the essay film some thoughts of discontent

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The essay film

In recent years the essay film has attained widespread recognition as a particular category of film practice, with its own history and canonical figures and texts. In tandem with a major season throughout August at London’s BFI Southbank, Sight & Sound explores the characteristics that have come to define this most elastic of forms and looks in detail at a dozen influential milestone essay films.

Andrew Tracy , Katy McGahan , Olaf Möller , Sergio Wolf , Nina Power Updated: 7 May 2019

from our August 2013 issue

Le camera stylo? Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

I recently had a heated argument with a cinephile filmmaking friend about Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983). Having recently completed her first feature, and with such matters on her mind, my friend contended that the film’s power lay in its combinations of image and sound, irrespective of Marker’s inimitable voiceover narration. “Do you think that people who can’t understand English or French will get nothing out of the film?” she said; to which I – hot under the collar – replied that they might very well get something, but that something would not be the complete work.

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 suggests is that the essentialist conception of cinema is still present in cinephilic and critical culture, as are the difficulties of containing within it works that disrupt its very fabric. Ever since Vachel Lindsay published The Art of the Moving Picture in 1915 the quest to secure the autonomy of film as both medium and art – that ever-elusive ‘pure cinema’ – has been a preoccupation of film scholars, critics, cinephiles and filmmakers alike. My friend’s implicit derogation of the irreducible literary element of Sans soleil and her neo- Godard ian invocation of ‘image and sound’ touch on that strain of this phenomenon which finds, in the technical-functional combination of those two elements, an alchemical, if not transubstantiational, result.

Mechanically created, cinema defies mechanism: it is poetic, transportive and, if not irrational, then a-rational. This mystically-minded view has a long and illustrious tradition in film history, stretching from the sense-deranging surrealists – who famously found accidental poetry in the juxtapositions created by randomly walking into and out of films; to the surrealist-influenced, scientifically trained and ontologically minded André Bazin , whose realist veneration of the long take centred on the very preternaturalness of nature as revealed by the unblinking gaze of the camera; to the trash-bin idolatry of the American underground, weaving new cinematic mythologies from Hollywood detritus; and to auteurism itself, which (in its more simplistic iterations) sees the essence of the filmmaker inscribed even upon the most compromised of works.

It isn’t going too far to claim that this tradition has constituted the foundation of cinephilic culture and helped to shape the cinematic canon itself. If Marker has now been welcomed into that canon and – thanks to the far greater availability of his work – into the mainstream of (primarily DVD-educated) cinephilia, it is rarely acknowledged how much of that work cheerfully undercuts many of the long-held assumptions and pieties upon which it is built.

In his review of Letter from Siberia (1957), Bazin placed Marker at right angles to cinema proper, describing the film’s “primary material” as intelligence – specifically a “verbal intelligence” – rather than image. He dubbed Marker’s method a “horizontal” montage, “as opposed to traditional montage that plays with the sense of duration through the relationship of shot to shot”.

Here, claimed Bazin, “a given image doesn’t refer to the one that preceded it or the one that will follow, but rather it refers laterally, in some way, to what is said.” Thus the very thing which makes Letter “extraordinary”, in Bazin’s estimation, is also what makes it not-cinema. Looking for a term to describe it, Bazin hit upon a prophetic turn of phrase, writing that Marker’s film is, “to borrow Jean Vigo’s formulation of À propos de Nice (‘a documentary point of view’), an essay documented by film. The important word is ‘essay’, understood in the same sense that it has in literature – an essay at once historical and political, written by a poet as well.”

Marker’s canonisation has proceeded apace with that of the form of which he has become the exemplar. Whether used as critical/curatorial shorthand in reviews and programme notes, employed as a model by filmmakers or examined in theoretical depth in major retrospectives (this summer’s BFI Southbank programme, for instance, follows upon Andréa Picard’s two-part series ‘The Way of the Termite’ at TIFF Cinémathèque in 2009-2010, which drew inspiration from Jean-Pierre Gorin ’s groundbreaking programme of the same title at Vienna Filmmuseum in 2007), the ‘essay film’ has attained in recent years widespread recognition as a particular, if perennially porous, mode of film practice. An appealingly simple formulation, the term has proved both taxonomically useful and remarkably elastic, allowing one to define a field of previously unassimilable objects while ranging far and wide throughout film history to claim other previously identified objects for this invented tradition.

Las Hurdes (1933)

It is crucial to note that the ‘essay film’ is not only a post-facto appellation for a kind of film practice that had not bothered to mark itself with a moniker, but also an invention and an intervention. While it has acquired its own set of canonical ‘texts’ that include the collected works of Marker, much of Godard – from the missive (the 52-minute Letter to Jane , 1972) to the massive ( Histoire(s) de cinéma , 1988-98) – Welles’s F for Fake (1973) and Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), it has also poached on the territory of other, ‘sovereign’ forms, expanding its purview in accordance with the whims of its missionaries.

From documentary especially, Vigo’s aforementioned À propos de Nice, Ivens’s Rain (1929), Buñuel’s sardonic Las Hurdes (1933), Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), Rouch and Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961); from the avant garde, Akerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974), Straub/Huillet’s Trop tôt, trop tard (1982); from agitprop, Getino and Solanas’s The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), Portabella’s Informe general… (1976); and even from ‘pure’ fiction, for example Gorin’s provocative selection of Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909).

Just as within itself the essay film presents, in the words of Gorin, “the meandering of an intelligence that tries to multiply the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected),” so, without, its scope expands exponentially through the industrious activity of its adherents, blithely cutting across definitional borders and – as per the Manny Farber ian concept which gave Gorin’s ‘Termite’ series its name –  creating meaning precisely by eating away at its own boundaries. In the scope of its application and its association more with an (amorphous) sensibility as opposed to fixed rules, the essay film bears similarities to the most famous of all fabricated genres: film noir, which has been located both in its natural habitat of the crime thriller as well as in such disparate climates as melodramas, westerns and science fiction.

The essay film, however, has proved even more peripatetic: where noir was formulated from the films of a determinate historical period (no matter that the temporal goalposts are continually shifted), the essay film is resolutely unfixed in time; it has its choice of forebears. And while noir, despite its occasional shadings over into semi-documentary during the 1940s, remains bound to fictional narratives, the essay film moves blithely between the realms of fiction and non-fiction, complicating the terms of both.

“Here is a form that seems to accommodate the two sides of that divide at the same time, that can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate,” writes Gorin. When Orson Welles , in the closing moments of his masterful meditation on authenticity and illusion F for Fake, chortles, “I did promise that for one hour, I’d tell you only the truth. For the past 17 minutes, I’ve been lying my head off,” he is expressing both the conjuror’s pleasure in a trick well played and the artist’s delight in a self-defined mode that is cheerfully impure in both form and, perhaps, intention.

Nevertheless, as the essay film merrily traipses through celluloid history it intersects with ‘pure cinema’ at many turns and its form as such owes much to one particularly prominent variety thereof.

The montage tradition

If the mystical strain described above represents the Dionysian side of pure cinema, Soviet montage was its Apollonian opposite: randomness, revelation and sensuous response countered by construction, forceful argumentation and didactic instruction.

No less than the mystics, however, the montagists were after essences. Eisenstein , Dziga Vertov and Pudovkin , along with their transnational associates and acolytes, sought to crystallise abstract concepts in the direct and purposeful juxtaposition of forceful, hard-edged images – the general made powerfully, viscerally immediate in the particular. Here, says Eisenstein, in the umbrella-wielding harpies who set upon the revolutionaries in October (1928), is bourgeois Reaction made manifest; here, in the serried ranks of soldiers proceeding as one down the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin (1925), is Oppression undisguised; here, in the condemned Potemkin sailor who wins over his imminent executioners with a cry of “Brothers!” – a moment powerfully invoked by Marker at the beginning of his magnum opus A Grin Without a Cat (1977) – is Solidarity emergent and, from it, the seeds of Revolution.

The relentlessly unidirectional focus of classical Soviet montage puts it methodologically and temperamentally at odds with the ruminative, digressive and playful qualities we associate with the essay film. So, too, the former’s fierce ideological certainty and cadre spirit contrast with that free play of the mind, the Montaigne -inspired meanderings of individual intelligence, that so characterise our image of the latter.

Beyond Marker’s personal interest in and inheritance from the Soviet masters, classical montage laid the foundations of the essay film most pertinently in its foregrounding of the presence, within the fabric of the film, of a directing intelligence. Conducting their experiments in film not through ‘pure’ abstraction but through narrative, the montagists made manifest at least two operative levels within the film: the narrative itself and the arrangement of that narrative by which the deeper structures that move it are made legible. Against the seamless, immersive illusionism of commercial cinema, montage was a key for decrypting those social forces, both overt and hidden, that govern human society.

And as such it was method rather than material that was the pathway to truth. Fidelity to the authentic – whether the accurate representation of historical events or the documentary flavouring of Eisensteinian typage – was important only insomuch as it provided the filmmaker with another tool to reach a considerably higher plane of reality.

Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931)

Midway on their Marxian mission to change the world rather than interpret it, the montagists actively made the world even as they revealed it. In doing so they powerfully expressed the dialectic between control and chaos that would come to be not only one of the chief motors of the essay film but the crux of modernity itself.

Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), now claimed as the most venerable and venerated ancestor of the essay film (and this despite its prototypically purist claim to realise a ‘universal’ cinematic language “based on its complete separation from the language of literature and the theatre”) is the archetypal model of this high-modernist agon. While it is the turning of the movie projector itself and the penetrating gaze of Vertov’s kino-eye that sets the whirling dynamo of the city into motion, the recorder creating that which it records, that motion is also outside its control.

At the dawn of the cinematic century, the American writer Henry Adams saw in the dynamo both the expression of human mastery over nature and a conduit to mysterious, elemental powers beyond our comprehension. So, too, the modernist ambition expressed in literature, painting, architecture and cinema to capture a subject from all angles – to exhaust its wealth of surfaces, meanings, implications, resonances – collides with awe (or fear) before a plenitude that can never be encompassed.

Remove the high-modernist sense of mission and we can see this same dynamic as animating the essay film – recall that last, parenthetical term in Gorin’s formulation of the essay film, “multiply[ing] the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected)”. The nimble movements and multi-angled perspectives of the essay film are founded on this negotiation between active choice and passive possession; on the recognition that even the keenest insight pales in the face of an ultimate unknowability.

