After the Facts: These edits are my thoughts

The underlying research project of After the Facts is inquiring into creative practice, distributed cognition, and feminist film histories. The research methodology involves both embodied creative practice and analysis of cognitive actions occurring in practices. These analyses demonstrate that filmmaking creativity is an instance of distributed cognition (see Pearlman 2018; Pearlman, MacKay and Sutton 2018).

Once we understand that thinking is distributed—it doesn’t just happen in the brains of individuals, but arises through and within entangled engagements of brains, bodies, and worlds—we can look at women in early film and see that what they were doing was more than “just helping.” Although their ideas may not be documented on paper, we can see their creative and intellectual participation in their processes.