Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film

(Note: Sample material is taken from uncorrected proofs. Changes may be made prior to publication.)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND DOCUMENTARY

From its beginnings, the documentary enterprise has been largely understood and practiced as a means of knowing the material, social world. From the earliest days of filmmaking, when the Lumière Brothers sent cameramen world-wide, documentary has been associated with ethnography and empire. So, too, has documentary been considered a means of providing visible evidence of social injustice, and a powerful tool of national propaganda. Although the Lumière records of family domesticity made routine life public, few families had access to moving picture technology in the early twentieth century, and far more rare was any means of public distribution or exhibition of "home movies." As the century progressed, documentary's links to journalism, social science and government deepened and, consequently, exploration of personal subjectivity was considered anathema to the documentary enterprise. Thus, curiosity about private or psychological worlds (outside of narrative film) found expression in experimental or avant-garde filmmaking.

As 16mm independent filmmaking developed in the late 1940s and into the 1950s in the United States, émigrés Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas and American Stan Brakhage merged formal experimentation and subjectivity in a cinema of personal revelation. The individual-and often idiosyncratic-filmmaker became subject matter. Her or his inner life-revealed by dreams, released by ritual, and universalized by myth-became the site of interest (Dyer, 1990). These independently produced films, exhibited publicly but narrowly, marked an important shift from traditional documentary impulses to create a hybrid cinema that combined documentation with creative interpretation (for example, Mekas's diaries and Brakhage's films of lovemaking and his children's births and growth). This experimental urge to explore subjectivity continues as a potent influence for contemporary film and video artists. Simultaneously, in the post-war years, home movie-making, as a hobby, became an economic and technical possibility for many middle-class families (Zimmerman, 1995). Using amateur gauges and shown only in domestic environments, home movies of the fifties and beyond would become important aesthetic and topical influences as well as rich archival sources for autobiographical documentaries made by professional film-makers.

A conflation of technical and social changes-the introduction of lightweight, relatively inexpensive 16mm equipment; a distrust of all things official; the burgeoning women's movement; and a heightened interest in the political dimensions of personal life in the late 1960s and early 1970s-led to a surge in autobiographical filmmaking, especially in the United States. One strain of autobiography employed direct cinema methods to create motion picture diaries that emphasized the immediacy, intensity, and unpredictability of experience—the mantra of direct cinema—but with one crucial difference: the typical self-effacement of the direct cinema practitioner was replaced by a focus on the film-maker whose life became the film's subject. Thus, a potent configuration that was neither pure direct cinema nor journalistic cinema vérité was shaped from two dominant documentary styles of the period. Jim McBride's seminal, darkly comic David Holzman's Diary (1967) simultaneously introduced and satirized the form in a pseudo-documentary that has become a template for the possibilities and excesses of autobiographical documentary (and included in the [US] National Film Registry). Callow, self-absorbed, by turns bullying and insecure, Holzman (as played by L. M. Kit Carson) is the quintessential film student who lives for filming and, consequently, has nothing in his life worth filming. He violates his girlfriend's privacy, bores his friends, but, amazingly, did not destroy a willingness in other filmmakers to continue the format. Both the diary form and McBride's entanglements in sexual politics were embraced earnestly in Edward Pincus's multi-year exploration of open marriage and family life in Diaries (1971-1976), and comically in Ross McElwee's nervous journey to the American South in Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibilities of Romantic Love in the South during an Era of Nuclear Weapon Proliferation (1986). Pincus was drawn to autobiographical production (as many others have been) through interest in philosophy, phenomenology and politics. His diary films have been influential in their exploration of the concept of "presence"; in their investigation of the interactive consequences of filming; and in their recognition of subjectivity as the great problem of film (Lane, 2002).

However, the diary form-shooting everyday events for a sustained period of time and the construction of a subsequent narrative in chronological order-has not been the dominant autobiographical documentary style. More commonly, autodocumentaries combine observational footage with interviews and archival materials to create life stories situated historically, often organized achronologically, usually with a voice-over narration by the filmmaker, and frequently bound by the parameters of family life. By the mid-1970s, the proliferation of film schools and the inauguration of feminist production and exhibition networks increased opportunities for women film-makers. This situation produced a concomitant increase in autobiographical productions that centered on the complexities of intergenerational relationships among women. Joyce Chopra's Joyce at 34 (1973); Amalie R. Rothschild's Nana, Mom and Me (1974); Michelle Citron's (partially) faux autobiographical Daughter Rite (1978), and Chantal Ackerman's News from Home (1991) all interrogate the complex, tenuous bonds between mothers and daughters, which were undergoing special strain during a historical moment when many Western women were resisting the values and expectations that had driven their mothers' lives.

Feminist critics have noted that patterns of openness and dialogic engagement characterize women's autobiographical production (Lesage, 1999). Intensified by the Lacanian turn in feminist film theory, autodocumentaries made by both women and men (who were often either part of academe or strongly influenced by it) demonstrated a heightened interest in the consequences of patriarchy and frequently saw childhood trauma as a defining autobiographical moment. Unsatisfactory relationships with fathers saturate autodocumentary. Maxi Cohen's Joe and Maxi (1978), Abraham Ravett's Everything's for You (1989), Su Friedrich's Sink or Swim (1990), and Marco Williams's In Search of Our Father (1992) are but a cluster from a far larger pool of films that confront the primal father-child bond and its lasting effects on the adult child.

Ethical issues of consent, an abiding problematic in all documentary production, are repositioned, rather than avoided, in autobiographical productions that center on often volatile and fragile family relations (Katz and Katz, 1988). Some autodocumentaries, such as Alan Berliner's Nobody's Business (1996) are built around a family member's resistance to participation in the construction of a family portrait. In contrast to Oscar Berliner's pugnacious contempt for his son's project (albeit a disdain that never erases the old man's affection for his son), many autodocumentaries include a minor complaint, or a slight hesitation, or a look of discomfort that is fleetingly included amid a general appearance of cooperation, leaving the viewer puzzled as to how strident off-camera resistance or edited objections from family members might have been.

Incentives toward self-inscription were numerous in the 1980s. Memoirs flooded the book market, confessional talk shows filled the airwaves, and autobiography seemed ubiquitous. A new expression, identity politics, gained currency. Some of the spurs toward self-representation were long in coming and well deserved. Widespread and sustained critiques challenged the assumptions and presumptions of traditional ethnographic work and fostered the growth of a documentary sub-genre newly labeled autoethnography, in which members of (often maligned or ignored) cultures and sub-cultures took control of the politics of representation to produce work that investigated the cultural through the personal, and vice-versa. Individuals whose identities were partially constituted through membership in groups that had been disenfranchised by earlier documentary work-people of color, gays and lesbians, members of the working class, the chronically or terminally ill and their families-embraced autoethnography. Productions that joined the specificity of personal history with broader cultural concerns resulted in a vibrant, oxymoronic form: the collective autobiography. These collective autobiographies, or autoethnographies, were bolstered by targeted federal support in many nations in the West and made available to large audiences through new venues for exhibition (for example, the P.O.V. series on American public television and specialized film and video festivals, such as gay and lesbian festivals, worldwide). Rea Tajiri (History and Memory: for Akiko and Takashige, 1991), Marlon Riggs (Tongues Untied, 1989), Tony Bubba (Lighting over Braddock, 1988), Derek Jarman (The Last of England, 1987; The Garden, 1990; and Blue, 1993), Deborah Hoffman (Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, 1994) and scores of other producer/directors created provocative work that situated the individual within a decidedly cultural (and often historical) context.

By the mid-1980s, some documentary critics and producers considered reflexivity not only a stylistic choice, but an ethical imperative. Although all autobiographical production is by definition reflexive (that is, self-conscious), if not reflective (regarding its processes of construction) (Ruby, 1988), a strain of autobiographical documentary is particularly focused on its own construction process. Such is the case with Silverlake Life: The View from Here (1993), the poignant journal Tom Joslin made of his life, and death, which a former student and friend completed after both Joslin and his partner died of AIDS. Autodocumentaries structured as personal accounts of the difficulties a film-maker faces in completing a project range tonally to work that is wry, intensely engaged with political struggle, and deeply sorrowful (for example, Jill Godmilow's Far From Poland [1987] and Elia Suleiman's Chronicle of a Disappearance [Segell Ikhifa], [1997]) to pieces that are light and comical (such as Renos Haralambidi's No Budget Story [1997]).

