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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

Art, documentary and the essay film

PHILOSOPHY OF tHE ESSAY FILM

Art, documentary and the essay film Esther LeslieFilm as document

The moment when Siegfried Kracauer knew that he wanted to write of film as what he terms the ‘Discover of the Marvels of Everyday Life’ is relayed in his introduction to the Theory of Film from 1960.1 Kracauer recalls watching a film long ago that shows a banal scene, an ordinary city street. A puddle in the foreground reflects the houses that cannot be seen and some of the sky. A breeze crosses the site. The puddle’s water trembles. ‘The trembling upper world in the dirty puddle – this image has never left me’, writes Kracauer. In this trembling, which is the moment of nature’s uninvited intervention, its inscription as movement on film, everything, from nature to culture, ‘takes on life’, he notes. What is important about film is its presentation of this given life indiscriminately. The puddle, this unworthy spillage, is redeemed in the low art of cinema. Both cinema and puddle are elevated from the ground. The upper world is brought down to earth as image. Fixed for ever – or for as long as the film strip exists – is a wobble of movement, which comes to stand in for what is life, because it is life captured, being nature’s vitality. It is a life that is possessed by the wind and articulated constantly, but usually expunged from what is to be seen when film is watched. It is a fact, a chip of the world as it is, and it is caught on film or amidst film and the staged world.

Walter Benjamin, in a piece titled ‘Paris, the City in the Mirror’, written for the German edition of Vogue , on 30 January 1929, makes a similar point in relation to photography. [2] In discussing Mario von Bucovich’s volume of Paris photographs from 1928, with its images from Bucovich and Germaine Krull, he posits photography as a mirror of the city. The collection by Bucovich and Krull, he notes, closes with an image of the Seine. It is a close-up of the surface of the water, agitated, dark and light with a hint of cloud broken on its ripples. It seems to him that this reflecting surface is a reflection of photography itself, which is as rightfully there, in the city of looks and looking, as the River Seine, which shatters all images, like a committed montagist, and testifies to the evanescence of all things. Nature, the river, the wind, the clouds passing by all intervene in film, all leave a documentary trace that is seen and not seen at once. Fragments of the world are caught in the grains of the photographic papers. Recorded are both those things that are meant to be seen and those that simply are.

Benjamin’s analysis of Soviet cinema, in critical response to Oskar A.H. Schmitz, twists a sense of enlivened nature, which happily makes itself available for filmic recording, into a more directly politicized physis of the collective labouring body. For him, in his experience of Soviet cinema, there is the entry into film of something not previously bidden into culture and not previously captured in it – the worker, or rather the proletarian, who is part of a collective – set in equivalence to the material nature that marks itself on film, outside of the filmic scenario. An image in Benjamin’s retort to Schmitz makes this graphic.

What began with the bombardment of Odessa in Potemkin continues in the more recent film Mother with the pogrom against factory workers, in which the suffering of the urban masses is engraved in the asphalt of the street like ticker tape. [3]

It is not the wind blowing a puddle, or the reflection of a cloud in the river, caught and remediated on film. It is the labouring body exposed in the stark streets. The film strip absorbs the strip of the road. A place of collective suffering, the street where battles occur, just as the daily grind of life occurs, is given room on the screen. The modern shiny surface of the asphalt road, described elsewhere by Benjamin as a momentous component of the bourgeois city and the bourgeois self, which, like other shiny surfaces, such as windowpanes and mirrors, and the camera too, reflects the city and its residents from many angles. City and residents are fragmented and multiplied, generating feelings of disorientation and loss. Like the running script of a twenty-four-hour news channel, engravings of a modern type, the cinema gives this type and this sensibility a place, a corner of the screen.

Entering too into film are the spaces of this collective. For Benjamin, movement is the key to cinema, but it is not an endless movement or ‘the constant stream of images’ so much as ‘the sudden change of place that overcomes a milieu which has resisted every other attempt to unlock its secret’. [4] It is in relation to this that Benjamin characterizes the locations of cinema, which cannot remain unchanged by the camera’s remediation of them. The passage is well known.

We may truly say that with film a new realm of consciousness comes into being. To put it in a nutshell, film is the prism in which the spaces of the immediate environment – the spaces in which people live, pursue their avocations, and enjoy their leisure – are laid open before their eyes in a comprehensible, meaningful, and passionate way. In themselves, these offices, furnished rooms, saloons, big-city streets, stations, and factories are ugly, incomprehensible, and hopelessly sad. Or rather they were, and seemed to be, until the advent of film. The cinema then exploded this entire prison-world with the dynamite of its fractions of a second, so that now we can take extended journeys of adventure between their widely scattered ruins. [5]

The world is ‘laid open’ and viewers come away with an enhanced knowledge of the structure of actuality through exposure to a prism in which spaces are represented with various types of intensity and fullness, and through which they are led by proletarian heroes, who emerge from and back into collectives, human and spatial collectives. [6] Cinema detonates a ‘prison-world’ – the spaces of this world, his world, are also prison spaces, but the jail can be broken from, filmically, as a first step. Audiences penetrate the secrets contained even in very ordinary reality, once it has been fractured into shards. But those shards are the material of the world, seen from all angles, in close-up, through the fragmenting material of film and its apparatus, and each shard is set next to other shards, other scenarios, and perhaps wordlessly, just as Jan Tschichold and Franz Roh proposed in their volume foto-auge/oeil et photo/photo eye , published in 1929. For example, a photograph by Sasha Stone of alphabetized index cards in a filing cabinet, titled ‘Files’, was placed next to an image, owned by the chemical concern IG Farben, of people relaxing on a beach. The meanings of each – work, leisure, mass society, loss of individuality, public, private, surveillance, bureaucracy – was modulated by the other.

In montage and in absorption of the outlines of the present moment, photography and film proved to be legitimate art forms. As with the polemic against Schmitz for his petty-bourgeois understanding of Battleship Potemkin , Benjamin wrote a caustic response to an article in Die literarische Welt by Friedrich Burschell, published on 20 November 1925. Burschell’s article was a commemorative piece on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the death of the writer Jean Paul and it bemoaned, in its final paragraph, the way in which the anniversary was treated in the popular press, specifically in relation to the use of imagery. Benjamin launched a robust defence of the legitimacy of the montagist, Dada-like sensibility generated by the illustrated press, which in this case had set its images of Jean Paul, miniaturized and cast into a corner, among the children of Thomas Mann, the petty-bourgeois hero of a dubious trial, two tarts all done up in feathers and furs, and two cats and a monkey. Benjamin uses the notion of ‘aura’ here. The images, he notes, exude the ‘aura of their actuality’, in their higgledy-piggledyness, in their thrusting up and out of the chaos of modern life, and in their acknowledgement of the actual social value of things – including cultural figures – rather than the one which they should, apparently, receive from the union formed by technology and capital. It is so incomparably ‘interesting’ precisely because of the rigour with which it concentrates, week after week, in its concave mirror, the dissolute, distracted attention of bank clerks, secretaries, assembly workers. This documentary character is its power and, at the same time, its legitimation. A large head of Jean Paul on the title page of the illustrated magazine – what would be more boring? It is ‘interesting’ only as long as the head remains small. To show things in the aura of their actuality is more valuable, is more fruitful, if indirectly, than crowing on about the ultimately petty-bourgeois idea of educating the general public. [7]

The aura of actuality, the moment of the film or photo, or montage, its absorption into its material of all the contradictions and absurdities of the present, and thereby much that is unbidden, unintended, comes to the fore. Spaces relate to other spaces that have until now been kept apart. Like photography and film itself, meeting its viewer halfway, these new dimensions jut out into the environments of those who take them in their hands.

