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Autobiographical
videos by American women of the late twentieth century
contribute to cultural archives that include "public"
explorations of "private" spheres. These independently
produced experiments often establish links between print
and electronic media, adapting various forms of
unpublished and published texts. In the crossover to
video exhibition, the writing undergoes strategic
transformations. Frequently drawing on the
autobiographical subjects' personal archives, which may
include diaries, journals, and letters, the videos
represent women looking back on their lives as well as on
personal texts they wrote -- and memorabilia they
collected -- during the periods that their
reflections address. Thus integrating autobiographical
and diaristic genres, the videos also accentuate
intermedia convergences between video and print. In the
process, edited versions of formerly "private" texts
become "public" documents available for public reception
(and inspection). The videos
Flag (USA 1989), by Linda Gibson, and Trick or
drink (USA 1984), by Vanalyne Green, explore such
interplay.[1]
Both videos incorporate childhood diaries into women's
autobiographical narratives so that the mutually
inflecting dynamics of diary writing and videomaking
performed on camera constitute a vital component of the
protagonists' self-portraits. The archival documents that
the videos appropriate, which include the diaries as well
as a range of multimedia texts, contribute to the
blurring of boundaries between "private" and "public"
spheres and help to define the audiences that the videos
target, issues that theorists of women's autobiographical
texts underscore.[2]
At the same time, the archival documents promote
exchanges between the autobiographical subjects and
younger versions of themselves. Produced in
the 1980s during a pre-internet era, the videos exhibit
similarities as well as differences. Flag uses
actors to examine the political transformation of an
African American girl who was born in 1952 to a
middle-class family in the Northeast. Diary entries from
the mid-1960s are used to contrast the girl's beliefs
about patriotism, race, and equality in the United States
with the woman's expanded perspectives. Shifting
attitudes toward the American flag implicate the social
context in which Gibson's changes occur. Trick or
drink stages a one woman performance of the white
videomaker who revisits her past with the aid of diaries
that she kept in the early 1960s when she was a teenager
struggling with the American dream. The child of
alcoholic parents and a survivor of compulsive eating
disorders, Green engages with the teenager's personal
world both to heal herself and to politicize the
personal. Along the way, she forges collective
alliances. In both cases,
postmodern autobiographies take shape while the
storytellers embody subjects who construct multilayered
histories about growing up female in America after the
Second World War.[3]
Like the independent films and videos that Patricia
Mellencamp examines, Flag and Trick or
drink involve Flag
and Trick or drink remind viewers of places off
stage, beyond the spotlight, where other languages are
spoken and other logics endorsed: "private" and "public"
inscriptions commingle. Displayed for audiences of
independent video, the personal archives showcase
materials, such as girls' diaries and family albums, that
generally have been excluded from public forums.
Singularly and collectively, the archives thus gathered
constitute alternative resources on which to draw for
metaphors and (re)constructions of an imaginary. These
cultural resources, which acknowledge the histories of
women and recognize them as addressees, serve as
counterpoints to more exclusive archives or cultural
repertoires, such as that which Michèle Le Doeuff
calls the "philosophical imaginary."[5]
By incorporating personal archives into the narratives,
Flag and Trick or drink also help to
broaden the critical perspectives of scholars who study
women's autobiography. With such an objective in mind,
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson recommend the building of
archives and documentary collections that incorporate
works traditionally considered "'merely personal' and
extraliterary." Examples of such works include "diaries,
letters, journals, memoirs, travel narratives,
meditations, cookbooks, family histories, spiritual
records, collages, art books, and
others."[6] To suggest the
scope of the resources that Flag and Trick or
drink preserve, detailed descriptions of the personal
archives that each video assembles have been included in
the analysis, which explores how personal, social,
spatial, and historical strands may be interwoven to tell
the story of a woman's life.[7]
Flag and Trick or drink demonstrate how two
American women from the same generation approach the
task, undertakings that open up directions for others to
explore further in a range of old and new media. Rather
than point toward a shared feminine aesthetic or suggest
essentialist characteristics related to women's
videomaking -- objectives that Martha Gever
persuasively disavows -- Flag and Trick or
drink encourage viewers to acknowledge differences
among women and their approaches to
discourse.[8]
At the same time, the videos contribute to cultural
archives that comprise autobiographical texts from the
worlds of print, moving images, visual arts, and
hypermedia.[9]
The videos raise questions for future discussions about
the impact that diary keeping during adolescence has on
creative choices later in life and how the diaries, when
saved, inform both the writers' remembrances of the past
and other readers' views of the worlds the young diarists
construct. Autobiographers of the early twenty-first
century who choose to work with their diaries might turn
not to personal archives that have evaded public
inspection, as Gibson and Green have, but to entries they
have posted online for the world to view.[10] Flag
and Trick or drink belong to an independent
tradition of videomaking that has compelled its
supporters to cultivate audiences in diverse cultural and
educational venues while typically receiving only minimal
institutional support. [11]
From the perspective of the mid-1990s, Michael Renov and
Erika Suderburg argue that this often marginalized work
merits critical attention for its potential to expand the
cultural archives of alternative film and video and to
catalyze debate. Neither privileging "video art" nor
positioning video as an autonomous medium with essential
properties, Renov and Suderburg relate the practice of
video to "ongoing cultural, aesthetic, and political
agendas and activities" (xvi-xvii). For their purposes,
independent video production encompasses "single-channel
video, 'experimental' video, broadcast intervention,
cable, interactive video, computer-generated video,
experimental documentary, home video" as well as work
associated with the "video art" canon (xviii). The broad
view that Renov and Suderburg support also takes into
consideration video's capacity to intervene in everyday
life (xix). The areas of investigations they map out
complement analytic frameworks that concentrate on
independent video primarily in relation to the art world.
An integrated approach provides an apt context for the
discussion of Flag and Trick or drink,
which media critics have linked to a variety of cultural,
aesthetic, and political agendas. Gever, who
examines several women's autobiographical videos from the
mid-to-late 1980s, associates Flag and Trick or
drink with the feminist performance art that
flourished during the 1970s in the United States, where
the tapes were produced. She claims that performances in
which women speak for themselves introduce metaphors that
oppose sexist representations of "the mute compliant
female body." In addition to challenging connotations of
femininity that are prevalent in Western culture, Gever
asserts, female performers establish a basis for
alternative modes of representation (234-35). While
associating Flag and Trick or drink with
this tradition, Gever also acknowledges how approaches to
performance have changed. She points out that Flag
and Trick or drink, as well as other tapes
from the period, were made with improved video equipment
during a social era when the home video industry
burgeoned and the production and distribution of
small-format tapes became "part of the social landscape."
Nevertheless, the most significant differences between
women's videos from the 1970s and 1980s, she contends,
have more to do with challenges to realist documentary
traditions than with technological advancements (229-30).
While examining how identity and American culture
intersect, the tapes Gever studies address the problems
of performance and generate a set of critical terms that
she considers feminist. Related to historical and
political issues, the terms include "conceptions of
public and private spheres, the nuclear family, racial
identity, national identity, consumer culture, corporate
power" (227, 241).[12] Issues that
media critics such as Gever, Mellencamp, Julia Lesage,
and Christine Tamblyn raise provide a theoretical context
for the analysis of Flag and Trick or drink
in relation to women's film and video on a broad scale.
Mellencamp, for example, develops an analytical framework
that engages with debates surrounding women and
postmodernism. She identifies strategies of
'heterogeneity' in feminist film and video to refute
theoretical approaches by scholars who elide differences
among and within women. In addition to transgressing
boundaries between private and public spheres, mentioned
previously, feminist strategies that Mellencamp cites
which are pertinent here include addressing women as
subjects, employing collective identifications, and
telling 'stories' rather than sanctioning grand master
narratives (129-31). With regard to developments in the
1980s, when Flag and Trick or drink were
produced, Mellencamp claims that women accentuated the
critical significance of female subjectivity and strove
to become speaking subjects, artists, and writers. At the
same time, a binary model of difference between male and
female expanded to include "racial, cultural, and
chronological as well as sexual
differences."[13] Julia Lesage
examines women's autobiographical videos in which
fragmented consciousness constitutes both a theme and a
major structuring principle.[14]
Instead of working in realist modes, the autobiographers
whom Lesage studies "pursue an epistemological
investigation of what kinds of relations might constitute
the self, using as a laboratory their own consciousness."
