Now you hear it, now you see it. Silence and Trauma in Autodocumentary Film

Abstract

Although trauma and memory have been a focus of cultural studies for more than twenty years now, few scholarly works focus on medium-specific representations of trauma and even fewer comment on the tendency of trauma representations to be autobiographical in the twenty-first century. Since it was established as a genre in the 1960s, the autobiographical documentary has flourished due to the increased accessibility to recording equipment offered by technological advancement. The present paper will analyse two autodocumentaries, namely Sarah Polley‟s Stories We Tell (2012) and Chantal Ackerman‟s No Home Movie (2015), both of which represent the death of the filmmaker‟s mother and its aftermath. However, while Polley‟s autodocumentary was well-received by the audience, Ackerman‟s personal documentary was seen as an improper representation. I aim to investigate the context of creation for both films and how their form made these representations of trauma successful and unsuccessful, respectively.

Keywords

• address
• autodocumentary
• media
• silence
• trauma