I remember, therefore I am, could well provide the equivalent of Descartes's cogito ergo sum, for European film directors in the closing years of the Twentieth Century, for in a period characterised by social and political turmoil, as traditional boundaries shift, and loyalties and identies are in flux, they seem to have their eyes firmly turned backwards, towards what now seems a safer, more innocent past. However, amongst the plethora of literary-inspired reflections of earlier and less tortured days, can be found films which whilst looking backwards across time, do so as part of an essentially forward-looking process, and whilst truthfully recreating an individual's past experiences, must simultaneously be recognised as fiction.
These autobiographical films stand apart from other types of 'historical' film, not least because of the paradoxes which lie at their heart, but perhaps more importantly because they seek to recreate the past, not as a means of escape from an uncomfortable present, but as a way of understanding that present more clearly, and even of coping better with the future.
What we are dealing with here is a relatively new genre; one which inevitably will be quantitatively restricted, and unlikely to be found in mainstream Hollywood, but which nevertheless constitutes an important development in filmic discourse, as well as providing a significant commentary on the insecurities of European nations on the brink of an uneasy union. This genre, still largely unrecognised by the majority of film critics, is characterised by the fact that the director is - by definition - both the narrator and the narrated, both subject and object; as such it presents us with a uniquely subjective exploration of memory. Posing the deceptively simple question 'Who am I?', and attempting to answer it with an equally problematical 'Who was I?', autobiographical films are inevitably ambiguous; they raise questions whilst recognising that no solutions can be provided. The apparent simplicity of their form is belied by inherent complexities such as the shifting and unstable gap between narrated past and narrating present, the fallible, selective, and manipulative nature of memory, the subjective and relative status of the 'reality' of past experience, and the constant temporal and narrative slippage.
Recent years have seen a significant increase in the number of European directors making unequivocally autobiographical films, although critical reactions to these reveal little understanding of the nature and concerns of the genre or of the narrative strategies being employed, and still less of the unique potential offered by film for the creation of the imaginary realism, and the overlapping of first and third person viewpoints, which are fundamental to autobiographical discourse.
The purpose of this article is to develop further the notion of autobiography as a new film genre, and to examine the contention that film constitutes a privileged medium for the expression of autobiographical memory, before attempting to establish the extent to which such films may be seen as an essentially European phenomenon. Main points of reference will be autobiographical films by eight European directors: Andrey Tarkovsky, Mirror (USSR, 1974); Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander (Sweden, 1982); John Boorman, Hope and Glory (England, 1987); Louis Malle, Au revoir les enfants (France, 1987); Claire Denis, Chocolat (France, 1988); Giuseppe Tornatore, Cinema Paradiso (Italy, 1988); Jaco van Dormael, Toto the Hero (Belgium, 1991); Terence Davies, The Long Day Closes (England, 1992). This list is personal and incomplete; however, even this fact substantiates the claim that the genre, if restricted, is nevertheless flourishing. It will be noticed, for example, that with the exception of Tarkovsky's Mirror, all the above examples date from the last dozen years.
Not surprisingly, the content of these films has much in common. The majority of the directors grew up in the forties and fifties, and this is the historical present which informs the narrative. The films tend to focus on a relatively restricted period, bearing in mind that external time is in any case distorted and largely irrelevant, except as a trigger to memories which exist within an entirely subjective time scale. Thus, we can contrast the breathtaking speed with which Boorman's memory picks out exciting events from his wartime childhood, recreated through quick cutting, and erratic and unexplained time lapses, with the intensely slow, subjective, and reflective camera of Davies's The Long Day Closes, when the child stands outside time, transfixed by an image or a pattern.
Another important characteristic is that, without exception, they are perceived as films which have imposed themselves on each director; films in some way different from the rest. They seem to have been difficult to make, even for the most experienced directors, not only because of the problems universally encountered in obtaining funding, but more significantly because their peculiar status, as personal explorations of past and present identity, renders them almost too important for their auteurs. Malle described all his work before Au revoir les enfants as a means of 'buying time', of preparing himself for this overwhelmingly important film.[1] Tarkovsky speaks in similar vein about Mirror, a film which he knew would alter the rest of his life because 'for the first time I would use the means of cinema to talk of all that was most precious to me, and to discuss directly, without playing any kind of tricks'. [2] We are dealing with films in which the director cannot hide behind a fictional narrator, but must accept exposure to the public gaze.
The directors share too the realisation that such films are uniquely special, not only because they afford the possibility of a somewhat self -indulgent recreation of the past, but because they also permit a continuation; a move from present to future. The films therefore claim a privileged status in the directors' lives: a shifting ground between various subjective times and realities. It is interesting that having made an autobiographical film, each director appears to feel in some way liberated, able now to forget the past that has been admitted, and to move forward.
Much of the difficulty in making autobiographical films results, of course, from the nature of the memories being explored. Malle's film deals with memories which for years he had suppressed, finding them too painful to express openly (although earlier works, such as Lacombe Lucien (1973), can be seen as a desire to deal, at least partially, with these memories by fictionalising them). His intense feelings of guilt at the arrest by the Gestapo of his Jewish school friend are both personal, (as we shall see, he feels that he is responsible for the incident), and, no less painfully, part of what he sees as a national guilt resulting from his country's collusion with the Germans.
Claire Denis claims to have been compelled to make Chocolat because of her largely subconscious need to explore the guilt she feels at having been a white child reared in a colonial world. Once again personal and national guilt merge, both within the film's narrative, and through the fact that the child is actually called France.[3]
Mirror was seen by Tarkovsky as a painful but essential acknowledgment of his inadequate relationship with his mother, his 'feeling of duty left unfulfilled'.[4] Similar concerns also provide the subtext of the apparently light-hearted Cinema Paradiso (and are certainly more overtly present in the recently released Director's Cut). Other directors seem to be attempting to come to terms with feelings of inadequacy, isolation, and fear, all of which are deeply rooted in childhood experience. In common, they reveal an overwhelming need to return to their roots, and both to reexperience and to reevaluate their past selves. Autobiographical film is thus both discovery and catharsis, both retrospective and prospective.
What we are dealing with is not therefore a straightforward recreation of a childhood world, but an often painful exploration of childhood memories by a searching adult mind. Consequences, such as the constant slippage between present and past, between past as remembered through a child's eyes, and the awareness that even this vision is filtered through an adult gaze, are of course accepted as basic features of literary autobiography, whose formal parameters, if flexible, are nevertheless well-established. In film criticism, on the other hand, uncertainty about the status of the apparently realistic objects and scenes shown on the screen has encouraged the notion that film automatically presents an objective reality, 'the world seen without a self' [5] thereby precluding the subjective self-awareness of autobiography. [6] As a result, there is often considerable confusion about how to read and handle films which claim autobiographical status.
It is, for instance, absolutely essential to recognise that the past worlds, so minutely recreated for us on the screen, are in fact entirely subjective. It is not Liverpool in the fifties that Terence Davies shows us, despite the authenticity of the architecture and the nostalgic radio voices, but his Liverpool, the Liverpool of his memory. Autobiographical film does not deal in historical fact, but in subjective reality, and it is important therefore not to be misled by the almost fanatical precision with which directors lovingly and obsessively strive to recreate the world as they saw it.
Malle recounts that, before shooting Au revoir les enfants, he repainted the school in cold shades of blue, not because those were the original colours of the walls, but because he wanted to recreate the essentially bleak world of his memories of occupied France.[7] In defiance of local opinion, Tarkovsky insisted, before making Mirror, on replanting the fields around his childhood home with buckwheat, whose snow-like white flowers had stayed in his memory as one of the distinctive and essential details of his childhood.[8] Detailed childhood memories of surrounding streets and buildings are a significant feature of both Cinema Paradiso and The Long Day Closes; while Boorman took great pains to reproduce precisely the furnishings and wallpapers of his childhood years. All of the directors accord particular attention to costumes, in some cases even insisting on clothes that appear worn and comfortable.
Despite this apparent mimetic precision, what we are shown is still a personal vision, a 'memory realism', which exists not so much to underwrite the historical veracity, as to provide the means of liberating suppressed or half-forgotten dreams, feelings, and concerns. The images confronting us are not, therefore, as Caughie suggests, static exhibits in 'a museum of collective traces'[9] but objects/settings as memory triggers; an integral part of the very processes of remembering.
Here we can begin to see why film constitutes a privileged medium for autobiographical discourse: it can show the viewer the world exactly as the director remembers it, without recourse to the elusive ambiguity of words. Like the others, Tarkovsky recognises that cinema is the only art form which permits the author to create 'an unconditioned reality, quite literally, of his own world'.[10] Within each deceptively real framework, the directors transport us into the subjective reality of their earlier existence, so that we too see it as reality, on their terms.
