Authorship, Autobiography and the Archive

Authorship, Autobiography and the Archive

Blog Article

In 2004, documentary theorist Michael Renov described ‘the recent turn to filmic autobiography’ as ‘the defining trend of “post-verite” documentary practice.’ In 2008 Renov went further still, suggesting that ‘the very idea of autobiography challenges/reinvents the VERY IDEA of documentary.’ Archive based autobiographical filmmaking, meanwhile, is even more problematic for documentary theory.Indeed, a number of recent documentaries, because of their status somewhere in the Denture Creams spectrum between biography and autobiography, have prompted the construction of an entirely new conceptual category, deploying Omega - 3 Algae archival film, often in the form of home movies, to document the lives of their human subjects in Renov’s formulation ‘shared textual authority’.

In this article I examine one of ‘my’ own archive based documentaries, ‘Marilyn on Marilyn’ (BBC2 2001), as a way of asking questions not just about biographical and autobiographical documentary but also - and perhaps more urgently - about attributions of authorship in archive-based documentary.