First-Person Documentary and the New Political Subject: Enunciation, Recent History, and the Present in New Argentine Cinema

Abstract

In his groundbreaking study of “autobiography in film and video” (as per the author’s own description of his work), Michael Renov speaks of the emergence of a new subjectivity in documentary productions of the 1980s and 1990s as the construction of “a self, typically a deeply social self” (2004, 178). What is new about this subjectivity, he explains, is that it does not reject the collective: “current documentary self-inscription enacts identities—fluid, multiple, even contradictory—while remaining fully embroiled with public discourses” (178). This process accounts for the surfacing of new identities in the cinematic sphere of American post-modernity: gay and lesbian, African American, and immigrant or exilic identities will be of particular interest to Renov. Although it goes beyond a study of the inscription of identity politics in the American documentary, The Subject of Documentary could be seen as the most accomplished articulation of a poetics and rhetoric of postmodern documentary, in a context “in which politics were not so much abandoned as transformed” (171).