The other key inheritance the essay film received from the classical montage tradition, perhaps inevitably, was a progressive spirit, however variously defined. While Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) amply and chillingly demonstrated that montage, like any instrumental apparatus, has no inherent ideological nature, hers were more the exceptions that proved the rule. (Though why, apart from ideological repulsiveness, should Riefenstahl’s plentifully fabricated ‘documentaries’ not be considered as essay films in their own right?)

The overwhelming fact remains that the great majority of those who drew upon the Soviet montagists for explicitly ideological ends (as opposed to Hollywood’s opportunistic swipings) resided on the left of the spectrum – and, in the montagists’ most notable successor in the period immediately following, retained their alignment with and inextricability from the state.

Progressive vs radical

The Grierson ian documentary movement in Britain neutered the political and aesthetic radicalism of its more dynamic model in favour of paternalistic progressivism founded on conformity, class complacency and snobbery towards its own medium. But if it offered a far paler antecedent to the essay film than the Soviet montage tradition, it nevertheless represents an important stage in the evolution of the essay-film form, for reasons not unrelated to some of those rather staid qualities.

The Soviet montagists had created a vision of modernity racing into the future at pace with the social and spiritual liberation of its proletarian pilot-passenger, an aggressively public ideology of group solidarity. The Grierson school, by contrast, offered a domesticated image of an efficient, rational and productive modern industrial society based on interconnected but separate public and private spheres, as per the ideological values of middle-class liberal individualism.

The Soviet montagists had looked to forge a universal, ‘pure’ cinematic language, at least before the oppressive dictates of Stalinist socialist realism shackled them. The Grierson school, evincing a middle-class disdain for the popular and ‘low’ arts, sought instead to purify the sullied medium of cinema by importing extra-cinematic prestige: most notably Night Mail (1936), with its Auden -penned, Britten -scored ode to the magic of the mail, or Humphrey Jennings’s salute to wartime solidarity A Diary for Timothy (1945), with its mildly sententious E.M. Forster narration.

Night Mail (1936)

What this domesticated dynamism and retrograde pursuit of high-cultural bona fides achieved, however, was to mingle a newfound cinematic language (montage) with a traditionally literary one (narration); and, despite the salutes to state-oriented communality, to re-introduce the individual, idiosyncratic voice as the vehicle of meaning – as the mediating intelligence that connects the viewer to the images viewed.

In Night Mail especially there is, in the whimsy of the Auden text and the film’s synchronisation of private time and public history, an intimation of the essay film’s musing, reflective voice as the chugging rhythm of the narration timed to the speeding wheels of the train gives way to a nocturnal vision of solitary dreamers bedevilled by spectral monsters, awakening in expectation of the postman’s knock with a “quickening of the heart/for who can bear to be forgot?”

It’s a curiously disquieting conclusion: this unsettling, anxious vision of disappearance that takes on an even darker shade with the looming spectre of war – one that rhymes, five decades on, with the wistful search of Marker’s narrator in Sans soleil, seeking those fleeting images which “quicken the heart” in a world where wars both past and present have been forgotten, subsumed in a modern society built upon the systematic banishment of memory.

It is, of course, with the seminal post-war collaborations between Marker and Alain Resnais that the essay film proper emerges. In contrast to the striving culture-snobbery of the Griersonian documentary, the Resnais-Marker collaborations (and the Resnais solo documentary shorts that preceded them) inaugurate a blithe, seemingly effortless dialogue between cinema and the other arts in both their subjects (painting, sculpture) and their assorted creative personnel (writers Paul Éluard , Jean Cayrol , Raymond Queneau , composers Darius Milhaud and Hanns Eisler ). This also marks the point where the revolutionary line of the Soviets and the soft, statist liberalism of the British documentarians give way to a more free-floating but staunchly oppositional leftism, one derived as much from a spirit of humanistic inquiry as from ideological affiliation.

Related to this was the form’s problems with official patronage. Originally conceived as commissions by various French government or government-affiliated bodies, the Resnais-Marker films famously ran into trouble from French censors: Les statues meurent aussi (1953) for its condemnation of French colonialism, Night and Fog for its shots of Vichy policemen guarding deportation camps; the former film would have its second half lopped off before being cleared for screening, the latter its offending shots removed.

Night and Fog (1955)

Appropriately, it is at this moment that the emphasis of the essay film begins to shift away from tactile presence – the whirl of the city, the rhythm of the rain, the workings of industry – to felt absence. The montagists had marvelled at the workings of human creations which raced ahead irrespective of human efforts; here, the systems created by humanity to master the world write, in their very functioning, an epitaph for those things extinguished in the act of mastering them. The African masks preserved in the Musée de l’Homme in Les statues meurent aussi speak of a bloody legacy of vanquished and conquered civilisations; the labyrinthine archival complex of the Bibliothèque Nationale in the sardonically titled Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) sparks a disquisition on all that is forgotten in the act of cataloguing knowledge; the miracle of modern plastics saluted in the witty, industrially commissioned Le Chant du styrène (1958) regresses backwards to its homely beginnings; in Night and Fog an unprecedentedly enormous effort of human organisation marshals itself to actively produce a dreadful, previously unimaginable nullity.

To overstate the case, loss is the primary motor of the modern essay film: loss of belief in the image’s ability to faithfully reflect reality; loss of faith in the cinema’s ability to capture life as it is lived; loss of illusions about cinema’s ‘purity’, its autonomy from the other arts or, for that matter, the world.

“You never know what you may be filming,” notes one of Marker’s narrating surrogates in A Grin Without a Cat, as footage of the Chilean equestrian team at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics offers a glimpse of a future member of the Pinochet junta. The image and sound captured at the time of filming offer one facet of reality; it is only with this lateral move outside that reality that the future reality it conceals can speak.

What will distinguish the essay film, as Bazin noted, is not only its ability to make the image but also its ability to interrogate it, to dispel the illusion of its sovereignty and see it as part of a matrix of meaning that extends beyond the screen. No less than were the montagists, the film-essayists seek the motive forces of modern society not by crystallising eternal verities in powerful images but by investigating that ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic relationship between our regime of images and the realities it both reveals and occludes.

— Andrew Tracy

1.   À propos de Nice

Jean Vigo, 1930

Few documentaries have achieved the cult status of the 22-minute A propos de Nice, co-directed by Jean Vigo and cameraman Boris Kaufman at the beginning of their careers. The film retains a spontaneous, apparently haphazard, quality yet its careful montage combines a strong realist drive, lyrical dashes – helped by Marc Perrone’s accordion music – and a clear political agenda.

In today’s era, in which the Côte d’Azur has become a byword for hedonistic consumption, it’s refreshing to see a film that systematically undermines its glossy surface. Using images sometimes ‘stolen’ with hidden cameras, A propos de Nice moves between the city’s main sites of pleasure: the Casino, the Promenade des Anglais, the Hotel Negresco and the carnival. Occasionally the filmmakers remind us of the sea, the birds, the wind in the trees but mostly they contrast people: the rich play tennis, the poor boules; the rich have tea, the poor gamble in the (then) squalid streets of the Old Town.

As often, women bear the brunt of any critique of bourgeois consumption: a rich old woman’s head is compared to an ostrich, others grin as they gaze up at phallic factory chimneys; young women dance frenetically, their crotch to the camera. In the film’s most famous image, an elegant woman is ‘stripped’ by the camera to reveal her naked body – not quite matched by a man’s shoes vanishing to display his naked feet to the shoe-shine.

An essay film avant la lettre , A propos de Nice ends on Soviet-style workers’ faces and burning furnaces. The message is clear, even if it has not been heeded by history.

— Ginette Vincendeau

2. A Diary for Timothy

Humphrey Jennings, 1945

A Diary for Timothy takes the form of a journal addressed to the eponymous Timothy James Jenkins, born on 3 September 1944, exactly five years after Britain’s entry into World War II. The narrator, Michael Redgrave , a benevolent offscreen presence, informs young Timothy about the momentous events since his birth and later advises that, even when the war is over, there will be “everyday danger”.

The subjectivity and speculative approach maintained throughout are more akin to the essay tradition than traditional propaganda in their rejection of mere glib conveyance of information or thunderous hectoring. Instead Jennings invites us quietly to observe the nuances of everyday life as Britain enters the final chapter of the war. Against the momentous political backdrop, otherwise routine, everyday activities are ascribed new profundity as the Welsh miner Geronwy, Alan the farmer, Bill the railway engineer and Peter the convalescent fighter pilot go about their daily business.

Within the confines of the Ministry of Information’s remit – to lift the spirits of a battle-weary nation – and the loose narrative framework of Timothy’s first six months, Jennings finds ample expression for the kind of formal experiment that sets his work apart from that of other contemporary documentarians. He worked across film, painting, photography, theatrical design, journalism and poetry; in Diary his protean spirit finds expression in a manner that transgresses the conventional parameters of wartime propaganda, stretching into film poem, philosophical reflection, social document, surrealistic ethnographic observation and impressionistic symphony. Managing to keep to the right side of sentimentality, it still makes for potent viewing.

— Catherine McGahan

3. Toute la mémoire du monde

Alain Resnais, 1956

In the opening credits of Toute la mémoire du monde, alongside the director’s name and that of producer Pierre Braunberger , one reads the mysterious designation “Groupe des XXX”. This Group of Thirty was an assembly of filmmakers who mobilised in the early 1950s to defend the “style, quality and ambitious subject matter” of short films in post-war France; the signatories of its 1953 ‘Declaration’ included Resnais , Chris Marker and Agnès Varda. The success of the campaign contributed to a golden age of short filmmaking that would last a decade and form the crucible of the French essay film.

A 22-minute poetic documentary about the old French Bibliothèque Nationale, Toute la mémoire du monde is a key work in this strand of filmmaking and one which can also be seen as part of a loose ‘trilogy of memory’ in Resnais’s early documentaries. Les statues meurent aussi (co-directed with Chris Marker) explored cultural memory as embodied in African art and the depredations of colonialism; Night and Fog was a seminal reckoning with the historical memory of the Nazi death camps. While less politically controversial than these earlier works, Toute la mémoire du monde’s depiction of the Bibliothèque Nationale is still oddly suggestive of a prison, with its uniformed guards and endless corridors. In W.G. Sebald ’s 2001 novel Austerlitz, directly after a passage dedicated to Resnais’s film, the protagonist describes his uncertainty over whether, when using the library, he “was on the Islands of the Blest, or, on the contrary, in a penal colony”.

Resnais explores the workings of the library through the effective device of following a book from arrival and cataloguing to its delivery to a reader (the book itself being something of an in-joke: a mocked-up travel guide to Mars in the Petite Planète series Marker was then editing for Editions du Seuil). With Resnais’s probing, mobile camerawork and a commentary by French writer Remo Forlani, Toute la mémoire du monde transforms the library into a mysterious labyrinth, something between an edifice and an organism: part brain and part tomb.

