Ruby, Jay

1978 The Celluloid Self. In Autobiography: Film/Video/Photography. John Katz, editor. Art Gallery of Ontario, pgs. 7-10. Note original pagination maintained for citations purposes.)

page 7

THE CELLULOID SELF [1]

Jay Ruby

1978 The Celluloid Self. In Autobiography: Film/Video/Photography. John Katz, Editor. Art Gallery of Ontario, pgs. 7-9. [Original page numbers have been preserved for citations purposes. Please downlaod and use as if it were taken from the original.]

The tradition of representing oneself to others began when the first anonymous artist traced his hand on a cave wall. Autobio-graphical film, then, is merely the latest manifestation of a 50,000-year-old tradition of revealing oneself. Since cinema is so eclectic-borrowing from earlier visual and verbal expressive forms-it might be profitable to explore the idea of autobiographical film by examining four related ways of presenting the self and others-biography, autobiography, portrait, and self-portrait.

Most commonly, portrait is used to refer to pictures and biography to writing. We car think of biographies and autobiographies, factual and fictional, but biographical or au-tobiographical photographs or paintings are terms never used. Portraits are pictorial - pictures that we think of as being representational rather than abstract. Biographies are usually in prose-the exception being a "poetic" portrait, that is, a portrait in words. Similarly, terms like "a biography of a corporation" or "a portrait of our times" are clearly metaphoric.

A distinction should be made here between self-reference and autobiography. Self-reference is the metaphoric or allegoric use of self -a common occurrence in novels and popu-lar song lyrics. However, since self-referen-tial statements or signs are present in al human articulations-when we create some-thing we leave our impress upon it-I feel that a distinction should be made. Otherwise, all symbolic articulations would have to be called autobiographical. [2]

Historically, portraits and biographies obey a similar rule - they were made of someone important - a king, a pope, or some other representative of the ruling class -political, religious, or financial-usually male and often elderly or dead. One massive difference between the written and the visual modes was that a biography was made to be sold and read by many people. Portraits, on the other hand, tended to be financed by the subject or his family or friends and were less available to the public.

For the last century we have assumed that most personages can and probably will write about themselves. It should be understood how strange and recent a phenomenon that is. There had to be a lessening of the impor-tance of personages and a heightening of the importance of writers before autobiographies were available. After all, personages wouldn't waste their time writing unless it was a mark of esteem. They would hire a writer .

The self-portrait do not appear until the 15th century and then only very timidly Once established, it flourished and virtually every painter since has done at least one self-portrait. Rembrandt is reputed to have painted over one hundred. What is interest-ing is that unless the painter labels it, self-portraits are not distinguishable from portraits.

Important people seldom have the skill to make self-portraits and painters are not important enough as personages to have someone commission them to paint themselves. The self-portrait, therefore, has an entirely different function from that of the portrait. It is not a record of someone important but a personal expression-an exploration of self. In a sense it is a portraitmaker saying that he, himslef is important.

With the invention of photography Kodak made everyone a potential portrait maker and the situation changed dramatically. We no longer needed a painter for our portraits. Now only the very powerful and rich have their portraits painted. Contemporary por-traits are the province of the photographer. Moreover, the concept of what constitutes a person worthy of a portrait has broadened. Not only kings and ministers of state but small businesmen even highschool graduates.

The very code has been altered. The development of the snapshot and professional candid photography have caused the parameters of the portrait to be stretched from the formality of the studio painting to the unposed candid portrait to the casualness of the

page 8

snapshot.

While photographic self-portraits are virtually as old as photography itself, they have remained relatively uncommon. The average snapshooter asks a friend, a spouse, or even a stranger to "take my picture." Unless one is a Lee Friedlander one rarely stands before a mirror and photographs oneself. It confines the person to the presentation of self as photographer - a limited persona. The only other option is to use a large studio camera on a tripod with a long cable release. While this type of self-portrait is possible, it is also a rarity. So in photography the divergence between portrait and self-portrait seems to be extremely wide.

While the domains of the portrait and self-portrait have been altered since the inception of still photography, the concept of biography and autobiography has remained unchanged. No new technology has been invented for the written word. The tape recorder has not really caused any significant innovations despite anthropologist Oscar Lewis' assumption that it would produce "autobiographies" of illiterate people. Biographies are still published about important personages, usually males and frequently dead, and autobiographies are still primarily written by elderly male personages.

