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This article explores the cinematic potential of representing a silenced history of Korean residents in Japan who were repatriated to their "homeland" (North Korea) by examining Yang Yonghi's films, Dear Pyongyang (2006), Sona, the Other Myself (2009) and Our Homeland (2012). About 94,000 Koreans in Japan were repatriated to North Korea between 1959 and 1984, but stories of these individuals after their repatriation are largely unknown due to the tightly controlled information about their lives in North Korea and the complex geopolitical relations among South Korea, North Korea and Japan. The repatriates and their families' experience of separation and multiple displacements is a historical disaster borne of Japanese colonialism and the Cold War. Yang's autobiographical films visualise the silenced suffering of repatriates in a poignant handling of space, objects and sound that articulates their affective reaction to their homeland. Yang's works thus make two important contributions to our understanding of the historical disaster: they highlight the ambiguity of the homeland for the repatriates while functioning as a cinematic testimony to the silenced suffering of the repatriates and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the autobiographical documentary films "Strong Island," directed by Yance Ford, "Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?," directed by Travis Wilkerson and "Minding the Gap," directed by Bing Liu. It examines the contemporary social and political debates reflected in these films, the significant role of narratives in addressing public and collective issues, and the origins of a connection between autobiographical knowledge and collective affairs.

The article focuses on the Massachusetts filmmaker and gardener Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949–2012). Topics include considered that taking personal responsibility for her well-being during episodes of mental illness, Robertson gardened and filmed her garden as a form of diary and examines that the "Five Year Diary" is an autobiographical film begun in 1981 and ends far later than its title anticipated, in 1997.

The article reports that Stanley Cavell and James Baldwin talk about their respective philosophies of film, their modes of autobiographical writing, and shared fixation on Bette Davis. Topics include considered that Cavell's elaboration of privacy, especially as it relates to the character of the ‘unknown woman', suggests something of own politics of world refusal.

This essay aims to examine how archival material is repurposed within autobiographical documentaries in order to reconstruct the documentarian filmmaker's self in relation to their family. It is plausible for the filmmaker to explore their own identity by reexamining their family history, especially with interviews and observational devices; however, domestic media plays a particular role in creating a supporting discourse that finds new meanings from the confrontation of statements and images. By analyzing three examples of autobiographical documentaries, namely Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003), 51 Birch Street (Doug Black, 2005) and The Marina Experiment (Marina Lutz, 2009), we will explore how the re-contextualization of personal images works as a narrative strategy to unveil identity contestations in American autobiographical filmmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the autobiographical documentaries My Survival as an Aboriginal (1978) and My life as I live it (1993), by Essie Coffey. We aim to localize Coffey's work historiographically and theoretically in relation to American, European, Australian and Latin American documentary traditions, pointing out aspects of racial and gender identity and class alterity. Our analysis of these films indicates innovative methodological and thematic intersections between autobiographical narratives and social and race issues as well as highlighting the potential autobiographical narratives have to update both personal issues and issues of collectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although cinema took up the issue of sport in Nazi concentration and extermination camps as early as 1963 with the film The Boxer and Death, it was only in 2013 that Jacques Ouaniche released the film Victor Young Perez, a film completely dedicated to the career of the French boxer of the same name, who was crowned world boxing champion in 1931 and deported to Auschwitz in October 1943. Rooted in cultural history, this paper looks at the political context and cultural universe, as well as the memorial dynamics and conflicts of interest against which the film was produced in France. Resuscitated in an article of L'Équipe in 1992, the trajectory of Young Perez only found its way into the memory of French sport at the beginning of the 2000s when the 'duty to remember' flooded public space. The paper also intends to understand why Jacques Ouaniche's biopic enjoyed only moderate success. The dialogue between fiction and reality, the distancing from historical facts and the storyline constitute the main areas explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of The Jesse Owens Story (1984) and Race (2016) provides a unique opportunity to examine the portrayal of race relations in popular culture as the biopics offer two different versions of the same life lived. Whereas The Jesse Owens Story chronicles Owens's life from birth to death, Race focuses on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Despite being released over thirty years apart, the biopics nevertheless embrace similar tropes and reinforce parallel ideas about racism. Each film supports a colour-blind ideology, embraces a white saviour narrative, and insinuates racism was an historical problem that has since