First Person Singular. (Auto)representation strategies for shaping the “self” in non- fiction film

Abstract

The article explores the narrative, aesthetic and formal strategies of autorepresentation in non-fiction cinema. The subjective and introspective feature that characterizes autobiographical documentary is delimited in a private, intimate, quotidian, affective, emotional, confessional realm, adopting settings that gather different auto-representational resources to shape a distinct space, time and voice that come together to evoke the “self ”. The article reviews Chilean contemporary autobiographical documentary and its relation to new modalities of enunciation of traumatic experience, regarding its most recurrent strategies and the diversity of experiences shown through its filmic material, in order to represent subjectivity on behalf of new generations of filmmakers which stray away from classic enunciation strategies. The autorepresentation in chilean non fiction film, seems extremely interesting since there has been a strong change in which a sense of public “collective” social memory (related to Chilean dictatorship) has given way to intimate and subjective memory in the reconstruction of the past and the evocation of meaning in the present (the reconstruction of even more intimate personal biographies relating to themes such as family secrets and lies, adoption, depression, suicide, etc).