The Nick Dixon Sampler II- The Autobiographical Mode

This is the story of me, as told through my bedroom.  I have an odd assortment of objects, but I'm very choosy about what actually gets put in my room.  Not just any old thing makes it in.  This is the view of my bedroom from my door looking in.  Welcome to an intimate peek into my life.

This is a wide shot of my room.  It's not an optical illusion.  My ceiling is really slanted like that.  I'll go into some more of the details surrounding some of the items pictured later.

This is my sink.  I'm not particularly proud of my sink, but have found through my years of inhabiting dorms with other males that my choice in hand soaps is somewhat unorthodox.  The left two scents are "Warm Apple Cider" and "Warm Vanilla Sugar."  I use these most commonly in the evening due to their calming aromas.  And yes, I do have an extra bottle of "Warm Vanilla Sugar" beneath the sink.  The scents off to the right are "Fresh Picked Lemon" and "Fresh Picked Apples," which I use in the morning or afternoon, mostly because of their rejuvenating side effects on my olfactory bulb. Rest assured that I'm as straight as I claim to be, which is very straight.  Having the choice of what your hands smell like is just one of life's simplest pleasures.

This is my work station.  I make my living here.  I'm sort of torn about how I feel about this.  One the one hand, I know several professionals who don't have stations this nice.  It's cool to still be a student with a professional setup that I paid for myself, which also helps me bring home the bacon.  On the other hand, I'm always wondering what great things I may have accidentally sacrificed on the way to obtaining such a materialistic goal and worldly recognition.  Also, this is a terrible picture, for which I apologize.

These are my shoes.  At first glance, my room may look like a hodge-podge of random crap, but I'm actually very organised, as evidenced by my European spelling of 'organized' and shoe pouches, which stick to the door via thin hooks at the top and 3m Sticking Strips® at the bottom.  I also keep a hidden supply of Nerf® Guns, just to be safe. 

Some of my Nerf® Guns are displayed on my wall, along with other unusual items.  The poster shown is awesome and makes my morning just about every morning.  Who needs a wife when you can wake up to Snuggles?  Just kidding.  I'm still looking and currently available, perhaps for a limited time only, so ACT FAST!  The "No Smoking" sign is one of my proudest achievements.  I discovered that if you draw a line from the fumes of the cigarette to the cigarette's mouthpiece, it looks just like a piece of pie.  I rejoice in my occasional strokes of stupidity laced genius.  As another testament to my organizational habits, the hooks off to the right of the door are where I put my keys, wallet and glasses every night.  Last, that isn't a real policeman.  It's just a cardboard cut-out.  I'm not that eclectic.

In 2006, I qualified for the World Championships for the Rubik's Cube Speed Competition.  My fastest time ever is 23 seconds.  I am not as fast as I used to be, but I can still solve one in about a minute.  That's why they call me "Quick Nick."

Ok, nobody actually calls me that.

This is my bulletin board.  I write my ideas down on this whenever I get some that need developing.  I used 3m Sticking Strips® to fasten it to the wall.  I used a special kind of 3m Sticking Strips® though that have velcro® on them so I can remove the board on a whim, which is fortunate because I'm very whimsical.

As you may have noticed, I put all my movie ticket stubs on my ceiling.  I know exactly who I went to each movie with and can tell you just about all the social details surrounding each film. 

I dragged my brother to this Wes Anderson film.  He had never seen any of him films before.  He thought it was weird.  A few weeks later, he wanted to see it again.  He's seen almost every Wes Anderson film since then.  I'm proud to have helped him discover a notoriously artsy filmmaker.  This is the film that started the broadening of his horizons.

This was from just about the weirdest first date I ever went on.  My best friend wanted to see this movie together as a man date and decided hours before that he wanted to make it a double date.  So I called up a girl I knew and she graciously accepted the invitation.  I never take dates to movies, much less first dates.  She was awesome though and it stands as one of my favorite dates within the last few years.  I wouldn't be completely honest though if I didn't mention that I really blew it with her.  I made a stupid decision to date somebody else that I knew full well would end in disaster and ruined my chances with her.  If she ever reads this, I want her to know how sorry I am.

