Lisa French - research projects

Lisa French

R E S E A R C H P R O J E CT S
& C O N S U L T A N C Y

Research Projects

Detail at:

http://media.rmit.edu.au/research/people/lisa-french

Current Project
'It sounds a bit 70s to me: Women In the Victorian Film and Television Industries'. The research examines women’s participation in the film, television, video and multimedia industries in Victoria.

It has been 17 years since the last major study, which revealed (as did several major studies before it), that women were under represented in all key creative roles and had significantly lower representation in the film industry than in the Australian workforce. Has this changed in the last 17 years, what are the industry trends? It is funded by the Malcolm Moore Industry Research Grant (RMIT).

Recent Project
My latest publication, Shining a LIght: 50 Years of the Australian Film Institute has just been published. You can order it from the AFI website at www.afi.org.au or the ATOM site at: www.atom.org.au.

PhD Project:
Centering the female: the articulation of female experience in the films of Jane Campion, RMIT, 2007.
The aim of this thesis is to discover the vision of cinema embodied in Jane Campion’s feature films and to understand and explore the way in which her cinema articulates ‘female experience’. As a centrally feminist project the research therefore asks whether, and how, female experience can be aestheticized. The investigation is approached in relation to the following key question: Are the films of Jane Campion centrally preoccupied with a cinematic articulation of female experience? The question of female authorship is examined in order to discover the function and position of the woman director.

Selected past projects
Research Grants

I worked on a project titled Timescopes, developed with research grant by Dr David Crean. It explores the history of Australia through images and contains an extensive array of media images and footage of key events in Australian history. The material I Indeveloped (film study guides and contextual research) now exists as part of a site that suggests a range of multimedia teaching/learning pathways to extend and enrich social, cultural and historical analyses and understandings:

http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ncas/resources/index.html

Practice: A Journal of Visual, Performing and Media Arts
In 1996 Lisa French founded Practice at Deakin University Melbourne. This was made possible by a grant from the Publications Committee, Faculty of Arts, Deakin University. Material included in Practice was refereed by a) an academic, b) someone from the media, or visual/performing arts. The editorial statement read:
This publication encompasses a range of areas which are not normally found together in one journal (Media & Visual Arts, Drama, Dance, Music and Arts and Entertainment). It is different to exhisting publications in that it is a refereed journal which also includes contemporary art.
Practice will provide an arena for artists, performers, academics, theorists and critics to debated and exhange ideas relating to historical, current and forthcoming concerns. Key objectives are to legitimise creative production research and to foster links between institutions and practitioners. Reviews and artist pages were included in the journal; artist featured included Marcus Bergner, Callum Morton, Robyn Stacey and Andrew Hurle. Practice was produced until 1999 and can be found in libraries such as the State Library of Victoria.