title: The noble art of selfpretence: auto/biography and intertextuality in the work of Stephen Dwoskin
Creators: name: O'Donoghue, Darragh
Publisher: name: University of Reading
Year: 2022

description: The written part of the PhD aims to offer an alternative to the two dominant 
approaches to filmmaker and artist Stephen Dwoskin - Lacanian psychoanalytic and 
historical - by looking at his work as an ‘intertextual’ practice. Specifically, it will 
examine the representation of the self in his work. The central subject of Dwoskin’s 
work is ‘auto/biography’, an umbrella term that will be used to describe what is called 
‘personal narrative’ or ‘life writing’ in literature – for example portraiture and self-portraiture, biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, notebook, sketchbook, home 
movie, and oral history. However, Dwoskin’s auto/biographical works are not 
presented in a naively confessional way. In 1983, Dwoskin made his first 
biographical film, Shadows from Light, a study of the émigré photographer Bill 
Brandt. Rather than present a straightforward, chronological account of his subject, 
he structured his film around Brandt’s main influences: Alice in Wonderland,
Surrealism, and Orson Welles. This thesis is inspired by Dwoskin’s methodology in 
Shadows from Light - it will suggest that his self-representation is always filtered 
through his engagement with other works of art.
Through a series of discrete but interconnected texts, the thesis will look at 
Dwoskin’s auto/biographical output in a variety of media – films, paintings, drawings, 
prints, interviews, published writings and archival sources including diaries, draft 
autobiographies, letters, and unrealised, auto/biographical scripts. Even those works 
which have no apparent auto/biographical content – films about young women in 
cramped interiors, a multimedia piece about a singing hobo, an opera aria – will be 
read according to what literary theorist Philippe Lejeune, in a variation on his seminal 
concept of the ‘autobiographical pact’, calls the ‘phantasmatic pact’ – an implied 
contract entered into by the reader with the writer that apparently fictional material 
can ‘reveal[…] phantasms of the individual’ creator.
The practical part of the PhD will comprise a catalogue raisonné of Dwoskin’s 
output as a filmmaker, painter, printmaker, artist’s bookmaker, photographer, writer, 
and graphic designer. The catalogue is ultimately intended to serve as a reliable reference work for Dwoskin scholars; for the purposes of the PhD, however, the 
project is a species of thought experiment. Questions it will raise include: Is it 
possible to apply a methodology developed for an older conception of the fine arts to 
one generated in the post-artefactual 1960s? Can the experimental film - which 
exists uneasily on the boundary between the art world and arthouse cinema, and 
doesn’t quite belong in either - be subjected to an art-historical methodology? Is the 
totalising, formal approach of the catalogue raisonné appropriate to the sprawling, 
libertarian life and work of an artist like Dwoskin?
The two strands are intended to complement each other as parallel approaches to 
the representation of the self or biography in the work of Dwoskin. The methodology 
of the thesis derives organically from Dwoskin’s own life and interests; the catalogue 
artificially imposes a rigid, external template on them. One privileges thought, 
imagination, and subjectivity; the other purports to be historical, factual, and 
objective. Each is a tacit and ontological critique of the other. Whether either -
separately or combined - gets us closer to an understanding of the life and work of 
Stephen Dwoskin, remains to be seen.