Shooting Yourself: Film Diaries
WHEN TALKING ABOUT HIS WORK, Jonas Mekas refused the filmmaker moniker. Instead, he insisted, he was a filmer. A pioneer of what we now term the “diary film,” Mekas made dozens over his career. He rarely used synchronized sound, and his editing style privileged intuitive rather than linear or thematic connections. Particularly with his film work (as opposed to his digital), he shot in bursts, creating a flickering effect, as if loved ones and memories were slipping through his fingers. His film diaries became a tool for self-discovery, a place to journey for a sense of belonging and meaning.
What exactly is a diary film, though? It’s an autobiographical mode of filmmaking that privileges the mundane and emphasizes the filmmaker’s subjectivity. Michael Sicinski, experimental cinema writer and critic, has explained, “The diary or journal has a unique relationship to such cinematic concepts as point-of-view and temporality since the filmmaker is establishing her/himself as the ‘speaker’ of the film, and ‘everyday life’ as the timeframe.” Aside from Mekas, filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda, Anne Charlotte Robertson, and Caveh Zahedi have been associated with the form. Strict distinctions aren’t particularly helpful when discussing diary, a genre as diverse and malleable as the variety of artists who engage with it. What is clear, though, is that those artists
