Alisa Lebow - The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary

THE CINEMA OF ME

Nonfictions is dedicated to expanding and deepening the range of contemporary documentary studies. It aims to engage in the theoretical conversation about documentaries, open new areas of scholarship, and recover lost or marginalised histories.

General Editor, Brian Winston

Other titles in the Nonfictions series:

Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties

by Dave Saunders

Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice

edited by Alan Grossman and Aine OBrien

The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture

edited by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas

Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television

by Timothy Boon

Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch

edited by Joram ten Brink

Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain

by John Wyver

Chavez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised A Case Study of Politics and the Media

by Rod Stoneman

Documentary Display: Re-Viewing Nonfiction Film and Video

by Keith Beattie

The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film

by Laura Rascaroli

THE CINEMA OF ME

The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary

EDITED BY ALISA LEBOW

WALLFLOWER PRESS

LONDON & NEW YORK

A Wallflower Book

Published by

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright Collection Columbia University Press; Introduction Alisa Lebow 2012; individual essays the authors 2012

All rights reserved.

E-ISBN 978-0-231-85016-2

A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-231-16214-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-16215-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-85016-2 (e-book)

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CONTENTS

Michael Chanan

Andrs Di Tella

Jos Gatti

Laura Rascaroli

Efrn Cuevas

Peter Limbrick

Angelica Fenner

Sabeena Gadihoke

Linda Dittmar

Elspeth kydd

Sophie Mayer

Alisa Lebow

Peter Hughes

Alexandra Juhasz

This book has been several years in the making, so I would first like to acknowledge the patience and forebearance of the authors who kept the faith, through all of the ups and downs that characterise academic publishing, that their work would one day appear in print. It has been an honour to work with each and every one of you. I also want to thank Wallflower Presss commissioning editor, Yoram Allon, and the Nonfictions series editor, Brian Winston, for seeing the potential in this volume. Special thanks also to Jodie Taylor who kept the books production on track, and to our tireless copy-editor, Ian Cooper, who had to be vigilant against the wanton mixing of English and American spellings that I wasnt able to catch.

PROFESSOR MICHAEL CHANAN, Roehampton University, UK

When I was a philosophy student, someone remarked that all philosophy students write poetry in secret and really want to be filmmakers. I stopped writing poetry when I made my first film. A few years later, since independent filmmaking is not a secure way to make a living, I got a job which made me feel like an unemployed filmmaker employed to teach people to become unemployed filmmakers. I also started writing books, then went back to making films, and after that returned to teaching. Now, Im glad to say that as a Professor of Film in the digital twenty-first century, its just about possible to do all these things at once, sort of. Anyway, my last long film was Chronicle of Protest, composed from video blogs I was posting on the New Statesman website, and my latest book, The Politics of Documentary, was published by the British Film Institute in 2007. I also run a blog called Putney Debater.

DR. EFRN CUEVAS, University of Navarra, Spain

I am an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the University of Navarra, Spain. One of my main research areas focuses on home movies, family memoir and autobiographical documentaries. On these topics, I have co-edited the books The Man without the Movie Camera: The Cinema of Alan Berliner (2002), and Landscapes of the Self: The Cinema of Ross McElwee (2008); and in Spanish, I edited La casa abierta. El cine domstico y sus reciclajes contemporneos [The Open House: Home Movies and Their Contemporary Recycling]. I have also dealt with these issues in chapters for the books Documental y vanguardia (2005), El cine de los mil aos. Una aproximacin histrica y esttica al cine documental japons (2006), and Cineastas contra el espejo (2008); and in journals such as the Spanish Archivos de la Filmoteca and Secuencias, and the American Biography.

ANDRS DI TELLA, Independent filmmaker, Argentina

I am an Argentinian filmmaker, based in Buenos Aires. My feature documentaries include Montoneros, una historia (1995), Prohibido (1997), La television y yo (2003), Fotografas (2007), El pas del Diablo (2008) and Hachazos (2011). My work also comprises installations, video-art and performance pieces and a book of narrative non-fiction, Hachazos (2011), as well as documentaries made for TV both at home and abroad (PBS, Channel Four). Addressing the lack of venues for independent cinema in Argentina, I created the Buenos Aires International Festival for Independent Cinema (BAFICI), considered one of the principal film events in Latin America, which I directed in its first editions (1999 and 2000). I am currently the Artistic Director of the Princeton Documentary Festival at Princeton University, where I have also been visiting professor. I have been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including the JS Guggenheim Fellowship. My work is discussed in several books in Spanish, including Cine Documental en Amrica Latina, edited by Paulo Antonio Paranagu (Editorial Ctedra, 2005); Andrs Di Tella: cine documental y archivo personal, edited by Paul Firbas and Pedro Meira Monteiro Siglo XXI, Argentina); and Inventario de regresos: el cine documental de Andrs Di Tella, edited by Casimiro Torreiro (Cines del Sur, 2011). Retrospectives of my work have been held at the Filmoteca de Catalunya (Barcelona), Filmoteca Espaola (Madrid), Cines de Sur (Granada), Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales (Montevideo), Its All True Festival (Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia), Festival de Lima, and Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas (Buenos Aires).

DR. LINDA DITTMAR, University of Massachusetts, Boston, US

For a professor of English teaching film and literature at the University of Massachusetts, Boston since 1969, mine is an unusual biography. I grew up in Israel before and after its founding in 1948, served in the Israeli army, earned a Stanford University PhD in English, and came of age politically at the cusp of the Civil Rights, Vietnam War, and Second-Wave feminist movements. My teaching reflects these concerns, as do my articles, book chapters and two edited books, From Hanoi To HollywoodL: The Vietnam War in American Film and Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism. Though I am now an Emerita Professor, I continue these activities, including ongoing service on Radical Teachers editorial board and a photo-text in progress, documenting what is still visible of pre-1948 Palestinian life inside Israel.