Writing for artists' moving image

Artists Jordan Lord, Blaise Kirschner and Corin Sworn respond to set questions of the subject of ​‘writing for artists’ moving image’.

Jordan Lord is a filmmaker, writer, and artist whose work addresses the relationships between historical and emotional debts; framing and support; access, disability, and documentary. Their films have been shown at festivals and venues including MoMA Doc Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Union Docs, and Dokufest. Their film ​‘Shared Resources’ (2021) won the John Marshall Award for Contemporary Ethnographic Media at the Camden International Film Festival and the Critics Jury Prize at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. They have presented solo exhibitions at Piper Keys, Artists Space, and Squeaky Wheel. Their work has been featured in publications such as Screen Slate, Filmmaker Magazine, Millennium Film Journal, Film Quarterly, and Hyperallergic.

Their exhibition ​‘Narrative Warfare’ is on show at LUX, London, 11 April to 31 May 2026..

Blaise Kirschner (they/​them) is an artist who primarily works in the moving image. Kirschner’s films and video installations draw on histories from below, popular genres and speculative fiction and examine how socio-political, economic and ecological ruptures, and the fantasies and fears animated by them, are encoded in cultural forms.

Kirschner has widely exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Secession (Vienna), Chisenhale Gallery (London), Extra City (Antwerp), NBK – Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin) and CCA – Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow) and group exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (Lisbon), Benaki Museum (Athens), HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Whitechapel Gallery (London) and others.

They were the winner of the prestigious Jarman Award in 2011 and participated in the British Art Show (2011), the Liverpool Biennial (2012) and the Athens Biennale (2009, 2013) as well as many film festivals, including the 60^th BFI London Film Festival, 57^th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, 66^th Berlinale and the 53^rd and 59^th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Their films are distributed by LUX and held in the British Film Institute Artists’ Moving Image Collection (both London), and the Arsenal Institut für Film und Videokunst (Berlin), and private collections.

Since 2023 Blaise Kirschner is a Professor in Fine Art with Focus on Moving Image at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Between 2013 to 2016 they co-led the DAAD-funded educational and artistic research programme ​‘Survival Kit’, a cooperation between the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and the Athens School of Fine Art, and were part of a team of artistic mentors and students who initiated and ran Circuits and Currents, the project space of the Athens School of Fine Art.

Corin Sworn engages with language, material and place as transversal living concepts. Sworn stages relations between moving image, installation and experimental writing, aiming to evoke thought as sensorial, situated and in motion. Recent works have focused shifts in understanding that occur adjacent to emergent technologies with particular regard to translation and boundary conditions. Sworn won the Max Mara Award for Women Artists in 2015, a Leverhulme Prize in 2017 and is Professor of Contemporary Art at Northumbria University.

Recent exhibitions include: Gallery North, Newcastle (2025); ​‘Moving in Relation’, The Common Guild Glasgow (2023); ​‘Cumulo’, with URRA, Buenos Aires (2022); the radio play ​‘Fabric Noir’ with Jude Browning for Radiophrenia (2022); OCAT Shenzhen (2021); Edinburgh Art Festival (2019); Galeria Arsenal, Białystok (2016); Toronto Film Festival (2016); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia (2015); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Langen Foundation, Neuss (2015); Sydney Biennial, Australia (2014); 55^th Venice Biennale (2013); and Tate Britain (2011).

Jordan Lord: Writing is fundamental to my filmmaking (a term I use broadly). Most of my films have an essayistic quality and sometimes begin as stand-alone essays. There’s usually something I’m trying to think through, and if there’s a set of images I can imagine recording (or more often, something I have already recorded), I begin to think about the writing as the start of a film or video.

Often, this writing just looks like jotting down notes, ideas, things I would like to be able to shoot or want to figure out how to connect together. I’m especially drawn to words or concepts that are the same on the surface but are used in different contexts. For instance, ​‘access’ is a term I primarily use and encounter in relation to care and disability. But it’s used to mean something different in documentary filmmaking, more like the ​‘value added’ to one’s production because of the amount of permission or intimacy you’ve been granted to the people and places you want to film. Here, I then start to think about how these things actually have a concerning amount in common: this notion of permission or intimacy being conditional and easily taken for granted/​abused, on the one hand, and, on the other, the role that value plays in the provision/​withholding of access.

