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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Essay Film

Introduction, anthologies.

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Spectator Engagement
Personal Documentary
1940s Watershed Years
Chris Marker
Alain Resnais
Jean-Luc Godard
Harun Farocki
Latin American Cinema
Installation and Exhibition

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Essay Film by Yelizaveta Moss LAST REVIEWED: 12 April 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 24 March 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0216

The term “essay film” has become increasingly used in film criticism to describe a self-reflective and self-referential documentary cinema that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Scholars unanimously agree that the first published use of the term was by Richter in 1940. Also uncontested is that Andre Bazin, in 1958, was the first to analyze a film, which was Marker’s Letter from Siberia (1958), according to the essay form. The French New Wave created a popularization of short essay films, and German New Cinema saw a resurgence in essay films due to a broad interest in examining German history. But beyond these origins of the term, scholars deviate on what exactly constitutes an essay film and how to categorize essay films. Generally, scholars fall into two camps: those who find a literary genealogy to the essay film and those who find a documentary genealogy to the essay film. The most commonly cited essay filmmakers are French and German: Marker, Resnais, Godard, and Farocki. These filmmakers are singled out for their breadth of essay film projects, as opposed to filmmakers who have made an essay film but who specialize in other genres. Though essay films have been and are being produced outside of the West, scholarship specifically addressing essay films focuses largely on France and Germany, although Solanas and Getino’s theory of “Third Cinema” and approval of certain French essay films has produced some essay film scholarship on Latin America. But the gap in scholarship on global essay film remains, with hope of being bridged by some forthcoming work. Since the term “essay film” is used so sparingly for specific films and filmmakers, the scholarship on essay film tends to take the form of single articles or chapters in either film theory or documentary anthologies and journals. Some recent scholarship has pointed out the evolutionary quality of essay films, emphasizing their ability to change form and style as a response to conventional filmmaking practices. The most recent scholarship and conference papers on essay film have shifted from an emphasis on literary essay to an emphasis on technology, arguing that essay film has the potential in the 21st century to present technology as self-conscious and self-reflexive of its role in art.

Both anthologies dedicated entirely to essay film have been published in order to fill gaps in essay film scholarship. Biemann 2003 brings the discussion of essay film into the digital age by explicitly resisting traditional German and French film and literary theory. Papazian and Eades 2016 also resists European theory by explicitly showcasing work on postcolonial and transnational essay film.

Biemann, Ursula, ed. Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age . New York: Springer, 2003.

This anthology positions Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) as the originator of the post-structuralist essay film. In opposition to German and French film and literary theory, Biemann discusses video essays with respect to non-linear and non-logical movement of thought and a range of new media in Internet, digital imaging, and art installation. In its resistance to the French/German theory influence on essay film, this anthology makes a concerted effort to include other theoretical influences, such as transnationalism, postcolonialism, and globalization.

Papazian, Elizabeth, and Caroline Eades, eds. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia . London: Wallflower, 2016.

This forthcoming anthology bridges several gaps in 21st-century essay film scholarship: non-Western cinemas, popular cinema, and digital media.

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Essays on the Essay Film

About the author.

In addition to his long career in film archiving and curating, Jan-Christopher Horak has taught at universities around the world. His recent book, Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design (2014) was published by University Press of Kentucky.

"Archival Spaces" Blog - Ithaca College

Sans soleil (1983)

For decades, I’ve been interested in the essay film, ever since I fell in love with Jean-Luc Godard’s work from the 1960s, like Pierrot le fou (1965), Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), but especially since the 1990s, when I wrote about Godard’s colleague Chris Marker, whose Sans soleil (1983) is a masterpiece of the genre. Recently, I discussed Saul Bass’ Why Man Creates (1968) as an essay film. But is it a genre? Straddling documentary and fiction, the subjectivity of the author and the objectivity of the filmed image, vacillating between image and sound, visuality and the word, essay films in many ways defy definition. Jean-Pierre Gorin, himself a film essayist, writes in Essays on the Essay Film (ed. Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, Columbia University Press, 2017): “They come in all sizes, shapes, and hues – and they will continue to do so... How can one even attempt to draw its floor plan, sketch its history and catalog the idiosyncratic products that appear in its inventory?” (p. 270).

Such semantic nebulousness already held true for the literary essay, as this anthology documents. Max Bense notes that essays always imply a level of experimentation, because they are exploring various forms of subjectivity. Similarly, the essays in this volume experiment with possible definitions of film essays. Essays on the Essay Film is accordingly divided into four sections: 1. Theoretical essays on the essay as a literary form by Georg Lukács, Robert Musil, Max Bense, Theodor W. Adorno and Aldous Huxley. 2. Previously published essays on the essay film by Hans Richter, Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin. 3. Analytical essays by Phillip Lopate, Paul Arthur, Michael Renov, Timothy Corrigan and Raymond Bellour. 4. Essays by filmmakers of the form, including Gorin, Hito Steyerl, Ross McElwee, Laura Mulvey and Isaac Julien.

Pierrot le fou (1965)

The editors make a wise decision to include writings on the literary essay, since many of its characteristics can be applied to essay films. Georg Lukács, for example, supposes that the essay is not an act of creating the new, but rather only of reconfiguring previously known information. Max Bense defines essays as a form of experimental writing that eschews absolute statements in the interest of exploring parameters and possibilities. Theodor Adorno takes Bense a step further by connecting the essay to anti-Platonic values, such as the ephemeral, the transitory, and the fragmentary. Given the ambiguity of the image, the push and pull between the filmmaker’s subjectivity and the objectivity of the image, are not such values integral to the cinema experience?

The earliest theoretical statements about the essay film come from experimental filmmaker and artist Hans Richter, who in his 1939 tract, Struggle for the Film: Towards a Socially Responsible Cinema , foresees a new form of documentary that has the ability to visualize thought. Alexander Astruc, an early member of the French New Wave , theorized the future of cinema in neither documentary nor fiction films, but rather in filmmakers who use the camera as a pen— le camera au stylo— for the expression of authorial subjectivity. Phillip Lopate, on the other hand, defines five characteristics for the essay film: 1. It has to communicate through language, whether spoken or written. 2. It must be the work of a single author. 3. It must set itself the task of solving a specific problem or problems. 4. It must be a wholly personal point of view. 5. It must be eloquent and interesting. Like Lopate, the late film critic and essayist Paul Arthur focuses on the film auteur, insisting that the essay film must give evidence a critical, self-reflexive author who is able to communicate through word and image.

Timothy Corrigan contributes a historical analysis of the essay film, from Dziga Vertov to Agnès Varda, agreeing with Lukács’ thesis that the essay film indeed creates no new forms, but remixes and recontextualizes ideas that are already in circulation. The final part of his essay focuses on a close reading of Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000).

Again and again the authors of the volume emphasize the essay film’s openness of form and always-tentative contours that defy any absolute definitions. Thus, the authors of Essays , as well as the even more subjective contributions of the filmmakers, discuss definitions and characteristics of a genre that isn’t one, unable or unwilling to draw definite conclusions. They are consciously circling around an indefinable object. The pleasure here is not to be found in the end goal, but rather in the intellectual journey. Nevertheless, it would have been nice if there had at least been agreement about when the essay film first appeared in film history, whether with Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Georges Franju’s Le sang des bêtes (1949) or Chris Marker’s Lettre de Sibérie (1958). A filmography of the essay film would have helped readers visualize the parameters of what films are considered essay films, a common ground for further discussion. Personally, I would have also liked to have read more about the aesthetics of the essay film, its visual and emotional appeal, not just intellectual pull. In retrospect, I remember the tactile sensuality of images in many of the films discussed, scenes that evoke emotion. I also question whether the essay or essay film is mainly a remix, and not in some way an independent creation of aesthetic value. Despite these slight reservations, this volume is eminently readable and a contribution to understanding a form of cinema that continues to morph and grow.

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Hey presto: F for Fake and the invention of the essay film

The 1970s have been seen as a period of frustration for Orson Welles, as he struggled – and failed – to complete self-financed feature films. But the same period saw his brilliant F for Fake, said this September 2012 feature.

21 September 2023

By Simon Callow

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The early 1970s for Orson Welles, by then in his mid-fifties, were typical of the way his life as a self-declared independent filmmaker had resolved itself since the 1950s: a whirl of what the French call travaux alimentaires – bread-and-butter work, acting and narrating and an increasing number of guest appearances on comedy shows – out of which he attempted to finance at least the initial work on the bewildering number and variety of projects which endlessly proliferated in his fertile brain.

As a director, he was out on a limb. Neither of his mainstream American ventures of the 1950s, his dazzling teleplay The Fountain of Youth (1956) for Desilu nor Touch of Evil (1958) for Universal, had led to any further offers of work. Back in Europe, where he had been living and working since 1947, he had shot – with intermittent financing, and in the face of what to anyone else would have been insuperable obstacles – Othello (1952) and 1955’s Mr Arkadin aka Confidential Report (neither released in America); as a sideline, he had created some remarkably innovative work for British television: Orson Welles’s Sketchbook and Around the World with Orson Welles , for the BBC and Associated-Rediffusion respectively. There had been some stage work: a triumphant Moby-Dick in London in 1955, an indifferent Chimes at Midnight in Ireland in 1960, and a Rhinoceros at the Royal Court Theatre from which he had been sacked by its star, Laurence Olivier. He had even created a ballet, Lady in the Ice , for Roland Petit, again in London.

