Autobiographical documentary: ‘all I have to offer is myself’

‘There is no real cinematic equivalent for autobiography…’ – Elizabeth Bruss

suggested in 1980 (296). Her view was that
in autobiography, the logically distinct roles of author, narrator and
protagonist are conjoined, with the same individual occupying a
position both in the context, the associated ‘scene of writing’, and
within the text itself’(300).
This lack of ‘conjoinment’ is particularly evident in documentary films in which
the autobiographer appears in front of the camera, at that point probably
delegating some of the functions of authorship (framing or camera position for
instance) to the camera operator. As Bruss describes it:
When the autobiographical filmmaker ‘passes into view’ ‘a flash of
vertigo, an eerie instant in which ‘no-one is in charge’ and we sense
that a rootless, inhuman power of vision is wandering the world’ (309).
Because filmmaking involves, Bruss says, ‘a disparate group of distinct roles
and separate stages of production’, this undermines the ‘unquestionable
integrity of the speaking subject’ (304) which she holds to be an essential
component of autobiographical authorship.

There are two (slightly contradictory) ways I’m interested in challenging her
assertion here. First, whilst her characterisation of filmmaking as necessarily
involving a wide range of distinct authorial agents is true for the more
mainstream and industrial forms of filmmaking, it has never held for the more
avant-garde practices, and has also been increasingly undermined, across all
forms, by recent developments in video and digital technology, in particular
camcorders and desk-top editing which allow for individual authorship in
hitherto impossible ways.

Secondly, her requirement that the autobiographical speaking subject has

‘unquestionable integrity’ (which is undermined by the range of authorial
agents often involved in filmmaking), would seem an impossible and
undesirable goal to many people, given that we are now so aware of the
inevitably fragmented and relational nature of the self. Indeed this awareness
may indicate that film is a particularly useful medium for contemporary
(critical) autobiography: ‘film may enable autobiographers to represent
subjectivity not as singular and solipsistic but as multiple and as revealed in
relationship’ (Egan 1994: 593). So the multiple perspectives (of
cameraperson, editor and subject/protagonist for instance) that many
filmmaking practices entail may make film/video appropriate media for the
representation of contemporary non-unified selves. Certainly this is what
Catherine Russell believes when she describes how the
three “voices” – speaker [ in voice-over], seer and seen - are what
generate the richness and diversity of autobiographical filmmaking. In
addition to the discursive possibility of these three voices is another
form of identity, which is that of the avant-garde filmmaker as collagist
and editor (1999: 277).

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Bruss thinks that autobiographical films have ‘a tendency […] to fall into two
opposing groups – those that stress the person filmed and those that stress
the person filming – replicating the split between the ‘all perceived’ and the ‘all
perceiving’(309). But perhaps the tensions between these two opposites (or
between the four ‘voices’ Russell identifies) are productive, at least for those
of us interested in critical autobiographical filmmaking1. I would argue anyway,
that most autobiographical documentaries exist somewhere in the middle
ground between these two groups, and so tend to subvert both the omniscient
surveillance of the ‘other’ implicit in her phrase the ‘all perceived’, and the
sovereign subjectivity conveyed by the phrase ‘all perceiving’. Bruss herself
acknowledges the possibilities for self-fragmentation film offers when she
complains that
The unity of subjectivity and subject matter – the implied identity of
author, narrator and protagonist on which classical autobiography
depends – seems to be shattered by film; the autobiographical self de-
composes, schisms, into almost mutually exclusive elements of the
person filmed (entirely visible, recorded and projected) and the person
filming (entirely hidden, behind the camera eye)’(297).

Of course, the apparently exclusive categories of ‘person filmed’ and ‘person

filming’ have been brought together (potentially, and, in the video diary form,
actually) by recently available camcorder technologies. But the practice of
autobiographical film goes back further than this recent history. As P. Adams
Sitney’s writing makes clear (1978: 199-246), filmmakers such as Jerome Hill,
Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas were working autobiographically well before
Bruss declared that autobiography had no cinematic equivalent. Indeed, the
possibility of autobiographical expression in film, where ‘roles of author,
narrator and protagonist are conjoined’ (Bruss 1980: 300) was inherent in
Alexandre Astruc’s concept of ‘La Caméra-Stylo’, elaborated in an essay
written in 1948 (1968), which overtly stresses the similarities between
cinematic and literary authorship. Joram Ten Brink comments that the early,
personal documentaries made by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker2 followed
‘the ‘Caméra-Stylo’ assertion that cinema is a tool of subjective expression’
(2007: 239) He goes on to discuss how the reflexivity in Rouch’s Chronique
d’un été was a ‘direct consequence of the ‘Caméra-Stylo’’, and how for Rouch
and Morin (the authors of the film) ‘Their ‘self, either visible or obscured, is
often an reference point, and inseparable from the ‘text’ of the film’(241).
Laura Rascaroli describes how, in the same period in Italy, the filmmaker and
theorist of Italian Neo-realism, Cesare Zavattini, developed ‘radical ideas on
the need and opportunity to use the camera for a personal, autobiographical,
first-person cinema’ (2009: 111).

1
A similarly diverse number of voices were involved in the authorship of A Whited Sepulchre:
me as cameraman, me as video diarist speaking to camera, me as interviewer/protagonist,
me as voice-over artist (for myself and for AK), and me as editor (in collaboration with Jerry
Rothwell).
2
Marker has said more recently: ‘The process of making films in communion with oneself, the
way a painter works or a writer, need not now be solely experimental. Contrary to what
people say, using the first-person in films tends to be a sign of humility: ‘all I have to offer is
myself’’ (Darke 2003)

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The challenges of autobiographical filmmaking outlined by Bruss were also
taken up on the other side of the Atlantic. The schisms and de-compositions
predicted by her were consciously played with by US independent Jon Jost in
his 1974 autobiographical film Speaking Directly. He talks often directly to
camera (as the title implies) in the film, and at one point comments specifically
on the distance between being the person filmed and the person filming:
Most lenses focus good from about a foot and a half away, to infinity –
which isn’t quite close enough to get a good picture of yourself .. or
myself.
Jost’s film also gives his partner, and some of his friends the opportunity to
comment on his character – often in less than flattering terms – so the ‘point
of view’ of the film is certainly not unproblematically univocal.

Michael Renov’s writing has traced the development of the visible self and the
autobiographical voice in documentary over the last two decades. He cites the
work of Mekas, Lynn Hershmann and Ilene Segalove in the 1980s as
inaugurating a ‘new autobiography in film and video’ (2004: 104-119), part of:
the recent outpouring of work by independent film and video artists who
evidence an attachment both to the documentary and [original
emphasis] to the complex representation of their own subjectivity(109).
Jim Lane also acknowledges this autobiographical history within the avant-
garde in his book The Autobiographical Documentary in America (2002),
which concentrates, however, not on the avant-garde, but on work by
filmmakers (like Ross McElwee and Ed Pincus) who emerged from the Direct
Cinema movement. The hand-held, observational style of Direct Cinema, with
its long takes and suspicion of conventional editing, was in many ways suited
to autobiography, as MacDougall suggests in a comment on the embodied
nature of observational camerawork:
In place of a camera that resembled an omniscient, floating eye which
could at any moment be anywhere in a room (with a close-up, an over-
the-shoulder shot, a reverse angle) there was to be a camera clearly
tied to the person of an individual filmmaker (MacDougall 1998: 86).
A camera clearly tied to a person offers a kind of subjective ‘claim on the real’,
which also connects these filmmakers’ to their roots in Direct Cinema. They
shared a belief in actuality, in the ‘referential’ function of film, which
distinguished them from the avant-garde:
Their use of sound and image functioned on a register far removed
from the avant-garde. The tendency of this movement was (and is) to
view documentary as a fundamentally referential from, marking a
significant difference from the autobiographical avant-garde (Lane
2002:14-15)
At the same time Lane points out how
By repositioning the filmmaker at the foreground of the film, the new
autobiographical documentary disrupted the detached, objective ideal
of direct cinema, which excluded the presence of the filmmaker and the
cinematic apparatus. (12)

On this side of the Atlantic this move from observational to autobiographical

documentary has been mirrored most clearly in the career of Nick Broomfield,
initially trained in observational documentary at the National Film School.

