Most critical commentators and even casual viewers would agree that it’s an exciting time for documentary – measured in terms of popular attention, institutional legitimacy or scholarly output – and for those of us interested in the documentary project. By ‘documentary project’, I refer here not to the single-minded, formal or rhetorical orthodoxy of the sort associated with the Griersonians of the 1930s or the direct cinema devotees of the 1960s so much as a broad-based, loosely-knit commu-nity of interest worldwide that supports and sustains documentary culture.
Now culture, according to the late Raymond Williams, is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language (1983: 87). Developing from its earliest usages as a noun of process (the tending of something, crops or animals), the word began to refer to more abstract processes by the mid-nineteenth century, eventually entailing both material production and signifying practices. Williams writes of the word’s rich etymological sources, to the Latin noun, culter – ploughshare, that which tills the earth and prepares the way for seeding – and thus to a kind of husbandry as well as to the verb colere and its various meanings – to cultivate, protect, and honor with worship. Williams’ discussion supports my own expanded sense of documentary culture in the present moment, referring as it does to a set of practices both material and symbolic and to a diverse cast of characters whose husbandry, protection, and honoring of the documentary project have facilitated its reinvention.
But my concern here is for autobiography, a domain which has produced and sustained a culture of its own with roots in literature, painting, and performance.
Filmic autobiography remains little discussed in the academy to date although that situation is beginning to change.1My own twenty-year-long fascination for autobiog-raphy may have something to do with the paradoxes and contradictions that arise when the worlds (indeed, the cultures) of documentary film and literary autobiogra-phy collide. Let me explain. When I have spoken about the ideas contained in my book, The Subject of Documentary, I have at times been challenged by those who see the films of which I write as self-absorbed, overly emotionalized, and brimming with the platitudes of 1990s identity politics. These works are found to be either too straightforward (too on-the-nose and insufficiently ironic) or, perhaps more damning for documentary scholars, not straightforward enough (too far removed from the earnest truth claims and activisms of the committed documentary).
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I doubt that the latter expectation (not serious or political enough) attaches to these films’ literary counterparts that appear to bear no such ‘burden of representa-tion’ and, besides, have a pedigree that stretches back as far as Augustine in the late fifth century. It would take a very long digression to account for the weight of that expectation of political seriousness, the ways that documentary came into its inheritance as ‘sober discourse’. (That digression would want to address the role of state support – in the Soviet Union, the UK and elsewhere – in the early decades of documentary’s emergence or its centrality to oppositional political movements in Europe and the US in the 1930s or in Latin America in the 1960s.) I will want to return to this question, the charge that autobiographical works evade or elide politics, for I think, in answering that charge, we’ll discover some of the grounds for first-person filmmaking’s cogency and contemporaneity.
For now, I would like to offer my first thesis on filmic self-inscription for it has to do with the larger relations between autobiographical practices as discussed in the critical literature and the documentary project. It may help to explain why at least some documentary scholars have been slow to accept the autobiographical impulse within the tradition of non-fiction. I would put it this way: the very idea of autobiography challenges the VERY IDEA of documentary. Documentary studies is animated (or perhaps bedeviled) by debates regarding the potential for film, through recourse to ‘facts’ and the logical disposition of arguments, to produce something like
‘verifiable knowledge’. Some see this as the epistemological glory of documentary discourse. Non-fiction film, understood in this way (as the arrangement of facts and arguments in filmic form), can turn for institutional support to standards of journalistic reportage, legal disputation, and historiography. Documentary is thus deemed capable of ‘delivering the goods’, furnishing ‘visible evidence’, producing knowledge and this capability is taken seriously.
Those who study autobiography – and here we are more likely to encounter literary critics than philosophers or historians – seem less attached to the factual, having long noted the constructed and incomplete character of all self-depiction.
