what is an essay film

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 ...

The essay film, however, has proved even more peripatetic: where noir was formulated from the films of a determinate historical period (no matter that the temporal goalposts are continually shifted), the essay film is resolutely unfixed in time; it has its choice of forebears. And while noir, despite its occasional shadings over into semi ...

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.

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 ...

Essays on the Essay Film is accordingly divided into four sections: 1. Theoretical essays on the essay as a literary form by Georg Lukács, Robert Musil, Max Bense, Theodor W. Adorno and Aldous Huxley. 2. Previously published essays on the essay film by Hans Richter, Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin. 3.

Topics. This anthology of fundamental statements on the essay film offers a range of crucial historical and philosophical perspectives. It provides early critical articulations of the essay film as it evolved through the 1950s and 1960s, key contemporary scholarly essays, and a selection of writings by essay filmmakers.

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 ...

Today, the essay film is, arguably, one of the most widely acclaimed and critically discussed forms of filmmaking around the world, with practitioners such as Chris Marker, Hito Steyerl, Errol Morris, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Rithy Panh. Characteristics of the essay film include the blending of fact and fiction, the mixing of art- and documentary ...

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.

Rick Warner. Godard and the Essay Film offers a history and analysis of the essay film, one of the most significant forms of intellectual filmmaking since the end of World War II. War-ner incisively reconsiders the defining traits and legacies of this still-evolving genre through a groundbreaking examination of the vast and formidable oeuvre of ...

The essay film as a visual form raises new questions about the construction of the subject, its relationship to the world, and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. This volume examines the potential of the essayistic to question, investigate, and reflect on all forms of cinema.

The essay film, which is a rapidly growing practice throughout the world, is seen as the epitome of subjective and idiosyncratic expression in film. We know that in China, too, more personal forms of documentary, including autobiographical documentary, are currently spreading. What is the place of the essay film in Chinese cinema today?

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia continues with essays by other acclaimed, yet indefinable filmmakers such as Jean Luc-Godard and Claire Denis. Essays by Rick Warner and Martine Beugnet explore how these filmmakers defy closure and continuity, even while appearing to work within established forms and genres. Ann Eaken Moss explores ...

The essay film constructs such spectatorial position by adopting a certain rhetorical structure: rather than answering all the questions that it raises, and delivering a complete, "closed" argument, the essay's rhetoric is such that it opens up problems, and interrogates the spectator; instead of guiding her through emotional and ...

Essay films, unlike conventional documentaries, are only partly defined by their subject matter. They tend not to follow linear structures, far less to buttonhole viewers in the style of a ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Godard and the Essay Film offers a history and analysis of the essay film, one of the most significant forms of intellectual filmmaking since the end of Worl...

the essay film itself accounts for myriad formal and cultural practices and changing definitions. A case can certainly be made for the early signs of the essayistic genre in the short travelogues, topicals, and lecture films of the late 1890s, as these documentary-style and educational films are less

Explores the essay film as a global film practice World Cinema and the Essay Film examines the ways in which essay film practices are deployed by non-Western filmmakers in specific local and national contexts, in an interconnected world. The book identifies the essay film as a political and ethical tool to reflect upon and potentially resist the multiple, often contradictory effects of ...

In literature, an essay is a composition dealing with its subject from a personal point of view. The pioneer of this genre, 16th-century French writer and philosopher Michel de Montaigne, used the ...

Here's a step-by-step guide to help you with an essay service: 1. Watch the Movie. This is the obvious starting point, but surprisingly many students skip this step. It doesn't matter if you've watched the movie twice before. If you're asked to write an essay about it, you need to watch it again.

And despite the outrage, it's clear that Kael admired "Citizen Kane" and the man who marshaled it into existence. "Orson Welles brought forth a miracle," she wrote. Bless his heart ...

As Megan Hunter's debut novel, 'The End We Start From', is turned into a film of the same name starring Jodie Comer, the author reflects on how motherhood gave her more hope about our future.