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Despite the ‘autobiographical’ presence Broomfield has cultivated in his more
recent films, he is strictly speaking not an autobiographical documentary
maker, but, as Stella Bruzzi convincingly demonstrates, someone who uses
his ‘alter ego of the friendly man with a boom [microphone]’ (2006: 109) as a
particular filmmaking strategy: so ‘Nick Broomfield ≠ ‘Nick Broomfield’’(208).
He made this distinction very clear himself when he made series of television
advertisements - starring ‘Nick Broomfield’ - in 1999 for Volkswagen. He
appears - almost parodying his persona - as the familiar friendly, but slightly
bumbling man with the boom and headphones, testing out the cars’ safety
features.

So ‘Nick Broomfield’ is a partly fictionalised character that Broomfield

‘Nick Broomfield’
mobilises for narrative purposes in his films. This is perhaps made most clear
when the device breaks down (and the films become more ‘authentically
autobiographical’), as in the sequence in which an obviously impassioned
‘Broomfield’/Broomfield storms the ACLU stage to confront Courtney Love in
Kurt and Courtney (1998), or in the final interview sequence with Aileen
Wournos in Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003), just before her
execution. In her discussion of this sequence Bruzzi describes this film as
among his ‘least showy’ and ‘most sincere’ works since he began involving
himself as author on screen (217)3.

3
The relationship between the autobiographical filmmaker’s ‘performance’ and their
‘authenticity’ is, of course, a complex issue in all autobiographical filmmaking – not just in
Broomfield’s version.

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For Bruzzi, Broomfield is a prime example of a filmmaker (along with others
like Molly Dineen and Michael Moore) who shows how ‘documentaries are
performative acts whose truth comes into being only at the moment of filming’
(10 & 207-217) His work also developed out of the ‘direct cinema’ tradition
whose original ambition was to convey on film the truth of ‘being there’, of
unmediated presence. What became clear to Broomfield and many others,
was that the truth (and the drama) of ‘being there’ inevitably involved their
own (the filmmaker’s) presence, and to deny it was both dishonest, and
missed much of the actual drama of the documentary-making process. As Jon
Dovey puts it:
More than any other film-maker Broomfield’s work represents the
documentary tradition confronting and taking on the epistemological
challenges of contemporary culture and incorporating them into a
structure which relies crucially on the foregrounding of subjectivity in
order to be able to make sense (2000: 33)

However, despite this foregrounded subjectivity, Broomfield – and other

filmmakers like Michael Moore who work in the same vein, remain quite
hidden. We ‘know nothing of their private selves – only their narrative
personae’ (Dovey 2000: 40).
There is however a growing body of documentary film work by male
film-makers that pushes the first person mode much further towards
the confessional. [..] Ross McElwee is widely regarded as one of the
leading film-makers in this territory (ibid: 40-41)
McElwee, like Broomfield, started working within the Direct Cinema tradition,
before becoming more directly autobiographical: 'I began making
autobiographical films because I felt that I just didn't have whatever it took to
maintain that artifice of being the invisible person from behind the camera'4.
His first film in this mode – Sherman’s March (1986) - dramatises the
transition. It begins – ostensibly - as an historical film about General
Sherman’s march to the sea in 1864, but is quickly side-tracked into an
exploration of McElwee’s tortuous love life. McElwee has pursued this
technique in his films in the twenty years since Sherman’s March – always
positioning himself autobiographically and personally within the social themes
and issues which his films also explore. So The Six O’Clock News (1996) is
about his feelings as a first time parent concerned for his new baby,
counterpointed with a nervous critique of sensationalist news coverage of
murders and natural disasters (as he put it: 'seeing the world through the lens
of fatherhood for the first time'5), and the more recent Bright Leaves (2003)
tells the story of his family’s involvement in the tobacco trade interspersed
with more personal reflections ('a meditation on legacy and heritage [...] and
what legacy means'6). He approaches the social world and conventional
documentary themes by filming, and filtering them through, his personal,
autobiographical experience, as he put it himself in an interview:

4
Interview with Doug Block, The Ross McElwee Collection DVD, First Run
Features 2006
5
ibid.
6
ibid.

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 […] melding the two – the objective data of the world with a very
subjective, very interior consciousness, as expressed through voice-
over and on-camera appearances – (Lucia 1994: 32)

As we have seen, the work of McElwee and Broomfield, in their self-referential use of
themselves on screen (their refusal to be ‘the invisible person from behind the
camera’), represents a radical shift from the conventions of Direct Cinema. Michael
Renov has pointed out how:
During the direct cinema period self-reference was shunned. But far from a
sign of self-effacement, this was the symptomatic silence of the
empowered who sought no forum for self-justification or display. And why
should they need one? These white male professionals had assumed the
mantle of filmic representation with the ease and self-assurance of a
birthright. (Renov 199: 94)
McElwee’s and Broomfield’s breaking the ‘silence of the empowered’ can
therefore be seen as an abandonment on their part of the authority of
anonymity, as well as a declaration of ‘honesty’. However the new ‘white male
professionals’ who embrace self-reference - Michael Moore and Morgan
Spurlock as well as Broomfield and McElwee – have themselves been
critiqued for the way they use a clearly signed and pronounced lack of self
assurance in their films. All four of them, in different ways mobilise (and often
revel in) what Jon Dovey has characterised as the ‘Klutz persona’ – whose
pratfalls on screen mask their authorial mastery and skills – ‘a failure who
makes mistakes and denies any mastery of the communicative process’
(2000: 27).

In his essay ‘Jargons of Authenticity’ (1993) Paul Arthur posited what he calls
a ‘documentary “aesthetics of failure”’ to explore the ‘klutz’ phenomenon. The
overall thesis of his essay is that – from the 1930s through the direct cinema
period to now – mainstream documentary has sought to guarantee its
authenticity by repudiating
the methods of earlier periods from the same perspective of realist
epistemology .. [which he defines as] the absolute desire to discover a
truth untainted by institutional forms of rhetoric ..
Arthur goes on to assert that
Each new contender (in the search for untainted truth) will generate
recognizable, perhaps even self-conscious, figures, through which to
signify the spontaneous, the anti-conventional, the refusal of mediating
process.’ (1993: 109)
In the current period (since the 1990s) that figure is the klutz – the only kind of
filmmaker whose truth claims, by virtue of his7 appearance on screen, we will
be inclined to believe in our sceptical, post-modern times. Nowadays, as
Arthur goes on to say
it is required that filmmakers peel away the off-screen cloak of
anonymity and, emerging into the light, make light of their power and

7
These filmmakers seem to be invariably male, and the films are consequently highly ‘gender
inflected’ (Dovey 2000: 27). Other examples include Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson,
although they don’t ‘self-shoot’ but work as journalists with crews.