The films that draw Benjamin’s attention because of their novelty and legitimacy – Battleship Potemkin , Mother , and possibly the film that kindled Kracauer’s interest in film – were not documentaries. They were documentary only in the sense that for Benjamin, as for Kracauer, their basis was in the documentation of actuality that is film and photography. Still Benjamin considered Battleship Potemkin in relation to ‘facts’. The fictional actions of the sadistic ship’s doctor become interesting if facts and statistics can establish that this is not an individual aberration but a portrayal of a social reality in which brutal state and brutal medicine are intertwined and have acted so since the Great War. [8] The fiction caught on film must not be severed from the one in the world that backs it up, becomes its legitimation and makes of it fact. This sets Benjamin’s sense of things in 1927 as a theoretical precursor to Brecht’s later experiment in fiction and actuality, Kuhle Wampe, or To Whom Does the World Belong? , in 1932. That Brecht’s interest was in the way in which fiction may lead towards and not away from social fact was understood, to Brecht’s bemusement, most clearly by the German censor. The film reflected on notions of collective practice – in terms of its production – and in relation to a wider extra-filmic world, in that it relied on the existence of a mass communist and labour movement that were both the audience and stimulus of the film, as well as providing some of the actors for it. The episodic form, the montage and the detached acting style all contributed to a sense in which the film was not about a particular fictionalized individual but rather about the destiny of a collective, a class. In a note on a meeting with the censor, ‘A Small Contribution to the Theme of Realism’ (1932), Brecht explained how the censor had well understood the film’s intent in depicting the suicide of an unemployed man. [9] A young man, after having gone on a futile quest for work, competing against myriad other young Berliners, takes off his watch, the single thing of value on him, and steps off the window ledge of the family’s wretched apartment. This is all done noiselessly, undramatically, in a detached fashion. The censor protested that it did not depict suicide as the abnormal act of an unfortunate individual, but rather, in its impersonality, made suicide seem to be the doom of an entire social class. Brecht and the film company were caught out, and by ‘a policeman’ of all people. Made perceptible in a certain mode of fiction were the actual pressures brought to bear on a class. Drama was simply a pretext for social fact, and social fact on a mass scale at that.

Shub’s work

The Soviet film-maker Esfir Shub worked with a sense of film as conduit to a reality outside of film, which it captures and mobilizes – whether fiction film, documentary or whatever scrap. Film is a piece of actuality, something that could yield knowledge about what exists, once it is deployed in the right way. It is this physically, in that it has absorbed something of a world that passed before it and that may even have been caught unintentionally on the strip. It is this ideologically, in that it has absorbed something of the times and circumstance in which it is made and carries that into the future, where it can be undermined or enstaged. It is this generically, in that film offers itself as an artform in which the facts of the world may be – though not necessarily – reflected and dealt with. All film emerges from the realm of the real, even when it is at its most fake. Film is a material, a raw material ripe for processing. The film is the thing that builds the filmic world and is the thing that is seen. Of course, it is hard to see Esfir Shub because of her authorial anonymity, her use of found footage, grainy, second-hand materials, gathered strips made by nameless filmers. Shub was an editor of films. Or perhaps someone whose labour on film did not even have a name, for she was not simply an editor in the way that many other women were, in terms of their job description, engaged in sorting shots, cutting the negative, but not making even a rough cut of the film. In her work, she did something else. Her editing work for the Soviet film industry from 1922, re-editing and re-titling foreign films, such as Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse, Der Spieler or trashy American serials, so that they might become ‘ideologically correct’, involved more than just being an editor. Hers was a key cultural role: in 1924 over 90 per cent of films shown were produced in capitalist countries. In these years of the New Economic Policy, many films were imported. Shub worked on a politically and economically viable solution to a materials crisis, and she learnt how to montage films, producing new meanings from old stock, re-channelling ruling-class ideology. She carried this work over into her own practice as a film-maker, in which she developed a form that predates the canonic essay-film form, but that establishes film as a vehicle for proposing arguments. It does this by amassing fragments of the fictional and non-fictional, drawing together disparate spaces and times, chasing conceptual elements suggestively, by dislocating images from their allotted places, establishing a thematic line out of the disparate, and asserting a directing intelligence, but one that is to be shared by all who watch, as much as by the editor.

Shub’s film The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty was made in 1927, as part of a trilogy on Russian history from 1896, when Lumière filmed the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II. It was one of several films made to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. It is said that the Soviet film body Sovkino initially refused to acknowledge her authorial rights and pay the royalties that would duly accrue. She is credited on the poster as follows: ‘Work by E.I. Shub’. [10] What was that work? Shub’s film reconstructed critical history out of many metres of newsreel footage and Romanov home movies. Documentary film of whatever type – news, scientific or industrial footage, home movies – could yield information about reality. Shub’s ‘compilation film’ showed the tsar and family at their summer home and on duties of state, the carnage of war and Lenin agitating. For this film, and for the other two ‘compilation films’ she made in the late 1920s, Shub had to amass materials that had, in many cases, been taken out of the country, sold to foreign producers, or had deteriorated under poor storage conditions. For her film covering the first ten years after the October Revolution she was compelled to respond to the monotony of much film produced in newsreels in those years: parades, official celebrations, meetings, delegates arriving, stock that evades all the drama of political reconstruction. To compensate, she shot images of old documents, photographs, newspapers and objects. That this work was only or was blandly ‘work’ is the ‘problem’ attendant on working outside an authorial, directorial mode. But there is, of course, a perfect meeting of Shub’s reuse of found footage, her labour or arrangement or compilation of something conceived as ‘raw material’, and the ideas prevalent among the circles of the Left Front of Arts, the avant-gardist and pro-revolutionary groupings that had surfed the ecstasies of revolution and clamoured for a role in state-building through the arts. They argued that the author was a producer, or more, the author should be effaced, in the collective labour of socially and technically produced and reproduced works of culture. Shub more than others knew what it meant to be anonymous, to genuinely work within the model of the collective, author, the author as producer, the author who rejects all the bourgeois bunkum about creativity, genius and originality.

Shub’s more famous colleague Sergei Eisenstein had paid lip service to this, in a polemic against Bela Balázs. Eisenstein writes: ‘His terminology is unpleasant. Different from ours. “art”, “creativity”, “eternity”, “greatness” and so on.’ [11] Eisenstein, for his part, broke with the grouping around LEF in March 1929, precisely over questions of personal style and authorship. Eisenstein was too much the artist. Eisenstein placed too much of himself in the film. Eisenstein made his films about Eisenstein’s eye and sense of things. As proof of this stood Eisenstein’s celebration as a film-maker in Europe and the fact that US studios sought him out, keen to import a little higher art into their venues.

But Shub’s work did something more than articulate the anonymous, collectivized art worker or engineer, and in so doing sent into relief the practices of another, more prominent documentarist: Dziga Vertov. Shub’s approach signalled a new approach to documentary, overturning the highly montaged, artistic, formalistic documentary films of the early period, as practised by Vertov. Vertov had worked with found footage in 1918, in his Anniversary of the Revolution , and in 1921 in History of the Civil War . But he moved away from the practice in the main. Shub objected to Vertov’s efforts to monopolize non-fiction film, insisting in a piece written in 1926 that ‘different facts must reach the studio’, not just those endorsed by the Futurists working within Vertov’s Kinoks or Cine-Eye. [12] Vertov deployed all manner of tricks and technical devices, derived from the fragmented and dynamic world-view of Futurism, in order to emphasize cinema’s role in mediating reality. Shub’s archival work rescued fact from oblivion and made it speak again in a new context and not to questions of cinematic self-reflection. In her use of archival and documentary footage, or what she called ‘authentic material’, Shub displayed her commitment to the fact, the fact that had become a fetish among the LEF people, who spoke of their work in terms of ‘documentarism’ or ‘factography’. The later 1920s, perhaps under the pressure of waning revolutionary dynamism and conscious of questions of state building, seemed to demand a new aesthetic, which was then matched by Shub. Shub’s was seen to be properly a ‘cinema of fact’.

What is a cinematic fact? This was a question that was asked and answered in relation to Shub’s projects. It was a debate that took place in the pages of the journal Novyi Lef , where one contributor, Sergei Tretyakov, opined that ‘the degree of the deformation of the material out of which the film is composed’ was tantamount to ‘the random personal factor in any given film’. [13] The raw material, the facts that are absorbed by the celluloid strip of the camera, should come before the eyes of the audience as undeformed as possible. The cinematic fact was to appear in as ‘undistorted’ a form as possible. Such a fact is seen to be a building block of a new reality that needed stability after the dynamic change of revolution. Such a fact is like a weapon in the hands of a party entrenching its power and desirous of conveying the upward soaring truth of the young Soviet Union. Shub, it is true, avoided playing with the film material, tending often to let chunks of found film run their course. She gave time to her material, but not simply so. There was a sense, though, in her work that the film material was of historical interest in itself and did not need to be undercut and criticized through cinematic devices.

