Familial Pursuits, Editorial Acts: Documentaries after the Age of Home Video

I think it's going to be very interesting . . . to see what happens with this digital generation of parents who have recorded their kids' every footstep. . . . People can just go back to the data bank and see exactly how little Jimmy spooned his peas into his mouth at age four. There'll be a record of it.

—Ross McElwee quoted in Lawrence F. Rhu,
"Home Movies and Personal Documentaries"

Since the 1990s a significant number of documentaries have been produced that rely heavily upon primary footage taken by the subject(s) of the documentaries over the course of their purportedly predocumentary lives. In films like Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003) the film's subject and director are the same. More often, as in Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003) and Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005), the film's director employs footage that was taken by and of the documentary subject(s). In so doing, the documentary director assumes the role of editor and interpreter of a prerecorded, personal moving image archive that has already been edited, always conceptually and sometimes literally. This extensive use of home movies—home videos would be the more accurate term in most recent cases—signals a shift in recent documentary production, one that compels us to consider the implications of using home videos as narrational and illustrative tools, as conduits to history and memory.¹ The representational and ethical ramifications of this recent spate of documentaries that rely on home video have yet to be assessed. What follows considers these issues by focusing on the current generation of obsessive self-documentarians and the 35mm, feature-length, theatrically released documentary films that have been made, at least partly, out of their autobiographical video records.

A close but selective engagement with the aforementioned early-twenty-first-century films will aid in our understanding of this phenomenon of lives lived seemingly in preparation for documentary exploration. As McElwee seems to suggest in the epigraph above, the prevalence, ease, and affordability of home video equipment have made it possible for people to create an expansive library of moving image material with which to illustrate their lives. Personal memory is made tangible—it is, in essence, authorized—when a visual record appears to substantiate it. However, as we suggest, the availability of these video records also informs the shape and scope of the histories and memories these documentaries represent. In other words, home videographers have already made a preemptive directorial intervention by virtue of their representational decisions, inclusions as well as exclusions, and these decisions impact the nature of the documentaries that employ this footage. The home video camera's presence not only affects the moment of recording (perhaps especially so when the subjects document themselves) but also provides seemingly irreplaceable evidence of that moment. These moments are, of course, partly dictated by the videographer's intentions, which guide the expenditure and focus of the primary video footage. The documentary filmmaker working with extant biographical or autobiographical video material performs, then, a kind of secondary editorial role in which relevant video footage is assembled before the commercial cinematic product is even undertaken.

McElwee's observations above also point, however obliquely, to a central concern arising in these films with regard to the state of the American family. Where he envisions a generation of parents with a "data bank" of video material documenting their children's lives, these recent films suggest a shift away from parents as the producers of photographic records to "children" as videographers who often take parents and parenthood as their subjects.² Considered alongside each other, the films investigated here present a provocatively destabilized image of the contemporary American family and its organizing structure: from the nuclear (Capturing the Friedmans), to the extended and re-created (Tarnation), to the "families we choose" or invent (Grizzly Man).³ This article, then, is also an attempt to confront a thematic convergence around the subject of family—both literal and constructed, traditional and alternative—in these at first seemingly disparate documentaries. The quest to understand or to achieve a sense...