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Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions Michelle Citron |
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A powerful and personal exploration of the line between truth and fiction, by a celebrated filmmaker. Two decades ago, a father gave his daughter shoeboxes stuffed with old home movies. The daughter, a filmmaker, appropriated these family images, folding them into a film about mothers and daughters. The film, in turn, infiltrated the life of the family, creating a crack through which seeped the sexual secrets of three generations of women. In this sharply observed and visually rich book, Michelle Citron, one of the most influential independent woman filmmakers of our time, explores the life that surrounds an artist's work, its inner surprises, and the necessary fictions that shape it. Using essay, memoir, fiction, and images drawn from her family's home movies, Citron creates a series of moving narratives (even literally--one chapter is also a flip book). She tells the story of her vital and fraught relationships with her strong-willed mother and grandmother; her transformative, near-fatal illness; life with the woman who has been her partner for twenty years; and her slow realization of the sexual abuse that marked her childhood. The book concludes with the scripts of two of Citron's best-known films, Daughter Rite and What You Take for Granted, works that resonate with and extend the themes of this book. Citron uses a series of leitmotivs that surface, disappear, and resurface: class, sexuality, incest, power, the transcendence of art, the role of the filmmaker, the ethics of autobiographical work. Hers is an account of an artist's growth and development. But here are also the lacerations of class mobility, the life-shaping power of the unspeakable, and the exquisite web of family ties. Throughout, she tests "the sly, fictitious nature of memoir against fiction's hard nugget of truth," creating a book that both reveals and challenges this important genre. "Citron's writing style is graceful, introspective, and accessible. Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions is itself a document of a process of self-revelation that is ongoing. It is a mark of the quality of Citron's work that this process does not come to seem cloying or narcissistic, or therapeutic in a merely personal sense. She uses her own psychic journey as an exemplary tale, a narrative of self-invention that testifies to injustice and addresses it." —Feminist Studies “Michelle Citron, an award-winning filmmaker, has written a uniquely powerful book called Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions. In this brave memoir she narrates her reconstruction of her life upon coming to grips with childhood incidents of incest at the hands of her grandfather. As is fitting, her book is both narratively and cinematically oriented as she pairs her spare, honest prose with stills from some of her own childhood home movies. The result is nothing short of an agonized and illuminating cross-genre deconstruction of childhood myth and fantasy, representation, and objectivity.” —The Georgia Review Michelle Citron is an award-winning independent filmmaker who has received grants from the NEA and NEH. She is a professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University, where she is also director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts. 1999 recipient of commendation from the Kovacs Book Award 216 pages | illustrated throughout | 7 x 10 | 1998 |
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$20.00 Paper