6
 dominion […] But a willingness to actually take apart and examine the
conventions by which authority is inscribed – as opposed to making
sport of them – is largely absent.’ (1993: 128)

So – in less theoretical language, the klutz is a ‘con’, a confidence trick – the

latest attempt to shore up documentary filmmakers’ authority and our realist
truth claims. It is also a technique borrowed from written autobiography, in
which ‘to prevent the reader being repelled by the blatant egotism of the
autobiographer’s self display, the self may also be represented as inadequate,
ashamed and in some respects a failure’ (Dalziell 1999: 6). However, when
Broomfield messes up his interview with Terre Blanche in The Leader, His
Driver and The Driver’s Wife (1991) or Michael Moore fails to track down
Roger in Roger and Me (1989), their displays of being out of control merely
reassert their actual control over their material – giving an impression of its
authenticity and therefore confirming its (and their) authority. ‘Out of
controlness’ becomes a rhetorical device that signifies authenticity, as well as
modesty:
‘.. it is exactly the open admission of, indeed a central obsession with,
inadequacy emblazoned by formal disjunction and underwritten by
dramatic displays of nontotalized knowledge – patriarchal mastery in
disarray – which performs the labour of signifying authenticity and
documentary truth.’(Arthur 1993: 132)

The master maybe be in disarray, but he is still master. Arthur’s unhappiness

about these filmmakers’ lack of a ‘willingness to actually take apart and
examine the conventions by which authority is inscribed’ contains an implicit
plea for filmmakers to adopt techniques that are more genuinely self-reflexive,
that problematise rather than tacitly reproduce documentary authenticity.
Perhaps the most visible and articulate proponent of forms of reflexivity that
undermine what she calls ‘the Master’s colonialist mistakes’(1992: 124) is the
filmmaker and theorist Trinh T.Minh-Ha. For her, documentary films that are
either overtly personally authored (like ‘klutz’ films), or completely avoid
authorial self reference in the interests of objectivity, are both equally suspect:
What is presented as evidence remains evidence, whether the
observing eye qualifies itself as being subjective or objective. At the
core of such a rationale dwells, untouched, the Cartesian division
between subject and object which perpetuates a dualistic inside-
versus-outside, mind-against-matter view of the world. The emphasis is
again laid on the power of film to capture reality ‘out there’ for us ‘in
here’. The moment of appropriation and of consumption is either simply
ignored or carefully rendered invisible according to the rules of good
and bad documentary. (Minh-Ha 1991: 35)
She is therefore critical of those filmmakers who ‘appear in person in the film
so as to guarantee the authenticity of the observation’(191: 55), or who ‘agree
to the necessity of self-reflectivity and reflexivity in filmmaking’ but ‘think that it
suffices to show oneself at work on the screen, or to point to one’s role once
in while in the film’(1991: 77). She is not against ‘bringing the self into play’,
but argues for a ‘radically plural’ form of reflexivity:
What is set in motion in its praxis are the self generating links between
different forms of reflexivity. Thus, a subject who points to him/her/itself

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 as subject-in-process, a work that displays its own formal properties or
its own constitution at work, is bound to upset one’s sense of identity –
the familiar distinction between the Same and the Other, since the
latter is no longer kept in a recognizable relation of dependence,
derivation or appropriation. (Minh-Ha 1991: 48)
On these terms she appreciates the uses of autobiography – as a way for
marginalised people ‘to find a voice and to enter the arena of visiblity’ (Minh-
Ha 1991: 191):
Its diverse strategies can favor the emergence of new forms of
subjectivity: the subjectivity of a non-I, plural I, which is different from
the subjectivity of the sovereign I (subjectivism) or the non-subjectivity
of the all-knowing I (objectivism). Such a subjectivity defies the
normality of all binary oppositions including those between sameness
and otherness, individual and societal, elite and mass, high culture and
popular culture. (Minh-Ha 1991: 192)
In my view (perhaps as someone overly schooled the ‘rules of good and bad
documentary’) Minh-Ha’s formulations sometimes read as frustratingly
abstract, and some of her films, while frequently beautiful on the surface,
remain (as frustratingly) impenetrable (to me) at the level of their meaning8.
Jon Dovey alludes to the same problem when he suggests that
It is hard to understand how the film texts implied by a critique like
Trinh’s could function as anything other than culturally marginal
experiments in which an address to the ‘constitution of meaning’
produces meaninglessness’ (2000: 52).
I’m inclined to believe that this potential ‘meaninglessness’ is caused by
Trinh’s apparent disregard for what (to me) is a basic fact of filmmaking: the
possession of a camera by the filmmaker inevitably renders what/who is in
front of his/her lens as ‘other’ – an inescapable ‘binary opposition’ which of
necessity has to reproduce ‘the Cartesian division between subject and
object’ (Minh-Ha 1991: 35). I think that the reflexive potential of
autobiographical filmmaking derives precisely from this ‘Cartesian division’,
and lies in the fact that the main ‘other’ in front of the lens is usually none
other than the filmmaker her/himself, both seer and seen, making this
opposition/division a primary, and often explicit theme of these films.

This is perhaps most obviously exemplified in the work of Ross McElwee, in

which his own presence as camera-person/director is a constant theme of his
films. For instance in Time Indefinite (1993) – which centres on his
relationship with his family, particularly his complex feelings about his father,
at a time when he himself is contemplating marriage - his camera runs out of
battery power just as he’s announced his engagement to his girlfriend Marilyn,
in a large group of relatives that have gathered for a family birthday. McElwee
cuts to some camcorder footage shot by one of his relatives, and suggests in
voice-over that his father was giving out a ‘force field that plays havoc with my
equipment’. There is also the sequence from Six O’clock News (1996) that

8
Or even at the level of being able to (literally) see them. Trinh tells an amusing story about
her ‘dislike of visible chatter. Visibility is not our main concern and our cinematographer
(Kathleen Beeler) has often had to remind us of the factor of legibility in the process of image-
making’. (Minh-ha 2007: 116)

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comes around half an hour into the film. The basic theme – as I’ve already
mentioned, McElwee’s increasing feelings of vulnerability as a new father in
the face of the daily horrors and disasters he witnesses on the 6 o’clock news
- has already been established. In this sequence he allows himself to become
the subject of a local news programme, allowing them to film him as a
curiosity: the strange man who films his own life. By intercutting his own
footage of the crew’s visit to his flat with the item that ends up on the 6 o’clock
news, McElwee reflexively portrays an amusing struggle between conflicting
cinematic ethics, styles and objectives. He makes us aware of his own – and
other - filmmaking practices within the piece by filming of the three takes by
the news crew as they are coming through the door, making their apparently
‘spontaneous’ introductions. Once they are installed in his kitchen, he
competes (unsuccesfully) for the best camera position with the news
cameraman, with McElwee ending up disadvantaged by having to shoot into
the light from his kitchen window. His customary ironic voice-over (added at
the editing stage) is present throughout the sequence, confessing his
personal difficulty in coming up with ‘soundbites’ for the reporter, and musing,
for instance, on the nature of ‘real’ (or Hollywood) films versus his own
practice of making documentaries.

Of course these examples are highly reflexive (in the sense that the
filmmaking techniques draw attention to their own construction) – especially,
of course, when McElwee is being filmed himself. Furthermore, despite the
reflexive shortcomings of the autobiographical mode in Minh-ha’s critique, it is
my contention that reflexivity forms an important element in most
contemporary approaches to first-person filmmaking. I’m interested here in
analysing some of these films to focus on the material, reflexive relationship of
the filmmaker/autobiographer to the camera, the filmmaking process and to
the other subjects of the films, to address more closely the issue of the
opposition/division between seer and seen explored above. This also, of
course, returns us to Bruss’s concern with ‘the implied identity of author,
narrator and protagonist on which classical autobiography depends’, and will
enable us to see how this identity is manifested, and played with, particularly
in relation to the other (non-authorial) subjects of the films. In a way that
written autobiography can easily avoid, autobiographical filmmaking
necessarily confronts the author/narrator, both with him/herself and with
her/his ‘others’ (friends, family and any other characters in the films). My
argument is that these confrontations invariably lead to a reflexive quality
manifested in the films.

Confrontations along these lines are at the heart of Living Dangerously: the
Alcohol Years (2000), Carol Morley’s film in which she retraced a missing
period of her life when she had drunk herself into oblivion, by interviewing
people she knew at the time. She doesn’t appear in the film, but her
interviewees talk directly to her (and us in the audience), looking into the lens
of her camera, producing a curious sensation of the collapse into one another
of the identities of author, protagonist and audience. This autobiographical
use of the camera has profound consequences for the issue of ‘othering’.
Morley’s previous alcoholic self is ruthlessly scrutinised (some of her
interviewees being hurt by, and/or critical of, how she treated them in her lost

9
years), but we in the audience are made to experience the scrutiny almost as
though it were us being judged, because the interviewees speak into the lens.
The boundaries between subject and object, the authorial self and her ‘others’
are blurred and complicated.

