A Series of Dated Traces: Diaries and Film

Christian Quendler

Biography, Volume 36, Number 2, Spring 2013, pp. 339-358 (Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: 10.1353/bio.2013.0028

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bio/summary/v036/36.2.quendler.html

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 A SERIES OF DATED TRACES: DIARIES AND FILM

CHRISTIAN QUENDLER

Diaries, journals, and notebooks are immensely productive genres of inter-

medial approximation that help us understand and accommodate new media
and innovative media uses. Throughout film history, analogies to diaries and
notebooks have generated new ways of understanding film and contributed to
a great many innovations in filmmaking in diverse aesthetic traditions. One
reason for this may be attributed to the fact that journals often predate or ac-
company a film production. As a genre of exploration and experimentation,
the diary is invoked programmatically in Dziga Vertov’s quest for an absolute
film language liberated from literary, dramatic, or painterly conventions. The
opening credits of his masterpiece and cinematic manifesto Man with a Movie
Camera (1929) frame the film as “excerpts from the diary of a cameraman.”
In the same year, Wilhelm Georg Pabst’s adaptation Diary of a Lost Girl was
praised for introducing a new realism to filmed melodramas by portraying a
diaristic reality.
Journals also played an eminent role in auteur cinema of the 1950s. In
a gesture that appears almost diametrically opposed to Vertov, Robert Bres-
son’s Journal d’un curé de campagne [Diary of a Country Priest] (1951) re-
turns to the early intermedial matrix of literature and film to re-invent cinema
from scratch. The encroachment of the diary on avant-garde films and per-
sonal documentaries has received the most critical attention. Diaristic forms
and testimonial genres informed a number of film movements in the second
half of the twentieth century, including the French New Wave—see espe-
cially Agnès Varda’s early short L’opéra-mouffe [Diary of a Pregnant Wom-
an] (1958)—the British documentary movement Free Cinema, as well as
the autobiographical turn in US avant-garde cinema during the 1960s and
1970s.1 Jim McBride’s movie David Holzman’s Diary (1967) deserves per-
haps a special mention in this historical trajectory, as it absorbed trends in
experimental film at that time and later became a reference point for both
autobiographical documentaries and the mockumentary genre (Lane).

Biography 36.2 (Spring 2013) © Biographical Research Center

340 Biography 36.2 (Spring 2013)

Whether serving as a vehicle of personal reflections or formal innova-

tions, diary formats are frequently exploited to probe new media technolo-
gies. Innovations in recording technologies (digital cameras, camcorders, cell
phones, etc.) are often embraced for new diary effects. When camcorders
became common objects in everyday tourist and entertainment life, for in-
stance, new diary film types involving “lost-and-found” and circulating video
cameras emerged—Richard Martini’s Camera—Dogme #15 (2000), for ex-
ample, or Kirby Dick’s Chain Camera (2001) or Fariborz Kamkari’s Black
Tape: A Tehran Diary (2002).
As even such brief and synoptic glances at film history show, diaristic no-
tions raise central concerns for our understanding of cinema. They address
film as a means of expression while testing intersubjective modalities of vi-
sual technologies and questioning notions of agency and authorship as well
as mediation and authenticity. All this may be seen as evidence for deep con-
ceptual affinities between diary and film, or at least for the crucial role that
diary practices play in exploring film and media as social forms. This essay
argues in favor of both claims. After introducing literary and film theoreti-
cal approaches to the diary as praxis, the second part of this article will take
up Philippe Lejeune’s minimalist definition of the diary as a “series of dated
traces” (179),2 and read it against orthodox and analytical conceptions of film
as an indexical record that, not unlike a diary, traces the present of a past.
Traces are reflexive phenomena. We continually read traces in order to re-
construct an objective world. Traces not only bring this world closer to us,
they—like souvenirs—also serve as means of subjective investment that help
us to sustain emotional relations to this world. Conversely, we routinely trace
or record ourselves in order to discover and develop new expressions of our
subjectivity, which in turn may become part of our repertoire of symbolic
practices. I will discuss this reflexive dimension of traces by comparing testi-
monial discourse of written diaries with diaristic uses of film. After reiterat-
ing Charles Sanders Peirce’s model of sign functions, the third part of this
essay will discuss notions of indexicality from a historical perspective of dia-
ristic writing and filmmaking practices. Indexes may be generally described
as existential markers; their mode of pointing can be interpreted in ethical or
ontological terms. While documentary traces are traditionally associated with
ontological frames that affirm or negate the reality of something, testimonial
frames are typically viewed within ethical frames that deal with intricacies
and vicissitudes of a situated reality. I will conclude my article by examin-
ing experimental diary films that programmatically subvert this alignment of
documentary and ontological issues, on one hand, and testimonial and ethi-
cal issues on the other.
 Quendler, Diaries and Film 341