The experimental videomakers who produce such works
reformulate relations among psychological, corporeal,
emotional, historical, and familial strands of their
lives (311). Lesage proposes that such explorations often
reveal powerful insights into how society works. In fact,
she claims that a fragmented consciousness may be a
prerequisite for social activism rather than a hindrance
to it (335). One of the four stylistic approaches that
Lesage identifies entails the privileging of voice-off
narration while a panoply of images from personal and
public archives appear on screen. Diaries and letters
sometimes provide source material. Lesage selects
Trick or drink to exemplify this approach
(311-23). Stylistically, Flag employs similar
devices. In both videos, however, a great deal more is
going on than the reduction to "a rigidly fixed
sound/image relation" allows (313). Elements of the video
diary style also come into play, for example, although
excerpts from the adolescents' written diaries are
conveyed retrospectively on a multilayered stage. From
the vantage point of the 1980s, the autobiographical
subjects revive self-inscriptions that they composed in
the 1960s. The young diarists thus become members of the
cast. Moreover, Flag, a performance that involves
actors, experiments with a style that in some ways
resembles the skillfully edited autobiographical fictions
that Lesage describes (312-13). A model of stylistic
hybrids would account for the complexity of the
videos. Tamblyn
discusses hybridity in relation to a video genre that
conflates portraiture and social documentary. The makers
reflect on the world and simultaneously portray
themselves: "by 'looking out,' they are able to 'look
in.'"[15]
Like other texts by women that unsettle generic
conventions, the hybrids that Tamblyn identifies pose
problems to some diagnosticians. According to Celeste
Schenck, feminist reworkings of genre theory --
which often involve "[m]ixed, unclassifiable,
blurred, or hybrid genres" -- have been designed "to
deconstruct the normative (masculine) criteria of genre,
which consign feminine practice to inferior,
idiosyncratic, or debased use of forms."[16] Central to
Tamblyn's analysis is the notion associated with feminist
consciousness-raising of the 1970s that 'The personal is
political.' Touching on issues that Gever also covers,
Tamblyn elaborates: Tamblyn
relates 1970s feminist video performance to the
'narcissistic' video that Rosalind Krauss describes in an
influential essay that was published in 1976. Tamblyn
draws connections between the state of video technology
during the 1970s and the genre that Krauss proposes
(406).[17]
Accordingly, while recognizing theoretical shifts that
problematized realist documentary conventions, Tamblyn
connects advancements in video technology that occurred
in the 1980s, notably lightweight cameras and accessible
postproduction editing equipment, with the hybrid genre
that she identifies. Unlike much of the earlier, low-tech
performance video, which focused primarily on the
artists' bodies and used minimal editing and camera
movement, many videos that women made in the 1980s
involved extensive postproduction editing and questioned
the transparency of representation, features that Tamblyn
emphasizes (405-7). The evolving video apparatus, which
encompasses modes of production, distribution, and
exhibition, proved to be well suited for a generic hybrid
that supports "the feminist project of constructing
alternatives to the dominant dichotomous patriarchal
world view" (417). Both Flag and Trick or
drink, which were made during the period Tamblyn
addresses, experiment with the creative and conceptual
possibilities that portraiture and social documentary
afford.[18] From the
vantage point of the mid-1990s, Tamblyn proposes that
videos by nonprofessional consumers who use camcorders,
like videos by artists and independent makers who use
small-format technology, serve as "vehicles for cultural
intervention" in everyday life. To support her contention
that "consumer video" and "video art" overlap in this
way, she equates home video genres, such as diaries,
family albums, and travelogues, with analogues by women
and men from "the video art canon."[19]
Since she examines artists' videos in detail but refers
to consumers' videos only in passing, commonalities
between "high" and "low" video culture remain speculative
(17). The literary
or written diary, which informs both the artists' and the
consumers' approaches to video diaries, receives only
modest consideration and is unsupported by any
acknowledged sources. Without providing much background,
Tamblyn argues that literary diaries promote interiority
because they are written and read by solitary
individuals. Video diaries, in contrast, encourage social
interaction during both the frequently collaborative
production process and the often communal viewing
experience, Tamblyn maintains (18-19). She does not
consider forms that combine video performance with
written texts, as Flag and Trick or drink
do. Moreover, she fails to consider in any depth what
may be lost with the shift from written to video
diaries. The attention
to audience, however, raises important questions about
the distinctions between private and public social
spheres in videos that involve self-representation and
personal storytelling. Tamblyn reaffirms this point when
she proposes that new forms of intersubjectivity connect
the video artists to their audiences in ways that
eradicate the kinds of boundaries between subjects that
modes of interiority support. She argues that consumer
video technologies, which make comparable experiments
possible on a large scale, facilitate the integration of
such practices into everyday life. According to Tamblyn,
both the artists' videos and the consumers' videos
suggest ways for makers "to reconcile mental space with
the social sphere" (26- 27). Suitable for viewing in
public venues and sometimes on television programs such
as America's funniest home videos (15),
productions by nonprofessionals may resemble artists'
videos in some ways, but the types of interventions that
home videos catalyze warrant a more detailed examination
that Tamblyn offers. Furthermore, since, overall, little
or no postproduction editing is used in the consumer
versions of the video genres she mentions, and sometimes
not in the artists' versions either, she brackets the
concerns about postproduction editing and realist
traditions that she addresses in her article "Significant
others: social documentary as personal portraiture in
women's video of the 1980s," discussed above. Despite the
blindspots in the argument, the analysis makes clear that
"the democratization of video" is underway and cultural
intervention and innovative self-representation may
emerge anywhere. The view of the social landscape that
Tamblyn sketches suggests that boundaries between high
art and popular culture continue to break down in
promising ways. Relatedly, new modes of producing,
distributing, and exhibiting independent videos by
professionals as well as nonprofessionals create
opportunities for various audiences to encounter work
they might miss otherwise. Yet, given the "quasi-obsolete
technology of video" to which Tamblyn refers (13), the
critic lays the groundwork for theoretical considerations
that extend beyond the video apparatus and into the
twenty-first century. Rather than dismiss either artists'
videos or consumers' videos, Tamblyn implies that an
analysis of shared characteristics might prove
illuminating to producers and scholars of the future who
look back on videos from the late twentieth century for
direction. Flag and Trick or drink,
artists' productions that feature girls' written diaries
and archival family albums, demonstrate how boundaries
between high art and popular culture can be broken down
in a single text, thus unsettling the already tenuous
generic distinctions that Tamblyn makes. Moreover, in the
process of staging convergences between writing and video
technologies, Flag and Trick or drink raise
issues that theorists of women's literary autobiography
address. A multimedia perspective broadens the
analysis.[20] Although
Flag and Trick or drink are not video
diaries in the ways that Lesage and Tamblyn define the
genre, the videos nevertheless share certain attributes
with productions that document ongoing lives. At the same
time, Flag and Trick or drink are informed
by diaristic conventions that have applied to girls'
private writing in the age of print. With regard to girls
who have kept diaries, Mary Jane Moffat
states: Writing about
women's diaries, Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia Huff offer a
perspective that relates to girls' diaries as well. They
argue that women's diaries challenge scholars to question
boundaries between private and public and to consider the
consequences that such divisions have on social,
political, and personal levels. Bunkers and Huff also
charge that diaries raise questions about audience and
the interactions between readers and writers, and in this
way call attention to the social and historical contexts
in which the reading and writing take place. Given the
role that gender plays as an analytical category in the
study of women's diaries, Bunkers and Huff reframe
traditional approaches to the genre and pose new
questions as well. Besides rethinking issues such as the
public/private dichotomy, they raise questions that
concern interrelations among race, class, and gender and
ask how the reading of women's diaries contributes to
this inquiry.[22] Margo Culley
both reinforces and challenges generic conventions when
she distinguishes the personal diary or journal from
other forms of autobiographical writing.[23]
According to Culley, the periodic creation and structure
of a diary make unique demands on the reader and the
writer. As she explains, "The writer's relationship to
'real time' and representation of 'time passing' in the
text create formal tensions and ironies not found in
texts generated from an illusion of a fixed point in
time" (220-21). Regarding the authenticity of women's
diaries, she warns that despite their value as historical
sources that provide insights into women's lives, diaries
and journals are verbal constructs that raise questions
about the selection and arrangement of information, real
or implied audiences, and other 'literary' concerns such
as narrative, persona, voice, imagery, and theme. Diary
and journal writers thus are implicated in complex
literary and psychological processes (217). Hence,
whether they are conscious of their actions or not, many
diarists inscribe "a self which is to some degree a
fiction, a construction" (218). These concerns echo those
of theorists and practitioners who examine
autobiographical constructions of the subject that either
by design or default blur the boundaries between fact and
fiction, whether the "personal" texts are edited for the
public or not.[24] As
autobiographical hybrids that integrate video performance
and retrospective diary writing, Flag and Trick
or drink raise issues that resonate with
autobiographical texts in other media, including print.
