Self-portrait, both written and filmed, is an autobiographical subgenre that places the author at the centre of the discourse without necessarily following a narrative logic. One of the first critics interested in its film translation was Raymond Bellour, who explained its specific features as follows:
The self-portrait clings to the analogical, the metaphorical, the poetic, far more than to the narrative. Its coherence lies in a system of remembrances, afterthoughts, superimpositions, correspondences. It thus takes on the appearance of discontinuity, of anachronistic juxtaposition, of montage. Where autobiography closes in on the life it recounts, the self-portrait opens itself up to a limitless totality. (1989: 8–9)
A few examples of self-portrait films would be Speaking Directly: Some American Notes (Jon Jost, 1973), Film Portrait (Jerome Hill, 1973), Self Portrait (Jonas Mekas, 1990), JLG/JLG – autoportrait de décembre (JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December, Jean-Luc Godard, 1994) or Cinéma, de notre temps: Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman (Chantal Akerman, 1997). Similarly to other forms of autobiography, the self-portrait developed its film version as a consequence of the global tendency towards subjectivity that arises from the rift between oneself and the world, as suggested by Marta Andreu (2009: 151). This subjective turn was simultaneously developed in Europe and America thanks to the mutual influence of their respective findings: on the one hand, Chris Marker’s and Jean-Luc Godard’s essay films opened the possibility of a first-person cinema, while on the other Jonas Mekas’s and Ed Pincus’s film diaries offered an alternative to the orthodoxy of direct cinema. Regarding the American case, Jim Lane has related the origins of this autobiographical impulse to the following four historical factors:
First, the autobiographical avant-garde film of the 1960s paved the way for self-inscription in documentary. Second, autobiographical documentarists rejected the realist conventions of the popular American direct cinema of the same period. Third, the reflexive turn in international cinema strongly influenced experimentation with autobiography in documentary. Fourth, the rise of autobiographical documentary coincided with a larger turn to the politics of selfhood in the United States. (2002: 8)
In a broader sense, the subjective turn has to do with the linguistic and cultural turns that the social sciences and the humanities underwent after the collapse of the rational-structuralist paradigm. In fact, the emergence of the reflexive and performative modes in the 1980s may be interpreted as their film counterparts: the reflexive mode would be the outcome of the linguistic turn, while the performative one rather seems a specific sign of the cultural turn. This link between the evolution of academic discourses and documentary film can be extended to many other fields, from politics and economics – in which Keynesian solutions were replaced by neoliberal policies – to urban planning and social tendencies – among which stood out the separation between public and private spheres or the rise of individualism and narcissism. This is the reason why the paradigm shift of the 1970s affected up to five interrelated levels: first, the political and economic decisions to face the post-industrial crisis; second, their social consequences; third, the physical space in which they took place; fourth, the academic discourses that tried to explain them; and fifth, the cultural practices that echoed the new zeitgeist.
Personal issues have always been political, as claimed by the feminist movement. In Doc: Documentarism in the 21st Century, Antonio Weinrichter mentions that self-reflexive practices are, above all, ‘part of the ideological project of the film, which does not stop being political simply because it allows the intervention of the narrator’ (2010: 276). In the same book, the resurgence of documentary forms in the 2000s is directly considered by Josep María Catalá as ‘an act of resistance to the flattering of reality instigated by the neoliberal neoculture’, in which aesthetic concerns work as ‘a way of recovering power over reality, usurped by the media and the propaganda apparatuses of a military-industrial imagery’ (2010: 281). Inside this hostile mediascape, the autobiographical approach has given voice – and visibility – to the people willing to challenge dominant discourses, especially those filmmakers who come from underrepresented or misrepresented groups such as women, gays and lesbians, ethnic minorities or Third World nations (see Nichols 2001: 133, 153; Renov 2004: xvii; Chanan 2007: 7).
The emergence of autobiographical documentaries has been linked with the displacement of the politics of social movements by the politics of identity in the United States (see Nichols 2001: 153; Lane 2002: 21; Renov 2004: 176–7). The inability of the American New Left to defeat the Establishment in the short-term led its activists to focus on the specific demands of their communities, replacing collective struggle with identity issues. The feminist movement pioneered this attitude change by realising that gendered hierarchies persisted in the counterculture, and was also the first group to understand the potential of autobiographical documentaries for community building. Following their example, and regardless of their gender or race, many contemporary filmmakers have used their personal experience in order to express the problems, standpoints and worldviews of their respective communities, thereby counteracting the ideologies that attempted to hide their particular history and culture behind the myths of national unity and universal identities. The new formulation of performative documentaries – ‘we speak about ourselves to them’, or even ‘we speak about ourselves to us’ – has provided them with a useful tool to convey their political messages to society, as summarised by Nichols:
[Performative documentaries] contribute to the social construction of a common identity among members of a given community. They give social visibility to experiences once treated as exclusively or primarily personal; they attest to a commonality of experience and to the forms of struggle necessary to overcome stereotyping, discrimination, and bigotry. The political voice of these documentaries embodies the perspectives and visions of communities that share a history of exclusion and a goal of social transformation. (2001: 160)
According to Nichols, the performative mode offers a meeting point for several opposite pairs, such as the general and the particular, the individual and the collective or the political and the personal (2001: 133). In his ‘official’ definition, Nichols explains that this mode ‘emphasizes the subjective or expressive aspect of the filmmaker’s own engagement with the subject and an audience’s responsiveness to this engagement’, and in addition rejects ‘notions of objectivity in favor of evocation and affect’ (2001: 34). This move away from ‘a realist representation of the historical world’ has encouraged filmmakers to explore ‘more unconventional narrative structures and more subjective forms of representation’, to the point that sometimes these documentaries may lean towards fake, combining ‘the actual and the imagined’ in order to include the filmmaker’s fantasies as another element of the historical world (2001: 131). In short, all these features make this mode the most suitable for autobiography, since it usually gives an added value to ‘the subjective qualities of experience and memory that depart from factual recounting’ (ibid.).