By rubbing these two things against each other, I start to understand both uses of the term in a new way and start to think about how the film can talk about these things – – often in voiceover narration or in things people onscreen are discussing – – and what images might visualize them. For instance, in ​‘After… After… (Access)’, a film about my open heart surgery, I was trying to get access to filming my care in the hospital but was told I needed an expensive insurance policy that I couldn’t afford. In trying to find an image that shows me something about the rub between disability access and legal/​documentary access, I realized that footage I’d recorded of being wheeled down an empty hallway in the hospital (which I wasn’t supposed to do because I hadn’t been granted permission) poses a challenge to both notions of access, while also narratively standing in visually for the moment I’m being taken to surgery.

On a narrative level, this is sort of a manipulation on my part; the footage was recorded after the surgery; there’s an unmarked time jump because the hospital wouldn’t let me film the moment of being taken into surgery, and it was only after getting into the rhythm of hiding my camera under my blanket that I was able to record. But I’m okay with the manipulation because the bigger issue for me at that moment is what made me want to make the film in the first place: why/​how access is treated as both valuable and a threat to powerful institutions .

At the same time, the ​‘essay’ part of my writing is never separate from the literal process of trying to make the film’s images or sounds accessible to disabled audiences, so even though I’m often not directly ​‘writing’ them myself, audio descriptions provided by other participants in the film come to function as the script, and I write around them. All of my films integrate audio description and captioning into the writing and editing process. I generally record other people’s descriptions live, while I write and then record mine because the description often directly responds to or blurs with the ​‘essay’ I’m writing. Usually, I will wait to write my own audio description until I’ve first recorded audio description with participants, and I think about what I want to communicate that they haven’t already.

Sometimes there’s a point I have made that I want to make through the essay, but then an observation someone else has made about what they see in the image will make it redundant. Other times, I’m sort of shocked by how someone chooses to describe something in a way I never would or that maybe even actively misrepresents what I think is being shown. A really good example of this is at the end of my film ​‘Shared Resources’; my mother is describing footage of a sunset over the lake behind her house, as the camera lens fogs up. She calls it ​“a beautiful representation of our hope.” But she doesn’t describe the fact that the lake is no longer visible behind the fog on the lens. In thinking about writing my own description, it became less a moment to correct her or to say that it isn’t a beautiful representation of their hope (though that is not how I intended it or what I see when I look at it) than to add the information that ​“the camera lens has fogged,” both taking responsibility to not mislead an audience who can’t see the image and, ideally, creating the space for audiences to question what the film is showing at the moment.

Blaise Kirschner: I write scripts for most of my moving image works. When I started out as an artist filmmaker I did take a course in screenwriting for film, and I do still use that format in my practice because it makes it easier to estimate the running time, budget and scale of the production and to communicate with performers and other collaborators with a background in film and tv. That said, I do adapt the standard screenplay format for my own purposes, because I do not work with conventional narrative structures (often defined by three acts, characters ​‘journey”’ central conflict etc.). Over the years I started to teach screenwriting workshops for artists in which I introduce basic screenwriting rules alongside approaches to screenwriting that use alternative formats and show how elements from both can be adapted for the specific needs of a range of artists’ moving image projects.

