Panel: New Technologies and Genres
Copanelists: Tanya Kam and Paul John Eakin
In their article “The Rumpled Bed of Autobiography,” Smith and Watson present a series of questions regarding the status of life narrative in contexts where younger autobiographers are deploying a range of material and textual remnants from the past, asking “how do we describe the difference between selected quotation of one’s past moments in such memorabilia as objects and diaries, and the performance of one’s past as memory work?” (4)
Filmmaker Jonathan Caouette (Tarnation, 2003) is representative of a generation of auto/ biographers who have unprecedented access to photographs and video and sound recordings of their own development. In these instances, life narrative becomes a process of assemblage, where personal archival footage is reworked in conjunction with material created specifically for the purpose of forming and structuring the final product of the text. This paper will focus on the use of home movie footage and its complex role in translating childhood experiences and emotional states in auto/biographical film.
Taking up Smith and Watson’s question of citation and representation, this paper will consider how Jonathan’s childhood performances for the camera disrupt attempts to clearly distinguish between citational and representational strategies of translating the past for an audience. Examining a scene from Tarnation, we might start to consider how the home movie carries some of the “aura” of the object, yet the persistent performance by Jonathan for the camera troubles our impulse to read the footage as an indexical image which is quoted within the broader context of the film. This analysis will seek to initiate a discussion regarding the effects of increased access to the technologies of cultural production on the production and consumption of life narrative, examining self-made films as an emerging genre.
Anna Poletti lectures in Communication and Writing at Monash. Her research investigates the intersection of technologies of cultural production and consumption, youth cultures, and life writing, with a specific interest in the materiality of texts. Her book Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture has just been released by Melbourne University Press, and with Gillian Whitlock, she co-edited the Winter 2008 special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly on autographics.