The development of the self-portrait film as a documentary subgenre is a consequence of this rise of performativity in the non-fiction field. Nowadays, the ethnographic film has become ‘autoethnography’ or ‘domestic ethnography’ (see Russell 1999: 275–314; Renov 2004: 216–29), the conventions of direct cinema have evolved into ‘an aesthetics of failure’ (see Arthur 1993: 126–34), and even institutional documentaries have lately been commissioned to filmmakers willing to tell their life story, as in the case of Manoel de Oliveira’s
Porto da Minha Infância (
Porto of My Childhood, 2001) or Terence Davies’s
Of Time and the City (2008).
1 Urban self-portraits would then be those performative documentaries in which the filmmaker’s self is constructed in relation to his or her hometown, as well as any urban documentary that depicts a city through the filmmaker’s personal experiences, especially when he or she has left places of memory there. According to this definition, documentaries such as
News from Home and
Lost Book Found could also be urban self-portraits, but this does not mean that all urban self-portraits necessarily adopt the
mise-en-scène of autobiographical landscaping.
The first examples of this subgenre were made after the post-industrial crisis, when many cities were transformed by factory closures and the subsequent urban decay. In the 1980s, the interest in endangered cityscapes was initially associated with a nostalgic reaction before the end of a long growing period, a feeling that was first analysed by British cultural historian Robert Hewison in his book The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline:
The impulse to preserve the past is part of the impulse to preserve the self. Without knowing where we have been, it is difficult to know where we are going. The past is the foundation of individual and collective identity, objects from the past are the source of significance as cultural symbols. Continuity between past and present creates a sense of sequence out of aleatory chaos and, since change is inevitable, a stable system of ordered meanings enables us to cope with both innovation and decay. The nostalgic impulse is an important agency in adjustment to crisis, it is a social emollient and reinforces national identity when confidence is weakened or threatened. (1987: 47)
Within the field of urban planning, this nostalgia involved a fetishisation of the past that led to the construction of city tableaux and banalscapes in central locations and gentrified areas, but not to an extensive programme of restoration in those neighbourhoods inhabited by low-income citizens. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau have described this situation with their peculiar sense of humour: ‘In spite of its absence, history is the major preoccupation, even industry, of the Generic City. On the liberated grounds, around the restored hovels, still more hotels are constructed to receive additional tourists in direct proportion to the erasure of the past’ (1995: 1256). Like this type of urban planning, the urban self-portraits of the 1980s and 1990s recalled missing cityscapes as part of an idyllic past, but they simultaneously denounced the gradual disappearance of endangered places. However, as industrial cityscapes were disappearing, this nostalgia gave way to a more lyrical approach that included a pinch of irony as antidote against idealisation. Thus, instead of depicting the filmmakers’ places of memory through a series of recollections frozen in the past, the urban self-portraits of the 2000s rather showed their evolution over time.
The six case studies in this section –
Lightning Over Braddock (Tony Buba, 1988),
Roger & Me (Michael Moore, 1989),
Les hommes du port (Alain Tanner, 1995),
Porto of My Childhood (Manoel de Oliveira, 2001),
My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007) and
Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2008) – summarise the evolution of urban self-portraits from the 1980s to the 2000s. In these films, their directors, most of them born and raised in industrial cities in the 1940s and the 1950s, develop a similar elegiac discourse about the loss of their childhood’s cityscape.
2 They all combine their creative work behind the camera with an awareness of the successive gazes with which their hometowns have been depicted throughout film history. Indeed, Braddock, Flint, Porto, Winnipeg and Liverpool have always been present one way or another in their works, to the point that they have become metracritics of the film representation of their hometowns – only Genoa, the city portrayed in
Les hommes du port, does not regularly appear in Alain Tanner’s films, due to the latter’s condition as travelling filmmaker.
All these urban self-portraits directly address the emotional relationship between these filmmakers and their places of memory, thereby providing a critical account of the decline and subsequent renewal of their hometowns or host cities. Since these films can be compared in terms of similarities (their autobiographical approach) or differences (their political commitment) they will be analysed in pairs according to their belonging to three different documentary traditions: first, Lightning Over Braddock and Roger & Me stand for the subjective turn of the American socio-political documentary in the 1980s; then, Les hommes du port and Of Time and the City are urban self-portraits highly influenced by the European essay film; and finally, Porto of My Childhood and My Winnipeg are representative examples of a recent trend within the fake documentary: self-fiction.