Beyond Personal Documentary

The personal documentary and the biographical film, at their very best, reflect both a desire to discover and need to reveal, discover that which is already forgotten and reveal how the personal story is implicated in social realities and historic processes. When a documentary does not embody a passion to discover a forgotten truth it simply become a chronology and cannot be referred to as personal, and when it fails to suggest how the personal is emblematic of some larger social or political phenomenon it becomes a form of pornography of the self. The successful personal documentary is thus inherently a form of investigation, an inquiry into the self or the nearby, and frequently into the past, tackling directly the problem of memory and time, and so the films often take on the structure of the fragmented nature of the broken down recollections that are its materials. In my research for the past three years, I’ve been working towards finding a new form for my work, one that would enable me to keep creating film-based art which in its essence can still be referred to as both personal and documentary, but would step beyond linear storytelling, beyond non-linear storytelling to a place where moving images and sounds create an actual new space in the gallery, a space with no beginning or end, a magical space that feels familiar and strange at the same time. My films will often tackle themes of exile, immigration and otherness, and use an idiosyncratic approach to history, by telling my own subjective unofficial history of a particular time. In her book, Experimental Ethnography, Katherine Russell Identifies four distinct, subjective voices of the filmmaker: as the speaker (narrator), as the seer (the person holding the camera), as the seen (the person on camera), and as the editor (277). It is this last editorial voice of the writer of temporal structures, the collagist, that is most central to my films and is one of the primary concerns of this dissertation.