Stuart Croft's current and recent research projects include:

Funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council, Practice-Led and Applied Research Grants. The Stag Without a Heart asks what happens when the normally linear cinematic themes of corruption, temptation and deception are circularised. Within a classical Hollywood mise-en-scène, a wealthy American delivers an endless political fable to the empty bed of a dead man.

Funded by RCA Research Development Fund. The Death Waltz is an exercise in filmic control; it asks what occurs when control of the camera is handed over to a film’s participants. At a formal dinner party in a baronial mansion, a Scottish man tells a violent, military ghost story to a group of silent guests. The project is shot by the film’s own actors, using a Super 8mm camera that is passed around the dinner table.

Funded by Arts Council England and RCA Research Development Fund. Drive In seeks to bring the Hollywood road movie into the gallery space, and equally aims to explore the doomed fantasy of paradise. During a circular car journey at night, a woman delivers an endless desert island joke to a silent male driver. The punch line never arrives, and both joke and car journey recur seamlessly.

Funded by Fred London Ltd and RCA Research Development Fund. Century City proposes a narrative, spatial and temporal impossibility. On two screens, a detective in Cape Town and a movie director in Los Angeles discuss a homicide case by phone. The murder is never solved, and moreover the film’s characters appear to occupy the same physical space, despite being several thousand miles apart.