Julie Reichert, James Klein.
Growing up female (1971)
In the films of the 70s we've seen so far,
We've seen a continuation of the documentary tradition of activism and
and a move toward increasing participation of filmmakers in shaping
the events happening before the camera.
We've seen an increasing number of documentaries that attempt to
uncover, redefine, or recapture,
social or cultural histories
from mainstream obscurity or mainstream subversion.
In aka don bounus, we saw the continuation of a trend started in the late 60s
and early 70s
for filmmakers from historically marginalized communities
to speak to the audience about themselves,
rather than having someone speak for or about them.
In films such as Word is Out and Rosie the Riveter, this movement involved
letting that community make its own case
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by having it speak directly about its experiences and its history to the
audience.
Despite the increasingly personal and political involvement of doc
filmmakers in these films, many of them remain fairly traditional in one
significant way:
In nearly all of the films we've seen so far including the films of
the 70s we've watched, the filmmaker has stayed firmly behind
the camera--a largely unseen presence, even when the
filmaker's cinematic and political voice comes strongly through.
Filmmakers working in the observational mode remained both silent
and invisible in terms of of the profilmic event.
Participatory filmmakers tended to only fleetingly made their presence
known:
In Harlan County, we sensed this presence and saw fleeting glimpses
of the filmmaker's larger role as a social actor in her own film.
We only saw a flash of Peter Adair in the mirror in Word is Out.
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During the 70s and after, however, another mode or trend of documentary
filmmaking arose: the autobiographical or first-person narrative film: these
are films that talks to you about me (or my immediate family).
These films can be seen as a direct outgrowth of 60s and 70s political and
social actualizations and identity politics.
Unlike the social activist films of the period which attempted to enlist us in
political discourse and political action,
the rhetoric of autobiography is generally not aimed at making
arguments or persuading the audience about a point of view as much
as it is
aimed at enlisting our identification with the filmmaker's life
and building an understanding of how this life relates to our
own and to the society in which we live.
Like the Women's consciousness raising and rap groups I mentioned last
time, autobiographical filmmaking provided an unprecendented outlet for
women to speak about those personal and cultural issues in their life
previously unarticulated or unspoken...
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Michel Citron
Why didn't Citron make a straight cinema verite film focussing on her life
What relationship between the mother images/relationships in this film and
classical Hollywood narrative's dealing with mother/daughters.
How do we feel upon learning this film is largely acted? Why? What
expectations are subverted? What conventions and visual codes have lead to
these expectations.
Use and repurposing of home movies ... Classical unmediated doc evidence
of happy performance, subverted to "read" differently in the presence of
angry narration. ("Just as feminist historians whave called attention to the
dilemma of searching out women within written history, Citron calls
attention to a similarly patriarchal vision of domestic life captured in home
movies...")???
Narrator: speaking as if to a film diary
Verite look of staged sections...we read them as real, spontaneous
What the father films as the natural behavior of mother and daughters is refilmed by the daughter-filmmaker as ritualized, learned behavior.
"representation replaced by multiple, overlapping relations to. All of these
relations to are characterized by very specific problems of identification with
the mother that radically affect each daughter's sense of self"
(Rich/Williams)
The film's mixed mode form of presentation profoundly criticizes the very
forms in use without sacrificing the emotional commention binding the
viewers to its workings.
Citron
I create fiction because of the ethical discomfort experienced in exhibiting
someone else's life, despite his or her willingness to do so. I create
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autobiographical fiction because of a driving need to use my life as a case
study and, unable to flee from my subjects once the filming was over, was
protective of both them and myself. Fiction was the escape hatch.
Over the years, I've steadfastly maintained that Daughter Rite is not
autobiographical. After all, I told myself and anyone else who asked the
question, I had interviewed many daughters prior to writing the film and
later hired actors to speak the text. The film was about mothers and
daughters in general, not my mother and her daughters specifically.
Through this semantic slight of hand, I let myself of the hook. Of course,
the reality of the film's verisimilitude is more complex.
Daughter Rite contains different approaches to the autobiographical act, both
documentary and fictional. ... Aat one end lie the autobiographical
references that have fidelity to the details of my life. In Daughter Rite these
are the documentary images represented by actual filmic documents shot by
my father--the home movies. ...
A second category exhibits fidelity to the details of other women's lifves:
the stories told to me by the 35 daughters I interviewed for th film. These
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stories are clearly not autobiographical, yet thety could have remained as
documentary interviews surounding the more autobiographical elements of
the film. Instead, I transformed these interviews into material that is scripted
and acted. I think of this material as being true to the details of women's
lives in general (mine included), however reworked.
Finally there is the material that is totally imagined...
Ultimately ... these categories insufficiently express the autobiographical
nature of the film, for it is in the emoional texture that the film is
autobiographical. ... The core of my lived experience fuels the fiction.
My own work is fueled by a desire to understand my life in relation to larger
cultural forces, as well as a yearning for a presence in the world.
Fiction gives me a distance on a subject--myself--that I often have precious
little distance on.
Autobiographical fiction presents a paradox. It allows for more authenticity
by giving a voice to that which we both consciously and unconsciously
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know. Yet at the same time, it works by deception, which ironically, by
opening up a space of safety, may ultimately lead to honesty and truth,43
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