been solved. A comparative analysis of The Jesse Owens Story and Race shows the continuation of 'new racism' in the depiction of Black athletes in film. The similarities in the cinematic representations of Owens's story thus demonstrate a lack of change in the portrayal of systemic racism in biopics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Touted as a representative of the 'Me' generation of documentary makers in twenty-first-century Taiwan, Wuna Wu has appeared as both filmmaker and social actor in her documentaries. Even when the ostensible subject matter of the film is not Wu, she has often inserted herself into the story and the frame. This raises questions of why she elects to be visible to the documentary viewer, what her visibility and performativity in front of the camera allows her to achieve, and what she gains by using a first-person voiceover narration. This essay examines Wu's first-person positioning in three prize-winning documentaries: Happy or Not (2002), Farewell 1999 (2003) and Let's Fall in Love (2008) and argues that she has experimented with a wide variety of first-person positionings, ranging from that which renders her vulnerable to that which self-empowers. Her diverse first-person approaches underscore the question of documentary ethics, the importance of mediation for self-identity, and the opportunities for building sociality and community through documentary. Her first-person films bring out the interconnectedness between self and other, providing a window on the residual effects, in modern Taiwan, of the Confucian concept of the self as relationally defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, the author offers a reflection on the famous command of the Oracle at Delphi gnōthi seauton ("know thyself") in order to advance our understanding of the dynamic interaction between knowledge of the self and right action. This is done alongside and by means of a critical reflection on recent developments in cinema studies. The chapter begins with a reflection on the self-conscious cinematic presentation of the protagonist Filip Mosz in Krzysztof Kieślowski's quasi-autobiographical film Camera Buff (Amator). Following this, a novel and sustained reading of the Ring of Gyges is offered as one way of understanding to role of the gaze in cinematic experience, building off a reconstructive analysis of the concept of the "objective gaze" in light of Sartre's analysis of shame as a motor of self-knowledge. Finally, this re-reading of Sartre on shame and the gaze in concert with the place of the gaze in Plato's retelling of the Gyges story is put into conversation with Herodotus's version of the Gyges story and Diderot's Letter on the Blind. In this closing moment, it is argued that the notion of the objective gaze, as advanced in classical film theory, does not necessarily contribute to our understanding of self-knowledge or right action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Tongues Untied, Marlon Riggs's 1989 documentary whose aim is to give voice to the diverse experiences of black gay men in the late 1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis. I examine Riggs's use of autobiographical storytelling and argue that his visual and rhetorical strategies during these moments evince the filmmaker's hesitation to become his own subject and to allow viewers into his experiences. In other words, the formal strategies adopted during the autobiographical sequences complicate narrative empathy. The authorship of one's own identity is an important thread in Tongues Untied, and empathetic responses may be in part a desire in viewers to participate in the authoring of or colonizing of Riggs's represented identity. I argue that the film resists this, and, while it remains a call to witness, it is, then, a critique of viewers' desire for narrative empathy.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irish intercultural cinema looks at the development of a cinematic genre which focuses on issues of Irish migrancy but is produced outside of Ireland. This paper has as its focus the cultural landscape of Irish-Australia. The essay uses methodologies of ethnographic and documentary theory plus textual analysis of film and written texts to establish a throughline of Irish intercultural film. The essay begins by contextualising the place of the Irish diaspora within the creation of Irish identity globally. The discussion around migrancy is widened to consider the place of memory and intergenerational tensions within not just the Irish migrant population, but also within the diverse cultures which comprise the contemporary Australian landscape. The historical development of intercultural cinema is then explored internationally within a context of colonial, gender and class struggles in the 1970s and1980s. The term intercultural cinema has its origins in the Third Cinema of Argentinians Solanas and Getino in the 1970s and covers those films which deal with issues involving two countries or cultures. The term was refined by Laura Marks in 2000 and further developed by Hamid Naficy in 2001 in his discussion of accented cinema which narrows its definition to include the politics of production. The paper then traces the development of Irish intercultural cinema from its beginnings in England in the 1970s with Thaddeus O'Sullivan through to Nicola Bruce and others including Enda Murray in the present day. The essay concludes by bringing these various strands together to see where intercultural film might have a place in today's globalised cultural landscape. Common traits within intercultural film such as the notion of place, autobiographical film and personal identity are explored using examples of intercultural filmmaking from around the globe. These commonalities point to a way forward for the future of a sustainable multicultural film culture.