DIARY PRAXIS VS. DIARY ART

For Lejeune, diaries are above all “forms of praxis, not artistic artworks” (225),
an emphasis that sets diaries in opposition to finished products as well as fic-
tions and fabrications.3 In a similar way, and drawing on Lejeune’s earlier work
on autobiography, the film scholar David E. James has conceived of the diary
as a mode of production. He suggests distinguishing between the “film diary”
as a process and practice, on one hand, and the “diary film” as a product, on
the other. Notably, James’s distinction has another crucial implication that is
congruent with Lejeune’s differentiation between autobiographic and diaristic
discourses. While genres like autobiography and memoirs are forms of social
communication, diaries are better described as forms of personal reflections
that do not include a pact with a reader. Or, as James argues, the diary extends
the relations of identity between author, narrator, and protagonist (which de-
fines the contract with readers in autobiographies proper) to the reader (Power
Misses 125). If the author is also the reader, diaries may assist processes of self-
reflection by providing a means of intuition and representation. Once the di-
ary is introduced to the social world and made available for other eyes, it be-
comes a means of communication. For James, film diaries primarily serve the
former function, while diary films are products of communication that per-
form the latter function. For him, this dichotomy lies at the heart of a number
of personal approaches in avant-garde filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s. He
sees the roots of this productive dichotomy in the influence of Romanticism
and anti-Enlightenment movements of the modernist avant-garde. The ten-
sions implied in the conceptual pair of film diary/diary film (such as process vs.
product, communication vs. non-communication) are characteristic of what
Jacques Rancière refers to as the aesthetic regime in modern art:
In the aesthetic regime, artistic phenomena are identified by their adherence to a
specific regime of the sensible, which is extracted from its ordinary connections and
is inhabited by a heterogeneous power, the power of a form of thought that has be-
come foreign to itself: a product identical with something not produced, knowledge
transformed into non-knowledge, logos identical with pathos, the intentional of the
unintentional, etc. (22–23)

The artistic appropriation of diaristic practices in avant-garde films of the

1960s offers an interesting case study that sheds light on the historical ne-
gotiations of the aesthetic regime and its relation to ethical and representa-
tional domains. I am following Rancière’s tripartite conception of art as be-
ing distributed over ethical, representational, and aesthetic regimes.4 Ethical
relations describe art as socially and culturally situated practice, and qualify
342 Biography 36.2 (Spring 2013)

its social uses and effects (e.g. entertaining vs. edifying, or harmful vs. ben-
eficial). The representational dimension refers to the means and techniques
of artistic expression as a repertoire of formal conventions, which Rancière
relates back to the ancient meaning of art as craft. By contrast, the aesthetic
regime is understood in a distinctly modern sense. It describes a realm of re-
flection and intervention where representational conventions and ethical val-
ues are suspended, interrogated, and negotiated.
The autobiographical turn in avant-garde film of the 1960s gave rise to a
peculiar genre. On one hand, the artistic claim of these films sets them apart
from both documentaries and personal records of so-called home movies.
On the other, the preoccupation with the artist’s biography and everyday-
life experiences discriminates them from fictional and dramatic enactments.
In short, they must be true to life, art but not fiction. This generic differen-
tiation through diaristic practices in avant-garde film turns them into a par-
ticularly rewarding genre for studying the ruptures and negotiations between
ethical, representational, and aesthetic regimes.
To better understand the projection and integration of diary features in
artistic works, it is helpful to begin by examining some constitutive features
that make up diary praxis. Lejeune sees the origins of the diary in practices
of accounting and bookkeeping, in “making a record and dating it” (51). Its
roots in commercial practices spawn a long tradition of spiritual and religious
diaries that organize entries in two columns, recording good and bad deeds,
or victories and defeats in mastering certain virtues. Such practices can be
traced back to ancient techniques of meditation and spiritual hygiene. While
in the Middle Ages such accounts were mainly preparatory notes on wax tab-
lets, and often destroyed after confession, the invention and widespread use
of paper offered more stable means of collecting traces of one’s life, and sup-
ported more complex forms of “personal accounting.” Indeed, we can think
of early personal diaries as material-based reasoning not unlike computations
done with calculating devices. As personal records are held in place and in
stable forms, a new experience of time begins to emerge from this practice.5
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a variety of approaches to format-
ting paper in time became available. Annual almanacs appeared with blank
spaces for each day, usually laid out to keep a balance of housekeeping. Yet,
as Lejeune assumes, “nothing stopped people from recording other things in
them and turning them into journals, or even using them as datebooks, in the
modern sense, by noting down meetings and plans” (59).
This organization of records in time links practices of the diary to a vec-
torization of time, a sense of a progressive and irreversible time that contrasts
to periodical and cyclical notions of time. For Lejeune, such forging of an ex-
istential link with time defines the diary:
 Quendler, Diaries and Film 343

a diary is a series of dated traces [série de traces datées]. The date is essential. The trace
is usually writing, but it can be an image, an object, or a relic. An isolated dated trace
is a memorial rather than a diary: the diary begins when traces in a series attempt to
capture the movement of time rather than freeze it around a source event. (179)

Although writing would appear to be the most common form of recording,

Lejeune’s definition is conveniently media-unspecific and lends itself to il-
lustrating the structural similarities between diary praxis, on one hand, and
serial photography or cinematography, on the other.6 Lejeune’s minimalist
definition of the diary and its abstraction from social and biographical con-
texts seems to match cinema’s own early history of self-definition. In his essay
“Vitagraphic Time,” Garrett Stewart regards the biographical scope in the
names of early film companies and technologies (such as Vitagraph, Muto-
scope, or Biograph) as short-lived misnomers that were soon to be replaced by
the general term movies “as a hedge against recognized serial fixity” (159).

