Film as a research method: interview with Paul Craddock

First, I wanted to say that I found the films published on Common beautifully made, with a lot of care and attention to the embodied and the tactile. Please tell me more about the Common and its approaches to the research films.

‍Common works only with researchers and research-led institutions, and it emerged from academic work on filmmaking as a research method. The work we do is really quite unique and varied, in that it straddles many different institutional and funding contexts. And each project naturally comes with its own bespoke set of research concerns.

The most straightforward projects we work on tend to foreground impact or valorisation. In this context, we make work that creates impact for an academic project or demonstrates the impact of a particular project.

We also work on more complex clinical projects that draw upon co-production methods from healthcare. This way of working is closely collaborative: rather than making films about patients (or indeed clinicians, or carers) we make films with them. In this sense we invert what you would usually expect from a hired-in production agency – we’re not telling stories from the top-down; we instead facilitate expression in open collaboration.

Our third strand of work is film-making-as-research. This is where we engage with the material, the performative, and the sensory, and where we might use film to raise and address questions in non-written modes. This way of working can happen within any given research project, especially if questions of materiality, performativity or embodiment are central. For example, you might have a really interesting project surveying the history of stained glass. But if that research is limited to a text-based survey, then everything that makes stained glass an interesting research subject – its colour, shape, the way the light moves through it – is lost. We can use film to survey and explore this kind of richness, and undertake distinctly different types of investigations to solely text-based ones.‍

What can film bring to research that other media, such as text, cannot?‍

I have thought a lot about the relationship between the film and text, especially considering that my preferred medium is text — I am primarily a writer. One of the reasons I like working in text more is that it's easier to say things like ‘and,’ ‘but,’ ‘therefore.’ In other words, it is easier to draw relationships between ideas, easier to explicate. And that's the way I think as an academic – I think in terms of ideas and the relationships between them, and I find it easier to put things together in text.

But some ideas are very difficult to treat in that way. For example, a lot of the medical training depends on the body, on being in a space, on having interactions that have no clear purpose. By way of explanation, Anna Harris and I reflected on this kind of inexplicable behaviour in a peer-reviewed video article about workshopping. One of the points that emerged when filming a workshop was the messiness involved in working out the ideas. People in the workshop space were thinking out loud, joking with each other, moving around the space seemingly unnecessarily, gesturing and touching one another, playing — all that was very messy, with lots of seemingly unrelated activities happening all at the same time. Nevertheless, this kind of ‘messiness’ or playfulness was a feature of what it means to ‘workshop’. And when it came to producing the video article, we were asked to make a transcript. That forced a very significant question: how do you transcribe something so chaotic and rich?

In the Fabric Bodies project, where I worked with Fleur Oakes, the embroiderer, to reenact the vascular anastomosis technique of Alexis Carrel and compare that with the embroidered works of Marie Anne Leroudier, I could not put into words the knowledge of an embroiderer by writing it down. I can describe it in general terms, but it would make little sense to write about the relationship between hands, tools and materials. You have to show it.

Historically, in medical education, we have tended to focus on things that can easily be tested, things that can be the subject of tick-box exercises and therefore easily graded. But when it comes to the theme of care or caring, for instance, it is notoriously difficult to judge and grade as an educator. I think that creating assessments using film can help medical educators and students to engage with the more performative, craft-based or interpersonal dimensions of, for example, what it means to be a doctor.

What makes research films different from other types of films?‍

With a normal film, you start with the idea that the story is primary. Whereas in research, you start with the vast experience of a researcher, the questions they’re interested in asking, and their research priorities, then you let that lead. And then you have to fashion a story as well, in many cases, in order to get something funded. But I think the primary motivation of a research-led film is that it starts with either a research question or a desire to formulate a research question that you can get to by working with film. It might also be used to raise new questions. For example, in a digitisation project, a filmmaker can ask something like: ‘what cannot be digitised?’. Or, where you need to convene multiple viewpoints, film can flatten hierarchies.

I feel that film is very linear, similar to text. Are there other multimedia forms that can move beyond this linearity present in both mediums?

I actually disagree with the premise of that question. I think text is obviously set out in a linear fashion. But you can flick through a book, you can range about it, and approach text in a nonlinear fashion. And nowadays, you can also very easily scrub around a timeline and jump around a video in much the same way. You are no longer, as Lucien Taylor put it in the 1990s, ‘imprisoned in the temporal order’ as you might be when watching something like a film reel from start to finish. In fact, the video article that Anna and I made on workshopping is set up in a way that promotes the agency of the viewer and expects the viewer to skip around. Only a special kind of person would want to watch that film from start to finish. It would bore most people. But it was made as an article and an academic provocation, not entertainment.

How do you set the ground and prepare when starting the filming process?‍

If the film is made to tell the story of a piece of research, then we always start with a treatment. But when it comes to research film, you have much more freedom. For instance, as a historian I’ve spent a lot of time with archives, museums and galleries, and that’s also become one of Common’s specialisms – we make a lot of films about archives and object collections. If we’re making a film about an archive, we will go and look at the archive, and we will take some shots, experiment, and see if anything emerges from that very basic practice. We’ll ask questions of the archive and the people that use it, the disciplines it might relate to, and its materiality and sensory qualities. Once you get to know the archive, it’s almost like you render it in film by feeling your way around it.

When it comes to co-produced film, we do not start with the film at all. We start with the people we are co-producing with and let them lead, because it would not really be a co-production otherwise. And a lot of that preparation is about developing relationships and being genuinely curious about the lives and perspectives of other people.

Do you have any recommendations for people who want to introduce film into their educational or research practice?‍

I would want to know why they want to start using film in the first place. There must be a reason for wanting to use film. I suppose that translates into a basic recommendation to be ‘knowing’ in the media you use in your teaching or research.

There are two other recommendations I would make. One is to pull out your phone and experiment, try to capture ways of moving and thinking with the body. The other, which follows on from that, is to try to outline a more substantial investigation that emphasises performative material and sensory dimensions. And then formulate a research proposal that centres those ideas and then you have the kind of investigation that film is best suited for, to either ask the right kinds of questions, or answer certain questions that cannot be easily or sensibly answered in a language-based mode.