Abstract
Abstract What can the film essay do? I attend to this question by bringing together writings by Theodor Adorno, Max Bense, Hans Richter, and Hito Steyerl, among others, and films by Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, and Agnès Varda. What distinguishes my inquiry is that I propose to consider the essay form as a kind of rhythm. Following Roland Barthes, I understand the latter as a fleeting and fugitive form, a form that escapes capture. As a “manner of flowing” (rhuthmos in pre-Socratic philosophy) rather than a fixed form, the essay articulates not only a manner of knowing but also a mode of being. It pertains to the domain of aesthetic ontology, where it enables the emergence not of subjective or personal viewpoints but, rather, the reconfiguration of the distinction between the subject and the object, the body and the world, and the imaginary and the real.
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