Contemporary Virtual Reality production often relies on increasing visual fidelity in order to enhance the creation of deep-space 360-degree worlds. In turn, performance is situated as one component of realist space that needs high-resolution images in order to support it. This paper considers what happens when this visual fidelity is foregone in favour of the production of a haptic, tactile visuality that draws attention to the material qualities of the 360-degree visual sphere and the performances that are a part of it. Using my autobiographical short 360-degree film PND as an example, I advocate that low-fi visual artefacts such as digital noise, over and under exposure, and glitch movement can provide a productive way to create new, embodied, relationships between performer and viewer in VR’s 360-degree space. In this way, new artistic paths for working with VR and performance are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the intimate shift that documentary film has experienced in the last decades in Spain. The aim is to identify the aesthetic and narrative strategies that characterize the first-person documentary, as well as its implementation difficulties in Spain due to the socio-historical value associated with the genre. As a case study, the film Mapa (Siminiani, 2012) is analyzed as a practice where the cinematographic and the life of the author are inextricably linked. This is intended to shed light on the generic ambiguity of the film, between the road movie, the filmed diary and auto-fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the archival status of the earth as a medium and metaphor for the writing of the Cambodian disaster as depicted in Rithy Panh's autobiographical account of the Khmer Rouge regime, The Missing Picture (2013). Drawing on transnational film theory and the geological turn in media studies, it confronts Western and non-Western conceptions of trauma to ultimately demonstrate how the film's handcarved clay figurines embody both the materiality of mourning in Cambodia and the environmental implications of Pol Pot's failed agrarian utopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the strategies by which The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu (2010) engages in memory work and dramatizes the complex relationships between cinema, history, and memory. To capture the individual remembering process animated by the film, I weave into the film analysis a fragmentary narration of my subjective experience as a viewer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a close reading of Vincent Dieutre’s 2012 production Jaurès. It presents the film as the continuation of a sustained autobiographical filmmaking practice in which individual experience provides the perspective from which to consider experience more generally. The article examines the way in which Dieutre presents what we see on screen in Jaurès as an archival inventory of the ephemeral rhythms of the past. The article moves on to question what happens when this inventory becomes avowedly fictive, identifying in Dieutre’s filmmaking an impulse that moves from a forensic gesture of temporal retrieval to one of fictionalised reinterpretation and restaging. Dieutre asks the spectator to participate in a mode of remembrance that treads the line between fiction and reality as a means of giving a more malleable and reflective account of experience. This article shows how Dieutre constructs a filmic poetics based on showing and hiding that allows him to explore the mechanisms of social definition that shape and control both public and private identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how philosophical ideas, a literary and filmic practice and the biographical predicament of being a migrant intersect to create a form of cinema that could be best described as 'minor'. It uses thereby Deleuze's and Guattari's concept of 'minor literature' in regard to Jonas Mekas's classical 1960s' and 1970s' diary films Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1969), Reminisces of a Journey to Lithuania (1971) and Lost, Lost, Lost (1976) - films that can now be regarded as important predecessors to autobiographical documentary film practices today. The article proceeds by first outlining philosophy's difficult relation to autobiography, before situating the emergence of autobiographical documentary practices within the transnational cine-writing culture of the 1960s as well as within a genuinely American 'culture of the self' that stems from Romanticism and Transcendentalism. With figures like Mekas, not only a practice, but a whole 'philosophy of autobiographical documentary' emerges in the 1960s in America, one in which documentary filmmakers explore themes like accented or embodied authorship, the relation between images and words or autobiographical approaches to memory and perception. Taking all of this into account, the article explores, towards the end, Mekas's oeuvre as an exemplary case of minor cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chantal Akerman's films provide meticulous observations of the everyday, depicting in obsessive detail the activities that weave across daily life. Experimental and often on the border of fiction and