This was a difficult movie for me because I saw so much of myself in it.  At the time of its opening, I was currently undergoing some of the worst drama of my life.  My best friend of 12 years and I got into a feud over a girl.  We three don't speak anymore, even though the girl is another of my best friend's little sister.  She's getting married in December.

This movie was awful but I still have a soft spot for it in my heart.  The reason there are three stubs is because I took my two little sisters to see it when they were in town one weekend.  We laughed and laughed at the film.  It was not a comedy.  I love my sisters dearly.

This was a fun film.  I was really proud of myself on this occasion because I began dating a girl but decided I wasn't interested.  A few months later, I invited her to see this with us.  In spite of the fact that things didn't work out romantically, we were able to stay friends, which was a breath of fresh air after what I had experienced earlier on.  She's also married now.

Movie tickets aren't the only things that hold memories for me.  I surround myself with these memories to remind me of my past mistakes, as I pointed out with the previous 5 or so pictures, in an effort not to repeat those mistakes.  I also put up good memories to remind me to continue doing the things I've done right.  A few weeks ago, I parked my car in my complex' garage to find a piece of paper folded in half labeled 'Nick.'  In spite of the crude label, the note held within it one of the most sincere and heartfelt notes I've ever read.  It was anonymous and to this day, I still have no idea who wrote it.  If whoever wrote it ever reads this, know how grateful I am for your words.  A lot of my movie tickets remind me of stupid mistakes I've made, but this wall reminds me of my past successes and motivates me to continue to try my hardest.

This is my family and a collage that a friend made of my senior year in high school.  Also, I have a brainteaser-a-day calendar from the world famous organization MENSA®.  I have successfully solved 17 of these puzzles this year.  I blame the other 348 unsolved puzzles on a lack of time.  Sometimes I take stacks of sheets off at a time to make it look like I've done more. 

This wall is full of my slang flashcards.  They show me a slang word, the correct pronunciation and a definition of each.  They also include a picture and example so I know when to use the slang word.  My Nerf® Gattling Gun® is also there.  Also, I have several unfinished projects stashed here.  Off to the left is my helicopter designed to carry a DSLR.  It would seriously take about 15 minutes worth of work to finish, but it has been sitting there for weeks.  Same with my door knocker (a device designed to unlock a door if the correct secret knock is presented).  I have it working and just have to glue the components to that PVC pipe thing by the Nerf® Gattling Gun®.  Maybe after finals I'll finish them.

This concludes the Second Nick Dixon Sampler®.

The autobiographical mode is an interesting one to me for several reasons.  First off, I’ve somehow made a reputation for being a genuine person amongst my friends.  I think that I’m good at being fairly open about myself, my past triumphs and mistakes, to others.  For some reason though, this doesn’t carry over to my art very well.  I can create art just fine but have a harder time putting myself into it.  I honestly don’t know why, which is a large part of the reason that this mode held so much glamour for me.  Through studying this mode a little closer, I’ve realized why I think I have a hard time putting my unfiltered voice into my art: because it’s mine.  Because of some somewhat recent experiences in my life, I’ve become somewhat afraid of rejection.  I could handle that as a missionary just because I knew it wasn’t me they were rejecting, just something that I held dear to me (ie Christ), which is still a small but notable degree of removal from just plain me.  I could handle that.  It was still hard, but I could do it.

Art, on the other hand, is more personal.  If somebody rejects my art, I take it personally.  That’s what makes art so beautiful though.  It’s a projection of one’s soul onto a more tactile medium, whether it be canvas, music or film.  The risk involved in the autobiographical mode is not only terrifying, but also very admirable.  I’ve only recently come to realize that nobody is perfect.  I’ve held several people up on a pedestal but have come to realize that even those people have emotional baggage or that they’ve made serious errors.  The vulnerability that the autobiographical mode often portrays is in many ways an indication of the filmmaker’s strength.  Nobody likes admitting they’re weak.  I know this from experience.  But admitting one’s defeat is really the first step toward improvement, for both the artist and the audience. 

