The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film - Paperback

by Laura Rascaroli (Author)

The Personal Camera is an exploration of an elusive but more and more compelling field: essayistic cinema. The essay film, together with its cognate forms--the diary, the travelogue, the notebook and the self-portrait--is cinema in the first person. It is a cinema of thought, of investigation and self-reflection, in which the filmmaker, instead of withdrawing behind the camera, comes out into the open, to say 'I', to take responsibility, and to address and engage with the spectator within a shared space of embodied subjectivity. Authorial, experimental and radical, essayistic cinema belongs within the lineage of avant-garde and political filmmaking and responds above all to the need we feel today for more contingent, autobiographical, private forms of expression. This study provides a unique insight into an intricate but fascinating field, by engaging with the work of directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alexander Sokurov, Michelangelo Antonioni, Derek Jarman, Federico Fellini, Wim Wenders, Jonas Mekas and Agn s Varda.

Author Biography

Laura Rascaroli is senior lecturer in film studies at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author, in collaboration with Ewa Mazierska, of From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema (2003), The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: Dreams and Diaries (2004), and Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (2006).