Essay Film Research Articles

Exploring memory through the essay film To Remember: An exercise into the decolonisation of the filmmaker’s unconscious

This research started as an effort to recover lost childhood memories. I (Emilio Bassail) used the film-making apparatus as a device that allowed me to excavate, elaborate and produce representations based on the small fragments of memory I had left. After creating an archive of reconstructed memories, I started questioning the images I had unearthed. This position allowed me to interrogate and challenge the discourses behind the images. What I discovered is that forgetfulness was in fact an effect of the suppression of potentially subversive discourses. I had not really forgotten, but rather I had chosen not to remember (since the hidden childhood memories defied the internalised discourses of power and structure). To be able to remember and therefore to create, first I had to debilitate the discourses of the power structures that prevented me from going forward in my research. Following Suely Rolnik’s (2019)

What is in the draft: A reflection on precarity in Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Europa: ‘Based on a True Story’

Director Kivu Ruhorahoza’s film Europa: ‘Based on a True Story’ is a blend of fiction, quasi-ethnography and autobiography. In this article, built in part on the foundations of Judith Butler’s conceptualizations of precariousness, precarity and assembly, Europa is read as a refusal to be relegated to the marginal spectrality of bare life. Simultaneously, this article considers the draft-like provisionality of the film as a hallmark of its precarity. Framed as an essay film about the fate of an African director who attempts to make a film ‘out of Africa’, Europa provides a meditation on belonging and the precarious conditions of filming in Europe with an African passport. As Nandini Sikand writes, ‘the assumption of ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation is that by living and learning for an extended period alongside our informants, we are able to document and analyze their experience more accurately’ (2015: 45). Ruhorahoza’s film compels us to think about the position of the participant observer when the ‘extended period’ involves an agonizingly long asylum case, and when that observer is relegated to a space of unbelonging.

Of Haunted Spaces

Of Haunted Spaces is an art-based research project focusing on Chinese ghost cities. This exposition follows the making of an essay film that combines acting and documenting to indicate the phantasmatic aspect of global capitalism. In China, the need to maintain and boost economic growth through surplus production results in more cities being built than are needed. This exposition investigates how global capitalism is affecting and haunting living conditions today. Urban spaces, which were once a grandiose vision for boosting prosperity through collective fantasy, have now become exhausted and empty sites. Ella Raidel develops a performative documentary film to create a discursive space in which facts, analyses, commentaries, and references are woven into one narrative.

Sans soleil by Chris Marker. The essay film and its cinematic thinking process: reflecting on postmodernity

ABSTRACT The essay film is defined by its capability to embody an audiovisual thinking process. Chris Marker’s Sans soleil/Sunless (1983) is undoubtedly one of the highest expressions of this filmic form, which reflects on postmodernity through the nature of images. This article aims to analyse the thinking in act of the film, using Jacques Rancière’s concept of sentence-image, and applying Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image and the crystal-image. The cinematic thinking process forces the spectator to constantly transform the actual image/virtual image relationship of the film until it reaches a time-image and crystal-image of postmodernity. It is possible thanks to the shifts among the different subjectivities created by Marker and the interstices they generate. This shift also reaches a crystal-image as a materialisation of the postmodern concept of alterity as analysed by Paul Ricœur and Zygmunt Bauman. The reflection is constructed by means of an itinerary through four types of images and their screens – film image, television image, electronic image and video game image – in order to develop the image-memory-history axis and to generate an audiovisual reflection on postmodernity in total consonance with Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the image, Marc Augé’s of non-places and Fredric Jameson’s of the postmodern historicism.

Sans soleil by Chris Marker. The Essay Film and its Cinematic Thinking Process: Reflecting on Postmodernity

Sans soleil by Chris Marker. The Essay Film and its Cinematic Thinking Process: Reflecting on Postmodernity

Documentary re-enactment in Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes: countering the work of the imperial camera shutter

ABSTRACT Framed by an understanding of Raoul Peck as a transnational filmmaker performing the role of a public intellectual, this article reads Exterminate All the Brutes, his self-referential and self-reflective documentary released on HBO in 2021, as an essay film that scrutinizes the role of image-making in the production of history to advance a form of counterhistory and a practice of ‘potential history.’ This reading of the structural hinge between visual apparatuses, imperialism, and white supremacy – the core story Peck aims to crack open ‘from the inside out’ in the essay film – engages with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s arguments, in Potential History, on how the camera shutter operates as the primary mechanism of imperialism. To demonstrate Peck’s deployment of scripted fictional scenes in Exterminate as a documentary strategy of creating a counterhistory and rehearsing ‘potential history,’ I consider two re-enactments: 1) the archival montage of wet-plate photographs (c. 1872–1873) of the Victorian explorer Henry Morton Stanley and his enslaved adopted child Ndugu M’hali (renamed Kalulu), and 2) the dramatization of Frederic W. Farrar’s lecture on the ‘Aptitude of Races’ delivered at the Ethnological Society of London in 1866.