Through this blur of activity Welles managed, in the 1960s, to shoot – again, under virtually impossible financial circumstances – the film that many of us consider to be his masterpiece, Chimes at Midnight (1966), as well as the relatively fiscally stable The Trial (1962), produced by the Salkinds, père et fils , and the elegant and concise Isak Dinesen adaptation The Immortal Story (1968), made for French television, Welles’s only completed fiction film in colour. These films – the tiniest fraction of his list of projects – were the ones where, by happy accident, the sperm, so to speak, hit the egg.

There were others – his saga of the Dumas clan, for example, or Surinam , his Conrad adaptation (from Victory ), or his screenplay from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 – which simply never happened. And there were those of which he shot what he could, for as long as he could afford to. The Deep from 1970 was among these projects, abandoned, half-edited and not fully shot; more significantly, that same year Welles began shooting The Other Side of the Wind , a magnum opus designed as his response to the death of the old Hollywood and the birth of the new. Meanwhile, Orson’s Bag , a compilation of sketches, improvisations and a substantial 40-minute version of The Merchant of Venice , for CBS , foundered when the company, for ‘tax reasons’, withdrew its backing.

This was Welles’s world. Stop, start; glimmers of hope quickly snuffed out; unending acting work on other men’s films (including, most bitterly of all, on the 1970 Catch-22 directed by the new kid on the block, Mike Nichols); doing the rounds of the television shows of Johnny Carson, Dean Martin, Dick Cavett and Rowan and Martin, telling anecdotes, doing magic tricks, burlesquing himself, enduring fat jokes, partly to make money but also, as he fondly hoped, to remind Hollywood (which he never ceased hoping to return to) of his existence.

Meanwhile, among all this confusion of different Welleses, another potent image had been long forming, particularly in Europe, of the réalisateur maudit : of the great director, blighted by destiny, or the studios, or the financiers, denied access to the means of production. Welles himself – as opposed to his films – loomed very large indeed, a kind of Vanderdecken of film, a Flying Dutchman doomed to roam the world, begging bowl in hand, until he could finally make the film or films that would fulfil his destiny as the greatest of the great. He became a pin-up for Cahiers du cinéma , a terrible example and a hero at the same time.

He was endlessly profiled on British and European television. In 1968, for example, French television produced a 30-minute film called Portrait: Orson Welles , co-directed by Frédéric Rossif and François Reichenbach. Welles and Reichenbach had met when the latter interviewed him on the set of Is Paris Burning? (1966). They hit it off and kept in touch, most often meeting at the editing studio Antégor, “nerve centre for independent documentary-makers”, as François Thomas and Jean-Pierre Berthomé put it in their indispensable Orson Welles at Work . In 1970 Reichenbach, with the British journalist Richard Drewett, made Elmyr: The True Picture? , a 40-minute BBC documentary about Elmyr de Hory, the Hungarian faker of 20th-century masters, and his biographer Clifford Irving; Reichenbach asked Welles to narrate it. Welles declined, but was predictably intrigued, on many levels, by the material. It touched him at many points: his own facility as a painter, his lifelong fascination with conjuring – with the art of illusion in all its forms, in fact – and his equally long-standing attraction (from Citizen Kane onwards) to biographical enquiry all chimed with him.

He may well have had occasion to ponder deeply on the question of what a man’s life amounts to when, in August 1970, his Madrid villa burned down, wiping out many of his papers, screenplays, stories and sketches. And the subject of Reichenbach’s film, the delicate question of authorship, which had dogged Welles from at least as far back as the famous War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938, now raised its head in particularly aggressive form with the publication, in successive issues of The New Yorker in February 1971, of two articles by Pauline Kael alleging that Herman Mankiewicz, Welles’s credited co-author of the screenplay of Citizen Kane , had in fact written the whole thing. Welles was deeply upset by this allegation; Reichenbach’s film now took on an urgent personal relevance for him.

Reichenbach had shown Welles the hour or so of footage that he had been unable to use; now he became seriously intrigued, asking Reichenbach to allow him to rework the material into a film of his own. Reichenbach not only agreed but offered to finance a 30-minute film through his own company Les Films du Prisme. Welles accordingly went to Ibiza to shoot new material with de Hory, and shot scenes in a Paris restaurant with himself and Reichenbach in discussion. But somehow the material failed to gel; Welles seemed to have reached an impasse and his initial enthusiasm petered out.

Then, in January 1972, sensational news broke: it was revealed that the autobiography of the notoriously reclusive Howard Hughes, whose sale had been brokered by none other than de Hory’s biographer Clifford Irving, had in fact been forged by Irving himself. This news that the faker’s biographer was himself a faker galvanised a delighted Welles, who instantly saw the potential for a movie in which nothing is as it seems – in which everything, in fact, is fake. This idea liberated him. He could use stock footage, footage he had shot himself for other purposes or no purpose at all. He would weave apparently disparate elements into a vivacious and completely non-linear essay on the idea of fakery, a dazzling scherzo on the theme of deception, at the still centre of which would be a meditation on the great cathedrals, built by unknown craftsmen. Who cares, asks Welles, who built Chartres? Its greatness is independent of its authorship.

The art of editing

For one of the most present of filmmakers, whose every frame proclaims his authorship of his film, whose performances overwhelmingly dominate his own work, whose bulky profile was among the best-known images of 20th-century culture, to make a film praising anonymity is just one of many pieces of outrageous chutzpah in the film that finally became known as F For Fake (1973). But beyond the question of authorship, beyond even the question of fakery, the film is above all a hymn to the art of editing – of which, from Othello onwards, Welles had become an absolute master. In that work, his editorial virtuosity derived partly from necessity – the film had to move fast because too often, in a movie shot on several continents over many years, the eye had to be distracted.

As early as his work on the footage he shot for his stage show of Too Much Johnson at the Mercury Theatre in 1938, he had discovered what all directors quickly find out: to shoot is human, to edit divine. Here, in the editing suite, the director is absolute master, able to make a fast scene slow, a slow one fast, a funny scene sad, a dully-acted one dazzling. Increasingly Welles regarded filming as simply the generation of the rawest of raw material to be shaped, changed, transmuted by the editorial hand. In the early 1950s, Darryl Zanuck had given him a portable moviola in lieu of a salary; it went with him wherever he went.

With Welles, filming and editing went hand in hand to an unusual degree; in F For Fake the editing preceded the filming: as the film took shape in the editing suite, Welles saw the direction the film was taking, and this dictated the shots he required. And as events in the external world unfolded, he was able to respond to them. He worked from 5am to 11pm every day, with up to three different editors, reeling off instructions as he passed from one editor to the next. He moved the film away from narrative towards pure prestidigitation. Its form, Thomas and Berthomé observe with inimitable Gallic precision, is rhizomatic, “like tubers that multiply underground throwing up roots, no one being more important than any other… The underlying thread of the film is the magician’s control over the credulous mind and its corollary – the desire to believe in the improbable.”

At the centre of it all is Welles the conjuror. In Henry Jaglom’s 1970 experimental film A Safe Place he had played a character known only as The Magician; he would do so in other films, in various different manifestations. But F For Fake is his magical apotheosis. Throughout the film, his sense of exhilaration in his own virtuosity is palpable: making it, he refound his almost childlike sense of joyous discovery, of naughty astonishment at what he could get away with. After Citizen Kane , F For Fake was the next best train set a boy ever had.

Gary Graver, his cinematographer on much of the film, describes how, when the money was running out, they improvised technical solutions, inventing the cinema as they went along, just as Griffith had done, as Gance had done with Napoléon . The opening credit sequence, for example, was filmed in an abandoned old house in the depth of the countryside. The sequence called for a 360° shot, but they had no generator to produce the requisite light. They decided instead to give each of seven or eight crew members sun guns. As the camera circled by, one after another of the crew would duck down to keep out of shot, then immediately stand up again; it works perfectly. On another occasion, lacking a focus puller, the cinematographer rigged up a string with a toothpick attached to the lens and adjusted the focus as he operated.

Graver, whose experience was essentially on low-budget (and fairly low-life) movies, was Welles’s ideal partner in filmmaking, ready to be told what to do by Welles, but endlessly inventive of means – cheap means – by which to achieve what he was asked for. Welles’s extraordinary ability to keep the whole film in his mind as he worked enabled him to create shots which would match the pre-existing footage. This godlike capacity to yoke together people who had been filmed years and sometimes oceans apart, defying time and space, is another element of the film’s quite extraordinary exhilaration. It feels like a young man’s film, not least in the director’s quite shameless desire to show off his sexy girlfriend to the world.

Oja Kodar had been a part of Welles’s life since 1962, when he was directing The Trial . He remained married to Paola Mori, but their intimate life was over. Oja had quickly become an artistic partner as well as an emotional and sexual one. All the evidence suggests that in her Welles had at last found his soulmate – a woman with whom he could share his life at every level. From an early stage they started to collaborate on projects: The Deep was, to a large extent, designed to promote her career as an actress. Both The Other Side of the Wind (the title was hers) and F For Fake (ditto) are strongly influenced by Oja’s frank and uninhibited sexuality; both, indeed, might be said to showcase it. Sensuality had never been a part of Welles’s world; sex – as in The Lady from Shanghai (1947) – had most often been presented as problematic and disturbing. No doubt Welles’s relationship with Oja was not without complexities: curiously enough, in F For Fake Oja is shown as the object of voyeuristic interest, either from the drivers and pedestrians ogling her in the streets (of what appears to be Paris, but is in fact Rome; another illusion), or from Picasso. But the celebration of her physical allure is unashamed and joyous.