non-fiction, Akerman's films have created a rich archive, both personal and collective, of domestic life. Many of Akerman's films have a range of autobiographical registers. In this article, I position the experimental autobiographical film as archive. Drawing on feminist critiques which challenge the distinction between autobiography and archive and which shift assumptions about what constitutes an archive, I examine the autobiographical tendencies of Akerman across several of her films. In particular, I discuss Saute ma ville, Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, News From Home and No Home Movie. These four films variously document domestic spaces, everyday habits, personal memory and family relationships. I argue that Akerman's films can be read together as a dynamic archive of gestures, habits and repetitions of domestic life. Positioning Akerman's experimental autobiography as archive contributes to the work of feminist scholars of history who continue to challenge what an archive is, and question what 'counts' as evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the late motion picture director Chantal Akerman's use of autobiographical elements in her films, and it mentions Akerman's suicide, as well as her several of her motion pictures such as "Là-bas (Down There)" and "News From Home." Mother-daughter relations in Akerman's movies are examined, along with the roles that Akerman's real-life mother Natalia "Nelly" Akerman played in films such as "No Home Movie."

This piece explores the notion of Foucauldian 'regimes of truth' within 21st-century Latin American documentary production. Focusing on the treatment and representation of testimonial accounts, we may trace a history of the political and aesthetic valence that testimony has maintained within documentary production since the emergence of New Latin American Cinema. The specific analysis here of three films--Argentine Albertina Carri's Los rubios, Franco-Chilean Raúl Ruiz's Cofralandes, and Brazilian João Moreira Salles's Santiago--traces a new trend within documentary production in the new millennium that blurs the lines between truth and fiction through an unconventional use of testimonial language. Carri, Ruiz, and Moreira Salles thus elucidate the operative regime of truth that has come to determine what and how stories can be told within documentary production. Central to this analysis are the political and historical situations that each of these directors is attempting to represent (or not represent, as the case may be) as well as the politics of production and reception of documentary film in their respective countries. The analysis engages film criticism from around the world as well as Latin America specifically. Ultimately, this intervention traces a new mode of conceptualizing the points of contact between personal expression and political culture through these films' problematizing approaches to their directors' individual pasts as well as to their country's present-day political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the discursive context surrounding John Curran's recent adaptation of Robyn Davidson's Tracks (1980), suggesting that the mutual imbrication of the film and its source texts works against the grain of recent trends in adaptation studies that seek to distance them, and to consider screen adaptations as independent creations. At the centre of the red carpet at international film festival premiers as well as the broader publicity campaign promoting Tracks stands author Robyn Davidson, whose nuanced understanding of the adaptation process and savvy relationship to the media have enabled her to retain a firm grip on her original material, at the same time as establishing for herself a pivotal role in enunciating the film's greater significance and authentic 'Australianness' for both local and global audiences. Davidson's role impacts, ultimately, on the positioning of the film in terms of genre, character, nationality, history, race, and gender politics and ecology--as well as making the adaptation process an explicit subject for discussion in Tracks' wider articulation and framing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ross McElwee's cinematic signature in his documentaries celebrates, but also problematizes, notions of subjectivity in his unique approach towards domestic ethnography. His autobiographical oeuvre crosses the cinematic terrain of the journey film, the personal diary film and the essay film, while using techniques from direct cinema and cinema verite, in addition to incorporating home movies and cinematic elements from amateur filmmaking, to create a singular work that embraces a hybridity that defies simple categorization. The topics of his films are autobiographical in nature – concerning his relationships to his family, friends, the South where he grew up and later left, and himself as a filmmaker making his documentaries. McElwee's films, however, are not just about himself. His auto-ethnographic stance also raises the issue of interiority as a valid form of knowledge within documentary filmmaking, how cinematic narrative strategies and chronological time determine the ‘text construction of the self’ and how the subject exists as a ruptured