Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions

Although including elements that have become familiar in today's memoir genre--incest, buried memories, troubled parent/child relations--filmmaker Citron reworks and reviews them to come up with a fresh, often fascinating hybrid, as much fiction as autobiography, that forces the reader to choose what and how to believe. ""As a woman artist I have always worked from that place where the erotics of my muse and the erotics of my body coincide,"" she writes, a collusion this book engineers in several ways: through scripts of, and comments on, her films; through illustrated memoir that spirals backward to her first violation by her grandfather; and through fictionalized retellings of her rage toward a mother who had herself been raped as a child. At their best, 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 definitively 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. (Nov.)