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One of the main differences between observational and psychogeographical landscaping is the filmmaker’s degree of intervention: Benning’s careful choice of framings is much less explicit than Keiller’s fictional narratives or Steyerl’s voice-over commentary, but all these elements reveal a gradual involvement of filmmakers in urban space. Autobiographical landscaping develops further this link between subject and object –or sender and message, in the usual terms of information theory– by combining the distancing effect of structural films with the subjective dimension of first-person accounts. In these documentaries, the autobiographical content becomes a key element to decode the meaning of the urban surface, despite the differences established by the way in which the first-person is used.

Prior to the 1980s, cinema was not perceived as a suitable medium for autobiography. Literary scholar Elizabeth Bruss asserted that “there is no real cinematic equivalent for autobiography” because filmmakers could not embody the filmed subject while they were behind the camera or, conversely, they could not film themselves if they were in front of the camera (1980: 296). She criticised early examples of this film practice such as Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947), Joyce at 34 (Joyce Chopra and Claudia Weill, 1974), Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, Fraçois Truffaut, 1959),

8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963) or Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) for their lack of “truth-value”, “act-value” and “identity-“truth-value”, three criteria that have been summarised by Jim Lane as follows:

Truth-value is associated with reference and autobiography’s empiricist claim “to be consistent with other evidence”. Act-value is associated with performance, “an action that exemplifies the character of the agent responsible for that action and how it is performed”.

Identity-value is associated with the conflation of the roles of author, narrator, and protagonist in autobiography and “the same individual occupying a position both in the context, the associated ‘scene of writing’, and within the text itself” (2002: 29).

Since Bruss wrote her article, non-fiction film has undergone a subjective turn that led many film theorists to defend the opposite idea: the existence of mise-en-scène and editing resources capable of overcoming these problems. Philippe Lejeune, for example, pointed out the ability of home movies, film diaries, still photographs and voiceover narration to address the past in a cinematic way (2008: 19); Jim Lane added formal interviews and interactive modes of filming to those resources (2002: 94); Michael Renov reminded us that the filming subject could easily be before and behind the camera at the same time “thanks in no small measure to (…) the mirror and the tripod”

(2004: 232); and finally Gregorio Martín Gutiérrez enumerated up to five markers of subjectivity: “the inclusion of the filmmaker’s own voice, (…) the presence of his body, his gaze bound to the camera’s perspective, [the presence of] documents or objects with his own name, or the indicative nature of certain images, such as recording his own shadow” (2010: 372). One way or another, all these resources fit in with the three levels on which filmmakers can inscribe themselves, as defined by Catherine Russell: first-person voice-over, the origin of the gaze and their body image, to which she added editing choices as an indirect form of identity (1999: 277).

As these categories go beyond what Lejeune termed “the autobiographical pact” –in which author, narrator and character are always the same subject (1989: 3-30)– it is necessary to make a distinction between purely autobiographical filmmakers and those first-person filmmakers who construct a socio-political discourse from their identity. On the one hand, autobiographical filmmakers would be those who strictly fulfil the autobiographical pact, such as Jonas Mekas, Ed Pincus, Ross McElwee, Alan Berliner, Joseph Morder, Alain Cavalier, David Perlov or Avi Mograbi. On the other hand, directors such as Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Werner

Herzog, Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, Joaquim Jordá, Michael Moore, Judith Helfand, Nick Broomfield or Terence Davies should be considered first-person filmmakers, because they “speak from a first person position in the role of witness, and sometimes participant observer, without being centred on the autobiographical self”, as Michael Chanan has explained (2012: 24). There is even a third type of filmmakers, such as Nanni Moretti, Manoel de Oliveira or Guy Maddin, who practise self-fiction, a hybrid genre in which “the identity of the filmmaker is maintained, but the events referred to may be imaginary” (Martín Gutiérrez 2010: 372). Self-fictions can be as fictional as fakes or mockumentaries, but their distance from the discourses of sobriety turns them into “a useful tool to explore what is beyond the appearance of reality” (Catalá &

Cerdán 2007-2008: 17, my translation). Thus, in spite of distorting what is usually understood as reality, these fantasies can be interpreted as a subjective truth that challenges official accounts, because they convey the way filmmakers perceive their place in the world.