The commitment to the fact did not imply that any other questions of film were irrelevant. Shub in her capacity as editor worked on questions of compilation, which were questions of montage and rhythm. Connections between events and their interpretation were expressed through juxtapositions, as well as through the times attributed by editing and also through inter-titles. The whole builds up. The whole has direction and compiles an argument that can be seen and borne in mind. It becomes essayistic. Shub wrote that her own ‘emphasis on the fact is an emphasis not only to show the fact, but to enable it to be examined and, having examined it, to be kept in mind’. [14] To watch a film by Shub was to watch reality pass by, moulded, made into concept and argument, a comprehensible concept and argument. Shub was not averse to arguments about skill and even the rhetoric of masterliness. Indeed in 1927 she titled an article ‘We Do Not Reject the Element of Mastery’. The facts, like any raw material, need shaping.

Shub’s work takes the fact and deploys it skilfully.

Her work is planned, and that, of course, at a time when plans are becoming more the focus of political rhetoric and energy. Shub’s relationship to the archive, the place of her raw material, might invite parallels with a bureaucratic approach – congruent with the times – examining the files of reality for evidence, sorting and classifying it for further eyes to pore over. The LEF circle recognized her abnegating act of editing. She also carried out the work of organizing the archive, thereby bequeathing a raw material to those who came after, to all the other films that could be made from it, all the other meanings that might be extracted from this raw material of the real. That was a further service to multiple authorship.

In 1927, Shub argued in the journal Novyi Lef that the controversy between staged and unstaged film was ‘the basic issue of contemporary cinema’. [15] Only documentary cinema could express reality. ‘With great mastery it is possible to make a film from nonplayed material that is better than any fiction film’, she insisted. [16] The polemic was pointed. Shub criticized Eisenstein’s October as a distortion of history, because of its restaging of the historical events of the Russian Revolution. Eisenstein had watched Shub as she worked in the early days and he learnt from her, developing film aesthetics to adequately convey revolution’s reorganizations, its swift changes, its rearticulation of modes of thought and life. She learnt from him in turn, and they led discussions in letters in 1931 over the necessity of ‘developing one’s concept of reality in the process of shooting, and only then subordinating the material to the director’s vision’. [17] But Eisenstein stuck with the played film. Shub was particularly affronted by an actor’s impersonation of Lenin. Why let someone pretend to be Lenin when there is archive footage of the real Lenin? Shub placed film’s power in its capturing of the ‘small fragment of the life that has really passed. Whatever elements it contained.’ [18] Whatever elements it contains and even if it was itself once just a fiction, a slice of ideology, or contaminated by anti-revolutionary values. The ideological circumstances that had produced much of the material did not adhere to the film pieces once they were redeployed in a new context. Ideology could be respun or even overturned. The films’ return revolutionized them. [19]

Revolution is a spin, a re-spin, but not one that repeats – or if it does it is a sign of its failure. A revolution involves another spin, a revolving, an activation into something else – which is movement, a rapid turn and overturning, upturning. Just as the camera turns, spins the exposing film and makes something new happen: the imprinting of an out-there on the in-there of the film strip. Just as the projector turns, revolves, spins the filmed things through its mechanism, in order for them to take on their ghost life, their shadowy and light existence on the screen. Something new happens – the film exists out there, on the screen and is seen. Shub understood that film’s essence lay in its spinning and respinning:

The intention was, not so much to provide the facts, but to evaluate them from the vantage point of the revolutionary class. This is what made my films revolutionary and agitational – although they were composed of counter-revolutionary material. [20]

One film planned in 1933–34 was to be titled Women . Conceived of in seven parts, it was to be about the recent history of female oppression and consequent female liberation by the Bolsheviks. Women were to be shown – through filmic found footage and scripted constructed situations – moving from sexual objectification and class oppression to politically engaged subjects. Shub described her work as ‘artistic documentary’ film. This is a name for a feature-length documentary, but it also implies a level of elevation, of structuring, of making artistic, of forming. The term acknowledges in one concept the proximity of document, of the unplayed, and the structuring, planning or mastering of filmic elements. Shub wrote of the project in a 1933 article titled ‘I Want to Make a Film about Women’:Hitherto it was considered that the non-staged film lacked the possibility of developing events dramatically and that it could not sustain a plot construction within itself. That is why the documentary film was never appreciated by the large audiences. I am aware of this, and in my new documentary film I will try to construct a thematic line. This does not mean that I need to follow the established canons of the staged cinema, nor that I have to use actors to impersonate my characters. Life is so complex and contradictory in everyday situations that it continuously creates dramatic conflicts and resolves them unexpectedly in the most extraordinary way. [21] No one need play anyone who they are not in this film. Reality itself is dramatic enough – and contradictory enough to generate stories, dramas of the type invented for the played film. For Shub, life itself usurps the dramatic function of fiction. Effectively, the artistic documentary can stage the unstaged, can make an art of the document. The treatment or screenplay begins with excerpts from the ‘art’ of the Imperial period. Animation segues a mother into a nude woman, into a Beardsley-style siren – Madonnas, Gretas, Susans created by world-famous artists. Then cinema intervenes. Old film footage shows women as madonnas or whores. One French film heroine is shown in her role as a madonna, then as a fairy. She mutates into other Russian stars, who emulate her. A woman with child in arms appears and morphs into a prostitute, then a peasant. A parade of women appear, all backed by circus music. The exhortation follows to the men of the actual cinema audience: ‘Gentlemen, do you still want to enjoy the face of the ideal woman of the XX century? If so buy the gramophone records. Watch the films produced by Pathé.’ [22] Tragic film incidents from fictional films flash up, shots, strangulations, alienation – ‘Oh my God’ states a woman in a melodrama, ‘What shall I do?’ The fiction of unreal women is brought to the point of real intervention in the world. Shub’s script picks up the question: ‘Indeed she has to do something.’ Shub has provided in a rapid montage a selection of limited stereotypes of women. A comment in the script notes: ‘The movie theatres of Imperial Russia depicted the Russian woman always in the same manner.’ This was, apparently, often fainting into the arms of a man. In the treatment, the words continue to echo: ‘Oh my God! What shall I do? What shall I do?’ These scenes are followed by more examples of how women have been positioned, as fashionable creatures, as targets of advertising concerned about their busts, their waists, belts, as seductresses. Women dependent economically on men, husbands, lovers. What is this sphinx of woman, asks Shub? This is the ideal nature of woman as depicted in the movies. A beauty, sometimes powerful, sometimes vulnerable, but always gorgeous. This intense tumble of ideological images is interrupted by a clown falling through a ceiling, hitting his wife with a rolling pin, such that everything freezes. The audience shouts bravo. The scene of violence against women, the nasty heart of entertainment, serves as a transition. Silence comes. Darkness. The darkness lifts and we are all transported to the countryside. Everything is different. Cinema now has the time of duration, distance, the day, real sounds. Bells are ringing in the far distance. There is a village. There are old women and they go to church. A voice announces that we are at a co-operative farm. Instead of the ideological chit-chatter of films, advertising and religious song, the hum of the motor, speeding us through the space of collective labour, whirrs. This car that moves us through a landscape is, at the same time, a mobile sound movie theatre. It has come, and we the audience have come, to discover the reality of female life in the Soviet Union. Not just how it looks, but how it sounds too – for Shub has found a way to achieve her dream of synched sound, which she discussed in 1929 in an article titled ‘The Arrival of Sound in Cinema’: For us, documentarists, it is crucial to learn how to record the authentic sound: noise, voices, etc., with the same degree of expressiveness as we learned how to photograph the authentic, nonstaged reality. Therefore, we have little interest in what presently goes on in the film studios, in those hermetically insulated theatrical chambers dotted with microphones, sound intensifiers and other techniques. We are interested in the experimental laboratories of the scientists and true creators who can function as our sound operators. [23]

Eisenstein feared that naturalistic sound could destroy montage, and insisted that it be treated as an element of montage – in a way more congruent with the later essay-filmmakers. Shub disagreed, insistent on its importance as an experimental element that remained realist. It was real in the way that Hollywood’s sound system, developed for studio recording not location, was not. It was sound occurring in the spaces where such sounds occur.