OBJECTS, TRACES, AND EXPRESSIONS

Regarding writing and photographic images indiscriminately as traces is likely

to provoke objections from film scholars and analytical philosophers. For Ken-
dall Walton and Gregory Currie, traces are “in a sense independent of belief ”
and therefore quite distinct from pictorial or verbal testimonies (Walton qtd.
in Currie 286). Our relation to traces, they argue, is not filtered or marred by
intentions, but appears to be somewhat transparent. This straightforward con-
nection between object and trace further qualifies the trace as an unambigu-
ous effect of a past event. In other words, traces do not relate to hypothetical,
imaginary, or future events. Or, as Currie maintains, traces cannot be intrin-
sically misleading. While Currie’s argument follows a clear-headed analytical
logic, his account of the affective impact of traces includes a curious passage:

Traces of things bear particularly direct relations to those things: things leave their
traces on other things. Possessing a photograph, death mask, or footprint of some-
one seems to put me in a relation to that person that a handmade image never can.
(289)

The epistemic and emotional power of traces creates a kind of voodoo effect.
It seems that closeness or immediacy to the material is impressive in a physi-
cal and a psychological sense. We can relate this closeness and immediacy to
the physical properties of the trace and the intentional scope of its mediation,
respectively.
In the case of written documents, the direct availability of material evi-
dence can lead us to include physical aspects in our interpretation. We
344 Biography 36.2 (Spring 2013)

routinely attribute meaning to the format and material organization of a dia-

ry, or investigate handwriting as “psychic fingerprints.”7 As Lejeune remarks,
it was only in the nineteenth century that individual and personal writing
practices emerged from collective writing practices, which did not permit
such a psychology of handwriting styles. The diarists, he claims, “were the
first to lend significance to their handwriting” (286). Parsing through the his-
tory of film theory, we can find similar attempts of conceptualizing cinema-
tography as a kind of reading and writing in psychological and stylistic senses
that regard conventional and idiosyncratic film practices as evolving over time
and in dynamic relations with technological and artistic innovations.8
In classical film theories, critics and filmmakers have variously proposed
to decipher moving images for (inherent) expressive qualities that endow
the object depicted with intentional and emphatic states. The psychoana-
lyst Hanns Sachs, who had served as a consultant for Georg Wilhem Pabst’s
psychoanalytic film Secrets of a Soul (1926), proposed a “Film Psychology”
(1928) that uses film to study small, almost unnoticed “slip actions.” The
phenomenological basis for such psychological film readings may be found
in Béla Balázs’s first book-length theory of film, Der sichtbare Mensch oder die
Kultur des Films [Visible Man, or The Culture of Film] (1924). He regarded
the close-up as a kind of micro-expressionist laboratory where in showing the
intimate face of all living gestures the deepest layers of the soul are revealed
(49). In response to Henri Bergson’s philosophy of life, Jean Epstein argued
that cinema permits a glimpse into the inner life of things, their continuous
mobility, and their entanglement in the flux of time (189).
Although such psychological and phenomenological readings of moving
images surface early in film theoretical writings, personal(ized) forms of film-
ic writing come comparatively late.9 Perhaps such reflections on the condi-
tions and possibilities of filmic perception are better framed as aesthetic pro-
legomena to a general theory of film, whereas programmatic calls for personal
filmmaking often expressed a critique of established or institutionally domi-
nant forms of filmmaking. Notably, critics and filmmakers associated with
the French New Wave cinema have variously placed new personal film styles
in relation to both diaristic practices and amateur film technologies. François
Truffaut envisioned the future of film as “plus personnel encore qu’un ro-
man, individuel et autobiographique comme une confession ou comme un
journal intime” (“even more personal than a novel, individual and autobio-
graphical like a confession or a personal diary” 4). Alexandre Astruc’s auteur-
ist metaphor of the caméra-stylo addresses a number of issues that relate to
cinema as technology, as institution, and as means of expression. He intro-
duces this metaphor to promote a plurality of cinemas apart from the insti-
tutionally dominant format of a cinematic show projected in an auditorium:
 Quendler, Diaries and Film 345

