Between arrival and departure: recycling of home movies in the essay-film (original) (raw)
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Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology
2020
The editors would like to acknowledge the help of all the people involved in this project and, first of all, the late Thomas Elsaesser. Without his support and guidance, this book would not have become a reality. Our sincere gratitude goes to the chapter's authors for their wonderful texts. We would like to thank Janice Loreck for her research assistance in preparing this volume and the editorial team at Amsterdam University Press-Maryse Elliot, Mike Sanders, Chantal Nicolaes, and Danielle Carter-for contributing their time and expertise to this book. Special thanks are due to Adrian Martin for translating into English, for the first time, Raymond Bellour's 'Trente-cinq ans après: le "texte" a nouveau introuvable?', written in 2009, and collected in Raymond Bellour's La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma-installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L, 2012), pp. 124-137. It is reprinted with permission of the author and publisher.
Home Movies as Personal Archives in Autobiographical Documentaries
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The aim of this article is to study the use of home movies in films made with an autobiographical approach, in which the film-makers employ domestic material as personal archives in their quest to build a narrative out of their lives and the lives of their families. I will propose three different ways in which home movies are recycled in this context: naturalization, contradiction and historicization. These three approaches show the diversity and richness of meanings that these personal archives acquire when they become public in autobiographical films. For this analysis, I will draw from the work of film-makers such as Ross McElwee, Lise Yasui, Alina Marazzi or Michal Aviad.
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Adaptation 6, no. 1 (2013): 1-24.
Though it stubbornly resists classification, the essay in cinema still tends to be approached as a genre or quasi-genre constituted through recurring structural traits. This article develops an alternative view by stressing the adaptive principles of the form, specifically as they concern citation, self-portraiture, and an implicit running dialogue with a spectator who potentially shares in the intellectual labor of montage. I offer a pointed discussion of the Essais of Montaigne in order to draw attention to the activity of essaying over time, in and across multiple works. Then, while extending this conception to several of the cinema's most prolific essayists, I focus on how Jean-Luc Godard takes up a Montaignian sense of the practice in his late endeavors of self-portrayal, most notably in his film JLG/JLG: Autoportrait in December and in his video series Histoire(s) du cinéma. Ultimately I argue that what distinguishes the most capable essayists working with sounds and images is a " pedagogical " mission to pass on to the spectator not simply ideas and arguments but a particular way of seeing, a means of investigation to be incisively replayed and re-tested.
Comparat/ive Cinema, 2016
The present article aims to analyze the nature of the filmic self-portraits of three of the greatest authors of francophone cinema: Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman and Agnès Varda. They all generate an identity self-portrait showing the essences of their respective filmic gazes. Three self-portraits that describe an itinerary from absence to (multi)presence, from identity to alterity and intersubjectivity, from fiction to autobiography, from artistic to intimate space, from literary to plastic arts presence, which share the same primordial will: the vindication of their female filmmakers’ status through cinematic reflexion. Marguerite Duras only showed her image in a single work, The Lorry (1977), to incarnate, through her voiceover, different female characters who remain absent from the filmic image. A duality-identification is then generated between the filmmaker and the fictional characters and these latter compose a self-portrait in absence of the author in Le navire night (1979), Aurélia Steiner (1979), Agatha and the Unlimited Readings (1981) and The Atlantique Man (1981). Chantal Akerman, while splitting into filmmaker and actress at the beginning of her career, created three works that represent her existential self-portrait: News from home (1977), Down There (2006) and No Home Movie (2015). Films of a diaristic character where the self-portrait is constructed through the conflict with maternal alterity and self-identity and which is embodied by the dialectic presence-absence of Akerman in it. Finally, Agnès Varda creates a self-portrait of the multipresence born of her interest in alterity, of the portraits of others created in Jane B. for Agnès V. (1988) and Jacquot de Nantes (1991) and continued in The Gleaners and I (2000). In The Beaches of Agnès (2008) the meeting between autobiography and art installation allows her to generate multiple self-images, present and past, real and fictional, in order to reach a collage-puzzle of herself._________________________________________________________ El presente artículo pretende analizar la naturaleza de los autorretratos fílmicos de tres de las mayores autoras del cine francófono: Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman y Agnès Varda. Todas ellas generan un autorretrato identitario que muestra las esencias de sus respectivas miradas fílmicas. Tres autorretratos que describen un itinerario desde