First person Jewish / Alisa S. Lebow.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lebow, Alisa.

Series:

Visible evidence ; v. 22.

Visible evidence ; v. 22

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jews in motion pictures.

Jewish motion picture producers and directors.

Documentary films--History and criticism.

Documentary films.

Autobiography.

Identity (Psychology) in motion pictures.

Stereotypes (Social psychology) in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

xxxiii, 203 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2008]

Summary:

Documentaries have increasingly featured the first person, with a number of prominent filmmakers finding critical and commercial success with this intimate approach. Jewish filmmakers have particularly thrived in this genre, employing it to explore disparate definitions of the self in relation to the larger groups of family and community.

In First Person Jewish, Alisa S. Lebow examines more than a dozen films from Jewish artists to reveal how the postmodern impulse to turn the lens inward intersects provocatively (and at times unwittingly) with historical tropes and stereotypes of the Jew. Focusing her efforts on Jewish filmmakers on the margins, Lebow analyzes the work of Jonathan Caouette, Chantal Akerman, and Alan Berliner, among others, also including a discussion of her own first person film Treyf (1998), made with Cynthia Madansky. Applying a multidisciplinary approach to first person films, Lebow shows how this form of self-expression challenges both autobiography and documentary and, in the process, changes the art of cinema and records the cultural shifts of our time.

Contents:

Memory once removed: indirect memory and transitive autobiography in Chantal Akerman's D'Est

Reframing the Jewish family

A treyf autocritique of autobiography

Ambivalence and ambiguity in queer Jewish subjectivity

Conclusion: a limit case for Jewish autoethnography.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-193) and index.

"Selected filmography of Jewish diasporic first person documentaries": pages 195-197.

ISBN:

9780816643547

0816643547

9780816643554

0816643555

OCLC:

191760095