Family Secrets: Alan Berliner's Nobody's Business and the (American) Jewish Autobiographical Film

Abstract

The article focuses on the Jewish autobiographical film "Nobody's Business," by Alan Berliner, and discusses the depiction of the role of family in a journey towards self-understanding and self-construction. It explores how through the autobiographical films, the maker presents a selective version of oneself through the editing of sound and image almost always in relation to familial others such as fathers and mothers. It states that Jews, who always care about family, place the self-understanding in an understanding of familial past. It mentions that domestic ethnographers believe that ethnography begins in the home, a place of great intimacy, and Alan, being a Jewish domestic ethnography, has shown the discovery of self through a scrutiny of its refraction in the mirror of the family.