My own writing process varies according to the demands of different works, so I will give several examples. For my film and installation ​‘The Last Days of Jack Sheppard’ (2009, with David Panos) – a ​‘critical costume drama’ set in 1720s London that dealt with the relationship between fiction, speculation and aesthetics – the script was composed of historical sources (such as satirical poems, pamphlets, newspapers, the writings of Daniel Defoe). I lifted quotes from different source text and rearranged them into dialogues between the characters. This process was both text-based and visual, so there is at least one print or painting from the period that provides the main visual reference for each scene as well. The annotated script was published by CCA, Glasgow, and Chisenhale Gallery, London, it includes many illustrations and original sources in the footnotes. In ​‘UNICA’ (2022), I wanted to move away from narration altogether and use navigation as an alternative structure of progression derived from computer games. There is very little dialogue in the film. We mostly hear an off-screen voice instructing a performer in a motion capture studio to act out scenes for a post-apocalyptic computer game. I really wanted to emphasize the contrast between the pared-down, workaday setting of the motion capture studio and the gory in-game scenarios the performer had to imagine (such as ​“your arms are splattered in blood up to your elbows” etc.). In preparation I studied various computer games and worked together with Zee Hartmann, a choreographer and dramaturge, to create a style of performance that would echo digital avatars for the scenes that were set IRL (“in real life”), blurring the lines between reality and simulation.

Corin Sworn: In early stages of production, I find writing offers a way to aggregate across different forms of research. I draw notes from a range of places, and transcribe thoughts that arise while doing so, once collected I move these pieces around to find and unfold relations. Sorting and rearranging creates various degrees of resonance and I ask, what could visually open or elaborate this gathered research? Because I tend to work with how the past has been imaged, I look for ways visuals either ground what is being said, or trouble an assumed idea. This tends to make somewhat conversational works where the through line argues with itself.

I once read, to map time and narrative development in feature film, a page of script should align to one minute of screen time. I don’t hold to the adage of one minute per page but I do place text within the page as a field to explore where it might fall in space in relation to how it might be experienced. I find this as a way to ​‘feel language’ as a trajectory in space – should it be felt emotionally near or far? Relatedly, what should the camera do?

Sometimes I work with on screen text. For The Coat text appeared on the moving image work in the form of subtitles. The film is in several dialects and languages; these were colour coded to show lingual variance. There are birds who speak in the film too. At times they attack the subtitles, finding in language itself an impoverished form of communication emblematic of human hubris.

Jordan: In working with collaborative audio description, writing is always a collaborative process. But here it is maybe less about a direct exchange of ideas than a kind of reckoning with the fact that how I intend for it to function is dependent on /​might conflict with how it’s received by the other people who are in it/​worked on it/​who are watching it.

I actively co-wrote my most recent film ​‘Concealed and Denied’ with Abby Sun, who has worked as a producer on all of my films since 2021. This was a different but somehow familiar way of working, as the writing often looked more like editing.

We were researching and selecting primary sources and thinking about how to excerpt them and frame them to produce meaning through how they resonate with what came before or after, trying to add as little of our own commentary as possible and making it clear when we were inserting our own words/​descriptions/​interpretations.

Something I learned a lot through this process was how tiny details like standardizing the format for how each source was introduced through voiceover and captions – – the date and platform it appeared on – – created not only a rhythm but also a set of tools for the audience to read what the film shows.

The film tries to demonstrate a way of working through the news and right-wing disinformation machines that have been used to manufacture consent for extra-legal state violence in the US since Trump’s election, withholding the original images and sounds (which function largely as propaganda) but nevertheless describing them and how they’re constructed.

Writing this film with Abby was really key to being able to both get through this material and to arrive at one of its primary propositions, which is that, because the right-wing seeks to overwhelm the public with this (dis)information, it can be helpful to absorb it with others to try to make sense of it and to think about how we fight back against it.

Blaise: It’s often a solo process for me, with some notable exceptions. In my feature film ​‘Moderation’ (2016) the writing process stretched over two years and was more organic and collaborative. When I was developing the film, which is in the meta-horror genre, I made audio recordings and transcripts of all the conversations I had with people during the research process. Initially this was just for background and not intended to go directly into the final script, but then I decided to cast some of the horror actors I had spoken to in the film, as lightly fictionalised versions of themselves. So we ended up basing much of their dialogues on edited versions of the transcripts. Because our conversations contained personal details, I gave each actor the opportunity to review the dialogues and redact any content that they did not want to share on screen. Other parts of the script were co-written with two of the principal actors, Maya Lubinsky and Anna de Filippi, who were also friends of mine. At the time of writing we were in different time zones and we would use an open source text editing platform we all had access to and write our contributions in different colours and then we would spend long hours on the phone in conversation and sharing horror film references and theoretical texts.

