U Know Them By Their

This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given I hereby declare that neither this film nor written thesis has been or will be submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Summary My research explores the documentary encounter between the filmmaker and a familial subject who is also politically opposite to me, or what I term an 'extreme other'. The Thesis consists of a one-hour film and a forty thousand word critical and reflective work analyzing the ethical, aesthetic and political implications of this documentary encounter. The subject of my film is my cousin from the USA who used to work as a high school principal, but who over the past decade has adopted ethno-religious nationalist views—including the view that only white males should be allowed to vote in the USA. My aim was to create a representation of my politically 'far right' subject which would be, to use Mikhail Bakhtin's term, unfinalizable. My film and my writing both focus on navigating the possible obstacles to unfinalization, such as the fact that my views may be considered oppositional to my cousin's, my marginal authorial status as a national other, and the implications of theorist Michael Renov's designation of family film as domestic ethnography—a type of film which he writes is so highly intersubjective due to blood relations that the familial subject " refracts " (2004: xiii) the filmmaker and the film becomes an " autobiographical " self-portrait (ibid). I responded to my quandary of representing radical intersubjectivity between myself and a familial 'extreme other' by experimenting with narrative, thematic, and montage strategies deeply influenced by concepts from life-writing, documentary theory, literature, psychoanalysis and ethnography. Through the process of integrating critical exploration with filmmaking practice, I invented a form and style for the film to approach my goal of unfinalizing, while leaving traces of my ethical and aesthetic choices, and of my grappling with the problematic nature of representing opposing political views. Meanwhile I reflected on the ways in which intersubjectivity has been represented between filmmakers and …