Beside Du Côté de la côte (1958): Agnès Varda’s early applied cinephilia

This article reappraises Agnès Varda’s formative career as she made Du Côté de la côte in 1958. To do this, it explores Varda’s situation within the post-war French film ecosystem before the French New Wave, how she engaged key practices of that overlooked era. By studying the ways Varda directly cites peer productions in Du Côté de la côte, we reveal her as heir to, and in dialogue with, a number of significant but neglected practitioners, notably women like Nicole Vedrès, Jacqueline Jacoupy and Yannick Bellon. Extrapolating from these creative protocols, we can properly gauge Varda’s primary, and long-term, affinities for short films and essay films, two formats that film studies is often reluctant to recognize, let alone canonize. Nourishing Varda’s work as a post-war short film essayist, we will also discover how applied cinephilia – intertextual deployments of film history that catalyse actual filmmaking – informed Varda’s professional rise.

Teaching L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958)

This article describes the advantages of teaching Agnès Varda’s early short film L’Opéra-Mouffe, known in English as Diary of a Pregnant Woman, in an introductory course on film form. This award-winning, sixteen-minute film offers a compelling demonstration of the core characteristics of the essay film, along with readily teachable examples of visual metaphor, cinematography, sound, and editing. Its cultural and auteurist contexts can also complement a variety of curricular topics, including the French New Wave and Left Bank creators, post-war France, and feminist filmmaking. Finally, its focus on Varda’s personal experience of pregnancy also makes L’Opéra-Mouffe an ideal vehicle to introduce radical feminist pedagogies that recognize and value personal experience as a valid way of knowing about the world.

The Question of Ireland (2013) and A History of Stone, Origin and Myth (2016)

Abstract Curated Spaces features two projects by the artists and filmmakers Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan. The Question of Ireland (2013) is a cross-disciplinary film installation that attempts to provoke the relationship between the language of politics, performance, and cinema. A History of Stone, Origin and Myth (2016) is a nonnarrative film essay that explores the space between individual memory and national history through the lens of political monuments found throughout Ireland that relate to Irish rebellion, the 1916 Rising, and the foundation of the state.

Sans soleil by Chris Marker. The Essay Film and its Cinematic Thinking Process: Reflecting on Postmodernity

Sans soleil by Chris Marker. The Essay Film and its Cinematic Thinking Process: Reflecting on Postmodernity

The way of the bricoleuse: experiments in documentary filmmaking

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the way experimental documentary film practitioners may utilize the methodology of the bricoleuse in order to create films. I refer to my experiments in documentary film practice – mediations of memory, place and subjectivities – where I deploy hybrid filmic strategies of critical realism and fictional enactment. The bricoleuse may use footage obtained through pocket cameras, mobile devices, stills, archive or found footage – including their own past films, analogue and digital – using a digital database to store footage and to provide her with an endless storehouse of digital documents that can easily be accessed and reused in infinite ways to create new practice [Baron 2014. The Archive Effect. London: Routledge, 142]. I analyse in particular My Private Life II [Daniels, Jill. 2015. dir. My Private Life II. UK. https://vimeo.com/139077147] where I used the footage from an earlier film, My Private Life [Daniels, Jill. 2014. dir. My Private Life. UK. https://vimeo.com/104385249], to create a split screen view and my short documentary essay film, Breathing Still [Daniels, Jill. 2018. dir. Breathing Still. UK. https://vimeo.com/253291495] (shown at The Mobile Innovation Network and Association [MINA] in 2018), a short epistolary film addressed to Rosa Luxemburg and shot on a pocket camera (Canon G9X).

Nagisa Ōshima’s Essayistic Exploration of Japan’s “Korean Problem”

Japanese New Wave filmmaker Nagisa Ōshima repeatedly tackled Japan’s cultural and systemic discrimination toward Koreans in his films. The “Korean problem” is a complex issue that stems from a storied history between the two countries. However, Ōshima was undaunted at the task of confronting his Japanese audience with challenges to their potential biases. Ōshima incorporated essay film techniques in his films Forgotten Soldiers (1963), Diary of Yunbogi (1965), Death by Hanging (1968), and Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968) to disrupt the illusion of film and encourage self-reflection among the audience.