This complication is a recurrent trope of many recent autobiographical

documentaries. The filmmaker is always ‘visible’ in relationship to the people
s/he is filming, sometimes actually because s/he appears alongside them,
sometimes metaphorically because his/her presence is registered from behind
the camera (in similar ways as Morley’s was above). So too the issue of how
the (autobiographical) filmmaker relates to, and is treating his/her subjects is
also almost always visible. Family (2001) is a film by two young Danes, Sami
Saif and Phie Ambo-Nielsen, in which Phie (operating the camera) observes
Sami as he struggles reconcile with his family back in Yemen where he
comes from. Phie and Sami were in a relationship at the time of filming – and
their intimacy becomes the main device of the film as Phie gently confronts
Sami, persuading him to go deeper into his familial relationships – first in a
search for his father, then in his developing relationship with his new found
brother in Yemen.
Because she is not only a cinematographer and filmmaker but also a
girlfriend, Phie is unable to merely observe and register what goes on
[…] from her position behind the camera (Jerslev 2005: 94)
There is a key scene which demonstrates this complex relationship well, in
which Sami’s brother weeps about their other brother’s suicide with Sami,
then turns to the camera and says ‘Thankyou Phie’ and she thanks him back,
mitigating the voyeurism which is often a part of the more ‘objective’
documentary depiction of strong emotion. Jerslev later describes this
technique as ‘an unpretentious immanent reflexivity [original emphasis] that
may to serve the projection of a sense of immediacy and proximity and thus
involve the viewer emotionally’ (103).

Dennis O’Rourke’s documentary The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991) also

makes use of the way in which the autobiographical filmmaker relates to
her/his subject, but in a more troubling way. Linda Williams has described this
as a ‘film about a Thai prostitute hired by the filmmaker to be his lover and the
subject of his film’ (1999: 176) – a strategy by which, she says, he ‘makes
himself vulnerable to feminist wrath’(176). However she goes on to ‘argue that
that very vulnerability is also what makes this film so challenging to
conventional documentary ethics’(176-7). A large part of this vulnerability
derives from the way his autobiographical camera exposes his relationship
with Aoi (the prostitute):
Her speech to the camera (and thus to O’Rourke, who operates both
camera and sound throughout the film) alternates between extremely
factual accounts of the economics of her life [..], and extremely
emotional accounts of her hatred of men [..]. She clearly condemns the
patriarchal system that holds her in such thrall, and she astutely
includes her relationship with O’Rourke as part of that system (Williams
1999: 180-81)

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At the same time Williams applauds ‘O’Rourke’s effort to be ethical within an
unequal situation – which is, after all, the situation that most men women
inhabit in the real world’ (185), and points out how his film is one of those ‘new
forms of documentary practice that seem to have abandoned the traditional
respect for objectivity and distance [..] in contexts fraught with sexual, racial
and postcolonial dynamics of power’ (Williams 1999: 178).

In a more domestic register, Sandrine Bonnaire – the well-known French actor

– filmed her autistic sister over many years as her disability worsened, and in
Elle S’Appelle Sabine she edits this footage together into a moving and
intimate account of Sabine’s life and their relationship. Sabine’s disability
sometimes manifested itself as an obsessive need for reassurance that
Sandrine is not about to abandon her, or is returning the next day to see her,
so that often she’s repeatedly addressing these kinds of questions directly to
the camera: ‘When are you going?’ ‘Are you coming back tomorrow?’: and
Sandrine is answering them, often with mounting exasperation, from behind
the camera, which puts us, in the audience, into a virtual simulation of their
relationship, not dissimilar to O’Rourke’s with Aoi in The Good Woman of
Bangkok, or Morley’s with her friends in Alcohol Years. This works as well
with scenes of joyful intimacy, as with conflict. At one point towards the end of
the film Sandrine shows her sister home-movie footage of a trip to the US
they made when Sabine was younger and less disable. Sabine bursts into
tears when she sees her younger self, telling the camera/Sandrine that they
are ‘tears of joy’.

In I for India (2005) Sandhya Suri also builds on the unique emotional access
she has to her subjects, but in a very different way, as she tells the story of
her parents immigration to England from India, largely through a reworking of
the family home-movie archive. Her father was a keen amateur fllmmaker,
and he exchanged 8mm films, video and audio cassettes with relatives back
in India. The filmmaker (who appears as her younger self in much of this
material, of course) arranges these elements, along with some contemporary
interviews and observational sequences of her family members, into a moving
impression of the emotional cost of immigration and diasporic living. I for India
is a self-conscious exploration of the family memory as represented (often
partially or unreliably) in the ‘home-movie’ footage. In a sense, as a portrait of
a family by an insider, it is more what Michael Renov calls ‘domestic
ethnography’ than autobiography, but Renov comments that ‘domestic
ethnography entails but exceeds autobiography’:
In all instances of domestic ethnography, the familial other helps to
flesh out the very contours of the enunciating self, offering itself as a
precursor, alter ego, double, instigator, spiritual guide or perpetrator of
trauma (228).

As Renov implies, the ‘familial’ or intimate ‘other’ in these films is frequently

in conflict with the filmmaker. In Alan Berliner’s Nobody’s Business (1996) –
a portrait of his father – this conflict becomes the main narrative device of
the film, which is structured around an abrasive interview by Berliner of his
father, who is constantly on the verge of walking out because he considers
his life ‘nobody’s business’ but his own. In Tell Them Who You Are (2006)

11
 Mark Wexler also struggles portray (and to reconcile himself with) his own
father, the cinematographer and left-wing radical filmmaker Haskell Wexler9.
Mark is clearly politically much more conservative: his best known film
documentary up to the point he made Tell Them Who You Are was a
celebratory film about Air Force One, the US Presidential airplane. However
the differences between father and son are revealed as more than political,
and are embedded into the structure of this film they are making together
(often competitively filming each other). This Oedipal struggle is made clear
in the poster for the film (Fig. 5) in which Mark appears as a little boy whose
tiny video camera seems no match for his father’s 35mm machine: size is
everything in this shoot-out:

Even so, Tell Them Who You Are ends with a touching reconciliation
sequence in which Mark, shooting his father swimming in a pool, gives up the
struggle and allows his father to direct the shot as he swims smiling towards
the camera. The emotional resolution in the film is cleverly effected via a
negotiation about how the scene is to be photographed – a sequence enabled
by the relationships made possible in self-shot autobiographical documentary:
their reconciliation is reflexively expressed.

Sometimes the ethics of these encounters with ‘familial others’ through the
camera are less clear cut. In Tarnation (2004) Jonathan Caoutte makes a
portrait of himself alongside a very emotional account of his relationship with
his mother, who spent all of his life with her going in and out of Mental Health
institutions. The film includes a couple of long sequences where he films his
interactions with her when she is clearly in states of obvious distress and
extreme confusion – which he does with himself too in a tearful piece to
camera towards the end of the film. Nevertheless he has been critiqued10 for
transgressing the boundaries of the ‘home movie’ – making public what was

9
Haskell Wexler is well known for directing Medium Cool (1969) a ‘docu-drama’ about the
1968 Chicago Democratic convention.
10
For instance by Liz Czach (2005)

12
intended to be private and domestic, and could equally be called to account
for exploiting his mother when she was clearly completely unable to give lucid
consent to the filming process. However, the quality and impact of these
sequences – the raw, touching openness and vulnerability of Caoutte’s
mother - are clearly the result of her relationship to her son and his
autobiographical, observational camera

The issue of obtaining the consent or even collaboration of the films’ other
subjects for the autobiographical filmmaker is complex – and often visible in
the film as we saw with Berliner and Wexler above. It is a noticeable feature of
the films of Ross McElwee how often his friends and partner ask him to stop
shooting and turn off his camera. The voyeuristic power over their subjects
that all documentary filmmakers possess is rendered much more obvious in
these films by the often inevitable reflexivity of the shooting situation. In
Flying-Confessions of a Free Woman (2006) – a 6 x 1 hour series Jennifer
Fox made for television, she explores a way of deconstructing this voyeuristic
power. She had two main aims in making the series: the first was to break
through her feeling when she started filming that she was in a crisis of
‘modern female identity’ (‘I cannot see my life’)11, and the second was to
explore these feelings with women family members and women friends to find
out ‘how women speak when men aren’t around’, and whether the feeling of
sharing she experienced with her friends would be there in different parts of
the world. She shot 1600 hours of material over five years about her own and
her international group of women friends’ attitudes to sex and relationships, by
doing self-filmed pieces to camera (on

Jennifer Fox does a piece-to-camera In Flying, after discovering that she is pregnant

every day she filmed) as well as by using a technique she calls ‘passing the
camera’. In conversations with individuals and groups of friends and women
she had just met, she would (with some minimal instruction) pass the camera
to someone else if she had something to add to the conversation. In these
ways some of her voyeuristic power was diminished and she was able to

11
These statements and those that follow were all made by Fox at a ‘Masterclass’ with the
filmmaker I attended at the ICA, London, February 2008.