For instance, in order to recreate the freshness of his childhood view of the world, Davies used devices such as exaggerated shadows and perspectives, railings which curl and twist like living things, and over-sized kerbs and cobbles.[11] The carefully recreated pattern on Boorman's wallpaper was wrong, according to his mother. However, this is irrelevant; what matters is that the wallpaper was true to his childhood memory of it.[12] Davies, and Malle used special filters, whilst Van Dormael over-exposed whole sequences of his film, to recapture the quality of colour, light and atmosphere they remember. There is little point, therefore, in treating such films as documentaries from which to deduce historical truths, and still less in criticising the films for ignoring important contemporary events. The reality they portray is subjective, autonomous and entirely self-contained.[13]
For children, even more than for adults, reality is a blending of fantasy and dream, of things seen in films and read in books, of possibilities and hypotheses which are as real as, or more real than, day to day events (which are relevant only when they impinge directly upon the child's own experience). Given that memory is therefore part truth, part fiction, it is important to recognise the cinema's unique ability to portray all levels and states of reality and fantasy as equally real, enabling directors to adduce the way in which fantasy constitutes an integral and convincing part of a child's world. 'The prerogative of childhood is to move unhindered between magic and oatmeal porridge, between boundless terror and explosive joy.'[14] Not surprisingly, unmarked cutting from fantasy to so-called reality thus emerges as one of the defining characteristics of autobiographical films. It is shown, for instance, in the opening scene in Fanny and Alexander, when the child, alone in an empty flat, hides under the dining table and stares in horror as the comfortingly familiar objects around him gradually assume a sinister life of their own. Similarly, the galleon sailing through Bud's daydream in The Long Day Closes is both overwhelmingly real, and at the same time quite clearly a depiction of a young boy's image of such a ship, based on model kits and adventure stories. The nightmare images of water streaming down walls, of falling masonry, and of the faceless, insect-like mother which confront the young child in Mirror, are all clearly part of the shifting realities which constitute his memory.
What is significant about such recreations of the child's viewpoint is that no judgments or explanations are offered by the remembering adult; even if we are shown an image of the child from what might at first seem to be a third person viewpoint, our vision is on his terms (the spray from the imaginary ship soaks the hair and face of the child whom we observe as he imagines the incident).[15] Within a child's reality, anything can happen, a belief which underlies the entire structure of most of these films. In Fanny and Alexander which, like Mirror, constitutes a particularly complex interweaving of fantasy and memory, Bergman quotes Strindberg: 'Anything can happen, anything is possible and likely. Time and space do not exist. Against a faint background of reality, imagination spins out and weaves new patterns', and this offers a beautiful description too of the filmic worlds we discover through these autobiographical works.
Autobiographical memory is composed of endlessly shifting viewpoints and parameters; it is simultaneously emotional and analytical, a child's vision and an adult's understanding. Once again, it is clear that film is unique in the possibilities it offers for creating these direct, multiple, and even conflicting, visions. The most straightforward way of preparing the viewer for the need to be on the look out for temporal and narrative shifts, is to depict the narrator at different stages in his life. In Cinema Paradiso, Tornatore uses three different narrators, representing Toto (himself), as child, adolescent, and adult.[16] The adult is used to present the flashback structure of the film, and intervenes at various stages, to remind the viewer that the categories are not discrete. In the end, the adult narrator returns in person to the setting of his childhood memories, as an indication that he (the director/narrator) is actually facing up to his guilt at having abandoned his family and childhood friends. Claire Denis also uses an adult narrator in Chocolat, primarily to introduce the initial flashback, but also to provide the adult's evaluation of the remembered past. It is possible that both films use a similar structure because, in each, a physical pilgrimage to the place where the director grew up is seen as a prerequisite for expressing feelings of guilt.
Boorman, whilst not including an adult narrator in Hope and Glory, uses a voice-over at the start, and at certain other moments in the film, both as a distancing technique, and to remind us of the nature of the events we are viewing. Malle's voice intervenes only in the closing shots, admitting that he has continued to be haunted by the events we have witnessed, and providing us with information about the fate of the arrested children and teacher. He is thus introducing into the diegesis events and knowledge that it could not contain, and is further breaking down the barriers between film as fiction and film as documentary. Similar narrative and temporal dislocation is achieved by Tarkovsky when, in Mirror, we hear the voice of his own father reading his poetry. Tarkovsky also includes shots of his mother within the narrative, whilst the role of his mother when young is played by the actress who concurrently plays his wife.
Devices such as the presence of narrators of different ages, and the use of narratorial voice-overs, are not necessarily the main way of creating the necessary slippages, since the camera itself (and this most basic of points seems frequently to be overlooked by critics who maintain that film cannot express subjective narration) is able to create the multiple viewpoints and the distancing irony of the adult gaze. Malle recounts, for instance, that he originally intended to include a voice-over at the start of Au revoir les enfants to describe the despair with which, as a child, he made the journey back to his boarding school at the start of term. However, as the film took shape, he realised that there was little point: the switching viewpoints of the opening sequences, in turn that of the child gazing forlornly out through the train window at the cold and hostile landscape racing past, and that of the adult narrator looking in at the child who is trapped within the rigid structures of the window, isolated by the thick glass, impotently being carried away from his mother and security, say it all.