self – one that contains several types of ‘selves’ that McElwee simultaneously enacts as well as performs. Altogether, McElwee destabilizes formal considerations of subjectivity in documentary filmmaking in his experiential journeys through personal and historical space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present study utilized retrospective, autobiographical methodology to investigate the social psychological significance of specific movies, identified as memorable or meaningful for a sample of emerging adults (N = 83). Participants identified a movie and responded to a series of open-ended prompts including why the movie was chosen, the valence and socio-emotional context of the viewing experience, and its perceived emotional impact. Qualitative coding revealed three themes: Life Lessons (inspiration, social comparison, coping, and negative contemplation), Character Connections (identification and idealization), and Social Relationships (joy, gratitude, and loss). Life Lessons were associated with mixed-valence viewing experiences, significant life events, and ongoing emotional impact. Results highlight the role of movies in the social and emotional development of emerging adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: Prior research on multimodal, digital composition has highlighted the need for educators to bring such practices into classrooms, yet little research has been done to show what kinds of products children create and what those products can tell us as researchers about how children articulate their life experiences. We draw on recent theorizations of transnationalism in relation to immigrant children's school experiences, and Bakhtinian perspectives on language and ideology, to frame our analysis of the identity work that transnational and immigrant children undertook in the multimodal, digital composition projects we analyze. Purpose/Objective: We analyzed 18 digital videos made by transnational children aged 8-10, asking what the key features of their narratives told us about what they found important in their lives, what voices were orchestrated in the composition of those narratives, and what voices were omitted. We also asked what students' narratives told us about who they were and wanted to be, as immigrants or children of immigrants. Finally, we asked what these features and omissions suggested about perspectives on their immigration experiences and current lives. Research Design: These data come from an ongoing, design-based research project. Qualitative methods were employed, including: interviews with and surveys of children and teachers at various stages of the video production process; collection of children's written work; collection of children's videos; and the writing of field notes and analytic memos. Conclusions/Recommendation: Asking children to write about themselves for teachers, peers, and parents meant asking them to orchestrate multiple voices into potentially contradiction-ridden, yet coherent stories. Our work so far suggests that, at the least, we should expect children to try out new identities, and seek new ways of orchestrating the voices in their lives into a coherent whole. We caution researchers and teachers who work with immigrant youth not to assume that immigration will necessarily be a pivotal moment, or even a central or important moment, to children. We also caution that children may not feel that their school is a safe place to talk about such issues; offering the space is all we can do. The kinds of composition we have described exceed the narrative writing and speaking and listening demands of the Common Core State Standards. Teachers should be aware of the ways multimodal, digital composition can help meet their immigrant students' self-authoring needs and surpass the demands of the new standards. Finally, to connect with others, to become more aware of one's place(s) in an increasingly globalized world, and to orchestrate competing voices--these are the potentials for multimodal, digital composition with immigrant youth to which we continue to aspire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might we be able to read and appreciate John Akomfrah's documentary The Stuart Hall Project? This article explores the film from a combined film and cultural studies approach, inspired by the intellectual work of Professor Stuart Hall himself. It situates the documentary about the life and work of Hall in terms of a development of Akomfrah's earlier work and in particular provides a close reading of the film as it deals with issues of biography and autobiography, identity and travel, and how it leaves us with an intriguing possibility of a conjunctural ending. It is argued that these topics have been represented through a reflexive audio-visual aesthetic as they are in an intimate dialogue with Hall's own cultural theory on such matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the film "Dear Mick Jagger..." Topics discussed include the creative styles and techniques such as documentary footage and artistic imagery used in the film, the autobiographical texts consisted in the narrative of the film, and the site-specific screening conducted to the film for the inclusion of participants in the work.