Corin: Even when it is apparently solo, I find writing collaborative, it offers a way to speak with pasts, other texts and differing ways of seeing and knowing. Alone, I tend to be quite text led, to plan and build experience through words, then invite images in. I like working collaboratively as it disrupts this inclination. Co-directing, working with a dramaturg, interviews proliferate experiential approaches.

Scripts can offer ways to write collectively. For ​‘The Coat’, co-director Tony Romano and I wrote a loose plot outline, having interviewed emigres and immigrants to and from southern Italy. We then found locations to situate filming and sought people whose lived experience elaborated our outline. Much of the script was worked up responsively on location. Here a story board and text came together to create a working space that offered enough looseness and direction to hold the cast, so we could write together, on location, responsively.

Jordan: I haven’t really solicited feedback during the writing process actually (with the exception of literally co-writing); I usually save this for the editing process. But as I’ve said, I think of these things fluidly. Unsurprisingly, I’ve found it most challenging to get conflicting feedback. But this is also where a lot of important decisions and clarifications can be made about why you’re choosing to work one way over another.

Blaise: The most constructive feedback usually comes from my peers – especially other artist filmmakers who share and/​or understand my approach to moving images and whose assessment I trust. Often someone with a background in screenwriting for film and television will be of little help when it comes to artists’ moving image, as the stakes are so different.

If you work with dialogue and voiceovers, always read them out loud to yourself while you are writing – speech comes across very differently from text on a page. If you work with performers, allocate sufficient time to rehearsals. Performers who share your vision can be extremely helpful interlocutors, and I usually make script revisions during rehearsals, when we can see what works and what doesn’t.

Corin: I have found productive feedback through workshopping material with actors or a cinematographer. This can grant a sense of how textual material relates to on screen time and what might feel clunky when spoken. Sometimes an actor can produce variants of what could happen with a section of dialogue, this can be helpful and disorienting. I feel it as similar to working in more documentary forms where many nested narratives are found in interviews and editing involves drawing through lines between them.

One of the challenges I find most alluring, involves language as a constructed system in its own right and very separate to picture. There is what words say, and what you want them to do, the latter can relate to timing, repetition, sound, alliteration and silence. Once quite deep into editing I can feel both together. The challenge of sharing too early, is to have the words’ overt meanings made explicit in a way that disorders their felt ​‘echo’ and this can affect how sound and picture might work together.

Jordan: I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot, in the context of both teaching screenwriting at my current job (in spite of never having worked as a professional screenwriter) as well as trying to work on a screenplay for the first time in many years for a film that will have fictional, scripted elements.

In many ways, how I came to work in a documentary or essayistic mode is that I don’t actually think very clearly about what I want to shoot until I’ve recorded it. It’s very helpful for me to have an image already recorded to work with and then write what it makes me think about and connect it with something else I’ve either thought about or already recorded. I think part of this has to do with me not being able to imagine beforehand what it will feel like to spend time with what I’ve recorded until I watch it back and feel time unfolding through it.

I’d sort of like to blend the two ways of working, writing a script and shooting things I haven’t yet written, without fully knowing who the actors or cast will be. I feel very flummoxed by the long timeline and economics of trying to fund a fictional film (likewise in documentary; the grant writing process can stall out my writing for months at a time), particularly the attempt to resolve what it will be before it’s made. At the same time, with fiction, in the absence of the ability to pay collaborators to make a world with me, this means using myself or inanimate objects as stand-ins for the characters I’m trying to create.

At the same time, I’m having fun (when I’m not feeling frustrated or overwhelmed) being able to imagine what I’d like to experience in a film that I haven’t experienced before. While most of my practice takes a documentary approach, much of my impulse to make films is to try to imagine the world otherwise. (I’m currently living in a very conservative part of Colorado, and I started by just wanting to imagine all of the tourist‑y nature spots as gay cruising grounds when the tourists aren’t looking). I think this is one of the things writing is good for, and it has been the motivating factor in the new film I’m starting to outline.

