The Self as Evidence and Collaborative Identity in Contemporary Autobiographical Documentary

Abstract

Autobiographical documentaries abound in our contemporary cinematic landscape. Much in the same way that we are now (and have been for some time) living in a memoir boom, we are living in a documentary boom, and among these films, many incorporate autobiographical elements. Documentarian-autobiographers create feature-length life narratives that tell the filmmakers’ own stories from birth to the present moment; other documentarians use bits and pieces of their lives in the service of projects focused on a wider group, place, or issue. Autobiography, in other words, has found numerous pathways into documentary filmmaking practices. Over a number of years, I’ve been drawn to these cinematic-autobiographical moves. I’ve wondered about the ways that the unique features of the cinematic medium impact the representation of a life narrative. I have tried to examine the ways that documentary raises new questions for autobiography, about identity and authenticity, and about the individual and the collective. How can the self and one’s life story represented cinematically serve to bring about social change? How do you film your life story when there are missing pieces? How do you find the “true” story among all of the many threads woven together by the distinct voices that come into play in the collaborative process of filmmaking? What I’ll do here is highlight two quite distinct filmmakers, Josh Fox and Sarah Polley, whose approaches offer hints at what may be to come for the intersection of autobiography and documentary and for those who research and write about this area. Fox’s antifracking films, Gasland and How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change, have earned him much praise, including an Oscar nomination in 2010. While these films are focused on a specific environmental issue, Fox’s unique use of his own story, his person, and his home suggest important autobiographically inflected avenues for future activist-documentarians. Polley’s Stories We Tell is a more “purely” autobiographical film that narrates the filmmaker’s life story. Polley blazes new trails, however, by subverting a good many norms of autobiographical and documentary storytelling. Chief among her innovations