The boundaries between these three groups –autobiographical, first-person and self-fiction filmmakers– tend to be ambiguous, because they can change their style from one film to another, but they all are interested in showing the historical world through their own subjectivity. “The documentary maker”, Antonio Weinrichter has written, “sets himself up as a character, as well as an active enunciator, resorts to tactics of identification (…) and filters our perception of the events that are presented” (2010:

276). This subjective turn involves a double movement: first inwards, to the filmmaker’s personality and identity, and then outwards, to his or her historical context, due to the identification between the first person singular and the first person plural proposed by French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy (2000). This idea, according to which there is no individual existence without co-existence with another, has been applied to the non-fiction field by Alisa Lebow, establishing a bridge between the individual and the collective dimension of first-person filmmaking:

The ‘I’ is always social, always already in relation, and when it speaks, as these filmmakers do, in the first person, it may appear to be in the first person singular ‘I’ but ontologically speaking, it is always in effect, the first person plural ‘we’. The grammatical reference reminds us that language itself, though spoken by an individual, is never entirely our own invention, nor anyone else’s. Despite the fact that we believe it to express our individuality, it nonetheless also expresses our commonality, our plurality, our interrelatedness with a group, a mass, a sociality, if not a society. This is as true about the expression of individuality and subjectivity in first

person films as it is in language itself. And that is precisely what I find most arresting and fascinating about first person films. They are quite the opposite, in most cases, of the singular

‘I’; and can even be understood to be a ‘cinema of we’ rather than a ‘cinema of me’” (2012: 3).

Autobiographical landscaping echoes this double movement inwards and outwards by depicting the city as a lived space, using the filmmaker’s personal history in order to represent a collective experience. In these documentaries, directors embody all those residents who negotiate their relation with the places they inhabit every day through an account –their account– that might be interchangeable with someone else’s. In this sense, the two films analysed below, News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1977) and Lost Book Found (Jem Cohen, 1996), combine an observational attitude towards everyday street scenes with a first-person commentary that provides a subjective reading of the images, thereby offering a portrait of life in the city from a collective and autobiographical perspective at the same time. In fact, both documentaries share a similar interest in exploring unusual variations of the first-person commentary: in News from Home, Akerman reads up to twenty letters written by her mother and addressed to her during her 1972 stay in New York; while in Lost Book Found, the narrator, who is not Cohen, tells a fictional story slightly inspired in the filmmaker’s first job when he settled in New York in the 1980s. Therefore, the commentary gives rise to an indirect autobiography in News from Home –because Akerman uses her own voice but not her own words– and a third-person autobiography in Lost Book Found –in which Cohen’s story is told by someone else’s voice.

News from Home: Urban Crisis from the Walker’s Perspective

Chantal Akerman filmed News from Home in the summer of 1976 under the confessed influence of the American avant-garde film (Grant & Hillier 2009: 154-155, Koresky 2009: 1). A year before the New York City blackout of 1977 –the event that would later symbolise the city’s urban crisis– she depicted a cityscape of dilapidated buildings, closed stores, dirty alleys, obsolete infrastructures and graffiti on subway cars [Image 6.1]. The film can then be interpreted as an objective portrait of New York in the mid-1970s, but it is also something else: a hidden family portrait in which the dispassionate reading of the filmmaker’s correspondence creates a distancing effect that turns the cityscape into a state of mind. The contrast between the observational record

of street scenes and the personal implications of such a commentary produces a subjective reading of urban space that reveals the emotional gap between the filmmaker and her mother, thereby giving an autobiographical meaning to the film.

