Kaleidoscope Stories: Film (My Nana's Home) as a Dialogic Platform for Life Stories

Abstract

Using the film ‘My Nana’s Home’ as a basis for analysis, this paper argues that the medium of film enables a life history text to be socially situated and dialogically constructed. Much like a turning kaleidoscope, the life history text is formed through the intersection of various perspectives of an individual’s life path, reflected off of one another. Despite the fact that my Nana, her children, and her friends all view the same set of major events that occurred in her lifetime, they have experienced and interpreted them differently. Thus, film can play an active role in mediating and representing the lived experiences of these perspectives through various layers of dialogue and video editing techniques. In this way, the meaning of the life history text emerges through the intersubjective structure of compound authorship between film subject, filmmaker and film audience.