“There will be several cinemas just as today there are several literatures, for the
cinema, like literature, is not so much a particular art as a language which can
express any sphere of thought” (33). Rejecting the prevalent notion of cinema
as “nothing more than a show” (33), Astruc not only favors alternative ven-
ues of filmic exchanges such as bookstores, film clubs, and private gatherings,
but also seeks alternatives to cinema’s predominant mode of representation.
Rather than merely illustrate, moving images should serve as means of expres-
sion and vehicles of thought. His vision of a “new avant-garde” seeks to intro-
duce the achievements of expressionist cinema and experimental montage to
a general, non-specific, non-professional domain of cinema.
Such desire to widen the scope of cinema also idolized the amateur film-
maker. The notion of the film lover as opposed to the professional pervades a
great variety of international film movements in the second half of the twenti-
eth century, and is a recurrent theme in many programmatic writings by avant-
garde artists and filmmakers between the 1950s and 1970s.10 In “A Call for a
New Generation of Film-Makers” (1959), Jonas Mekas builds on the kindred
spirit of the French New Wave, the British Free Cinema, and what he sees
as the achievements of a new generation of American filmmakers that “seek
to free themselves from the overprofessionalization and overtechnicality that
usually handicap inspiration and spontaneity of the official cinema” (74). Like
Maya Deren before him, Stan Brakhage has opposed his notion of the artist
to the expert and the professional in a comparison that contrasts the true lover
with the self-conscious lover, who like (Kierkegaard’s) Don Juan, “tend[s] to
always think of himself as ‘on display’: and if he makes movies, even if only
in his home, he will be known for making a great ‘show’ of it and will imi-
tate the trappings of the commercial cinema” (143). Instead of emulating the
shopworn dramatic schemes of Hollywood cinema, for Brakhage, “any art of
the cinema must inevitably arise from the amateur, ‘home movie’ making me-
dium” (149). Thus, notwithstanding the differences in such calls for personal
documentary, fictional, and experimental films, we can find a common revolt
against associating film with traditional notions of a movie show: whether it
is the cinema as a place or institution, the dramatic mode of showing, or the
show produced as an act of entertainment and cultural communication.
By focusing on expressive bodily and mental states, personal filmmak-
ing contests both the reduction of the moving image to its representational
content and subservience as a means of communication. The (precarious)
attempt to suppress communicative frames is also a defining feature of dia-
ristic practices. Lejeune’s emphasis on trace in conjunction with a dated se-
ries discriminates between diary and autobiography as well as fictional forms.
Traces evoke a sense of presence, which is usually the presence of a past event.
Dating turns the diary entry into a space of enunciation that documents or
346 Biography 36.2 (Spring 2013)

asserts the “presence” of that space.11 In contrast to autobiography or fic-

tion, the diary does not make a pact with a reader but with time. Lejeune is
convinced that in keeping a diary one makes a “mystical alliance with time”
(204). Writing for time in this sense not only means writing in the present
but also writing in the face of what is unknown and unpredictable, which is
why Lejeune opposes the diary to literary fiction: “An imaginary reconstruc-
tion of the present could only be viewed as a lie, or insanity, and would be
difficult to keep up over time” (202). Lejeune’s categorical exclusion of fic-
tional and communicative realms aims at distinguishing the protean genre of
the diary from other fictional and non-fictional genres. However, it is also an
idealization made at the expense of psychological and psychoanalytical com-
plexities. In diaries, the projections of self and others are often embedded in
communicative scenarios that address an imaginary or real other. The line
between self-reflection and communication, like the one between performing
and acting, is frequently tenuous and intricate.

INDEXING LIFE: TECHNOLOGY, ETHICS AND AESTHETICS

Although Lejeune’s reflections on the historical pragmatics of the diary do

not mention Peirce, his existential definition of the diary comes close to what
Peirce conceived of as an indexical relation, complementing symbolic and
iconic sign functions. Whereas symbols are signs established by convention
and icons are founded on resemblance, a sign is indexical when there appears
to be an existential relation between the sign and its object (Peirce 135, 160).
As film theory has long been preoccupied with issues of indexicality, this
notion offers a fruitful ground for conceptually aligning films and diaries.12
Peirce illustrates indexical relations with a number of examples. A man with
a rolling gait is probably an indication of a sailor. A bowlegged man in cordu-
roys, gaiters, and a jacket is likely to be a jockey. A sundial points to the time
of day and a barometer can help us to predict rain. Varied as these examples
are, they all underline the pointing function of the index and show how indi-
ces construe relations across different senses of temporalities (see Peirce 160–
61). While the physiognomy of the sailor is revealing of habits formed in the
past, the jockey’s clothes reveal his current activities. The deictic functions of
sundials, clocks, and barometers range from the present to a (probable) fu-
ture. Gauges like the barometer are particularly interesting because they illus-
trate how material anchors blend with their symbolic context: viewed against
the lines of gradation, the mercury column transforms itself into a syntactic
element in the representation of temperature. Similarly, indices often align
with iconic relations, as illustrated best in photography:
 Quendler, Diaries and Film 347

Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we

know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But
this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such cir-
cumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature.
(Pierce 160)13
Peirce’s example is indeed very instructive, and we may spin it one step fur-
ther by arguing that the iconic relations that rest upon indexicality may them-
selves become the basis for symbolic uses of photographic images.14 By con-
trast, the traces of a written diary represent an inverse case, as such entries are
made of symbolic signs. By having each entry correspond chronologically to
one’s life experience, diaries generate iconic relations that inform the indexi-
cal function of diaries as “existential allegories” (especially if we understand
this phrase as the “enunciated other of one’s being”). Not unlike the annual
rings of a tree, diarists often view completed pages and books as correlations
representative of lives lived.
In short, we can consider diaries and movies as traces of different kinds
(testimonial vs. documentary) and indices of different orders (bottom-up vs.
top-down). When film is defined on a photographic base and understood in
indexical terms it does indeed perform the functions Lejeune attributes to
the date in the diary. Film captures and dates a trace or an imprint of the
past; it points and presents. The differences in order make the pairing of
diaries and movies very productive. It can challenge the idea of photography
as a constitutive indexical base of film, or complicate the seemingly straight-
forward identification of the photographic as indexical. These indexes are
not only different composites of sign functions, but are routinely processed
within different conceptual frames: photographic indexicality is interpreted
in ontological terms, while the indexicality of a diary is examined in ethical
terms.
The indexicality of a diary is above all ethical when the existential relation
traced by the diary pertains to human experience. The date not only docu-
ments the diary’s commitment to time, it also frames the diarist as an ethical
subject, a being situated in time. Yet the diarist’s ethical demands differ sig-
nificantly for someone who writes from temporal distances or in the mode of
historical past tense. In such cases ethical questions concern predominantly
issues of fidelity, truthfulness, and sincerity. How does the writing relate to
the reality it describes? What is the writer’s relationship to the reader? Ethical
questions raised in diaries are less about agreeing or disagreeing with a repre-
sentation of reality (fictional or real) than about the writer’s existence in this
reality (real or delusional). The diarist’s exigency of being thrown into time
looms larger than his or her care for and about a reader.
348 Biography 36.2 (Spring 2013)