Everyone is learning in this new authentic sound world. As the script notes: ‘We place our cameras in front of the window, we arrange the microphone and explain to Comrade Klyazin where he should stand’, in order for his voice to be heard as he asks his questions of the three sisters. This is a film about voice, about speaking the self authentically, though what is authentic is also a matter of history and development. For we hear from Shub that the communist sisters are used to speaking at conferences and therefore talk briskly, while the religious one is more embarrassed. This sonic discrepancy, though, this mark of experience in voice and rhythm, ‘will help us’, she notes, ‘to keep the conversation alive’. We hear examples of the questions the sisters will be asked – ‘The Fascists claim that women must be involved only with the kitchen, the church and children. Do you agree with this?’ Shub writes:We suspect that their answers will be keen and direct. To achieve this, Comrade Klyazin’s questions must be spelled out in such a way that they reveal both the real life and psychology of a typical woman working in the Soviet village. If we succeed, it will be the first direct film interview with the new woman farmer in the USSR. Therefore it has to be done in such a way that the conversation does not look contrived. All we can predict at this moment is that the interview will end with the words: ‘ … now, would you take us to the Selsoviet?’As if as a nod to the role of staging in all this, the final scene of part one takes place in the main offices of the Selsoviet, the rural council. A girl is calling for a revolt, bored with life on the collective farm. Arguments are happening. But, it transpires, it is a drama rehearsal, just a play for the collectives’ theatres, in which the language and appearance of the youth, who are urbanizing, and the traces of peasant language still spoken on the collective farm battle it out. This is a documentary, a capturing of fact that has been shaped by Shub’s concepts, with elements that must be imported from art in order to make ideological sense of the reality which otherwise unfolds. Improvisation can be improved upon, in the name of a larger, greater improvement. Perhaps a negation of the negation is achieved through this. Film never stops being a document, even when it is most fictional, or especially then. The rotten cinema of Weimar, Hollywood and Imperial Russia could have truth squeezed from them, if rightly framed, and so too can the film that moves between fact and staging. The document can supersede all – even the fiction film, even the staged film, is a document of something and if it can be documented, and its factographical powers unleashed, in the interests of the larger history, which is one that is being built, planned, constructed, then it will produce an authentic cinema. In 1932, Shub’s film on the communist youth bared the means of the cinematic device, by leaving cameras and microphones visible in scenes, but it also left in the stumbles and stutters of participants, or shone so bright an arc lamp into their eyes – so assaulted their bodies – that their eyes screwed up. The material of film and cinema directly confront the material of the collective body. The artifice of cinema leaves factual traces on the cinematic subjects. Shub exposed this. In the film script for Woman she notes that the play in the Selsoviet represents a ‘conflict between the urban appearance of the village Komsomol youngsters and the quasi-peasant language the author of the play forces his characters to talk’. The fictionalizing author brutalizes reality, but this is the struggle in play in reality too – the traces of the past that must be re-spun for new meanings to arise from them, new accents to develop out of them. This is what Shub wants to show. It is not that she finds a middle path between Vertov’s Kinoks and cinema of fact and Eisenstein’s staged films; rather, in confronting each mode openly with the other, she makes a third term, another thing, that, among other things, beats out a path for the essay films, or the essay film genre to come.

1. ^ Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality , Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1997, Intro., p. li.

2. ^ See Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften , Vol. IV. [1] , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1991, pp. 356–9.

3. ^ Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 1927–1930 , Vol. 2:1, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2005, p. 18 (translation modified).

4. ^ Ibid., p. 17. 5. Ibid.

6. ^ Ibid., p. 18. 7. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften , Vol. IV. [1] , pp. 448–9.

8. ^ Benjamin, Selected Writings 1927–1930 , Vol. 2: 1, p. 19.

9. ^ Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Small Contribution to the Theme of Realism’, Screen , vol. 15, no. 2, 1974, pp. 45–7.

10. ^ Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films , George Al en & Unwin,

London, 1964, p. 25.

11. ^ Cited in Martin Stol ery, ‘Eisenstein, Shub and the Gender of the Author as Producer’, Film History , vol. 14, no. 1, Film/ Music (2002), p. 90.

12. ^ Esfir Shub, ‘The Manufacture of Facts’, in Ian Christie and Richard Taylor, eds, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939 , Routledge, London, 2012, p. 152.

13. ^ Tretyakov cited by Ben Brewster, ‘Lef and Film’, in John Ellis, ed., Screen Reader 1: Cinema/Ideology/Politics , SEFT,

London, 1977, p. 305.

14. ^ Quoted in Mihail Yampolsky, ‘Reality at Second Hand’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television , vol XI, no. 2, June 1991, p. 163.

15. ^ Christie and Taylor, eds, The Film Factory , p. 187. 16. Ibid.

17. ^ Vlada Petric, ‘Esther Shub: Cinema is My Life‘, Quarterly Review of Film Studies , vol. III, no. 4, Fall 1978, p. 434.

18. ^ Christie and Taylor, eds, The Film Factory , p. 187. 19. Despite her criticism of other film-makers – a product of the exciting culture of debate in the young Soviet Union – Shub acted in solidarity as Stalin’s cultural policy tightened its grip. In 1931, while filming in Mexico, Eisenstein was accused in the Soviet journal International Literature of ‘technical fetishism’ and other ‘petty bourgeois limitations’. Shub wrote to him with warning of the increasingly hostile climate and recommending his swift return.

20. ^ Cited in Petric, ‘Esther Shub: Cinema is My Life’, p. 431. 21. Cited in ibid., p. 449.

22. ^ All citations are from the film screenplay or treatment as translated in Petric, ‘Esther Shub: Cinema is My Life’.

23. ^ Cited in Petric, ‘Esther Shub: Film as a Historical Discourse’, in Thomas Waugh, ed., ‘Show Us Life’: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary , Scarecrow Press, Metuschen NJ, 1984, p. 34.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media
• The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments
• Laura Rascaroli
• Wayne State University Press
• Volume 49, Number 2, Fall 2008
• 10.1353/frm.0.0019
• View Citation

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• Laura Rascaroli (bio)

The label "essay film" is encountered with ever-increasing frequency in both film reviews and scholarly writings on the cinema, owing to the recent proliferation of unorthodox, personal, reflexive "new" documentaries. In an article dedicated to the phenomenon that he defines as the "recent onslaught of essay films," Paul Arthur proposes: "Galvanized by the intersection of personal, subjective and social history, the essay has emerged as the leading non-fiction form for both intellectual and artistic innovation." 1 Although widely used, the category is under-theorized, even more so than other forms of non-fiction. In spite of the necessary brevity of this contribution, by tracing the birth of the essay in both film theory and film history, and by examining and evaluating existing definitions, a theory of the essay film can be shaped, some order in its intricate field made, and some light shed on this erratic but fascinating and ever more relevant cinematic form.

Most of the existing scholarly contributions acknowledge that the definition of essay film is problematic, and suggest it is a hybrid form that crosses boundaries and rests somewhere in between fiction and nonfiction cinema. According to Giannetti, for instance, "an essay is neither fiction nor fact, but a personal investigation involving both the passion and intellect of the author." 2 Arthur's framing of such in-betweenness is particularly instructive: "one way to think about the essay film is as a meeting ground for documentary, avant-garde, and art film impulses." 3 Nora Alter insists that the essay film is " not a genre, as it strives to be beyond formal, conceptual, and social constraint. Like 'heresy' in the Adornean literary essay, the essay film disrespects traditional boundaries, is transgressive both structurally and conceptually, it is self-reflective and self-reflexive." 4 [End Page 24]

Transgression is a characteristic that the essay film shares with the literary essay, which is also often described as a protean form. The two foremost theorists of the essay are, as is well known, Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács; both describe it as indeterminate, open, and, ultimately, indefinable. According to Adorno, "the essay's innermost formal law is heresy" 5 ; for Lukács, the essay must manufacture the conditions of its own existence: "the essay has to create from within itself all the preconditions for the effectiveness and solidity of its vision." 6 Other theorists and essayists make similar claims: for Jean Starobinski, the essay "does not obey any rules" 7 ; for Aldous Huxley, it "is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything" 8 ; for Snyder, it is a "nongenre." 9 As these examples indicate, many existing definitions of both literary and filmic essays are simultaneously vague and sweeping. Indeed, elusiveness and inclusiveness seem to become the only characterizing features of the essayistic; as Renov observes: "the essay form, notable for its tendency towards complication (digression, fragmentation, repetition, and dispersion) rather than composition, has, in its four-hundred-years history, continued to resist the efforts of literary taxonomists, confounding the laws of genre and classification, challenging the very notion of text and textual economy." 10

As José Moure argued, the fact that we resort to a literary term such as "essay" points to the difficulty that we experience when attempting to categorize certain, unclassifiable films. 11 This observation flags the risk that we accept the current state of under-theorization of the form, and use the term indiscriminately, in order to classify films that escape other labeling, as the following remark appears to endorse: "The essayistic quality becomes the only possibility to designate the cinema that resists against commercial productions." 12 The temptation of assigning the label of essay film to all that is non-commercial or experimental or unclassifiable must, however, be resisted, or else the term will cease being epistemologically useful, and we will end up equating very diverse films, as sometimes happens in the critical literature—for instance, works such as Sans Soleil/Sunless (Chris Marker, FR, 1983) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, US, 2004), which have very little in common aside the extensive voice-over and the fact that they both...