Truffaut, who stands out for making one of the earliest autobiographical films, was a master of such irony. One has only to think of the way in which, after showing us the rigid and hostile reality of the classroom in Les 400 coups, the camera moves outside the school, and pans downwards, slipping quite quickly past the words 'Liberté,Egalité, Fraternité' which are inscribed on its forbidding facade. The message is probably something the child noticed, but certainly something whose significance he could not have understood. The young narrator is completely imprisoned within an unjust system; the adult narrator recalls and recreates the misery of this situation, but is also able to add his judgmental and ironic comment.
A similar effect, although more laboured, is achieved by Boorman in a scene which cuts together shots of a despotic headmaster preaching patriotism and liberty, and of him caning Billy for having arrived at school slightly late. Such scenes, which already create irony in their internal structure, are further layered since they need to be read within the overall irony of the film's title: Hope and Glory.
Irony is unfailingly present in the classroom scenes which occur in all these films. We identify with the child's misery because we share his or her exaggerated viewpoint, but at the same time the distancing irony of the adult's vision enables us to laugh, even at the sadistic teachers who abuse their pupils verbally and physically. In other words, the genre elicits both our emotional involvement and, at the same time, our objective assessment.
Of course, words too can be used to achieve an ironic duality within films which present simultaneously differing viewpoints. When, in Chocolat, the young France escapes an imposed siesta by climbing out of her bedroom window, one of the servants says: 'Not lying down? You'll go black, and your father will be cross'. In hearing such words, we have to be sensitive both to the child's innocent reaction, and to the guilt the memory induces in the adult narrator.
In fact, the entire world of the child, this painstakingly constructed narrative space we are privileged to share, is itself simultaneously created and subverted by the adult gaze. The child's universe is defined by home, school, church, and cinema. Home is generally a place of refuge, but it is also a source of feelings of guilt and isolation (shown, for instance, in The Long Day Closes, and Hope and Glory , by repeated shots of Bud or Billy sitting alone on the stairs, separated by banisters from the exclusive and incomprehensible adult world). Church appears as a place of puzzling ritual and frightening visions. School, almost without exception, constitutes a hostile universe, peopled by sadistic and all -powerful adults. Cinema alone offers the child a sense of freedom and happiness, and these films abound with references to, and images of, the exotic and thrilling interior of the local cinema. [17] In its unique ability to subvert both temporal and spatial perception, the camera can link the disparate elements of the child's world in such a way as to recapture its essentially claustrophobic atmosphere. In The Long Day Closes, they are fused by slow tracking shots to form a single locus. In Cinema Paradiso, Toto steps from church into cinema in a single cut which accords them the same narrative space. Thus our adult concepts of distance and difference are lost within the narrow confines of childhood.
However, the camera can simultaneously provide adult distance and comment for, unlike the child, it is able to escape this tightly knit universe, and to view it with a sense of perspective. Such an ironic overview is found, for example, in The Long Day Closes, in a sequence where the camera rises up, looking vertically down at Bud, and then executes a single tracking shot from right to left, encompassing Bud, cinema, church, and school, before returning impossibly to its starting point. As effectively as in a drawing by Escher, spatial logic is attacked and destroyed, but the awareness of the impossibility of the shot, which the vertical distancing provokes, is also a comment upon the ultimate impenetrability and self-containment of childhood.
An autobiographical film is essentially a voyage of self-discovery into a half-remembered, half-invented past, but in enabling the director to recreate his or her memories, the film itself becomes part of the process of self-discovery. In other words, the film ensures constant movement between the different identities of the narrator. An example may be quoted from Au revoir les enfants which Malle saw as a means of coming to terms with his guilt at having been one of a group of children whose thoughtless blackmarketeering indirectly led to his friend's arrest. This is a reasoned, adult view of the events. When making the film, he claims to have invented, purely for dramatic effect, a scene in which he glances at Bonnet across the classroom, thus helping the watching Gestapo officer to identify him. Malle recounts how shocked he was to discover that audiences, particularly children, read this scene as an indication that he had been directly responsible for his friend's arrest. He claims that this was not what he intended to say, but adds 'although, maybe that's what I was saying unconsciously'.[18] One possible interpretation is that this incident is actually exposing entirely irrational feelings of guilt that Malle experienced as a child (probably based around the very scene he later 'invents'), and had suppressed, because they were so painful. If this is so, we can see how the film leads the director to a new self-awareness, as well as enabling him to forget the past which had haunted him for so long, and to move on. It is certain that similar experiences affect many of the other directors; autobiographical films become part of the process of redefinition and change, through their reevaluation of the past. As was shown at the beginning of this article, there can be no conclusions, no answers, but what is important is that the questions which are part of the formal content of an autobiographical film, once formulated enable the director to ask new questions, and thus to develop.
