In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Moving Image 5.1 (2005) 171-175



[Access article in PDF]
Conference. . Moving Images and Biography. Conference at Northeast Historic Film, July 30–31, 2004.


Click for larger view
Figure 1
Photograph by Karan Sheldon

From the late-nineteenth-century films of everyday life made by the Méliès brothers, to the 1930s biopics of notable historical figures, to our current plethora of documentaries, docudramas, television programs, and cable television series, biography has been an integral dimension of moving image history. Understanding the significance, meaning, and interpretation of moving images as biography was the theme of the fifth annual Summer Film Symposium held at Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport, Maine. The two-day symposium, held July 30–31, 2004, brought archivists, academics, and artists from across the country and as far away as Australia to examine and discuss how various amateur, commercial, and avant-garde moving images have given shape and form to biography.

[End Page 171]

In his opening remarks, comoderator Eric Schaefer provided an overview of how biography has historically become lodged in moving images and how moving image biographies have proliferated. For more than seventy-five years, a growth of media, venues, and expanded means of distribution has resulted in more varieties and subjects of biographical films and television programs. As Schaefer observed, this accumulation of moving images has led to a focus on all quarters of life—ranging from the celebrated to the quotidian, from the "factual" actualities of news footage to the biographical and autobiographical "fictions" generated by amateurs and industry professionals alike.

Exploring these portraits of life captured and created in moving images is, in many ways, an avenue toward a broader examination of that blurry overlap between fact and fiction symptomatic of a time when the conventions and confidence once held for biographical representation now elicits more questions than firm certainties about the story of one's life. In this context, the symposium presentations that followed offered a diverse set of approaches revealing how the linkage between biography and film is a basis for cultural conceptions of history, memory, and legend in the arenas of scholarly inquiry and popular knowledge.

Clearly, linkages among biography and moving images are part and parcel of the construction and deconstruction of notions of celebrity. In her presentation "The Trouble with Merle," Australian filmmaker Maree Delofski provided insight into the complexities of researching and structuring a film narrative that attempts to unpack the conflicting accounts, facts, and legends that revolve around the identity of Merle Oberon, a Hollywood film star of the 1930s and 1940s who declared Tasmania (a small island state of Australia) as her birthplace. Rather than creating a biographical film focusing on Oberon's career as an actress, Delofski described how her 2002 film, The Trouble with Merle, was an effort to create a kind of "memory account" based on the different stories circulating around the image and idea of Oberon's past. In discussing the making of her film, Delofski illuminated "the tensions that often exist between empirical notions of historical evidence, and the significance of oral histories and myths in people's lives." While images from Oberon's film career and celebrity image may provide the mythic proportion of her life, Delofski's presentation (and excerpts from her film) provided insight into a much more complex terrain of "competing truth claims" about Oberon, and how those claims were infused with questions of nationality, race, class, memory, and identity. Delofski showed how Oberon's screen images served as a site where audiences, particularly those Tasmanian audiences with a stake in her background, could spin their own tales of the star and themselves, and project their own hopes and desires for national pride. Assuming a role as a kind of postmodern detective, Delofski did not aim to solve the question of Oberon's "true" identity. Instead, her excursion through conflicting images, stories, official records, and oral histories help clarify the limits of evidence in the understanding of a celebrity life and how the value of myth is in the way "it supplies a culture's needs."

An...

pdf

Share