‘Look what I found!’: (Re-)crossing boundaries between public/private history and biography/autobiography in Péter Forgács' The Maelstrom

Abstract

Péter Forgács' The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle (1997), which (re-)constructs the history of the Jewish Peereboom family in 1933–1942, reveals how the found footage documentary can function as a site of (auto-) biographical activity and demonstrates the thin line between private and public in our everyday lives. This article questions how a public and private history of ‘ordinary people’ is (re-)constructed through the use of found footage in The Maelstrom, and demonstrates how this work can function as an important source of historical information, in a non-traditional fashion. Moreover, The Maelstrom problematizes conventional notions of autobiography and biography, because textual authority is posthumously shared by Péter Forgács and Max Peereboom. Therefore, this article also investigates how The Maelstrom can be categorically positioned with regard to autobiography and biography in documentary film, arguing that this found footage work justifies a new categorical designation of (auto-)biographical documentary film: the ‘collaborative autobiography.’