Autobiographical Documentary Research Articles

Death and collective autobiography in Silverlake Life: The View from Here

ABSTRACT This article presents a study of the creative process of Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, 1993), from the perspective of its authorial multiplicity. Silverlake Life is regarded as one of the main representatives of autobiographical documentary in the 1990s. The specificity of the film is found in the circumstances of the death of the filmmaker-autobiographer, Tom Joslin. By recognizing a tripartite process of creative autonomy among Tom Joslin, Mark Massi and Peter Friedman, this article outlines both how each individual contributed to the achievement of the film and how Silverlake Life preserves its status as autobiographical documentary despite the tragic deaths of both Joslin and Massi before the film’s completion. This work of comprehending the film’s collaborative autobiographical process was made possible through the analysis of three extratextual sources: the original proposal for the film, written by Tom Joslin and which appears at the beginning of the narrative; the written diary of Mark Massi, Joslin’s widower; and extensive interviews with Peter Friedman on the subject.

From a Distance: Orna Ben-Dor’s Holocaust Quintet

Orna Ben-Dor (1954- ) is one Israel's most prominent filmmakers and television directors. By the 2000s Ben-Dor had directed four films with Holocaust survivors as her main protagonists. The article analyzes the central themes in Ben-Dor's Holocaust-related films and explains how the director maintains a perspective of distance. Because she so often relates in film interviews to her parents' Holocaust and her sensitivity as a second-generation Holocaust survivor, one might have expected her to engage with the topic in her autobiographical documentary, released in 2009. However, as this article will show, Ben-Dor downplays the Holocaust in this film and turns the camera inward to focus on gender rather than on the hallmark themes of her previous films: PTSD of Holocaust survivors, the transgenerational transfer of trauma to the second generation and the absorption of Holocaust survivors in Israel. As a director who has played such an important part in Israel's Holocaust commemoration, Ben-Dor remains strangely reticent about her own personal Holocaust-related story.

Autobiographical documents of Petro Kurinny in the archives of the Ukrainian Free University

This paper is devoted to a famous scientist Petro Petrovych Kurinny – an archaeologist, historian, art critic, musuemist, and heritage protectionist in Ukraine and in immigration. This article provides information on the autobiographical documentary of P Kurinny, which is stored in the archive of the Ukrainian Free University in Munich. He immigrated to Germany and attempted to immediately start scientific and educational activities. The scientist was among not too many archeologists in the diaspora and considering his high reputation and scientific weight, Ukrainian Free University engaged him as an extraordinary professor since 1946, since 1948 as an ordinary professor and since 1950 he received the doctorate. All these allow analyzing the autobiographical documents in the archive of Ukrainian Free University. Special scientific value can be found in his autobiography «Short biography», which was provided to the Ukrainian Free University as part of the application for the mentioned above positions. An important part of the scientific documents play the lists of publications and the articles that were finished but yet not published. It was established that the lists of materials that the scientist and archeologist had an intention to publish and were taken by him from Ukraine but have not been found in his archive. This paper proved that there are no traces of self-censoring as it was in his soviet time of scientific work. In addition, these documents allow us to analyze the events of his scientific and academic life in immigration in Germany, as well as to establish unknown facts of his biography. We also can observe the prosopographical portrait in a circle of the famous figures of Ukrainian emigrant science. Key words: Petro Kurinny, autobiographical documents, short biography, Ukrainian Free University, Munich.

Blind Cinema: Reframing Visual Impairment in Shadow Girl (Chile 2016)

From an ableist perspective, few things may seem more unlikely than a blind filmmaker. Vision (a physical state) and the "gaze" (a theoretical construct) are central to and constitutive of film, so how could it be possible for a blind person to make a film? Yet, blind and visually impaired filmmakers such as Chilean director María Teresa Larraín, by virtue of their unique perspective, capture images in new ways, reframing blindness and altering society's expectations about the central role of the image and of how visuality operates in film. Recent films by visually impaired directors, as well as collaborations between blind and sighted filmmakers, show how the aesthetics and content of these works represent the experience of blindness. For example, Larraín's autobiographical documentary "Shadow Girl" (2016) mimics the filmmaker-protagonist's gradual vision loss by progressively darkening the screen, placing the spectator at the center of her traumatic experience. This self-reflexive documentary narrates the filmmakers' journey into blindness and, concurrently, her return to Chile after a lengthy exile. The loss of her vision is intricately linked to the loss of the Chile she recalls, binding the personal to the political. By asserting a new visual style that evokes vision loss even as she advocates for her rights as a blind artist, Larraín will reconstruct her status as a filmmaker and locate a renewed hope for Chile. Moreover, Shadow Girl disrupts our mistaken belief that vision is the primary way of processing the cinematic experience and the world at-large, making it a truly transgressive film in form and content alike.

