Abstract/Summary

The written part of the PhD aims to offer an alternative to the two dominant approaches to filmmaker and artist Stephen Dwoskin - Lacanian psychoanalytic and historical - by looking at his work as an ‘intertextual’ practice. Specifically, it will examine the representation of the self in his work. The central subject of Dwoskin’s work is ‘auto/biography’, an umbrella term that will be used to describe what is called ‘personal narrative’ or ‘life writing’ in literature – for example portraiture and self-portraiture, biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, notebook, sketchbook, home movie, and oral history. However, Dwoskin’s auto/biographical works are not presented in a naively confessional way. In 1983, Dwoskin made his first biographical film, Shadows from Light, a study of the émigré photographer Bill Brandt. Rather than present a straightforward, chronological account of his subject, he structured his film around Brandt’s main influences: Alice in Wonderland, Surrealism, and Orson Welles. This thesis is inspired by Dwoskin’s methodology in Shadows from Light - it will suggest that his self-representation is always filtered through his engagement with other works of art. Through a series of discrete but interconnected texts, the thesis will look at Dwoskin’s auto/biographical output in a variety of media – films, paintings, drawings, prints, interviews, published writings and archival sources including diaries, draft autobiographies, letters, and unrealised, auto/biographical scripts. Even those works which have no apparent auto/biographical content – films about young women in cramped interiors, a multimedia piece about a singing hobo, an opera aria – will be read according to what literary theorist Philippe Lejeune, in a variation on his seminal concept of the ‘autobiographical pact’, calls the ‘phantasmatic pact’ – an implied contract entered into by the reader with the writer that apparently fictional material can ‘reveal[…] phantasms of the individual’ creator. The practical part of the PhD will comprise a catalogue raisonné of Dwoskin’s output as a filmmaker, painter, printmaker, artist’s bookmaker, photographer, writer, and graphic designer. The catalogue is ultimately intended to serve as a reliable reference work for Dwoskin scholars; for the purposes of the PhD, however, the project is a species of thought experiment. Questions it will raise include: Is it possible to apply a methodology developed for an older conception of the fine arts to one generated in the post-artefactual 1960s? Can the experimental film - which exists uneasily on the boundary between the art world and arthouse cinema, and doesn’t quite belong in either - be subjected to an art-historical methodology? Is the totalising, formal approach of the catalogue raisonné appropriate to the sprawling, libertarian life and work of an artist like Dwoskin? The two strands are intended to complement each other as parallel approaches to the representation of the self or biography in the work of Dwoskin. The methodology of the thesis derives organically from Dwoskin’s own life and interests; the catalogue artificially imposes a rigid, external template on them. One privileges thought, imagination, and subjectivity; the other purports to be historical, factual, and objective. Each is a tacit and ontological critique of the other. Whether either - separately or combined - gets us closer to an understanding of the life and work of Stephen Dwoskin, remains to be seen.