Mapping and problematising the enunciating subject within my documentary practice

Abstract

ABSTRACTABC Colombia (86 min, 2007) and Home Sweet Home (90 min, 2012) are the first two films of a trilogy exploring places and communities to which I am personally connected, questioning – from an insider/outsider perspective – the relationship between place and identity and notions of home and belonging. Through the analysis of both the process of making and the works’ final form, the article examines the nature of documentary filmmaking as a relational process, a form of engagement with the world. Addressing how each film articulates questions of authorship, enunciation, narration and communication the article also traces and problematises the surfacing of the enunciating subject, how I inhabit my films as an author. In particular, it critically engages with the shift from a more traditional ‘participatory observation’ mode of address to the progressive negotiation of a plurality of modes and ‘voices’, and to a more explicitly articulated personal viewpoint. In the ever-changing post-modern and post-grand narrative scene the challenge for a filmmaker today, I argue, is to develop a subjective cinema capable of negotiating the coexistence of different registers of address in open dialogue with each other, each interpellating the spectator in their own distinctive way.