13
make herself appear (as a subject of the filmmaking process) as equally open
and vulnerable
as the other women she was filming (despite her being in editorial control).

Jennifer Fox (second from right) with some her subjects/co-authors in the series.

I think it is clear from all of the examples that the particular circumstances of
autobiographical filmmaking, the confrontations it engenders between the
filmmakers selves and the others that appear in their films, continually raise
key questions about the (power relationship) between filmmaker and subject
in an always overt and often reflexive fashion.

First Person Video:

First of all, the low grade video image has become the [original
emphasis] privileged form of TV ‘truth-telling’, signifying authenticity
and an indexical reproduction of the real world; indexical in the sense
of presuming a direct and transparent correspondence between what is
in front of the camera lens and its taped representation. Secondly, the
camcorder text has become the form that most relentlessly insists upon
a localised, subjective and embodied account of experience (Dovey
2000: 55)

Clearly Fox’s techniques in Flying (2006), described above, were very

dependent on being able to generate footage on low cost, lightweight and
easy-to-use video equipment. The advent of the camcorder has enabled a
new aesthetic in autobiographical filmmaking, that of the ‘video-diary’, which
has itself become a new ‘jargon of authenticity’ (Arthur 1993) :
Everything about it, the hushed whispering voiceover, the incessant to-
camera close-up, the shaking camera movements, the embodied
intimacy of the technical process, appears to reproduce experiences of
subjectivity. We feel closer to the presence and process of the
filmmaker. (Dovey 2000: 57)

14
Agnes Varda revels in this intimate
use of the camcorder in The
Gleaners and I (2000), celebrating
it as one more instance of
‘gleaning’, in the way it enables
her to hoover up images with ease
as she travels, like the gleaners in
the wheat fields in Millet’s painting
‘Les Glaneuses’, whom she talks
about at the
beginning of the film. She enthuses
on the soundtrack ‘these new small
cameras, they are digital, fantastic,
narcissistic, and even hyper-realistic’ Frame grab from The Gleaners & I
and exploits the potential of her camera as
a tool for self examination, ‘gleaning’ images of herself as she points it at her hand:

Fig 7 : frame grabs from The Gleaners & I

The film becomes a self-portrait and meditation on ageing and death, counter-
pointing the social critique of poverty and waste that is the main theme of the
film. In a number of sequences she reminds us of the physicality – ‘the
embodied intimacy’ – of her use of the camcorder, for instance as she drives
along the motorway filming her own hand:

15
 Frame grabs from The Gleaners & I

This playful, home-made aesthetic made possible by the camcorder, is a large

part of its appeal for documentary makers. In comparison to film, video is
cheap and accessible: for instance, the production of Tarnation (2003 -
described above) was wholly dependent on developments in low-cost video
technology in a number of respects. A lot of the footage was originally shot by
Caouette in his childhood on various domestic formats, which he then edited
together with contemporary diary and impromptu, intimate observational
footage, on i-Movie, Apple’s domestic editing programme. This first cut, before
the film was taken up by distributors and shown at the Cannes Film Festival,
cost a total of $213.7212. Other video artists in the US, before Caouette, have
exploited the accessible, domestic intimacy of the new video technologies in
similar ways – notably Sadie Benning, George Kuchar and Wendy Clarke.

Benning’s tapes from the early 1990’s 13(when she was a teenager) made use
of an early ‘toy’ video camera made by Fisher Price, that, in Catherine
Russell’s words, ‘produced such a low definition image that it became known
as pixelvision’. Russell goes on to remark:
Because pixelvision is restricted to a level of close-up detail, it is an
inherently reflexive medium [..] The “big picture” is always out of reach,
as the filmmaker is necessarily drawn to the specificity of daily life
(1990: 291).
Benning’s tapes were often made in the privacy of her bedroom, and
explored, aongst other themes, her coming out as a young lesbian. This same

12
According to Caouette himself in an interview (Sherwin 2004). He estimated the final costs,
after all the post-production processes needed to put it into distribution, were going to be ‘just
under $400,000’ (ibid).
13
Her work is distributed by Video Data Bank:
www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artistdetail?BENNINGS (accessed 6/11/09)

16
quotidian intimacy is a feature of George Kuchar’s video diaries14, again
according to Russell:
He creates the impression that he carries the camera with him
everywhere, and that it mediates his relation with the world at large. [..]
The camera is explicitly situated as an extension of his vision, but also
of his body. In close-ups of food or of himself, the proximity of the
profilmic to the lens is defined by the length of his reach (286 & 289).
Russell summarises Benning’s and Kuchar’s video diaries as representing
their bodies in space. The camera as an instrument of vision serves as
a means pf making themselves visible, a vehicle for the performance of
their identities. [..] Video provides a degree of proximity and intimacy
that enables this spatialization of the body. Instead of a transcendental
subject of vision, these videos enact the details of a particularized,
partialized subjectivity (294-295).
This kind of subjectivity is, of course, in stark contrast to ‘the monarch-of-all-I-
survey scene’ which Pratt criticises (1992: 205), and acts as a counter to
Minh-Ha’s ‘Master’s colonialist mistakes’(1992: 124).

Wendy Clarke’s Love Tapes 15 project is a very different piece of work in

terms of its production process, although it exploits the subjective and intimate
possibilities offered by video in a similar way. Since 1978 she has been
inviting individuals, in a wide range of venues, to sit in front of a camera
connected to a monitor for 3 minutes on their own, and talk about ‘love’ to a
musical accompaniment of their own choosing. At the end of their recording,
the participant/confessant plays the tape back to her/him-self, still on their
own, and decides whether to erase it or add to Clarke’s collection. Over the
years she has amassed an enormous number of these pieces, some of which
have been collected together and distributed, most of which are still piled up
in her house, uncatalogued16. Michael Renov describes how they
tap remarkable, and unpredictable, affective wellsprings in troubled
youths, guilt-stricken fathers, adoring dog owners, those who have lost
or never known love, others whose capacity for love has been revived
(2004: 206).
Renov’s contention is that ‘The Love Tapes effect a temporary inversion’ of
the power of television:
Instead of spewing a one-way stream of words and images [..],
Clarke’s installed monitor shows the subject only herself as she
(re)produces herself. [..] At last [..] television stops talking and just
listens. Video becomes the eye that sees and the ear that listens,
powerfully but without judgement or reprisal (206).
US filmmaker Lynn Hershman when she attests to this power as she talks to
the camera in her film ‘Binge’: ‘Right now I’m sitting here with no cameraman
in the room. I’m totally alone. I would never, ever talk this way if somebody
were here’ (quoted in Renov 2004, 202).