The existential question raised by the indexicality of recording technolo-

gies has been answered traditionally in ontological rather than ethical terms,
even though ethical premises indubitably inform the construction, design,
and development of technologies like film and photography. The orthodox
view is that the photographic image does not care for and about the objects
it depicts. Or, as William Talbot puts in a popular account of his invention
of photography, “photogenic drawings” present the object as if it had drawn
itself (23). Another way of arguing how photography avoids ethical questions
is to suggest that the mechanism is pre-programmed and does not evolve
from decision-making processes specific to the recording situation. For the
same reason, ethical questions are discussed mainly in regards to the ways
technologies are employed.
The overall alignment of testimonial expressions with existential and eth-
ical concerns, on one hand, and of technological recordings with representa-
tional and ontological questions, on the other, makes film diaries ideal aes-
thetic exercises in probing the limits of ethical and representational regimes:
under what conditions or from which perspective does the “index of an ob-
jective reality” associated with film converge with “the index of subjective
experience” associated with the diary? I suggest conceiving of such a conver-
gence as the effects of meaningful juxtapositions, and would like to discuss
them by surveying a number of aesthetic strategies that emerged in personal
avant-garde filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s.

ROBERT HUOT’S DIARY FILMS

In the second part of this article, I suggested thinking of filmic approxima-

tions of diary practices as attempts to reconcile two kinds of traces that lie
at opposite ends in a spectrum of testimonial and documentary traces. Or,
as I argued in the previous part, filmic emulations of diaries negotiate differ-
ent orders of indexicality that traditionally have come to be associated with
ethical and ontological concerns, respectively. In both ontological and ethical
readings time plays a key role. As an index of reality, the photographic base
documents instantaneous moments in time. Similarly, diary entries trace the
writer’s movement as a subject situated in time. As progressive and interca-
lated practices of writing that allow for all kinds of feedback mechanisms
between the written and the lived life, diaries offer working models for in-
tegrating film in narrative, expositional, and other representational frames.15
Although diaries come with a low degree of generic constraints, and their
formal openness permits a most heterogeneous discourse, they are in fact,
as Lejeune observes, “methodical, repetitive, and obsessive” (179). In this
 Quendler, Diaries and Film 349

contrast between formal freedom and a regimented writing practice lies the
promise of the diary as a genre of exploration. It provides a direct means of
observation and reflection as well as a stable and enduring object of analysis.
In reviewing all dates and entries, writers and readers may recognize patterns
and rhythms and relate them to a global view of experience and life.
If we think of diaries as practices of (self-)exposure that are geared to-
wards what is unknown and unpredictable, then the notion of control lies
at the core of the diarist’s project. Diaristic practices suspend communica-
tive constraints and an all-encompassing perspective that presents lived life
retrospectively to meet the demands of a specific point of view, place, and
time. Indeed, many approaches to diaristic filmmaking have focused on cur-
tailing the filmmaker’s control as a cinematographer and editor. Sitney has
described Howard Guttenplan as “the most rigorous inventor of self-imposed
constraints for his diary films” (“Autobiography” 103). Guttenplan made a
point not to go out of his normal path to get a particular shot, and aside from
eliminating weak or false moments, refrained from editing his films.
The painter and filmmaker Robert Huot added an innovative twist to the
artistic challenge of working within diaristic constraints. His first three diary
movies, each documenting one year of his life in the early 1970s, share one
condition of filmmaking: One Year (1970) (1971), Rolls: 1971 (1972), Third
One Year Movie—1972 (1973) include all the material shot during their des-
ignated time frames. By including interesting shots along with less interest-
ing ones, Huot hoped to get at the “tissue of reality” (MacDonald, “Robert
Huot” 114). His interest in diaries grew out of a dissatisfaction with the for-
malist and conceptualist fads in the New York art scene. As Scott MacDonald
has pointed out, the first reel of One Year (1970) documents this shift from
a minimalist aesthetic of carefully arranged one-roll shots to a more informal
style of filming that is aesthetically less distanced but also visually less interest-
ing (“Surprise!” 300). This change in style parallels the contents of the film,
showing Huot’s adaptation to his new farm life after his move from New
York City to upstate New York.
Huot himself has described this shift as a radical attempt to reduce the
form of filmmaking to the basic unit of the film roll: “My only awareness of
that sort of thing—of using the single roll as form—was the Lumière brothers”
(qtd. in MacDonald, “Robert Huot” 107). It is tempting to link Huot’s refer-
ence to the beginning of cinema to the emergence of journals and datebooks
as envisioned by Lejeune—if only to highlight the power of material formats
in the evolution and innovation of practices. The appropriation of annual al-
manacs as personal journals draws on the almanac as paper formatted in time.
In a similar way, Huot uses the film roll as a basic unit and format for his diary
350 Biography 36.2 (Spring 2013)

