Most critical commentators and even casual viewers would agree that it’s an exciting time for documentary – measured in terms of popular attention, institutional legitimacy or scholarly output – and for those of us interested in the documentary project. By ‘documentary project’, I refer here not to the single-minded, formal or rhetorical orthodoxy of the sort associated with the Griersonians of the 1930s or the direct cinema devotees of the 1960s so much as a broad-based, loosely-knit community of interest worldwide that supports and sustains documentary culture.
Now culture, according to the late Raymond Williams, is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language (1983: 87). Developing from its earliest usages as a noun of process (the tending of something, crops or animals), the word began to refer to more abstract processes by the mid-nineteenth century, eventually entailing both material production and signifying practices. Williams writes of the word’s rich etymological sources, to the Latin noun, culter – ploughshare, that which tills the earth and prepares the way for seeding – and thus to a kind of husbandry as well as to the verb colere and its various meanings – to cultivate, protect, and honor with worship. Williams’ discussion supports my own expanded sense of documentary culture in the present moment, referring as it does to a set of practices both material and symbolic and to a diverse cast of characters whose husbandry, protection, and honoring of the documentary project have facilitated its reinvention.
But my concern here is for autobiography, a domain which has produced and sustained a culture of its own with roots in literature, painting, and performance.
Filmic autobiography remains little discussed in the academy to date although that situation is beginning to change.1 My own twenty-year-long