Nonfiction Theater

Abstract Are there nonfiction genres of theater scripts, just as there are nonfiction genres of film, such as documentary, and of literature, such as biography and history? I propose that there are, and that Verbatim Theater qualifies as a nonfiction theater genre. What sets it apart is that it is supposed to instruct performers not merely to reenact, or represent, a series of events, but overall to present evidence or arguments for a thesis, or for the audience to draw their own conclusions. For scripts to present evidence, audiences have to be able to filter out what is supposed to serve as evidence from what else occurs on stage. Unlike various other genres of theater that one might initially appear to be nonfiction—such as autobiographical dialogues, Documentary Theater, and ethnodrama—Verbatim Theater does this.

Screening Winnie and African Feminist Herstories

This teaching note offers reflections on the screening of Winnie an autobiographical documentary about the life of Winnie Mandela, South African liberation struggle actor. I explore the pedagogical decisions I made in screening this film which deals with the history of apartheid South Africa to a mixed audience at a university in London.

The autobiographical documentary: archive and montage to represent the self

ABSTRACT This essay aims to examine how archival material is repurposed within autobiographical documentaries in order to reconstruct the documentarian filmmaker’s self in relation to their family. It is plausible for the filmmaker to explore their own identity by reexamining their family history, especially with interviews and observational devices; however, domestic media plays a particular role in creating a supporting discourse that finds new meanings from the confrontation of statements and images. By analyzing three examples of autobiographical documentaries, namely Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003), 51 Birch Street (Doug Black, 2005) and The Marina Experiment (Marina Lutz, 2009), we will explore how the re-contextualization of personal images works as a narrative strategy to unveil identity contestations in American autobiographical filmmaking.

Introduction to the diasporic autobiographical documentary

This article aims to introduce a new film genre that I call ‘diasporic autobiographical documentary’ that I have been working on during my last years of research, first in France and now in a broader context. In this genre, diasporic cinema and autobiographical documentary meet and create an original ensemble, especially produced in the last twenty years, in order to give place to the search for identity by individuals belonging to more than one nation and culture. In the first part, the present text exposes the principal axes of definition of this body of work, following Raphaëlle Moine’s theory of film genre. In the second part, it deals with two concepts necessary to understand the main issues of this genre: the diasporic subject and the origin. In the search of their lost origin and of their collective memories, diasporic subjects negotiate their identity through the subjective enunciation of the documentary, and offer an important work of reflection on today transnationalism and multiculturalism.

His Body of Work, the Work of His Body: The Chronicles of Christopher Lee, and Respect After Death

ABSTRACT This article examines the cultural and political work of transgender Chinese and Polish American filmmaker Christopher Lee through the affects of Lee’s autobiographical documentary short Christopher’s Chronicles – Chapter 1 (1996) and the work Lee’s queer/trans of color family performed to pass California’s Respect After Death Act (2014) to get Lee’s correct gender identity recorded on his death certificate. It argues that positioning the politics and affect of Chronicles next the actions of Lee’s queer/trans of color family through the Respect After Death Act allows us to rethink Asian American gendered citizenship through kinship, time, and affect.

Essie Coffey’s My Survival as an Aboriginal (1978) and My life as I live it (1993): autobiographical documentary and the socio-political struggle of an Aboriginal, Black woman

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the autobiographical documentaries My Survival as an Aboriginal (1978) and My life as I live it (1993), by Essie Coffey. We aim to localize Coffey’s work historiographically and theoretically in relation to American, European, Australian and Latin American documentary traditions, pointing out aspects of racial and gender identity and class alterity. Our analysis of these films indicates innovative methodological and thematic intersections between autobiographical narratives and social and race issues as well as highlighting the potential autobiographical narratives have to update both personal issues and issues of collectivity.