Most literary scholars have taken to heart the insights of the late sixteenth-century essayist, Michel de Montaigne, who embraced arbitrariness and indeterminacy in his writing of the Book of the Self. Despite his attention over many years and three volumes to topics ranging from friendship to cannibalism or the verses of Virgil, Montaigne’s most consistent aims were the testing of his self-conception and the examination of a life lived. Montaigne remained skeptical about knowledge as a totalizable goal:
I take the first subject that chance offers. They are all equally good to me.
And I never plan to develop them completely. For I do not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us …Each particle, each occupation, of a man betrays him and reveals him just as well as any other.
(1948: 219–20) Though deeply resistant to globalizing epistemologies of the sort to be developed by René Descartes in the next century, Montaigne never shrank from self-knowledge (‘No man ever treated a subject he knew and understood better than I do the subject 40 MICHAEL RENOV
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I have undertaken; … in this I am the most learned man alive’ (1948: 611)). Yet he avers the contingency and mutability of truth produced in the telling of the self:
I do not portray being: I portray passing … My history needs to be adapted to the moment. I may presently change, not only by chance, but also by intention. This is a record of various and changeable occurrences, and of irresolute and, when it so befalls, contradictory ideas: whether I am different myself, or whether I take hold of my subjects in different circumstances and aspects. So, all in all, I may indeed contradict myself now and then; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.
(1948: 611) Given such Montaignian precepts, it would be fair to say that the sources and philosophical underpinnings of the culture of autobiography are far removed from those of the documentary mainstream which I have characterized (in a chapter of The Subject of Autobiography entitled ‘Documentary disavowals and the digital’) as aggres-sively modernist, devoted to suasion and certainty.
An understanding of the relations between documentary film and the culture of autobiography requires taking a deeper look at matters historical and technological.
For, as regards autobiography, big changes occur after photography. The indexicality of the camera arts bears with it a far greater claim on the real than that associated with a Montaignian essay or a Rembrandt self-portrait. If, as Jerome Bruner (1993: 55) has written, ‘autobiography is life construction through ‘‘text’’ construction’, the building blocks of a filmic life construction can be not words (rich with connotation) or brushstrokes but indexical signs bearing the stamp of the real. The documentary tradition has long traded in that currency of the real, using it to build and sustain arguments or induce agency. But autobiography, even when constructed of indexical parts, remains an agnostic in the house of certainty.
Does it make sense, then, to think of autobiography as (or in relation to) non-fiction? The answer for me is a resounding yes although the character of that relationship is complex. One of my first efforts to speak publicly about filmic autobiography was entitled ‘Fictions of the self in the non-fiction film’, a title which I hoped would capture the founding paradox at issue. In my teaching, I have discovered that autobiography offers insight into the general epistemological condi-tion of documentary. What hope have we of producing verifiable or factual accounts if films made on topics of which the maker holds special or even exclusive knowledge, namely, the self, are riddled with equivocation and uncertainty? Put another way, the ‘truths’ that autobiography offers are often those of the interior rather than of the exterior. I am tempted to call them psychological truths but that only betrays a preference for one kind of psychology (the psychoanalytic model) over another (the behaviorist model, ascendant in the 1950s, on which the truth-seeking of direct cinema is based).
In any case, it seems to me that autobiographical works can breed a kind of healthy skepticism regarding all documentary truth claims. Especially since the 1970s, documentary films have depended on interviews to advance their arguments and reinforce their historical armatures. But the partial and contingent character of self-knowledge so often and so self-consciously on display in autobiographical works FIRST-PERSON FILMS 41
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cannot help but undermine our confidence in the stories people tell about them-selves. So, in my view, if the very idea of autobiography challenges the very idea of documentary, there is a theoretical and pedagogical value that accrues from that friction.