Focusing on literary forms of life writing, Leigh Gilmore
considers the parallel histories of autobiography and
postmodernism with an emphasis on how the subject has
been theorized. She associates the critical potential of
postmodernism with "an emphasis on the subject as an
agent in discourse, where the subject itself is
understood as necessarily discursive." She suggests that
within this framework autobiographical texts facilitate
the production of cultural identities.[25]
She argues, further, that postmodern debates have
destabilized the foundations of autobiography studies by
calling into question concepts that have been central to
the tradition of autobiography, such as history and
subjectivity. Attention to the relations among
"ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, and differing forms
of representation" also alters the paradigm.
Consequently, texts that formerly would not have been
regarded as properly autobiographical or worthy of
critical attention now interest scholars. Gilmore
stresses that such positions unsettle the Augustinian
lineage of autobiography which naturalizes "the
self-representation of (mainly) white, presumably
heterosexual, elite men" (4-5). The alternative
approaches she discusses not only challenge previous
definitions of the genre but also the theory of genre
itself, which imposes exclusionary standards that support
identity hierarchies (5-9). [26] Other
theorists of women's autobiography also recognize that
the autobiographical subject is a complexly layered
construct and in this way raises issues of particular
concern to women, a view that Bella Brodzki and Celeste
Schenck affirm. Brodzki and Schenck grapple with "the
imperative situating of the female subject in spite of
the postmodern campaign against the sovereign self." They
recommend a provisional way out of the dilemma that
entails taking cues from contemporary theory and not
promoting "a simplistic identification with the
protagonist of the autobiographical text" while also
providing "the emotional satisfaction historically
missing for the female reader, that assurance and
consolation that she does indeed exist in the
world."[27]
Gever, Mellencamp, Lesage, and Tamblyn articulate similar
concerns when, in their own ways, they promote
autobiographical videos that integrate theory and
practice. Writing in the
mid-1990s, Smith and Watson address the prevalence of
personal narratives in everyday life, which are
communicated via diverse means: "on the body, on the air,
in music, in print, on video, at
meetings."[28]
While emphasizing that occasions for such confessional
storytelling are multiple, Smith and Watson compare
personal narrators to the bricoleur. In this role, the
narrators create historically specific personal histories
by assembling fragments of the identities and narrative
forms that the culture makes available (13-14). As
editors of Getting a life: everyday uses of
autobiography, Smith and Watson concentrate on how
consumers from all strata of American culture are eager
both to construct their own narratives and to learn about
the life stories that other people tell (3). Smith and
Watson argue: Moreover,
Smith and Watson claim, both officially sanctioned
autobiographical discourses and personal versions that
subvert authorized views enable consumers "to align the
privatized consciousness with identities credited in the
public sphere and to glimpse and critique the
misidentifications of that alignment" (36). These
disparate personal histories share the common feature of
documenting the storyteller's attempt to "get a life"
(6). Autobiographical narrators thus position themselves
as agents in and of the stories they tell, an element of
control that often appeals to speakers who have stories
to share that have been considered "culturally
unspeakable" (14-15). In the telling of formerly
"unrecited narratives of American culture/s," which may
include "histories of child abuse and spouse battering,
interracial marriage, homosexuality, alcoholism, mental
illness, and disability," the narrators, as witnesses,
reframe what is regarded as speakable and open up new
ways to speak about it (14-15). Autobiographical
narrators, whatever their stories, often connect with
others in new ways as well, especially when their stories
resonate with the stories of people in a compatible group
or "a community of secret knowers" (15). In these ways,
Smith and Watson contend, narratives provide a way to
intervene in postmodern life, and the narrators "can
facilitate changes in the mapping of knowledge and
ignorance, of what is speakable or unspeakable, disclosed
or masked, alienating or communally bonding" (15-16).
Tamblyn contemplates similar interventions when she links
autobiographical home videos to generically analogous
artists' videos that promote new forms of
intersubjectivity between makers and their audiences "
("Qualifying," 26).[29]
Smith and Watson, along with the contributors to the
anthology that they edit, take the next step, however, by
actually examining popular texts across a range of
media. Yet, unlike
Tamblyn who, with respect to video, attempts to bridge
gaps between "high" and "low" culture ("Qualifying," 17),
Smith and Watson reinforce these divisions. They
distinguish between the "backyard ethnography" that they
privilege -- which focuses on "the everyday
practices of autobiographical narrating in America" --
and autobiographical texts that are aligned with "the
'high culture' of published, 'artful' autobiography"
(17). Such distinctions do appear tenuous, though, in a
postmodern culture that encourages "bricoleurs" from all
strata of society to draw on a common multimedia
repertoire for identities and narrative forms. Tamblyn
expresses comparable sentiments when she proposes that
"[c]onsumer video modes also connect the formerly
elite practice of video art with more pedestrian uses of
home video" ("Qualifying," 27). She nevertheless shares
Smith and Watson's concern with how variously positioned
autobiographical discourses prompt interventions in
everyday life that bring like-minded people together
either actually or virtually. This shared concern links
the two inquiries together despite their differing
analytical frames. Both Tamblyn's and Smith and Watson's
arguments prove especially valuable in the analysis of
cultural texts such as Flag and Trick or
drink which overtly exhibit ties to high art and
popular culture without being limited to either side of a
dichotomous cultural divide that enforces social
hierarchies. Michael Renov
also focuses on autobiographical texts that promote new
forms of social interaction in everyday life. More in
tune with what he deems 'literary' approaches to personal
narratives than with approaches he associates with
popular culture, Renov distinguishes the low-end
confessional videos by independent artists that he
examines from "capital-intensive, industrially organized,
mass market cultural commodities, on film or
tape."[30]
He limits his attention to such noncommercial
first-person video confessions in order to account for
the unique dynamics between confessors and their
audiences that artists' productions of this kind support.
He claims that televisual confessions, in contrast, have
been commodified to support the profit orientation of
broadcast television and thus involve dynamics between
confessors and their audiences that warrant another kind
of analysis (82). The list of selected videos that fit
his model includes the three titles that also appear on
Tamblyn's list of exemplary video diaries by
artists.[31]
Whereas Tamblyn considers how home video producers can
continue on a large scale the types of interventions in
everyday life that the artists have explored, Renov
concentrates on how artists' confessional video projects
can function therapeutically for the makers as well as
for the culture at large in a variety of contexts beyond
the art world (97).[32]
Trick or drink appears on Renov's selected list of
video confessions by independent artists (87). While
Flag shares the independent status of Trick or
drink and involves personal disclosures, the video
contrasts with Renov's model of a private
"self-interrogation" or a "ritualized self-examination,"
in which the usually solo performer employs direct
address (88, 97). Rather than reduce either Flag
or Trick or drink to the confessional genre,
such affiliations expand the parameters of the analysis.
The positioning of autobiographical constructs in such
multifaceted contexts supports the interconnected
qualities both of these videos and the lives they
enframe. Linda Gibson,
the videomaker and autobiographical subject of
Flag, relies on actors to recreate a personal
drama within the social context prevalent in America
during the post-World War II, Civil Rights, and Viet Nam
eras. The African American woman who stands in for Gibson
as an adult participates in a dialogue with her younger
counterpart, who is represented by diary entries from
1963 that are read off camera and transcribed on
screen.[33]
The eleven-year-old Gibson reflects on race, cultural
identity, and patriotism. Additional comments from her
high school years pick up where the diary leaves off.