entries, shot on a weekly basis from January to December. One Year (1970)
presents a series of forty-nine, chronologically arranged rolls. Many of them
consist of single shots or appear to be edited in camera. Huot also includes
the flare at the beginning and the end of a roll as visual markers of each entry.
The formal limitations of arranging his entire material chronologically recall
a common problem of published diaries. Although viewers gain intimate in-
sights into Huot’s personal life, and there are filmic moments of surprising
beauty, these come at the price of the film’s length of about 160 minutes (cf.
MacDonald, “Surprise!” 302). In a screening of his film, Huot cut the film’s
length down to forty minutes by simultaneously projecting four reels in two
rows. This projection allowed viewers to contemplate the juxtaposition of cy-
clical and progressive notions of time: the simultaneous, spatial display of the
four seasons in the four quarters of the projections, and the chronological re-
cords of each reel. While the first shows the outlines or perimeters of farming
the land, the second traces Huot’s individual path of experience.
In his next two diary films, Huot explored alternative editing schemes
that formally recreated the unit of the film roll rather than adhere to the for-
mat of an actual roll. In Rolls: 1971, thirteen of twenty rolls are presented in
unedited form. They are preceded and followed by “virtual rolls” that juxta-
pose one-second shots from the remaining nine rolls and additional personal
images from that year. These one-second sequences are arranged according
to a preconceived algorithm inspired by drawdown techniques used in the
pigment industry to match colors. The sequences form, as it were, serial color
palettes where shots from the first roll are compiled in a pattern that would
juxtapose them with shots from the other rolls and additional material:
1 2 3
1 4 5 3 4 2
1 6 7 2 6 3 7 4 6 5 7
1 8 9 2 8 3 9 4 8 5 9 6 8 7 9
1 10 11 2 10 3 4 10 5 11 6 10 7 11 8 10 9 11 . . .

The first six shots show a long shot of a heavy snowfall, a close-up of Huot’s
wife breastfeeding, a medium shot of Huot spoon-feeding his son, another
long shot of a snowfall, a long shot of a summer landscape, and a close-up of
Huot filming himself masturbating in front of a mirror.16
The montage sequences can be seen as indexes that periodically cut
through the film. Even though the pattern is too complex to serve as a table
of contents, these sequences point to and expose the contents of the film.
Through their recurrence they draw the viewers in and involve them in
guessing which shots will be elaborated into entire rolls, and perhaps also in
 Quendler, Diaries and Film 351

which order. As Huot introduces other miscellaneous material towards the

end of these sequences, the patterns emerging are not entirely congruent with
the film’s structure, but include a number of surprises and ventures into the
unknown.
Huot’s invocation of a filmic drawdown chart juxtaposes in an ingenious
way the two senses or orders of indexicality introduced above. On one hand,
the sequences display a register of a year’s visual traces; on the other, his meth-
od of matching these traces projects new visual patterns of association. In this
latter sense, the sequences perform what in Lejeune’s definition emerges as a
revelatory moment of the diary—they capture patterns of movement in time.
To the extent the synthetic rolls present the diary as a process (of reviewing
serial traces), we can describe the structure of the film as alternating between
diary film and film diary. While the matching method brings out surprising
juxtapositions and reveals new patterns of lived life, it also creates a leveling
effect that treats different experiences (farming, painting, sex, or nursing) in
a methodically detached manner. We may say that the testimonial discourse
approaches the documentary by relegating editorial control to a prearranged
scheme. The drawdown-editing method transfers the photomechanical prin-
ciple of recording to the level of editing. It is also through the editing scheme
that notions of progressive and cyclical time are combined, which in his pre-
vious film was achieved by simultaneously projecting four reels as parts of a
seasonal cycle.
In his Third One Year Movie—1972, Huot employed an editing scheme
that highlights the process of matching images and constructing patterns as
viewing activities. Huot ordered the rolls of his filmed material according to
the number of shots they contained and edited the film by successively tak-
ing one shot from each roll. Thus, while the first parts of the film contain the
longest takes, the film becomes increasingly faster and repetitive. The effect
of this editing scheme brings out the dynamics of experience and memory.
The long takes at the beginning invite us to contemplate the images and re-
flect on their symbolism. One roll-long shot frames jostling cows in a way
that makes them seem to fight over being in the center of the camera’s atten-
tion. As new images appear and re-reappear, viewers actively engage in plays
of visual memory and pattern matching. Viewers may wonder perhaps if they
are actually seeing something for the first time or only noticing it for the first
time, and they may start focusing on changes between takes from the same
roll. The film’s overall move from contemplating visual experiences to recog-
nizing and connecting visual patterns is orchestrated by the increasing cutting
frequency towards the end.
This play with the evanescence of experience and the tenuous line between
seeing and recognizing lies also at the heart of Mekas’s diaristic filmmaking,
352 Biography 36.2 (Spring 2013)

