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The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary.
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
In this article I explore the cinematic representation of memory, trauma and identity in
experimental documentary cinema with reference to my autobiographical
documentary film, The Border Crossing (2011):
i
The film is set in the Basque country
and explores my memories of a sexual attack 40 years ago while hitchhiking. It
deploys documentary realism in interviews that explore memories of violence, with
two Basque women, Aitziber a young Basque nationalist and Maria a middle-aged
photographer. It also documents aspects of Maria’s daily life and contains extensive
images of signifiers of the ongoing nationalist struggle in shots of political posters and
demonstrations in support of Basque prisoners.
ii
The film combines this realist
strategy with performativity in the enactment of my younger self and in voice-overs.
In recent years there is general awareness of a growth in autobiographical
documentary filmmaking, films that place a filmmaker at the heart of their work.
Most of these films deal centrally with the filmmaker’s difficult life, often within their
family and other intimate personal relationships, in an effort to discover and represent
their contested sense of identity. However, in this article I will argue that there are
broader possibilities for autobiographical filmmaking, drawing on the work of Alisa
Lebow, Jim Lane and Janet Walker. The questions I will explore in this respect are:
How does the filmmaker negotiate the representation of subjectivities when including
autobiography within a film? How does the placing of the autobiographical self in the
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
2
work complicate how the film represents, and refers to, the real world? Further, in
relation to my film, The Border Crossing what form may be utilised when attempting
to specifically represent autobiographical memories of traumatic events? Finally, with
reference to my methodology in the representation of memory in autobiography, I
refer to David MacDougall (2006), who notes that: “the encounter with visual images
demands more of us than the mental facility that language has given us. There is a
specificity and obduracy to images that defies our accustomed habits of translation
and summation…if we are to gain new knowledge from using images, it will come in
other forms and by different means.”
iii
Therefore it is not by talking or writing alone
that I am able to deal with these problems within the world of the film to solve them,
but through working on the film itself with its complex structure of sound, image and
temporality.
Many influential theorists and filmmakers have viewed the autobiographical
documentary film as problematic because, as Michael Renov (2004) notes: “the
domain of non-fiction was typically fuelled by a concern for objectivity, a belief that
what was seen and heard must retain its integrity as a plausible slice of the social
world. How else to persuade viewers to invest belief, to produce ‘visible evidence’
and even induce social action?”
iv
Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, the Maysles
brothers and the proponents of direct cinema, including Frederick Wiseman, shunned
an exploration of subjectivity in their documentary films in an elusive search for
objectivity. Nevertheless, reflexive strategies did appear in documentary cinema in
America and elsewhere, partly as an oppositional response to this claimed
verisimilitude of documentary realism. Many of these filmmakers are, as Roxana
Waterson (2007) notes, exploring their own subjectivities through cinematic
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
3
representation, but are also “engaged in a courageous personal quest to break
officially imposed silences.”
v
Examples of autobiographical films produced over the last two decades that utilise
reflexivity, not to eradicate the real but to complicate referential claims include: Rea
Tajiri’s History and Memory (1991) that explores the representation of Tajiri’s
Japanese-American mother’s internment in the USA during WWII through Tajiri’s
post-memories of this event;
vi
Michelle Citron’s Daughter Rite (1998), an
exploration of the difficult relationships between mothers and daughters, that deploys
faux documentary of female siblings placed alongside extensively reworked home
movie autobiographical footage of Citron as a child with her sister and mother;
vii
Carol Morley’s autobiographical film The Alcohol Years (2000), centred around her
early life in Manchester in the 1980s, and her participation in a rich period of pop-
music history;
viii
Tony Dowmunt’s A Whited Sepulchre (2009) that articulates his
own position as a white ‘Englishman’ travelling in Sierra Leone, alongside an
investigation of what might have led his great grandfather to embrace the racism
underpinning British colonial rule in that country.
ix
An important component therefore, of the exploration of autobiography in
documentary cinema, is the utilisation of reflexivity as a deliberate filmic strategy in
order to demystify the filmmaking process, thus drawing attention to the ideological
position of the film itself and also that of the filmmaker. As Janet Walker (2003)
points out, these works breach the normal standards of objective documentary
filmmaking by incorporating fictional and personal elements, but within that breach,
“they discover new truths about the correlation between the objective mode of
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
4
documentary production and mainstream history and […] the potential of
experimental documentary for historical understanding.”
x
On a formal level therefore,
these types of films allow an extension of the possibilities for documentary cinema to
represent realities. Autobiography brings one a step closer to an acknowledgement
that the exploration of subjectivity and reflexivity in documentary films may provide
additional rich possibilities for the cultural exploration of the social world than is
allowed solely through documentary realism.
