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:

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.