A personal filmic exploration of contemporary Irish-Australian identity

Abstract

This thesis consists of two parts: a documentary film and a written exegesis. The film, Secret family recipes, explores a personal experience of migration and documents issues of personal identity within broader family, community, and intercultural contexts. The documentary uses the device of cake baking to provide a narrative spine for the journey of exploration. The filmmaker, Enda Murray, journeys from Sydney back to his birthplace in Ireland in 2007 and helps his elderly mother bake her annual Christmas cake. In the course of this journey, he talks to his mother and peers about their memories of growing up and ponders on his own early family life in Ireland. He then returns to Australia and bakes a cake with his two daughters (ages six and four), using this occasion to reflect on his current family situation. The exegesis provides a background context in Irish-Australian history and culture. It examines the major influences on the author's work as an artist and draws on a range of literature to critique the production of Secret family recipes against the context of Irish documentary, Irish migrant documentary, and Irish-Australian accented cinema. The exegesis argues that Secret family recipes uses elements of 'performative documentary', defined by Bill Nichols as documentary that includes the author as a performing character in the film. It also argues that the documentary uses elements of 'domestic ethnography', a term coined by Michael Renov to describe filmmaking that explores the complexity of communal or blood ties between the subject and his or her family. This is a form of supplementary autobiographical practice where the subject constructs self-knowledge through the familial other. This research project proposes a new framework of 'domestic performativity' within documentary that combines elements of performative documentary and domestic ethnography. This thesis argues that domestic performativity allows a stylised representation of the subject's voice and combines elements of documentary and ethnography to produce an enhanced autobiographical product.

Date of Award	2013
Original language	English