In The Border Crossing, I deploy a similar methodology, to the films I have referred
to above, to utilise and locate my own experience of violence in order to explore the
cinematic representation of traumatic memory and identity. The knowledge and
experience of my own subjective memories provided a rich source of direct material
to draw upon in devising strategies for this representation. Walter Benjamin (1979)
provided a framework for the methodology in my use of autobiography when he
notes:
“He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man
digging […] he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to
scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter
itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous
examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images […]
that stand—like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery—in the prosaic
rooms of our later understanding.”
xi
Inscribing a mediation of my subjective experience within The Border Crossing
enabled me to act freely in developing strategies to call upon as a filmmaker, with the
overall aim of representing traumatic memory and violence. In addition in this
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
5
respect Alisa Lebow (2008) usefully asks: “Do we call up our cultural ghosts, or do
they call on us? Is not the latter likely, where in the process of being called upon (to
represent, to represent ourselves, to represent ourselves in certain ways, using certain,
very specific tropes), we are interpolated into the body of (cultural) knowledge we
think of as our (contested) self?
xii
However, drawing upon our ‘cultural ghosts’ to
represent my contested self, necessitates a measure of personal emotional
distanciation that may be translated through the filmic strategies of articulating
personal trauma. Achieving the emotional distance to enable me to represent my own
history and memories of my own traumatic event took many years but this period of
time assisted me to reflect on the nature of trauma and the difficulties of mediating it
through cinematic language.
Articulating an‘authentic’ cinematic representation of memories of the past poses
particular problems for the filmmaker. Individual memories are central components
of our inner worlds and provide us with the sense of our individual and communal
identity. Memories may be perceived as effected by our visual, aural and sensory
inner worlds. Their perception in our interior world is subjective and takes different
forms. A memory may sometimes appear to us as fixed, resembling an image of a
frozen moment in time. Other memories appear fragmented and unreliable, containing
significant elisions in time or place and they may continually change in form and
sensation. Memories may disappear from our view altogether or reappear, seemingly
unbidden, or as a result of the effect of external forces. Representing subjectivities of
memory is complicated by the knowledge that individual memory is cinematically
unrepresentable via literal digital or analogue filmic means. ‘Memory’ cannot be
seized and brought in front of the camera to be filmed. Further, every time we
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
6
‘remember’ an event, an image, sound, or a sensation from the past, we ‘remember’ in
the present: “In the process of memory […] the ‘now’ is as important as the ‘then’.
Memory is a relationship between pasts and a particular present.” (Clare and Johnson
2000).
xiii
Complicating the representation of memory further in The Border Crossing is the
additional mediation of autobiographical memories of events that have occurred in the
past. This is a mode of mediation distinct in its primacy of subjectivity. The problems
of autobiographical representation of memory in documentary cinema are further
complicated in The Border Crossing by the articulation of memories that are centred
on trauma and violence. In her analysis of memory and trauma Cathy Caruth (1996)
draws on the work of Freud to note that: “trauma is understood as a wound inflicted
not upon the body but upon the mind.” [emphasis in the original]. She also notes that
the traumatic experience “is an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs”.
xiv
It is the fact of the incomprehensibility of the violent event that haunts the victim and
leads to its non-assimilation through direct recall. The representation of memories of
trauma in documentary cinema cannot therefore avoid an acknowledgement of the
incomprehensibility of the violent event alongside, and in addition, to the
acknowledgement of the unreliability of all subjective memories. Caruth cites Freud
to support her argument that due to the non-assimilation of the original experience:
“historical memory […] is always a matter of distortion, a filtering of the original
event through the fictions of traumatic repression, which makes the event available at
best indirectly.” (ibid. 15-16). Caruth refers to the strategy deployed in Resnais’ film,
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1950): “it is through the fictional story, not about Hiroshima
but taking place at its site, that Resnais and Duras believe such historical specificity is
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
7
conveyed […] the interest of Hiroshima mon amour lies in how it explores the
possibility of a faithful history in the very indirectness of its telling.” (ibid. 27).
xv
Whilst Hiroshima Mon Amour is a fiction film and its indexical link to actuality is
conveyed elliptically via its narrative and in documentary archive footage of the
affects of the nuclear explosion at Hiroshima in 1945 at the start of the film, its filmic
strategy draws parallels with the strategies deployed in The Border Crossing. The
methodology deployed in The Border Crossing recognises the multiple problems of
representation that are outlined above. It utilises a number of distinct strategies to
represent subjectivities that include trauma. At first sight some of the strategies may
appear unusual in their deployment together within a single experimental
documentary film. However as will become clear they create together a synergy of
language that informs and enriches the filmic language of the film.