Appropriations of various historical documents, cultural
texts, and personal memorabilia set up powerful
juxtapositions that fuel political debates. Modulated by
the African American woman's expressive dance
performances and the creative activities of a white
flagmaker, the temporally collapsed intrapersonal
dialogues, which take place inside a makeshift artist's
studio, are offset by journalistic interviews outside
with a culturally diverse group of people from the
surrounding community. Designed in this way, the video
enables "Gibson" to participate in both interior and
exterior dialogues that reach audiences the young diarist
could not have imagined. We learn that
"Linda Gibson," an African American girl, was born in
1952, raised in a middle-class family, and lived in the
Northeast. As the narrative develops, the normative
standards that informed her early thinking and writing
are dethroned, even if the social order that promulgated
such norms is not. Through strategic juxtapositions and
counterpoints, the video questions the authority of the
discourses cited and challenges the systems of thought
that keep the discourses in place. The American flag
referred to in the title undergoes symbolic alterations
that parallel Gibson's shifting views about the nation
for which it stands. An elaborate image repertoire
supports the story, which brings together the conflicts
about racial identity that the young diarist expresses
with the pride in her African American heritage that she
exhibits as an adult. Commenting on
the writing of her own autobiography, cultural critic and
feminist theorist bell hooks describes a process that
resonates with Gibson's journey backward and forward in
time. hooks says: The
autobiographical writing enables hooks to recapture the
black culture of her youth and in her mind to rescue the
girl she once was. During the process of writing, this
girl stops being the enemy within, whom the adult hooks
previously had wanted to annihilate so the woman could
"come into being" (159). A similar
transformation takes place in Flag, which the
first diary reenactment sets in motion: This is the
first time I ever really decided to keep a diary. You
will be the only friend I have that I can confide
everything to. For that reason I give you the name I
hold dear, "Heidi." It was my name in German
class.[35] During the
off-camera reading, an illustration of a blonde-haired
Caucasian girl is introduced, suggesting a visual
representation of Heidi, the alter ego and confidante to
whom the diarist addresses her entries. (The image
reappears during later diary readings as well.) Also in
this sequence, an actual woman with features that
resemble those of "Heidi" performs. She holds a notebook
in which she crayons the title "My scrapbook." This woman
alternately poses as historical archivist, flagmaker, and
counterpoint to the African American woman who also
performs on this stage. While suggesting adult versions
of Heidi and Gibson, respectively, these two performers
engage with each other in ways that differentiate the
African American woman from the alter ego the diarist
invented. After
establishing the prominence of the Heidi figure in the
narrative, the video dissolves to a series of photographs
that feature Gibson as a child -- pigtailed and
smiling, celebrating a birthday, posing with Santa Claus,
dressing for Halloween. Intercut with the snapshots we
find video footage of the dancer. She moves
self-assuredly, with dignity. Militantly, she carries an
American flag. Notably engaged in a series of solo
performances, this woman, as a surrogate for the mature
Gibson, engages with the orally rendered diary extracts.
The performance thus associates the voice-off readings
with a racially distinct woman who is vital and strong.
In this way, the performance makes explicit the racial
and sexual identity of the young diary writer as a
politically awakened woman. Like the autobiographical
narrators in stories by twentieth-century black women
that Nellie McKay identifies, Gibson rejects
victimization and acts as a witness against, racism,
sexism, and classism.[36]
Additional sequences reinforce this theme. While
subscribing to the convention of a personal struggle
involving a privatized, confessional itinerary --
aspirations typically associated with autobiographical
writing -- the video also acknowledges the political
dimension of subject formation and the collective
character of self-representation, aspirations not
typically associated with the autobiographical genre
according to Watson and Smith.[37]
Complexly layered scenes that capture various moments in
Gibson's social and psychic life story reveal suggestive
patterns. In one instance, for example, a woman who
speaks off-camera reads alternately from the Girl Scout
Promise and the Pledge of Allegiance. Superimposed over a
shot of the flagmaker while she assembles the historical
scrapbook, text appears on camera that states: "The flag
stands for America." The video then dissolves to a
crayoned drawing of an American pilgrim over which is
superimposed a photo of the young Gibson and footage of
the dancer in the act of pledging. Another dissolve leads
back to the flagmaker. Now, though, she contributes to a
collectively assembled multimedia installation designed
to resemble the American flag. On the designated wall,
she places the drawing of the pilgrim. Other
participants, including the dancer, periodically add
cultural artifacts of their own choosing. This
collaborative version of the American flag recognizes
many voices and many visions, including
Gibson's. The
participants in the group project mime on a small scale
the video's overall agenda -- to construct a
multimedia compendium that unpacks personal and
socio-cultural reserves from previously excluded sources
and thus enriches the cultural archives. Smith and Watson
capture the spirit of this endeavor when they
state: Flag
insistently offsets autobiographical probings with
socio-cultural counterpoints, readily dissolving spatial
and temporal borders. As Gibson wages intrapersonal
battles, territorial boundaries between private and
public spheres collapse. An implicit dialogue ensues
between the diary writer and the woman she becomes, yet
always with reference to social and discursive contexts.
Culley proposes that the tendencies of diary writers to
reread, emend, notate, recopy, and edit their entries
later in time resembles psychoanalytic dialogues "with
aspects of the self," a process which involves "unlocking
mysteries of the human psyche and becoming the occasion
of profound knowledge, growth, and change" (219). From
the perspective of documentary film studies, Janet Walker
and Diane Waldman also discuss the importance of
psychoanalysis, especially with regard to its emphasis on
intersections of the past and the present. This emphasis,
they argue, resonates with tendencies of the historical
documentary "to retrieve a past that is both eminently
tangible and ultimately ephemeral, and to laminate
that past to an equally mediated present and an imagined
future."[38]
Gibson's involvement with comparable processes underlies
the narrative's development as the adult reengages with
the diary writing and the memories that it evokes.
Besides staging intrapersonal dialogues, Flag
re-positions the girl's intimate reflections in a social
context and introduces the diary writing to new
audiences, strategies that acknowledge the political
dimensions of self-representation. Temporal
overlappings and voice-image dynamics mediate the layered
exchange, as in a segment that begins with Gibson's
seventh-grade class photo. All the students are white
except Gibson. Superimposed footage of the dancer
follows. She sits at a student's desk, an older version
of the politically naïve seventh-grader whom we
continue to see, simultaneously, in the photo. The
corresponding audio track begins with chants from a civil
rights protest rally. A woman's voice-off reading of
Gibson's early diary resumes: "I think the flag stands
for something, the United States. Therefore, if you have
no respect for the flag, you're showing a lack of respect
for the country." Angry chants from the rally continue:
"The people, united, will never be defeated. . . ." Soon
thereafter, we see an image of Marilyn Monroe, over which
is positioned a headshot of the seventh-grade Gibson. The
reading of the diary proceeds: "All men are created
equal." The young Gibson's photo fades out and footage of
the dancer, crying, takes its place. A photo of the
pigtailed, smiling young Gibson then reappears as the
diary excerpt concludes: "The concept of all men are
created equal is important to America. Maybe all men are
created equal, but who says they die that
way?" Functioning as
an autobiographical narrative, Flag doubles as a
study of the exclusive socio-cultural system in which
Gibson is situated. Resembling the "out-law" genres that
Caren Kaplan examines, the video renegotiates "the
relationship between personal identity and the world,
between personal and social history."[39]
At the same time, the video involves the type of
"perspectival adjustment" that Watson and Smith
recommend. In particular, Flag contributes to the
long-term project of studying and practicing forms of
"life writing" other than what has been associated with
Western autobiography ("Introduction,"
De/colonizing, xvii). Hence, Flag
explores issues that Watson and Smith address when they
assert: In a complex
manner, then, Flag maps out variants of "Gibson"
while also dispelling notions of a universal human
subject and an undifferentiated collectivity of "others,"
as Watson and Smith might say (xvii). At the same time,
the video introduces into the public sphere voices seldom
heard there and exposes conflicts about identity that
Gibson kept secret for many years. The first
diary entry that acknowledges racial bigotry shifts the
tone of the girl's narrative from self-deprecation in the
face of a dominant white culture to a search for
collective affirmation of another heritage. The diary
entry explains how two white boys followed Gibson while
she was riding her bicycle. The narrator
reads: When the
reading begins we see a medium shot of the flagmaker who
is dyeing fabric. Inserts follow: a high school
graduation photo of the Gibson figure, archival photos,
presumably of Gibson's ancestors. Intercut with the
photos appears dance footage of Gibson's stand-in. She
moves stealthily, the American flag wrapped around her
body. Exterior shots of fire are superimposed briefly
during the sequences. As the diary reading winds down,
the previously inserted photo of Marilyn Monroe
reappears. Gibson's graduation photo is positioned over
Monroe's image, fleetingly this time. The movie star's
image breaks up electronically; Gibson's photo remains
intact. A photo of the black militant Angela Davis
emerges. Gibson's ideological shifts are reinforced by a
later scene in which the teenager's graduation photo is
mounted over Davis's face just as it had been placed over
Monroe's earlier.[40]
The dialogue between the diarist and the woman she is in
the process of becoming reinforces the power of this
shift. For the self-affirmation that the girl demands
comes belatedly, and then only after the woman's
unraveling of a naturalized white mystique that so
strongly had captivated -- and deceived -- the
young diary writer. In addition to
exploring Gibson's changing attitudes toward dominant
white society, the video also inscribes a spatial
framework indicative of discursive politics of the late
1980s. The dynamics of this frame link the interior
setting of Gibson's narrative, an artist's studio, with
exterior shots of the community outside. Besides setting
the performative facets of Gibson's narrative inside an
enclosed artist's studio, Flag relies on
choreographed movement, an art installation, and
experimental music that is ethnically indistinct.