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1. The Essay Film and its Global Contexts: Conversations on Forms and Practices

• Published: July 2019
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Based on interviews she conducted with Cuban filmmaker and theorist Susana Barriga, Hanoi-based filmmaker and moving image artist Nguyen Trinh Thi and New York-based artist and filmmaker Bo Wang, essay film theorist Laura Rascaroli investigates the ways global artists who call their films ‘essays’, or whose work has been labelled as such by art institutions, think of their practice in light of this somewhat ambiguous term. Rascaroli is interested in what these non-Western-born artists have to say about a form that has been conceptualised by heavily drawing on Western thought and according to Enlightenment categories of Self, human subject, world/society and the role of the artist. As these interviews confirm, the essay film emerges as a privileged meeting ground of different impulses and hybrid influences.

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Essays on the Essay Film

• Edited by: Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Copyright year: 2017
• Audience: Professional and scholarly;
• Main content: 392
• Published: April 10, 2017
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Video essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent

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

Kevin B. Lee Updated: 22 May 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8.   Man with a Movie Camera

19.   Mirror (1974)

48.   Histoire(s) du cinema

69.   Sans Soleil (1982)

102.   Two or Three Things I Know About Her…

127.   Hiroshima Mon Amour

=183.   Listen to Britain

=183.   The Thin Red Line

202.   Russian Ark

235.   The House is Black

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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Further reading

The essay film

Andrew Tracy , Katy McGahan , Olaf Möller , Sergio Wolf , Nina Power

What I owe to Chris Marker

Patricio Guzmán

The world at sea: The Forgotten Space

His and her ghosts: reworking La Jetée

Melissa Bradshaw

At home (and away) with Agnès Varda

Daniel Trilling

Out of the ether: Hito Steyerl’s In Free Fall

The land still lies: Handsworth Songs and the English riots

John Akomfrah’s Hauntologies

Laura Allsop

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The essay film after fact and fiction.

Nora M. Alter

Columbia University Press

Pub Date: January 2018

ISBN: 9780231178211

Format: Paperback

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For many years, Nora Alter has been our most brilliant advocate of the essay film as an open genre that floats between documentary, fiction, and the art film. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction is the first comprehensive survey of this difficult and experimental genre in both its historical context and variable aesthetic manifestations. The depth and complexity of Alter’s account of the essay film’s critical force and aesthetic innovations will not soon be surpassed. D. N. Rodowick, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago

This magisterial study marks a milestone in scholarship on the most intellectually expansive and unpredictable film genre of the last half-century. Global in scope, Alter’s book displays the essay film's astonishing richness of forms and functions from its beginnings in the 1920s to contemporary art installations. Both a reliable history and a sharp-eyed investigation, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction is indispensable for anyone interested in the past and future of nonfiction cinema. Anton Kaes, University of California, Berkeley

The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction is unfailingly lucid, balanced, and informed. Alter provides generous and illuminating analyses of specific films, filmmakers, and decisive shifts in the arts and media history. Her book is a definitive guide to the multiple modes of production and global contexts of a vital tradition that continues to enrich contemporary culture and nurture critical thought. Edward Dimendberg, University of California, Irvine

The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction deepens the reader’s understanding of the history, aesthetics, and politics of its subject. Josh Guilford, Film Quarterly

This book is invaluable for its scope and depth; the sheer number of films and filmmakers considered makes it an indispensable resource. Choice

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Film Analysis

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This handout introduces film analysis and and offers strategies and resources for approaching film analysis assignments.

Writing the film analysis essay

Writing a film analysis requires you to consider the composition of the film—the individual parts and choices made that come together to create the finished piece. Film analysis goes beyond the analysis of the film as literature to include camera angles, lighting, set design, sound elements, costume choices, editing, etc. in making an argument. The first step to analyzing the film is to watch it with a plan.

Watching the film

First it’s important to watch the film carefully with a critical eye. Consider why you’ve been assigned to watch a film and write an analysis. How does this activity fit into the course? Why have you been assigned this particular film? What are you looking for in connection to the course content? Let’s practice with this clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Here are some tips on how to watch the clip critically, just as you would an entire film:

• Give the clip your undivided attention at least once. Pay close attention to details and make observations that might start leading to bigger questions.
• Watch the clip a second time. For this viewing, you will want to focus specifically on those elements of film analysis that your class has focused on, so review your course notes. For example, from whose perspective is this clip shot? What choices help convey that perspective? What is the overall tone, theme, or effect of this clip?
• Take notes while you watch for the second time. Notes will help you keep track of what you noticed and when, if you include timestamps in your notes. Timestamps are vital for citing scenes from a film!

For more information on watching a film, check out the Learning Center’s handout on watching film analytically . For more resources on researching film, including glossaries of film terms, see UNC Library’s research guide on film & cinema .

Brainstorming ideas

Once you’ve watched the film twice, it’s time to brainstorm some ideas based on your notes. Brainstorming is a major step that helps develop and explore ideas. As you brainstorm, you may want to cluster your ideas around central topics or themes that emerge as you review your notes. Did you ask several questions about color? Were you curious about repeated images? Perhaps these are directions you can pursue.

If you’re writing an argumentative essay, you can use the connections that you develop while brainstorming to draft a thesis statement . Consider the assignment and prompt when formulating a thesis, as well as what kind of evidence you will present to support your claims. Your evidence could be dialogue, sound edits, cinematography decisions, etc. Much of how you make these decisions will depend on the type of film analysis you are conducting, an important decision covered in the next section.

After brainstorming, you can draft an outline of your film analysis using the same strategies that you would for other writing assignments. Here are a few more tips to keep in mind as you prepare for this stage of the assignment:

• Make sure you understand the prompt and what you are being asked to do. Remember that this is ultimately an assignment, so your thesis should answer what the prompt asks. Check with your professor if you are unsure.
• In most cases, the director’s name is used to talk about the film as a whole, for instance, “Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo .” However, some writers may want to include the names of other persons who helped to create the film, including the actors, the cinematographer, and the sound editor, among others.
• When describing a sequence in a film, use the literary present. An example could be, “In Vertigo , Hitchcock employs techniques of observation to dramatize the act of detection.”
• Finding a screenplay/script of the movie may be helpful and save you time when compiling citations. But keep in mind that there may be differences between the screenplay and the actual product (and these differences might be a topic of discussion!).
• Go beyond describing basic film elements by articulating the significance of these elements in support of your particular position. For example, you may have an interpretation of the striking color green in Vertigo , but you would only mention this if it was relevant to your argument. For more help on using evidence effectively, see the section on “using evidence” in our evidence handout .

Also be sure to avoid confusing the terms shot, scene, and sequence. Remember, a shot ends every time the camera cuts; a scene can be composed of several related shots; and a sequence is a set of related scenes.

Different types of film analysis

As you consider your notes, outline, and general thesis about a film, the majority of your assignment will depend on what type of film analysis you are conducting. This section explores some of the different types of film analyses you may have been assigned to write.

Semiotic analysis

Semiotic analysis is the interpretation of signs and symbols, typically involving metaphors and analogies to both inanimate objects and characters within a film. Because symbols have several meanings, writers often need to determine what a particular symbol means in the film and in a broader cultural or historical context.

For instance, a writer could explore the symbolism of the flowers in Vertigo by connecting the images of them falling apart to the vulnerability of the heroine.

Here are a few other questions to consider for this type of analysis:

• What objects or images are repeated throughout the film?
• How does the director associate a character with small signs, such as certain colors, clothing, food, or language use?
• How does a symbol or object relate to other symbols and objects, that is, what is the relationship between the film’s signs?

Many films are rich with symbolism, and it can be easy to get lost in the details. Remember to bring a semiotic analysis back around to answering the question “So what?” in your thesis.

Narrative analysis

Narrative analysis is an examination of the story elements, including narrative structure, character, and plot. This type of analysis considers the entirety of the film and the story it seeks to tell.

For example, you could take the same object from the previous example—the flowers—which meant one thing in a semiotic analysis, and ask instead about their narrative role. That is, you might analyze how Hitchcock introduces the flowers at the beginning of the film in order to return to them later to draw out the completion of the heroine’s character arc.