which makes for a good comparison to conclude my discussion of Huot’s di-

ary films. In contrast to Huot’s formal editing experiments that were designed
to include his entire footage, Mekas has championed the art of in-camera ed-
iting through his signature single-frame filming style.17 Rather than mere-
ly documenting his life, his film Diaries, Notes and Sketches, also known as
Walden (1968) seeks to capture both the dynamics of the object filmed and
the immediate sensations of his (filming) experience. The spontaneous and
nervous intensity of his filming often creates an atmosphere that endows his
images with the dreamlike quality of a remembered vision. A great example
of Mekas’s single-frame style is the circus scene on the first reel of Walden.
It depicts horses and acrobats in an arena through mesmerizing flashes that
resemble a cherished childhood memory. Mekas has described the actual
processes of filming or deciding to film something as rather unconscious and
often triggered by an almost forgotten memory.18
The finder of Mekas’s camera—in a quite literal sense—becomes the
frame for this search. The camera operates almost like a romantic automa-
ton that produces preconscious visions and what Marcel Proust has famously
dubbed mémorie involontaire. Mekas’s diaries are not so much remembered
visions as they are images that are themselves remembering. The sense of
agency attributed to his camera recalls Talbot’s description of photography
as a form of autotelic drawing. Yet, Mekas adds an intersubjective dimension
to the “interobjective” idea of photography as objects representing them-
selves. For him, the act of recording attains a double or reflexive meaning.
The image is not simply a record of a profilmic event but also a souvenir and
an act of remembering that inevitably (involuntarily) points beyond what it
has recorded. Mekas has frequently stressed this fusion of exterior reality and
his mental imaginary vision: in his film As I Was Moving Ahead I Saw Brief
Glimpses of Beauty (2000) he says, “What you see is my imaginary world,
which is not imaginary at all, but is real.” This double exposure of the filmic
image as tracing both an imaginary vision and reality turns the image into an
interface of documentary and testimonial dimensions, where ontological and
ethical issues are inseparably connected.
In his diaristic approach, the camera is fully ingrained in his viewing and
filming habits. In an interview, Mekas compared himself to a jazz musician.
For him, the camera, not unlike a musical instrument, “is an extension of
the fingers. And the fingers are transmitters—extensions of the mind, your
heart, your whole body and everything that you are. That’s what my cam-
era becomes” (Lanthier). In this sense, Mekas’s film style can be described
as a “psychological fingerprint” in the way Lejeune suggested for analysis of
handwritten diaries.
 Quendler, Diaries and Film 353

CONCLUSION

Like Huot, Mekas explores alternative ways of filmmaking that program-

matically subvert received notions about the mechanical and artistic domains
of cinema as well as traditional assumptions about the ontological and ethi-
cal status of the filmic image. Mekas’s model of the camera can be described
as psychological in that it builds on the mind’s habitual power of associat-
ing acts of perception with those of memory and imagination. Mekas aims
at synthesizing filmic and bodily experiences as well as cinematography and
editing. Huot’s mechanical approach evolves from a contrast and separation
between his informal filming style, which privileges experiential parameters
over formal aspects, and his conceptual editing schemes, which are developed
independently of the filming experience.
Both Mekas and Huot blend mechanical and psychological aspects of
filmmaking in unorthodox ways. Mekas’s single-frame techniques and mul-
tiple exposures in the circus scene disrupt the fluidity of filmic records, which
is normally maintained by the camera’s film transport mechanism. In doing
so, he introduces personal and subjective impulses to what is conventionally
seen as an automatic process. Since fluidity is also a characteristic of (the con-
tinuous stream of ) consciousness, the ruptures and multiple exposures in the
circus scene enhance the dreamlike effect and the impression that the camera
records flashes of memory. Conversely, even though editing is traditionally
considered a privileged domain of subjective and symbolic intervention, Huot
largely refrains from such personal acts of intervention by applying pre-set
schemes for arranging his footage. While his first diary film accepts the film
roll as a basic unit of memory, Rolls: 1971 introduces a more dynamic model
of memory that draws on color matching techniques as a metaphor for cogni-
tive pattern matching processes. Huot’s formal approach brings out unfore-
seen connections between past recordings, and as especially his Third One Year
Movie—1972 shows, may in fact approximate experiential dimensions of hu-
man memory.19
Taken together, Huot and Mekas can illustrate a spectrum of approaches
that modify, elaborate, and complicate notions of indexicality. Like Peirce’s
examples of indexes, their modes of pointing are very diverse and invoke dif-
ferent senses of temporality. Huot’s early diary films are perhaps closest to
the classical photo-indexical example. He consciously curbs the artist’s inten-
tions and inventions by using informal camera styles and organizing his ma-
terial according to the format of film rolls. The editing scheme in Rolls: 1971,
where the montage sequences literally take stock of the film’s contents, shifts
the notion of indexicality from linear, causal relations to cyclical, contextual
354 Biography 36.2 (Spring 2013)

concerns. Every recording is repeatedly placed next to and matched against

samples of all the shots in the film. The sense of indexicality in Mekas’s ear-
ly diary films is even more temporally expansive, and may be compared to
Peirce’s example of the sailor’s gait. While they capture the intersubjective
dynamics of the recording situation they also bear the traces of viewing and
filming habits: Mekas’s characteristic single-frame style in this sense can be
seen as such a habitual inscription.20
The different senses of indexicality explored in these experimental diary
films not only echo Peirce’s wide-ranging understanding of indexicality, they
also underscore its pragmatic constitution of the film medium and its con-
tingency on practices of use. Film does not merely assume a recording and
formatting function that holds traces in place and thereby allows more com-
plex calculation and manipulations of reality. As Huot’s experiments with
increasingly more complex forms of (virtual) film rolls illustrate, the filmic
format also serves as existential units that gauge the ethical dimension of be-
ing in time.

