FM 455

Painting and photography have traditions of self-portraiture, and writing has the memoire whose stories of a month or a life form self-portraits. Film has a handful of semi-autobiographical films and essays – the work of Ross McElwee (Time Indefinite, Sherman’s March) counts, as do one or two Chantal Akerman films (No Home Movie), and Jean-Luc Godard has been making essay films from the beginning (JLG/JLG and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her are two good ones). Other films might be read autobiobgraphically (Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up), but the idea of the self- portrait hardly exists in film. This course, working with the other media as examples, gives students the opportunity to make two self-portraits: a short, relatively straight profile of themselves as artists, and, thinking of the filmmakers listed and of the photographer Lee Friedlander, of painters from Rembrandt to Warhol, and writers from Joan Didion to James McBride, students will devise film self-portraits of their own.