The documentary genre proposes unique opportunities to explore and depict ‘reality’, attempting authenticity of human feelings and events. “First Person Plural” by Lynn Hershman reveals how effective the documentary film could be. This film provides the natural power of the visual image and gives a “point of view” and a clear persuasive ‘intent’ to the target audience. The uniqueness of modern documentaries is that they teach audiences ‘about how to be a citizen in the real world’ through personal examples and life stories.
The ‘First Person Plural’ is an autobiographical documentary depicting life troubles and grievances faced by a Korean woman during her childhood. In this film, Hershman unveils that a woman’s consciousness and self-identity are shaped by the social environment, family relations, and domestic violence. The notion that women in particular have a more fluid sense of self, developed in their relationship to their family, has become one of the sites of the autobiographical documentary (Barnouw, 1992). The promise of exploration or revelation of a ‘self’ has made an autobiography of immense interest to modern viewers but has also highlighted problems and confusions faced by modern society. Hershman puts both the notions of ‘self’ and ‘life’ under close examination describing the ‘real life’ and ‘real selves’ of the main characters (Aufderheide, 1997). She underlines that in ‘real life’ women are categorized as ‘objects’ by patriarchal cultures, and her autobiography gives an opportunity for many women to express themselves as ‘subjects’, with their own selfhood (Renov 2005). For Hershman, to be ‘a citizen’ means to protect herself from oppression and violence, to become an independent and honest person. Hershman comments: “I always told the truth… for the person I was. But the personas kept fluctuating. They would see things from all sides… and be afraid of all sides” (Hershman 1995). This ‘self’ is a regulating, collecting, disposing of concept. Hershman portrays that by constraining others to speak and to be recorded, a woman realizes and finally possesses her own self. The uniqueness of the documentary is that it records and regulates the rationality of the male and patriarchy. For instance, Hershman depicts that she was a victim of child abuse and family violence. The purpose of this documentary is to reflect upon ethical aspects of the various elements of political culture. The Ethic of resistance together provides a valuable means for reclaiming and revitalizing ethical norms. The autobiography portrays the morals of contemporary society, the collective customs, and the practices of modern culture. She unveils unique standards upon which to evaluate morals (Aufderheide, 1997).
The relations between subjective and objective are evident in this documentary. The subjectivism is found in the personal position of the author and her unique vision of life and reality. Hershman virtualizes reality which bears the hallmarks of ‘the social’ and the kinds of people who are found in social life: it derives from ‘actual reality’ and it is used to manage ‘actual aspects’ of it and ‘actual people’ therein. Moreover, these virtualization processes change not only the relationship between what is real and what is false, but they also have shared perceptions of what this is, and what is real. Virtual systems dissolve the boundaries of the real and the virtual of actual persons that inhabit the world (Barnouw, 1992). Learning about an individual through her personal narrative requires close scrutiny of the language as well as skill in reading between the lines. The resulting information may not be perceived by viewers like a novel, or indeed an autobiography, but it does provide scaffolding for understanding the articulated segments of a life once lived (Renov 2004). For instance, Hershman pays special attention to the importance of detailed knowledge of other people and other classes, the skill of reading situations and behavior so that sarcasm and superiority cannot be disguised behind studied politeness, is conveyed in the documentary. Hershman portrays masochism scenes from her childhood and battery scenes. The interest in autobiography in this broad approach comes from the ways in which autobiography – self, life, writing – both shapes and helps enact self-identities; and the locus of analytic attention is on how this takes place within the construction of notions of selfhood and identity (Cunningham, 2005). The theoretical argument it is connected with proposes that in the historical period before modernity, selves were understood and experienced through sets of interlocking social and kin-based responsibilities and obligations, with notions of interiority and individuation emerging over a period of time and involving a fundamental change to the earlier experience of selfhood. What results is a concern in theorizing modernity around the production of selves with interiorities and authenticities locked in a confessional culture (Cunningham, 2005).
As a woman, Hershman portrays feeling both outrages at her mistreatment and mortification. Hershman teaches the audience about class and gender as autonomous but interacting systems of power and family relations. Feminism offers a distinctive vantage point from which to view these concerns, highlighting the gendered constructions of self they typically assume, and the ethical and political consequences of such assumptions (GÓmez-PeÑa, 2000). For Hershman, the centrality of the idea that women’s voices have been silenced to feminist concern with autobiography raises issues concerning the relationships in which the narrator is embedded. Hence the second section of this volume focuses on subjectivity, a term with at least a two-fold meaning (Stubbs, 2002). It may be used to refer, on the one hand, to the relationship between personal narratives and the public stories available within popular culture, and, on the other, to the relationship between the narrator and the audience.
The documentary events are filtered through a person’s awareness, itself not uninfluenced by a history of private experience, by all sorts of aspirations, frustrations, and yearnings. The director has her own purposes to consider, her own experiences; she has gradually accumulated manners of hearing and remembering, of listening to tapes, based on notions of what she is meant to do professionally. Hershman picks and chooses her way through a narrative sequence that might be titled in various ways. She says: “When I was small, there would be these episodes of batterings and I would go up to my attic and retreat into other personas, into other people that had a voice since I had lost my own” (Hershman 1995). Within this context, the female narrative is seen as separate and optionally additional generic components. Such an emphasis on human particularity includes the ups and downs of life, even events in that life that seems to have nothing to do with the objectivity of the world of Korea and America (Stubbs, 2002).
In sum, this autobiography can be defined as text which develops the life story and specific traits; produces a system of formal and structural recurrences as well as the stress on the social self, The documentary is not self-indulgent but a real narrative of life and the role of a citizen in modern society. This documentary produces a reference to socio-symbolic discourse and the social imaginary through which culture, by means of language and maps presented in autobiography.
Bibliography
Aufderheide, P. 1997, Public Intimacy: The Development of First-Person Documentary. Afterimage Vol. 25, Iss. 1, 16.
Barnouw, E. 1992, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. Oxford University Press, USA; 2 edition.
Cunningham, M. 2005, The Art of the Documentary: Ten Conversations with Leading Directors, Cinematographers, Editors, and Producers. New Riders Press.
GÓmez-PeÑa, G. 2000, Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back. Routledge.
First Person Plural. 1995, dir, by Lynn Hershman. Color USA.
Renov, M. 2004, The Subject of Documentary. University of Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Stubbs, L. 2002, Documentary Filmmakers Speak. Allworth Press.