Alternatively, for documentaries, I don’t think I would really be interested in making these kinds of films without writing with or alongside them. For me, writing is the way I make sense of what I’ve shot and what I’m trying to do with this material.

Blaise: Since moving image is such a complex and composite medium, some form of writing is almost always useful, most minimally to clarify your intentions for your project for yourself. Even if your process relies mostly on improvisation it is good to have a script or score to share with the people involved in your project, so they can have a more informed picture before they agree to work with you. In my early film ​‘Polly II’ (2006), an anti-gentrification pirate sci-fi set in London’s East End, the cast consisted predominantly of working class actors from the area. They had experienced displacement through gentrification first hand, so they were much better at articulating their experience than I was at writing about it, but I still showed them my script, because I wanted them to have a sense of my own politics before they said yes to the project – and on that basis we then made changes together.

Corin: I love text image differentials, the way words ask the mind to make what they name, as a felt process significantly different from the presentation of pictures by the camera. Words can grant the feeling of in-sight quite erratically and I find this weird internal presentation very useful for generating visuals that might be brought to a work. However, when working in a text led manner, I remind myself that language has its own logic, if this comes to bear too strongly the liveliness of working between vision and sound can be undercut.

When making a voice led essay film, once the text is recorded and picture edited, I must cut the spoken section again. There is often too much said verbally at this point, even as it feels ​‘complete’. To disturb this apparent logic, I must choose a point to cut into, so I can figure out what might be removed, where absence will do more than speech.

Jordan: Yes, beyond the actual writing I do for my films, there’s a kind of immediate feedback between my filmmaking and the writing I do about filmmaking, art, politics, and disability.

Something that might not be as obvious on the surface is how much the writing in my films is influenced by other artists, who work in text-based forms, particularly the work of Cameron Rowland, Carissa Rodriguez, Tiffany Sia, Park McArthur, and Constantina Zavitsanos. Each of these artists has fundamentally shaped how I think, but my writing and films have equally been transformed by how they work with text as a frame and a material.

For instance, Rowland not only refuses to allow images of their work to be reproduced without the textual caption that contextualizes and is as much the work (without the caption, the image would fundamentally fail to render what the work is). In their practice, the writing that summarizes their research is not just information but is actually doing something (to/​with the audience) in the act of being shared through /​as the material objects they present.

Or in the case of Rodriguez, the press release is a story that conceals and reveals the reproductive labor the work is born out of; the framing device is not outside the work but is constantly shifting where we understand the work as beginning and ending.

In all of these artists’ work with text is something fundamentally live and dependent on the audience.

Blaise: In my practice I engage in different forms of writing, from scripts to theoretical texts. Before and while I write for moving image I usually draw. Drawing for me often feels like a prior stage to writing in which I develop a visual and conceptual schema for a given work. I use the term schema in the sense of the Greek avant-garde filmmaker Antoinetta Angelidi, as that which combines the idea, form, and structure of a film:

A film is indeed a building, a big schema-structure, which re-emerges in every phase of its composition as it includes the new elements, until it is finally completed. It is important to always have in your mind the initial conception: in shooting and in editing, in choosing and forming the shooting sets, in directing the actresses’ and actors’ movements, and the camera. In post-production the initial conception re-emerges through new discoveries and bursts of illumination, where you realise that your initial schema gets a new form.*

For ​‘The Last Days of Jack Sheppard’ my drawings were based on pared down and recombined architectural elements from William Hogarth’s print series ​‘Industry and Idleness’ (1747), which loosely references events from Jack Sheppard’s life. In the drawings I intuitively explored the systemic relationship between workshop and prison cell, bourgeois home and the gallows that lay at the heart of Sheppard’s story. These drawings were later adapted into sets for the film and installation. I went through a similar process with ​‘UNICA’, which was inspired by the anagrammatic poems and drawings of Unica Zürn. Here drawing, prior to and concurrent with scriptwriting, was a way of processing Zürn’s anagrams and drawings on my own terms. It became a way of determining the driving formal elements of the film.