To create this type of analysis, you could consider questions like:

• How does the film correspond to the Three-Act Structure: Act One: Setup; Act Two: Confrontation; and Act Three: Resolution?
• What is the plot of the film? How does this plot differ from the narrative, that is, how the story is told? For example, are events presented out of order and to what effect?
• Does the plot revolve around one character? Does the plot revolve around multiple characters? How do these characters develop across the film?

When writing a narrative analysis, take care not to spend too time on summarizing at the expense of your argument. See our handout on summarizing for more tips on making summary serve analysis.

Cultural/historical analysis

One of the most common types of analysis is the examination of a film’s relationship to its broader cultural, historical, or theoretical contexts. Whether films intentionally comment on their context or not, they are always a product of the culture or period in which they were created. By placing the film in a particular context, this type of analysis asks how the film models, challenges, or subverts different types of relations, whether historical, social, or even theoretical.

For example, the clip from Vertigo depicts a man observing a woman without her knowing it. You could examine how this aspect of the film addresses a midcentury social concern about observation, such as the sexual policing of women, or a political one, such as Cold War-era McCarthyism.

A few of the many questions you could ask in this vein include:

• How does the film comment on, reinforce, or even critique social and political issues at the time it was released, including questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality?
• How might a biographical understanding of the film’s creators and their historical moment affect the way you view the film?
• How might a specific film theory, such as Queer Theory, Structuralist Theory, or Marxist Film Theory, provide a language or set of terms for articulating the attributes of the film?

Take advantage of class resources to explore possible approaches to cultural/historical film analyses, and find out whether you will be expected to do additional research into the film’s context.

Mise-en-scène analysis

A mise-en-scène analysis attends to how the filmmakers have arranged compositional elements in a film and specifically within a scene or even a single shot. This type of analysis organizes the individual elements of a scene to explore how they come together to produce meaning. You may focus on anything that adds meaning to the formal effect produced by a given scene, including: blocking, lighting, design, color, costume, as well as how these attributes work in conjunction with decisions related to sound, cinematography, and editing. For example, in the clip from Vertigo , a mise-en-scène analysis might ask how numerous elements, from lighting to camera angles, work together to present the viewer with the perspective of Jimmy Stewart’s character.

To conduct this type of analysis, you could ask:

• What effects are created in a scene, and what is their purpose?
• How does this scene represent the theme of the movie?
• How does a scene work to express a broader point to the film’s plot?

This detailed approach to analyzing the formal elements of film can help you come up with concrete evidence for more general film analysis assignments.

Reviewing your draft

Once you have a draft, it’s helpful to get feedback on what you’ve written to see if your analysis holds together and you’ve conveyed your point. You may not necessarily need to find someone who has seen the film! Ask a writing coach, roommate, or family member to read over your draft and share key takeaways from what you have written so far.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Aumont, Jacques, and Michel Marie. 1988. L’analyse Des Films . Paris: Nathan.

Media & Design Center. n.d. “Film and Cinema Research.” UNC University Libraries. Last updated February 10, 2021. https://guides.lib.unc.edu/filmresearch .

Oxford Royale Academy. n.d. “7 Ways to Watch Film.” Oxford Royale Academy. Accessed April 2021. https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/7-ways-watch-films-critically/ .

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Cinema Art Discussion: Context in Film Essay

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Films are a separate and unique branch of art that combines several other fields – music, painting, and theater. Films are built on a story through which the viewer feels connected to the characters and tries to understand why they choose a particular decision. One of the essential features of a film is the context of the setting. The situation allows the film to be endowed with feelings. The context plays a role in allowing the viewer to become a part of the film and be imbued with it.

The context is a set of scenery, images, and moments that concretize the idea of the film and give it meaning. For example, a documentary about the world’s oceans should show the ocean, not deserts; a film about historical figures should show their portraits, not modern figures; a film about outer space should show the stars and universes, not botany. Context allows us to ascertain whether the authors’ thoughts are consistent with what they are presenting and how they are doing it. It provides the location of the action and determines how and for what reasons it will take place (Jacobus & Martin, 2018). The mood and emotional connection to the film are created through authenticity and the presence of the features the viewer expects to see.

Context is necessary for the characters in the films to fit into and be a part of the environment and for the viewer to understand how all the elements are connected. The setting enhances the characters’ character traits, reveals them, and gives them uniqueness in a particular film. The geographical setting is one of the most critical aspects of context because it allows the viewer to travel with the characters and experience similar emotions. Lack of context for a film will be critical because the viewer will not be able to visually enjoy it, understand the intent, and subsequently associate the film with something specific.

Context clues help the viewer establish the main idea of the film. Details and passages allow the viewer to immerse themselves in the film, become a part of it, and have an emotional experience from watching it. For example, The Lovely Bones often uses shots of scorched earth, sad music, and the camera moving very slowly while showing the characters. It allows the viewer to feel the emotions of Susie, who has to watch her family with longing until she can finally pass into the world of the dead. Sometimes, the context of the films allows us to understand who their director is. For example, Christopher Nolan’s films are recognizable: the viewer has learned to notice the films’ constant connection to memory, the improbability of the storylines, the great music, and the connection to the ethical components of reality. The viewer does not wonder why Inception and The Cause leave a similar impression, but it is precise because of the director’s ability to create a mood through music and visuals.

Thus, context is the totality of the setting, the combination of sounds and pictures that allow the film to be made whole. Context is meant to create an emotional response, to form an idea of the universe within the film, and to take it as a given. Credibility, fulfillment of expectations, and connection between place and character form the context, making it meaningful to the viewer. Music will create a mood only if the picture fits the meaning, and the film will impress only if the plot is logical.

Jacobus, L. A., & Martin, F. D. (2018). The humanities through the arts (10 th ed.). McGraw Hill Education.

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IvyPanda . 2024. "Cinema Art Discussion: Context in Film." August 10, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cinema-art-discussion-context-in-film/.

1. IvyPanda . "Cinema Art Discussion: Context in Film." August 10, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cinema-art-discussion-context-in-film/.

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Film Art: An Introduction, Essay Example

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You are free to use it as an inspiration or a source for your own work.

What is film form?

Just like every work of art, film also has a form. It is a system that provides the art with structure. It is influenced by the viewers’ expectation, emotions, and relationships between characters and events. Overall, the film form is the total system by which the audience understands and perceives the film (Bordwell, 42).

Define it and its specific parts.

The specific tools used in e form of the film are emotion, feeling, meaning, evaluation. However, the main parts of the form are based on relationships between events, emotions, and characters, such as  function, similarity and repetition, and development, and unity/disunity. However, using the above rules of structure requires the person analyzing the structure to break down the film to smalller and larger parts, which is a process called segmentation.

What are the “principles of film form?” Define the five examples give in Film Art.

The formal principles of the film form are function, similarity and repetition, difference and variation, development, and unity/disunity. An example for function can be the role of Miss Gulch, as the person who makes Doroty run away from home in “The Wizard of Oz”, therefore, she is a motivator. In the same movie, similarity is represented by the characters who all lack something and desire help (scarecrow and tinman, etc). Difference and variation is represented by the same characters, as they appear different, and have one thing in common: lacking an ability, but they have limitations in unique areas. Development is also represented by how the characters changed, or by their journey. Unity and disunity  is also presented by taking the same path and asking for help together.

What is narrative?

Narrative is one of the subsystems of the film form, along with the stylistic one. Narrative is a chain of events that are in logical, chain-effect relationship with each other.

What is the difference between “plot” and “story?”

The story is the idea behind the system, while the plot is the starting point for the development. The story is the entire narrative, while the plot is designed to explain something through the events.

What is narration?

Narration is designed to create suspense and curiosity through a series of plots and narratives. It is how the plot provides information for the viewer.

Works Cited

Bordwell, David; Thompson, Kristin.. “Film Art: An Introduction” (4th Edition) .  1993. Print.

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The Video Essay As Art: 11 Ways to Make a Video Essay

Part one in a series of commissioned pieces on video essay form, originally published at Fandor Keyframe.

This feature piece, the first in an ongoing series, was originally published by Fandor Keyframe in May 2016. You can read the other pieces in this series here .

When you think of the video essay, you might imagine someone expressing their love of a movie over a selection of clips, a compilation of a famous director’s signature shots, or a voice that says: “Hi, my name is Tony.” But these are just a few of a remarkable variety of approaches to making videos exploring film and media, a diversity of forms that is continually evolving and expanding. Here’s an attempt to account for some of the more recognizable modes of video essay, with key examples for each.

