FRANCESCO RAGAZZI

FILMMAKING AS A RESEARCH ‘METHOD’

Francesco Ragazzi co-directed his first documentary in the same year he started his doctoral studies in 2003. Trained in social science in Sciences Po Paris (B.A, 2002 and M.A. 2003), he holds a PhD in Politics from Sciences Po (Paris) and Northwestern University (Chicago, 2010). Since 2010, he is lecturer in International Relations at Leiden University (the Netherlands). His writing and his films deal with identity, migration, citizenship and violence.

STARTING POINT: DOING THINGS WRONG What does it mean to use filmmaking as a method in artistic research? Coming from an academic perspective, I initially thought I would research the use of artistic approaches and techniques –more specifically film approaches and techniques – as methods to pursue, through a different perspective, the interests as I had been chasing over the fifteen years as a social scientist. ‘Filmmaking as method’ I thought. I also very naïvely thought that coming from academia was giving me an advantage to understand artistic research. Nothing of the sort.

From the early days, my take was considered as “too academic”. A way to distinctively signify that it wasn’t that of an ‘artist’ or an ‘artistic researcher’. While I was told to “feel free” – which I thought I was doing – I was more often than not receiving polite and embarrassed feedback to my work. I was “thinking logically, not emotionally”, I was told. I wanted to “privilege text over image”. I seemed to be missing the point. None of my attempts worked. I was doing things wrong. Fair enough, I thought. I wasn’t an artist per my credentials. Yet wasn’t this precisely the point, I thought, to experiment? Why was I consistently told, albeit implicitly, that I was doing things “wrong”? As it appears clearly now, even though I had directed and produced some documentary films in the past, the problem, in fact, is that I had been directing them as an academic. My alleged advantage was the problem. I had been refusing to see two important differences between social science and artistic research.

RESEARCH IN CONDITIONS OF SPECTATORSHIP: THE ‘MAKING OF’ Over the course of these two years, I understood that I hadn’t been thinking through film but on top of film. I had been putting images and sounds to the service of words, I hadn’t let myself be guided by the material, I had been using film as illustration for an academic discourse that could exist by itself. I thus had to ‘un-learn’ this approach in order to give way to the emergence of a practice centred on working from the material itself –and my own subjective relation to it. At the centre of this was a simple fact that I had been ignoring: there is a fundamental difference between the experience of readership and that of spectatorship: film works because it is an invitation to the viewer to co-create meaning through the interpretation of signs and symbols. It is, in simple words, ‘showing, not telling’. It took a long and unexpected way, only to fall back into one of the first lessons of filmmaking. It implied however being ready to operate a certain number of shifts and translations. Most of all it implied acknowledging what the true nature of the problem had been so far. I hadn’t been making ‘bad films’. I hadn’t been making films, in this sense, at all. This element allowed me to reframe my research, namely, how can knowledge be produced and presented in the specific conditions of spectatorship?

The film I am presenting here explores one possible solution to this question, through the notion of the ‘making of’. While it is certainly not an original device in the history of essay and documentary film, the ‘making of’ stages both the re search and the object of research, allowing to present to the viewer an analysis on filmmaking as part of the plot itself. This idea emerged organically from the process of filming itself. I initially intended to shoot this film as a family home movie –a quick and naïve scenario as an excuse to record good moments together. While the film I intended to shoot was more or less coming on as I expected, the dual audio system set-up was capturing all the conversations we were having between the shots. I realised I had recorded material that could be telling another story than the very confidential film I had initially planned. Doors opened.

REFRAMING RESEARCH THROUGH A PERSONAL PRACTICE Working through film wasn’t however the only challenge I had to overcome. The second, and perhaps more important one, is that I had been refusing to let go of the safe distance that social scientists traditionally place between them and their object of study. I was refusing (or had been unable) to put my own subjectivity — that intellectual and emotional filter through which we all perceive the world in our own specific ways — at the centre of the research. This aspect required a much more important shift that has only been possible through a painful process of critique and self-doubt in dialogue with other fellow filmmakers. The social and institutional pressures, which ended up generating feelings of frustration, humiliation, rejection, but also motivation, valorisation and ultimately acceptance have been, like in no other educational experience, part of the constitution of a new perspective and therefore fundamental to the evolution of my practice.

If what distinguishes the arts from the sciences is the engagement with the realm of emotions, feelings and perceptions, the processes resulting from the social rejection/ inclusion into the group cannot be swept under the rug as if it was a negligible by-product of art education. This social process of initiation, which reveals itself in moments of desperation, feeling lost, feeling useless, but also feeling supported, praised and accepted, are part and parcel of a pedagogic/initiatory process which requires the researcher to start focusing on how they put their individual subjectivity to the service of the production of artistic research.

Working through one’s subjectivity does not necessarily mean working on a personal or intimate subject matter –but for anyone starting from the same position from which I started, I don’t think there could have been a better path. For the simple reason that it is a route in which it is impossible to maintain a comfortable, distant and neutral position; one is forced to engage in a complex and awkward introspection of oneself and one’s relation to others. The project I am presenting here reflects this uneasy approach. I started the research looking for the ways in which film could be used as a ‘method’. I ended realizing that ‘thinking through film’ cannot be accomplished without incorporating, embodying, practicing the filming gaze and approach. Making this film has thus been the way for me to mature these ideas from the making itself and from the making with others. From a research question centred on the narrow question of method, my research has been reframed once again, this time as the question of how to embody a cinematographic subjectivity with the purpose of research. It has reframed my perspective how to choose a subject, how to approach it and how to make sense of it.

13 Attempts To Shoot My Father (Working Title) The short documentary essay film deals with the director’s relation to his father as much as his relation to filmmaking. Based on the genre of the “making of” or the ‘backstage’, the film explores the father-son relation through a metaphor ical questioning of the traditional roles of cinema practice: the actor, the director and the audience.