Altogether, the film suggests a fresh wind from Welles, a rediscovery of his essential pleasure in filmmaking, and a giant stride in a new direction. He thought of it as the pioneering work in a new genre, one unique to him because it depended entirely on his personality to make it cohere. “I’m a better actor than I’m a director, and I’ve never had a chance to prove it,” he told Bill Krohn in an interview in Cahiers du cinéma . “I’m very serious. I know that the thing I do best in the world is talk to audiences. And that’s what confuses me and makes me think I should have been in politics, which is nonsense… my favourite mask is myself. And I feel much more at ease on the stage talking to the audience than I do pretending to be someone else. With most actors it’s exactly the opposite.”

This slightly odd observation – surely what he is talking about has nothing to do with acting – is nonetheless disarmingly frank in its main point: all his career, Welles had been reaching out to the public, sometimes more successfully than at others. Since the late 1930s, in radio programmes, in newspaper columns, in speeches, on television, he had always been, as he puts it, trying to talk to audiences. He had always had this compelling need to address the public in propria persona – in the persona, that is, of a wise, benevolent, impassioned, ironic, wayward, quizzical interlocutor. In The Fountain of Youth , Welles as the storyteller relates both to the action and to the audience. He is not part of the story; he is the magician, summoning up these people and making them disappear again. He is the master of ceremonies. With F For Fake and his invention of the essay film, he combines all his impulses: the desire to instruct, to entertain, to bewitch, to tease. In it he triumphantly effects his escape from linear narrative, which has always been his enemy.

A mark of his exhilaration in his new creation is that he curbed his natural tendency to linger over the editing process, and the final film was speedily delivered early in 1973 – although, with the usual complications which seemed to attend the release of every Welles movie, it was in fact not shown publicly for many months. It was liked, on the whole, in Europe; its reception in America was essentially one of bemusement. Yet again, Welles was taken to task for not having made a second Citizen Kane .

He was not to know it, but his constantly surprising champagne cocktail of a film, which he hoped would be the harbinger of a long line of similar films, was the last film he was ever to complete. The frolicsome new departure of F For Fake was a hop, skip and a jump to nowhere.

The new issue of Sight and Sound

Hamaguchi Ryūsuke: insights on and from the Japanese auteur Plus: Mica Levi on their innovative score for The Zone of Interest – Víctor Erice interviewed about his masterful return to feature filmmaking, Close Your Eyes – a festival report from a politically charged Berlinale

Other things to explore

The magnificent ’74: the conversation.

By Jessica Kiang

Blue Gene: Tierney in the UK

By Josephine Botting

My father the hero: Víctor Erice’s El sur

By Mar Diestro-Dópido

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, reflexive memories: the images of the cine-essay.

While the video essay form, in regards to its practice of exploring the visual themes in cinematic discourse, has seen a recent surge in popularity with viewers (thanks to invaluable online resources like indieWIRE’s Press Play, Fandor’s Keyframe and the academic peer-reviewed journal [in]Transition), its historical role as a significant filmmaking genre has long been prominent among film scholars and cinephiles.

From the start, the essay film—more affectionately referred to as the “cine-essay”—was a fusion of documentary filmmaking and avant-garde filmmaking by way of appropriation art; it also tended to employ fluid, experimental editing schemes. The first cine-essays were shot and edited on physical film. Significant works like Agnès Varda ’s "Salut les Cubains" (1963) and Marc Karlin’s "The Nightcleaners" (1975), which he made in collaboration with the Berwick Street Film Collective, function like normal documentaries: original footage coupled with a voiceover of the filmmaker and an agenda at hand. But if you look closer and begin to study the aesthetics of the work (e.g. the prolific use of still photos in "Cubains," the transparency of the “filmmaking” at hand in "Nightcleaners"), these films transcend the singular genre that is the documentary form; they became about the process of filmmaking and they aspired to speak to both a past and future state of mind. What the cine-essay began to stand for was our understanding of memory and how we process the images we see everyday. And in a modern technological age of over-content-creation, by way of democratized filmmaking tools (i.e. the video you take on your cell phone), the revitalization of the cine-essayists is ever so crucial and instrumental to the continued curation of the moving images that we manifest.

The leading figure of the cine-essay form, the iconic Chris Marker, really put the politico-stamp of vitality into the cine-essay film with his magnum-opus "Grin Without A Cat" (1977). Running at three hours in length, Marker’s "Grin" took the appropriation art form to the next level, culling countless hours of newsreel and documentary footage that he himself did not shoot, into a seamless, haunting global cross-section of war, social upheaval and political revolution. Yet, what’s miraculous about Marker’s work is that his cine-essays never fell victim to a dependency on the persuasive argument—that was something traditional documentaries hung their hats on. Instead, Marker was much more interested in the reflexive nature of the moving image. If we see newsreel footage of a street riot spliced together with footage from a fictional war film, does that lessen our reaction to the horrific reality of the riot? How do we associate the moving image once it is juxtaposed against something that we once thought to be safe or familiar? At the start of Marker’s "Sans Soleil" (1983), the narrator says, “The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.” It’s essentially the perfect script for deciphering the cine-essay form in general. It demands that we search and create our own new realities, even if we’re forced to stare at a black screen to conjure up a feeling or memory.

Flash forward to 1995: Harun Farocki creates "Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik," a video essay that foils the Lumière brothers’ "Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory" (1895) with countless other film clips of workers in the workplace throughout the century. It’s a significant work: exactly 100 years later, a cine-essayist is speaking to the ideas of filmmakers from 1895 and then those ideas are repurposed to show a historical evolution of employer-employee relations throughout time. What’s also significant about Farocki’s film is the technological aspect. Note how his title at this point in time is a “video essayist.” The advent of video, along with the streamlined workflow to acquiring digital assets of moving images, gave essayist filmmakers like Farocki the opportunity for creating innovative works with faster turnaround times. Not only was it less cumbersome to edit footage digitally, the ways for the works to be presented were altered; Farocki would later repurpose his own video essay into a 12-monitor video installation for exhibition.

Consider Thom Andersen’s epic 2003 video essay "Los Angeles Plays Itself." In it, Andersen appropriates clips from films set in Los Angeles from over the decades and then criticizes the cinema’s depiction of his beloved city. It’s the most meta of essay films because by the end, Andersen himself has constructed the latest Los Angeles-based film. And although Andersen has more of an obvious thesis at hand than, say something as equally lyrical and dense as Marker’s "Sans Soleil," both films exist in the same train of thought: the exploration of the way we as viewers embrace the moving image and then how we communicate that feeling to each other. Andersen may be frustrated with the way Hollywood conveys his city but he even he has moments of inspired introspection towards those films. The same could be said of Marker’s work; just as Marker can remain a perplexed and often inquisitive spectator of the moving images of poverty and genocide that surround him, he functions as a gracious, patient guide for the viewer, since it is his essay text that the narrator reads from.

Watching an essay film requires you to fire on all cylinders, even if you watch one with an audience. It’s a different kind of collective viewing because the images and ideas spring from an artifact that is real; that artifact can be newsreel footage or a completed, a released motion picture that is up for deeper examination or anything else that exists as a completed work. In that sense, the cine-essay (or video essay), remains the most potent form of cinematic storytelling because it invites you to challenge its ideas and images and then in turn, it challenges your own ideas by daring you to reevaluate your own memory of those same moving images. It aims for a deeper truth and it dares to repurpose the cinema less as escapist entertainment and more as an instrument to confront our own truths and how we create them.

RogerEbert.com VIDEO ESSAY: Reflexive Memories: The Images of the Cine-Essay from Nelson Carvajal on Vimeo .

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Essays on the essay film.

Edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan

Columbia University Press

Pub Date: March 2017

ISBN: 9780231172677

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Creatively and capaciously, this rich volume gets at the essay film not only by including key critics and practitioners of the form but, importantly, by going beyond the genre itself to broader contributions to essay theorization from philosophy and belles lettres. An exciting, inventive volume with great delights at every turn. Dana Polan, New York University

Alter and Corrigan's masterful new volume on the essay film is rigorous, comprehensive, and refreshingly surprising. Their invaluable collection probes theoretical reflections on the essay as a mode of expression and a way of thinking in light of the creative and political investments of filmmakers around the globe; it also chronicles the essay film's changing countenances, from its prehistory and early signs of life to novel permutations in the present. Featuring a very distinguished cast of players, this collection is a production of the highest order. Eric Rentschler, Harvard University

Nora Alter and Tim Corrigan bring their seasoned literary experience to herd but never tame the unruly essay film. Its prestige soaring, this mode is tethered to a long history of experimental writing that will keep it from disappearing into the bog of blogs and YouTube mashups whose best examples it is already inspiring. The proof is in the Table of Contents: a brilliant litany of sensitive, reliable writers, who dare to take on the most daring forms of image-thought the cinema has produced. Dudley Andrew, Yale University

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in interest in the history, concept and diverse manifestations of the essay film. In this essential collection, Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan have brought together a superb selection of foundational texts with a range of key recent writings by leading scholars and essay filmmakers. The result is an enormously rich resource for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of this most vital of audiovisual forms. Michael Witt, University of Roehampton

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Defining the Cinematic Essay: The Essay Film by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades, and Essays on the Essay Film by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan

When it came time for the students to create their own documentaries, one of my policies was for them to “throw objectivity out the window”. To quote John Grierson, documentaries are the “creative treatment of actuality.” Capturing the truth, whatever it may be, is quite nearly impossible if not utterly futile. Often, filmmakers deliberately manipulate their footage in order to achieve educational, informative and persuasive objectives. To illustrate, I screened Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North and always marveled at the students’ reactions when, after the screening, I informed them that the film’s depiction of traditional Inuit life was entirely a reenactment. While many students were shocked and disappointed when they learned this, others accepted Flaherty’s defence of the film as true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Inuit’s vanishing way of life. Another example that I screened was a clip from controversial filmmaker Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002) which demonstrated how Moore shrewdly used editing to villainise then-NRA president Charlton Heston. Though a majority of the class agreed with Moore’s anti-gun violence agenda, many were infuriated about being “lied to” and “misled” by the editing tactics. Naturally these examples also raise questions about the role of ethics in documentary filmmaking, but even films that are not deliberately manipulative are still “the product of individuals, [and] will always display bias and be in some manner didactic.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 193.)

To further my point on the elusive nature of objectivity, I screened Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard ( Night and Fog , 1956), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008.) Yet at this point I began to wonder if I was still teaching documentary or if I had ventured into some other territory. I was aware that Koyaanisqatsi had also been classified as an experimental film by notable scholars such as David Bordwell. On the other hand, Nuit et brouillard is labeled a documentary film but poses more questions than answers, since it is “unable to adequately document the reality it seeks.” (Alter/Corrigan p. 210.) Resnais’s short film interweaves black and white archival footage with colour film of Auschwitz and other camps. The colour sequences were shot in 1955, when the camps had already been deserted for ten years. Nuit et brouillard scrutinises the brutality of the Holocaust while contemplating the social, political and ethical responsibilities of the Nazis. Yet it also questions the more abstract role of knowledge and memory, both individual and communal, within the context of such horrific circumstances. The students did not challenge Night and Fog’s classification as a documentary, but they wondered if Waltz with Bashir and especially Sans Soleil had entirely different objectives since they seemed to do more than present factual information. The students also noted that these films seemed to merge with other genres, and wondered if there was a different classification for them aside from poetic, observational, participatory, et al. Although it is animated, Waltz with Bashir is classified as a documentary since it is based on Folman’s own experiences during the 1982 Lebanon War. Also, as Roger Ebert notes, animation is “the best way to reconstruct memories, fantasies, hallucinations, possibilities, past and present.” 2 However, it is not solely a document of Folman’s experiences or of the war itself. It is also a subjective meditation on the nature of human perception. As Folman attempts to reconstruct past events through the memories of his fellow soldiers, Waltz with Bashir investigates the very nature of truth itself. These films definitely challenged the idea of documentary as a strict genre, but the students noticed that they each had interesting similarities. Aside from educating, informing and persuading, they also used non-fiction sounds and images to visualise abstract concepts and ideas.

Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983)

Sans Soleil has been described as “a meditation on place […] where spatial availability confuses the sense of time and memory.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 117.) Some of my students felt that Marker’s film, which is composed of images from Japan and elsewhere, was more like a “filmed travelogue”. Others described it as a “film journal” since Marker used images and narration to describe certain experiences, thoughts and memories. Yet my students’ understanding of Sans Soleil was problematised when they discovered that the narration was delivered by “a fictional, nameless woman […] reading aloud from, or else paraphrasing, letters sent to her by a fictional, globe-trotting cameraman.” 3 Upon learning this, several students wondered if Sans Soleil was actually a narrative and not a documentary at all. I briefly explained that, since it was also an attempt to visualise abstract concepts, Sans Soleil was known as an essay film. Yet this only complicated things further! The students wondered if other films we saw in the class were essayistic as well. Was Koyaanisqatsi an essay on humanity’s impact on the world? Was Jesus Camp (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2006) an essay on the place of religion in society and politics? Where was the line between documentary and the essay film? Between essay and narrative? Or was the essay just another type of documentary? Rather than immerse myself in the difficulties of describing the essay film, I quickly changed the topic to the students’ own projects, and encouraged them to shape their documentaries through related processes of investigation and exploration.

If I had been able to read “Essays on the Essay Film” by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades before teaching this class, I still may not have been able to provide definitive answers to my students’ questions. But this is not to say that either of these books are vague and inconclusive! Each one is an insightful collection of articles that explores the complexities of the essay film. In her essay “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments” featured in Alter and Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” Laura Rascaroli wisely notes that “we must resist the temptation to overtheorise the form or, even worse, to crystallise it into a genre…” since the essay film is a “matrix of all generic possibilities.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) Fabienne Costa goes so far as saying that “The ‘cinematographic essay’ is neither a category of films nor a genre. It is more a type of image, which achieves essay quality.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) It is true that filmmakers, critics, and scholars (myself included) have attempted to understand the essay film better by grouping it with genres that bear many similarities, such as documentary and experimental cinema. Yet despite these similarities, the authors suggest that the essay film needs to be differentiated from both documentary and avant-garde practices of filmmaking. Both “Essays on the Essay Film” and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” illustrate that this mutable form should not be understood as a specific genre, but rather recognised for its profoundly reflective and reflexive capabilities. The essay film can even defy established formulas. As stated by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin in his essay “Proposal for a Tussle” the essay film “can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 270.)

Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” consists of writings by distinguished scholars such as Andre Bazin, Theodore Adorno, Hans Richter and Laura Mulvey, but also includes more recent work by Thomas Elsaesser, Laura Rascaroli and others. Although each carefully selected text spans different time periods and cultural backgrounds, Alter and Corrigan weave together a comprehensive, yet pliable description of the cinematic essay.

“Essays on the Essay Film” begins by including articles that investigate the form and function of the written essay. This first chapter, appropriately titled “Foundations” provides a solid groundwork for many of the concepts discussed in the following chapters. Although the written essay is obviously different from the work created by filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Trinh T. Minh-ha, Alter and Corrigan note that these texts “have been influential to both critics and practitioners of the contemporary film essay.” (p. 7) The articles in this chapter range from Georg Lukacs’s 1910 “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” to “Preface to the Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley” which was published in 1960. Over a span of fifty years, the authors illustrate how the very concept of the essay was affected by changing practices of art, history, philosophy, culture, economics, politics, as well as through modernist and postmodernist lenses. However, these articles are still surprisingly relevant for contemporary scholars and practitioners. For example, in an excerpt from The Man Without Qualities , Robert Musil writes that, “A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?” (p. 45.) Naturally, this reminded me of my class’s discussion on Sans Soleil and Waltz with Bashir. It concisely encapsulates the difficulties that arise when the essay film crosses boundaries of fiction and non-fiction. However, in his 1948 essay “On the Essay and its Prose”, Max Bense believes that the essay lies within the realm of experimentation, since “there is a strange border area that develops between poetry and prose, between the aesthetic stage of creation and the ethical stage of persuasion.” (p. 52.) Bense also notes that the word “essay” itself means “to attempt” or to “experiment” and believes that the essay firmly belongs in the realm of experimental and avant-garde. This is appropriate enough, given that writers, and more recently filmmakers and video artists have pushed the boundaries of their mediums in order to explore their deepest thoughts and emotions.

Alter and Corrigan follow this chapter with “The Essay Film Through History” which details the evolution of the essay film. Writing in 1940, Hans Richter considers the essay film a new type of documentary and praises its abilities to break beyond the purportedly objective goals of documentaries in an attempt to “visualize thoughts on screen.” (p. 91) Eighteen years later, Andre Bazin celebrates Chris Marker’s thought-provoking voice-over narration as well as his method of “not restricting himself to using documentary images filmed on the spot, but [using] any and all filmic material that might help his case.” (p. 104) Bazin even compares Marker’s style to the work of animator Norman McLaren, supporting the idea of the essay film’s use of unfettered creativity. By the time the reader gets to the third chapter, “Contemporary Positions”, he or she is well aware of the capricious and malleable nature of the essay film. As Corrigan remarks:

As it develops in and out of those documentary and avant-garde traditions, the history of the essay film underlines a central critical point: that the essayistic should not necessarily be seen simply as an alternative to either of these practices (or to narrative cinema); rather it rhymes with and retimes them as counterpoints within and to them. Situated between the categories of realism and formal experimentation and geared to the possibilities of “public expression,” the essay film suggests an appropriation of certain avant-garde and documentary practices in a way different from the early historical practices of both, just as it tends to invert and restructure the relations between the essayistic and narrative to subsume narrative within that public expression. The essayistic play between fact and fiction, between the documentary and the experimental, or between non-narrative and narrative becomes a place where the essay film inhabits other forms and practices. (p. 198)

Alter and Corrigan’s volume implies that the essay can inhabit many forms, styles or genres. More importantly is the idea that it should be recognised for its intentions and capabilities. Whatever form it takes, the essay is an attempt to seek, explore, understand, visualise and question, without necessarily providing clearly defined answers. The essay film also places considerable value on the intellect and opinion of the viewer, since it is an invitation to reflect on the thoughts, experiences, emotions and perceptions that are being conveyed. “Essays on the Essay Film” sensibly concludes with the chapter entitled “Filmmakers on the Essayistic”. Notable filmmakers, such as Lynn Sachs and Ross McElwee provide valuable insight into their own practices. The featured filmmakers, documentarians and video artists in this chapter do not focus specifically on what form their work takes, but what they are trying to achieve. For instance, in her article “On Writing the Film Essay,” Lynn Sachs proclaims that “My job is not to educate but rather to spark a curiosity in my viewer that moves from the inside out.” (p. 287.) Admittedly, Sachs’s statement contradicts the idea that documentary films seek to educate, inform and persuade, which I taught in my own classes. Yet Sachs’s insights, as well as those of the many other filmmakers in “Essays on the Essay Film” demonstrate how the camera is as versatile as the pen when communicating thoughts, emotions and ideas.

