Provenance in personal documentary: My Mother's Village
type: CreativeWork
description: My Mother's Village is a personal documentary response to The Sri Lanka Series (1980), a series of ethnographic films produced by the author's anthropologist mother, Sharon Bell, and filmmaker father, Geoff Burton. Four women, a community of fishermen, and a dance instructor were the 'subjects' of their three films. The feature length film My Mother's Village revisits the same participants in Sri Lanka and pursues the original themes and issues, such as economic conditions, the status of women, colonialism, religion, ritual, and inter-generational change. My Mother's Village explores how both the filmmaker and participants are navigating heredity and inheritance. Supplementing the film, the exegesis component, Provenance in Personal Documentary interrogates the conceptual underpinnings of the creative research. 'Provenance', the key concept informing the production of My Mother's Village is a fine art term specifically â repractisedâ and retheorised here. It is hypothesised that cross-disciplinary personal documentary production is a fertile environment that responds to increasingly accessible technologies and progressive interpretations of what contemporary â documentaryâ means. This research project responds to the lack of a critical framework for interpreting and developing inter-disciplinary documentary praxis. The experimental methods employed in the provenance of My Mother's Village extend to the adoption of an auto-ethnographic and autobiographical mode of storytelling in this exegesis. This marriage of creativity and scholarly research is further reflected in the relationship between the exegesis and corresponding personal documentary film production. The provenance of My Mother's Village reveals an historical convergence of 20th century documentary traditions of photography, cinema, and visual ethnography. The convergence of these traditions in the contemporary art context echoes Walter Benjamin's observations of the shifting nature of art in the 20th centu…
abstract: My Mother's Village is a personal documentary response to The Sri Lanka Series (1980), a series of ethnographic films produced by the author's anthropologist mother, Sharon Bell, and filmmaker father, Geoff Burton. Four women, a community of fishermen, and a dance instructor were the 'subjects' of their three films. The feature length film My Mother's Village revisits the same participants in Sri Lanka and pursues the original themes and issues, such as economic conditions, the status of women, colonialism, religion, ritual, and inter-generational change. My Mother's Village explores how both the filmmaker and participants are navigating heredity and inheritance. Supplementing the film, the exegesis component, Provenance in Personal Documentary interrogates the conceptual underpinnings of the creative research. 'Provenance', the key concept informing the production of My Mother's Village is a fine art term specifically â repractisedâ and retheorised here. It is hypothesised that cross-disciplinary personal documentary production is a fertile environment that responds to increasingly accessible technologies and progressive interpretations of what contemporary â documentaryâ means. This research project responds to the lack of a critical framework for interpreting and developing inter-disciplinary documentary praxis. The experimental methods employed in the provenance of My Mother's Village extend to the adoption of an auto-ethnographic and autobiographical mode of storytelling in this exegesis. This marriage of creativity and scholarly research is further reflected in the relationship between the exegesis and corresponding personal documentary film production. The provenance of My Mother's Village reveals an historical convergence of 20th century documentary traditions of photography, cinema, and visual ethnography. The convergence of these traditions in the contemporary art context echoes Walter Benjamin's observations of the shifting nature of art in the 20th centu…
author: Burton, Aaron
language: EN
keywords: Provenance, Documentary, Sri Lanka, Cinema, Photography, Ethnography, Village, Sharon bell, Geoff burton, Personal documentary
license: https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/
date published: 2014
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:33:18Z
provider: University of New South Wales
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: UNSW, Sydney

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/53857

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.26190/unsworks/2624