The Border Crossing is located at the site of the traumatic event and articulates its
exploration of the past through indirect forms of mediated representation,
performativity and enaction. It reprises the strategy of historical specificity deployed
by Hiroshima Mon Amour in the creation of a direct indexical link to the site of the
trauma and tells the story indirectly. It explores the fragility of remembering and
forgetting and the non-assimilation of traumatic experience in a complex layering of
voice-overs that constantly make reference to ‘my’ unexplained desire to locate the
exact site of the border crossing. However, the film represents an autobiographical
event not a fictional one, the film maintains a strong indexical link to actuality. As
Susannah Radstone argues: “Memory work does not reduce memory to fiction, to
dream, or to poetry, for instance. Memories, that is, continue to be memories, and it
their relation to lived historical experience that constitutes their specificity.”
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
8
(Radstone, 2003).
xvi
The film takes into account that the articulation of the past must
take place in the present, and thus seeks to recreate the past rather than recapture it.
As Naomi Green (2000) notes: “Marked by its ‘distance’ from history, […] memory
seeks less to recapture the past than to re-create it; it wants not to confront the ghosts
of history but rather to establish a place where they may flourish forever”.
xvii
Therefore my filmic strategy is to “emphasize not the link between past and present
but, instead, the absolute discontinuity” (ibid). Creating a film that consisted only of
re-enactment was not adequate for my purposes in representing memory in
autobiography. A fictional strategy necessitates the creation of a mise en scène that
either appears authentic to the period or is deliberately theatrical and modern day.
Therefore complete performativity deflects attention away from actuality in the
representation of non-fictional memory.
Two distinct and separate filmic strategies, performative enactment and documentary
realism are realised. They do not create distinct binary oppositions but instead
underpin one another to create dialectical relationships of themes. In the performative
element, a girl, a non-professional actor, chosen for her likeness to myself at her age,
represents my younger self.
xviii
Stella Bruzzi (2006) points to the usefulness of
performativity as a filmic strategy where realism is insufficient, arguing that: “the
performative documentary uses performance within a non-fiction context to draw
attention to the impossibilities of authentic documentary representation. The
performative element within the framework of non-fiction is thereby an alienating,
distancing device, not one which actively promotes identification and a
straightforward response to a film’s content”(my emphasis).
xix
In The Border
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
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Crossing the spectator is thus enabled to reflect on the themes of memory and
violence raised by the film and participate in the construction of identification.
In addition, reflexivity is at the heart of the making of all autobiographical
documentaries. Reflexivity heightens our awareness that The Border Crossing is a
filmic construct, because in addition to the depiction of my own self as a subject of
the film, I am also the filmmaker. The film draws the spectator’s attention to this
reflexivity in its representation of memory at various junctures in the film. For
example, during sequential shots of the girl walking through city streets the film is
interrupted by a black screen and my voice-over remarks: “I lose sight of myself at
this point. Not until I reach the docks and the railway do I become visible again to
myself in my mind’s eye.” This draws the spectator momentarily away from the
diegetic world of the film to a reflection on its construction and its representation of
unreliable memory. The film resumes the sequential shots of the girl in a city street
but in a different location to the previous sequence. This conveys a different, though
non-specified, temporal point. Catherine Russell (1999) believes that these three
layers of voices, the “speaker [in voice-over] seer and seen”,
xx
add richness and
diversity to the work of the autobiographical filmmaker, and notes that: “In addition
to the discursive possibility of these three voices is another form of identity, which is
that of the avant-garde filmmaker as collagist and editor”. (ibid).
In The Border Crossing I therefore constructed an interweaved montage of voiced
memories, voices in the present and fictional enactment. Voice-overs describe the
girl’s journey and reflect on the fragility of memory and the affects of violence and
loss. These sometimes appear to bind with the enactment on screen. At other times
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
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the voice-over describes memories of events, at an unspecified time and place, that, it
says, are prompted by the images on the screen, evoking a fictionalized impression of
the images themselves enabling memories to be recalled. Through the separation of
the voice from the image a thematic relationship is created, not a narrative one, that is
not fully explained, one that is resistant to definitive interpretation and referencing.