— Chris Darke

4. The House is Black

(Khaneh siah ast) Forough Farrokhzad, 1963

Before the House of Makhmalbaf there was The House is Black. Called “the greatest of all Iranian films” by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who helped translate the subtitles from Farsi into English, this 20-minute black-and-white essay film by feminist poet Farrokhzad was shot in a leper colony near Tabriz in northern Iran and has been heralded as the touchstone of the Iranian New Wave.

The buildings of the Baba Baghi colony are brick and peeling whitewash but a student asked to write a sentence using the word ‘house’ offers Khaneh siah ast : the house is black. His hand, seen in close-up, is one of many in the film; rather than objects of medical curiosity, these hands – some fingerless, many distorted by the disease – are agents, always in movement, doing, making, exercising, praying. In putting white words on the blackboard, the student makes part of the film; in the next shots, the film’s credits appear, similarly handwritten on the same blackboard.

As they negotiate the camera’s gaze and provide the soundtrack by singing, stamping and wheeling a barrow, the lepers are co-authors of the film. Farrokhzad echoes their prayers, heard and seen on screen, with her voiceover, which collages religious texts, beginning with the passage from Psalm 55 famously set to music by Mendelssohn (“O for the wings of a dove”).

In the conjunctions between Farrokhzad’s poetic narration and diegetic sound, including tanbur-playing, an intense assonance arises. Its beat is provided by uniquely lyrical associative editing that would influence Abbas Kiarostami , who quotes Farrokhzad’s poem ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’ in his eponymous film . Repeated shots of familiar bodily movement, made musical, move the film insistently into the viewer’s body: it is infectious. Posing a question of aesthetics, The House Is Black uses the contagious gaze of cinema to dissolve the screen between Us and Them.

— Sophie Mayer

5. Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still

Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972

With its invocation of Brecht (“Uncle Bertolt”), rejection of visual pleasure (for 52 minutes we’re mostly looking at a single black-and-white still) and discussion of the role of intellectuals in “the revolution”, Letter to Jane is so much of its time as to appear untranslatable to the present except as a curio from a distant era of radical cinema. Between 1969 and 1971, Godard and Gorin made films collectively as part of the Dziga Vertov Group before they returned, in 1972, to the mainstream with Tout va bien , a big-budget film about the aftermath of May 1968 featuring leftist stars Yves Montand and  Jane Fonda . It was to the latter that Godard and Gorin directed their Letter after seeing a news photograph of her on a solidarity visit to North Vietnam in August 1972.

Intended to accompany the US release of Tout va bien, Letter to Jane is ‘a letter’ only in as much as it is fairly conversational in tone, with Godard and Gorin delivering their voiceovers in English. It’s stylistically more akin to the ‘blackboard films’ of the time, with their combination of pedagogical instruction and stern auto-critique.

It’s also an inspired semiological reading of a media image and a reckoning with the contradictions of celebrity activism. Godard and Gorin examine the image’s framing and camera angle and ask why Fonda is the ‘star’ of the photograph while the Vietnamese themselves remain faceless or out of focus? And what of her expression of compassionate concern? This “expression of an expression” they trace back, via an elaboration of the Kuleshov effect , through other famous faces – Henry Fonda , John Wayne , Lillian Gish and Falconetti – concluding that it allows for “no reverse shot” and serves only to bolster Western “good conscience”.

Letter to Jane is ultimately concerned with the same question that troubled philosophers such as Levinas and Derrida : what’s at stake ethically when one claims to speak “in place of the other”? Any contemporary critique of celebrity activism – from Bono and Geldof to Angelina Jolie – should start here, with a pair of gauchiste trolls muttering darkly beneath a press shot of ‘Hanoi Jane’.

6. F for Fake

Orson Welles, 1973

Those who insist it was all downhill for Orson Welles after Citizen Kane would do well to take a close look at this film made more than three decades later, in its own idiosyncratic way a masterpiece just as innovative as his better-known feature debut.

Perhaps the film’s comparative and undeserved critical neglect is due to its predominantly playful tone, or perhaps it’s because it is a low-budget, hard-to-categorise, deeply personal work that mixes original material with plenty of footage filmed by others – most extensively taken from a documentary by François Reichenbach about Clifford Irving and his bogus biography of his friend Elmyr de Hory , an art forger who claimed to have painted pictures attributed to famous names and hung in the world’s most prestigious galleries.

If the film had simply offered an account of the hoaxes perpetrated by that disreputable duo, it would have been entertaining enough but, by means of some extremely inventive, innovative and inspired editing, Welles broadens his study of fakery to take in his own history as a ‘charlatan’ – not merely his lifelong penchant for magician’s tricks but also the 1938 radio broadcast of his news-report adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds – as well as observations on Howard Hughes , Pablo Picasso and the anonymous builders of Chartres cathedral. So it is that Welles contrives to conjure up, behind a colourful cloak of consistently entertaining mischief, a rueful meditation on truth and falsehood, art and authorship – a subject presumably dear to his heart following Pauline Kael ’s then recent attempts to persuade the world that Herman J. Mankiewicz had been the real creative force behind Kane.

As a riposte to that thesis (albeit never framed as such), F for Fake is subtle, robust, supremely erudite and never once bitter; the darkest moment – as Welles contemplates the serene magnificence of Chartres – is at once an uncharacteristic but touchingly heartfelt display of humility and a poignant memento mori. And it is in this delicate balancing of the autobiographical with the universal, as well as in the dazzling deployment of cinematic form to illustrate and mirror content, that the film works its once unique, now highly influential magic.

— Geoff Andrew

7. How to Live in the German Federal Republic

(Leben – BRD) Harun Farocki, 1990

Harun Farocki ’s portrait of West Germany in 32 simulations from training sessions has no commentary, just the actions themselves in all their surreal beauty, one after the other. The Bundesrepublik Deutschland is shown as a nation of people who can deal with everything because they have been prepared – taught how to react properly in every possible situation.

We know how birth works; how to behave in kindergarten; how to chat up girls, boys or whatever we fancy (for we’re liberal-minded, if only in principle); how to look for a job and maybe live without finding one; how to wiggle our arses in the hottest way possible when we pole-dance, or manage a hostage crisis without things getting (too) bloody. Whatever job we do, we know it by heart; we also know how to manage whatever kind of psychological breakdown we experience; and we are also prepared for the end, and even have an idea about how our burial will go. This is the nation: one of fearful people in dire need of control over their one chance of getting it right.

Viewed from the present, How to Live in the German Federal Republic is revealed as the archetype of many a Farocki film in the decades to follow, for example Die Umschulung (1994), Der Auftritt (1996) or Nicht ohne Risiko (2004), all of which document as dispassionately as possible different – not necessarily simulated – scenarios of social interactions related to labour and capital. For all their enlightening beauty, none of these ever came close to How to Live in the German Federal Republic which, depending on one’s mood, can play like an absurd comedy or the most gut-wrenching drama. Yet one disquieting thing is certain: How to Live in the German Federal Republic didn’t age – our lives still look the same.

— Olaf Möller

8. One Man’s War

(La Guerre d’un seul homme) Edgardo Cozarinsky , 1982

One Man’s War proves that an auteur film can be made without writing a line, recording a sound or shooting a single frame. It’s easy to point to the ‘extraordinary’ character of the film, given its combination of materials that were not made to cohabit; there couldn’t be a less plausible dialogue than the one Cozarinsky establishes between the newsreels shot during the Nazi occupation of Paris and the Parisian diaries of novelist and Nazi officer Ernst Jünger . There’s some truth to Pascal Bonitzer’s assertion in Cahiers du cinéma in 1982 that the principle of the documentary was inverted here, since it is the images that provide a commentary for the voice.

But that observation still doesn’t pin down the uniqueness of a work that forces history through a series of registers, styles and dimensions, wiping out the distance between reality and subjectivity, propaganda and literature, cinema and journalism, daily life and dream, and establishing the idea not so much of communicating vessels as of contaminating vessels.

To enquire about the essayistic dimension of One Man’s War is to submit it to a test of purity against which the film itself is rebelling. This is no ars combinatoria but systems of collision and harmony; organic in their temporal development and experimental in their procedural eagerness. It’s like a machine created to die instantly; neither Cozarinsky nor anyone else could repeat the trick, as is the case with all great avant-garde works.

By blurring the genre of his literary essays, his fictional films, his archival documentaries, his literary fictions, Cozarinsky showed he knew how to reinvent the erasure of borders. One Man’s War is not a film about the Occupation but a meditation on the different forms in which that Occupation can be represented.

—Sergio Wolf. Translated by Mar Diestro-Dópido

9. Sans soleil

Chris Marker, 1982

There are many moments to quicken the heart in Sans soleil but one in particular demonstrates the method at work in Marker’s peerless film. An unseen female narrator reads from letters sent to her by a globetrotting cameraman named Sandor Krasna (Marker’s nom de voyage), one of which muses on the 11th-century Japanese writer  Sei Shōnagon .

As we hear of Shōnagon’s “list of elegant things, distressing things, even of things not worth doing”, we watch images of a missile being launched and a hovering bomber. What’s the connection? There is none. Nothing here fixes word and image in illustrative lockstep; it’s in the space between them that Sans soleil makes room for the spectator to drift, dream and think – to inimitable effect.

Sans soleil was Marker’s return to a personal mode of filmmaking after more than a decade in militant cinema. His reprise of the epistolary form looks back to earlier films such as  Letter from Siberia  (1958) but the ‘voice’ here is both intimate and removed. The narrator’s reading of Krasna’s letters flips the first person to the third, using ‘he’ instead of ‘I’. Distance and proximity in the words mirror, multiply and magnify both the distances travelled and the time spanned in the images, especially those of the 1960s and its lost dreams of revolutionary social change.

While it’s handy to define Sans soleil as an ‘essay film’, there’s something about the dry term that doesn’t do justice to the experience of watching it. After Marker’s death last year, when writing programme notes on the film, I came up with a line that captures something of what it’s like to watch Sans soleil: “a mesmerising, lucid and lovely river of film, which, like the river of the ancients, is never the same when one steps into it a second time”.

10. Handsworth Songs

Black Audio Film Collective, 1986

Made at the time of civil unrest in Birmingham, this key example of the essay film at its most complex remains relevant both formally and thematically. Handsworth Songs is no straightforward attempt to provide answers as to why the riots happened; instead, using archive film spliced with made and found footage of the events and the media and popular reaction to them, it creates a poetic sense of context.