By way of illustration, consider animator Faith Hubley’s My Universe Inside Out (US, 1996), a whimsical and highly elliptical account of the artist’s 72 years that is short on facts but rich in the evocation of childhood memory, sensory experience, and the quotidian pleasures of family life. It is an autobiographical work that activates both meanings of the corpus – the body of the artist (albeit abstractly rendered) as well as the body of work – for Hubley’s film is alive with extracts from the scores of films made by her alone or in tandem with her late husband John Hubley. There is little doubt that the film is a work of autobiography judging by its retrospection, insistent use of the first person pronoun, the unleashing of private imagery that soars alongside the artist’s spoken commentary, and the revelation of the end credits that warrants the voice, writing, drawing, and even the cello-playing on the track as the artist’s own – a tour-de-force of self-inscription.
The very title, My Universe Inside Out, restates the paradox autobiography poses in the face of documentary truth claims. In offering to show us the universe, Hubley would seem to align herself with science or with documentary activism whose aim is comparable, to ‘show us life’.2 But what does the universe look like from the inside out and what does it mean to qualify the universe with the personal possessive pronoun ‘my’? It is an interiorized, equivocal and fragmented, one-of-a-kind universe that we are given and in this Hubley’s piece is prototypically autobiographical. But in what sense is the film also a documentary? Hubley plays fast and loose with the
‘facts’, tantalizing more than edifying the audience, offering visual correlatives for elusive interior states rather than demonstrative proofs. If the creative treatment of actuality (the Griersonian thumbnail definition) was meant to authorize the rear-rangement of elements of the world given to the eye, that is, if ‘actuality’ is understood as equivalent to ‘exteriority’, then this film and much of the autobio-graphical oeuvre fails the test. But that would also mean that many of the most enduring documentary achievements of the past two decades – the personal and performative works since Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (US, 1989) that have so enlivened documentary culture – fall outside the pale. Private truths, inner realities have come to be the business of documentary as much as public proclamations. It makes more sense to rewrite this first thesis: the VERY IDEA of autobiography reinvents the VERY IDEA of documentary.
Thesis number two is a historical point. Filmic autobiography is nothing new.
People have been making self-portraits on film and video for some time. But, once again, I need to reintroduce some notion of the received limits of documentary culture in order to make a necessary point. That’s because autobiography is a tried and true form in the realm of the avant-garde rather than the non-fiction film. In his classic essay, ‘Autobiography in avant-garde film’, P. Adams Sitney makes the argument that ‘what makes autobiography one of the most vital developments in the cinema of the late Sixties and early Seventies is that the very making of an autobiography constitutes a reflection on the nature of cinema’ (1978: 202). The 42 MICHAEL RENOV
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filmmakers Sitney writes about are some of the key figures of the North American Avant-garde – Hollis Frampton, Jerome Hill, Stan Brakhage, and James Broughton. In films as diverse as Frampton’s nostalgia, Hill’s Film Portrait, and Brakhage’s Scenes from Under Childhood, the authority of chronology as well as the ontological status of the image is repeatedly called into question in ways that are medium-specific. Film has the power to stop and even reverse time’s inexorable passage, providing a powerful tool for the obsessive investigation of the past, autobiography’s stock-in-trade.
In nostalgia (US, 1971), a film Sitney calls ‘the performative autobiography par excellence’, a series of photographic images said to have been made by Frampton are given to our view. The film turns on a familiar autobiographical trope – the discovery of the artist’s vocation – for Frampton’s métier, prior to cinema, was photography.
What we witness is the exhaustion and literal combustion of the old art form in favor of the new. As each image in turn begins to burn and turn to ash on what we see is a hot plate placed inches from the camera lens, we are taken out of our spectatorial comfort zone; these photographic images are shown to occupy a flat, two-dimensional picture plane rather than an illusionistic, three-two-dimensional space of the sort familiar from most cinematic experiences. The discomfort increases as we come to realize that the voice-over commentary accompanying each image is literally out-of-sync with it; what we hear describes the image to come rather than the one we see. Now this ‘disjunctive synchronicity’ as Sitney calls it is well suited to the autobiographical enterprise given its penchant for placing time out of joint in the service of intensive self-scrutiny. But in cinema such meta-critical escapades are rarely to be found outside the precincts of the avant-garde. Few if any scholars of the documentary film tradition in the 1970s thought to claim nostalgia or other autobiographical films like it for non-fiction, in part because the film so blatantly problematizes film’s capacity to deliver the past as a narrative of continuity and historical understanding.