The displacement of readability through a lack of synchrony of voice and image and
the references to wider unexplained memories shakes the spectator’s view of
complete authenticity and foregrounds the film’s reflexive construction. The strategy
also allows the possibility of a reflection on the nature of past events and the fragile,
fragmented and unreliable construction of memory and identity. The use of
performativity in The Border Crossing, thus creates a useful method for discourse
around the cinematic representation of subjectivities towards a metaphorical
representation of past and present. It allows the camera and microphone to record an
impressionistic landscape of sound and image to build a mosaic of exterior space that
merges with and informs an imagined space of the past to occupy the fertile space
between documentary realism and fictional enactment.
The performative enactment is further complicated by the use of documentary realist
strategies. In documentary films realist strategies generally represent events as they
unfold in the present although characters may recall to camera events that took place
in the past. There may also be voice-over or a text that refers to events in the past. In
the realist element of The Border Crossing my voice describes my encounters and
growing fascination with two women, Aitziber and Maria, who have suffered from the
continuing effects of violence. Over shots of Maria taking photographs in a park my
voice introduces her: “I have met Maria, she is my age. If I’d stayed all those years
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
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ago her story might have been mine.” Later in the film my voice-over introduces
Aitziber with the remark: “I’m drawn to Aitziber, who I have met on the
demonstration. She spent 5 years in a Spanish prison. I recognize in her the fragility
of someone whose inner world is scarred by violence.” Aitziber talks, in close up,
directly to camera, offering a detailed narrative of imprisonment and sexual torture at
the hands of the Spanish State.
As I point out above the juxtaposition of enactment and realism may appear to be in
contradiction to the preconceived idea of what a documentary film looks and sounds
like. However, in his work on the autobiographical documentary, Jim Lane (2002)
points out that, “autobiographical documentaries have revealed an array of formal
possibilities […] that have changed our attitudes about what a documentary should
look and sound like.”
xxi
With the utilisation of my autobiographical voice to
introduce the realist sequences, I bring into the diegetic world of the film, characters
and events that might not immediately appear to be contiguous with the cinematic
world created through enactment. The ultilisation of enactment and realism creates
layers of meaning that are richer in meaning than would otherwise be possible
through the utilisation of a single one of these strategies. Enactment does not eradicate
the real but complicates it. Within the filmic discourse therefore, I am able to ask
questions of Maria and Aitziber in my role as the filmmaker engaging with
documentary realism and the filmmaker/subject of my own narrative of memory and
identity. Lane argues that the representation of the self in film complicates how non
fiction films represent and make reference to the world and therefore,
“autobiographical documentaries use reflexivity not to eradicate the real as much as to
complicate referential claims.” (ibid 17-18).
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
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Through the utilisation of my self as a filmmaker and as subject of the film with my
vocalised interests and preoccupations, I may incorporate any type of seemingly
disparate stylistic material into the film. Thus in The Border Crossing the utilisation
of the girl as a character representing my younger self is not at odds with the formal
stylistic strategies of documentary realism present in the rest of the film. The
representation of my history and self in this work has enabled me to explore the
representation of trauma and memory in the contrasting subjectivities of my self with
the selves of others and to delve deeper into the representation of history and violence
in the Basque country. Mica Nava (1992) argues usefully, in the introduction to her
book, Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism, that this ‘kind of
work’ always emerges from the author’s embeddedness in a specific configuration of
inextricably intertwined historical, cultural and psychic narratives.
xxii
In regarding myself therefore, as a contested self, with a fragmented sense of identity,
embedded in a specific configuration of historical, cultural and psychic narratives, I
have made choices about which aspects of my identity I have included in The Border
Crossing. The mode of representation for my autobiography is complicated by
trauma. I am not representing just any autobiographical event in my life but
specifically one of violent trauma. The elisions of memory in trauma and its non-
assimilability will, and must, affect the way in which I choose to represent my self in
the diegesis. Janet Staiger (1996) in her article Cinematic Shots discusses the
impossibility of representing trauma in more traditional linear narratives because, she
says, it leads inevitably to a fetishism of the event. She argues that, because it tries to
become a substitute narrative, trying to fill in “for the lack of an ability to describe or
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
13
explain the events” (ibid 40) as I have discussed above, it leads to the narrative
undoing the “process of mourning for the loss of explanation.” (ibid). She argues that
therefore only “anti-narrative non stories of the literary (post) modernist kind are able
to represent such traumatic events; the anti-narrative form of representation is not
totalizing and permits mourning to occur.” (ibid).
xxiii
In The Border Crossing I do not represent the sexual attack. There is a growing
anticipation of violence through much of the film in the voice-over and through the
repeated shots of an unseen man driving a car at night through the rain. In the final
sequence the meeting of the unseen man and the girl is implied but not specified. The
sequence is set at a border crossing in shots of the girl as she sits waiting for a lift.
