Recollect: home video and the autobiographical self

[摘要] This research looks at home video footage and family photographs as part ofthe visual portrait of a curated record of the autobiographical self. Theresearch includes a written thesis exploring the theoretical concerns andprovides a reflexive analysis of the creative component of the PhD, which is a60-minute documentary film. The research, both creative and written,assesses how autobiographical memory is informed and shaped by homevideo recordings, and how new digital formats have allowed home video tocollapse the boundaries between the personal and the public. It also exploreshow personal narratives speak to the wider socio-political and culturalconcerns of a particular time. These 'collapses’ between boundaries provide aplayful, pluralistic approach to a history of the self. The many paradigms thatcoexist within the work – the past and the present, time and space, previouslyaccepted narratives and newly formed ones – do not exist as binary to eachother, but rather exist in conversation with each other and serves to explorethe ever elastic subject/object dichotomy.The autobiographical film is titled Fraternal, with the tagline 'The future isn’tlike it used to be’. It tells the emotional story of the relationships betweenmyself and my twin, and our parents – the hellos and goodbyes, arrivals anddepartures, beginnings and endings that happen within family ties. The film isset against the backdrop of the political situation in southern Africa during the1980s and 1990s. It is cut predominantly from personal home video footage: amixture of Super 8mm, Hi8 and DV footage shot largely between 1984 and1994 in Zimbabwe and South Africa

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand