Ordinary Acts: Performance in Nonfiction Film, 1960-1967

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2005

RESUMO

This dissertation examines the role of individual performers in nonfiction films made in the United States between the years 1960 and 1967. It argues that the concept of performance is a vital component of nonfiction film discourse, one that helps define the relationship between the filmmaking process and the socio-historical world. As part of the world of lived experience, individual performers constitute a privileged subject for nonfiction cinema. More than simple tokens of reality, however, non-fictional actors are active players in the process of representation. They are producers of meaning who share part of the filmmaker s authority. Non-fictional performance appears thus as a form of discursive authority. For all its relevance, the concept of non-fictional performance has nonetheless been repeatedly overlooked in nonfiction film scholarship, in part because staged events seem to contradict the nature of documentary discourse. A performance is, from this perspective, a way of altering or corrupting non-fictional reality. This dissertation challenges mis dichotomy by implicating non-fictional acts in the material recorded by the camera. Drawing from a set of theoretical references that could be generally identified with poststructuralist thinking, it sees non-fictional performance as a creative gesture, one that produces the very reality made available to the camera This dissertation also examines a particular period in the history of American nonfiction cinema. The years between 1960-67 saw the emergence of filmmaking practices in which several of the issues outlined here were played out in intriguing and provocative ways. On the one hand, a new school of documentary cinemagenerally known as direct cinema or cinema véritérediscovered the importance of individual subjects in non-fictional discourse. On the other hand, experimental films, such as those made by Andy Warhol, stretched the limits of documentary discourse by placing the acts staged for the camera at the center of the filmmaking process. Looking at films such as Meet Marlon Brando, Portrait of Jason, and Poor Little Rich Girl, this dissertation treats those performances as a defining feature of American nonfiction cinema from the early and mid sixties.

ASSUNTO(S)

cinema experimental films documentary cinema filmmaking process performances american nonfiction cinema

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