The film is an example of counter-media in that it slows down the demand for either immediate explanation or blanket condemnation. Its stillness allows the history of immigration and the subsequent hostility of the media and the police to the black and Asian population to be told in careful detail.

One repeated scene shows a young black man running through a group of white policemen who surround him on all sides. He manages to break free several times before being wrestled to the ground; if only for one brief, utopian moment, an entirely different history of race in the UK is opened up.

The waves of post-war immigration are charted in the stories told both by a dominant (and frequently repressive) televisual narrative and, importantly, by migrants themselves. Interviews mingle with voiceover, music accompanies the machines that the Windrush generation work at. But there are no definitive answers here, only, as the Black Audio Film Collective memorably suggests, “the ghosts of songs”.

— Nina Power

11.   Los Angeles Plays Itself

Thom Andersen, 2003

One of the attractions that drew early film pioneers out west, besides the sunlight and the industrial freedom, was the versatility of the southern Californian landscape: with sea, snowy mountains, desert, fruit groves, Spanish missions, an urban downtown and suburban boulevards all within a 100-mile radius, the Los Angeles basin quickly and famously became a kind of giant open-air film studio, available and pliant.

Of course, some people actually live there too. “Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticise,” growls native Angeleno Andersen in his forensic three-hour prosecution of moving images of the movie city, whose mounting litany of complaints – couched in Encke King’s gravelly, near-parodically irritated voiceover, and sometimes organised, as Stuart Klawans wrote in The Nation, “in the manner of a saloon orator” – belies a sly humour leavening a radically serious intent.

Inspired in part by Mark Rappaport’s factual essay appropriations of screen fictions (Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, 1993; From the Journals of Jean Seberg , 1995), as well as Godard’s Histoire(s) de cinéma, this “city symphony in reverse” asserts public rights to our screen discourse through its magpie method as well as its argument. (Today you could rebrand it ‘Occupy Hollywood’.) Tinseltown malfeasance is evidenced across some 200 different film clips, from offences against geography and slurs against architecture to the overt historical mythologies of Chinatown (1974), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and L.A. Confidential (1997), in which the city’s class and cultural fault-lines are repainted “in crocodile tears” as doleful tragedies of conspiracy, promoting hopelessness in the face of injustice.

Andersen’s film by contrast spurs us to independent activism, starting with the reclamation of our gaze: “What if we watch with our voluntary attention, instead of letting the movies direct us?” he asks, peering beyond the foregrounding of character and story. And what if more movies were better and more useful, helping us see our world for what it is? Los Angeles Plays Itself grows most moving – and useful – extolling the Los Angeles neorealism Andersen has in mind: stories of “so many men unneeded, unwanted”, as he says over a scene from Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), “in a world in which there is so much to be done”.

— Nick Bradshaw

12.   La Morte Rouge

Víctor Erice, 2006

The famously unprolific Spanish director Víctor Erice may remain best known for his full-length fiction feature The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), but his other films are no less rewarding. Having made a brilliant foray into the fertile territory located somewhere between ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’ with The Quince Tree Sun (1992), in this half-hour film made for the ‘Correspondences’ exhibition exploring resemblances in the oeuvres of Erice and Kiarostami , the relationship between reality and artifice becomes his very subject.

A ‘small’ work, it comprises stills, archive footage, clips from an old Sherlock Holmes movie, a few brief new scenes – mostly without actors – and music by Mompou and (for once, superbly used) Arvo Pärt . If its tone – it’s introduced as a “soliloquy” – and scale are modest, its thematic range and philosophical sophistication are considerable.

The title is the name of the Québécois village that is the setting for The Scarlet Claw (1944), a wartime Holmes mystery starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce which was the first movie Erice ever saw, taken by his sister to the Kursaal cinema in San Sebastian.

For the five-year-old, the experience was a revelation: unable to distinguish the ‘reality’ of the newsreel from that of the nightmare world of Roy William Neill’s film, he not only learned that death and murder existed but noted that the adults in the audience, presumably privy to some secret knowledge denied him, were unaffected by the corpses on screen. Had this something to do with war? Why was La Morte Rouge not on any map? And what did it signify that postman Potts was not, in fact, Potts but the killer – and an actor (whatever that was) to boot?

From such personal reminiscences – evoked with wondrous intimacy in the immaculate Castillian of the writer-director’s own wry narration – Erice fashions a lyrical meditation on themes that have underpinned his work from Beehive to Broken Windows (2012): time and change, memory and identity, innocence and experience, war and death. And because he understands, intellectually and emotionally, that the time-based medium he himself works in can reveal unforgettably vivid realities that belong wholly to the realm of the imaginary, La Morte Rouge is a great film not only about the power of cinema but about life itself.

Sight & Sound: the August 2013 issue

In this issue: Frances Ha’s Greta Gerwig – the most exciting actress in America? Plus Ryan Gosling in Only God Forgives, Wadjda, The Wall,...

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DVDs and Blu Ray

Buy The Complete Humphrey Jennings Collection Volume Three: A Diary for Timothy on DVD and Blu Ray

Humphrey Jennings’s transition from wartime to peacetime filmmaking.

Buy Chronicle of a Summer on DVD and Blu Ray

Jean Rouch’s hugely influential and ground-breaking documentary.

Further reading

Video essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent

Kevin B. Lee

The land still lies: Handsworth Songs and the English riots

The world at sea: The Forgotten Space

What I owe to Chris Marker

Patricio Guzmán

His and her ghosts: reworking La Jetée

Melissa Bradshaw

At home (and away) with Agnès Varda

Daniel Trilling

Pere Portabella looks back

John Akomfrah’s Hauntologies

Laura Allsop

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Watch (Almost) Every Film From Kevin Lee’s Provocative Video Essay

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Prolific video essayist Kevin Lee has a new one up at the British Film Institute’s website, and this one’s a bit of a pot-stirrer. (The video’s not embeddable, so click here .) In “The essay film — some thoughts of discontent,” Lee questions the definition of the essay film itself, both as it was was original conceived — free-flowing, meditative, inward-looking — and as it’s currently applied, to supercuts and other less analytic forms.

The video essay itself is worth watching several times, and it’s paired with a text essay where Lee questions whether the essay film, whatever that might mean, has lived up to its potential, or whether it’s just one more flood of images in a world already bursting with them.

In this way, the essay film might realize 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.

“The essayistic,” Lee quotes a member of the collective Otolith Group, “is dissatisfaction. It’s discontent.” There are several points in Lee’s essay — inspired, in part, by his recent trip to the Flaherty Seminar — at which I balk, but I prefer to let them sink in for a bit, and reapply them to the many classics of the form Lee quotes from. To make that easier, Criticwire has gathered links to every one of the film’s Lee cites in his credits, most of which are available in full online. Watch and enjoy.

A Valpariso (Joris Ivens, 1962)

A propos de Nice (Jean Vigo, 1930)

L’Amour Existe (Maurice Pialat, 1960)

A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings, 1945)

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Leckey, 1999)

F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973)

Film not available online, but Welles’ 10-minute trailer, a masterpiece in its own right, is here :

Handsworth Songs (Black Audio Film Collective, 1987)

LBJ (Santiago Alvarez, 1968)

Letter to Jane (Groupe Dziga Vertov aka Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972)

Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Anderson, 2003)

Madrid (Patricio Guzman, 2002) — trailer

O saisons, o chateaux (Agnes Varda, 1968) — not available

Otolith I (Otolith Group, 2003)

10-minute excerpt here :

Rock My Religion (Dan Graham, 1984)

Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983) — excerpt

79 Springtimes (Santiago Alvarez, 1969)

Slow Action (Ben Rivers, 2010) — excerpt

Toute la memoire du monde (Alain Resnais, 1956)

Train of Shadows (Jose Luis Guerin, 1997)

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Art & Photography

Film & tv, life & culture.

The secret history of the essay film

Charting the resurgence of ‘sort of documentaries’ to celebrate chris marker, king of the essay film.

“Essay films are arguably the most innovative and popular form of filmmaking since the 1990s,” wrote Timothy Corrigan in his notable 2011 book,  The Essay Film . True, perhaps, but mention of the genre to your average joe won’t spark the instant recognition of today’s romcoms, sci-fis and period dramas. The thing is, essay films have been around since the dawn of cinema: they emerged not long after the  Lumière brothers  recorded the first ever motion pictures of Lyonnaise factory workers in 1894, yet their definition is still ambiguous.

They are similar to documentary and non-fiction film in that they are often based in reality, using words, images and sounds to convey a message. But according to Chris Darke – co-curator of the Whitechapel Gallery’s current retrospective  of the great essay filmmaker Chris Marker – it is “the personal aspect and style of address” that makes the essay film distinct. It is this flexibility that has appealed to contemporary filmmakers, permitting a fresh, nuanced viewing experience.

Geoff Andrew, a senior programmer at the BFI who helped curate last year’s landmark essay film season, explained, “they are sort of documentaries, sort of non-fiction films.” The issue is that some filmmakers try to provide an objective point of view when it is just not possible. “There’s always somebody manipulating footage and manipulating reality to present some sort of message.” Andrew continued, “So, in a way, all documentaries are essay films.”

But the essay film is particularly resurgent these days, with filmmakers like Michael Moore , Werner Herzog , and Nick Broomfield  molding the genre in their own ways. Their popularity isn’t just due to incendiary topics like men getting eaten by bears as in Herzog’s Grizzly Man  and high school massacres as in Moore’s Bowling for Columbine ; essay films are capable of compelling beauty. Now, with the Whitechapel Gallery ’s retrospective of the late Frenchman, Chris Marker , arguably the greatest essay filmmaker there’s ever been, we take a look at the essay film’s secret history.

1909  -  D. W. Griffith ’s   A Corner in Wheat

Considered by some to be the first essay film ever, A Corner in Wheat  is a little subversive thorn in the side of the man. Lasting only 14 minutes, it tells the tale of a ruthless crop gambler who amasses riches by monopolising the wheat market, exploits the agricultural poor, and is promptly killed under a pile of his own grain. Think twice, greedy capitalists.

1929  -   Dziga  Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera

“The film drama is the opium of the people,” proclaimed Soviet film pioneer  Dziga Vertov , “down with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios.” He was the most radical of his fellow Soviet filmmaker compatriots, and Man with a Movie Camera  was his masterpiece. In it, he tried to create an “international language of cinema” through a beguiling mix of jump cuts, split screens and superimpositions. Vertov’s idea was to uncover the artifice of filmmaking, with one scene of the film depicting a cameraman inside a giant beer.

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 be contradictory, irrational, and fantastic.” So while World War II was blazing away, a new cinema was born.