14
His work is distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix: ww.eai.org/eai/artistTitles.htm?id=313
(accessed 6/11/09)
15
An early collection of the tapes is distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (Clarke 1981)
16
Personal communication with Wendy Clarke (2004)

17
The video diary genre
Video diary making evolved its own specific generic qualities as it developed
through the 1990s. Perhaps the most visible of these – and the one I want to
focus on here – is the ‘to-camera piece’ in which the video diarist turns the
camera on her- or himself and records her/his thoughts, very much as we’ve
seen with The Love Tapes. This technique provides a close, filmic analogy to
the written diary:
The visual form … borrows from the literary model the tone, the
revelation of intimate detail, and its use as a site for recording
traumatic or at least serious confessions. The personal mode of
address has a visual analogue in the ‘to-camera’ set up of the video
diary...’ (Reid, 1999)
Sue Dinsmore characterises this ‘set up’ as ‘providing a space for self-
reflection and reconsideration that performs a function very similar to making
an entry in a written diary’ (46). So the video camera – particularly when
directly addressed by the diarist - becomes a recording device not very
different to the pen and paper of the private written diary.

Ironically, though, the ‘piece to camera’ convention also closely resembles

the most widely used technique for conveying public authority and objectivity
on broadcast TV. The direct, square-on address to the camera almost always
connotes impartiality, neutrality, the delivery of the objective facts (the
newsreader being its most iconic from). It is only rarely used to evoke the
person’s individuality or subjectivity. However, in the video diary form, as Jon
Dovey notes ‘… the direct camcorder address has a simplicity that marks it
out from other highly mediated TV genres’(128). And ‘… in the diary format it
becomes another way of creating high levels of identification with the
filmmaker. Aiming the camera at yourself, using your own body to record your
own body, you the diarist, whisper in to the lens’ (73).

The first viewer to experience this whispered intimacy is usually the video
diarist her/himself, playing back what they have recorded before showing it to
anyone else. The camcorder is a ‘mirror machine’ (Stoney 1971: 9), literally
so now that most camcorders have reversible LCD viewfinders17, and
certainly much more so than in 1971 when the documentary maker George
Stoney celebrated the arrival of portable video: ‘Those of us who have ..
(been) trying to find a simpler, less threatening way to introduce viewers to
the viewed, even viewers to themselves, find these new little mirror machines
heady stuff’(ibid: 9). Michael Renov suggests the ‘video apparatus .. is both
screen and mirror, providing .. a reflective surface on which to register the
self’(186). Before both of them Jean Rouch had discovered some of the same
‘heady stuff’ as Stoney in his film ‘Chronique d’Un Été’ (1961) in which he
cajoled Parisians into ‘a very strange kind of confession in front of the
camera, where the camera is, let’s say, a mirror’ (Eaton 1979: 51).

17
These are small screens which can be pointed away from, or in the same direction, as the
camera lens so that self-filming subjects can see themselves as they record.

18
The mirror encourages us into an intimate exchange with ourselves, and the
‘to-camera’ mirroring set up of the video diary is an even more powerful way
to elicit ‘confession in front of the camera’ than was available to Rouch in the
1960s. In the UK this was first harnessed by the BBC’s Community
Programme Unit (CPU), which had been set up in the late 1960s to enable
groups and individuals normally excluded from television broadcasting to have
‘access’ to the airwaves – an access that was, however, always strictly limited
by being mediated through CPU staff and professional film crews. When Hi8
camcorders became available in the early 1990s (enabling the production of
near-professional images on easy-to-use domestic equipment) the CPU
handed them out to selected members of the public, to whom they also
offered basic video production training and support during their (often very
long) shooting periods. After the diarist had gathered their material with their
camcorders, they would then have further support and direction from CPU
staff in editing and post-production – a form of much less heavily mediated
‘access’ than before. These Video Diaries were followed in 1993 by Video
Nation, a project in which diverse group of fifty people were selected from
across the UK, given training in the use of camcorders and invited to record
aspects of everyday life during the course of a year:
On 7 March 1994 a two minute programme was transmitted on BBC2
under the Video Nation logo. Colonel Gordon Hencher spoke to
camera in an understated but powerful way about aging, and the gap
between his image and his self-image: ‘One doesn’t feel old you know.
But it’s a ghastly thing, to look and see your face, what it is now, and
what you feel it should be, inside you ..’ (Hencher quoted in Rose 2007:
127-8)

Gordon Hencher’s Video Nation short

Hencher’s meditation on what he sees of himself in the mirror18 was the first
of 1,300 Video Nation Shorts made for BBC 2 between 1994 and 2000. The
project continues to the present on the web19. The contact with the self and
the vulnerability that the to-camera piece induces is evident in many Video
Nation pieces, not least, for example, in the work that Jean Lee did for Video

18
Available at www.bbc.co.uk/videonation/articles/u/uk_mirror.shtml (accessed 6/11/09)
19
http://www.bbc.co.uk/videonation/ (accessed 1/1/09)

19
Nation during and after her pregnancy. In Bump she describes her obsession
with her pregnant belly, how she’s never loved any part of her anatomy as
much, as she caresses it in close-up; and in Labour she films herself at home
with the

Still from Bump

new-born baby in her arms and describes his very long and painful birth,
crying as she recalls how her mother and sister were with her during her
labour and made her feel loved20.

Since this innovative use of video diary production in the 1990s the technique
has been incorporated into mainstream television and documentary in a
variety of ways. As Biressi and Nunn comment: ‘The look of Video Nation has
been popularised in commercials and popular programming and has become
part of the new visual lexicon of ‘real life’ on television’(2005: 19). However
video-diary making remains a way for ‘non-professionals’ to represent
themselves, in the best instances, in a relatively unmediated way in
mainstream media.

The Prisoners of the Iron Bars (Sacramneto 2003) is a Brazilian feature length
documentary in which the filmmakers gave inmates camcorders to record
their own view of life in Carandiru, a notorious prison in the city of Sao Paolo.
In one sequence ‘The night of an inmate’, the film features the occupants of
one particular cell, trying to, in their words, ‘show you about this place,
especially at night .. It’s hard with words. Maybe it works with images, right?’
The sequence conveys an impression of the lives of these prisoners which
would have been impossible other than in the video diary from. The prisoners
film their morning and evening routines, photos of their families and homes,
distant commuter trains passing, and fireworks exploding far away in the dark
night outside their cell window. They show how they communicate with a
woman in a block of flats opposite the prison, using hand signals, and, in a
remarkable scene from the early morning, how they use a mirror to extend
what they can see outside their cell window:

20
http://www.bbc.co.uk/videonation/articles/s/southern_bump.shtml &
http://www.bbc.co.uk/videonation/articles/u/uk_labour.shtml (accessed 1/1/09)

20
 Fig .11: Screen grabs from ‘The Prisoners of the Iron Bars’

UK television has made use of this kind of intimate connection that develops
between video diarists and their cameras, not least in a number of instances
with younger people. The veteran documentary maker Marilyn Gaunt
developed a technique she called ‘absentee interviewing’21 in her film Kelly
and Her Sisters (2001) , which was a sensitive portrait of a very poor, single
parent family on a run-down estate. After shooting with the family during the
day, she would strap a camcorder to the children’s bunk bed and encourage
them to record answers to questions she left them with, overnight. The results
had an unusual spontaneity and freshness that wouldn’t have been
achievable in a more formal interview set-up. This was true too of Nicola
Gibson’s My Life as a Child 22, which was entirely shot by mostly pre-teenage
children, on their own and entirely unsupervised apart from occasional visits
to the family by members of the production team. Their pieces to camera were
extraordinarily touching and revealing, often about very difficult issues in their
families.

The ‘claim on the real’ that video-diary making’s immediacy and situated
subjectivity appear to offer, has led to its wide proliferating use on television
across all factual genres, from video journalists like Sean Langan - who often
films himself, hand-held, as he moves through war zones and other
challenging environments - to ‘info-tainment’ formatted history programmes
like 1900 House (Wall to Wall 1999) and it successors in which the
participants are frequently offered the opportunity to record their ‘private’
thoughts and responses to the day’s activity, and ‘speak to video camera of
their tiredness, fear or pain’(Biressi & Nunn 2005: 110). Any claim on the real
or to ‘authenticity’ that may have accrued to the Video Diary genre must have
been seriously questioned (if not finally laid to rest) by its use in the various
forms of ‘reality TV’, in which issues of (increasingly exaggerated and self-
conscious) performance of the self are to the fore. To give just one example
from the Channel 4 series Big Brother (Endemol 1997-) : the Diary Room,
which Biressi and Nunn describe as ‘the unacknowledged guarantor of the
speaker’s true feelings (2005: 20), is certainly a kind of ‘private’ confessional,
but the contestants who use it also must know that they are communicating
with the television audience who will vote them in or out of the ‘house’ on the
basis of their performance.

