Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition

27. Contested Territory: Camille Billops and James Hatch’s Finding Christa

Chapter 27 Contested Territory Camille Billops and James Hatch’s Finding Christa Julia Lesage Autobiography and the Textuality of Daily Life The self that everyone has is not singular but plural selves. And these selves change over time. Contemporary autobiographers, both in literature and the visual media, seek new formal strategies to bring into public consciousness images of and narratives about what some authors have called “the postmodern condition”—that is, the fact that we live in a rapidly changing world where we are multiply situated inside contradictory discourses and roles. In particular, women artists working in various media often take up the theme of the self’s fragmentation, personae, layering, ambivalence, and contradictions, often refracted through the optic of interpersonal relations and the mundane business of daily life. In the documentary film and video tradition, women making such autobiographical works thus face a specific conceptual problem. They must find formal means to “complicate” subjectivity, a strategy that goes against the grain of documentary’s common incorporation of “witnesses” who speak in the first person and whom the documentarist uses to advance an argument. The documentary witnesses’ most common function, then—to advance an explanatory or argumentative narrative—simplifies and reifies their subjectivity. In contrast, autobiographical documentaries by women characteristically layer contrapuntal dialogues between various Finding Christa 457 voices, contradictory aspects of the maker’s identity, and discrete moments of that identity across time, often a span of generations. Examples of such documentaries include Marilu Mallet’s Journal Inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1986), where Mallet, a Chilean in Quebec, examines the layers of her identity as a woman in exile, with husband and son speaking different languages; Sadie Benning’s adolescent video diaries (1989–90), in which she experiments with self-definition by tracing the objects in her room, performing her image for the camera, and writing bits of social and political concerns on scraps of paper; and Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory (1991), which examines her and her sister’s need to create images to affix identity, the difficulty of doing that because of the parents’ silence about their internment in the 1940s, and the historical paucity of images of the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. These and other contemporary autobiographical videos by women testify to the fact that the self is textual and, further, that the plurality of the self is related to its textuality. Not only do we need words and textual strategies to construct a sense of self, we also shape versions of social reality and especially the past as texts. For example, in the everyday world, this “textual” establishing of identity is accomplished by our looking at old family photos, listening to what the older generation has to say about the past, or participating in gossip, that is, asking about and adding to the stories that circulate about us and those we know. We do these things in order to establish continuity out of experience. We cannot face the succession of events as a string of discrete and discontinuous “presents,” for that would render experience meaningless. In order to live in the present as persons with a continuous history, we constantly evoke memory to reexperience past images, events, and emotions (Eakin). We stubbornly persist in feeling ourselves to be “naturally” unitary, unique, and important even though this requires that we do much unconscious work to maintain ourselves as such. Autobiography derives from our need to create a meaningful narrative of selfhood, but it also questions life’s continuities. In particular, autobiographical works by women often question ideologies of the familiar , the family, and the natural, even as they evoke moments from the domestic sphere with great emotional impact. In exploring the domestic sphere, women’s autobiography makes use of the daily textualizing of identity to develop aesthetic forms artfully drawn from a close observation of daily life. However, these autobiographical artists and writers also contest the bonds of domesticity. Their works detail the ideological and institutional limits on women’s lives, and in this way they analyze how a woman’s subjectivity is subjugated and acted upon. They record feminine 458 J U L I A L E S A G E masochism, the common wounding of a woman’s spirit, her “colonized mind” (Lesage).1 Finding Christa A contemporary documentary film that exemplifies some of these strategies of contemporary women’s autobiographies is Finding Christa (1991), in...