Preface

Summary

The impetus for this volume emerged out of a symposium that took place in 2008 at the University of Toronto, conceptualized by Angelica Fenner under the title “Autobiographical Non-Fiction Film: The German Context” and hosted by the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures, with additional funding from the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, and the Cinema Studies Institute. Drawing together ten scholars and two filmmakers from Germany, including Hito Steyerl, with whom a memorable interview was also conducted, the event posed a vital opportunity for culturally contextualizing contemporary trends in personal filmmaking. Building on this momentum, the ensuing launch of an edited anthology in collaboration with Robin Curtis, at that time of the Freie Universität Berlin and now at the University of Düsseldorf, afforded a venue for showcasing scholarly approaches to theorizing the autobiographical mode through the dual specificities of medium and culture.

We would like to thank Jim Walker, editorial director at Camden House, for his enthusiastic support of the project throughout a gestation lengthier than with many such volumes, as a result of the cross-cultural terrain navigated. We would also like to thank research assistants Béla Jász-Freit and Viola Steiner-Lechner, who compiled the extensive filmography, and Christin Bohnke, who assembled the index. Contributors hailed equally from the European and North American arenas, necessitating nuanced editorial attention to clarity of language, to terminology, and to the complexities of cultural perspective at various stages of each manuscript’s evolution. As coeditors collaborating across two different continents, we also navigated disparate academic calendars as well as distinct approaches to the editorial process. From these unique conditions, a multifaceted collection has emerged that foregrounds questions of geography, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, family heritage, and not least of all, historical experience and historiography. These considerations constitute both potentialities and constraints placed on subjectivity, whose ramifications these essays explore amid the increasing mediatization of the autobiographical mode.

Finally, the cover photo, a self-portrait of Swiss filmmaker Peter Liechti drawn from his film Hans im Glück was provided by and is used with gracious permission of his production company, following his unexpected death in April 2014 just as this volume was going to press.