Reading hieroglyphs behind glass: A glimpse of reparative feminism in Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)

This article examines Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s 1977 avant-garde essay film Riddles of the Sphinx as a cinematic text that makes the museum a site for imagining psychoanalytic feminism as a reparative reading practice. I argue that the film questions gender and race as “musealized” images that make predetermined essences present, and offers instead images of working through the damages of sexism and racism that erode the familiar poles of idealization and denigration. Focused on the psychic life of a middle-class white woman as she begins extricating herself from the narrow confines that white patriarchal culture has allotted her, Riddles revises the visual logics of castration, which opens the possibility that white women can, instead of defending themselves against shame, respond to the forms of sexism and racism that write Black women’s lives.

Dancing the Waterways in Leanne Simpson’s she sang them home

Inspired by essay films meditating on time, travel and ceremony and informed by cinematic cartography, my short dance film, sing them home (2020), travels the specific bodies of water that form the route that Atlantic Salmon once journeyed as they migrated to Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg territory. Rooted in Nishnaabewin and Indigenous food sovereignty, toward a vision of the collective continuance of Michi Saagiig aki miijim, the film uses movement to activate sites in and on the shores of these lakes and rivers in the present while remembering the past and future of this waterway and her kin. This photo essay documents the film's journey and invites you to consider the making of this dance film as a prayer for the salmon to return.

Nostalgia for Futures Past

This article investigates the intellectual and political legacies of Maoist and other left Third Worldist thought of the 1970s through an analysis of Naeem Mohaiemen’s 2020 film, Afsan’s Long Day, The Young Man Was. The film presents a narrative of the history of the 1970s anti-imperialist left, and in Brechtian fashion, compels the viewer to take an emotionally distanced assessment of the left’s chaotic trajectory through a unique engagement with themes of time, history, and repetition. In the article, I explore several aspects of the film − its relationship to the ‘essay film’ as a genre, the historical context of the global 1970s as depicted in the film, and then conclude with a discussion of the theoretical concept, hauntology, in order to interrogate the political praxis of the film. The 1970s Global left represents a future that never came to be but yet continues to animate contemporary left thought.

Mircea Săucan — Secretul cel mai bine păzit din cinematografia românească a anilor ’60-’80

Mircea Săucan, one of the most atypical figures of Romanian narrative cinema, is yet to be un-veiled. He only directed a few full-length features which were either banned or isolated from the rest of the films produced at the time. “When Spring Is Hot” (190) was one of the first Romanian movies to challenge propaganda clichés. Its poetic visuals had but one rival in Romanian cinema: “The Mist Is Lifting” (1958) by Iulian Mihu and Manole Marcus. “The Endless Shore” (1963) was meant to depict the socialist transformation of agriculture in Dobrogea, South-Eastern Romania. It ended up as a non-narrative poem about the miracle of love. “Meanders” (1967) is “one of the most daring quests for a highly expressive cinematic language so far”, said film theorist George Littera. “Alert” (1967) caused a big scandal because Săucan twisted the original subject story into a poetic film essay. “100 Lei” (1973) depicts a young misfit, as a victim of an indifferent and merciless soci-ety. The movie premiered in a truncated version, with some additional scenes that were meant to replace the tragic ending of the main character with a soft, “positive” conclusion.

The Essay Film as an Archival Practice for Self-representation

The Essay Film as an Archival Practice for Self-representation

The Amazed Spectator: An Essay Film Focused on the Viewers

The Amazed Spectator: An Essay Film Focused on the Viewers

Drifting with Cousins: Mark Cousins and the Psychogeographical Essay Film

Drifting with Cousins: Mark Cousins and the Psychogeographical Essay Film

Melusine as Emblem of Truth: Philosophical tentacles, themes and approaches explored in the audiovisual essay The Mystery of Melusine

This article introduces the philosophical underpinnings, themes and approaches explored in the audiovisual essay The Mystery of Melusine (2021). Its footage consists of a dramatic performance in which I am enacting the contents of a philosophical poem authored by myself as the titular character. The narrative of the film essay explores the nature of truth and espouses an ontology of magic through a re-interpretation of the myth of Melusine. In European folklore, Melusine is the reclusive and mysterious wife who agrees to marry upon the condition that she is granted her privacy every Saturday. On Saturdays, she spends her solitude secretly bathing her fish tail until one day her husband peeps through the keyhole of her bathing chamber. She learns he has broken his promise to not impede her privacy, and so she evanesces. In my film essay, Melusine is a metaphor for the secretiveness and elusiveness of truth, and the way life unfurls itself in secretive and clandestine ways. The notion of truth as elusive and secretive derives its inspiration from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and this film essay can be considered a mythic interpretation of some of his ideas. In addition to a mythic interpretation of truth, the film essay provides a narrative for the way life meets itself through otherness and recounts the journey of personal transformation in which the querent must reconcile to truth; this is elaborated as a process of self-seeing and self-recognition that takes place through the alien other.