Hidden in plain sight: post-holocaust mnemonic objects and material traces in Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat (הדירה)

ABSTRACT In his autobiographical documentary film The Flat (2011; הדירה), Arnon Goldfinger retraces his German Jewish grandparents’ relationship with Leopold von Mildenstein (1902–1968), a former SS officer and Judenreferent, through mnemonic objects and testimonial artefacts. Both as a filmmaker and on-screen subject, Goldfinger approaches his grandparents’ keepsakes and mementos with a keen eye for minute details and lost traces – not unlike a crime investigator who collects, analyzes, and interprets forensic evidence. As memory and materiality become interdependent co-producers of memory work, Goldfinger reminds us that although ‘matters’ or objects are full of memories, they do not speak for themselves; they can only ‘illuminate their human and social context’ through our interactions with them. It is precisely for this reason that Goldfinger’s memory archive – Gerda and Kurt Tuchler’s flat in Tel Aviv – seems devoid of history. Whereas every nook and cranny is filled with heirlooms, the entire apartment is replete with an ever-present void of a silenced familial past. Ultimately, the process of gathering facts, examining records, and visiting eyewitnesses proves difficult yet transformative for Goldfinger who is forced to grapple with intergenerational memory conflicts that continue to reverberate in present-day German and Israeli society.

‘News from home’ de Chantal Akerman: El documental autobiográfico en el contexto del documental contemporáneo

This research focuses on Chantal Akerman’s documentary ‘News from Home’ (1977), as an example of an autobio-graphical documentary made by women. The filmmaker’s story goes through the foundations of the filial maternal relationship to provoke a reflection on the relationship between women, the generational pulse, the day-to-day routine or the extraordinary nature of their lives, the emotional void. Starting from the typologies of autobiograph-ical inscription (self-portrait, family cinema, amateur cinema, travel diary, filmed diary, filmed letters) the analysis of this piece will also allow us to identify many of the characteristics of contemporary autobiographical documentary, such as the renunciation of objectivity, the breaking of the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, or the use of a particular audiovisual grammar that acts as a catalyst for the expression of two universes: Akerman’s intimate world and its symbolic representation in contemporary documentary narrative.

Self-Portraiture and Historical Memory: Zhang Mengqi’s Documentary Practice

ABSTRACTThis article examines the documentary films made by Zhang Mengqi, a filmmaker who has been participating in Wu Wenguang’s Folk Memory Project. In line with the autobiographical trend in literary writing and the personal documentaries that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, Zhang’s Self-Portrait series reveals new possibilities for approaching autobiographical documentary through performative and participatory modes of filming practice. Taking her matrilineal family and patrilineal village as two reference groups that provide different sources of self-definition, Zhang’s filmmaking enacts a process of seeking self-identity on multiple planes: self (body), family relationships, and collective memories.

Being Jacob: Young Children, Automedial Subjectivity, and Child Social Media Influencers

Being Jacob: Young Children, Automedial Subjectivity, and Child Social Media Influencers

Os filmes e o pensamento de Ed Pincus: o cinema direto em direção à autobiografia

Ed Pincus’ oeuvre may be seen as a development of the American direct cinema of the 1970s. Leading the MIT Film Section, Pincus’ intelectual and cinematographic work evidences the proposal of a direct-autobiographic cinema. I will seek to expose conceptually this scenario through the use of primary information sources, as well as through an analysis of Diaries (1971–1976) , his most important documentary. Keywords: Ed Pincus; autobiographical documentary; direct cinema; MIT Film Sec- tion; Cambridge.

Interjections and Connections: The Critical Potential of Animated Segments in Live Action Documentary

Gwen Haworth’s 2007 documentary about her male-to-female gender transition is an autobiographical documentary that comprises mostly interviews with family members and close friends, interspersed with home video and observational material. The film also includes some less conventional documentary material in the form of a few short animated segments. About thirty minutes into the documentary an interview with Gwen’s mother is interrupted by an animated sequence that playfully establishes the issues she has with Gwen’s take on being female. Captions are added to retro magazine images of women and domestic scenes, such as ‘family events are not optional’ and ‘grow your hair long.’ Haworth (2008) has commented that she included the animation to lighten the mood and to add humour to a film that would otherwise become too intense and serious. However, this segment is more than a comic interlude. We might think of the use of animation in She’s a Boy I Knew as an interjection. In spoken language, an interjection is a word such as ‘wow’ or ‘aha’ that one utters to create emphasis, draw attention to what has just been, or is about to be, said and to express emotion and attitude. Grammatically, an interjection is not related to the other part of a sentence, yet it only really gains meaning, or significance, when heard in conjunction with that sentence. If a speaker says ‘wow!’ and nothing else, the listener will most likely wonder ‘what?’ If the same speaker says ‘wow! That’s the best documentary I’ve ever seen!’ then the listener will better understand why they said ‘wow’ and the value judgement being made regarding the documentary in question will gain greater emphasis. So, while the ‘How to be a girl’ section in She’s a Boy I Knew can be viewed independently of the documentary in which it appears and as such could stand as an exclamatory statement on its own, it only fully resonates as an articulation of the film’s themes about the societal expectations around gender when viewed within the film as a whole.