NOTES

1. See especially Sitney and Rascaroli.

2. An important selection of Lejeune’s prolific writings on diaries, in English translation,
has been edited recently by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Unless noted otherwise all
quotations from Lejeune are from this seminal anthology: On Diary.
3. For a discussion of autobiographical filmmaking that focuses on this divide between
fact and fiction, along with the distinction between acting and performing, see also
Gernalzick.
4. See The Politics of Aesthetics 20–30. For a historical analysis of the re-distribution of
these regimes of art in early cinema, see my article “Autopsy and Autography in the
First Decades of Cinema.”
5. On the cultural techniques of cognition distributed between mind and media, see
Hutchins.
6. Lejeune’s comments on the uses of film and photography for diaries are rather sparse.
See, for example, Signes de vie 66–67 and his anthology (coedited with Catherine Bo-
gaert), Le Journal intime 220–24.
7. Lejeune claims that “diaries lost three quarters of their meaning once they were put in
print” (286).
8. On the relationship between technology and handwriting, see Sonja Neefs’s study Im-
print and Trace.
9. Or better, individual and original styles in early classical cinema were often praised for
what they contributed to the creation of (universal) film language. On the fashion-
ing of D. W. Griffith as the “inventor of film language,” see Gunning, D. W. Griffith
31–56.
 Quendler, Diaries and Film 355

10. See David James’s excellent discussion of “The Idea of the Amateur” in The Most Typical
Avant-Garde 137–64.
11. The distinction between the enunciative act of dating and the enunciated, or recording
and the recorded, helps to locate consensual ground between Lejeune’s and Currie’s no-
tions of a trace. For Currie a verbal representation becomes a trace when it is about the
act of presenting (enunciation in Lejeune’s sense). Currie’s example for a verbal trace is
a historical recording of a speech by Hitler, which he contrasts to the testimony given by
a historiographic voice-over commentary (where it is all about what is said, enunciated
in Lejeune’s sense).
12. Recent media-theoretical debates on the digital have increasingly questioned concep-
tions of indexicality and stressed the historicity of the concept itself. See Gunning,
“Moving Away from the Index.”
13. Peirce suggests that this close alignment of indices has both iconic and symbolic rela-
tions and may be the result of its existential quality: “If the Sign be an Index, we may
think of it as a fragment torn away from the Object, the two in their Existence being one
whole or a part of such whole” (136).
14. In Vie et mort de l‘image: une histoire du regard en occident, Régis Debray proposes in
rather broad strokes to think of film history as paradigmatic changes in the sign func-
tions of film. Accordingly, early cinema appears largely indexical, whereas later periods
move from the iconic to the symbolic. See also Rosalind Krauss’s “Notes on the Index,”
which comments on the intricate relations among indexical, iconic, and symbolic sign
in American art of the 1970s.
15. While Gérard Genette subsumes diaries under what he refers to as “intercalated narra-
tion,” Lejeune favors the term “progressive.” The difference is one of perspective, and
both perspectives play a crucial part in writing diaries. While “progressive” suggests a
movement of writing towards what is open and unknown, “intercalated” implies a sense
of review: the (re-)reading of diary entries against a timeline or one’s biography. See
Lejeune 207.
16. For a complete outline of Huot’s editing scheme, see MacDonald, “Surprise!” 305
17. The pioneering work of Robert Breer and his attempt to make non-sentimental souvenir
films through rapid montages produced on a printer can be seen as an approach that lies
halfway between Huot’s editorial and Mekas’s cinematographic approach. Juxtaposing
animated drawings and cut-out shapes and whatever came in handy from his work en-
vironment with quotidian real-life images from outside his studio, Breer’s films Eyewash
(1959) and Fist Fight (1964) can be described as retinal collages in the sense that the
speed of visual impressions goes faster than the mind can process and synthesize them.
Memory as the processing of traces is experienced as a series of kinetic impulses that un-
derscore the precedence of visual and visceral sensations over intellectual understanding.
In contrast to Huot’s mechanical and pre-programmed model of matching memories,
Breer invokes cinema as a physiological model of memory where the visual record is cor-
related to visceral effects.
18. See also Efrén Cuevas’s essay on “The Immigrant Experience in Jonas Mekas’s Diary
Films.”
19. Interestingly, for his Diary Film #4 (1974), Huot delegated the editing to his friend
Adam Mierzwa, replacing, as it were, a mechanical editing rationale by a human agent.
356 Biography 36.2 (Spring 2013)

20. Breer’s retinal collages may be placed in between Mekas’s psychological and Huot’s
mechanical models. The retinal collages suggest iconic relations by suggesting similari-
ties between the projection of moving images and the perceptual processing of visual
impulses. Indeed, we can view Breer’s experiments as a commentary on Peirce’s remark
on the iconic features of photography quoted above. Whereas Peirce argues that pho-
tographs resemble reality because they have been produced under circumstances that
enforce point-by-point correlations, Breer’s film Eyewash points to similarities (and
differences) between the ways filmic and mental images are processed.

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