An intimate portrait of film maker Stephen Dwoskin, who is working on his latest film Oblivion. He talks about his way of working in film and about his personal life story. The film also includes key fragments from his earlier oeuvre.
Self Made Portrait is both a professional and a personal portrait of Stephen Dwoskin, made when he was working on his latest film, Oblivion, in 2005. Dwoskin talks at length about his way of working, about the way he uses music, the subjects and styles that engross and engrossed him as a film maker, and about his early years as a graphic designer.
The film, with sparing fragments from Oblivion and earlier films by Dwoskin (including Intoxicated By My Illness and Dad), can certainly be described as an intimate portrait. The camera feels its way over the film maker, and in doing so differs little from what Dwoskin himself does in his cinematographic experiments.
The relationship between subject and object, between the film maker and his subject, has a significant place in this. A relationship in which intimacy, sensuality, time and — related to this — transience, play a significant role. Making film, as Cocteau once remarked, also always means filming death, because a unique and therefore mortal moment is recorded.
Documentary makers Claudine Després, Julian Schmid and Cathy Day are involved in producing three DVD anthologies covering the whole of Stephen Dwoskin's oeuvre; a labour-intensive project, if only because of the parlous state of some of the available prints.
Erwin Houtenbrink, IFFR. English text preserved from the historical film page.