Autoethnographic Film as Post-Modern Genre
Autoethnographic Film as Post-Modern Genre: Multimedia Case Study Contextualization and Critically Reflective Exegesis
ISBN: 978-1-923292-02-4
This paper / ebook examines my experimental autoethnographic film Being in Time (2024) (see above or click link for original online hosting on US journal The Autoethnographer) as a hybridized proto-typical montagist methodological template for consideration of autoethnographic film as a postmodern genre. It delineates the trans-cultural conceptualization of the film in relation to prior autoethnographic avant-garde works - particularly those of Jonas Mekas - and a limited body of theoretical literature on autoethnographic film specifically, including the author’s own tentative draft writings. Methodologically, the paper locates the case study within a critically reflective contextualization of autoethnographic film-making praxis and simultaneous hybridized theorization informed by limited contemporary literature on multimedia autoethnographic research methodologies. This paper thus contextualizes autoethnographic film as a distinct post-modern film genre n terms of subjectivity/objectivity dialectics. This is analyzed in terms of autoethnographic film’s methodological appropriation in systematic fourfold discourse construction relational to a participant-observation process of rendering identity construct dialectics. Specifically, such discourse is constituted through autoethnographer-as-filmmaker participant-observer praxis of a “self-as-Other” identity-construct, the positionality and performativity of which enacts a progressive destabilization, deconstruction, reconstruction and self-actualization structural modeling of subjectivity epistemics through which to meta-textually engage the spectator in both film-making process and film-as-text product. In that, this paper’s case study focus contextualizes autoethnographic film’s split from ethnographic film in deference to the central question of the representative rendering of “self-as-Other” interpretivist phenomenology through montagist cinematic aesthetics which no longer locate such praxis within the mimetic social reality of ethnographic film. So too, the paper examines the discursive construction of this “self-as-Other” as informing identity construct formation through context-specific montagist film-making praxis. In addition to case study video extracts, examples are also given in reference to selected key ethnographic and autoethnographic film texts chronicling the still-evolving progression of ethnographic film into autoethnographic film as a specifically post-modern genre.
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