Temporality and narrativity in American autobiographical documentary

Abstract

This proposal for a research internship at the Department of Cinema and Media Studies of the University of Chicago is related to the Post-Doc research appointment held at the University of São Paulo (USP, Brazil) entitled "Documentary and autobiography under the risk of time: to film oneself being" (2018/12740-2). The possibilities regarding autobiographical narrativities are one of the most important trends of contemporary documentary film production worldwide. Moreover, the manipulation of time in relation to lived experience can be understood as an important propelling force for the artistic motivation of filmmakers-autobiographers who investigated how to "film oneself" from the late 1960s on. This research is intended to investigate how filmmakers such as Ed Pincus, Jonas Mekas, Tom Joslin, Marlon Riggs and Ross McElwee have defined - and redefined - methodological and epistemological patterns for a wider notion of autobiographical documentary, by transposing their own living experience into cinematic narratives under different patterns of temporality and tenses such as "past", "present" and "future". While the importance of US documentary to a worldwide autobiographical film culture has been proved, analytical work on this production has still been much absent in the Brazilian academic framework. Therefore, the main goals for the research internship at the University of Chicago are: a) to deepen and to expand theoretical concerns regarding the notion of temporality in autobiographical documentary film through contact with faculty as much as to gather and analyze unknown bibliographic and filmographic sources which could serve that specific research purpose; b) to produce academic work (articles, conference speeches) concerning the notion of narrative temporalities in US Autobiographical Documentary; c) to disseminate Brazilian production regarding autobiographical documentary film both in an academic framework and with respect to contemporary Brazilian films; d) to widen our perspectives concerning US contemporary documentary and Chicago-based filmic production. (AU)