PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Dowmunt: Tony | UK

A Whited Sepulchre:

a contemporary video travel diary contrasted with a colonial Victorian written diary: work-in-progress on the place of the first person moving-image narrative in an investigation of (colonial and post-colonial) history.

"This country is clothed with luxuriant vegetation, and strikes you from a distance as being bright green. If Sierra Leone is the white man's grave, it is certainly a whited sepulchre, very fair to look upon outside. However before long I shall have plenty of opportunity of seeing whether there is anything particularly foul within the fair exterior."

So wrote my great-grandfather, on arriving as a young Lieutenant in the British Imperial Army in Sierra Leone in the 1880s. When I was a teenage boy I found his hand-written diaries in an old bookcase, in a dark corner. Two of the vellum-bound volumes covered his time in Africa. They are both a detailed account of his daily life as an army officer and a frank record of his initial, brief questioning, then whole-hearted embrace of the racism underpinning British colonial rule.

               My great-grandfather (in 1898),            my grandfather,           and me (1957).                       

This presentation will feature a first edit of a video which will draw on the stories of two journeys: my great-grandfather’s account in his diaries of his posting to Sierra Leone and some of the things he experienced and wrote about there, and my own ‘video diary’ of a trip that I am making this December/January 2004-5, following in his footsteps but seeking a different understanding of Africa and of myself as a white ‘Englishman’.

A WHITED SEPULCHRE is my video diary project with another (written) diary at the centre of it: my great-grandfather’s. These contrasting autobiographical discourses (stretched between two historically situated, divergent but connected subjectivities) will call into question some of the more traditional aspects of the autobiographical form:

lnsofar as autobiography has been seen as promoting a view of the subject as universal, it has also underpinned the centrality of masculine - and , we may add, Western and middle-class - modes of subjectivity. (Linda Anderson: Autobiography (2001) p3)

The presentation will ask whether and how the more personal/confessional ‘video diary’ mode contrasts with the more formal, ‘objective’ tone of the written diaries. However part of this research project will also be the attempt to discover aesthetic strategies within (and beyond) the ‘video diary’ mode that will enable the piece to reveal and represent complex issues of identity formation – my own and my great-grandfather’s. I want to experiment with a video diary form that is about history, as well as the present, and that uses the confessional immediacy and ‘authenticity’ of the video diary, in a context which to some extent also calls it into question, reveals it as another ‘performance of the self’.

The material which I will show will include edited sequences from my Sierra Leone video diary (featuring the places, and descendants of some of the people, my great-grandfather encountered there), inter-cut with family photographs like the ones above. Among the questions/issues the presentation will raise for discussion are:

• How does the video-diary mode deal with binaries such as the public and private, historical/personal, the past/present, memory/actuality?

• And what is the function of the varied aesthetic strategies of video diary making: the 'to-camera' piece; the camera as 'mirror' in the performance of the self; filming of the self and/vs filming others; the effects of shooting diary footage & editing later; and of using stills, music, more 'poetic devices’ with diary footage?

Panel session abstract:

A Proposal for the ‘Writing Practice in/with Audio Visual Production’ Panel

(Chair: Cahal McLaughlin, Media Arts, Royal Holloway University of London)

Tony Dowmunt (AHRB Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts, Goldsmiths)

In our current situation it seems to me unnecessarily polarised, and increasingly irrelevant, to prolong the debate between the two old warring positions - (1) the self-explanatory artefact and (2) the necessary textual component - in relation to moving image research. In  my presentation I will start by outlining briefly these two positions, then go on to discuss two of the main reasons I think we should move the debate on:

1. The things we do as part of our research – filming, writing (academic and creative), reading, speaking, editing, publishing, exhibiting our films - are all material practices involving the deployment of ‘languages’.

1. All cultural production – of which academic research ‘publications’ are but a small, specialist segment – now happens in increasingly electronically ‘converged’ distribution environments (eg – electronic journals) where the distinction between text and image can (at least potentially) be blurred and the singular textual artefact (article, film, book) now exists in complex intertextual relations (eg DVD’s with Directors notes, accompanying documentaries etc). Why should we not expect our own output to be subject to the same pressures and opportunities?

I will try to draw these points out with specific reference to my own AHRB Fellowship on autobiographical documentary which uses a written diary (my Great-grandfather’s) and my own video-diary, partly to look at the distances and similarities between these two forms of autobiographical expression.

At a very simple level I have found it impossible in my research to ‘write’ what I want to say without using illustration, so in my own mind the production of a text becomes almost like making a storyboard: the meaning for me is derived from the linearly ordered interaction between image and text, word and picture – much like it is in film ‘language’ too.

Maybe what we need is not agreement on the ‘correct’ proportion of proportion/ratio of moving image to text in P/R work, but a workable definition of what constitutes research in the first place: eg. a process that has a demonstrable area of enquiry (‘research questions’), a methodology and context, all of which are made clear, as part of the process, to others in the ‘research community’. How this is achieved will vary from project to project, whose deliverable ‘outcomes’ will similarly vary and range across one or more of a variety of media - linear moving image, websites, DVDs and hard copy text – according to the demands of the particular project.   

Tony Dowmunt, AHRB Fellow in the Creative & Performing Arts, Department of Media & Communications, Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London SE14 6NW