Film, because it contains both the verbal in the form of speech, and the visual in the form of images, combines aspects of biography and portraiture. Therefore, the distinction between a film portrait and a film biography is sometimes unclear. However, by and large, films seem to have borrowed literary and painting codes. Biography has interested both the fiction and the documentary filmmaker. Films like Donald Britain's Bethune adhere closely to a literary model. They chronicle the events in the life of a famous personage. There are, also, "film portraits" like Henry Miller Asleep and Awake which are impressions with no attempt to deal chronologically or factually with the personage. It is taken for granted that the audience knows his significance. Both film biographies and film portraits follow the rule of social importance. That is, they are about the personages of our society.

While the idea of autobiographical and self-portrait films is quite old, these forms have flourished only recently. They are films that are made about oneself in a culture where talented people have the money and the social permission to make something as expensive as a movie about themselves. Making a film about oneself is an even more expensive allocation of social resources than publishing a book about oneself. Self-publication is considered not only a sign of vanity but a sign that one wasn't good enough to secure a commercial publisher. Making a film about oneself is more closely allied to making a self-portrait. Only talented people can do this and, in the case of film, only the affluent or those who can attract sufficient wealth.

These film forms cause filmmakers to treat themselves as personages. This is the closest that we have come in film to the self-portrait. People look at a self-portrait not really to see how the painter looked-as a record-but to see a demonstration of interpretative skills, not representation; how the painter articulated his persona. We look at self-portraits by good painters because they are, first of all, good paintings. The same is true for films. We demand that they be a first-rate articulation of self through film. It is not that the filmmaker has made a record of himself, but rather that he has developed a manner of showing the self.

These films achieve other dimensions. They represent a non-fiction genre which fits into neither the traditional definition of the documentary nor the personal art film. They violate the canons of both genres.

The documentary film was founded on the western need to explore, document, explain and, hence, symbolically control the world. It has been what "we" do to "them." The "them" in this case are usually the poor, the powerless, the disadvantaged, and the politically suppressed, and almost always, the "exotic." The documentary film has not been a

page 9

place where people explored themselves or their own culture.

To find this subject matter one must look avant-garde film or the home movie. In fact, film artists like Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage have developed a deliberate aesthetic from the conventions of the home movie, in much the same way as Diane Arbus created a snapshot aesthetic in photography. Until recently the division was relatively clear. If you wanted to make films about people exotic to your own experience you made documentaries, and if you wanted to explore yourself, your feelings, and the known world around you, you made personal art films, which tend to be more self-referential than autobiographical.

Now we have the autobiographical or self-portrait films. In subject matter they violate the norms of traditional documentary in that they are overtly motivated by and deal with a personal interest of the filmmaker. Yet the look or style of these films is documentary. In other words, the subject matter is that which has been traditionally the province of the art filmmaker and the style is that of the documentary. Examples would include Jerome Hill's Portrait; Miriam Weinstein's Living With Peter; Jeff Kreines' The Plaint of Steve Kreines as told by his younger brother Jeff and Amalie Rothschild's Nana, Mom and Me.

We now have films-both documentary and fiction-which represent the four most common means available for exploring and presenting our concepts of self and person- Biography, Autobiography, Portrait, and Self-portrait. Filmmakers have both adapted and adopted the humanistic and aesthetic assumptions and conventions of these four concepts. They have continued the uniquely western search for individuality and identity through these probings of self and other.

Notes

[1] An earlier version of this paper, by Jay Ruby and Sol Worth, was presented at the American Anthropological Association meetings in November 1977, in Houston, Texas.

[2] Cf. Jay Ruby, "The Image Mirrored: Reflexivity and the Documentary Film." Journal of the University Film Association, Vol. 29, No. 4, (1977) for an expanded discussion of these ideas.

JAY RUBY is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Temple University in Philadelphia. He founded the Conference on Visual Anthropology and is the president of International Film Seminars (sponsor of the Flaherty Film Seminar). Among his research interests are the anthropology of visual communication and the visual communication of anthropology.