(1) Self-filming: from Video Diaries to Mobile Journalism
Mobile Journalism has introduced a specific audiovisual language with self-filming as the main characteristic element.
If self-filming is fully associated with the Mojo movement and the era of social media, especially with the selfie in photography, this method of filming has already seen its appearance in the form of video diaries and vlogs.
This new culture of “Picture of Self” and communication with others has been able to flourish for some three decades.
Origins of Self-filming: Video diaries of Nelson Sullivan (Part 1/3)
In 1998, I decided to extend my research on family movie and amateur video by writing a study on video diaries *.
This project led me to analyze videos among the many shot by Nelson Sullivan. His films are sometimes referred as the “Nelson Sullivan TV Show” as it appeared in the program called Histoires de famille (Family Stories), which was released by the Vidéothèque de Paris in 1998.
On this occasion, a selection of films by Nelson Sullivan was broadcast on the TV channel Arte in March 1999 as part of the program called Switch (a magazine by Claire Doutriaux and Paul Ouazan), devoted to art video and experimental cinema.
This gave me the opportunity to record these films at that time and thus to analyze them (we can find them easily nowadays on YouTube…).
Nelson Sullivan was an active American videographer in the 80s. He shot more than 1,900 hours of video with a simple camcorder (VHS then 8mm). Also, by adding a Fisheye optic on the lens of his camera, he created a unique dimension in the images and a particular style.
He was filming everything around him, his friends, his meetings, some neighborhood events like protests, parties or gay pride in New York. And, above all, he was filming himself. This was, in my opinion, one of the first significant attempts of self-filming.
These “amateur” movies ended when Nelson Sullivan died of a heart attack on July 4th in 1989.
Subsequently, in the context of how they were received later, Nelson Sullivan’s films were considered experimental video art pieces. Today, with hindsight, these films can be also considered a documentary view of a certain period, in particular that of the 80s.
For my part, I support the idea that the succession of videos, precisely dated, is a consistent trace of the existence of Nelson Sullivan and it is therefore logical to call his films video diaries.
In so doing, the transfer from the private space to the public domain is then possible by the identification of these videos as art works. Specifically, I would like to refer to this phenomenon as a contextual shift of reception (or context shifting).
We could easily imagine Nelson Sullivan filming his life and environment today with a smartphone and sharing the content on social networks. But in the 1980s, Nelson Sullivan had almost no opportunity to broadcast through distribution channels such as social networks which obviously did not exist (and it is probably for this reason that he wanted to create his own television program).
Moreover, without this context shifting — the transition from the private to the public sphere — characterized by artistic recognition, his films could have remained in absolute anonymity, remaining unknown to the public.
What I would like to underline here, 20 years after analyzing some of Nelson Sullivan’s movies, is that he was undoubtedly the precursor of Mobile Journalism, through the intensive and even exclusive use of self-filming.
Indeed, his way of filming looks like, sometimes point by point, to that of some Mojoists or vloggers today.
Nelson uses his camera most often freehand style to film himself (the image moves and the framing appears unstable, the aesthetic aspect not being a big concern for him). He speaks and comments, especially in front of the camera, to describe what is going on around him. This doesn’t differ much from what people in social media like Yusuf Omar, Casey Neistat or Alex Ikkon, etc… do today, to name but a few.
Find the other two articles here: (2) Video Diary, Vlog and Mojo; (3) Self-filming and public space — Consequences.
Article available in French here.
*Jarosz Térence, Le journal intime vidéo : concept, forme et reconnaissance, Université de Metz, Mémoire de DEA, 1999.
*Jarosz Térence, « Opportunities and challenges of Mojo », Conférence ENEX Coordinators meeting, Bruxelles, 16 février 2017.
