Abstract
In this chapter, I critically assess the ability of autobiographical documentary to convey an authentic portrayal of the self and analyze the cinematic means through which autobiographical documentaries may be able to do so. I compare and outline the chief differences between autobiographical documentaries and literary memoirs and assess the ways in which cognitive analysis of film and post-structuralist accounts within film theory and documentary studies have dealt with the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. I lastly consider new avenues of autobiographical expression such as the ones potentially offered by social media, blogs, video diaries, personal websites, and so on.
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Notes
- 1.
Smith Magazine Six Words Memoir: accessed March 19, 2017, http://www.sixwordmemoirs.com/
- 2.
Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle, trans. Don Bartlett (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
- 3.
Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 167–168.
- 4.
Carl Plantinga, “What a Documentary is After All,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Spring, 2005): 105–117.
- 5.
Noël Carroll. “Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: Conceptual Analyses,” in Engaging the Moving Image. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 193–224.
- 6.
Trevor Ponech, What is Nonfiction Cinema?: On the Very Idea of Motion Picture Communication (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999).
- 7.
Bill Nichols. Introduction to Documentary. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
- 8.
While it is inevitable, when discussing the autobiography, to refer to this debate, its treatment in this chapter is rather scant and succinct. For a more comprehensive treatment of the debate, the reader should refer to Vitor Moura’s chapter, which appears in this section of the anthology (SECTION + PP).
- 9.
Most of my examples are taken from North American autobiographical documentaries. While partial, my choice is motivated by the strong connection between the theoretical issues covered by this chapter and by their intimate connection to the evolution of this genre both in relation to historical contingencies and in relation to the technology and cinematic possibilities that are at the basis of the emergence of this sub-genre.
- 10.
I am here loosely referring to Noël Carroll’s characterization of narrative connections as erotetic. See Noël Carroll, “The Power of Movies,” Daedalus Vol. 114, No. 4, The Moving Image (Fall: 1985): 79–103.
- 11.
David Velleman, for example, challenges the requirement of causality and favors, in its place, the idea according to which narratives find their “rhythm” and organization thanks to a mechanism of “emotional cadence.” David Velleman, “Narrative Explanation,” The Philosophical Review Vol. 112, No. 1 (Jan., 2003): 1–25. See also, in relation to narrative and autobiography David Velleman, “The Right to a Life,” in On Life Writing, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
- 12.
See, for instance, Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts. (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press: 2015).
- 13.
Paul Arthur, “The Moving Picture Cure: Self-Therapy Documentaries,” The Psychoanalytic Review, 94 (2007): 865–885.
- 14.
Laura Marcus, Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Cinema. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 15.
Such as concern is equally urgent in several other autobiographers, from Lotjie Sotherland’s obsession with her mind to Chantal Akerman’s films, which, she claims, are based on nothing but her own feelings. See, for example, Charles Warren, “Fiction and Nonfiction in Chantal Akerman’s Films,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, eds. David LaRocca & Timothy Corrigan (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 495.
- 16.
Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience Through Film (New York: Routledge, 2016).
- 17.
Polley relies on re-enactments but also on the testimonies of friends of her mother, her siblings, her father, and so on.
- 18.
Karen Hoffman, “Deceiving into the Truth”: The Indirect Cinema of Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing, in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, eds. David LaRocca & Timothy Corrigan (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 525.
- 19.
George Winston, Claiming the Real. Documentary: Grierson and Beyond, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Dirk Eitzen, “When is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Autumn 1995), pp. 81–102.
- 20.
Gregory Currie, “Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs,” 285–297. See also Gregorie Currie, “Documentary Traces: Film and the Content of Photographs,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, eds. David LaRocca & Timothy Corrigan (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017).
- 21.
Plantinga “What a Documentary is After All,” 105–117.
- 22.
Keith Dromm, “Understanding (and) the Legacy of the Trace: Reflections after Carroll, Currie, and Plantinga,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, eds. David LaRocca & Timothy Corrigan (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 413–429.
- 23.
Winston, Claiming the Real. Documentary: Grierson and Beyond, 202.
- 24.
Warren, “Fiction and Nonfiction in Chantal Akerman’s Films,” 501.
- 25.
Winston, Claiming the Real. Documentary: Grierson and Beyond, 230.
- 26.
Christopher Cowley, ed. The Philosophy of Autobiography (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).
- 27.
Jim Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 11–32.
- 28.
Auteur theory, albeit stemming in France, found a fertile ground in the New York movement of the 1960s and 1970s and specifically in the work of Andrew Sarris who is largely responsible for the “Americanization” of auteur theory and for its North American success. Andrew Sarris, “Notes on Auteur Theory in 1962.” In Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Leo Braudy & Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 451–454.
- 29.
Alexandre Astruc. “Du Stylo à la Caméra et de la Caméra au Stylo,” L’Écran Française, March 30, 1948.
- 30.
Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film. From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15.
- 31.
Bill Nichols, Speaking Truth With Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 99. See also: Bill Nichols “The Question of Evidence.” In Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, eds. Thomas Austin and Wilma De Jong (Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw Hill, 2008).
- 32.
Nichols, 1999.
- 33.
Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 149–153.
- 34.
Ibidem.
- 35.
While Nichols has softened his view on the importance of evidence, the message has not fundamentally changed. In Speaking Truths with Film, where he considers irony, paradox, and fictive techniques, sobriety seems to prevail. What prevails, in these films, is the desire to communicate something about the subject and something about how the subject interacts with everyday reality, no matter its uncertainty or the rhetorical stratagems it hinges upon.
- 36.
Noël Carroll “Nonfiction film and postmodern skepticism.” In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 293.
- 37.
Michael Renov “First Person Films: Some Theses on Self-Inscription.” In Rethinking documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, eds. Thomas Austin and Wilma De Jong (Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw Hill, 2008), 42.
- 38.
Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 110.
- 39.
See also: Jon Dovey, Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television (London: Pluto Press, 2000).
- 40.
Jason Wood (ed.), Nick Broomfield: Documenting Icons (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 229.
- 41.
Think, for example, of the 2010 “Global Lives Project” or of new technologies such as Florian Thalhofer’s Korsakow, a software for interactive narratives and at how fast their popularity is growing.
- 42.
Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus. Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. (New York: Penguin Press, 2010).
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Di Summa, L.T. (2019). The Autobiographical Documentary. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_27
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