Ghosts, Imagination and Theatre: re-enacting the futural past through documentary film
type: CreativeWork
description: This practice-led research looks at creative strategies to address the under-represented and marginalised history of Roma persecution in WWII The research has resulted in a film, The Deathless Woman (89’ 2019), a hybrid documentary film that has been created in response to European sites of atrocity against the Roma. This practice employs a number of experimental strategies that seek to supplement the limited historiography of the genocide of the Roma during WWII and formulate an innovative approach to documentary production that questions notions of authenticity and indexicality in Western knowledge formation. Starting in 1942 with the murder of a Roma family in a small village in Poland, the film aims to bring these events into the present by employing strategies such as the use of ghosts, fantasy and theatre within a documentary framework. Through this, the film aims to visualise and connect the traumatic past of the Roma to other traumatic pasts and to the traumatic present. This research project interrogates two central research questions. Firstly, how might a phenomenological approach to the invisible be employed in knowledge production to reframe our relationship to traumatic or marginalised histories and make their legacy relevant? Within this, I employ an experimental approach to empiricism that foregrounds the sensory as a device to investigate sites of atrocity. That these events were traumatic and centred on specific geographic sites is critical in my choice of sensory methods. I have paid particular attention to atmospheres, ghosts and affects in constructing both a film and an academic argument that foregrounds sensory experience as a method for knowledge production. Critical to my methodology is my decision not to make binary distinctions between imagination and reality (or truth and fiction), but rather to see the two as interrelated and intertwined. More specifically, this extends to declining to rationalise such things as ghosts, but rather to trea…
abstract: This practice-led research looks at creative strategies to address the under-represented and marginalised history of Roma persecution in WWII The research has resulted in a film, The Deathless Woman (89’ 2019), a hybrid documentary film that has been created in response to European sites of atrocity against the Roma. This practice employs a number of experimental strategies that seek to supplement the limited historiography of the genocide of the Roma during WWII and formulate an innovative approach to documentary production that questions notions of authenticity and indexicality in Western knowledge formation. Starting in 1942 with the murder of a Roma family in a small village in Poland, the film aims to bring these events into the present by employing strategies such as the use of ghosts, fantasy and theatre within a documentary framework. Through this, the film aims to visualise and connect the traumatic past of the Roma to other traumatic pasts and to the traumatic present. This research project interrogates two central research questions. Firstly, how might a phenomenological approach to the invisible be employed in knowledge production to reframe our relationship to traumatic or marginalised histories and make their legacy relevant? Within this, I employ an experimental approach to empiricism that foregrounds the sensory as a device to investigate sites of atrocity. That these events were traumatic and centred on specific geographic sites is critical in my choice of sensory methods. I have paid particular attention to atmospheres, ghosts and affects in constructing both a film and an academic argument that foregrounds sensory experience as a method for knowledge production. Critical to my methodology is my decision not to make binary distinctions between imagination and reality (or truth and fiction), but rather to see the two as interrelated and intertwined. More specifically, this extends to declining to rationalise such things as ghosts, but rather to trea…
author: Mortimer, R.
date published: 2020
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:01:29Z
provider: University of Westminster
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Westminster

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.34737/v414w