1982  - Chris  Marker’s Sans Soleil

You know that this brilliant, freewheeling travelogue is something special when it suggests that Pac-Man is “a perfect graphic metaphor for the human condition.” It takes in anti-colonial struggles, sumo wrestling, a volcanic eruption in Iceland, the antiquities of the Vatican, Marker’s love of cats and more. An unnamed female narrates a circuitous journey from Africa to Japan, in an engaging style never seen before. Some might say he laid down a marker.

1993  -  Derek Jarman’s Blue

Diagnosed with HIV and beginning to lose his eyesight, Jarman  decided to turn his illness into his art. Although the premise of nothing but a dim, blue background accompanied by voiceovers for 79 minutes might not seem enthralling, it really is. Jarman recalls memories of his past lovers, and his current life of endless pill-popping, with a poignant score by Brian Eno  and Simon Fisher Turner .

1998 - Jean -Luc  Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema

Comprised of hundreds of clips of films, music and poetry, this eight part series – that took over a decade to make – remained a secret seen only at a precious few film festivals thanks to the gargantuan amount of rights needed to be cleared. Histoire(s) du cinema is an epic of free association whose central theme is voyeurism, since Godard believes that cinema consists of a man looking at a woman. Harriet Andersson , topless and alluring on a beach in Ingmar Bergman ’s Monika , is one of many examples.

2004  -  Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11

The most successful documentary at the US box office ever, Fahrenheit 9/11  is a prime example of the essay film’s wild popularisation (it also won the Palme d’Or  at Cannes). Michael Moore ’s swipe at the Republican jugular was a classic example of the essay filmmaker’s prominence, outrightly mocking President George W. Bush and questioning the fairness of his election. Disney refused to distribute the film, and the rest is history.

2010  -  Errol Morris’ Tabloid

Tabloid is the outrageous story of a former Miss Wyoming, Joyce McKinney, who was alleged to have kidnapped an American mormon missionary living in England, handcuffed him to a bed in a Devonshire cottage and made him a sex slave. The woman claimed she was saving the man from a cult, but then fleed to Canada wearing a red wig, where she posed as part of a mime troupe. As ever, Errol Morris  deftly offers alternate explanations, which led to McKinney suing him after the release of the film.

2014  -  Hito Steyerl’s How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educationa l

After touring galleries of the world and a recent stint at the ICA, Hito Steyerl ’s How Not To Be Seen made waves as “an art for our times”. It is a disembowelling satire that mocks the idea that it we can become invisible and have genuine privacy, in this digital age. If we want to disappear, it suggests, we should become poor, or hide in plain sight, or get “disappeared” by the authorities.

Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat is on until 22 June at  Whitechapel Gallery

Kevin B. Lee

Here's a selection of the video essays I've made.

269. What Makes a Video Essay Great?

Video Essay Catalog No. 269 by Kevin B. Lee. Originally published December 28 2014 on Fandor Keyframe. fandor.com/keyframe/the-best-video-essays-of-2014

• Moving Image

A Selected Bibliography of Resources on the Essay Film

The essay film form lies between fiction and documentary genres. With etymological roots in the French  essai  [to try], the genre might be most productively conceptualised, much like its literary counterpart, as an exploration of an intellectual question or problem, articulated from the perspective of a single authorial voice. It can be tangential and meandering, self-reflexive and self-referential, and often foregrounds the unreliability of the narrator. In this sense, the essayistic form is not a straightforward exercise in pedagogy. Correspondingly, essay films are preoccupied less with editorial perfection than with laying bare the process of thought, thereby giving the impression, as Laura Rascaroli writes, of ‘being let into the private monologue of the enunciator’ (Rascaroli, ‘The Essay Film’ in  Essays on the Essay Film , 187).

The origins of the essay film genre have sometimes been identified in D. W. Griffith’s  A Corner in Wheat  (1909), in Sergei Eisenstein’s unrealised desire to transform Karl Marx’s  Capital  (1867) into film, and in Eisenstein’s, Vsevolod Pudovkin’s, and Dziga Vertov’s various experiments with montage. Other significant precursors include the ‘city symphony’ films of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Walter Ruttmann’s  Berlin: Symphony of a Great City  (1927), Vertov’s  Man with a Movie Camera  (1927), and Jean Vigo’s  À propos de Nice  (1930): films that made creative use of editing techniques to convey life in the modern metropolis, and combined narrative features with experimental form. Using ‘essay’ to describe a particular type of film was first posited in 1940 by Hans Richter, who decried the tendency of documentary films to provide only ‘pretty views’, and argued that they should instead ‘lend form to intellectual substance’ and ‘attempt to make the invisible world of imagination, thoughts, and ideas visible’ (Richter, ‘The Film Essay’, 89; 90; 91). In 1958, André Bazin notably identified Chris Marker’s  Letter from Siberia  (1958) as a new genre of cinema, which he described as ‘an essay documented by film’. For Bazin, the term ‘essay’ should be understood ‘in the same sense that it has in literature—an essay at once historical and political, written by a poet as well’ (Bazin, ‘Bazin on Marker’, 103).

Prominent essay films include: Humphrey Jennings’s  A Diary for Timothy  (1945); Alain Resnais’s  Toute la mémoire du monde  (1956); Forough Farrokhzad’s  The House is Black  (1963); Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s  Letter to Jane  (1972); Mike Dibb and John Berger’s  Ways of Seeing  (1972); Orson Welles’s  F is for Fake  (1974); Marker’s  Sans Soleil  (1983); Black Audio Collective’s  Handsworth Songs  (1986); Godard’s  Histoire(s) de cinéma  (1988–98); Harun Farocki’s  Leben — BRD  (1990); Derek Jarman’s  Blue  (1993); Patrick Keiller’s  London  (1994); Agnès Varda’s  The Gleaners and I  (2000); Thom Anderson’s  Los Angeles Plays Itself  (2003); and Grant Gee’s  Patience (After Sebald)  (2011). In recent years, a renewed attention to the form has been encouraged in part by the rise of digital filmmaking, but also by recognition of its potential for new modes of filmic practice. This increasing importance has been highlighted by the BFI Southbank season  The Art of the Essay Film  (2013), curated by Kieron Corless, as well as a number of conferences at academic institutions, including  World Cinema and the Essay Film  at the University of Reading (2015);  Essay Film and Narrative Techniques: Screenwriting Non-Fiction  at the University of York (2017);  City, Essay, Film  at University College London (2019); and  The Essay Film Form and Animation: Intersectionality in Motion , organised by the Derek Jarman Lab at Birkbeck, University of London, Arts University Bournemouth, and the Society for Animation Studies (2019). Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image has held the  Essay Film Festival  annually since 2015. And, following the success of Isaac Julian’s essayistic biography  Derek  (2008), the Derek Jarman Lab has produced  The Seasons in Quincy  (2016), a study of the form that experiments with four different approaches to it.

The following bibliography is not an exhaustive list of resources on the essay film, but it aims to provide a comprehensive starting point for researchers who are unfamiliar with the form and its intellectual contexts. The first section catalogues books and chapters in edited books on the essay film, while the second lists some important journal articles, many of which may be found in online repositories such as JSTOR and Project Muse. The third section provides a list of websites and digital resources. The fourth section, on fair dealing, lists articles on the subject as well as some useful resources for filmmakers seeking guidance on circumstances in which copyright works can be used without permission from, or payment to, the copyright owner. The last section comprises a short list of significant essay films.

Robyn Jakeman

Bibliography

Compiled by Robyn Jakeman, Lily Ford, and Bartek Dziadosz.

Contents: I. Books and Chapters in Edited Books II. Journal Articles III. Websites and Digital Resources IV. Selected Bibliography on Fair Dealing a. Articles b. Guidelines and Resources V. The Essay Film: A Selected Filmography

I.       Books and Chapters in Edited Books

Adorno, Theodor W., ‘The Essay as Form’, in  Notes to Literature , ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), pp. 29–47

Alter, Nora M.,  Chris Marker  (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006)

——,  The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction  (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018)

——, ‘The Essay Film and its German Variants’, in  Generic Histories of German Cinema: Genre and its Deviations , ed. by Jaimey Fisher (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), pp. 49–70

——, ‘Hans Richter in Exile: Translating the Avant-Garde’, in  Caught by Politics; Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture , ed. by Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnik (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 223–43

Alter, Nora M., and Timothy Corrigan, eds.,  Essays on the Essay Film  (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017)

Arthur, Paul, ‘The Resurgence of History and the Avant-Garde Essay Film’, in  A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965  (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 61–73

Astruc, Alexandre, ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera Stylo’, in  The   French New Wave: Critical Landmarks , ed. by Peter Graham (London: British Film Institute, 2009), pp. 31–37

——, ‘The Future of Cinema’, in  Essays on the Essay Film , ed. by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, trans. by Sofia Rabaté (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 93–101

Bacqué, Bertrand, Cyril Neyrat, Clara Schulmann, and Véronique Terrier Hermann, eds.,  Jeux sérioux: Cinéma et art contemporains transforment l’essai  (Geneva: HEAD, 2015)

Barthes, Roland, ‘The Third Meaning’, in  Image-Music-Text  (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 52–68

Bartos, Adam, and Colin MacCabe,  Studio: Remembering Chris Marker  (New York: OR Books, 2017)

Bazin, André, ‘Bazin on Marker’, in  Essays on the Essay Film , ed. by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, trans. by David Kehr (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 102–105

——,  What is Cinema? , trans. by Hugh Gray, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)

Biemann, Ursula, ed.  Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age  (Zurich: Voldemeer, 2003)

Bellour, Raymond,  Between-the-Images  (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2012)

Benjamin, Walter,  The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , trans. by J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2008)

Conomos, John, ‘The Self-Portrait and the Film and Video Essay’, in  Imaging Identity: Media, Memory, and Portraiture in the Digital Age , ed. by Melinda Hinkson (Canberra: ANU Press, 2016), pp. 85–100

Corless, Kieron, ‘Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film’,  BFI Southbank Programme Booklet  (August 2013)

Corrigan, Timothy,  The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

D’Agata, John, ed.,  The Lost Origins of the Essay  (St. Paul, MN.: Graywolf Press, 2009)

Ehmann, Antje, and Kodowo Eshun, eds.,  Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?  (London: Raven Row, 2009)

Elsaesser, Thomas, ed.,  Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines  (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004)

Fusco, Coco,  Young, British and Black: A Monograph on the Work of Sanfoka Film/Video Collective and Black Audio Film Collective  (Buffalo, NY: Contemporary Arts Center, 1988)

Godard, Jean-Luc,  Documents , ed. by Nicole Brenez, David Faroult, Michael Temple, James Williams, and Michael Witt (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006)

——,  Godard on Godard , trans. and ed. by Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972)

——,  Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television , ed. and trans. by Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2014)

——,  Son + Image, 1974–1991 , ed. by Raymond Bellour (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1993)

Gorin, Jean-Pierre, ‘Proposal for a Tussle’, in  Der Weg der Termiten: Beispiele eines Essayistischen Kinos, 1909–2004 , ed. by Astrif Ofner (Vienna: Schüeren, 2007)

Graham, Peter, ed.,  The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks  (London: British Film Institute, 2009). See particularly: Alexandre Astruc, ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde:  La Caméra-Stylo ’, pp. 31–37; André Bazin, ‘The Evolution of Film Language { Qu’est-ce que le cinéma }’, pp. 65–89.

