Recollect: Snippets of Self

• Main Author: Nikki Comninos
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Gothenburg 2020-06-01
• Series: Parse Journal
• Subjects: documentary film; autoethnography; punctum; zimbabwe; apartheid; south africa; home video; domestic ethnography
• Online Access: https://parsejournal.com/article/recollect/

This writing explores the place of personal testimony against broader political landscapes of official histories and narratives. It looks at home video footage and family photographs as part of the visual portrait of a curated record of the autobiographical self. I reflect on the process of the making my documentary film, Fraternal, which explores the history and memory of my own family. The film is set against the backdrop of the political situation in southern Africa during the 1980s, when my parents left South Africa and my twin brother and I were born in Zimbabwe, and the 1990s, when my family returned to South Africa after the unbanning of the ANC. The film is predominantly comprised of personal home video footage: a mixture of Super 8mm, Hi8 and DV. The film was employed as a methodological instrument to explore the theoretical landscape where I located my mode of practice in Barthes’s punctum and autoethnography. This writing explores both the film and what emerged from the making of it, how I mobilised the archive and how the film provided an anchor for my own subjective journey into my past and my future.