Although these variables evoke associations with the fine
arts, the video also uses techniques from the mass media,
especially toward the end of the piece. Cut away
interviews with people on the street, for example,
appropriate styles from television news reports. The
interviews also introduce a culturally diverse range of
voices and bodies into Gibson's narrative. Rhythmically,
the video fades in and out of the interior studio setting
and the exterior community, often layering one scene over
the other or constructing triptych-like arrangements that
alternately vary the enframing scene. Voice-image
transpositions further bridge distances between "inside"
and "outside," whereby voices from one scene speak over
the other. Flag thus reinforces its "out-law"
status and incorporates elements of cultural
autobiography, which, according to Kaplan, expands "the
borders of life writing to include coalition, the
cooperative activities of people and groups with
different points of view" (132). Such territorial
intermixing not only challenges oppositions between high
art and mass media, but it also helps to broaden the
young Gibson's perspective. The concluding
scene takes place inside the artist's studio, walls now
bare, performers absent, spotlight on a crumpled version
of the American flag, which lies on the floor. By the
time the lights dim, a master narrative has given way to
new versions of old stories and new spaces in which to
tell them. Somewhere in between the private artist's
studio and the public city street "Gibson" finds the
wherewithal to alter her pledges of allegiance and to
seek out new addressees. Transformed, she opens her diary
to others. Like
Flag, the video Trick or drink, by Vanalyne
Green, reactivates youthful diary writing to stage a
performance in which a woman confronts younger versions
of herself. Various personas emerge in both tapes and the
body is inscribed as a socially constructed site of
resistance and discord. To complement readings from the
early diaries, Trick or drink displays the
teenager's personal, multimedia archive, which the mature
Green disinters on camera in a voice-off style. Unlike
Flag, which involves actors who follow the
videomaker's autobiographical script and members of the
community who participate in journalistic interviews,
Trick or drink involves a cast of one in which the
videomaker plays herself. The child of
alcoholic parents and a survivor of compulsive eating
disorders, Green looks backward to move ahead. Along the
way, she explores family secrets and documents her own
compulsive activities, which involve weight and beauty
maintenance during adolescence, bulimic episodes in
college, and possessive relationships as an adult.
Although Trick or drink concentrates on two
distinct periods, setting the first in 1962 when Green is
fourteen and the second twenty years later, the video
self-portrait makes clear that the woman continues to
struggle with ghosts from the past. At the same time, she
finds strength in the diaries to which she once turned
for refuge. Transformed into public disclosures, personal
writing from the two periods contributes to an
autobiographical case study in which the build toward
direct address plays a liberating role. Attention to "who
is making films for whom, who is looking and speaking,
how, where, and to whom" accentuates the interplay
between voice and image in a multilayered and temporally
displaced exchange.[41] While the
mature Green revisits the past and "dialogues" with a
younger version of herself, she enters an insular space.
Archival documents, such as reference materials designed
for teenaged girls circa the early 1960s, suggest social
forces beyond the teenager's nuclear family; yet, the
narrative focuses on the teenager's personal world.
Initially positioned as a disembodied voice off camera in
this one-woman performance, the adult Green re-reads
entries from the teenager's diaries. Later, after a
turning point in the adult's section, Green appears on
camera for the first time. At this point, she addresses
viewers directly. These dynamics implicate features of
the video confession that Renov identifies and suggest
parallels with feminist confessional writing as
well. The way that
Trick or drink engages in confessional discourse
unsettles any one circumscription of the genre and
invites an interdisciplinary, as well as an intermedia,
discussion. Renov, for example, looks "beyond both church
and [psychoanalytic] couch" in his examination of
independently produced, low-end confessional video (81).
He argues for "a uniquely charged linkage between 'video'
and 'confession'" based on the immediacy associated with
portapaks, a feature that allows independent videomakers
and home consumers to produce, view, and exhibit their
work without the presence of technicians or other
intermediaries. Only invited viewers see the video
confession, at least during the production process (81,
84). A central premise of his argument is that "taped
self-interrogations can achieve a depth and a nakedness
of expression that is difficult to duplicate with a crew
or even a camera operator present" (88). As a form of
"self-interrogation" that builds toward direct address,
Trick or drink exemplifies characteristics of the
video confession that Renov posits (87, 97). In other ways,
Trick or drink resembles the confessional subgenre
of autobiographical writing that Rita Felski relates to
the feminist model of
consciousness-raising.[42]
Careful to avoid derogatory implications of the term
"confessional," Felski defines the (sub)genre as "a type
of autobiographical writing which signals its intention
to foreground the most personal and intimate details of
the author's life" and thus introduce private matters
into the public sphere (83), an agenda that Trick or
drink shares. According to
Joan Landes, second-wave feminists who emerged in the
1960s claimed that 'the personal is political' to
challenge myths regarding the family and personal life.
For many, the private sphere represented sites of "sexual
inequality, unremunerated work, and seething discontent."
As Landes explains, consciousness-raising groups and
feminist organisations paved the way for women to engage
in public activism. Divisions between private and public
life became closely linked to problems associated with
sexual subordination. Landes maintains that women broke
the silences of personal life in support of their efforts
to improve the private sphere as well as the democratic
public sphere.[43] These ideas
influenced women in all walks of life, including writers,
artists, and videomakers. Attentive to problems
associated with the private sphere, many women also
considered it a source of creative inspiration that was
valuable to explore. Both Gever and Tamblyn, for example,
discuss how the notion that 'the personal is political'
informed 1970s feminist performance. Besides introducing
metaphors to counter sexist representations of "the mute
compliant female body," as Gever proposes (234), such
performances often experimented with a range of
autobiographical themes that celebrated the private
sphere, a tendency that Tamblyn notes ("Significant,"
406). With reference
to such a social, cultural, and political context, Felski
argues that a central feature of the feminist literary
confession involves the implied relationship between a
female author and a female reader and an emphasis on "the
referential and denotative dimension of textual
communication rather than its formal specificity,"
features that distinguish the confession from "more
consciously stylized and 'literary' examples of
twentieth-century women's autobiography" (83). Trick
or drink has roots in the feminist art movement and a
tradition of videomaking that reaches out to women
viewers, like the confession that Felski describes. The
video experiments with stylized techniques in ways that
resemble the literary examples of women's autobiography
which Felski also mentions.[44] Felski
identifies two main groups of feminist confession. The
first group resembles the diary or journal form, which is
written in the present tense. The second unfolds
retrospectively and synthesizes the author's life
(85-86). According to this model, Trick or drink
represents a hybrid of the two groups in that it
discloses entries from the teenager's diary and the
woman's journal and also allows the autobiographical
subject as an adult to look back on her youth.
Simultaneously, the feminist confession encodes an
audience, as does the video. Felski asserts: Felski
recognizes the tension that the confessor experiences
between a focus on subjectivity and an attempt to
construct an identity that is communal rather than
individualistic (92). Felski does stress, however,
contrary to critics who denigrate the attention to
subjectivity, that within the context of women's history
and the traditional relegation of women to the private
sphere, the public focus on these private matters
provides a welcomed opportunity for critical reflection
(92). Throughout
Trick or drink, tension between the individual and
the collective becomes apparent. Green's encounters with
Alateen, an organisation for teens who have alcoholic
parents, and with Al-Anon, the adult counterpart, provide
striking examples. The encounters also expand the scope
of the audience that the video addresses to include
various forms of addicts and children of addicts.
