Deviate! The Second International 

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media Conference

University College Cork, 4-6 September 2014 

 

 

Panel Presentation: Commissioned works and Self-representation: 

 

How to Play with the Rules?”

 

A Director’s Notebook: Fellini between Deviation and Self-Representation

Laura Busetta

 

Sophie Calle’s Self-exposure, or the Art of Cheating 

Marlène Monteiro

 

Chantal Akerman’s Self-representations: the Art of diverting the subject

Muriel Tinel-Temple

 

At first sight, the idea of a film based on a commission for an institutional body would appear as the very antithesis of a ‘first-person film’. However, a close look at the work of film-makers and artists such as Chantal Akerman, Sophie Calle, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Kramer, or Wim Wenders, would reveal that sometimes – while fulfilling a contract – film-makers are often questioning their own corpus and their relationship to it. In other words, they deviate from the

contract, play with the rules and finally turn the initial project into a self-reflexive and creative piece of work. The aim of this panel is to identify – through three very different case studies – some of the strategies adopted by film-makers to change the rules of the production (financial, technical, formal, and thematic) in order to create what eventually becomes a ‘first-person film’.