THE PERSONAL CAMERA

The Personal Camera is an exploration of an elusive but increasingly compelling field: essayistic cinema. The essay film, together with its cognate forms - the diary, the travelogue, the notebook and the self-portrait - is cinema in the first person. It is a cinema of thought, of investigation and self-reflection in which the filmmaker, instead of withdrawing behind the camera, comes out into the open to say ‘I', to take responsibility, and to address and engage with the spectator within a shared space of embodied subjectivity. Authorial, experimental and radical, essayistic cinema belongs within the lineage of avant-garde and political filmmaking, and responds above all to the need we feel today for more contingent, autobiographical, private forms of expression. By engaging with directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Aleksandr Sokurov, Michelangelo Antonioni, Derek Jarman, Federico Fellini, Jonas Mekas and Agnès Varda, this book provides novel answers to some of the seminal questions of cinema: on the nature of the cinematographic experience, on authorship and spectatorship, on the filmic commitment to truth and on the state of subjectivity today.

October 2009
224 pages

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

'A fascinating book. Written with clarity, passion and style, it groups together an indispensible – but all too often overlooked – group of films and auteurs. This study forces us to rethink many old assumptions about subjectivity, documentary and the image, and brings a thoughtful analysis to how the essay film works as a narrative and expositional device.'
- Stella Bruzzi, University of Warwick