Supercut . A collection of images or sounds arranged under a category (i.e. Jacob T. Swinney’s wonderful The Dutch Angle ) or used to break down a film to a set of elements (i.e. Zackery Ramos-Taylor’s recent Hearing Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Joel Bocko’s The Colors of Daisies ). The supercut is usually very short and lacks text so as to maximize its impact on a visual level. This brevity of form emphasizes a central concept more than a narrative argument. If a supercut has an argument to make, it is typically in the order in which items are sequenced.

Personal Review . This broad category of video essay hinges on a strongly personalized account of a film. Scout Tafoya’s recurring series The Unloved is a prominent example of this, wherein he makes the claim that each film he focuses on is underappreciated and then asserts their qualities through visual analysis. The best of these, in my opinion, is his video on Michael Mann’s Public Enemies :

Vlog . While similar to the personal review, the vlog differs strongly in mode of presentation. There is a greater focus on direct address of the viewers, and on delivering opinion rather than analysis. They’re often played up for comedic entertainment value and feature a lot of voiceover or footage of the editor themselves. Chez Lindsay’s video on Joel Schumacher’s The Phantom of the Opera is a sprawling, informative, funny journey through theater and cinema history that in many respects encompasses elements of the video essay but first and foremost is grounded in a personal perspective. Outside of film, the work Jon Bois does at SB Nation in his series Pretty Good would also fall under this category (his latest, on character types in 24 , is very much worth the watch). The popular YouTube series CinemaSins would also fall under this category, which relies moreso on personal nit-picking than film analysis.

Scene Breakdown . A visually-driven close reading of a scene (or many scenes in one film) that leans heavily on explaining film form and technique. Tony Zhou is especially skilled at this, and his scene breakdowns often come nestled in a video about many scenes, like his look at ensemble staging in Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder or the approach to staging a fight scene in his video Jackie Chan—How to Do Action Comedy :

Shot Analysis . A cousin of the supercut and scene breakdown, though more analytical in nature than the former, the shot analysis dissects a shot or a repeated type of shot. Josh Forrest’s engaging video on the insert shot in David Fincher’s Zodiac is not shot analysis in and of itself; it’s more of a supercut. David Chen’s Edgar Wright and the Art of Close-Ups , on the other hand, is definitely a shot analysis, turning its compilation structure into a video essay by virtue of its director’s commentary track (which we might call the DVD-era ancestor of the video essay):

Structural Analysis . To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, these videos look at a film’s story shape, seeking to uncover hidden meaning or a subtextual emphasis by viewing the film as a collection of scenes rather than necessarily a plot or narrative. Kevin B. Lee’s Between the Lines: THE DAY HE ARRIVES is one of the best videos in this field, comparing repeated scenes in Hong Sang-soo’s film to reveal the film’s playful interpretation of time passing. One of my video essays for Fandor last year, Containing the Madness: George A. Romero’s THE CRAZIES , was an attempt to engage with this mode of video essay:

Side-by-side Analysis . Not a supercut, not yet a shot analysis. The side-by-side is a fascinating form of the video essay pushed by essayists like Cristina Álvarez Lopez, Catherine Grant ( All That Pastiche Allows ) and, in recent months, Davide Rapp, which finds meaning through visual comparison of two or more film clips in real-time. In What is Neorealism? , kogonada brilliantly employs the side-by-side comparison to reflect on the ideological and creative differences between Vittorio de Sica and David O. Selznick in the cutting of the same picture.

Side-by-sides with voiceover narration are relatively rare. Álvarez, Grant and Rapp tend to let viewers interpret the footage on their own. Rapp’s series of videos under the Seeing Double and Seeing Triple moniker place sequences from films and their various remakes side-by-side and implicitly address not only specific but generational aesthetic and narrative priorities. A particularly illuminating video in this collection is his look at Michael Haneke’s two versions of Funny Games :

Recut . The line between video essay and video art is blurred when we look at the imaginative re-purposing of texts. Filmscalpel’s 12 Silent Men is a good example of this, which was shared as a video essay despite being very similar in form to Vicki Bennett’s work of video art, 4:33: The Movie . Davide Rapp’s enchanting SECRET GATEWAYS (below), where he maps the space of a house in a Buster Keaton short and then moves his virtual camera between each of these rooms, is a more visually-focused re-purposing. I’d count my video essay, The Secret Video Essays of Jenni Olson , as also being a part of this form. It’s worth noting that an imaginative recut does not need to be visual, it can also be conceptual, as in Jeremy Ratzlaff’s Paul Thomas Anderson: A Chronological Timeline . This recut concept also extends to re-purposed marketing materials or film trailers, as seen in The Maze of Susan Lowell by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, which suggests an alternate cut of The Big Combo with Susan as the protagonist. The very popular YouTube series Honest Trailers would also fall into the category of the recut, as they mimic and parody film trailer form, though their comedic narration-as-criticism does blur the line even more.

Subject Essay . These videos typically tell a story to explore a filmmaker’s (or actor’s, cinematographer’s, etc.) body of work, an era of filmmaking or a recurring motif in a lot of films, incorporating elements of scene, shot and thematic analysis. For the most part, the better videos in this field seek to educate or inform the viewer about a relatively unknown body of work or period of time. In this vein they teeter on the edge of conventional documentary cinema, like Kevin B. Lee’s Bruce Lee, Before and After the Dragon , and are reminiscent of some of the essay films of Mark Rappaport (whose body of work in and of itself defies easy genre labels). An unconventional example of this, and one of the best video essays of 2015, is Tony Zhou’s Vancouver Never Plays Itself . Another unconventional example, and one which straddles the modes of supercut and shot analysis, is Rishi Kaneria’s brilliant Why Props Matter .

Academic Supplement . When Kevin B. Lee made his refractive video essay What Makes a Video Essay Great? back in 2014, he used an excerpt from Thomas van den Berg’s Reliable Unreliability vs Unreliable Reliability or, Perceptual Subversions of the Continuity Editing System , a chiefly academic piece of video criticism that runs for over half an hour, features lecture-like narration and is grounded in academic and theoretical concepts of cinema. While this video does stand on its own as analysis, when I say supplement I mean that it is supplemental to the academic form. Some of the video works from David Bordwell, which he has termed video lectures, are examples of this form, in spite of what they have in common with shot analysis and filmic survey (in particular, his Constructive Editing in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket ). Catherine Grant, another academic working in the realm of video essays, has managed to often subvert this expectation that academics making video essays will make supplementary works, turning in some wonderfully imaginative and non-academic videos like her brilliant UN/CONTAINED .

Desktop Video . A recent mode of video arguably born from the metatextual work of Harun Farocki ( Interface in particular), this seeks to present an argument about film within the confines of a computer screen. It’s worth noting that while the visual experience is tethered to a screen, like the recent horror flick Unfriended, it’s often not actually a real-time one-take desktop journey. The defining film in this field (arguably moving beyond the video essay label to become an experimental documentary in its own right) is Kevin B. Lee’s Transformers: The Premake :

As you can see from the various definitions above, the problem with all of these videos standing under the umbrella category of the video essay is that they’re all trying to do different things and aiming for different audiences. Because of this, when any two practitioners talk about what they like in video essays, they may be talking about very different things, not just in terms of content but in what they think the purposes of these videos are. Earlier this month Filmmaker Magazine posted a series of responses to the question What is a Video Essay? and answers ranged from a tool to stimulate better film viewing to a new form of essay filmmaking; and from a means of expressing cinephile obsession to a means of critiquing that same obsession.

On the other hand, what’s certain is that these videos, in their multitude of forms, have become very popular online over the last few years. There are many communities forming in the world of video essays, not just within publishing sites like the one you’re visiting now, but also in the “schools” of approaches taken by like-minded video makers. The mostly straightforward film-analysis approach is a favorite among very popular YouTubers. The academic-minded teaching aide is championed by the online journal [in]Transition. The personal love letter to cinema arises in supercuts and most single-film videos. The miniature essay film floats in and out of categorization, making it one of the most interesting forms of video essay.

Here at Keyframe I’ll be writing about various approaches to the video essay, looking at a wide variety of videos and video essayists and speaking to curators and editors to try to understand just how we got to where we are now. I’ll explore questions such as: why do some supercuts work better than others; when and when not to use voiceover and much more. Join us, won’t you?