A parallel development in the realm of video art deserves mention in this context as well. Developing through the 1970s, conceptual artists, painters and sculptors such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Richard Serra, Lynda Benglis, and Peter Campus began to experiment with the still-new video apparatus, seeing it as a way to push long-standing artistic preoccupations in new directions.
Coming out of the art world of the 1960s, one such preoccupation was with the artist’s own body (think ‘body art’, the Happening, the Living Theater). In 1976, art critic Rosalind Krauss went so far as to opine that ‘most of the work produced over the very short span of video art’s existence has used the human body as its central instrument’ (1976, 1986: 179–80). It was Krauss’s belief that narcissism could be generalized as the condition of the whole of artists’ video. This position might have made sense to audiences schooled in the various video experiments of these first-generation artists, experiments that utilized video tools (the camera, mixer, the playback loop) as adjuncts of the human sensorium. Marshall McLuhan hyperbolized that television was an extension of the central nervous system, but it was video artists who demonstrated the medium’s capabilities to write through the body, to write as the body. As I have argued in ‘The Electronic Essay’ chapter of The Subject of Documentary:
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Durable, lightweight, mobile, producing instantaneous results, the video apparatus supplies a dual capability well suited to the [autobiographical]
project: it is both screen and mirror, providing the technological grounds for the surveillance of the palpable world, as well as a reflective surface on which to register the self. It is an instrument through which the twin axes of essayistic practice (the looking out and the looking in, the Montaignean
‘measure of sight’ and ‘measure of things’) find apt expression.
(2004: 186) Clearly, then, audio-visual autobiographical efforts are nothing new, but, until the 1990s, these practices tended to fall outside the consensual limits of documentary.
The distinctions once drawn among avant-garde filmmakers, video artists, and documentarians seem less and less meaningful today. This may be about the
‘convergence’ we hear about so much in the media arts and industries or it may just mean that filmic avant-gardism and video art have been so fully absorbed into commercial culture (or annexed by the art world) that little turf remains. Post-1990s documentary culture has, to some degree, inherited and been transformed by the other two traditions.
Thesis three: Filmic autobiography comes in many forms. By this I mean to suggest, as I think is already clear, that autobiography (in literature and painting as in film and video) is a protean form, many-headed, given to variation. In my writing, I have described a range of autobiographical modalities, diverse approaches to the writing of the self through sound and image. In this matter of modalities, it is the graphological dimension that comes into play, the ways in which self-inscription is constituted through its concrete and distinctive signifying practices. Here I have in mind the essay film, the electronic essay, the diary film, the video confession, the epistolary mode, domestic ethnography, the personal Web page, and the blog. In each instance, varying possibilities for the expression of subjectivity and the telling of life stories arise. Those variances depend, in some measure, on the medium of choice as well as the discursive conditions that prevail. In The Subject of Documentary, I argue, for
Thesis three: Filmic autobiography comes in many forms. By this I mean to suggest, as I think is already clear, that autobiography (in literature and painting as in film and video) is a protean form, many-headed, given to variation. In my writing, I have described a range of autobiographical modalities, diverse approaches to the writing of the self through sound and image. In this matter of modalities, it is the graphological dimension that comes into play, the ways in which self-inscription is constituted through its concrete and distinctive signifying practices. Here I have in mind the essay film, the electronic essay, the diary film, the video confession, the epistolary mode, domestic ethnography, the personal Web page, and the blog. In each instance, varying possibilities for the expression of subjectivity and the telling of life stories arise. Those variances depend, in some measure, on the medium of choice as well as the discursive conditions that prevail. In The Subject of Documentary, I argue, for