This brings us to the final point: the possible link which may be established between personal, essentially individual voyages, and collective journeys. Virtually all the directors quoted in this article have spoken of their surprise on discovering that what, for each of them, had been an intensely subjective exploration, seemed to provoke from viewers everywhere the response that the film showed them their own childhood. Thus the personal eye of the autobiographical camera can serve to enable viewers to see their own memories. Clearly, these films are further united by the particular historic past they share, and by a complex and deep-rooted fund of cultural points of reference. It seems, therefore, unlikely that coincidence alone should account for the increase in the number of autobiographical films being made in Europe in the last decade, or for the enthusiastic response they have triggered in European audiences. Hovering precariously on the edge of an uncertain future unity, Europe faces a period of reassessment and reevaluation. Old national prejudices and suspicions must be admitted and examined honestly before any genuine new relationships can develop; and this is precisely the message of autobiographical film which, by enabling us to accept our past and thus to move untrammelled towards the future, provides a way of assuaging current fears of a loss of personal and national identity. In conclusion, it is therefore evident that cinema, with its unique ability to use reflected reality to 'interrogate the more subjective and inaccessible realms of identity'[19] has an important role to play in the process of redefinition which Europe is facing.
1.
Louis Malle, Malle on Malle (London, Faber &
Faber,1993),p.168
2.
Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the
Cinema (London, Faber & Faber, 1989), p.133
3.
Claire Denis, 'The Film-Makers' Panel', in Screening
Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European
Cinema (London, BFI, 1992), p.67
4.
Andrey Tarkovsky, ibid, p.134
5.
Frank McConnell, The Spoken Seen: Film and the
Romantic Imagination (Baltimore, The John Hopkins University
Press, 1975), p.113
6.
See, for example, Elizabeth W.Bruss's essay 'Eye for I: Making and
Unmaking Autobiographical Film', in which she advocates that, for the
reasons we have discussed, 'There is no real cinematic equivalent for
autobiography', in J.Aulney
(ed.),Autobiography: Essays Theoretical
and Critical (Princeton, University Press, 1980), p.296
7.
Louis Malle, ibid, p.174
8.
Andrey Tarkovsky, ibid, p.132
9.
John Caughie, 'Half Way to Paradise', in Sight and
Sound, May 1992, pp.11-13
10.
Andrey Tarkovsky, ibid, p. 176
11.
Pat Kirkham and Mike O'Shaughnessy, 'Designing Desire', in Sight
and Sound, May 1992, pp.13-15
12.
John Boorman,'My life in film', Kaleidoscope , a radio 4
interview with John Boorman and Terence Davies, 1992
13.
In 'Half Way to Paradise' (Sight and Sound, May 1992), John
Caughie claims that The Long Day Closes is not strictly
autobiographical because it shows 'the fantasy of memory rather than
the reality of experience' (p.12). A further misunderstanding of the
nature of autobiographical discourse is revealed by his criticism of
the film for its lack of historical awareness: 'History in the shape
of Suez or Hungary or the break up of the left, is almost totally
absent'. (p.13)
14.
Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern (London, Penguin Books,
1988), p.13
15.
A further example of a critic failing to recognise characteristics of
autobiography occurs when Wheeler Winston Dixon, in an introduction
to an interview with Terence Davies, declares that 'Davies resurrects
his memory without really providing either cultural or psychological
inter pretations of the way his family lived.' 'The Long Day Closes:
An Interview with Terence Davies, in Cineaste, xix, Nos. 2-3,
December 1992,p.20
16.
Narrators of different ages are also included in Toto the
hero, a film which is semi-autobigraphical in that it portrays
the death of the narrator. By definition, autobiographical films must
be open-ended, since they are, as we have seen, part of an on-going
process.
17.
Another defining characteristic of autobiographical film is that it
constitutes both a homage to cinema, and an exploration of the
cinematic development of its author. It is therefore obvious that the
cinema will be accorded a central role within the narrative. This
aspect, which I do not have time to develop here, accounts for the
tight intertextuality of such films.
18.
Louis Malle, ibid, p.181
19.
Duncan Petrie, 'Change and Cinematic Representation in Modern
Europe', in Screening Europe, p.3