as a form of critical and research-led experimentation within and beyond the academy.
The book will be valuable to scholars, postgraduate students, filmmakers, artist-researchers, and anyone interested in the evolving relationship between creative practice, critical inquiry, and academic publishing.