Green, Renée,  Other Planes of There: Selected Writings  (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)

Gunning, Tom, ‘ A Corner in Wheat ’, in  The Griffith Project , ed. by Paolo Cherchi Usai, 12 vols (London: British Film Institute, 1999), iii, 130–41

Harrison, Thomas,  Essayism: Conrad, Musil, and Pirandello  (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)

Hollweg, Brenda, and Igor Krstić, eds.,  World Cinema and the Essay Film  (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019)

Julien, Isaac, with Cynthia Rose,  Isaac Julien: Riot  (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013)

Liandrat-Guigues, Suzanne, and Murielle Gagnebin, eds.,  L’Essai et le cinéma  (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2004)

Lukàcs, Georg, ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay’, in  Soul and Form , ed. by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis, trans. by Anna Bostock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 16–34

Lupton, Catherine,  Chris Marker: Memories of the Future  (London: Reaktion, 2004)

Marker, Chris,  Commentaires , 2 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1961; 1967)

Mekas, Jonas, ‘The Diary Film (A Lecture on  Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania )’, in  The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism , ed. by P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), pp. 190–98

Minh-ha, Trin T.,  Framer Framed: Film Scripts and Interviews  (New York: Routledge, 1992)

Montaigne, Michel de,  The Essays of Michael Signeur de Montaigne , trans. by Charles Cotton (London: Alex Murray and Son, 1700)

Montero, David,  Thinking Images: The Essay Film as Dialogic Form in European Cinema  (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012)

Mulvey, Laura,  Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image  (London: Reaktion, 2006)

Obaldia, Claire de,  The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Pantenburg, Volker,  Farocki/Godard:Film as Theory  (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). See particularly chapter three: ‘Deviation as Norm—Notes on the Essay Film’, pp. 135–52.

Papazian, Elizabeth, and Caroline Eades, eds.,  The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia  (New York: Wallflower Press, 2016)

Rascaroli, Laura,  How the Essay Film Thinks  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

——,  The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film  (New York: Wallflower Press, 2009)

Richter, Hans, ‘The Film Essay: A New Type of Documentary Film’, in  Essays on the Essay Film , ed. by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, trans. by Maria P. Alter (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 89–92

——,  The Struggle for Film , trans. by Ben Brewster (New York: Wildwood House, 1986)

Roscoe, Jane, and Craig Hight,  Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality  (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001)

Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ‘Orson Welles’s Essay Films and Documentary Fictions: A Two-Part Speculation’, in  Discovering Orson Welles  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 129–45

Scherer, Christina,  Ivens, Marker, Godard, Jarman — Erinnerung im Essayfilm  (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001)

Silverman, Kaja, and Harun Farocki,  Speaking About Godard  (New York: New York University Press, 1998)

Vertov, Dziga,  Kimo-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov , ed. by Annette Michelson, trans. by Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)

Warner, Rick,  Godard and the Essay Film: A Form that Thinks  (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2018)

Wees, William C.,  Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films  (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1992)

Witt, Michael,  Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian  (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013)

Wollen, Peter,  Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies  (London: Verso, 1982)

II.      Journal Articles

Alter, Nora M., ‘Composing in Fragments: Music in the Essay Films of Resnais and Godard’,  SubStance , Special Issue: Between the Essay Film and Social Cinema: The Left Bank Group in Context, vol. 41, no. 2 (2012), 24­–39

——, ‘The Political Im/perceptible in the Essay Film: Farocki’s “Images of the World and the Inscription of War”,  New German Critique , no. 68 (Spring–Summer 1996), 165–92

——, ‘Theses on Godard’s  Allemagne 90 neuf zéro ’,  Iris , no. 29 (2000), 117–32

——, ‘Translating the Essay into Film and Installation’,  Journal of Visual Culture , vol. 6, no. 1 (2007), 45–58

Arthur, Paul, ‘Essay Questions’,  Film Comment , vol. 39, no. 1 (2003), 53–62

Astruc, Alexandre, ‘L’avenir du cinéma’,  Trafic , no. 3 (1992), 151–58

Bazin, Andre, ‘Bazin on Marker’, trans. by Dave Kehr,  Film/Comment , vol. 39, no. 4 (2003), 43–44

‘Chris Marker’, Special Issue:  Images documentaires , no. 15 (1993)

‘Chris Marker’, Special Issue:  Trafic , no. 84 (2012)

Corrigan, Timothy, ‘Of Diaries on Film, or Velocities of Non Place’, in  Der Essayfilm: Ästhetik und Aktualität , ed. by Sven Kramer and Thomas Tode (Konstanz: UVK, 2011), pp. 125–44

Eisenstein, Sergei, ‘Notes for a Film of “Capital”’, trans. by Maciej Sliwowski, Jay Leyda, and Annette Michelson,  October , no. 2 (1976), 3–26

Gorbman, Claudia, ‘Finding a Voice: Varda’s Early Travelogues’,  SubStance , Special Issue: Between the Essay Film and Social Cinema: The Left Bank Group in Context, vol. 41, no. 2 (2012), 40–57

Grob, Veronika, and others, eds., ‘Essay’, Special Issue,  Cinema , no. 50 (2005)

Lee, Kevin B., ‘Video Essay: The Essay Film — Some Thoughts of Discontent, in  Sight and Sound , May 2017, < https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/deep-focus/video-essay-essay-film-some-thoughts > [accessed 7 November 2019]

Leslie, Esther, ‘Art, Documentary, and the Essay Film’,  Radical Philosophy  (July–August 2015), < https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/art-documentary-and-the-essay-film > [accessed 14 November 2019]

Lopate, Philip, ‘In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film’,  The Threepenny Review , no. 48 (Winter 1992), 19–22

Rascaroli, Laura, ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’,  Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media , vol. 49, no. 2 (Fall 2008), 24–47.

Harvey, David Oscar, ‘The Limits of Vococentrism: Chris Marker, Hans Richter and the Essay Film’,  SubStance , Special Issue: Between the Essay Film and Social Cinema: The Left Bank Group in Context, vol. 41, no. 2 (2012), 6–23

Ritchey, Andrew, ‘Lines of Flight: Jean-Daniel Pollet, “Mediterranée”, and the “Tel Quel” Group’,  SubStance , Special Issue: Between the Essay Film and Social Cinema: The Left Bank Group in Context, vol. 41, no. 2 (2012), 79–98

Renov, Michael, ‘History and/as Autobiography: The Essayistic in Film and Culture’,  Framework , vol. 1 (1989), 6–13

Sandhu, Sukhdev, ‘Vagrancy and Drift: the Rise of the Roaming Essay Film’,  The Guardian , 3 August 2013, < https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/03/rise-essay-film-bfi-season > [accessed 13 November 2019]

Tracey, Andrew, ‘The Essay Film’, in  Sight and Sound , August 2013, < https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/deep-focus/essay-film > [accessed 7 November 2019]

Ungar, Steven, ‘Introduction: Between The Essay Film and Social Cinema’,  SubStance , Special Issue: Between the Essay Film and Social Cinema: The Left Bank Group in Context, vol. 41, no. 2 (2012), 3–5

Ungar, Steven, ‘Scenes in a Library: Alain Resnais and “Toute la mémoire du monde’,  SubStance , Special Issue: Between the Essay Film and Social Cinema: The Left Bank Group in Context, vol. 41, no. 2 (2012), 58–78

III.    Websites and Digital Resources

16:9, < http://www.16-9.dk/kategori/media/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

8hours, < https://www.8hours.com/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media , < http://www.alphavillejournal.com/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

The Audiovisual Essay , < https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/ > [accessed 7 november 2019]. Free Resource.

Audiovisualcy , < https://vimeo.com/groups/audiovisualcy > [accessed 1 October 2020].

BFI, ‘The Best Video Essays of 2017’, < https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/polls-surveys/annual-round-ups/best-video-essays-2017 > [accessed 1 October 2020].

BFI, ‘The Best Video Essays of 2018’, < https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/polls-surveys/best-video-essays-2018 > [accessed 1 October 2020].

BFI, ‘The Best Video Essays of 2019’, < https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/polls-surveys/best-video-essays-2019 > [accessed 1 October 2020].

BFI Player, < https://player.bfi.org.uk/ > [accessed 7 November 2019]. Paywall; some films free to access.

Box of Broadcasts , < https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/ > [accessed 7 November 2019]. Paywall; available through institutions.

Catherine Grant, Vimeo, < https://vimeo.com/filmstudiesff > [accessed 7 November 2019]. Free Resource.

The Cine-Files: A Scholarly Journal of Film Studies , < https://www.thecine-files.com/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Correspondencias , < http://correspondenciascine.com/ensayos-audiovisuales/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Cousins, Mark, ‘The Essay Film — A Manifesto by Mark Cousins’,  Notes on Cinematograph  (29 August 2013) < http://notesoncinematograph.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/essayfilm.html > [accessed 13 November 2019].

Desistfilm , < https://desistfilm.com/category/videoessays/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Every Frame a Painting, YouTube, < https://www.youtube.com/user/everyframeapainting > [accessed 7 November 2019]. Free Resource.

The Essay Film Festival , < http://www.essayfilmfestival.com/ > [accessed 7 November 2019].

Filmscalpel , < https://www.filmscalpel.com/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Film Studies for Free , < https://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com/ > [accessed 7 November 2019]. Free Resource.

Filmidee , < http://www.filmidee.it/category/video-essay/?fbclid=IwAR3WsAiTKCaJfHiA0YtSzPfoCEnmic2dD-39m0qUmKqvhmbfOE88WlxVm84 > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Filmkrant , < https://filmkrant.nl/video/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Frames Cinema Journal , < https://framescinemajournal.com/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies , Media Commons, < http://mediacommons.org/intransition/ > [accessed 7 November 2019]. Free Resource.