21
At a Dochouse Masterclass, 21st September 2003, at The Other Cinema, Rupert Street,
London, W1D 7PR
22
Six part series from 5 July 2005 on BBC2, series 2 from 29 Mar 2007, also BBC2

21
Today, in some ways, the video camcorder’s supposed ‘claim on the real’ - its
‘privileged form of TV ‘truth-telling’’, in Dovey’s phrase (2000: 55) - has been
usurped (as hand-held 16m film’s claim was by the camcorder) by
developments in mobile phone technology. As a recent article suggests:
[…] the mobile phone, with its poor, imperfection of resolution and
pixillated quality and small aspect ration is in some ways more ‘real’, in
that everyone has access to the medium and can learn it easily, but
more importantly it captures ‘what I am doing now, in this moment’
(Baker, Schleser & Molga 2009: 111)
The authors go on to valorise the mobile’s
[…] prediliction for close-ups and a sense of immediacy – instant,
realtime, ‘being here and now’. The portability factor allows for the
watching and shooting anywhere, with the intimacy of enabling one to
take their phone to private and personal spaces (119).
There is of course a striking similarity between these descriptions of the
virtues of the mobile phone as a filming device, and those made by video
activists about portable video from the 1970s on, and Direct Cinema
enthusiasts about 16mm film in the 1960s.

In the current environment of mobile telephony, Web 2.0 and social

networking and video sharing sites, video diary production is more popular
and widespread than ever before: ‘every minute, ten hours of video is
uploaded to YouTube’23 and the video diary is a frequently used form on the
YouTube website, by ‘video bloggers, or vloggers - people who regularly
record video diaries of their thoughts and feelings and share them with the
world’ (Young 2007). In a cementing of the already symbiotic and increasingly
‘converged’ relationship between broadcast television and the web, The Big
Brother production team have also recently ‘teamed up with YouTube to
launch an online auditions channel’ on which ‘hopefuls can upload a one
minute audition video to impress producers’24 – a very public performative
style of video diary making, giving the diarist a shot at celebrity.

‘Post-documentary’ culture and ‘Reality TV’

Both autobiographical filmmaking and video diary work are integral to current
debates about the status of documentary in the new century, contributing to a
pervasive sense of crisis and transformation. The editors of a recent volume
have characterised these ‘significant and ongoing changes’ and ‘sometimes
dizzyingly rapid developments’ as
the spread of new digital productions and editing equipment; the
increasing ‘intimization’ (van Zoonen 1991: 217) of content facilitated
by this; the continued proliferation of television formats; a so-called
‘boom’ in theatrical features; and the phenomenon of DIY footage

23
http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet (accessed 2/01/09)
24
The Guardian, 31/12/08, p. 10

22
 posted on websites like YouTube and Google Video (Austin & de Jong
2008: 1)
As we have already seen, first-person filmmaking has been a feature, and
often a driver, of all of these developments, and, of course, a significant
contributor to the ‘intimization’ of content. Van Zoonen’s deployment of this
term is in relation to thinking through how a ‘tyranny of intimacy’ provoked by
‘the predominance of women newsreaders in Dutch television news’ (1991:
217) has challenged the universalist, ungendered assumptions of the
conventional, bourgeois, public sphere. As Laura Rascaroli comments:
This is, indeed, a time in which the waning of objectivity and truth as
convincing social narratives invites different forms of expression, and
different dimensions and ways of engagement with the real – ways that
are more contingent, marginal, autobiographical, even private (2009:
190).
Similar challenges and tendencies – and the anxiety they provoke – are being
reproduced across virtually all forms of factual media (often focused on the
wide range of work known as Reality TV), and they are central to the feeling
of the crisis of legitimacy facing documentary filmmaking in the current
‘postdocumentary’ media environment.

John Corner coined this phrase in his attempt to locate the Reality TV show
Big Brother in what he calls the ‘”postdocumentary” culture of television’,
showing ‘how, within that culture, the legacy of documentary is still at work,
albeit in partial and revised form’(2002: 257). He then goes on to discuss how
this revision centres on issues of ‘self-display’(263) and the ‘self-in-
performance’ (265) in the series. This culture, for Corner, marks a departure
from ‘the defining moments of documentary history, those moments when an
expository realism seemed to resonate at least partially with a public rhetoric
of reform and progress’(265). Biressi and Nunn, in their book on ‘Reality TV’,
similarly characterise Corner’s ‘post-documentary culture’ as a
radically altered cultural and economic setting which includes an
imperative for playfulness and diversion and the erosion of the
distinctions between the public and the private sphere, between the
private citizen and the celebrity and between media and social space
(2005: 2).

Whilst acknowledging these developments, Brian Winston takes issue with

the term ‘postdocumentary’ because he thinks that ‘[g]iven the continuities of
of documentary elements in the new forms and formats, documentary is still
very much with us’ (2008: 269). Instead of a ‘postdocumentary’ era, he
declares that ‘[t]he age of post-Griersonan documentary is upon us’(290) - an
age in which ‘first-person documentaries’ are one of the defining
characteristics. He welcomes our imminent escape from ‘the dead weight of
the Griersonian heritage’ (275), with its spurious truth claims, and criticizes
Grierson’s pretence that ‘his films were reports on the news pages, as it were,
when in fact they were editorials for the established order’(274). He looks
forward to a post-Griersonian era in which ‘the audience’s understanding that
what is on offer is indeed [..] a record of a film-maker’s subjective interaction
with the world’ (2008: 290).

23
In a similar vein, Michael Chanan describes how the shift towards subjectivity
and self-inscription in documentary authorship (in and outside television)
‘rehearses a withdrawal of documentary from the rhetoric of the public world
into a space of personal pre-occupations’ (2007: 246). What Chanan calls ‘the
new documentary wave’ - surfed by filmmakers like Michael Moore, Molly
Dineen and Agnes Varda - allows for a new truth regime: ‘the truth they insist
on telling us no longer pretends to omniscience as it used to, and is no longer
delivered as if from on high, but is told from an individual or personal point of
view …’ (2007: 6)

The older documentary conventions of ‘expository realism’ to which Corner

refers, and their relation to public life, hark back to Bill Nichols’ well-known
suggestion that documentary
has a kinship with those other nonfictional systems that together make
up what we might call the discourses of sobriety. Science, economics,
politics, foreign policy, education, religion, welfare – these systems
assume they have instrumental power: they can and should alter the
world itself...’ (1991: 3).
Many of the documentary critics who have followed Nichols in recent years
have taken exception to his formulation, in one way or another. Renov argues
that ‘Nichols’s attribution of sobriety for documentary obfuscates more than it
reveals, for documentary is equally a discourse of delirium’ (2004: 100). He
objects to Nichols’ situating ‘documentary on the side of conscious rather than
unconscious processes, public activity more than psychical reality’ (ibid: 98),
as, for Renov, ‘knowledge and desire are ineluctably intertwined’. Beattie,
similarly, wants to force ‘a reassessment of documentary practices and
theoretical approaches to documentary texts which construct them solely in
terms of a discourse of sobriety’ and seeks to shift ‘the theoretical foundations
of documentary towards an acceptance of delirious display’ (2008: 128).
There’s a decidedly gendered flavour to this distinction too: a ‘masculine’,
historical sobriety is being undermined by a ‘feminine’, hysterical delirium.