Moreover, the narrative style of twelve-step programs
offers another model of confessional discourse that finds
its way into the video. Robyn Warhol and Helena Michie,
who analyze twelve-step narratives of recovery, argue
that "recovery and narrative are
indistinguishable."[45] Initially, we
see a mausoleum of still images that have been collected,
organized, and dated. This section represents the
teenager's private world, which has been designed to be
unpalatable. Ill-equipped to control her parents'
addictions or her own attachments to food, a tormented
young women seeks through writing to tame the chaos she
does not understand. Adopting a semblance of social
conformity, she keeps a beauty diary. Methodically, she
records the nuances of a body in revolt. Whether
painstakingly noting the state of her complexion,
establishing corrective imperatives, or admonishing
herself for minor eating infractions, she writes in an
obsessive tone that indicates more is at stake than meets
the eye. Controlling the day by day narrative of her life
in this way, she links bodily preoccupations with writing
and record keeping. Mass produced "progress charts"
reinforce these preoccupations, allowing the young Green
to assign accounts of her body to socially constructed
and labeled grids. The composition of the charts, like
the printed spaces of other diaries for girls and young
women, represents forms of social conditioning that
influence how the young writer constructs her life and
complies with cultural directives.[46] Reference
materials designed for teenaged girls and representations
of these teens circa the early 1960s are highlighted as
Green disinters her personal archives. The opening
segment, for example, begins with the date "1962" and the
heading "Your beauty diary." Inserts follow, which
include illustrated magazine and newspaper articles with
titles such as "Girls grow up," "Tips to help you look
and feel your best every day," and "How to feel
self-confident about menstruation." Photos of Green as a
healthy-looking teenager are included along with her
diligently kept "Progress chart." The chart comprises a
commercially prepared grid that is divided into columns
with titles such as "Complexion analysis" and "Beauty
plan." The camera focuses on selected portions of Green's
handwritten comments, which we see in spaces the form
allots. In the column for complexion analysis, Green's
notations include remarks such as "scarred but clearing"
and "better, but still scabs." In the column for her
beauty plan, she writes, "more washing, better diet,
constant care, no picking, right foods. . . ." During the
procession of Green's archival remembrances across the
video screen, the woman's voice-off readings of the
teen's diary excerpts resound. The young Green's
preoccupation with diet becomes apparent. On 2 January
1962, for instance, the woman recounts: Variations of
these themes recur in subsequent diary
entries. Photographs of
the videomaker as a young woman provide no visible hints
of the turmoil her writing discloses, and other than a
passing reference to her mother's drinking, the writing
avoids references to the familial cause of Green's
suffering. The diary writer looks wholesome, thin, and
well adjusted, and, as the video assemblage of snapshots
and beauty guides implies, she tries hard to fit the
image of the average (white, middle-class) American teen.
On the video stage that supports the performance,
internal tensions become apparent. The harder the
teenager tries to conform, the more frantic her writing
becomes. The diary
entries that accumulate both aurally and on the video
monitor suggest that Green sublimates into her writing
the conflicts she experiences about her family and her
self-image. Examples from a personal diary that Green
kept in 1963 illustrate these tendencies. From a group
photo of Green and other smiling teens, the camera cuts
to an insert of Green's private writing. Starting with a
close-up and then slowly zooming out, the camera frames
madly scrawled text that reads: I HATE
THEM. They're
driving me crazy. I HATE
THEM. While the text
appears on screen, Green reads diary entries that
complement the graphically represented passage and call
into question its meaning, as when she states, "I'm
reading The diary of Anne Frank. Very different
than my diary. Very good. Those stupid raisins. I hate
them. I haven't gone off yet. I hate my
parents. You know why." The voice-off reading
provides a context for the written diary entry that
appears on screen, which could refer to either the
raisins or Green's parents. The diary entries thus allude
to family secrets without disclosing specifics. Writing
provides an outlet for a rage that the teenager cannot
name. As long as
Green keeps the diary private, where the gatekeepers
think it belongs, the writing poses little threat to the
social order. Jacques Derrida identifies the stakes when
he says: Although the
teenager complies with such exclusionary logic, the woman
opts for another approach. She defines "inside" and
"outside" in her own way. With reference to Derrida,
Linda Anderson reframes questions about the genre of
autobiography. Instead of refining the classification,
she asks how the 'law of genre' works "to legitimize
certain autobiographical writings and not others." She
relates the question to Derrida's "larger questioning of
the borders of the text, of what belongs to the 'inside'
and the 'outside.'"[48] Similar
questions may be asked of territorial demarcations
related to private and public social spheres. According
to Shirely Ardener, for instance, notions of boundaries
that classify space reflect how social life is given
shape according to culturally determined rules that
societies generate.[49]
Green explores these boundaries -- and eventually
explodes them -- during the course of the
performance. Territorial commitments shift as the
distinctions that Green makes between private and public
help both to empower and entrap her. For in the act of
diary writing she learns to inscribe a body language that
she can represent nowhere else. Yet, she has no
interlocutors, either. In the teenager's section of the
video, we hear only the disembodied voice of Green as a
woman, uninterrupted by other speakers. She does not
appear on camera visually. Passing through again the
teen's insular world, twenty years later and assisted by
video, Green devises a scenario that exposes her earlier
dissimulation and puts excluded fragments of a life on
display. By confronting the private horrors that society
could not accommodate, Green introduces into public
discourse voices once confined to a hellish room (and
diary) of her own. The archival texts are revived, and
the social forces that threatened the teenager are subtly
unmasked. In the process, components of the archive break
out of encasements that the teenager deemed inviolable.
The time traveler reveals a scene of writing shaped by
voices that society has disavowed and by ready-made
compartments in which to put the silenced voices.
Hélène Cixous imagines a scenario that
relates to the force of Trick or drink: The adult's
section of Trick or drink examines directly the
private horrors that did not fit on the young diary
writer's charts or in the pages of her book. Green begins
with the same time frame as in the first section and uses
a comparatively methodical approach. She also discusses
addictions that she develops later in life, which involve
eating disorders and the relationship with a particular
boyfriend. Strategically positioned appearances of Green
on-camera unsettle the voice-off pattern that dominates
the video performance. The section
opens with an interior shot of a study. We see a
bookcase, desk, and patterns of light that are reflected
on the floor. This is where Green writes. The camera
focuses on this scene while Green reads an excerpt from
her adult journal, continuing the voice-off pattern that
she uses in the teenager's section: From the
vantage point that the passing of time affords, Green
tells the teenager's story differently. Moreover, she
imagines new audiences for her personal writing, unlike
the young diarist who felt compelled to write for
herself. In addition to
privileging retrospective journal entries, the mature
Green adds to her personal archive and provides a social
context for the memories that surface. During the
concluding segment in the household items series, Green
associates white sheets with her mother who wore them "as
she knocked on people's doors at Halloween with an empty
glass saying 'Trick or drink.'" (Hence the video's
title.) On camera we see a fleeting image of someone
masquerading as a ghost with the aid of a white
sheet. Empowering
aspects of Green's private space begin to overtake its
entrapping hold. We glimpse anew the phantasms that drive
the narrator outside the debilitating constructs she has
known. In the segment leading to Green's on-camera
appearance, the adult speaks off-camera to the teenager,
whom we see in photos that alternate with photos of her
parents. Some of the snapshots are misleadingly happy and
other alarmingly abject. In the scenario that unravels,
which Green describes as "a living surrealism," Green's
voice-off periodically incants, "Pretend you are
dreaming." As a belated response to the teenager, the
woman offers support. But the woman, too, wants to
understand, as when she asks, "Why are they talking to
you like that? Why are they laughing at you? Why are they
mad? Don't you have the right to have good parents?"
Finally, Green simply imposes another fantasy: "You are a
good child. You have a good family. You will wake up and
this will end." Her parents' alcoholism underlies the
despair that the anecdotes convey. Unwilling to
sustain an insular space that is dependent on archival
images and haunted by her mother's ghost, Green takes the
power of self-inscription a step further. After
declaring, "This is about trying to get help," she makes
room for new representations of her body in the text.
Green's talking head performances take place on a bare
stage. She assumes stationary poses (a frontal shot at
first, a silhouetted profile later). Green's on-camera
appearances unsettle a pattern that has been established.
Shortly afterward, Lou Reed's singing "The power of
positive drinking" is introduced, an unexpected addition,
since we have not yet heard "outside" voices. Together,
these disruptions impose traces of an order beyond that
of the hermetically displayed still lives that have been
featured so far. The altered
dynamics parallel a shift in Green's mode of address. For
the first time, she speaks to the audience directly, her
image and voice synchronized. Trained by diaristic beauty
charts to represent her own body, she also has learned to
keep such modes of representation to herself, to regard
herself as the addressee. Now she looks at
others. Teresa de
Lauretis's writings on film suggest implications for such
approaches to spectatorial address. She argues, for
example, that the space constructed by a film may be not
only a textual or filmic space of vision but also a
critical space of analysis, "a horizon of possible
meanings which includes or extends to the spectator."
