A filmic research on self-portrait cinema
A filmic research on self-portrait cinema
LITERARY REVIEW ON SELF-PORTRAIT CINEMA:
FORM, TEXTURE, AND THE DIALECTICS OF THE SELF, REPRESENTATION AND IDENTITY
What is the filmic self-portrait? How do we look at the filmic self-portrait? This literature review looks at the dialectics of the self-portrait film as discussed by writers on said contemporary genre of cinema. It reflects on thinkers on visual culture and on the discourse of the self, its identity and representation to question the look of the cinematic self-portrait and its ontologies.
The fundamental ideology that permeates in literatures of the self-portrait film is compendiously underlaid in Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez’s “Identity self-portraits of a filmic gaze”: “The defining essence of the filmic self-portrait lies in the impossibility of its fixing, ‘the film takes its images, erases and replaces them’” (64). Theorising that the film’s form is inherently in flux, always in the continuous motion of taking images, erasing then replacing them, there is a “permanent absence” - One that “is a symptom of cinema's potential to portray the self. Its flux moves through time, it transport a never completed image in the process of an ever-expanding future” (64). What is established here that is all well seen in literatures of the self-portrait is that the representation of the self will always be an incomplete image, so much so that “one discovers the impossibility of knowing oneself, except in fleeting moments” (Agnès Catalayud, 230).
The very notion of the self-identity that can never be wholly represented is generally agreed upon by seminal thinkers of visual culture. In writing about the act of looking at photographs of the self, Roland Barthes ponders on the subject of “likeness” in images in “Camera Lucida”: “Finding myself an uncertain, amythic subject, how could I find myself “like”? All I look like is other photographs of myself, and this to infinity: no one is ever anything but the copy of a copy, real or mental”, “ultimately a photograph looks like anyone except the person it represents”, “likeness gives out identity ‘as itself’, whereas I want a subject - in Mallarmé’s terms - ‘as into itself eternity transforms it’” (102). Albeit a reflection in photography, Barthes’ idea of the inextricability of the “self” image and its ever-transformation resonates with the intrinsic beliefs of thinkers in self-portrait cinema and with self-portraitist themselves: As Catalayud writes in “The Self Portrait in French Cinema”, “paradoxically, the filmmaker’s identity does not emerge unscathed from the making of a self-portrait: to represent oneself is a ‘painful and useless’ quest that never reaches its aim, no matter who embarks upon it” (212). Or when Ibáñez states, “making a self-portrait does not just mean presenting the actual image, it means proposing a search for the image as an imperceptible, piercing presence of an absence” (64). So if Ibáñez’s “presence” is that of the self-image’s transformation in all its ambiguity, we can thereby think of said absence as the inexistent concrete image of the self that we so desire to represent in visual art forms.
The transience of the self-identity works in conjunct to the inherent textural transience of the moving image - Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” reflects on the fleeting nature of the cinematic image, in which “the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of places and focus which periodically assail the spectator”, where in comparison, “the painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed”, he reflects on the process of being a spectator, “‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.’ The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change” (240). Benjamin thereby theorises the Arts of concentration, for works where the image are fixed, where “a man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it”. Conversely, there is the Arts of distraction, for images that are in constant flux, this is where “the distracted mass absorbs the work of art” (241). Michel Chion in “The Audiovisual Contract” notes identically - “The evanescent film image does not give us much time to look, unlike a painting on a wall or a photograph in a book that we can explore at our own pace and more easily detach from their captions or their commentary” (7). Chion and Benjamin both writes of the cinema as one that assails and asserts quite perpetually what is to be absorbed at any given moment, I further suggest it as an effect of the concurrent dominance of the audio/visual-scape that catalyses this sensory permeation.
