Postmodern Portraiture in Documentary Film and Television
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OBSCENE INTIMACIES: POSTMODERN PORTRAITURE IN DOCUMENTARY FILM AND TELEVISION by Angela Walsh B.A., The University of British Columbia, 2012 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (Film Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2015 © Angela Walsh, 2015 Abstract The past several decades have witnessed a steadily increasing output of documentaries which aim to explore the intimate lives of individual subjects. Although there has been no official scholarly study delineating these films as a documentary sub-genre, they have been variously termed portrait or biographical documentaries, and they are a persistent feature of both documentary film production and non-fiction television programming. This project aims to situate these films and television programs within broader cultural shifts that have occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century, including an upsurge in the ubiquity of images, distrust in the photographic medium’s ability to access the real, and dismantling of taste hierarchies. All of these changes fit under the broad paradigm of postmodern theory and culture, a societal condition that continues to evidence itself in the current age. Despite postmodernism’s proclamation that social relationships and individualism have collapsed, contemporary portraiture documentaries still aim to facilitate a sense of connection between viewer and subject. Postmodernism intersects here with what Richard Sennett has called the “intimate society,” which is characterized by a societal impetus toward personal revelation and emotional expression. I posit that portraiture documentaries represent the collision and working through of these two competing cultural features. Following an overview of the scholarship relevant to my research in Chapter One, Chapter Two will discuss two films by the documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield, Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (1995) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003). Often maligned in both critical and scholarly circles for failing to interrogate ideology in any meaningful way, I argue that his work operates on a reflexive level to suggest that images fail us when attempting to extract the intimate truth of the individual. In Chapter ii Three I discuss two examples of reality television series that focus on the lives of individuals, Errol Morris’s First Person (IFC, 2000-2001) and Intervention (A&E, 2005 - ), which demonstrate the persistent need to render the subject in visual terms and make the viewer witness to the most intimate and personal aspects of their lives. iii Preface This thesis is the original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Angela Walsh. An early version of Chapter Two was presented at the Film Studies Association of Canada’s annual conference in June of 2015. iv Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Preface............................................................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ vi Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Documentary in a postmodern context ....................................................................... 10 1.1 Dealing with documentary .................................................................................................. 11 1.2 Postmodernism in a cultural and historical context ............................................................ 18 1.3 The world of the image ....................................................................................................... 21 1.4 The postmodern subject in the intimate society .................................................................. 29 Chapter 2: Nick Broomfield and postmodern portraiture ............................................................. 34 2.1 Nick Broomfield: documentarian for the postmodern era .................................................. 35 2.2 Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam and the postmodern, mediatized subject........................ 38 2.3 Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer and the simulacra of the other ........................... 50 Chapter 3: Images of the self in postmodern television documentary .......................................... 63 3.1 Liminal spaces between documentary and reality television .............................................. 63 3.2 First Person and mediatized intimacy ................................................................................ 66 3.3 Intervention and the obscene pathos of addiction ............................................................... 78 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 89 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................. 95 v Acknowledgements It is with deep gratitude that I extend my thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Committee for their generous financial assistance. The faculty and staff of the Film Department at UBC have provided me with an immense amount of support during my time as both an undergraduate and graduate student. I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Brian McIlroy for having a seemingly endless amount of patience for my oftentimes erratic working methods. I have great appreciation for all of the advice, guidance and assistance I have received from Dr. McIlroy. I extend thanks to my second reader, Dr. Lisa Coulthard. It has been a pleasure working with you as a student and a teaching assistant, experiences through which I have expanded my intellectual and pedagogical horizons. I would like to thank Dr. Ernest Mathijs who helped me discover my interest in research and the possibilities of academia during my undergrad. Thank you also to Dr. Christine Evans who offered sage advice and a much needed dose of wit throughout my time in the MA program. Thank you to Cam Cronin and Karen Tong who provide the administrative backbone to the department, and to film librarian Richard Payment. I have certainly taken advantage of the treasure trove that is the UBC Film Library, and Richard consistently helped me navigate the meticulously organized collection and allowed me to loan films to my heart’s content. I extend special thanks to my cohort in the MA program: Claire Davis and Molly Lewis. To Claire, I cherish our many writing dates at Nelson the Seagull where I was able to sound off my ideas and receive your astute feedback. Laughs, fretting and advice were shared in equal measure, and I cannot think of a better person to have gone through the program with. To Molly, thank you for being an excellent partner-in-crime while we worked together on the graduate journal Cinephile and as teaching assistants. Your dedicated work ethic and positive vi spirit helped keep me afloat during the more trying times of this process. I also extend thanks to fellow graduate student, Hilary Hulsey for the many laughs she provided during long conversations in the TA offices and over burgers at Koerner’s Pub. Most of all, I would like to thank my parents, Janet and Denis Walsh. Thank you for not giving up on me. I can finally move out now! vii Introduction “We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality. We demand them. And we demand that there be always more of them, bigger and better and more vivid. They are the world of our making: the world of the image.” -Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (5-6) Although Boorstin wrote the above quote in 1961, he could easily be referring to the year 2015. Now, perhaps more than any other time in history, we are offered a countless number of ways to produce and consume images, both moving and still. To demonstrate how this phenomenon works in the present, I offer two recent examples. In Pakistan, a New York based street photographer takes a portrait of a human rights activist who is fighting to end indentured servitude in her country and posts it on his immensely popular Instagram account. The photo is seen by over three million followers.1 On the same site, a member of a famous Hollywood family and reality television star posts a photo of herself looking in a mirror, a type of picture termed a “mirror selfie.” The photo reaches the over 30 million followers she has on Instagram.2 Although these two photographs register vastly different meanings, they both occupy the same amount of digital space, and maintain a similar degree of public visibility on social media sites. The discrepancy between these two images, the former conveying a sense of political and social import and the latter reflecting narcissistic frivolity, is sutured by websites through which an engagement with the world can be achieved by solely visual terms. These websites facilitate 1 I’m referring here to Humans of New York, the photo blog by Brandon Stanton. The blog