Nelson Mandela The Living Legend (1918-2013): Reflections On The Colonial State, Nation Building And Progressive Leadership

SummaryThis article is a critique of the autobiographical documentary, Nelson Mandela the Living Legend (1918-2013), produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation to showcase the legendary hallmarks of former President Mandela’s role in transforming South Africa from apartheid to democracy. Its central theme evolves from Mandela’s portrayal as a prototype of the nefarious experiences of colonial bigotry under apartheid, a strategist in nation building and eventually providing archetypal leadership in the post-colonial period. Beyond disclosure of the underlying assumptions often associated with Mandela’s classic biographical reviews, the article uses interpretative thematic frames to explicate how the autobiographical narrative epitomises the legend’s astute creative intelligence in championing the transformative dialogue as an embodiment of the aspirations of South Africans. The article navigates both normative and ideological values incorporated in the content through a verbal-visual functional analysis of the main social and political actors as well as institutional contexts represented in the film. In conclusion it notes that, in addition to the content, form and organisation of the documentary, the producers successfully combined the erstwhile social, political and psychological milieu of the apartheid era with the post-apartheid democratic buoyancy. As a result, Mandela is represented as the biblical “Moses” imbued with the anointing to deliver the highly aspired “miracle rainbow” nation in the form of a democratic South Africa.

Reclaiming Filipino America through Performance and Film

Filipino Americans are the fourth largest migrant group in America and the second largest Asian population in the United States. Migration from the Philippines is constant and has increased dramatically in the last sixty years. Filipino Americans participate as the ‘Asian American’ identity/race but the specificity of Philippine-U.S. relations and migration pathways make this inclusion a misfit. As a former territory and with complex shifting migration policies, Filipinos have been considered by the U.S. government an ambiguous population, falling just out of reach of national visibility. As the population has continued to grow, Filipino Americans have shared narratives and begun conversation to address the constant cultural negotiation and struggles within the social and racial structures of America. Since the 1980s, a Filipino American cultural and artistic movement or ‘moment’, has emerged with artists, dancers, performers, and filmmakers. These artists make critical interventions that disavow the American empire. The works make comment upon the ramifications of being an unrecognized Asian colony and the systemic challenges of immigration assimilation. An example of a work from this cultural moment is Jose Antonio Vargas’ autobiographical documentary Documented (2013). The film, intended as an up close and personal account of an undocumented migrant in the United States, also serves as an example of current Filipino American cultural productivity and visibilization. By studying this artistic movement, one can approach deeper understandings of citizenship and national belonging(s) in the current transnational climate and the border crossings that circumscribe the Filipino American diaspora.

Reclaiming Filipino America through Performance and Film

Filipino Americans are the fourth largest migrant group in America and the second largest Asian population in the United States. Migration from the Philippines is constant and has increased dramatically in the last sixty years. Filipino Americans participate as the ‘Asian American’ identity/race but the specificity of Philippine-U.S. relations and migration pathways make this inclusion a misfit. As a former territory and with complex shifting migration policies, Filipinos have been considered by the US government an ambiguous population, falling just out of reach of national visibility. As the population has continued to grow, Filipino Americans have shared narratives and begun conversation to address the constant cultural negotiation and struggles within the social and racial structures of America. Since the 1980s, a Filipino American cultural and artistic movement or ‘moment’, has emerged with artists, dancers, performers, and filmmakers. These artists make critical interventions that disavow the American empire. The works make comment upon the ramifications of being an unrecognized Asian colony and the systemic challenges of immigration assimilation. The works make comment upon the ramifications of being an unrecognized Asian colony and the systemic challenges of immigration assimilation. An example of a work from this cultural moment is Jose Antonio Vargas autobiographical documentary Documented (2013). The film, intended as an up close and personal account of an undocumented migrant in the United States, also serves as an example of current Filipino American cultural productivity and visibilization. By studying this artistic movement, one can approach deeper understandings of citizenship and national belonging(s) in the current transnational climate and the border crossings that circumscribe the Filipino American diaspora.

The Condition of Polish Autobiographical Documentaries – More Similar to a Reality Show?

The autobiographical documentary has a number of elements which resemble those of a reality show. Such documentaries can be considered to be young directors’ responses to this TV genre and its celebration of voyeurism. The purpose of this article is to outline the similarities and differences between these two genres. The article consists of four parts: the first discusses the essence of the autobiographical documentary, the second focuses on the reality show, the third analyses the movie Moje dwadzieścia okrążeń by Łukasz Konopa, and the fourth is a summary of the considerations made in the text.