Corin: I tend to think of the gallery quite cinematically and often work with installation. I once made an exhibition where all the works’ titles aggregated into a separate story. A visitor could move through the exhibition space cumulatively as if along this journey or read each title as informing only the work it was said to relate to. I thought of the unfolding ​‘journey’ version as an expansion of a moving image practice into the exhibition space. This can offer means to facilitate understanding as it arrives through working a multitude of approaches and sensations.

Of late, I include digital or printed text-image works alongside an installation for those who need a motile alternative, who can’t experience all facets of an exhibition in the gallery and want a way to process later and elsewhere. These recent text-image additions stem from ​‘micro-films’ (the smallest section of script and one picture) which I began to make during the pandemic. I published some of these with Prototype a brilliant UK based experimental press. Galleries, cinemas, printed matter, these are all means of opening understanding, together and text travels through each of them.

Jordan: I would maybe start by questioning what counts as writing. As I’ve sort of hinted at, I both feel awkward and happy about the fact that I’m teaching screenwriting when this is not something I’m particularly trained or experienced in. I’m often not sure if what I’m discussing with students is actually the ​‘writing’ in the film or something else: directing, editing, cinematography, the improvisation of the actors, sound design, etc.

Because I feel a strong imperative to not teach the screenwriting ​‘rules’ that I was taught in college and immediately made me want to not write screenplays, I’m often showing films that have very few words in them. As a class, we’re often trying to figure out together what about these films are ​‘written’ and how would we write these films ourselves.

I’m not sure if this is useful or not, but what I ask students to do in this context is to begin by describing what they see and/​or hear in these passages without words. We think especially about how this process of description tells us something about how the world within the film works: what are the resources or infrastructures that are mediating how people relate to each other.

This doesn’t necessarily help them tell a clearer or more exciting story, but it gives them a starting point to think about what a frame shows, what it withholds, and how to play with this relationship (which I would argue is maybe the more fundamental thing to a film than its story or ​‘point’). Ultimately, the goal is that students are not focused on just showing or telling but rather understand that we can do both and how the frame is transformed in the process.

The very act of watching a film is also a form of interpreting it, which is also to say a way of writing with/​about/​nearby it. This might be a place to begin.

Blaise: Writing for moving image is very different from other forms of writing. The most important lesson I learned from conventional screenwriting is that you write actions in the present tense, you write only what the viewer will see and hear, and you write in the order in which things appear on screen. This is a valuable process, and it takes some discipline. It forces you to translate ideas, concepts and contextual information into concrete elements (action, speech, texts, props, sounds, camera, montage etc.) and it makes you envision your moving image work on the page shot by shot. There are no theoretical propositions, no interior developments, no backstory, if you can’t find a way to show it concretely. So you do not need to write ​‘well’ in a general sense to write a good script for your moving image work, rather, you need to be able to adapt how you write to the demands of the medium. Look at screenplays for your favourite films – it can be quite sobering how prosaic they look on the page. There’s also some published screenplays by artists working in the moving image that can help you see how each person has adapted the format to the needs of their own work. Also, writing always gets better with practice.

Corin: Play with text, don’t feel obliged to work text in a particular or even linear way (as text editing software tends to organise), use the whole page, spatially. I suggest this as it might free someone from feeling there is a right way to employ writing. And because I’ve found it helpful in considering filmic time and mise en scene.

Maybe I have the opposite problem, I’ve internalised an idea that images should speak on their own and verbal language is a crutch or extra, a weakness that good picture shouldn’t need. I think this can be a techno progressivist narrative base on a bad ethos of competition – oral telling and vocal timber are ancient and hold multiple means of approach. I love being told stories, through the texture of words, their capacity to guide in palpably, humanly disordered and involving ways.

* Rea Walldén, ​‘Giving Birth to Her Films: Wandering with Antoinetta Angelidi’, in The Films of Antoinetta Angelidi, ReFocus: The International Directors Series (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 204.