Screening: Sherman's March

I keep oscillating as to whether or not I would consider Sherman’s March to be autobiographical. While McElwee seems very self absorbed within the film (“How can I bring this conversation back to me?”), I find myself wondering what am I really learning about this man. Indeed he plays many parts within the film (director, protagonist, narrator, etc) but I wasn’t emotionally attached to the film or the characters. Because of my adverse reaction to the film I wonder why I as a viewer would expect an autobiographical film to really speak to me when it is about another person’s life. Do we expect all autobiographical forms to speak directly to us?

Eakin's "Registers of Self"

the phantom limb.
Originally uploaded by musictowakeyou

Because this is one self-contained chapter from a whole book, perhaps grasping all of the ideas of Paul John Eakin may prove to be a bit difficult. But looking at this introduction, we can garner his main point pretty easily. While the French philosopher Descartes places the “I” as a transcendental self, “entirely distinct from the body” (p. 9), Eakin sets out to speak of how the “I” or self is instead inextricable from the body. He draws upon neuroscience to hypothesize the coexistence of body (here, the brain) and the self. Eakin quotes Sacks “…movements and scenes from a person’s experience could be embedded in his physiology [than] his physiology itself could evolve, could become more personalized.” (quoted on page 17) While a person’s experiences become layered, the shape of their story will continually change. While Eakin’s examples of autobiography within this chapter deal with those who are left with an altered sense of self, I do not feel as though he takes into account certain cultural effects. If no one were to react adversely to someone who was “different”, would that person still feel the same about their change of appearance? The inclusion of society’s expectations of the body is lacking within this chapter, but perhaps dealt with later in the book.

How important is a person’s sense of self in relation to autobiography?
To what extent are society’s expectations relevant or irrelevant to one’s self?
If Eakin is concerned about how a change in the body affects the way in which our stories unfold, what would he have to say about how some autobiographical filmmakers choose to fragment themselves on the screen? (I am specifically thinking here of the films of Sadie Benning.)

LeJeune's "The Autobiographical Pact"

LeJuene puts a lot of emphasis on the name written on a literary work. When the name on the title page coincides with the name in the work there is no question of who is telling us and who we are reading about. On page four, LeJeune defines autobiography as “Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality.” But perhaps this definition is not broad enough, for is it possible for someone who is writing about herself to be purely objective? Because if not, then the style in which the autobiography is also a major part of what constitutes an autobiography.

Week 3 Lab

While reading both the blog of Steven Johnson and the essay by Rebecca Blood, I found myself distracted by all of the links within the text itself. So, instead of reading continuously, I would click a link and head over to somewhere else. I wonder if the message the author or blogger wishes to convey often gets fragmented in this way, or if perhaps that is the intention of the message.

With “Dark Night Flick”, I can not help but compare it with the films of Sadie Benning. Perhaps it is the confrontational feeling that I get from them. I feel as though the video by Justin Hall is more intimate. Although he is aware that the medium which he is using is not “real”, he is desperate to use it as a means to relate to others and to himself.

Geert Lovink “Blogging, the nihilist impulse”

Take-aways in the Internet Cafe
Originally uploaded by Starts...

A question that kept popping up in my mind while reading this essay is the following: Are we to see blogs simply as a source of self-identification, or are they a sort of revolutionary tool as well? What does it mean that “…blogs are witnessing and documenting the diminishing power of mainstream media…” but have yet to “…replace its ideology with an alternative.” (p. 7) While blogs are seen as liberating (with the self as seemingly all-powerful), with an emphasis on their “counter-culture folklore” (p. 1), Lovink sees them as tools of massification. Words that stuck out to me in the essay were the terms “massification”, “templates”, “filtered”, and “access”. Blogs are not a way of defining ourselves, but a way of redefining ourselves in the context of our current social and political atmospheres.

Smith and Watson: “Autobiographical Acts”

Dad *and* his autobiographical sketch together
Originally uploaded by bryan campen

This essay situates autobiography as a text that can be anywhere and everywhere at once. Not only can we document ourselves in literary terms, but orally and visually as well. Smith and Watson explain that “coaxers and coercers are everywhere” (pg. 51). Everyday we are invited to share ourselves with others. I found the example of standardized forms a little unnerving, because it really isn’t something that you think about while you do it. But who knows how many people read that information? What are they thinking about you? I feel as though Smith and Watson are indirectly addressing issues raised by Bruss in that they cite examples of how a literary autobiography is compromised and formed by multiple people. The term “multiples” also plays an important role in this essay in that there are multiple “I”s in autobiography, as well as multiple times and places in which a reader may interpret the autobiographical text.

Screening: Benning and Rony

I found the fact that both Benning and Rony fragmented their faces into shots of eyes or a mouth to be the most interesting aspect of the films. What is their reasoning for doing so? These fragmented visuals make me disassociate the text from belonging to one “self” and has it become more reminiscent of being disembodied. The eye or mouth could belong to anyone and thus the story seems to be more biographical than autobiographical. “On Cannibalism” seems to me the most outright biographical in that it draws us into the plight of a people more than one person. The visual that stuck with me the most in this film is where the photographs of different people were imposed over her face. This blurring of images also blurs the line between biography and autobiography.

Michael Renov's "The End of Autobiography or New Beginnings?..."

Renov disagrees with Bruss in that he does not believe that the autobiography will cease to exist, while he does subscribe to the ideas expressed in Bolter and Grusin’s remediation. In reference to personal web pages he says, “It turns out that writing, as well as photography, film, video, and the digital arts, provides some of the building blocks for personal Web pages, which are decidedly composite products.” (237). Autobiographical texts via the internet allow us to draw upon other forms of self-expression to form a new hypermedia. He notes his concern, as do I, about the ephemerality of web pages. What effect does the ephemerality of personal web sites have on their authors? Are they more open to revealing themselves to strangers because they know that the information will not be around forever?

Elizabeth W. Bruss "Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film"

On page 308 Bruss claims “[t]he perceiver can never hope to catch a glimpse of himself; the figure that he sees before him on the screen cannot be his own, for he is somewhere else watching it.” I disagree with this statement in that I feel that one of the reasons people are drawn to film is that it offers them a form of identification. How else can one explain why a person would take two hours of their time to watch a film? We seek to identify with the person or subject on the screen. Bruss also says that “…autobiography is predicated on sole authorship” (304) and that even a cinema auteur can not achieve “sole authorship” because of the many other people that are involved in the film making process. While an author may write her own autobiography, there are usually editors, proofreaders, etc. who will read the work and then return it with notes for the author to take into consideration. And just as a film is subjected to a manipulated view within a viewer’s mind, so is an autobiographical book, because the reader is left to make up images in their own head in relation to the text. Thus, both film and literary works are subjected to manipulation through the perceiver.