Tree of Life (Malick, 2011)

Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades have also compiled several surprising, challenging and thoroughly captivating articles that exemplify the many forms that the essay film can take. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia includes articles by several prominent scholars that explore the essay film’s place throughout history as well as within various cultural settings. Like Alter and Corrigan, they also present a convincing argument that the essay film is distinct from both documentary, avant-garde and narrative filmmaking, since it is “characterized by a loose, fragmentary, playful, even ironic approach […] and raises new questions about the construction of the subject, the relationship of the subject to the world and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema.” (Papazian/Eades, p. 1) Papazian and Eades explore how essayistic tendencies can manifest in narrative, documentary, avant-garde, and even video art through careful analyses of specific films and videos. The book opens with Timothy Corrigan’s “Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative” which explores how the essayistic can inhabit narrative film, specifically through Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross , both released in 2011. Corrigan observes that The Tree of Life “continually seems to resist its own narrative logic” (p. 18) by presenting a highly fragmented and non-linear plot. Instead of placing it into the hybrid realm of experimental-narrative, however, Corrigan argues that:

Rather than locate a linear connection between past, present and future, the narrative flashbacks in The Tree of Life become a search for genesis – or more accurately many geneses – which might be better described as disruptive recollections that never adequately collect and circulate, as fractured and drifting images and moments producing not evolutionary lines, but the spreading reflective branches of essayism. (p. 19-20.)

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia continues with essays by other acclaimed, yet indefinable filmmakers such as Jean Luc-Godard and Claire Denis. Essays by Rick Warner and Martine Beugnet explore how these filmmakers defy closure and continuity, even while appearing to work within established forms and genres. Ann Eaken Moss explores the essayistic approach that Chantal Akerman imbues within her experimental “home movies.” News from Home (1977) is a meditation on Akerman’s own sense of dislocation from her home in Belgium while she adapts to life in New York City. In “Inside/Outside: Nicolasito Guillen Landrian’s Subversive Strategy in Coffea Arabiga” Ernesto Livon-Grosman investigates Landrian’s means of furtively including his own political agenda within a government-sanctioned documentary. What was meant to be a propagandistic documentary about the benefits of Cuban coffee plantations becomes an essayistic critique on the power structure of Fidel Castro’s government. (Livon-Grosman.) Papazian and Eades conclude their volume with an afterward by Laura Rascaroli, affirming that “it is with the potentiality of all essay films to question and challenge their own form”. (p. 300) The essay film may be distinct from narrative, documentary and the avant-garde, but it itself has no discernable style or formula. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia clearly illustrates how the essay film, although bordering on established genres “must create the conditions of its own form.” (pp. 301-302.) Every filmmaker’s unique thoughts, experiences, meditations, questions and perceptions cannot neatly fit into a strict set of generic guidelines. However, this does not make the essay film more difficult to understand, but further implies that it is a unique practice rather than a specific form.

News from Home (Akerman, 1977)

Even with the insight provided by these two volumes, I do not regret introducing the essay film to my documentary students, despite their questions and confusion. As illustrated throughout Essays on the Essay Film and The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia it has typically been an esoteric and transgressive form, and perhaps including it with better known genres such as documentary and experimental films could be an effective way of introducing it to beginning filmmakers and scholars. Then again, perhaps it should be taught as a form separate from documentary, narrative and the avant-garde. I do wish that I was able to speak more about it at length during that particular instance, since the essay film deserves a considerable amount of thought and attention. Whether or not there is a correct pedagogical approach to teaching the essay film, both of these volumes are tremendously illuminating, but also open the door to further discussion about this compelling form of cinema.

Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary , 2nd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010). ↩
Roger Ebert, “Waltz with Bashir”, rogerebert.com , January 21, 2009, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/waltz-with-bashir-2009 ↩
Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Personal Effects: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans Soleil”, The Criterion Collection , June 25, 2017, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/484-personal-effects-the-guarded-intimacy-of-sans-soleil ↩

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Video essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent

In a world bedazzled by intractable images, do we need the essay film now more than ever? As S&S explores its art in our latest Deep Focus primer and BFI Southbank season, Kevin B. Lee weighs up this distinctively self-aware, searching form of cinema through both video and text.

Kevin B. Lee Updated: 22 May 2017

I cannot recall how the term ‘video essay’ came to be the adopted nomenclature for the ever-increasing output of online videos produced over the past few years by an ever-growing range of self-appointed practitioners (including myself). My own entrance into this field was an organic synthesis of my backgrounds as a film critic and a filmmaker, two modes that had competed with each other in my mind until I started to pursue the possibilities of critically exploring cinema through the medium itself. This practice is readily possible in an age when digital technology enables virtually anyone with a computer (not even a video camera, as images are overly abundant and accessible) to produce media with nearly as much ease as it is to consume it.

The Sight & Sound Deep Focus season Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film runs at BFI Southbank 1-28 August 2013, with a keynote lecture by Kodwo Eshun on 1 August, a talk by writer and academic Laura Rascaroli on 27 August and a closing panel debate on 28 August.

Does this type of production herald an exciting new era for media literacy, enacting Alexandre Astruc ’s prophecy of cinema becoming our new lingua franca? Or is it just an insidious new form of media consumption? At least that’s how much of what lately is termed ‘video essay’ strikes me: an onslaught of supercuts, list-based montages and fan videos that do less to shed critical insight into their source material than offer a new way for the pop culture snake to eat its long tail.

Minding the as-yet-unfulfilled potential of critical online media, I take great interest in the BFI Southbank’s August S&S Deep Focus series on essay filmmaking as a much-needed occasion to reflect on the significance of this word ‘essay’ in relation to film and video. However, having watched and re-watched most of the films in the series, and engaged with several critical texts on the essay film, I’m no longer even certain if most of the videos I’ve produced over the years qualify as ‘essayistic’.

I pondered this when encountering essay film scholar Laura Rascaroli’s disqualification of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 as an essay film :

“Spectators are asked to follow the facts, to watch and listen, and progressively discover an objective truth, to which the author holds the key.”

Much writing on essay films espouse a resistance to the didactic, the pedagogical (which my work has been described, and not always in tones of approbation), or the polemical, while embracing the form’s ability, through the combination of images, sounds and words, to express the process of subjective thought. In the words of Hans Richter , who coined the term in 1940, the essay film:

“allows the filmmaker to transgress the rules and parameters of the traditional documentary practice, granting the imagination with all its artistic potentiality free reign.”

However, these grandiose assertions confound as much as they clarify what constitutes an essay film. Rascaroli’s dismissal of Moore underestimates how his blunt-force polemics elicit (and even solicit) an active response from the audience, stimulating a critical engagement with the film and its political discourse, a strategy akin to the incendiary film essays of Santiago Álvarez (featured in the BFI series).

Richter’s definition doesn’t help much to differentiate the essay form from much of experimental cinema. And, as pointed out in the essays The Essay as Conformism by Hito Steyerl and Deviation as Norm by Volker Pantenburg, the common notion of the essay film as a form for free-flowing, subjective non-conformity, a concept borrowed from literary conceptions of the essay that are as old as Michel de Montaigne , has itself become a convention bordering on cliché.

My own working definition of the essay film errs on the side of inclusion at the expense of qualitative judgment or inflated promises of uniqueness: for me, an essay film explicitly reflects on the materials it presents, to actualise the thinking process itself. This gives a firmer delineation against a more general conception of experimental or documentary film practices, while also entertaining other films that one might otherwise neglect as ‘essay films’. Looking at the top results of last year’s S&S Greatest Films of All Time poll , one finds no-brainer examples like Sans soleil and Histoire(s) du cinema , but one should certainly also include the likes of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera , Tarkovsky’s Mirror – and why not Malick’s The Thin Red Line ?

Essay film candidates in the top 250 of Sight & Sound’s 2012 Greatest Films of All Time poll

8. Man with a Movie Camera

19. Mirror (1974)

48. Histoire(s) du cinema

69. Sans Soleil (1982)

102. Two or Three Things I Know About Her…

127. Hiroshima Mon Amour

=183. Listen to Britain

=183. The Thin Red Line

202. Russian Ark

235. The House is Black

To pose a more critical question than “are they or aren’t they?”, I wonder if the habitual exclusion of the aforementioned titles from the essay film conversation has to do with an urge to reserve the distinction for films and filmmakers who more thoroughly occupy a fringe area existing outside of conventional film genres. On this score the cause célèbre is Chris Marker , who figures prominently in the theorising done to date by essay film scholars such as Rascaroli, Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan, as well as in Andrew Tracy’s feature article on the subject in the August 2013 issue of Sight & Sound.

