Karen Pearlman’s filmmaking research
What defines filmmaking expertise when it’s shared across teams and tools? Associate Professor Karen Pearlman from the School of Communication, Society and Culture at Macquarie University explores this through creative practice and distributed cognition.
Pearlman has been a member of PERC at Macquarie University since its inception. Her work uses filmmaking itself as a research method, allowing her to observe and analyse how ideas emerge and evolve through collaboration, technology, and embodied knowledge. This approach reveals aspects of expertise that can't be captured in laboratory settings.
Her research is grounded in her own award-winning career as a film editor and director. This hands-on experience gives her a unique lens on how film crews think and create together. By applying the concept of distributed cognition—where thinking is seen as happening across people, tools, and environments, she uncovers the often-invisible skills that drive creative success.
Pearlman's forthcoming third edition of Cutting Rhythms: Creative Film Editing (Routledge, June 2025) introduces new frameworks for understanding editing as a form of expertise, not just intuition. Her 2025 monograph Shirley Clarke: Thinking through Movement (Edinburgh University Press) is the first book to explore the work of the pioneering filmmaker through the lens of film-philosophy and distributed creativity.
Her films also embody her research. I Want to Make a Film About Women (2020) is a vivid portrayal of collaborative creativity, winning over 20 awards and earning nominations from the Australian Academy and the Oscars. Breaking Plates (2024) tells the story of women's ingenuity in early cinema and won Best Short Documentary at the 2025 Antenna Documentary Film Festival for its bold, experimental storytelling.
In 2024, Pearlman's research helped achieve a major policy shift in the Australian screen industry. Working with the Australian Screen Editors and the Australian Writers' Guild, she helped secure recognition of documentary editors as co-writers. She co-led the initiative, authored the foundational paper, and helped shape the new credit, which is now official policy, ensuring editors can be acknowledged and compensated for their creative contributions.
As former ASE President Danielle Boesenberg noted, the new guidelines are "fantastic" for finally making the work of documentary editors visible and valued.