커뮤니케이션대학원 졸업논문
자전적 다큐멘터리, 주관성, 수 프리드릭, 콜라주, 페미니즘 영화, 주체, 자기기입, 자서전, autobiographical documentary, subjectivity, Su Friedrich, collage, feminist film, self-inscription, autobiography
본 논문은 수 프리드릭의 실험 다큐멘터리
This thesis examines how the self-enunciation in Su Friedrich’s experimental documentary Sink or Swim(1990) questions and deviates from the predominant mode of selfhood in autobiographical writing. Under varying influences from other areas in art and sociopolitical discourses, autobiographical documentary in the 1970’s had not only unsettled and put to test the limits of objectivity presumed in documentary and journalism but also fostered indeterminate, decentered, and incomplete positions for the speaking subject. As a critique of the myth of family and fatherhood in popular culture, Sink or Swim further problematizes the harmonic relation between the speaking subject and the genre conventions, between the private contemplation and the public discourse. Far from conforming to the premise of a stable, consistent worldview, the subject of autobiographical documentaries are defined by contingency and variability, and Friedrich’s film offers an intricate political account on the necessity of diversified voices in cinematic practices. As one of the pioneering works that redefined selfhood in autobiographical filmmaking in the 1980-90’s, Friedrich proposes fragmented, ambiguous, and paradoxical self-inscription as a mode of writing. In this study, I approach Friedrich’s film as a collage film in order to fully apprehend the aesthetic, rhetorical, and political implications of her treatment of her own voice. I define the main feature of collage as its creative juxtaposition of disparate materials in a manner that displaces contexts, which enables itself to reinstate its representational state and to derive new meanings. In Sink or Swim, the new layers of meaning derived from the collage construction are both self-reflexive and political. In order to analyse the rhetorical aspects and political implications of this methodology, I use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus(1987) as a theoretical framework. In doing so, I illuminate the ways through which the film furnishes the fragmented and displaced subject with political valour. Incorporating rich references from various sources, Friedrich displaces herself from her own unsettling memories and repositions private vulnerability in the social, cultural contexts. It is in this way that her representation of femininity and lesbian identity becomes a critique of the self-assured voice in male-dominated documentary. While tackling a personal theme, Friedrich evokes a mode of self-representation that opens and questions itself.