Memory, Place and Autobiography: Experiments in Documentary Filmmaking, by Jill Daniels

Abstract

There has been a significant growth in autobiographical documentary films in recent years. This innovative book proposes that the filmmaker in her dual role as maker and subject may act as a cultural guide in an exploration of the social world. It argues that, in the cinematic mediation of memory, the mimetic approach in the construction of documentary films may not be feasible, and memory may instead be evoked elliptically through hybrid strategies such as critical realism and fictional enactment. Recognizing that identity is formed by history and what 'goes on' in the world, the book charts the historical trajectory of the British independent filmmaking movement from the mid-1970s to the present growth of new online distribution outlets and new media through digital technologies and social media. Part I: Becoming an independent filmmaker. Formative years -- British independent filmmaking -- Becoming an independent filmmaker -- Mediating the "I" -- Part II: Experiments in place. Place and the familiar -- Place as allegory and metaphor -- Sites of contestation and the iconography of dislocation -- Part III: Memory & traumatic memory : representing the unrepresentable. Mediating memory in the documentary film -- Absence and silence : remembering, misremembering and forgetting -- Part IV: Blurred boundaries : hybrid strategies and techniques. Inside the academy : creativity, intuition and the Bricoleuse -- Realism and the imagined -- The documentary "interview" : realism and performance -- Excavations : remediation of found footage -- Screens : beyond the digital.