Online Response #7 – The autobiographical mode

Oftentimes things don’t turn out the way we originally expect them to.  What might be a simple recording for posterity becomes a lifeline to a mother who has passed away.  What might have been a forgotten photograph turns into a clue into the past and a question as to the security of home life.  And a journal entry from decades before emerges as a proverbial can of worms when trying to discover the truth.  This inscription of self, found in autobiographical documentaries like 51 Birch Street, open the door for communication between the filmmaker and his prey, and their association with the audience, playing an intricate and intimate role in the search for the truth.  As a mother tried to find herself so many years before, the son now begins his quest. 

                              

Fox notes that “baring oneself to a public is at the heart of autobiographical mode.  The emotional and personal life experiences of the producer become the documented reality.”  (pg. 41)  Block’s introspection into his parent’s lives and consequently into his own feelings on his view of and relationship with his parents is at the heart of the piece.  His voice over narration not only invites us into the piece, but the presence of the camera almost becomes a Pandora’s box of sorts, opening up a long suppressed world of disillusionment, infidelity, and struggle.  Through his use of interview, pictures, and media from his family history, the camera becomes for the son what boxes of notebooks and typed journal entries were for the mother, an attempt to find self and security. 

It is in this journey, that the line between filmmaker and audience is blurred.  Fox states that in the autobiographical mode, documentary filmmaking “not only closes the gap between the photographer and the subject but also the space between the filmmaker and the audience.” (pg. 41)  As an audience, we witness the most seemingly intimate moments – talking to a therapist or a rabbi, even to a spouse, as more than just a fly on the wall.  With the camera’s point of view, we assume the physical position of Block himself.  The rabbi questions us directly, the therapist listens to our explanations as we try to summarize our complicated relationship with our father and “our wife” averts her eyes from ours when we are discussing hard and intimate subject matter.  

Even the final conversation with his father follows true to this course.  As we assume the physical space of Block, do we hold his father’s hand?  Do our eyes take the place of his father’s as the camera is turned on the filmmaker and we ask him the most important question: “Are you happy?”  

There is more than a mere familiarity at this point between Block and ourselves, there is an intimacy that can never be forgotten.  After all, we are now a part of the family, and as the mother’s best friend so sagely asserted, relief can be found when someone truly knows us.