The epistemological crisis facing documentary – postulated by Renov and

Beattie as a struggle beween sobriety and delirium, or by Winston as between
pre- and post-Griersonian forms - has of course arisen in a particular social
and political time – one in which, for the last forty years at least, the
legitimacy of most of the ‘systems’ with ‘instrumental power’ in our society
have been questioned. Gendered and class-based systems of how and by
whom ‘knowledge’ is generated and disseminated, have been contested in
the media as well as in most other spheres. The BBC Community Programme
Unit’s work, mentioned above, was one attempt among many to widen access
and participation in television, and the result of this contestation has certainly
been a vast increase in the diversity (whether in terms of class, ethnicity,
gender, sexual orientaton, or (dis)ability) of protagonists in both fictional and
factual television (notably docu-soaps and ‘reality’ television, in the latter
category). However this widening of access has not very radically altered the
distribution of power between programme makers and their subjects. Biressi
and Nunn note in their discussion of ‘House’ members’ occasional rebellions
in Big Brother that :

24
 Participants’ ability to foil the production is not the same as being able
to contribute constructively to representation and seems a somewhat
feeble defence by media practitioners against accusations of
exploitation or emotional voyeurism (2005: 30)
As Richard Kilborn points out
[..] even when it might appear [original emphasis] that ordinary people
are being given a voice, closer inspection reveals that their
participation is severely constrained. Any talk about democratizing
potential has, therefore, to be accompanied by the recognition that the
broadcaster is still effectively calling the shots (Kilborn 2003: 189).

In addition Reality TV formats, although they frequently make use of ‘ordinary

people’ as subjects (or victims), are as subject as the rest of contemporary
media to the allure (and ratings appeal) of celebrity culture – as the eight
series’ (since 2002) of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! (Granada 2002-)
attest. Many other ‘reality TV’ series’ make use of the already famous,
including two whose themes and subject matter overlap with A Whited
Sepulchre. Who Do You Think You Are? is in its sixth series (Wall to Wall
2004-). Produced for BBC One, each episode features a celebrity researching
their family background, taking them on quests that invariably are both
physical and (sometimes powerfully) emotional for them. Despite the personal
focus of the series, it does engage with many social and historical issues
(perhaps most notably the legacy of the Holocaust in, for instance, the
episodes by David Baddiel (23 November 2004), Stephen Fry (25 January
2006), and Jerry Springer (27 August 2008). The series Empire's Children’s
ambitions were more explicitly political and historical, attempting to provide
insight into the British empire, again using the device of celebrities (all of
whom, for the purposes of this series, had ‘imperial’ family backgrounds)
researching their family histories, which showed how each of them was a
"child of the empire"25. Clearly a large part of A Whited Sepulchre is
concerned with discovering how I too am a "child of the empire" – albeit from
the perspective of a ‘nonentity’ rather than a ‘celebrity’. However in a wider
sense, my project echoes many the impulses of Reality TV, in its focus on the
personal, its ‘quest structure’ its subjecting the protagonist (me) to a process,
often involving ‘jeopardy’26, and of self-discovery.

The affirmation of the self offered by these new forms of television – despite
the increase in diversity in who gets shown noted above, remains a scarce
resource – there’s no room for more than a handful of Jade Goodys in the
mediasphere’s hall of fame. Nevertheless these forms still offer the promise of
affirmation:
Reality TV, then, arguably promotes and caters for the desire to be
observed and to have one’s existence validated through observation.
[..] It foregrounds the ways in which subjectivity more broadly is formed
through a matrix of looks, of processes of seeing, being seen and of

25
(Wall to Wall 2007 - See www.walltowall.co.uk/news_item.aspx?content=146 (accessed
6/04/09)
26
There was a period of a few years in the late 1990’s and early 2000s when most
Commissioning Editors for factual programming were looking for this quality. No programmes
were financed that didn’t in some way, show (or put their) characters in ‘jeopardy’.

25
 our self-conscious knowledge of being seen. It suggests that within
media culture being publicly regarded can constitute an affirmation of
the self (Biressi & Nunn 2005: 102)

Biressi and Nunn’s book on Reality TV concludes with this sentence:

To borrow an observation from Jon Dovey 'We are all learning to live in
the freakshow, it is our new public space' (2000: 4). The question
which should perhaps preoccupy us now is how we choose to navigate
this space and make it our own' (2005: 155).

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Filmography:
Films cited in the text (Director, date, film title, & - where known - Production
Company and/or Distributor):

Ambo, P. & Saif, S. (2001) Family - Cinevita Aps.

Anderson, L. (1968) If - Memorial Enterprises

Ashur, G. (1971) Janies’s Janie - Odeon Films, New York

Bass, T., Dowmunt, T. & MacLachlan, T. (1997) Girls, Girls, Girls – APT Film &
Television for Channel 4

Berliner, A. (1996) Nobody’s Business - www.alanberliner.com/srab_03.html

Bonnaire, S. (2007) Elle S’Appelle Sabine - Mosaique Films

Bordowitz, G. (2001) Habit - Video Data Bank

Broomfield, N. (1991) The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife - Lafayette Films
- (1998) Kurt & Courtney - Strength Ltd.
- (2003) Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer - Lafayette Films

Caouette, J. (2003) Tarnation - BBC Storyville

Chopra, J. (1972) Joyce at 34 - Phoenix Films

Clarke, W. (1981) The Love Tapes – Electronic Arts Intermix

Cukor, G. (1964) My Fair Lady – Warner Bros.

Dowmunt, T. (1998) Arizona Dreaming - ID World for 4Later, Channel 4

33
Dowmunt, T. (2002) Slot Art: Identinet – Maverick TV for Channel 4

Dowmunt, T. & Lacey, G. (1996) Album - APT Film & Television for BBC2

Dowmunt, T. & Porter A. - (1989) Remote Control – APT Film & Television for
Channel 4
- (1993) Tactical TV - APT for Channel 4
- (1993) Channels of Resistance series - APT for Channel 4

Endemol (1997) Big Brother - Channel 4

Fox, Jennifer (2006) Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman - Zohe Film Production

Friedman, P. & Joslin, T. (1993) Silverlake Life: The View from Here - Zeitgeist Films

Gaunt, M. (2001) Kelly and Her Sisters – Carlton TV

Godard, J-L. (1965) Pierrot Le Fou - Films Georges de Beauregard

(1967) 2 or 3 Things I know About Her - Argos Films

Granada (2002-) I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! – ITV Network

Jost, J. (1974) Speaking Directly - www.jon-jost.com/sales.html

Kubrick, S. (1968) 2001: A Space Odyssey - MGM

Lean, D. (1962) Lawrence of Arabia – Columbia Pictures

Marker, C. (1983) Sunless – Argos Films

Mcbride, J. (1967) David Holzman’s Diary - Second Run (UK DVD)

McElwee, R. (1986) Sherman’s March - First Run Features

- (1993) Time Indefinite – Channel 4
- (1996) Six O'Clock News - Channel 4
- (2003) Bright Leaves – Channel 4

Moore, M. (1989) Roger and Me - Dog Eat Dog Films/ Warner Bros. Pictures

Morley, C. (2000) The Alcohol Years - Cannon and Morley Productions

O’Rourke, D (1991) The Good Woman of Bangkok - O'Rourke and Associates

Filmakers Pty. Ltd.

Pick, C (Director) & Morrison, P (Producer) (1986) Mother Daughter, Mother Son
from A Change of Mind, Shadow Films for Channel 4 Televsion

Sacramento, P. (2003) The Prisoners of the Iron Bars - Olhos da Cão Produções

Suri, S. (2005) I for India - Fandango

Tysoe, A (Writer/Director) & Shuter, D (Producer) (2003) 21st Century Sons and
Mothers, Insight Films for the Discovery Channel

34
Varda, A. (2000) The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse) Paris: Ciné
Tamaris

Vitale, F. (1972) Hitch Hiking Tapes, Montreal: the National Film Board of Canada

Wall to Wall (1999-) The 1900 House – Channel 4

(2004-) Who Do You Think You Are? – BBC 1
(2007) Empire’s Children - Channel 4

Warhol, A. (1966) Chelsea Girls - Andy Warhol Foundation

Wexler, H. (1969) Medium Cool - H & J / Paramount Home Video

Wexler, M. (2006) Tell Them Who You Are – Wexler's World US

Tony Dowmunt – January 2011

35