In her article, ‘Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media’, Annette Kuhn explores whether the Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas’s Trilogy, made between 1972 and 1978 is “autobiographical” (Kuhn, 2010, p.3). She suggests that it is difficult to sustain a “first person voice” in cinema because the ‘I’ position “of literary autobiography” – in which the narrator, author and protagonist are the same person – does not translate to cinema” (Ibid., pp.3, 5). This interests me because Kuhn goes on to describe Douglas’s Trilogy being as much “authoethnographic” as they are “autobiographical” because the films reflect “from the inside” the filmmaker’s impoverished and traumatic childhood. She considers that these films, “speak from a place of otherness that sits well with the impossibility of cinema’s point of enunciation being ‘pinned down with any certainty’”, and identifies “personal experimental cinema” as exploiting this with its specificities of fragmentary montage and “non-linear temporality” (Ibid., p.5). From Kuhn’s discussion, I perceive that my filmmaking can be seen to belong within ‘personal experimental cinema’ – or ‘personal cinema’ – with Finborough Road, Returning to Dungeness and Father-land amplifying the ‘personal’ aspect through their use of the ‘first person voice’, and, further, that Father-land could be viewed as an autoethnographic work.
Kuhn, A. (2010) Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media. Memory Studies, XX,