Abstract
The focus of this chapter is the film or video selfie—in other words, film or video shots and sequences in which camera operators film themselves. The authors are interested in two interwoven aspects: the practice of recording and the moving image. Accordingly, they develop a conceptual model of the act of recording as well as analyze the video selfie as an aesthetic media artifact. For the model, the chapter focuses on both everyday amateur practice and video selfies in the specialized fields of journalism, art, and entertainment. The examination of the moving image is based mostly on audiovisual material from fiction films and serves both to conceptualize the heightened mobility of the camera as a representational practice and an aesthetic experience and as to trace a short history of the film and video selfie.
The camera must be placed in the hands of young people; the camera, I said, not a screenplay. And these young people, as they come out of their homes, must report everything they see, anything that strikes them. Some will film people ; some just windows; others will turn the camera onto themselves.
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Notes
- 1.
As most of the examples are made with digital handheld devices, for reasons of simplicity we mostly speak of video selfies but do not exclude film selfies.
- 2.
To weed out and ignore these photos tagged as “selfies” in accordance with the #selfietruther principles would indeed be foolish, since, by way of observing a specific photographic and videographic practice, they offer an invitation to reflect on the selfie as a practice of recording .
- 3.
Selfies shot with drones (dronies) could be included in this listing, as there is a direct link between cameraperson and camera; however, there is not a physical link as is the case in the other examples.
- 4.
On Zavattini’s idea of a new alternative (Italian) that which, completely removed from dramaturgical convention and narration, aims at chronicling everyday life and relies on small, lightweight cameras in the hands of everybody, see Ochsner (2012).
- 5.
On the pose and the gaze, see Silverman (1997).
- 6.
See the majority of video clips at https://gopro.com (accessed August 27, 2015).
- 7.
See http://www.br.de/mediathek/video/sendungen/dahoam-is-dahoam/selfie-portraet-holger-wilhelm-gregor-brunner-100.html (accessed August 27, 2015).
- 8.
On the act of mimicry as a specific interrelation of subject, photography and body , see Silverman (1997, 46–51).
- 9.
In several places, the film strongly recalls the adventurer Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald as played by Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s 1982 fiction film F itzcarraldo (Herzog 1982).
- 10.
On the concept of media-as-sociation, see Thiele (2009, 366).
- 11.
At approximately the same time, German filmmaker Lutz Mommartz made Selbstschüsse (Self Shots, DEU 1967), a playful film about filming oneself. He holds the camera on himself, he throws it in the air and he films his shadow. The film was shown at an experimental film festival in Knokke in 1967.
- 12.
Tony Hill picked up the experiment in 1993: In Holding the Viewer, the performer Keith Allen mounts the camera on a stick which he then in several scenes moves in various ways while keeping the camera trained on himself. The scenes are elaborately edited through match cuts.
- 13.
Philippe Bédard (2015) offers, apart from the subjective shot and the objective shot, a third category: the third-person image made with selfie-mounts and GoPro-cameras.
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
For more research on the cell phone documentary film, see Krautkrämer (2014a).
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Mediography
A World of Conflict (Jeffrey Porter, USA 2007)
Adolf Winkelmann, Kassel 9.12.67 11.54h (Adolf Winkelmann, DEU 1967)
Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, USA 1999)
Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, USA 2008).
Dahoam Is Dahoam (Bayerischer Rundfunk/PolyScreen/Constantin Television, 2007–)
Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (Renzo Martens, NLD 2008)
Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, GER 1982)
Holding the Viewer (Tony Hill, GBR 1993)
Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, USA 1947)
[REC] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, ESP 2007
Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, USA 1987)
Seconds (John Frankenheimer, USA 1966)
Selbstschüsse (Lutz Mommartz, DEU 1967)
Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, USA 2003)
Terminator (James Cameron, GBR/USA 1984)
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Krautkrämer, F., Thiele, M. (2018). The Video Selfie as Act and Artifact of Recording. In: Eckel, J., Ruchatz, J., Wirth, S. (eds) Exploring the Selfie. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57949-8_11
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