According to de Lauretis, films that address spectators
as women define character, image, camera, and other
points of identification with the "female, feminine, or
feminist" (133). The mode of address, more than
portrayals of women either positively or negatively,
concerns de Lauretis. She asks questions such as "who is
making films for whom, who is looking and speaking, how,
where, and to whom." She regards cinema as a social
technology and encourages others to "articulate the
conditions and forms of vision for another social
subject" (134-35). This process, she stresses, involves
redefining aesthetic and formal knowledge while also
acknowledging differences of women from Woman and
understanding differences among women (136,
146). Mode of
address relates to Trick or drink in two key ways --
the target audience and the performer's gaze. Although
the story involves issues with which women can identify,
Green also reaches out to other addicts, regardless of
gender, and to women and men who have alcoholic parents
or who have been affected by alcoholism in some way. In
fact, Green incorporates into Trick or Treat the
guidelines that she received from Alateen, an
organisation for teenaged children of alcoholics. During
her passage from invisibility to visibility on camera,
she relies on the guidelines again. Once on
camera, Green identifies her affiliation with Alateen and
explains its procedures. The camera cuts from Green to
copies of the guidelines on screen. An important part of
Green's personal archive, the Alateen guidelines, and
those of Al-Anon, its counterpart for adults, also inform
Trick or drink's confessional style and type of
self-disclosure. The Alateen-defined problem that Green
highlights includes the following assertions: We either
become alcoholics, marry them, or both, or find
another compulsive activity such as compulsive
overeating. We judge
ourselves harshly and have a very low sense of
self-esteem. This is manifested in a preoccupation
with 'wrong' behavior and obsessive need for
reassurance. In the
background, Lou Reed's singing accentuates Green's
transition from an insular, private space to a social,
public space. The shift from self-address to direct
address parallels this move. Green turns her gaze away
from herself in an effort to engage with others. Hence,
she acknowledges public reception. She also precipitates
a turning point in the autobiographical narrative. As
Mellencamp might say, she positions herself as a subject
who looks and talks back (130-31). On the stage where
Green performs, however, boundaries between private and
public prove to be more virtual than real. Ghosts linger
and laws break down. She finds comfort in a familiar
passageway. In the last
section of the video, Green, again in a voice-off
fashion, provides a detailed account of her experiences
at a meeting for adult children of alcoholics. The
self-portrait ends there, with Green in a room whose
parameters are defined collectively by its inhabitants,
of which she is now one. In her final voice-off, Green
comments: The
relationships that Green cultivates with Alateen and
Al-Anon, in combination with the affiliations that she
develops with the feminist art movement, suggest how she
resolves tensions between an individual and a collective
identity, tensions that Felski associates with feminist
confession (92) and Warhol and Michie link to twelve-step
narratives of recovery (348). New forms of
intersubjectivity connect Green to her audiences while
she attempts "to reconcile mental space with the social
sphere."[51]
The "self-interrogations" that transpire during the
course of the performance reveal "a nakedness of
expression" typically associated with the type of video
confessions that Renov examines (88). Like other tapes
that he associates with this genre, Trick or drink
aids the confessor's self-understanding and
simultaneously encourages viewers to engage in two-way
communication, forge human bonds, expedite emotional
recovery, and understand "across the gaps of human
difference, rather than simply capitalize on those
differences in a rush to spectacle" (97). As Trick or
drink enters the private homes of its viewers and
participates in public exhibitions, it indirectly
commemorates all the private spaces and smoke-filled back
rooms that compelled Green to write. The video thus
documents the latest transmutation of the teenager's
diary and the horrors stored there. In a move reminiscent
of the ghosts that return to haunt Green, disavowed
voices that she has suppressed return to haunt the
gatekeepers. Along the way, Green positions herself as an
autobiographical subject who moves back and forth between
culturally determined and socially generated
classifications of space.[52]
The renewed mobility between different spheres that the
video documents hints at the type of change Kerstin
Shands imagines when she says: The
performance unsettles "metaphorical and real spaces of
power."[54]
Viewers discover new passageways. Gibson's
Flag and Green's Trick or drink explore how
personal, social, spatial, and historical strands may be
interwoven to tell the story of a woman's life. The
personal archives that the videos showcase are
particularly noteworthy for the inclusion of diaries from
the videomakers' adolescence, which instigate the adults'
remembrances of the past. In the case of Flag, the
diary entries of an eleven-year-old girl disclose
Gibson's reflections on race, cultural identity, and
patriotism in 1963. Writings from high school document
shifting attitudes. To provide a context for the
disclosure of Gibson's thoughts, the video examines the
social milieu of the mid-1960s and its aftermath,
emphasizing the politics of race and protest in the
United States. As if simulating the private space in
which Gibson wrote her early diary, the actor who stands
in for the adult Gibson performs inside a makeshift
artist's studio along with a woman who represents the
white mystique that both captivated and misled the diary
writer. To offset the private, interior spaces which the
video makes public and to introduce a culturally diverse
cast of characters, exterior scenes from the surrounding
community are edited into the narrative. Both on camera
and in a voice-off style over scenes inside the studio,
members of the community express their feelings about the
American flag and social equality. They, too, become part
of the story. Instigated by the musings of an African
American girl, two historical eras thus come together --
the 1960s and the 1980s meet. In the process, discursive
choices that the young diarist made carry over into the
woman's videomaking. Gibson advances from private,
handwritten notes to "Heidi," an imaginary confidant and
alter ego, to independently produced videos for others.
The journey from the first inscription of "Dear Diary" to
the screening of Flag implicates the independent
video movement that enabled the once passive consumer of
media images to produce her own stories. To paraphrase
Smith and Watson, she "writes" herself into history
("Introduction," Women, 5). Green plays
herself in a one-woman performance that brings together
diary notes that she wrote in 1962 and 1963, beginning
when she was fourteen, with journals entries that she
wrote in 1982. Divided into two sections, which might be
subtitled "The videomaker as a young diary writer" and
"The young diary writer as a videomaker," Trick or
drink releases into the public sphere painfully
graphic notes about the personal horrors with which Green
struggled as a teenager and as an adult. The first
section focuses on entries in a beauty diary for young
women that she kept in 1962 but also includes excerpts
from a more traditional diary that she kept a year later.
Preoccupations with her complexion and her weight are
offset by allusions to her alcoholic parents and the
family's inability to comply with the American dream.
Like the young Gibson, she, too, embraces the standards
of beauty that idealized a certain type of white female.
Instead of dealing with conflicts about racial
differences, though, as Gibson does, Green feels
different from dominant representations of young
Americans for reasons related to her parents' alcoholism
and addictive traits of her own. Although Trick or
drink focuses on the teenager's private world of the
early 1960s, the social order beyond the confines of
Green's diary always looms, a presence reinforced by the
disinterment of Green's personal archives, which include
popular articles for young women as well as the beauty
diary itself, which, like the articles, reinforces
cultural notions of what a teenager should be. Media
images of all-American nuclear families contribute
further to the understanding of how the teenager
perceived her place in society. References to Alateen
(and later to Al-Anon, the adult counterpart of this
organisation for children of alcoholics) suggest
collective identifications, as does the type of
confessional performance that Green uses, which has roots
in feminist traditions of the 1970s based on the notion
that "the personal is political." The division of the
video into two historical moments, 1962 and 1982,
introduces spatial configurations to support the
discourses that are associated with each period. During
the course of her time travels, Green makes the
transition from a disembodied, off-camera voice over the
teenager's private world to an on-camera performer who
addresses directly audiences in the public sphere. She
revisits the past to prepare for the future. Attention to
the autobiographical designs of Flag and Trick
or drink provides signposts to both theorists and
practitioners who study women's personal narratives. In
addition to complementing analytical models that critics
and scholars have proffered, constructions that
interweave personal, social, spatial, and historical
strands open up creative directions for autobiographers
to develop further, whatever their discursive medium.
Flag and Trick or drink demonstrate how two
American women from the same post-World War II generation
approach the task. At the same time, the videos
contribute to cultural archives that comprise
autobiographical texts from the worlds of print, moving
images, visual arts, and hypermedia. Such assemblages may
be international in scope, configured according to a
variety of historical periods, and based on
considerations other than or in addition to the subject's
gender. As the
twentieth century draws to a close, Smith and Watson
recognize that "the theoretical grounds" beneath the
study of women's autobiographical practices continue to
shift. They consider ways for scholars to secure the
future of the discipline. In addition to broadening the
parameters of archives and documentary collections, among
other objectives, Smith and Watson encourage scholars to
apply to all autobiographical texts the questions they
have raised in relation to women's texts, with special
attention to intersections among gender and other
components of identity ("Introduction," Women,
38-39, 41). The perspectives Smith and Watson support a
few years earlier in Getting a life: everyday uses of
autobiography represent an attempt to extend such
critiques to the culture at large. Tamblyn also reframes
the parameters of her analysis in the mid-1990s to
acknowledge changes related to her field of inquiry.
