Article Questions and Answers

1.)    Is there truth behind Kit Carson’s statement “Godard once said that film is truth 24 times a second, so I thought that if I filmed my life, I might be able to understand it?”

 

While an interesting idea, I’m not sure that this is entirely plausible. I think, looking back on my work that I’ve been trying to do this exact thing. After years of making work only recently have I discovered that I was really making work about my own life, hiding it behind these theories. I think this is something I’m trying to accomplish with my new work, but I have no idea how it’ll turn out. I’m hopeful that this could happen. Again, I do find it odd that filming yourself will somehow magically reveal something you didn’t notice about yourself. Of course, within one day of shooting video of me waiting for Claire to recover from a bone marrow biopsy I realized how absolutely exhausted I was. So, there could very well be some truth is this statement.

 

 

2.)    Aufderheide states that “The makers of these first-person films, mostly middleclass professional filmmakers, go on journeys of discovery, often triggered by medical crisis--AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, brain damage, bulimia, mental illness--or by a family crisis. Accidents of fate or birth trigger an exploration of social identity, as a way of making meaning from events.” This so closely resembles my own situation; do I feel that I’m falling into a similar situation as the rest of these artists?

 

At first I was slightly panicked by this statement. How could I fall into this trap? How could I be just like all the other artists? After some thought this response to trauma isn’t surprising at all. The self-documentary seems to be the natural route for making sense of these events. This act of capturing everything could be a last ditch effort to preserve a person, especially in the event of terminal illness. By somehow filming them, the event, and the artist’s reaction I see this hope of capturing a moment in time; preserving the person and stopping the spread of the illness from destroying the life.  While this mostly refers to the “documentary” of self-documentary I think the reflective elements of self-documentary are also a common response to these crises of illness. I find it hard to believe that any filmmaker hasn’t thought about issues of exploitation or how to come to an understanding about their own situation. Naturally, these thoughts, these actions are very interesting to explore in front of the camera.