2 - The Impertinence of Saying “I”: Sylvia Schedelbauer’s Personal Documentaries

Summary

As a practicing filmmaker, I have had conversations with numerous documentarians over the past decade, and cannot help but get the feeling that the personal or autobiographical documentary has, in some ways, become a convenient form, one which solves several difficult problems that face documentary practitioners today. For one, the problem of “access” is overcome: you no longer have the difficult and patient work of establishing contacts with your subject and gaining their trust, and you no longer have to engage in the tedious process of securing access to certain places, people, or things. And this access comes with fewer of the messy “ethical” issues that seem so fundamental to the sober discourse of documentary film. The self becomes, for many personal documentarians, a last refuge of the authentic, a final place where the language of authenticity can still “responsibly” be used without offense to an “other.”

When thinking about personal documentaries, however, especially examples of the genre that are circulating these days on the international festival circuit, it might be useful to recall Theodor Adorno’s classic, and notorious, line from Part One of Minima Moralia: “In many people it is already an impertinence to say I.” I do not mean to cite this quote as a slight against autobiographical films per se, be they from Germany or elsewhere, but instead as a prompt to rethink, in the broadest possible terms, the historical determinants of the form. This section of Minima Moralia was written in 1944, while Adorno was in exile in the United States, and its implied critique of “many people” was aimed both at Nazi (and perhaps Stalinist) assaults on individual subjectivity as well as at the evacuation of the subject under the weight of the American culture industry and tendentially universalized commodification. Nevertheless, it remains utterly apt for our own historical moment, when the pressures on the human subject and its integrity can only be said to have increased exponentially.