In the last decades of the twentieth century, both literary and cinematic autobiography was greatly influenced by Western European postmodern theory. Many film and video-makers working in autobiographical registers challenged the concept of the unified self as autodocumentary became a means, and a method, for recognizing the construction of identity and for confronting the paradox of reality fiction at the core of all documentary production.

As confidence in realism diminished (arguably more for filmmakers than for their audiences), a performative turn permeated many types of documentary production, blurring boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. A growing number of producers of autodocumentary visualized their dreams, nightmares, and fantasies through non-realist techniques such as animation, stylized performance and theatrical set design, continuing to pursue goals established a half century earlier by experimental artists. Camille Billops and James Hatch's Finding Christa (1991) and Kidlat Tahimik's Why Is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow (1981-1993) turn to expressive means to explore subjectivity, while still retaining many traditional documentary features. Tracey Moffat's stylized Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, (1989), although informed by the film maker's autobiography, crosses an increasingly indeterminate line between performative autodocumentary and experimental psychodrama.

Autodocumentaries that explore the director's sexuality or gender identity frequently approach documentation of sexual activity through striking experimental methods that feature imagery of the filmmaker's body (and often the body of her partner[s]) as physical presence(s), but also attempt to visualize the phenomenology of erotic life. Carolee Schneemann's Fuses (1964-67) remains a memorable example of this tendency that is continued in Barbara Hammer's Women I Love (1976) and Mindy Farber's The Man Within Me (1995).

Perennial documentary concerns of authenticity and credibility are both diffused and intensified with autodocumentaries. Since subjects are usually not public figures, there are few reference points outside the autodocumentary text; trust between film-maker and spectator is (relatively) automatic (until or unless disrupted). The fiction of David Holzman's Diary demonstrates how easily that trust can be exploited and violated. Counterfeit images in autodocumentaries are sometimes announced mid-film, as when Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury notifies viewers of Halving the Bones (1995) that she has "faked" archival family footage, but far more often re-enactments or misappropriations are acknowledged in ending credits, as in Marlon Fuentes's Bontoc Eulogy (1995), which begs questions of authenticity in the tension between historical specificity (about Fuentes's actual grandfather) and cultural truth (about the display and mistreatment of Filipino men as World Fair exhibits).

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, production of autodocumentaries had proliferated worldwide, partly through the accessibility of increasingly inexpensive equipment and the global possibilities of Internet distribution systems. Imaginative young artists like Sadie Benning proved that even the most low-tech equipment (the short-lived pixel vision camera) could, n the right hands, be used to produce compelling, original (and in Benning's case, influential) autodocumentary. Easily operated equipment makes the production of video diaries feasible for amateurs. As digital production and distribution technologies expand, so, too, will the number and the variety of autobiographical documentaries.

Carolyn Anderson

See also: Ackerman, Chantal; Berliner, Alan; Brakhage, Stan; Deren, Maya;
Domestic Documentary, Finding Christa; Godmilow, Jill; Guzzetti, Alfred;
History and Memory; Interviews; McElwee, Ross; Mocumentary; Moffatt,
Tracey; Nana, Mom, and Me; Pincus, Edward; Reflexivity; Riggs, Marlon; Video Diaries.

Further Reading
Citron, Michelle, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Dyer, Richard, Now You See It: Studies on Gay and Lesbian Film, London: Routledge, 1990.

Eakin, Paul John, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Freeman, Mark, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative, New York: Routledge, 1993.

Katz, John Stuart, and Judith Milstein Katz, "Ethics and the Perception of Ethics in Autobiographical Film," in Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film and Television, edited by Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Kuhn, Annette, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, London: Verso, 1995.

Lane, Jim, The Autobiographical Documentary in America, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.

Olney, James, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Rabinowitz, Laura, Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943-1971, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Renov, Michael, "The Subject in History: The New Autobiography in Film and Video." Afterimage 17, no. 1 (summer 1989): 4-7.

Ruby, Jay, "The Image Mirrored: Reflexivity and the Documentary Film," in New Challenges for Documentary, edited by Alan Rosenthal, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Ruoff, Jeffrey, "Home Movies of the Avant-Garde: Jonas Mekas and the New York Art World," Cinema Journal 30, no. 3 (spring 1991): 6-28.

Russell, Catherine, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video, Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

Zimmerman, Patricia, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

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