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[Book] The Personal Camera
Title__ The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film
Writer__ Laura Rascaroli
Publisher__ Wallflower Press
Year__ October 2009
ISBN__ 978-1-906660-12-3
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.
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