Tracy’s essay gives a compelling account of the evolution of what in hindsight came to be known as the essay-film form, which, according to his telling, seems to culminate with the Left Bank triumvirate (amply represented in the BFI series) of Marker, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda , with their interrogations of a world of images – and of the power of the moving image itself – characteristically set to literate voiceovers of wilful indeterminacy.

To be sure, these works amount to a defining moment in the evolution of the form but not the defining moment; the three decades since Sans soleil have seen a veritable explosion of essayistic filmmaking that Tracy’s account neglects to acknowledge. Perhaps Marker’s recent passing moves us to attend to his sui generis contributions to cinema – but at the recent Flaherty Film Seminar on documentary film, the halo cast around Marker’s memory was so thick as to be suffocating. His legacy has become so firmly tied with the essay film that many presume a subjective voiceover narration is essential to such works. But over the last 30 years, the centrality of the essay film voiceover has been thoroughly complicated (cf. the Black Audio Film Collective’s masterfully polyphonal Handsworth Songs ), subverted (Ben Rivers’ faux-anthropological Slow Action ) or altogether abandoned (Jose Luis Guerin’s wordlessly analytical Train of Shadows ).

To Tracy’s credit, he links the use of voiceover to a purpose that he and I both consider essential to essay filmmaking – in his words, “to interrogate the image, to dispel the illusion of its sovereignty.” This discontentedness with the cinema, and all that it has promised us over the past century (total entertainment, total art, total Bazinian reality), is one of the profoundest subtexts to Tracy’s piece, a drop-kick through the looking glass of the screen into the world around it, a world it has done as much to distort or distract us from as it has revealed and connected back to us.

Where Tracy and I seem to differ is in the necessity of literary techniques such as the voiceover in determining cinema’s capacity to interrogate itself; where he seems to hold that such interpolations are necessary to create the necessary critical distance to cinema that enables the essayistic mode, I hold out that moving images on their own contain tremendous as-yet-untapped potential to shed critical light on themselves. To quote no less a Marker enthusiast than Kodwo Eshun of the Otolith Group [ homepage ]:

“To me, the essayistic is not about a particular generic fascination for voiceover or montage, the essayistic is dissatisfaction, it’s discontent with the duties of an image and the obligations of a sound.”

Here it’s worth mentioning another figure who has done as much as Marker to define essay filmmaking practice over the last 30 years: Harun Farocki , who has spent a lifetime unpacking images as embodiments of social systems (from prison surveillance videos to business presentations to football broadcasts), and as systems of meanings in themselves. He once described his practice as “images commenting on images”, an analytic technique that, through its resourcefulness and simplicity, frequently yields eloquence.

He is represented in the BFI series by How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany , a perversely inspired selection, given how much more overtly essayistic some of Farocki’s other films are compared to this Wiseman -esque observational chronicle of behavioural training sessions (birthing lessons, police drills, a striptease rehearsal). But there’s no question that over the accumulation of scenes, a socially critical discourse emerges, in a mode that’s highly relevant to critical (or uncritical) media today: the film plays like an extended supercut of real-life scripted events.

In his own way, Farocki’s work fulfils another wish for the essay film expressed by Tracy that I share, to see the image “as part of a matrix of meaning that extends beyond the screen.” This takes me back to this article’s starting point in the contemporary morass of online clip compilations and fan tributes that pass as essays, and what alternative mode of media could place us in a more critically aware position with regard to how media functions in our lives, where it comes from, what larger forces are behind its dissemination and our consumption of them.

In this way, the essay film might realise a greater purpose than existing as a trendy label, or as cinema’s submission to high-toned and half-defined literary concepts. Instead, the essay film may serve as a springboard to launch into a vital investigation of knowledge, art and culture in the 21st century, including the question of what role cinema itself might play in this critical project: articulating discontent with its own place in the world.

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Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media

The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments

Laura Rascaroli
Wayne State University Press
Volume 49, Number 2, Fall 2008
10.1353/frm.0.0019
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Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks

Godard and the Essay Film offers a history and analysis of the essay film, one of the most significant forms of intellectual filmmaking since the end of World War II. War-ner incisively reconsiders the defining traits and legacies of this still-evolving genre through a groundbreaking examination of the vast and formidable oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard. The essay film has often been understood by scholars as an eccentric development within documentary, but Warner shows how an essayistic process of thinking can materialize just as potently within narrative fiction films, through self-critical investigations into the aesthetic , political, and philosophical resources of the medium. Studying examples by Godard and other directors, such as Orson Welles, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, and Harun Farocki, Warner elaborates a fresh account of essayistic reflection that turns on the imaginative, constructive role of the viewer. Through fine-grained analyses, this book contributes the most nuanced description yet of the relational interface between viewer and screen in the context of the essay film. Shedding new light on Godard's work, from the 1960s to the 2010s, in film, television, video, and digital stereoscopy, Warner distills an understanding of essayistic cinema as a shared exercise of critical rumination and perceptual discovery. http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/godard-and-essay-film

Related Papers

Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez

The beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s essayistic practice is intrinsically linked to the use of the diptych device. Thus, a previous work is the cause of an essay film that aims to reflect on the cinematic practice carried out. This article aims to analyse the use, function, and evolution of this device in the beginning and consolidation of the Godardian essay film. While Camera-eye (1967) offers a prefiguration of this new filmic form in relation to La Chinoise (1967), Letter to Jane (1972) results in its first realisation concerning a previous fiction, Tout va bien (1972), in order to continue the reflection on the intellectuals’ role in revolution. Thanks to the decisive arrival of video technology, essential for the essay film practice, Ici et ailleurs (1976) takes up the material of the never released film Jusqu'à la Victoire to generate self-criticism in militant practice. Finally, with Scénario du film Passion (1982), Godard offers a new subsequent essay film that generates both temporalities, before and after the creation, in order to embody an essential self-portrait of the audiovisual essayist. This series of diptych works reveals a hypertextual audiovisual thinking process that rethinks cinematic practice.

The present article aims to show how the consolidation of the cinematic form of the essay film in Jean-Luc Godard’s work is a consequence of the evolution of his experience in the cinéma militant. This militant cinema emerges from the political and social circumstances that caused May 68 and in the case of the filmmaker is materialized through his participation in the Dziga Vertov Group. The defining elements of the group’s filmic experience –the supremacy of montage, the dialectics between images and sounds and the relevance of the spectator as an active part of a dialogical practice– are the same that bring about the essayistic form when the film is enunciated from the author’s subjectivity. With the analysis of Letter to Jane this paper tries to demonstrate how the irruption of subjectivity in the revolutionary cinematic practice allows the appearance of self-reflexivity and the thinking process that define the cinematic essay. RESUMEN El presente artículo pretende mostrar cómo la consolidación de la forma cinematográfica del film-ensayo en la obra de Jean-Luc Godard es consecuencia de la evolución de su experiencia en el cinéma militant. Un cine militante que surge de las circunstancias político-sociales que dieron lugar a mayo del 68 y que en el caso del cineasta se materializa mediante su participación en el Grupo Dziga Vertov. Los elementos definitorios de la experiencia fílmica del grupo –la primacía del montaje, la dialéctica entre imágenes y sonidos y la relevancia del espectador como parte activa de una práctica dialogística– son los mismos que propician la forma ensayística cuando la obra se enuncia desde la subjetividad del autor. Con el análisis de Letter to Jane pretendemos mostrar cómo la irrupción de la subjetividad en la práctica cinematográfica revolucionaria posibilita la aparición de la auto-reflexión y del proceso de pensamiento definitorios del ensayo cinematográfico.

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, ed. Caroline Eades and Elizabeth Papazian, 28-67. London: Wallflower, 2016.

Rick Warner

Adaptation 6, no. 1 (2013): 1-24.

Though it stubbornly resists classification, the essay in cinema still tends to be approached as a genre or quasi-genre constituted through recurring structural traits. This article develops an alternative view by stressing the adaptive principles of the form, specifically as they concern citation, self-portraiture, and an implicit running dialogue with a spectator who potentially shares in the intellectual labor of montage. I offer a pointed discussion of the Essais of Montaigne in order to draw attention to the activity of essaying over time, in and across multiple works. Then, while extending this conception to several of the cinema's most prolific essayists, I focus on how Jean-Luc Godard takes up a Montaignian sense of the practice in his late endeavors of self-portrayal, most notably in his film JLG/JLG: Autoportrait in December and in his video series Histoire(s) du cinéma. Ultimately I argue that what distinguishes the most capable essayists working with sounds and images is a " pedagogical " mission to pass on to the spectator not simply ideas and arguments but a particular way of seeing, a means of investigation to be incisively replayed and re-tested.

The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema, ed. Seung-hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski, 61-78. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Columbia University Press

Hunter Vaughan

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967); and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and The War Is Over (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists.

Critical Quarterly

Marcia Landy

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, co-edited by Elizabeth A Papazian and Caroline Eades. London: Wallflower Press, November 2016 (ISBN: 9780231176958 (pbk), 9780231176941 (hbk), 9780231851039 (e-book).

