The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments

Abstract

label encountered with ever-increasing frequency in both film reviews and scholarly writings on cinema, owing to proliferation of unorthodox, personal, reflexive new documentaries. In article dedicated to phenomenon that he defines as recent onslaught of Paul Arthur proposes: Galvanized by intersection of personal, subjective and social history, has emerged as leading nonfiction form for both intellectual and artistic innovation.1 Although widely used, category under-theorized, even more so than other forms of nonfiction. In spite of necessary brevity of this contribution, by tracing birth of in both film theory and film history, and by examining and evaluating existing definitions, a theory of 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 existing scholarly contributions acknowledge that definition of film problematic, and suggest it a hybrid form that crosses boundaries and rests somewhere in between fiction and nonfiction cinema. According to Giannetti, for instance, an neither fiction nor fact, but a personal investigation involving both passion and intellect of author.2 Arthur's framing of such in-betweenness particularly instructive: one way to think about film as a meeting ground for documentary, avant-garde, and art film impulses.3 Nora Alter insists that film a genre, as it strives to be beyond formal, conceptual, and social constraint. Like 'heresy' in Adornean literary essay, film disrespects traditional boundaries, transgressive both structurally and conceptually, it self-reflective and self-reflexive.4 Transgression a characteristic that film shares with literary essay, which also often described as a protean form. two foremost theorists of are, as well known, Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukacs; both describe it as indeterminate, open, and, ultimately, indefinable. According to Adorno, the essay's innermost formal law heresy5; for Lukacs, must manufacture conditions of its own existence: the has to create from within itself all preconditions for effectiveness and solidity of its vision.6 Other theorists and essayists make similar claims: for Jean Starobinski, does not obey any rules7; for Aldous Huxley, it is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything8; for Snyder, it 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 only characterizing features of essayistic; as Renov observes: the 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 efforts of literary taxonomists, confounding laws of genre and classification, challenging very notion of text and textual economy.10 As Jose Moure argued, fact that we resort to a literary term such as essay points to difficulty that we experience when attempting to categorize certain, unclassifiable films.11 This observation flags risk that we accept current state of under-theorization of form, and use term indiscriminately, in order to classify films that escape other labeling, as following remark appears to endorse: The essayistic quality becomes only possibility to designate cinema that resists against commercial productions. 12 temptation of assigning label of film to all that non-commercial or experimental or unclassifiable must, however, be resisted, or else term will cease being epistemologically useful, and we will end up equating very diverse films, as sometimes happens in 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 extensive voice-over and fact that they both present problems of classification. …