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Opinion: Banksy's London Zoo, art's simple joy during complex times

Scott Simon

ESSAY 08172024

A man eats an apple as he walks past a mural depicting a goat, purportedly by the street artist Banksy, on August 5, 2024 in the Richmond borough of London, England. Carl Court/Getty Images/Getty Images Europe hide caption

London has been abloom with images of animals in recent days. They are the work of Banksy, the mysterious street artist, who has posted art in unexpected places since the 1990s.

Over the past two weeks, he has spray-painted a mountain goat atop a wall buttress in west London, two elephants with their trunks reaching across a brick wall, and a rhinoceros standing on its hind legs, climbing on top of a car or — and I have to be oblique here — availing itself of the automobile below.

ARTnews said one of Banksy’s 13 million followers on Instagram declared, “This has to be a metaphor for technology replacing nature — maybe a commentary on AI and job security,” which, I confess, was not my reaction on seeing the libidinous rhino and the motorcar.

Banksy has also stenciled a pair of pelicans above a fish and chips bar, and monkeys on the side of a train bridge, swinging by their arms or tails, and a wolf, and a cat.

Each of the works posted on Banksy’s Instagram page has included the hashtag "#LondonZoo." On Tuesday, London awoke to behold a Banksy on a security shutter of the zoo, showing a gorilla lifting a cover to allow a seal and five birds to flap out, free.

Have Banksy’s recent artworks been saying, “Come see animals in this zoo!”? Or, “Isn’t it an outrage that animals are put in a zoo?”

But Vanessa Thorpe, arts correspondent for The Guardian, says the Pest Control Office, the organization that supports Banksy’s works, told her such theorizing is “way too involved … (T)he latest street art has been designed to cheer up the public during a period when the news headlines have been bleak.”

We can forget, when we look for artistic statements to fit an argument, that art can just bring cheer, too.

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Art, documentary and the essay film

2015, Radical Philosophy

Film as document The moment when Siegfried Kracauer knew that he wanted to write of film as what he terms the ‘Discover of the Marvels of Everyday Life’ is relayed in his introduction to the Theory of Film from 1960.1 Kracauer recalls watching a film long ago that shows a banal scene, an ordinary city street. A puddle in the foreground reflects the houses that cannot be seen and some of the sky. A breeze crosses the site. The puddle’s water trembles. ‘The trembling upper world in the dirty puddle – this image has never left me’, writes Kracauer. In this trembling, which is the moment of nature’s uninvited intervention, its inscription as movement on film, everything, from nature to culture, ‘takes on life’, he notes. What is important about film is its presentation of this given life indiscriminately. The puddle, this unworthy spillage, is redeemed in the low art of cinema. Both cinema and puddle are elevated from the ground. The upper world is brought down to earth as image. Fixed ...

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Jennifer Lopez Files for Divorce From Ben Affleck

By Emily Longeretta

Emily Longeretta

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• Jennifer Lopez Files for Divorce From Ben Affleck 5 days ago

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are divorcing after just over two years of marriage. Lopez filed on Tuesday, August 20, in L.A. County Superior Court, Variety confirms. The official separation date is listed as April 26.

Lopez, 55, and Affleck, 52, married in Las Vegas in July 2022 after re-sparking their relationship from two decades prior, which was dubbed “Bennifer” by tabloid publications at the time and was a fixation of their coverage in the early 2000s.

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Both got married and divorced in the intervening years — Lopez to Marc Anthony, Affleck to Jennifer Garner. Then the two began a public relationship once again roughly three years ago. Lopez provided frequent updates on her engagement, and eventual marriage, to her fans through her social media presence and newsletter.

Lopez also explicitly addressed the relationship in her most recent album, “This Is Me … Now,” a sequel to her 2002 album “This Is Me … Then,” which also discussed her then-relationship with Affleck. Affleck appeared in Lopez’s “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” a celebrity cameo-studded 65-minute fantasia centered on music from the new album. Released to Prime Video in February, the film features Affleck in prosthetic make-up playing a wizened but jaded anchorman.

During their second relationship and marriage, Affleck and Lopez made regular appearances on the promotional circuit for each others’ projects, walking the carpets for “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story,” “The Mother,” “Air,” “The Last Duel” and “Marry Me” together. The pair attended the Golden Globes earlier this year.

In May, Lopez canceled her summer “This Is Me… Now” tour, with a statement that read, “Jennifer is taking time off to be with her children, family and close friends.”

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NeurIPS Creative AI Track: Ambiguity

Following last year’s incredible success, we are thrilled to announce the NeurIPS 2024 Creative AI track. We invite research papers and artworks that showcase innovative approaches of artificial intelligence and machine learning in art, design, and creativity. 

Focused on the theme of Ambiguity, this year’s track seeks to highlight the multifaceted and complex challenges brought forth by application of AI to both promote and challenge human creativity. We welcome submissions that: question the use of private and public data; consider new forms of authorship and ownership; challenge notions of ‘real’ and ‘non-real’, as well as human and machine agency; and provide a path forward for redefining and nurturing human creativity in this new age of generative computing. 

We particularly encourage works that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries to propose new forms of creativity and human experience. Submissions must present original work that has not been published or is not currently being reviewed elsewhere.

Important Dates:

• August 16: Submission Deadline, for both Papers & Artworks
• October 17: Decision
• October 30: Final Camera-Ready Submission 

Call for Papers and Artworks

Papers (posters).

We invite submissions for research papers that propose original ideas or novel uses of AI and ML for creativity. The topics of research papers are not restricted to the theme of ambiguity. Please note that this track will not be part of the NeurIPS conference proceedings. If you wish to publish in the NeurIPS proceedings please submit your paper directly to the main track.

To submit: We invite authors to submit their papers. We expect papers to be 2-6 pages without including references . The formatting instructions and templates will become available soon. The submission portal will open sometime in July.

We invite the submission of creative work that showcases innovative use of AI and ML. We highly encourage the authors to focus on the theme of Ambiguity.  We invite submissions in all areas of creativity including visual art, music, performing art, film, design, architecture, and more in the format of video recording .  

NeurIPS is a prestigious AI/ML conference that tens of thousands researchers from academia and industry attend every year. Selected works at the Creative AI track will be presented on large display screens at the conference and the authors will have the opportunity to interact with the NeurIPS research community to germinate more collaborative ideas.

To submit:  We invite authors to submit their original work. An artwork submission requires the following:

• Description of the work and the roles of AI and ML 
• Description on how the theme of Ambiguity is addressed
• Biography of all authors including relevant prior works 
• Thumbnail image of the work (<100MB)
• 3-min video preview of the work (<100MB) 

Single-blind review policy

The names of the authors should be included in the submission. 

Conference policy

If a work is accepted at least one author must purchase a  Conference & Tutorials  registration and attend in person . For pricing visit the pricing page . For registration  information visit the registration page . The location of the conference is Vancouver and the authors are responsible for their travel arrangements and expenses. The conference does not provide travel funding. 

For updates, please check  https://neurips-creative-ai.github.io/2024/  regularly. To stay up-to-date with all future announcements, please join our  mailing list . You can also follow the  @ML4CDWorkshop  twitter. For other inquiries, please contact  [email protected]  and/or  [email protected] .

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Where Kamala Harris Stands on the Issues: Abortion, Immigration and More

She wants to protect the right to abortion nationally. Here’s what else to know about her positions.

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By Maggie Astor

• Published July 21, 2024 Updated Aug. 24, 2024

With Vice President Kamala Harris having replaced President Biden on the Democratic ticket, her stances on key issues will be scrutinized by both parties and the nation’s voters.

She has a long record in politics: as district attorney of San Francisco, as attorney general of California, as a senator, as a presidential candidate and as vice president.

Here is an overview of where she stands.

Ms. Harris supports legislation that would protect the right to abortion nationally, as Roe v. Wade did before it was overturned in 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

After the Dobbs ruling, she became central to the Biden campaign’s efforts to keep the spotlight on abortion, given that Mr. Biden — with his personal discomfort with abortion and his support for restrictions earlier in his career — was a flawed messenger. In March, she made what was believed to be the first official visit to an abortion clinic by a president or vice president.

She consistently supported abortion rights during her time in the Senate, including cosponsoring legislation that would have banned common state-level restrictions, like requiring doctors to perform specific tests or have hospital admitting privileges in order to provide abortions.

As a presidential candidate in 2019, she argued that states with a history of restricting abortion rights in violation of Roe should be subject to what is known as pre-clearance for new abortion laws — those laws would have to be federally approved before they could take effect. That proposal is not viable now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe.

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