In Media Res , Media Commons, < http://mediacommons.org/imr/ > [accessed 7 November 2019]. Free Resource.

Kanopy , < https://www.kanopy.com/ > [accessed 7 November 2019]. Paywall; available through institutions.

Keathley, Christian, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant,  The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy  < http://videographicessay.org/works/videographic-essay/index > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Lisorti, Leandro, ‘Working with Found Footage’, Vimeo. < https://vimeo.com/454501777 > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Little White Lies , < https://lwlies.com/tags/video/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Lola ,< http://www.lolajournal.com/ > [accessed 7 November 2019]. Free Resource.

MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture , < https://maifeminism.com/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Mediarxiv , < https://mediarxiv.org/ > [accessed 7 November 2019]. Free Resource.

MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism , < https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

MUBI Notebook , Video Essays, < https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/tag/Video%20Essays > [accessed 1 October 2020].

NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies , < https://necsus-ejms.org/journal/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Open Library of Humanities ,  < https://www.openlibhums.org/ > [accessed 7 November 2019]. Free Resource.

Sight and Sound , Video Essays, < https://www2.bfi.org.uk/sight-sound-magazine/videos > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays , < https://tecmerin.uc3m.es/en/journal/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Van den Berg, Thomas, and Miklós Kiss,  Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video , University of Groningen (July 2016). < https://scalar.usc.edu/works/film-studies-in-motion/index > [accessed 1 October 2020].

The Video Essay Podcast, < https://thevideoessay.com/ >, including the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist < https://thevideoessay.com/blacklivesmatter > [accessed 1 October 2020].

Zoom Out , < https://zoom-out.ca/ > [accessed 1 October 2020].

IV.    Selected Bibliography on Fair Dealing

a.         Articles

Bellido, Jose, (2014) ‘Looking Right: The Art of Visual Literacy in English Copyright Litigation’,  Law, Culture, and the Humanities , vol. 10, no. 1 (2014), 66–87

Deazley, Ronan, and Bartolomeo Meletti, ‘Copying, Creativity, and Copyright’, CREATe Working Paper (February 2016), < www.create.ac.uk/publications/copying-creativity-and-copyright/ > [accessed 14 November 2019]

Grischka, Petri, ‘The Public Domain vs. the Museum: The Limits of Copyright and Reproduction of Two-Dimensional Works of Art’,  Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies , vol. 12, no. 1 (2014), Art. 8. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.5334/jcms.1021217

Macmillan, Fiona, ‘Is Copyright Blind to the Visual?’,  Visual Communication , vol. 7, no. 1 (2008), 97–118, < https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/864/1/Fmacmillan864.pdf > [accessed 14 November 2019]

b.      Guidelines and Resources

The UK Intellectual Property Office, < https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright >, has e-leaflets explaining every exception to copyright with reference to the 2014 amendments to the copyright act, for both creators and users.

Copyrightuser.org addresses public mis/understandings of copyright and provides many resources for explaining in simple language both the UK law and the exceptions to it. It is set up by CREATe and is the platform for Ronan Deazley and Bartolomeo Meletti’s webseries ‘The Game is On!’, < https://www.copyrightuser.org/ > [accessed 14 November 2019]

DACS, the UK artists collecting society, has a factsheet explaining exceptions to copyright as they pertain to artists’ work: < https://www.dacs.org.uk/knowledge-base/factsheets/exceptions-and-limitations > [accessed 14 November 2019]

Tate has an extensive guide to copyright and its exceptions available online: < www.tate.org.uk/file/guide-copyright > [accessed 14 November 2019]

Learning on Screen’s Audiovisual Citation Guidelines are useful for correct attribution when quoting audiovisual material. Download the guidelines here: < http://bufvc.ac.uk/projects-research/avcitation > [accessed 14 November 2019]

Channel 4’s producers’ handbook on fair dealing for programme makers is worth checking if you are working on audiovisual outputs: < www.channel4.com/producers-handbook/c4-guidelines/fair-dealing-guidelines > [accessed 14 November 2019]

The College Art Association of the United States published a code of best practice for fair use in the visual arts in 2015: < www.collegeart.org/programs/caa-fair-use > [accessed 14 November 2019]. While this pertains to US fair use protocols, which differ from the UK’s principle of fair dealing (and copyright law is territorial), it is still an excellent resource.

V.        The Essay Film: A Selected Filmography

Akbari, Mania,  A Moon for My Father  (2019)

Akomfrah, John,  Handsworth Songs  (1986). A short Tate interview with Akomfrah, on film and the philosophy of montage, is available here .

Akerman, Chantal,  News from Home  (1977)

Anderson, Thom,  Los Angeles Plays Itself  (2003). A trailer is available here .

Buñuel, Luis,  Land Without Bread  (1933). The film is available on YouTube .

Cozarinsky, Edgar,  La Guerre d’un seul homme  (1982)

The Derek Jarman Lab,  The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger  (2016).

Dibb, Mike, and John Berger,  Ways of Seeing  (1972). Episodes one , two , three , and four are available on YouTube.

Erice, Víctor,  La Morte Rouge  (2006)

Farocki, Harun,  Images of the World and the Inscription of War  (1989)

——,  Leben — BRD  (1990)

Farrokhzad, Forough,  The House is Black  (1963)

Gee, Grant,  Patience (After Sebald)  (2011)

Godard, Jean-Luc,  Histoire(s) de cinéma  (1988–98)

——,  Two or Three Things I Know About Her  (1967)

Godard, Jean-Luc, and Jean-Pierre Gorin,  Letter to Jane  (1972).

Guzman, Patrizio,  Nostalgia for the Light  (2010)

Jarman, Derek,  Blue  (1993). The film is available on YouTube .

Jennings, Humphrey  A Diary for Timothy  (1945). The film is available on YouTube .

Julian, Isaac,  Derek  (2008)

Keiller, Patrick,  London  (1994)

Kiarostami, Abbas,  Close Up  (1990)

Kluge, Alexander , News from Ideological Antiquity  (2008)

Marker, Chris,  Le Fond de l’air est rouge  (1977)

——,  Letter from Siberia  (1958)

——,  Sans Soleil  (1983)

Mekas, Jonas,  Lost, Lost, Lost  (1976)

Minh-ha, Trinh T.,  Surname Viet Given Name Nam  (1989)

Morin, Edgar, and Jean Rouch,  Chronicle of a Summer  (1961)

Pasolini, Pier Paolo,  Notes Towards An African Orestes  (1970)

Reggio, Godfrey,  Koyaanisqatsi  (1982)

Resnais, Alain,  Night and Fog  (1956). You can watch this film on YouTube. An interview with Resnais on the film is available here .

——,  Toute la mémoire du monde  (1956). You can watch this film here .

Resnais, Alain, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet,  Statues Also Die  (1953). You can view this film on YouTube .

Rivers, Ben,  Two Years at Sea  (2011)

Ruttmann, Walter,  Berlin: Symphony of a Great City  (1927). You can view this film on YouTube .

Varda, Agnès,  Diary of a Pregnant Woman  (1958)

——,  The Gleaners and I  (2000)

——,  Ô Saisons, ô chateaux  (1958)

Vertov, Dziga,  Man with a Movie Camera  (1927)

Vigo, Jean,  À propos de Nice  (1930)

Welles, Orson,  F for Fake  (1974). You can view the film on YouTube . Welles’ original 9-minute ‘trailer’ for the film, which contains material not in the film, is available here . A video essay on the structure of  F for Fake , by Every Frame a Painting, is available here ; a short interview with Peter Bogdanovich on the film is available here .

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By Leigh Singer

Maurice Pialat: three steps to magic – a video essay

By Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Not in Kansas anymore: Warwick Thornton on Samson & Delilah

By Nick Bradshaw and So Mayer

Pasta as prologue: the Spaghetti House siege on film

By Charlie Shackleton

What is neorealism?

By kogonada

Critics’ talk: an introduction to anime (for BFI at Home)

By Michael Leader, Kambole Campbell and others

The long conversation: Richard Linklater on cinema and time

By :: kogonada

Portraits of young women on fire: Céline Sciamma on female art, identity and intimacy

Bong joon ho’s rampaging metaphors – a video essay.

By Luís Azevedo

Kirk Douglas: Hollywood champ

By Philip Kemp and Leigh Singer

Criticism in the age of TikTok – a video essay

A horror in the breach: claire denis’s trouble every day, blackface, whitewashing and the grey zone – a two-part video inquiry, gotta film dance the evolution of the movie musical – a video essay, watch the new re-release trailer for dr. strangelove or: how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, video: the world according to koreeda, three colours silver: europe 25 years after kieslowski’s trilogy – a video essay, access: sheffield doc/fest, “once upon a pair of wheels”… edgar wright on baby driver and the classic car movies, women on a bergman screen – a video essay, argento on suspiria – a video inquiry, video: the best films of 2017, wrapped in plasticity: twin peaks’ myriad laura palmers, in her eyes: notes on gloria grahame (a video essay), video: five finds at the 2013 rotterdam international film festival.

By Kevin B. Lee

Video essay: Kicking against the chick flicks – reclaiming the Hollywood romcom

Video: southern gothic.

By Robert Greene

Video essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent

Video: three closings and four highlights – the beijing independent film festival 2012.

Tools, tips and tricks for the budding video essayist

So you want to try your hand at video essays. Where to start? Well, by watching video essays. There are a lot of good examples on this site in the Best Practices section.

But we do not claim nor aim to be definitive or exhaustive. The best practices we cite are far from the only valuable examples of video essays that are out there. Other sites have been compiling a wide catalogue of such examples. You can start by browsing around the sites mentioned below.

In a decidedly meta-turn of events, a couple of video essayists have also made video essays about the video essay. These too are good reference points. The Kevin B. Lee video The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent was produced for Sight & Sound magazine and is an associative take on the genre. For Fandor, the prolific Lee made a video titled What Makes a Video Essay Great? which contains interesting observations about the directions in which the video essay format is developing.

When looking for an in-depth and academic approach to the video essay form, [in]Transition is the gold standard. It is a peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated entirely to video essays, or as [in]Transition more precisely describes it,  videographic film and moving image studies .

The aim of [in]Transition is to give those videographic studies the place they deserve within the academic community, by challenging that community’s preference for written scholarship. [in]Transition wants to validate the videographic approach as a new mode of scholarly writing by compiling, carefully curating and commenting on examples of fine videographic works. [in]Transition also has a wealth of information in their Resources section, addressing both the theoretical and practical aspects of  videographic film and moving image studies.

