Nonfictional Performance from Portrait Films to the Internet

There is a story about documenting personal experiences in the Internet age that goes like this: widespread access to recording technologies and distribution networks has spawned an unprecedented number of personal videos whose circulation overlaps with the rhythms of ordinary life. In these new contexts, playing oneself for the camera, as Thomas Waugh once described documentary performance, becomes a sort of lingua franca.¹ Personal videos, not surprisingly, often focus on the performance itself. Against the backdrop of uneventful situations and unpretentious settings, they have little to show other than the encounter between the player and the camera—the act of self-presentation. Much of this material, it is often assumed, is viewed by only a small number of people and can therefore be dismissed as solipsistic and inconsequential. Similarly, online performances end up appearing as a sort of compromise, a technological imposition that both facilitates and trivializes contact with others.

If we draw on the long history of performance in nonfiction cinema, however, there might be another way to tell the story of online personal videos. Documentaries have traditionally relied on the "contribution" of real-life subjects, and the practice of soliciting a performance from social actors goes back to the silent period. Now, as then, the performances create instances in which the referential world "erupts" onto the screen, or rather is summoned by the subjects in the film. Online personal videos are likely to revisit some of these practices, in particular the presentational modes of address associated with experimental nonfictional works. This is a kind of performance that resists narrative finality and rhetorical argumentation, and that is best described not as acting but as presentation or display. At its most basic, performing is a way of making oneself present to others. More than solipsism, it suggests a desire for conversation and exchange, which aligns the act of self-presentation with the contingencies of lived reality.

In what follows, I look at self-presentation as a form of intervention and a mode of address in nonfiction. The questions I ask are partly inspired by documentary scholarship; they involve issues of referentiality and rhetoric and invite us to think about the relations between individual performances and collective experiences. The examples I explore, however, assume a broad understanding of nonfiction. While I have no intention of sampling a large variety of performances, I do turn both to film and new media in an effort to examine how practices associated with documentary and experimental cinema are currently used in Internet videos. Underlying my claims is the belief that performance plays an increasingly significant role in the expanding universe of contemporary nonfiction media.

Performance, Nonfiction Film, and the Presentation of Self.

Paul Arthur describes the portrait film, a type of film with roots in early cinema but which found more consistent expression in the 1960s, as one of "the most 'literal' or nonrhetorical of filmic genres."² Portraits privilege fairly uneventful scenes, in which complex structures are dropped in favor of an experience that seems to unfold in the present. Indeed, the very conventions of the genre, Arthur goes on to explain, conspire to create such experience: "Longer takes and relatively straightforward handling of the camera are preferred over the use of montage . . . [while] temporal arrangements of shots or scenes abjure dramatic development or rhythmic articulation."³ Display, in other words, takes precedence over plotting. Lacking "proper" articulation, portrait films rely on the pose struck by the "sitter" to produce the subject of the film. The camera does not so much document a situation that exists before the moment of filming as it helps create that situation through the exchanges with the performing subject. Some of the examples used by Arthur are drawn, appropriately, from the cinema of Andy Warhol. Warhol's interest in portraiture exceeded his filmmaking activities; it involved media as different as painting, photography, and television.⁴ Yet, starting with his early works, cinema provided the most direct response to an artistic practice centered on the notion of performance. Several of Warhol's films feature only a subject performing ordinary—albeit studied—actions. Awkward monologues and...