Abstract
This essay investigates the rarely theorised genre of autobiographical film via a comparative analysis of the written and filmed versions of Cyril Collard’s Les Nuits fauves. Collard’s autobiographies are centred around three categories of relationships: his love affair with a woman, his love affairs with men, and his ‘savage nights’ - anonymous sado-masochistic encounters with men under a Paris bridge. In his written autobiography, Collard described himself as fragmented by these sexual relationships and invaded by the HIV virus. In the film version, made as he was dying, he incorporated these kaleidoscopic stories of otherness into a unifying and unified story of himself, consciously renegotiating an image that he knew would outlast him. As filmmaker and star, Collard stitched together his formerly fragmented self, adapting a text of dispersed identity into a film that would monumentalise him for posterity.
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