Elizabeth A Papazian , Caroline Eades

With its increasing presence in a continuously evolving media environment, the essay film as a visual form raises new questions about the construction of the subject, its relationship to the world, and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. In this volume, authors specializing in various national cinemas (Cuban, French, German, Israeli, Italian, Lebanese, Polish, Russian, American) and critical approaches (historical, aesthetic, postcolonial, feminist, philosophical) explore the essay film and its consequences for the theory of cinema while building on and challenging existing theories. Taking as a guiding principle the essay form's dialogic, fluid nature, the volume examines the potential of the essayistic to question, investigate, and reflect on all forms of cinema—fiction film, popular cinema, and documentary, video installation, and digital essay. Includes contributions by Luka Arsenjuk, Martine Beugnet, Luca Caminati, Timothy Corrigan, Oliver Gaycken, Anne Eakin-Moss, Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Laura U. Marks, Laura Rascaroli, Mauro Resmini, and Eric Zakim.

Journal of Film and Video

This article argues that video technology plays a decisive role in Godard’s double movement toward the “cinematic” and the “post-cinematic” as demonstrated in his videographic essay Histoire(s) du Cinéma. It claims that Godard’s videographic refashioning of cinema in the technical, ontological, and philosophical manners necessarily involves bringing cinema to its limits. As this article will discuss in the ensuing two parts, video’s material and technical elements transform the methods of cinematic montage and the ontological status of the films extracted from disparate sources extensively. As a result, video in Histoire(s) ultimately serves both as a tool for the postcinematic expansion of montage and as a “synthesizer” of discrete images (films, paintings, photographs) and soundtracks whose affiliated media are originally distinct from each other.

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'A master of the film-essay format' – a tribute to Agnes Varda

Melissa gronlund reflects on the life of the french filmmaker and remembers the four days she spent working in her paris apartment.

French director Agnes Varda at the 69th Berlinale film festival in Berlin earlier this year

Years ago I did my dissertation on the work of Agnes Varda, interested in her on the strength of one film that had become an unexpected arthouse success: The Gleaners and I, an essay-film from 2000 in which the French New Wave director researched the history of people who scrounge for food.

French director Agnes Varda at the Cannes Film Festival

With her signature pageboy haircut and visible curiosity, Varda picked potatoes from fields, rummaged with anarchists in dumpsters, and filmed collectors who wanted to let nothing go. Improbably, this idiosyncratic tale reached general distribution, entered into the competition at Cannes, and won awards across the globe.

Varda, who died today at the age of 90 , was born in 1928 in Belgium, and came of age in Paris as a filmmaker among the generation of the 1960s New Wave – of early Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Jacques Demy, whom she married in 1962. Her early film La Pointe Court (1955) anticipated the on-location shooting that became such a hallmark of that period, and she followed too the shift in Left Bank concerns from filmmaking to social justice.

She was one of the co-directors on the collaboratively made film Loin du Vietnam in 1967, which protested the Vietnam War, and she filmed the Black Panthers and newly communist Cuba, the latter in a short work comprised solely of photographs that only appeared years later in Cinevardaphoto (2004). And in Vagabond , a 1985 commercial success that followed a young homeless woman in France, she retained a commitment to political and feminist aesthetics.

But it would be wrong to characterize her solely as a New Wave filmmaker. If the nouvelle vague was fascinated by the institution of film – Hollywood codes, the romance and the glamour of leading ladies, the potential for nostalgia in its stories – Varda’s interests were more formal.

As in Cinevardaphoto, with its breaking up of the flow of film, she was enraptured by the idea of time. Varda's second film, Cleo from 5 to 7 , made in 1962, follows the character Cleo from 5pm to 7pm as she waits for the diagnosis of medical tests. The film is exactly two hours, aligning the drama's time with that of the person watching it. A radio playing intermittently in the scenes keeps track of the minutes passing, while also broadening out the political horizons of Cleo's world to include the news of the Algerian War and the Vienna Conference that were being reported at the time.

Around 2003, when she was invited by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist to show in the Venice Biennale, Varda started working more in the art world. Her video installations and photographs were eventually shown at sites such as the Centre Pompidou, the Cartier Foundation and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Here, her interest in time segued into one of space, with monitors and photographs of seas, self-portraits and film reels, organized into displays that experimented with scale and positioning towards the viewer.

The works were received well, but they lack her voice – interrogative, charming, understated – that gives her films such warmth and idiosyncrasy. Her choice of film genre, whose unpopularity never seemed to give her pause, was perfectly suited to these strengths. Varda was a master of the film-essay format, which she indeed helped define: the quasi-first person, quasi-nonfiction form that allows subjective emotions to unfurl unsentimentally. Her 1991 tribute to her late husband, Jacquot de Nantes, made as a film-essay, is a case study for love, classiness and independence.

epa07470502 (FILE) Agnes Varda arrives for the 90th annual Academy Awards ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California, USA, 04 March 2018 (reissued 29 March 2019). According to media reports on 29 March 2019, Varda has died, her family announced. She was 90. EPA/MIKE NELSON

Back when I did my MA, online portals such as Vimeo, Ubuweb, or Youtube didn’t exist or were just starting to come about. I couldn’t find Varda’s films anywhere – and particularly not among the fussy old libraries of Oxford where I was studying. I wrote to her production company, Cine-Tamaris, to ask where I might view them, and to my surprise she wrote back, saying she had them all in her living room. Why didn’t I come over and watch them while she was away?

It was Valentine’s Day when I arrived and her son – Mathieu Demy, a well-known actor and filmmaker in his own right – let me into the sunny little house in an area of Paris that I don’t recall any more. He made me a cup of coffee, showed me how the VCR player worked, and left me to it.

I had the same feeling as when I used to babysit: a stranger alone in someone else's house, with an imposter syndrome of responsibility. They've left me in charge of these ? I got out about four notebooks so that I could look especially studious if Demy came back (he didn't). And I just stayed there, over the course of four days, watching and rewinding.

I recognised the clock with no arms on the mantlepiece from its appearance in The Gleaners and I and it politely failed to keep pace as I slowly worked my way through her the dusty little stack of her oeuvre. When I was finished I left a note and a bottle of wine – a lowly sort of thank you for a woman who was open to every request, image, and invitation, and who let this principle guide her life and work.

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World Cinema and the Essay Film: Transnational Perspectives on a Global Practice

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World Cinema and the Essay Film examines the ways in which essay film practices are deployed by transnational filmmakers in specific local and national contexts, in an interconnected world. The book identifies the essay film as a political and ethical tool to reflect upon and potentially resist the multiple, often contradictory effects of globalisation. With case studies of essayistic works by John Akomfrah, Frances Calvert, José Luis Guerín, Jonas Mekas, David Perlov, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Zhao Liang, amongst many others, and with a photo-essay by Trinh T. Minh-ha, the book expands current research on the essay film and presents transnational perspectives on what is becoming a global film practice.

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Barbara Rush, Award-Winning TV and Film Actress, Dies at 97

She received a Golden Globe in 1954 as that year’s rising star and appeared in movies alongside Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Paul Newman.

A black and white collage of a darkened movie theater, overlaid with a cutout of Barbara Rush positioned over the film screen to make it appear as if she is popping out of it.

By Anita Gates

Barbara Rush, the supremely poised actress who rose to fame with supporting roles in 1950s films like “Magnificent Obsession” and “The Young Lions,” died on Sunday at her home in Westlake Village, Calif., in Los Angeles County. She was 97.

The death, in a senior care facility, was confirmed by her daughter, Claudia Cowan.

If Ms. Rush’s portrayals had one thing in common, it was a gentle, ladylike quality, which she put to use in films of many genres. She was Jane Wyman’s concerned stepdaughter in the 1954 romantic drama “Magnificent Obsession” and Dean Martin’s loyal wartime girlfriend in “The Young Lions” (1958), set during World War II. In 1950s science fiction pictures like “It Came From Outer Space” and “When Worlds Collide,” she was the small-town heroine, the scientist’s daughter, the Earthling most likely to succeed.

In both “The Young Philadelphians” (1959), with Paul Newman, and “The World in My Corner,” a 1956 boxing film with Audie Murphy, Ms. Rush was the prized rich girl. In “Bigger Than Life” (also 1956), with James Mason, she played a vapid but supportive wife. And in “Come Blow Your Horn” (1963), with Frank Sinatra, she played the only “nice girl” in a swinging Manhattan bachelor’s life.

But she did transcend type occasionally, as an Indian agent’s bigoted wife, for instance, in the western “Hombre” (1967), with Paul Newman. She also played Kit Sargent, the Hollywood screenwriter attracted to and repelled by the ruthless title character in the classic 1959 television production of “What Makes Sammy Run?”

For much of her career, Ms. Rush was treated as a pretty face more than a serious actress. But she did receive a Golden Globe in 1954 as most promising newcomer, and she won the Sarah Siddons Award as Chicago’s top actress of the 1969-70 season for her stage role as a mature woman courted by a younger man in the Jay Presson Allen comedy “Forty Carats.”

Her stage work, in fact, became a second career. Her best-known role was in “A Woman of Independent Means,” a one-woman epistolary saga. But when the show opened on Broadway in 1984, the nicest thing Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times , said about it was that Ms. Rush was “a handsome woman who tries terribly hard to be ingratiating.” She went on to play the role, however, for appreciative audiences throughout North America.

