Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- List of Transliterated Names
- List of Figures
- Epigraph
- Introduction: Writing Arab Selfhood – From Taha Husayn to Blogging
- 1 Autobiography and Nation-Building: Constructing Personal Identity in the Postcolonial World
- 2 Writing Selves on Bodies
- 3 Mapping Autobiographical Subjectivity in the Age of Multiculturalism
- 4 Visions of Self: Filming Autobiographical Subjectivity
- 5 What Does My Avatar Say About Me? Autobiographical Cyberwriting and Postmodern Identity
- Conclusion: Arab Autobiography in the Twenty-first Century
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Visions of Self: Filming Autobiographical Subjectivity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- List of Transliterated Names
- List of Figures
- Epigraph
- Introduction: Writing Arab Selfhood – From Taha Husayn to Blogging
- 1 Autobiography and Nation-Building: Constructing Personal Identity in the Postcolonial World
- 2 Writing Selves on Bodies
- 3 Mapping Autobiographical Subjectivity in the Age of Multiculturalism
- 4 Visions of Self: Filming Autobiographical Subjectivity
- 5 What Does My Avatar Say About Me? Autobiographical Cyberwriting and Postmodern Identity
- Conclusion: Arab Autobiography in the Twenty-first Century
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Theorizing Cinematic Autobiography
As the technological revolution of the last forty years has made, and continues making, fundamental changes to the culture of perception, and has initiated an array of new art forms, it is not surprising that representational discourse is expanding exponentially and now includes a wide range of visual and performative genres, of which cinema is perhaps the most influential one. Taking into account this and the rising quality and affordability of filmmaking equipment, contemporary autobiographers increasingly choose a moving image over a pen to articulate their selfhood. YouTube, home videos, shorts, autobiographical documentaries, and autobiographical motion pictures – these videographic and cinematic self-referential genres are as diverse and complex as their literary counterparts. As the famous French film director Francois Truffaut famously predicted in 1957:
The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary. The young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will relate what has happened to them … The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it. (Truffaut 2008: xi)
For the purpose of this study, I am particularly interested in full-length motion pictures that are autobiographical in that they reference the life of the film director (scenarist, producer). In Western cinema, examples of such works are Federico Fellini's 8. (1963) and Fellini's Roma (1972); Bernardo Bertolucci's Before the Revolution (1964); Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1982); Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror (1979); Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979); and several of Woody Allen's films, especially Deconstructing Harry (1997), Stardust Memories (1980), and Anne Hall (1977). The narrative structure of a motion-picture autobiography is comparable to a literary work: in a general sense, there is an autobiographical author, an autobiographical narrator, an autobiographical protagonist (or protagonists), a plot, and (more often than not) a range of other characters. Therefore, these basic similarities allow us to situate filmic autobiographies within the same typology that embraces nationalist, corporeal, and multicultural modalities, as discussed in previous chapters.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Culture , pp. 142 - 169Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014