In this activity, I attempted to show myself as I really am.  Fox makes special note in his book that "at its best, the autobiographical mode not only closes the gap between photographer and subject but also the space between filmmaker and audience- brought together through a subjective familiarity and an invitation to know the "I" behind the camera."  Sometimes I’m crassly sarcastic, other times I'm annoyingly smarmy and other times I’m an emotional infant.  But whatever.  That's me.  I’m not perfect and I’m not really ashamed of that anymore.  I try to embrace the experiences that have made me who I am, yet still aspire to be better.  There’s no shame in that.  In a lot of ways, these pictures and explanations show me in some of my most naked states (not actually naked- pervs).  And that naked state is what allows for an actual message to come through.  What is that message?  I’m leaving that up to the audience.  For me though, I’m just trying to say “This is me.”  And you know what?  I feel pretty good about that.

The Autobiographical Mode

For me, this was one of the most interesting modes of documentary to learn about.  The reason it was so interesting for me was simply because of its somewhat didactic nature.  This particular mode is pretty much entirely geared toward provoking some sort of social change within a culture.  I originally anticipated that the cause of this was that the filmmaker was inherently tied to the issue in some way, as was the case with Roger and Me.  Such an emotionally charged issue for a filmmaker is bound to turn out a product that attempts to cause some sort of change or at the very least raise awareness of the subject at hand.  I definitely realized this as I was watching Roger and Me and the films by Sadie Benning (especially Sadie Benning’s pieces since the issues she addresses hit so close to home for her). 

Something that I would have liked to see more of though was this mode represented by a filmmaker who was less attached to the subject.  The reading mentions filmmakers whose personal biases remain a mystery, as with Jennie Langston’s documentary Paris Is Burning.  I personally feel that I would have an easier time swallowing a documentary like this simply because I wouldn’t feel like a message is being shoved down my throat by an eager lobbyist waiting to change my opinion to match theirs.  Langston’s own views on the issue at hand in her documentary (which happens to be sexual orientations) never once come up in her documentary, which I find to be kind of an empowering mechanism in the film.

One film that I think fits quite nicely into this mode is a film I saw at sundance last year called 5 Broken Cameras, in which a Palestinian filmmaker tells about the Israeli invasion of his home.  This piece was definitely interesting and managed to be somewhat emotionally charged yet maintain a degree of fairness toward the opposing viewpoints, which I appreciated.  Here’s the trailer for your enjoyment.

The Excursion

For this doc mode assignment , I chose to explore the world of the reflexive documentary a little more thoroughly.  I was very attracted to how self aware the reflexive mode was as I read about it and viewed the films and attempted to do this in a video piece surrounding a tradition my friends and I have. 

Nichols describes that reflexive documentaries often challenge the issues of realism, which is something I attempted to do in this piece.  I approached that, first and foremost, with the film’s subject.  No realist would ever bat an eye at such a ridiculous tradition, which  makes it a perfect subject for a reflexive documentary.  Because of the subject’s stupidity, I decided to try and not focus on it in a realist sense.  The opinions formed are presented non-linearly and in a way in which it’s obvious that the subjects were somewhat guided in their responses.  They were never prompted to say anything in specific, but they were talking about a subject they likely wouldn’t have had they not been specifically asked to.  I begin the film’s dialogue with me asking a question, which happens two other times in the course of the film.  Additionally, the subjects stumble over their words and look at the camera, revealing the apparatus of the filmmaker.

One thing I wish I had done better though is something that would have heightened the audience’s awareness that they were watching a documentary.  I included snippets of myself asking the subjects the questions as a reminder that there is indeed someone behind the camera and tried to put in just about every clip when somebody looks directly at the camera, but I perhaps could have accentuated this with a portion of the subjects acting or something.  Reality was never really exaggerated, which could have greatly helped in the telling of this story.  In fact, there are very few moments of alienation in this doc, which would have been really great in raising the audience’s awareness of the documentary’s mechanics.

While this didn’t turn out to be a perfect reflexive documentary, I do think it exhibits several reflexive traits quite well.