Most thinkers on cinematic self-portraits discerns the genre one step away from narrative cinema. Without the linear temporal restrictions of a narrative, will this perpetual audiovisual assail (or “distraction”) be lessened? Laura Rascaroli, like most writers of the filmic self-portrait refer to literary self-portrait theorist Michel Beajour considerably in her collection “The Personal Camera: Subjective cinema and the essay film”: “The lack of continuous narrative is, indeed, a defining characteristic of the literary self-portrait: ... in such a way as to give the appearance of discontinuity, of anachronistic juxtaposition, or montage, as opposed to the syntagmatics of a narration, no matter how scrambled, since the scrambling of a narrative always tempts the reader to 'reconstruct' its chronology. The totalisation of the self-portrait is not given beforehand: new homologous elements can be added to the paradigm, whereas the temporal closure of autobiography already is implicit in the initial choice of a curriculum vitae", “where autobiography closes in on the life it recounts, the self-portrait opens itself up to a limitless totality” (105). John Conomos similarly reflects on his own self-portrait practices, “the film and video essay embodies cross-disciplinary concepts, forms and norms. Essentially, it does not adhere to a linear narrative trajectory, but rather is hybrid, open-ended and non-hierarchical in its pluralistic image–sound–spatial figurations." (93). Now the spectator is given more autonomy with the ability to reconstruct the audiovisual materials laid before their eyes, this newfound freedom in temporality lessen few factors within the audiovisual pervasion. Pulling an example of Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), Catalayud talks of the “mosaic and kaleidoscopic self-portrait” that proves as a familiar description to the self-portrait’s discontinuity the aforementioned theorists writes of: “Playing with the features of this camera, [Varda] amuses herself by zooming in on a part of her face, fragmenting it, adding double exposures to it, and making it disappear” (218). This reinforces the fact that “any portrait [is] impossible to make. [. . .] Through the play of attractions, through the exchange of glances, through different points of view, and through fragmentary information, one never stops moving the pieces of the puzzle, reconstituting an image made with fragments that fit together. One seeks the pieces one by one, as if in an investigation” (218). As fragmentation and discontinuity characterises the filmic self-portrait and the “self” it portrays, it is furthermore the key to enable the spectator’s reclamation (even if it is just to the smallest extent) of power over sound and image, the cinema as it becomes a self-portrait is lessened as an Art of distraction, moving perhaps just a little closer across the spectrum towards the Art of concentration.
As we talk of how power over audio-visuality could be transmuted through the artist to the spectator whence the film is made into the self-portrait, there is the presumption of the binary opposition between the spectator and filmmaker. This is however challenged as the relation between the two is complexed when thinking of a subjective, intimate cinema. The basic question to ask is, who is the self-portrait made for? Does the public eye sees the self-portrait the same way as the filmmaker’s own eye? Does the filmmaker make the self-portrait for the public, or is it for the self? For one, intimacy of the self that is exclusively written for the self versus the same intimacy that is instead written for the public eyes would translate into two very contrasting portrait. There exist a sub-realm in cinema where commerciality and publicisation in film is ridded, what is left is the subjectivity and intimacy that exists within the filmmaker’s personal viewership. This is more apparently seen in first-person filmmaking, as they are “more decidedly private than essay films are; and for this reason, they are also more ephemeral - so much so that some of them were not originally meant for theatrical release, but were intended for exclusively person use” (Rascaroli, 106), Rascaroli further recalls as “Pasolini produced an early attempt at theorising an ideology of a personal and subjective use of the camera in art film” (109). Conversely, there are filmmakers that produces an intimate work through the very consciousness of the public gaze, as Catalayud records of Jean-Luc Godard speaking of his self-portrait JLG/JLG: Self Portrait in December (1995), “one creates a self-portrait first and foremost to ‘show oneself to others... It is to list and then make public the contents of one’s ‘living memory’” (213). Rascaroli counter-argues for the publicity of the intimate cinema, “at the same time, it is easy to argue that the self-portrait, with its aim of self-presentation and its ambition to be a bid for eternity, is also always meant for a public” (173). The question rooted would then be if the representation of the self is only a result of the gaze of the other, the public - of sociality. At here we realise this discourse on whether the self-portrait’s attempt in self representation should be created under the presumption of its consequent private, or public gaze is invariably beyond filmic matters and interweaved into the dialectics of the self, identity/identification, performativity and representation. Rascaroli furthermore wrote on the matter of the addressee in the self-portrait:
“If the pact of the self-portrait is 'I won't tell you what I've done, but I shall tell you who I am', its rhetorical structure as in the diary and related forms (travelogue, notebook) is that of an 'I' talking to him- or herself, and addressing 'the putative reader only insofar as he is placed in the position of an overhearing third person’. For Beaujour this is why, in his Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975), for instance, Barthes sometimes refers to himself as 'he', in order to preserve the I-you relationship, 'despite the resistance of the discourse adopted, and to reserve in his text a fictional place for readers. Hence, while the essay proper is always and explicitly addressed to another - a reader/spectator, with whom the essayist establishes a dialogue - the self-portrait (similar to the diary, the notebook and the travelogue) is addressed primarily to the self as other” (171). “The identification of the spectator is, therefore, with the author; the spectator becomes the addresser” (173).
On one hand Rascaroli’s concept of treating the “self as an other” could refer to the post-production spectator-self looking back at the filmed self, where the spectator-self momentarily adopts the role as the “other” looking into the screened subject. On the other, Rascaroli’s example on Barthe referring to himself in second person signify that the self could well be treated as an “other” within the very process of producing the filmic text, not only outside of the making of the film. The “othering” of the self does not have to solely reside in viewership. There is hence no specific point in the process of filmmaking where one could compartmentalise the self and the self as an other. The two are entwined and confused, thus fused into a fluidity of one within the making and reading of the filmic self-portrait. In Agnès Varda’s picaresque documentary/self-portrait The Gleaners and I (2000), featuring quotidian interviews and stories of gleaners which entwines adventures of her own as a filmmaker “gleaner”, she reflected in the act of filming the self: “I have the impression that I am an animal. Worst than that. I am an animal I don't know” (Ibáñez, 69). Experimenting with self-filming “with the same interest she shows when approaching the people she interviews”, Varda “‘think about other so as to think about oneself, that is what [she] does in her quest for her own alterity’”(70). Ibáñez concludes by quoting the one of Varda’s gleaner interviews, "the subject, find its origin first, in the other” (70).
The conventional notion of the self-portrait as seen in more classical art forms such that of painting and photography promises the visuality of one’s countenance. Yet Catalayud notes, “‘to examine one’s own painting of oneself’ reminds us that the body of the artist in a self-portrait is primarily a fabricated image made out of paint or, when it comes to cinema, shadows and light”, so “‘to examine one’s own painting of oneself’ is to contemplate, long after, the timeless image that one has made of oneself at a precise moment of one’s life” (215). Catalayud points to the textual body and the self-image as mere signifiers, a fabrication for the self, that the signifier will itself only ever function as a signifier, the image only ever an image. Rascaroli suggests further, noting postmodern thinkers’ reflection on the nullification of identity, that it is not only the appearance that is a fabrication for the self, but the very notion of the “self” identity is itself a construction: “In postmodern times, the (Western) self has become decentred, split, liquid, protean, displaced, multiple, schizophrenic, as well as socially constructed”, summarising that postmodernists find an “(im)possibility in autobiographical content” where “the self in general is an utter fabrication” (10). Rascaroli quotes cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s thinking on identification:
“Rather than speaking of identity as a finish thing, we should speak of identification, and see it as an ongoing process.
Identity arises, not so much from the fullness of identity which is already inside us as individuals, but from a lack of
wholeness which is ‘filled’ from outside us, by the ways we imagine ourselves to be seen by others” (10).
The notion of self-representation in visual self-portrait is then nullified, just as Ibáñez writes: “Mere self-representation is absolutely insufficient for generating a self-portrait that springs from a search for a perhaps impossible image” (67); and of Catalayud’s reflection, “when one discovers the impossibility of knowing oneself, except in fleeting moments, what, then, can a self-portrait represent if not a whirlwind of questions, a collection of diverse and contrasting representations that simply deepen the examination of oneself?” (230). The postmodern self-portraitists’ aim is then to find ways to exceed the traditional material thinking of representing the self image in its whole. Cinema and its apparatus are taken in completely by the filmmaker and made into their own as the tools for a self-portraitist. One example of this is written in Ibáñez’s analysis of Chantal Akerman’s Down There (2006):
“The static camera registers the exterior events through the windows while the author's presence remains outside the frame, from where we can listen to her movements and actions and the phone calls she makes.[…] The off space of the voice is disconnected from the in-space of the image. […] We perceive this reality as almost enclosed. Vision is limited through the apartment windows, listening is restricted to the city murmur and the camera detaches from the filmmaker.[…] It becomes a witness of her retreat. Of immobility and absorption, so as to generate a film diary where 'the only thing that remains is the naked and poignant evidence of exterior exile" (68).