Several cars go by without stopping, until a white car passes in front of her in the
foreground close to the camera and then leaves the frame. The girl gets up and also
leaves frame, in the same direction as the car, her footsteps continuing on the sound-
track, until the slam of a car door is heard off-screen. The car returns into shot, its
occupants unseen and drives out of sight. However, in the next sequence the girl
enters a hotel room alone. Through this method of narrative elision I avoid the
possibility of fetishising the representation of trauma. Nevertheless, the absence of
enactment of the attack, anticipated and hinted at throughout the film’s diegesis, does
not elide it from reconstruction in the imagination of the spectator.
In conclusion, I have explored how the filmmaker negotiates the representation of
subjectivities when including autobiography within a film to bring one closer to an
acknowledgement that the exploration of subjectivity and reflexivity provide rich
possibilities for the cultural exploration of the social world. The placing of the
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
14
autobiographical self in the work complicates and enhances how the film represents,
and refers to, the real world. I have shown that by utilising autobiography and
performativity in The Border Crossing I have acknowledged the unreliability of
memories of traumatic events and avoided the fetishisation of trauma in representing
them. Finally, I have demonstrated that by deploying filmic strategies of
documentary realism alongside performativity there are rich possibilities in the
development of cinematic language in representing memory and autobiography in
experimental documentary cinema.
i
Daniels, Jill. The Border Crossing http://www.jilldanielsfilms.com/border.html
ii
In November 2011, after the film was completed, the ETA nationalist leadership announced its
commitment to end armed struggle.
iii
MacDougall, David. 2006. The Corporeal Image: film, ethnography, and the senses. Princeton
University Press. p. 2.
iv
Renov, Michael. 2004. The Subject of Documentary. University of Minnesota Press. pp.XVII.
v
Waterson, Roxana. 2007.. ‘Trajectories of Memory: Documentary Film and the Transmission of
Testimony’ in Anthropology Today. Vol 18. No. 1. Routledge. p.51.
vi
Tajiri, Rea. 1991. History and Memory. USA,
vii
Citron, Michelle. 1998. Daughter Rite. USA
viii
Morley, Carol. 2000. The Alcohol Years. UK.
ix
Dowmunt, Tony. 2009. A Whited Sepulchre. Thesis submitted for the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Examination. Goldsmiths, University of London.
x
Walter, Janet. 2003. Trauma Cinema. University of California. p.21.
xi
Benjamin, Walter. 1979. ‘Berlin Chronicle’ in One Way Street and other Writings. London: New
Left Books. [1932]. p.314.
xii
Lebow. Alisa. 2008. First Person Jewish. Visible Evidence Series, Volume 22. Minneapolis. pp.141-
42.
xiii
Clare, M & Johnson, R. 2000, ‘Method in our Madness: identity and power in a memory work
method’ in Radstone, Susannah (ed) Memory and Methodology. Berg. p.199
xiv
Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University
Press. pp. 3 & 5.
xv
Resnais, Alain. Hiroshima Mon Amour. 1959. France. It is a fiction film set in Hiroshima, Japan, the
site of the atomic bomb deployed by the USA that effectively ended WWII. The film is a love story
between a French woman and a Japanese man with an elliptical structure that refers to that event.
xvi
Radstone, Susannah. 2000. ‘Working with Memory: an Introduction’ in Memory and Methodology.
Radstone, Susannah (ed). Berg. p.11.
xvii
Greene, Naomi. 2000. ‘Empire as Myth and Memory’ in The Historical Film. Landy, Marcia (ed).
Great Britain: The Athlone Press. p. 247.
xviii
In the pre-credit sequence my voice-over points out that Sian had appeared in my earlier
documentary film Small Town Girl, 2007, a longitudinal study of 3 adolescent girls in the UK. I refer
to this prior relationship only in the pre-credit sequence.
xix
Bruzzi, Stella. 2006. 'The Performative Documentary’ in New Documentary, ed. Bruzzi, Stella.
Routledge. pp.185-86.
xx
Russell, Catherine. 1999. Experimental Ethnography: the work of film in the age of video. Durham
& London: Duke University Press. p.277.
xxi
Lane, Jim. 2002. Autobiographical Documentary in America, University of Wisconsin Press. p.4.
xxii
Nava, Mica 1992. Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism, London: Sage. p.1.
xxiii
Staiger, Janet. 1996. ‘Cinematic Shots’. In Sobchack, Vivian (ed) The Persistence of History:
cinema, television, and the modern event. UK: Routledge. p.40.
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in the
Autobiographical Documentary
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