la ausencia a la (multi)presencia, de la identidad a la alteridad y la intersubjetividad, de la ficción a la autobiografía, del espacio artístico al íntimo, de la presencia literaria a la plástica, y que comparten una misma y primigenia voluntad: la reivindicación de su condición de mujeres cineastas a través de la reflexión cinematográfica. Marguerite Duras solo mostró su imagen en una única obra, Le camion (1977), para a continuación encarnar mediante su voz off diferentes personajes femeninos que permanecen ausentes en la imagen fílmica. Personajes de ficción con los que se produce una dualidad-identificación y que componen así un autorretrato en ausencia de la escritora y cineasta en Le navire Night (1979), Aurélia Steiner (1979), Agatha et les lectures illimitées (1981) y L’homme atlantique (1981). Chantal Akerman, por su parte, además de desdoblarse en cineasta y actriz en el inicio de su filmografía, crea tres obras que componen su autorretrato existencial: News from Home (1977), La-bàs (2006) y No Home Movie (2015). Films de carácter diarístico donde el autorretrato se construye a través del conflicto con la alteridad materna y con la propia identidad y que se materializa mediante la dialéctica presencia-ausencia de Akerman en el mismo. Finalmente, Agnès Varda crea un autorretrato de la multipresencia que nace de su interés por la alteridad, del retrato del otro creado en Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988) y Jacquot de Nantes (1991) y continuado en Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000). En Les plages d’Agnès (2008) el encuentro entre la autobiografía y la instalación artística le permite generar múltiples imágenes, presentes y pasadas, reales y ficcionales, para alcanzar un collage-puzle de sí misma.
2020
The home movie has always been a borderline film category that breaks with cinematic standards and occupies a liminal position between the artistic and non-artistic domain. The very nature of these films has rendered traditional analytical frames such as film analysis, ethnographic investigation and participatory practices not only hard to apply, but also ineffectual for opening their meaning to a public made of specialist and non-specialist audiences. Sicilian home movies in particular constitute an underexplored yet rich field of enquiry. In my project, I deal with Sicilian home movies and the way we can reimagine their role as social objects in an increasingly digital context. The aim of the project is to find new methods and forms of expression that make these films more relatable. Bergson’s concept of actualization provides a suitable theoretical frame for conceptualizing new ways of looking at and engaging with these archives. Using this frame, I develop a practice-led approac...
Essay Film as a Dialogical Form
Jomec Journal, 2019
The essay film is one emerging genre in which the sonic elements and the editing characteristics are constructing the basis of its communication structure within and beyond the audiovisual material. This paper will enlighten the unique language and the means of communication of the essay form. In the essay film, the voice functions as a means of expression as opposed to a stack of sounds. With the support of the editing elements, the voice becomes a stylistic reflection towards the world, where the audience perceives the tone of the filmmaker. The voice is also not a rhetoric that oppresses the viewer but functions as a bridge to communicate with, and throughout, the audiovisual material as an artistic act that demands an intellectual response, like an open letter to be finalized in the viewers’ mind. The essay film does not seek to provide answers. Rather, it asks questions to the viewer, directly or indirectly, throughout the dialogue as the core of this filmmaking style. For the filmmaker to communicate with their viewer effectively, they position themselves as part of the audience. The essay film strives to go beyond formal, conceptual, and social constraint. Its structure undermines traditional boundaries, and is both structurally and conceptually transgressive, as well as self-reflective. It also questions the subject positions of the filmmaker and audience as well as the audiovisual medium itself – whether film, video, or digital electronic. This work highlights the dialogical characteristics of the essay film through a selection of essay film works with a focus on the voiceover usage and editing characteristics, to understand how a body of essayistic work addresses the viewer for a dialogical relationship.
Film – understood here as succession of still images on a material support designed for projection, which results in a perception of movement – is an ephemeral medium. To show a film, as Paolo Cerchi Usai argues, is to destroy a film. Perhaps more than any other medium, film requires special efforts of preservation to save its storage technology from what appears to be an irreversible material decay. Yet at the same time, a film only lives for and through audience. One could argue that film is a four-fold object: First, a film is a given print; second, a film encompasses the entirety of prints (and versions) in which it is available; third, there a film is a projection, an ephemeral event on a screen; and fourth, a film is the memory and record it leaves in the form of shared experiences and written texts. For its cultural meaning to come alive, a film must be projected and performed, but for that to be possible, its material base must be preserved. To elaborate on Cerchi Usai’s point, a film is an ephemeral medium in the senses that it. Link: http://synoptique.hybrid.concordia.ca/index.php/main/issue/current/showToc