This is where “the independence of the visual image and the sound image, the interstice between them and the voice-over’s enunciation as a pure act of speech all generate a coalescent time-image that negates representation” (65). In Ackerman’s cinematic acknowledgement of the autonomy of visuality and sound, we recognise the independent story the two generate within the simultaneous playback of both, and in coalescent the new textures of temporality and of cinema is experienced. Seeing that the “modern ‘problem of identity’” is on “how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable”, whereas the “postmodern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open’” (Rascaroli, 10). It then seem fitting, in a postmodern sense, for Ackerman to deconstruct and deterritorialise the hitherto synchronised whole of the audio-visual. “The filmmaker splits herself between the seen and the heard ‘to shift the viewer’s attention from image to sound by increasing the opaqueness of the sound imposed against an image that shows a situation we already know and in which nothing happens except the weight of stillness’” (Garin and Villavieja, 118). The weight of stillness, for Manuel Garin & Amanda Villavieja is “the passage of time expressed in fixed images and quotidian sounds” (119). “The dissociation of words and images is a perfect strategy to keep things undone, open, forcing the audience to figure out why certain voices remain deterritorialized and repressed, unable to attain full synchrony” (Garin and Villvieja, 119). There is a thinking in the hierarchy of sound and image in which we see Ackerman reflect upon, the filmic self-portraitist need not to show her face in order to portray the momentary self. In her grasp is each filmic apparatus familiarised, a cinematic thinking reflective of the filmmaker’s very own discussion of their self - “Because it seeks the expression of the filmmaker’s identity through her filmic gaze, as the materialisation of her cinematic thinking, overcoming the limitations that the application of a mere generic perspective would entail” (Ibáñez, 64).
To conclude in a summarising fashion towards the self-portrait film genre, I am reminded of Rascaroli’s proclamation on the one (ironic) commonality in the filmic self-portrait, “self-portraitists make self-portraits without knowing what they are doing. This 'genre' proffers no 'horizon of expectation'. Each self-portrait is written as though it were the only text of its kind” (107). Knowing now that the self, as Stuart Hall puts it, is never a finished product, but an ongoing process, just as the self-portrait film forever a process into the ever-expanding future, we can thereby conclude that the self-portrait cinema is a postmodern rendering of the self and of identification. Seeing that the materials for the self “are pulled out of oblivion, reworked by editing, and commentated upon here and now by a first-person voice-over, weaving in the process the fabric of a new film” (213). It is understood that the filmic self is made into a different fabric from the self we experience in reality. Now the further question to ponder is, is the filmic self a “copy”? To return to the postmodern mindset, perhaps it is never the case of differentiating the copy from the real, reaffirming the hierarchy of the two - As Jean Baudrillard theorises the relation of Simulacrum and representation, “whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum”, “[the image] bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (166). Hence now, when we read the filmic self, we must bear in mind that the self-portrait is never a copy of the “real” representation. The filmic self in the self-portrait is an edifice on its own. It is, in itself, a simulacrum.
WORKS CITED
Akerman, Chantal. Down There. AMIP, 2006.
Calatayud, Agnès. “THE SELF-PORTRAIT IN FRENCH CINEMA.” Textual and Visual Selves, UNP -
Nebraska Paperback, 2011, p. 209.
Godard, Jean-Luc. JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December. Gaumont, 1995.
Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra & Simulations,” Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001), 169-87.
John Conomos. “The Self-Portrait and the Film and Video Essay.” Imaging Identity, ANU Press, 2016, p. 85.
Rascaroli, Laura. The Personal Camera : Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. Wallflower Press, 2009.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage: 1993).
Varda, Agnès. The Gleaners & I. Ciné-Tamaris, 2000.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press, 1992), 211-44.