Image 6.1: News from Home, opening shot – an alley in New York City

The urban crisis had a highly negative impact on public space in the 1970s: streets, parks and even public transportation became dangerous places in which people – especially women– tried to spend the least possible time. Despite the open hostility of the city, Akerman decided to keep a “ground-level observational strategy” that Jennifer M. Barker has related to Michel de Certeau’s walker’s perspective (1999: 41). This choice has a feminist background, since the voyeur –the opposite figure to the walker–

has historically been identified with a dominant male figure: its natural habitat – skyscrapers, penthouses, observation decks, etc– are usually occupied by male characters, while the places identified with women –family residences, laundries or schools– remain at street level (Barker 1999: 53, 56). In order to counteract this gender division, Akerman paid particular attention to those spatial practices through which underrepresented subjects, such as women, children and African Americans, appropriated public space: a good example of this logic would be a thirty-second shot of an Afro-American woman who stares at the camera while sitting on a chair outside her

home, an image that claims both women’s visibility and the right to the city of low-income communities [Image 6.2]. The decision to emphasise this kind of non-events through duration is what Ivone Margulies has called Akerman’s ‘hyperrealist everyday’, a way of filming focused on those empty moments usually elided in commercial films:

The label ‘Nothing happens’, often applied to Akerman’s work, is key in defining that work’s specificity – its equation of extension and intensity, of description and drama.

The inscription of subject matter neglected in traditional film tends to involve a corrective thrust, a setting straight of the image bank: if conventional cinema contains too few positive images of women and ethnic or other minority groups, it becomes the realist filmmaker’s task to represent these groups. The inclusion of such ‘images between images’

begets a spatio-temporal, as well as moral expansion of cinema.

This interest in extending the representation of reality reflects a desire to restore a phenomenological integrity to reality (1996: 22).

Image 6.2: News from Home, women’s appropriation of public space

Women filmmakers are often interested in the representation of the everyday as a way to render women’s activities visible, especially those that are socially characterised as banal, mundane or ordinary. Akerman herself achieved worldwide recognition thanks to Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a film made just before News from Home in which she represented a single mother’s domestic routines

through fixed frames and long shots. Such minimalist mise-en-scene serves in News from Home to draw the audience’s attention to transit spaces that are below the threshold of visibility, such as empty alleys, crowded intersections, parking lots or subway stations. There, Akerman attempted to embody all those invisible women who move across the city every day, representing their experience in both objective and subjective terms: at fist sight, her images seem anonymous, because they show “what you see every day when you live there” (Akerman in Grant & Hillier 2009: 154), but they also express her own self as a foreign woman filmmaker, given that they contain information about her attitude towards the filmed space. In this regard, “the construction of the self”, as Barker has suggested, “becomes a spatial issue”:

Through forms of architecture and urban planning, and through forms of being in architecture and urban spaces, subjects of the city write and are themselves written in spatial, corporeal terms. (…) The deep resonance between body and city, between corporeality and ‘city-ness’

(…) allows Akerman to cast her autobiography as a ‘tour’ of this city. By tracing the spaces of the city in which she now lives, for which she has left her family and home town, she seeks herself as a subject (1999: 46, 48).

Akerman’s corporeal relationship with New York takes the form of a travelogue in which her body and her own words are absent both on the screen and in the commentary. Her voice, on the contrary, is heard from the third shot as she reads aloud her mother’s letters, whose text is usually trivial, repetitive and redundant. They all essentially tell the same story –conventional family accounts about work, money, holidays, illnesses and moods, besides motherly advice and comments on the weather–

to the point that their most remarkable feature is the phatic function: the mother constantly asks about the daughter’s new jobs and addresses in New York, claims for news from her and complains about the delay of her letters, simple requests that actually mean, according to Janet Bergstrom, “I love you, I miss you, so please, answer me”

(2004: 181, my translation). Akerman’s fast, cold and detached reading conveys the growing distance between her and her mother, and ultimately erases the original signature of the letters, thereby creating a strange superimposition of roles that Margulies has interpreted as a response to the mother’s complaints (1996: 151).

Taking into account that the mother’s words end up being drowned by the sounds of the city, Akerman’s answer has to be necessarily in the cityscape. Her confusion, loneliness and alienation as a foreigner in New York can be found in the images that

reveal her alien status there: in one of the sequences shot inside a subway car, two men react with clear discomfort when they realise that they are being filmed by a stranger –the first one gets off at his stop and the second blatantly escapes from the camera by changing to another car [Images 6.3 & 6.4]. Their returned gazes emphasise the distance between the filmmaker and the city, to which she does not belong and in which she cannot be recognised by anybody. Accordingly, Akerman’s gaze at New York can be compared with Ziolkowski’s foreign gaze at Los Angeles and Steyerl’s immigrant gaze at Berlin, in which the explicit gap between the perceiving subject –the filmmaker– and the perceived object –the city– establishes a strong sense of defamiliarisation towards the filmed space.

