Temporality in American Filmic Autobiography

Overview

Dating from the 1940s in the United States, filmic autobiography has gained profile around 1970 with the development of new, light-weight camera and sound equipment. In the past thirty years, filmic autobiography has been theorized in terms of genre, mediality, and technology in diverse small or specialized contributions in film studies, literary and autobiography studies, and media studies. In the present volume, these approaches are historicized and compared, so that a comprehensive definition of filmic autobiography emerges that involves recent theories of automediality. For the film analyses, Paul Adams Sitney's claim of the late 1970s that autobiographical cinema most directly shows us the differences between filmic time and experiential time is used as a methodological guideline for an investigation of temporality in filmic autobiography. Integrating film theory, autobiography theory, and theories of time and contingency, a transmedial theory of filmic tenses is proposed and applied in sample analyses to selected works from the canon of American filmic autobiographies.

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