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Lives are Led: Autobiographical Film and the New Documentary A thesis/film by John Henry Hookham B.A. (Hons), Dip ATFM (LIFS), MA (Witwatersrand) Creative Industries Research & Application Centre Queensland University of Technology Submitted for PhD 2004 2 Keywords: autobiographical film, documentary, South Africa, exile, immigration, autobiography, memoir, apartheid ‘An autobiography is, by definition, a man’s (sic) own story of his life. It has one advantage over other forms of literature and certainly over my own art form, the cinema. That is this: there’s nobody who can contradict the author. This is my book about my life. There is no producer or film cutter or studio boss who can make me change it. For once in my creative life I am about to have the last word.’ (LeRoy, 1974: 3) 3 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project has taken five years to complete. Many people gave willingly of their time and made huge contributions to the film. Friends, family, neighbours, students, colleagues and complete strangers participated in the making of the film as actors, interview subjects or technicians. I would like to most sincerely thank all of them. In particular, I would like to thank my editor, Tanya Schneider for all her intelligent and astute suggestions, hard work and dedication to the project. A great big thank you to Evan Olman who came to South Africa with me and made me realise how good it would be to have a son. My thanks also go to my supervisor Brad Haseman for his kind and generous support, his enthusiasm and frank comments. And then there is my other supervisor, Gary MacLennan. I simply cannot thank Gary enough. His contribution was enormous, both intellectually and emotionally. But most of all, I would like to thank Gary for the gift of friendship. Finally, I would like to thank my family, my wife Marian and daughter Bohemia, for their support, suggestions and many ideas. Without their love none of this would have been possible. 5 6 ABSTRACT This thesis consists of two parts: an autobiographical documentary film and a written exegesis. The film, My Lovers Both, is a record of two journeys back to my native South Africa wherein I confront aspects of my past. These two trips offer a means to explore a personal history around the experiences of immigration, displacement and exile. In the exegesis, I argue that autobiography is changing and rather than offering catalogues of public achievement, contemporary personal histories deal with sites of trauma and challenge dominant narratives of official memory. Likewise, the New Documentary is embracing fictional strategies and moving towards increased subjectivity and introspection. As a consequence, new forms are created that generate novel insights into causality and time. The exegesis goes on to examine the major influences on my work as a filmmaker and then articulates a reflective analysis of the creative process which produced My Lovers Both. 7 8 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND..................................... 11 CHAPTER ONE: ............................................................................. 22 The Autobiographical Moment CHAPTER TWO .............................................................................. 52 Towards an Understanding of the New Documentary CHAPTER THREE .......................................................................... 89 Major Influences CHAPTER FOUR........................................................................... 125 Conclusion BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................... 150 9 STATEMENT OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma at any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made. Signature: Date: 10 INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND ‘That is really the trouble with an autobiography you do not of course you do not believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right because it is not right. You are of course never yourself.’ (Stein, 1999: 186) This PhD thesis is in two parts – a written component which follows herewith and a documentary film. The two components complement each other and should be read/viewed together. It is envisaged that the reader/viewer will read this Introduction and then Chapters 1, 2 and 3. Then she/he will view the film before reading the reflective analysis in Chapter 4. The documentary film accounts for approximately 75 per cent of the thesis and the written component about 25 per cent. The documentary is autobiographical and therefore it is probably appropriate, at the outset, for me to fill in some background details. Let me tell you something about the social milieu in which I grew up. Something about context. I was born in South Africa two years after the apartheid government came to power and so all my formative years were lived under that oppressive regime. What was it like being a white South African at that time? In most Hollywood films whites are presented as privileged beneficiaries, the clichéd racist villains of apartheid. But in my experience, the most consistent overriding emotion for white people was guilt; not for anything they did so much as for what they didn’t do. Or what they were unable to do. Or what they were afraid to do. But some whites took a stand and fought vociferously against apartheid. In Chapter Three I will deal with the case of the Slovo family and the autobiographical writings that grew from that experience. However it must be said that if I still lived in South Africa, the film I have made would have been inconceivable. I would never ever have considered making it. It would have been 11 truly unthinkable. Its fate would have been summed up in judgements such as: ‘Another whining white making a film about the most egotistical subject imaginable. A film about himself!’ Even in Australia people have looked at me as if I am mad. ‘You’re making a film about what? Yourself? Who’s going to want to watch it?’ But at least in Australia I feel sufficiently liberated from guilt to contemplate making it. And now let me tell you something about what I tried to do in the documentary. It’s an autobiographical film that combines both fictional and documentary conventions. In September 1999, I returned to South Africa for the first time in six years to begin the film by shooting interviews with some seminal people from my past. This was only the beginning, because in 2001 I also shot re-enactments and re-constructions using actors to play former friends and lovers. There is of course nothing new in the use of re-enactments in documentary. Indeed they are the very stuff of the docudrama genre. However no less an authority than the great documentarist, Joris Ivens, had the following to say about the use of re-enactments: We must never leave things for reconstruction. When we have to reconstruct certain scenes, however, we must give careful consideration to this work. We must not risk untruthfulness and damage the true value of the documentary (Ivens, 1983: 91). Ivens’s remarks strike us now as rather dated and even Manichean in a time when the New Documentary has, as we will see in Chapter Two, launched wholesale raids on the armoury of fiction. Nevertheless, Ivens’s emphasis on the importance of the relationship between truth and documentary is very relevant to the consideration of documentary films, perhaps especially so in the case of autobiographical documentary. Moreover he clearly understood the communicative dimension of truth when he added: ‘I think three minutes of untruthfulness in an hour long documentary makes the whole film lose credibility’ (Ivens, 1983: 91). 12 In the interest of truth and credibility though, one should acknowledge at least one gap in Ivens’s own practice. This is made apparent in Pieter Jan Smit’s meditation on the human costs of Soviet industrialisation in Magnitogorsk: Forging the New Man (1996) which amounts to a devastating critique of the truth claims of Ivens’s own 1932 documentary, Song of the Heroes. Smit reveals clearly that Ivens worked within what Matt Payne has termed the tradition of Soviet Orientalism and his film was indeed a ‘propaganda paen’ (Payne, 1996: 102). Within my own film I have chosen to deal with the ‘truth claim’ problem by structurally using a kind of ‘bracketing’ device, namely the journeys back to South Africa in which I encounter figures from the past and the present. Each of these people has a different version of some of the events that occurred, or alternatively they placed a different emphasis on the events that transpired. These are placed against my memory of how I see the past and also how I view the present. I also returned to South Africa in 2002/3 and this gave the film the shape of a tale of two journeys. I became the cinematographer for the second trip. This stylistic difference marks the space of change and difference both within me and also in how I now see South Africa. It also marks a different emphasis in the autobiographical impulse in that the camera is now turned away from me (by me) to face my family and my wife’s family. This particular focus is what Michael Renov has termed ‘domestic ethnography’ (cited in Gaines, 1999: 141), whereby the filmmaker is connected to her/his subject by complex familial ties. Renov points out that ‘domestic ethnography is a kind of supplementary autobiographical practice; it functions as a vehicle of self-examination, a means through which to construct self-knowledge through recourse to the familial other’ (cited in Gaines, 1999: 141).

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