Memory and place in autobiographical documentaries

Abstract

Autobiographical documentary films involve the first-person recollection by filmmakers of events that have shaped their identity. Frequently in autobiographical documentaries there is a sense of poignancy in the process of looking back at the past, a sense of yearning for that which is gone, even if that past was not always positive when it originally occurred. What is the nature of this yearning for the past inherent in the process of articulating autobiographical experience, and how can the emotion in the process of re-approaching past experiences be expressed in the most moving way possible in the autobiographical documentary? In the retelling of lived events, the autobiographical documentary filmmaker frequently finds it important to communicate a sense of the way their identity in the present has emotionally coloured the tone and emphasis of their memory of the past event. In this way there is frequently a self-reflexive subjectivity to autobiographical documentaries that allows the filmmaker to evoke his or her own attitude to the remembered past and, increasingly, incorporates into the film’s discourse an implicit questioning of the ability of the representation process to provide access to an authentic sense of the past. This thesis will examine ways this aspect of memory can be movingly evoked in autobiographical documentaries. Much of this process of detailing the emotional resonance that memory holds for the filmmaker involves evoking interior emotional states, for which it is difficult to provide the same sort of visual evidence that is an integral component of documentary discourse when making claims about the external world. This project aims to investigate the sophisticated poetics that has developed in the autobiographical documentary form regarding the depiction of the past. How can cinematography, editing, voiceover, and sound design work in an imaginative, poetic way to express the sense of nostalgia, mourning, and the self-reflexive questioning of the process of representation that frequently characterizes the discourses of autobiographical documentaries? Can an interior, subjective sense of memory be communicated through creative means in a discourse that is conventionally focused on concretely verifiable facts about the external world? This thesis closely analyses the specific ways in which fourteen significant documentaries evoke a subjective sense of autobiographical memory, and how the filmmakers responsible for these particular films have depicted a sense of the crisis of the ability of autobiographical documentary to provide access to an authentic past through the articulation of memory.