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Rating: 
Summary: powerful and artfully written blend of fact and fiction
Review: In "Home Movies..." Citron uses an interplay of fact and fiction to guide the reader on a journey of secrets. We are never quite sure of who is speaking and yet always sure it is the author's voice we hear. Citron has crafted her written words with the same sense of artistry evident in her films. This book is powerful and artfully written. It is as much about understanding the well-buried and fragmented narratives we each conceal as it is about the story of Citron's individual exploration of her own stories. Communicated through simple language inflected with subtle nuances, the truths among these pages explore the juncture of life and art. Interacting with this text is quite an experience.
Rating:
Summary: powerful and artfully written blend of fact and fiction
Review: In "Home Movies..." Citron uses an interplay of fact and fiction to guide the reader on a journey of secrets. We are never quite sure of who is speaking and yet always sure it is the author's voice we hear. Citron has crafted her written words with the same sense of artistry evident in her films. This book is powerful and artfully written. It is as much about understanding the well-buried and fragmented narratives we each conceal as it is about the story of Citron's individual exploration of her own stories. Communicated through simple language inflected with subtle nuances, the truths among these pages explore the juncture of life and art. Interacting with this text is quite an experience.
Rating:
Summary: Once you start this book, you can't put it down!
Review: This is a really different kind of memoir. It's personal, yet gripping as a novel would be (part of it is memior, part is fiction). It's also thoughtful and analytical without falling into the trapof being dry or over-intellectualized. I learned as much about myself as I did about the author. The blurb on the back cover is right - once I started it, I couldn't put it down.
Rating:
Summary: Once you pick it up, you can't put it down!
Review: This is a really different kind of memoir. It's personal, yet gripping as a novel would be (part of it is memoir, part is fiction). It's also thoughtful and analytical without falling into the trap of being dry or over-intellectualized. I learned as much about myself as I did about the author. The blurb on the back cover is right - once I started it, I couldn't put it down.
Rating:
Summary: A great and insightful read.
Review: This is an intimately written and insightful work. Anyone interested in women, film, or issues surrounding lesbianism will enjoy the work. Beautifully formatted.
Rating: 
Summary: A powerful exploration of line between truth and fiction
Review: Two decades ago, a father gave his daughter shoeboxes stuffed with old home movies. The daughter, a filmmaker, appropriated these family images, folding them into a film about mothers and daughters. The film, in turn, infiltrated the life of the family, creating a crack through which seeped the sexual secrets of three generations of women. In this sharply observed and visually rich book, Michelle Citron, one of the most influential independent woman filmmakers of our time, explores the life that surrounds an artist's work, its inner surprises, and the necessary fictions that shape it.Using essay, memoir, fiction, and images drawn from her family's home movies, Citron creates a series of moving narratives (even literally-one chapter is also a flip book). She tells the story of her vital and fraught relationships with her strong-willed mother and grandmother; her transformative, near-fatal illness; life with the woman who has been her partner for twenty years; and her slow realization of the sexual abuse that marked her childhood. The book concludes with the scripts of two of Citron's best-known films, Daughter Rite and What You Take for Granted, works that resonate with and extend the themes of this book. Citron uses a series of leitmotivs that surface, disappear, and resurface: class, sexuality, incest, power, the transcendence of art, the role of the filmmaker, the ethics of autobiographical work. Hers is an account of an artist's growth and development. But here are also the lacerations of class mobility, the life-shaping power of the unspeakable, and the exquisite web of family ties. Throughout, she tests "the sly, fictitious nature of memoir against fiction's hard nugget of truth," creating a book that both reveals and challenges this important genre. Michelle Citron is an award-winning independent filmmaker who has received grants from the NEA and NEH. She is a professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University, where she is also director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts. "In home movies we look directly into the lens, a filmic moment rare, even for documentaries. In the home movies the gaze of the subject meets the gaze of the spectator. When I look at my family's home movies, my forty-seven-year-old self and my eight-year-old self meet each other's eyes across the gap of decades. I wonder what she will speak." "A fresh, often fascinating hybrid, as much fiction as autobiography, that forces the reader to choose what and how to believe. . . .Citron's clarity and unflinching honesty are bracing: What kind of real contact between people is possible through art, in particular through the medium of film? Ideally, she answers, we create 'necessary fictions' that 'serve the truth even if they can't definitely pin down the truth.' More often than not succeeding in its struggle to make something useful out of a painful and tangled past, this book turns Citron's theory into a means for living." Publishers Weekly "I found Home Movies so enthralling I started to read it again the minute I reached the last page. It's so richly textured, with treasures of wit and writing and insight and revelation, I wanted to make sure I had gathered them all in. The book is going to be essential reading for anyone interested in the psychological, social, and cultural development of an artist. It is a highly significant and totally winning contribution to women's autobiographical writing at the edge of fiction." Kim Chernin, author of In My Mother's House "In this profound and revelatory book, Michelle Citron combines the distinctive imagery of her pioneering feminist films with an innovative narrative form to reinvent storytelling as a way of understanding identity. Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions is wise, eloquent, and best of all, a pleasure to read." Yvonne Rainer, filmmaker of "MURDER and murder" "Haunting and challenging, Citron's account of her life and filmmaking exposes to the light of day the deep links between creativity and trauma, artist and family, the self and the work. A brave journey of self-investigation." B. Ruby Rich, film critic and author of "Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement" "Citron's exploration of her own past traumas and their relationship to the present--to her art and to her identities--is powerful and lucid. It is refreshing to read a work that is reflective and self-reflective at the same time--a work that explores personal history as well as the discourses that occlude, illuminate, and complicate knowledge of that history." Judith Mayne, Ohio State University
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