Another indispensable resource is Audiovisualcy. This online platform for videographic film and moving image studies compiles videos with an analytical, critical, reflexive or scholarly purpose. You can follow them on Vimeo , subscribe to their tweets or connect with them via their  Facebook page .

• Help & FAQ
• Video Essay
• Journalism, Media & Performance

Research output : Contribution to Conference › Non-Textual Output › peer-review

• Pedagogic research
• pedagogic innovation
• pedagogical practice

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• Teaching Process Arts and Humanities 100%
• Under-graduate Arts and Humanities 100%
• London Social Sciences 100%
• Research Project Social Sciences 100%
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• Video Essay Keyphrases 100%
• Tuition Fee Social Sciences 50%
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T1 - Video Essay

AU - Wallace, Roy

PY - 2018/9/12

Y1 - 2018/9/12

N2 - This is a twenty-minute video essay presentation to explore how we might employ the audio video essay to represent our scholarship within education, in particular the media studies discipline. Furthermore, to examine how this emerging academic approach may be used as a new form of research output and its potential to develop more focused, engaged, teaching and learning strategies for undergraduate students at the University of Northampton and elsewhere.I will reflect upon my current research and recent production of a sixty-minute video essay as part of my PhD research project and the subsequent re-orientation of my teaching delivery to include ‘video lectures’ as part of my teaching delivery to undergraduate students. A key issue in producing the finished research project was focused on my lack of experience in producing video essay works. I overcame this problem by researching current approaches then developing a series of ‘video essay’ projects for presentation at academic conferences, which I have now delivered to a range of audiences at various events. This has led to the development of ‘guidelines’ for the production of the academic video essay for undergraduate and post graduate students.The research into academic video essay was influenced by the work of Tony Zhou Every Frame a Painting, [in]Transition Online Journal, Kevin. B. Lee the Otolith Group and Audiovisualcy on Vimeo. Kodwo Eschun has influenced my perception regarding the video essayist approach when he suggests; the essayistic is dissatisfaction, discontent with the duties of an image and the obligations of sound. It is dissatisfaction with what we expect documentary to do especially. Key References:Kevin. B. Lee, Vimeo (197, The Essay Film: Some thoughts of Discontent).Shrum, W/Dugue, R/Brown, T. Digital Video as Research Practice: Methodology for the Millennium, Journal of Research Practice 1(1), 2005. Article M4 Utterson, Alan. Technology and Culture: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2005. PrintWayne, Mike. Theorising Video Practice. London: Lawrence & Wishart. 1997. Print

AB - This is a twenty-minute video essay presentation to explore how we might employ the audio video essay to represent our scholarship within education, in particular the media studies discipline. Furthermore, to examine how this emerging academic approach may be used as a new form of research output and its potential to develop more focused, engaged, teaching and learning strategies for undergraduate students at the University of Northampton and elsewhere.I will reflect upon my current research and recent production of a sixty-minute video essay as part of my PhD research project and the subsequent re-orientation of my teaching delivery to include ‘video lectures’ as part of my teaching delivery to undergraduate students. A key issue in producing the finished research project was focused on my lack of experience in producing video essay works. I overcame this problem by researching current approaches then developing a series of ‘video essay’ projects for presentation at academic conferences, which I have now delivered to a range of audiences at various events. This has led to the development of ‘guidelines’ for the production of the academic video essay for undergraduate and post graduate students.The research into academic video essay was influenced by the work of Tony Zhou Every Frame a Painting, [in]Transition Online Journal, Kevin. B. Lee the Otolith Group and Audiovisualcy on Vimeo. Kodwo Eschun has influenced my perception regarding the video essayist approach when he suggests; the essayistic is dissatisfaction, discontent with the duties of an image and the obligations of sound. It is dissatisfaction with what we expect documentary to do especially. Key References:Kevin. B. Lee, Vimeo (197, The Essay Film: Some thoughts of Discontent).Shrum, W/Dugue, R/Brown, T. Digital Video as Research Practice: Methodology for the Millennium, Journal of Research Practice 1(1), 2005. Article M4 Utterson, Alan. Technology and Culture: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2005. PrintWayne, Mike. Theorising Video Practice. London: Lawrence & Wishart. 1997. Print

KW - Video Essay

KW - Australia

KW - Multimodal

KW - education

KW - Pedagogic research

KW - pedagogic innovation

KW - pedagogical practice

M3 - Non-Textual Output

T2 - Not Another Brick in the Wall

Y2 - 1 November 2018

• Exhibitions

Previously at the ICA - Films

Essay Film Festival 2017: Critique, Protest, Activism and the Video Essay, a lecture-performance by Kevin B. Lee

30 Mar 2017

Our present social and political environment begs a moment of urgent reckoning for the audiovisual essay, whether it is practiced by artists, scholars, or everyday video-makers: how can or should it address the current crises facing the world? Kevin B. Lee's work has pondered this question in the past through video essays on filmic forms of social protest and dissent, including with Nicole Brenez on The Hour of the Furnaces (2012), in The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent (2013) and Real Film Radicals (2013).

These earlier videos explored films and media artefacts made by other creators. But at what point do audiovisual studies of works of activism become activist works in their own right? Especially when one important dimension of the video essay is to uphold a critical distance from its subject? How do criticism and activism co-exist, and possibly inform and nurture the other? In this event, Lee explores these questions through screening and discussing his and other recent works that engage with a social and political consciousness.

With the support of the Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading, and the Goethe-Institut, London.

Sight & Sound Film Poll: Nicole Brenez on The Hour of the Furnaces, Kevin B. Lee, 2012, digital video, 8 minutes

Produced for Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of the greatest films ever made, this video adapts Nicole Brenez’ argument for the poll to give greater consideration to political films, as well as to the politics of filmmaking.

Real Film Radicals, Kevin B. Lee, 2013, digital video, 6 minutes

A recontextualization of “radical” cinema, this video critiques how the use of the term “radical” has been applied to certain contemporary films. It then pays tribute to films, many of which have been neglected or marginalized from film history, that attest to a legacy of radical resistance filmmaking.

State of Emergence: The Wall, Anti Banality Union, 2016, digital video, 3 minutes

Who is the enemy, exactly? Dozens of clips from Hollywood zombie films are interwoven into a single sequence depicting how societal paranoia is propagated by mainstream entertainment. An excerpt from State of Emergence , a work-in-progress feature by Anti-Banality Union, a New York based media activist collective

Snake Oil for N-----town Fever, Steven Boone, 2016, digital video, 10 minutes

The 1960s Roger Corman B movie The Intruder is used as a blueprint for diagnosing the prevailing logic of 21st century Trumpism and the enduring racial dynamics of the United States.

Problems with the Gendered POV Shot in Lilya 4-Ever, Kiera Sandusky, 2017, digital video, 6 minutes

The 2004 Swedish film Lilya 4-Ever depicted the problem of sex trafficking so powerfully that it was used by governments, NGOs and educators as an awareness raising tool. This video examines the aesthetic choices that make the film so powerful, as well as the problematic outcomes when it was used for social education purposes.

My Crush Was a Superstar, Chloé Galibert-Laîné, 2017, digital video, 10 minutes

This desktop documentary follows a single image of an ISIS fighter through a trail of messages, videos and postings to uncover his existence in both social media and reality. An excerpt from an ongoing research project by Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee investigating videos produced and circulated by the Islamic State.

We are offering a special multibuy offer for Essay Film Festival 2017:

- if you purchase tickets for 3-4 screenings pay £9 (full price) / £7 (concessions) / £6 (ICA Members) per ticket - If you purchase tickets for 5-6 screenings pay £8 (full price) / £6 (concessions) / £5 (ICA Members) per ticket

Essay Film Festival 2017: Le Moulin + introduction

29 mar 2017.

Find out more

Essay Film Festival 2017: The Illinois Parables + Filmmaker in Conversation

28 mar 2017.

Essay Film Festival 2017: Three Landscape Films by Babette Mangolte + Filmmaker in Conversation

26 mar 2017, the essay film as an activist gesture.

Posted on: 28 Mar 2017

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The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent (2013)

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0 有用 moondust 看过 2024-01-30 21:49:56 广西.

人与过量的图像的对垒。

0 有用 wen 看过 2022-09-05 21:11:58 英国

“Imagine a cinema that lets us see in two directions at once” 像镜面的窗户

0 有用 淼针 看过 2023-11-25 15:58:09 北京

真共脑了 做完才看到 李起万领先我十年

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• Video Essay/The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent

by Kevin B. Lee

Kevin B. Lee, in person, December 10th, “Aesthetics of Analysis” at Other Cinema!

In a world bedazzled by intractable images, do we need the essay film now more than ever?…Kevin B. Lee weighs up this distinctively self-aware, searching form of cinema through both video and text–Sight and Sound

The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent from Kevin B. Lee on Vimeo .

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.

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 ?

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 voice overs 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 voice over narration is essential to such works. But over the last 30 years, the centrality of the essay film voice over 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 ).

San Soleil, 1983.

To Tracy’s credit, he links the use of voice over 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 voice over in determining cinema’s capacity to interrogate itself; where he seems to hold that such interpolations are necessary to create the 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 Marker enthusiast Kodwo Eshun of the Otolith Group:

“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 is 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 fulfills 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.

This essay first published online in BFI/Film Forever, “Sight and Sound” magazine.

Kevin B. Lee appears at Other Cinema on…

Still from Zbyněk Baladrán’s 40,000,000 , a short video essay.

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From the Editor: “META-“

Fall 2016, issue #31: “meta-“.

• Three Reviews: Form and the Book, Film and Community
• Review: Thoughts on “Experimental Filmmaking: Break the Machine” and Community
• Review: INCITE Issue No. 6, Fall 2015 – “Forever”
• Notfilm Review
• Interview: Vanessa Renwick, Portland, OR, 2016
• The Limits of Emetophobia: Simon Strong with Jack Sargeant
• With Bruce Conner: A 1984 Interview in REVERSAL

Artist Projects

• NEXT LEVEL FUCKED UP (More art from the project)
• UNBELIEVABLE: Teens Hang Out at Malls!
• Stratographic Time

Featured Articles

• The Sound of Breaking Glass
• DJ Lebowitz: The Piano Man Who Keeps Breaking Barriers
• Lost Men, Purposeful Women: Jim Shaw’s “The Hole” and “The Whole”
• Altered States: Materiality and The Moving Image
• PART 3: Five Years Ashore at the Cannes Film Festival
• YOU SAY GOODBYE, I SAY HELLO: Godard, Language, Image, Sex & the 4D Man