Concerned about the "quasi-obsolete technology of video"
and the shifting mediascape that the precarious status of
video portends, she adds to her consideration of the
video apparatus consumers' home videos ("Qualifying,"
13), a move that coincides with Smith and Watson's
expanded view of autobiographical interventions in
everyday life ("Getting," 15-16). Produced in
the 1980s before online multimedia superseded video as
the next frontier and a host of new media technologies
appeared on the scene in the 1990s,[55]
Flag and Trick or drink represent the kind
of autobiographical passageways that artists constructed
during a certain historical period. Amidst changes in the
"public" sphere that preceded the theoretical shifts and
technological breakthroughs to which Smith and Watson and
Tamblyn allude, the videos stage "private" transitions
that women undergo. The narratives hint at routes that
lead not only to a new communications era but one in
which women investigate autobiographical theories and
practices for the twenty-first century. Blurring genres
and experimenting with multimedia approaches to
portraiture, the videos rework autobiographical, as well
as diaristic, conventions. For twenty-first-century
producers who look back on Flag and Trick or
drink, the videos identify what Tamblyn deems "new
spaces for cultural intervention" ("Qualifying," 13).
Thus, in addition to unsettling barriers between private
and public spheres, between high art and popular culture,
and between print and video, Flag and Trick or
drink bridge gaps between videomaking during a
pre-internet era and multimedia production in the age of
the World Wide Web. (To
return to your place in the text, simply click on the
endnote number) [1]
Flag, prod. and dir. Linda Gibson, 24 min., 1989,
videocassette. The video is distributed by Gibson.
Contact her c/o Media Alliance, at WNET/Thirteen, 450
West 33rd Street, New York, New York, 10001,
USA, phone: (212) 560-2929, [2]
For an introduction to theories of women's autobiography,
see Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., Women,
autobiography, theory: a reader (Madison: U of
Wisconsin Press, 1998). For a general introduction to
theories of autobiography that considers feminist
positions, see Linda Anderson, Autobiography: the new
critical idiom (London and New York: Routledge,
2001). The analyses in both books focus primarily on
written texts, although the issues that are discussed
pertain to a range of media. Further references to these
texts appear as page numbers in parentheses. [3]
For an introduction to postmodern autobiographies, see
Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters, eds.,
Autobiography and postmodernism (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). [4]
Patricia Mellencamp, "Uncanny Feminism," in
Indiscretions: avant-garde film, video, and
feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990), 131.
Further references to this text appear as page numbers in
parentheses. For another perspective on women and
postmodernism, see Andreas Huyssen, "Mass culture as
woman: modernism's other," in Studies in
entertainment: critical approaches to mass culture,"
ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1986), 188-207. [5]
Le Doeuff examines "the philosophical imaginary" to
emphasize its gendered presu
15,910 words
Abstract
Introduction
a
transgression of the boundaries between private and
public spaces and experiences, entering with intimacy
the 'public sphere' and unsettling these metaphorical
and real spaces of power through confinement by
looking and talking back.[4]
Background
Women's
autobiographical video
In
the performance video that was influenced by these
consciousness-raising methods, autobiographical
themes, including the exorcism of constraining female
stereotypes in confessional monologues or the
expansion of self-potential through projective
role-playing predominated. . . . By exercising their
right to function as speaking subjects, the feminist
artists who made autobiographical videotapes were thus
using the medium for both aesthetic and political
purposes. (406)
Women's
literary diaries and autobiographical writing
For
all the differences in their individual temperaments,
social circumstances and historical periods, the girl
diarists sound as if they were in conversation with
each other, asking the same question, 'Who shall I
be?' in relationship to love and work.[21]
Social
contexts and confessional mediascapes
In
postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with
getting a life -- and not just getting it, but
sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are,
as well, obsessed with consuming the lives that other
people have gotten. The lives we consume are
translated through our own lives into story. Getting a
life is a necessary negotiation in the everyday
practice of American culture/s." (3, original
emphasis)
Flag
The
longing to tell one's story and the process of telling
is symbolically a gesture of longing to recover the
past in such a way that one experiences both a sense
of reunion and a sense of release. It was the longing
for release that compelled the writing but
concurrently it was the joy of reunion that enabled me
to see that the act of writing one's autobiography is
a way to find again that aspect of self and experience
that may no longer be an actual part of one's life but
is a living memory shaping and informing the
present.[34]
Dear
Diary,
Crucially,
the writing and theorizing of women's lives has often
occurred in texts that place an emphasis on collective
processes while questioning the sovereignty and
universality of the solitary self. Autobiography has
been employed by many women writers to write
themselves into history. Not only feminism but also
literary and cultural theory have felt the impact of
women's autobiography as a previously unacknowledged
mode of making visible formerly invisible subjects.
("Introduction," Women, 5)
Since
Western autobiography rests upon the shared belief in
a commonsense identification of one individual with
another, all 'I's [i.e., universal human
subject/Man] are potentially interesting
autobiographers. And yet, not all are 'I's.' Where
Western eyes see Man as a unique individual rather
than a member of a collectivity, of race or nation, of
sex or sexual preference, Western eyes see the
colonized as an amorphous, generalized collectivity.
The colonized 'other' disappears into an anonymous,
opaque collectivity of undifferentiated bodies. . . .
Moreover, heterogeneous 'others' are collapsed and
fashioned into an essentialized 'other' whose 'I' has
no access to a privatized but privileged
individuality. (xvii)
He
started cutting in near my bike and ramming my back
wheel, all the while shouting: 'Go home, nigger. Get
out, nigger. Fucking nigger, get out.' Heidi, I was
scared at first, but later I wanted to kill
them.
Trick or
drink
It
[the feminist confession] self-consciously
addresses a community of female readers rather than an
undifferentiated general public. This sense of
communality is accentuated through a tone of intimacy,
shared allusions, and unexplained references with
which the reader is assumed to be familiar. The
implied reader of the feminist confession is the
sympathetic female confidante and is often explicitly
encoded in the text through appeals, questions, and
direct address. The importance of the reader's role is
directly related to the belief that she will
understand and share the author's position.
(86)
The
videomaker as a young diary writer (1962)
I've
been tapering off on my food. Instead of five
doughnuts I had one. . . . Oh, I looked back on that
watch your weight chart. I've got to go on a real
diet. Whoa is me. I want to work on my face.
Dear
Diary,
In
order to cure the latter [logos] of the
pharmakon [writing] and rid it of the
parasite, it is thus necessary to put the outside back
in its place. To keep the outside out. This is the
inaugural gesture of 'logic' itself, of good 'sense'
insofar as it accords with the self-identity of
that which is: being is what it is, the outside
is outside and the inside inside. Writing must thus
return to being what it should never have ceased to
be an accessory, an accident, an
excess.[47]
(original emphasis)
When
'The Repressed' of their culture and their
society come back, it is an explosive return, which is
absolutely shattering, staggering, overturning,
with a force never let loose before. . . . Throughout
their [women's] deafening dumb history, they
have lived in dreams, embodied but still deadly
silent, in silences, in voiceless
rebellions.[50]
(original emphasis)
The young
diary writer as a videomaker (1982)
Today,
I want to cover the emotional terrain of a particular
experience. I want to talk about children of
alcoholics. I want to talk about suffering from a
state of walking inconclusion, similar to walking
pneumonia, or carrying an invisible virus that may
flare up at any unexpected moment of weakness. But the
words get swallowed down in me and my hands dislocate
from the alphabetical buttons. The thoughts locked in
my throat don't come from self-pity. Had I known there
were other children, like myself, for whom no one
intervened, other children who saw things that should
have never been seen, perhaps my life would be
different. My experience belongs to a private family
horror known as alcoholism. In this journal there are
ten pages of incomplete attempts trying to live with
the emotional inheritance of my family.
We
live from the viewpoint of victims, and are attracted
by that weakness in our love, friendship, and career
relationships.
What
sickness is this that I am at home in the smoke-filled
back room of the progressive church? . . . How is it
that in such a room I experience the only moments of
complete and unspoken recognition? Finally, I am at
home. Finally, I'm with my family.
Women
have not just been lacking spaces of their own . . .
nor have they always been prohibited to enter
male-dominated public spaces. The basic prohibition
for woman has perhaps been precisely this kind of free
movement between worlds. . . ." [53]
Conclusion
Endnotes
<http://www.mediaalliance.org/hp.contents.html>
(20 August 2001).
Trick or drink, prod. and dir. Vanalyne Green, 20
min., 1984, videocassette. The video is distributed by
the Video Data Bank, affiliated with the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago, 112 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago,
Illinois 60603, USA, 312-345-355 (phone), 312-541-8073
(fax), <http://www.vdb.org/>
(17 August 2001); and Women Make Movies, 462 Broadway
Suite 500, New York, NY 10013, USA, 212-925-0606 (phone),
212-925-2052 (Fax), <http://www.wmm.com/index.htm>
(17 August 2001).