Images 6.3 & 6.4: News from Home, returned gazes inside a subway car

Inside the crowd, however, the filmmaker acts like a female flâneur fascinated by the comings and goings of people, a character that is quite different from its male counterpart, as Maria Walsh has highlighted: “unlike that masculinist discourse, where the flâneur’s vision is both possessed by and possesses the city, here the gazer becomes more and more absorbed by the image of the city” (2004: 193). This is the reason why Akerman focuses on those places where anyone can go unnoticed, that is, “the ‘lived’

spaces of everyday life, with which the city’s residents would be more intimately familiar”, as Barker has described them (1999: 42). For example, there is a sequence made of twelve similar shots of people crossing the street at the geographic centre of Manhattan: the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 46th Street. There, Akerman moves her camera around the four corners of the intersection three times over the course of a day and a night, filming in both the crowded rush hours and the empty night time [Images 6.5 & 6.6]. Such an interest in the act of crossing a street recalls psychogeographical

practices like the static dérive, in which the observer had to spend an entire day without leaving a given place (see Debord 1956: 52). Likewise, Akerman just settled down in that particular intersection in order to let her camera record what happens when people believe that nothing happens, as she also does in subway cars and stations.

Images 6.5 & 6.6: News from Home, the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 46th Street

Images 6.7: News from Home, micro-narratives in a subway station

One of the longest shots of the film simply shows people waiting in a subway station to get on the trains [Image 6.7]. Passengers cross the platform at different paces, hurrying up or killing time, getting on and off trains that suddenly arrive, stop for a few seconds and then they go again, leaving behind a completely different scene. The

unusual length of this shot –nine minutes– captures the real experience of waiting: how many trains and minutes have to pass before a change of view? Gilles Deleuze defined this kind of take as “time-image”, because they entail a more direct representation of time than the “movement-image”, the visual regime commonly associated with mainstream film (1985). The main differences between these two conceptions of cinema have been summarised by Walsh as follows:

In the cinema of the direct time-image, the coordinates of the sensory motor schema of the movement-image are abandoned. Instead of characters being able to extend their perceptions into action, their internal mental states pervade the image, often immobilizing it or causing images to succeed one another by means of false continuity shots, thereby creating what Deleuze calls aberrant movement. (…) In a cinema of the time-image an intensive, infinitely expanding duration or interval suspends action, whereas in the movement-image the interval no longer assures continuity in space and succession in time (2004: 200).

The temporal logic of time-image is used above all in the shots filmed from means of transport, such as private cars, suburban trains and even a boat in the last sequence.

The first carscape, for example, is a ten-minute tracking shot in which the camera remains static inside a vehicle moving up 10th Avenue. From that perspective, the West Side is depicted as a volatile cityscape: streets and buildings follow one another throughout 21 blocks of shop and garage fronts, parking lots, urban voids, parked cars and passers-by [Images 6.8, 6.9, 6.10 & 6.11]. There is only enough perspective in the cross streets to make out some blurred skyscrapers, but the camera avoids landmarks to focus on the experience of driving through the city. The carscape can then be interpreted as a ‘cut’ in the urban fabric similar to Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts, a series of

The first carscape, for example, is a ten-minute tracking shot in which the camera remains static inside a vehicle moving up 10th Avenue. From that perspective, the West Side is depicted as a volatile cityscape: streets and buildings follow one another throughout 21 blocks of shop and garage fronts, parking lots, urban voids, parked cars and passers-by [Images 6.8, 6.9, 6.10 & 6.11]. There is only enough perspective in the cross streets to make out some blurred skyscrapers, but the camera avoids landmarks to focus on the experience of driving through the city. The carscape can then be interpreted as a ‘cut’ in the urban fabric similar to Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts, a series of