“I'VE SPENT A LOT OF TIME LOOKING at these images”: The “Viewing 'I” in Contemporary Autobiographical Documentary

Abstract

I look at three recent documentaries in which the self is framed as an interactive viewer of images that fragment the narratives of these filmmakers' autobiographies. In Agnès Varda's The Beaches of Agnès, Ross McElwee's Time Indefinite, and Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation, the directors' use of and engagement with key images stages the tension between narrative coherence and a non-unified autobiographical self.