This is a PhD project partly about my class and ethnic background and consciousness: how I have lived them as a white man and a documentary filmmaker, and how they are connected to the ghost of my great-grandfather, who was a soldier in the British Army in Sierra Leone in the 1880s. But it is also a project about autobiographical documentary filmmaking, and is submitted for examination in two main components: the first a video-diary based film (A Whited Sepulchre) in which I investigated the form/genre of the video diary by making one myself - filmmaking as a research method; the second, a text which has an independent relationship to the film - not one of ‘illustration, description or explication’ but hopefully of ‘expansive enrichment’ (Trinh T. Minh-Ha quoted in McLaughlin & Pearce (eds) 2007: 107). A Whited Sepulchre is a video which draws on the stories of two journeys: my great-grandfather’s account of his posting to Sierra Leone, and my own ‘video diary’ of a trip that I made in December/January 2004-5, following in his footsteps but seeking a different understanding of Africa and of myself as a white ‘Englishman’. The (written) textual component maps the intellectual and creative terrain that the project as a whole explores. It includes a survey of first-person and autobiographical film and video making in the context of contemporary media, but also makes a case for writing autobiographically, ranging across my family history before focusing on my own formation both as a white man from a particular class, and as a filmmaker and video-diarist. The text concludes with an argument - at odds with some postmodern orthodoxies - advocating the cultural and political importance of a ‘sincere’ and direct mode of autobiographical address.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:515426 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Dowmunt, Tony |
| Publisher | Goldsmiths College (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://research.gold.ac.uk/11053/ |
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