Barbara Rush was born on Jan. 4, 1927, in Denver. Her father, Roy, was a lawyer for a mining company who died when she was a teenager. Her mother, Nora (Simonson) Rush, had been a homemaker but took up acting around that time to support the family. She later became a nurse. Barbara attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she played Birdie, the guileless alcoholic, in the blistering “Little Foxes” by Lillian Hellman.

In 1950, when she was 23, Ms. Rush received a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse Theater Arts College and was signed to a contract at Paramount Pictures. She made her film debut that year in the family comedy “The Goldbergs.”

Television was always a part of her career, with guest appearances beginning in the 1950s. Although she never had a hit series, she did star in several short-lived ones, most memorably as a wealthy Florida wife in “Flamingo Road” (NBC, 1981-82). She was also a newspaper’s Washington correspondent in “Saints and Sinners” (NBC, 1962-63), an abused wife for one season (1968-69) of ABC’s “Peyton Place,” and a soap opera star during the last year (CBS, 1973-74) of “The New Dick Van Dyke Show.”

Her final screen appearances were as a recurring character in the family-values series “7th Heaven,” between 1997 and 2007.

Ms. Rush married and divorced three times. Her first husband (1950-55) was the actor Jeffrey Hunter . Her second (1959-70) was Warren Cowan , a founder of the Rogers & Cowan public relations firm. Her last marriage (1970-75) was to Jim Gruzalski, a sculptor.

In addition to Ms. Cowan, from Ms. Rush’s second marriage, she is survived by a son from her first marriage, Christopher Hunter, and four grandchildren. For about 50 years, she lived in Beverly Hills at a house once occupied by the Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.

Ms. Rush continued acting until her early 90s and professed an overwhelming love of her work. In 1997, she told The San Francisco Chronicle , “I’m one of those kinds of people who will perform the minute you open the refrigerator door and the light goes on.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

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Essay
Definitions John Locke's 1690 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt".In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as ...
Video essay
A video essay is an essay presented in the format of a video recording or short film rather than a conventional piece of writing; The form often overlaps with other forms of video entertainment on online platforms such as Youtube. A video essay allows an individual to directly quote from film, video games, music, or other digital mediums, which is impossible with traditional writing.
Deep focus: The essay film
The Sight & Sound Deep Focus season Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film runs at BFI Southbank 1-28 August 2013, with a keynote lecture by Kodwo Eshun on 1 August, a talk by writer and academic Laura Rascaroli on 27 August and a closing panel debate on 28 August. To take this film-lovers' tiff to a more elevated plane, what it ...
Essay Film
The term "essay film" has become increasingly used in film criticism to describe a self-reflective and self-referential documentary cinema that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Scholars unanimously agree that the first published use of the term was by Richter in 1940. Also uncontested is that Andre Bazin, in 1958, was the ...
The secret history of the essay film
1940 - Hans Richter's The Film Essay. The term "essay film" was originally coined by German artist Hans Richter, who wrote in his 1940 paper, The Film Essay: "The film essay enables the filmmaker to make the 'invisible' world of thoughts and ideas visible on the screen...The essay film produces complex thought - reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also ...
Essays on the Essay Film
Essays on the Essay Film is accordingly divided into four sections: 1. Theoretical essays on the essay as a literary form by Georg Lukács, Robert Musil, Max Bense, Theodor W. Adorno and Aldous Huxley. 2. Previously published essays on the essay film by Hans Richter, Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin. 3.
Hey presto: F for Fake and the invention of the essay film
Hey presto: F for Fake and the invention of the essay film. The 1970s have been seen as a period of frustration for Orson Welles, as he struggled - and failed - to complete self-financed feature films. But the same period saw his brilliant F for Fake, said this September 2012 feature. 21 September 2023. By Simon Callow.
Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks on JSTOR
XML. Godard and the Essay Film offers a history and analysis of the essay film, one of the most significant forms of intellectual filmmaking since the end of World War II. Warner incisively reconsiders the defining traits and legacies of this still-evolving genre through a groundbreaking examination of the vast and formidable oeuvre of Jean-Luc ...
Reflexive Memories: The Images of the Cine-Essay
The first cine-essays were shot and edited on physical film. Significant works like Agnès Varda's "Salut les Cubains" (1963) and Marc Karlin's "The Nightcleaners" (1975), which he made in collaboration with the Berwick Street Film Collective, function like normal documentaries: original footage coupled with a voiceover of the filmmaker and ...
Essays on the Essay Film
6. "The Film Essay: A New Type of Documentary Film," by Hans Richter 7. "The Future of Cinema," by Alexandre Astruc 8. "Bazin on Marker," by André Bazin Part III. Contemporary Positions 9. "In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film," by Phillip Lopate 10. "The Political Im/Perceptible in the Essay Film: Farocki's Images of the World and the ...
Essays on the Essay Film
Nora M. Alter is professor of film and media studies in the School of Theater, Film and Media Arts at Temple University. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967-2000 (2002), and Chris Marker (2006), and co-editor (with Lutz Koepnick) of Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004).
Defining the Cinematic Essay: The Essay Film by Elizabeth A. Papazian
The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia continues with essays by other acclaimed, yet indefinable filmmakers such as Jean Luc-Godard and Claire Denis. Essays by Rick Warner and Martine Beugnet explore how these filmmakers defy closure and continuity, even while appearing to work within established forms and genres. Ann Eaken Moss explores ...
Video essay: The essay film
In this way, the essay film might realise a greater purpose than existing as a trendy label, or as cinema's submission to high-toned and half-defined literary concepts. Instead, the essay film may serve as a springboard to launch into a vital investigation of knowledge, art and culture in the 21st century, including the question of what role ...
The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments
The label "essay film" is encountered with ever-increasing frequency in both film reviews and scholarly writings on the cinema, owing to the recent proliferation of unorthodox, personal, reflexive "new" documentaries. In an article dedicated to the phenomenon that he defines as the "recent onslaught of essay films," Paul Arthur proposes ...
How the Essay Film Thinks
A diverse range of case studies discloses how the essay can be a medium of thought on the basis of its dialectic use of audiovisual interstitiality. The book shows how the essay film's disjunctive method comes to be realized at the level of medium, montage, genre, temporality, sound, narration, and framing-all of these emerging as ...
Introduction
Today, roughly sixty years later, essay films have not lost their radical potential. In times of accelerated globalisation - or 'liquid modernity', as Zygmunt Bauman (2000) has called it - artists and filmmakers around the world, once again, exploit the essay film for purposes of socio-political critique. This potential of the essay film as a critical mode of enquiry and vehicle for ...
World Cinema and the Essay Film
Explores the essay film as a global film practice World Cinema and the Essay Film examines the ways in which essay film practices are deployed by non-Western filmmakers in specific local and national contexts, in an interconnected world. The book identifies the essay film as a political and ethical tool to reflect upon and potentially resist the multiple, often contradictory effects of ...
Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks
Rick Warner. Godard and the Essay Film offers a history and analysis of the essay film, one of the most significant forms of intellectual filmmaking since the end of World War II. War-ner incisively reconsiders the defining traits and legacies of this still-evolving genre through a groundbreaking examination of the vast and formidable oeuvre of ...
World Cinema and the Essay Film: Transnational Perspectives on ...
Located at the intersection between 'world cinema' and the tradition of the 'essay film', the label 'world essay film' designates a number of works in which the 'main idea' is, arguably, the whole world itself. This chapter investigates the world essay film from a theoretical perspective, focusing specifically on how the world ...
The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments
The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments. January 2008. Framework The Journal of Cinema and Media 49 (2):24-47. DOI: 10.1353/frm..0019. Authors: Laura Rascaroli. To read the ...
6. The Film Essay: A New Type of Documentary Film
10. The Political Im/Perceptible in The Essay Film: Farocki's Images of The World and The Inscription of War (1996) 11. Essay Questions (2003) 12. The Electronic Essay (1995) 13. The Essay film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments (2009) 14.
'A master of the film-essay format'
Her choice of film genre, whose unpopularity never seemed to give her pause, was perfectly suited to these strengths. Varda was a master of the film-essay format, which she indeed helped define: the quasi-first person, quasi-nonfiction form that allows subjective emotions to unfurl unsentimentally. Her 1991 tribute to her late husband, Jacquot ...
Miller's Girl
Miller's Girl is a 2024 American erotic thriller film written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett. The film stars Jenna Ortega and Martin Freeman as a student and teacher who enter into a complicated relationship after a creative writing assignment.. Miller's Girl was theatrically released in the United States by Lionsgate on January 26, 2024. The film received mixed reviews from critics.
World Cinema and the Essay Film: Transnational Perspectives on a Global
Abstract. World Cinema and the Essay Film examines the ways in which essay film practices are deployed by transnational filmmakers in specific local and national contexts, in an interconnected world. The book identifies the essay film as a political and ethical tool to reflect upon and potentially resist the multiple, often contradictory effects of globalisation.
Barbara Rush, Award-Winning TV and Film Actress, Dies at 97
By Anita Gates. April 1, 2024. Barbara Rush, the supremely poised actress who rose to fame with supporting roles in 1950s films like "Magnificent Obsession" and "The Young Lions," died on ...