essay film definition

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: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments. 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Abstract. 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 ...

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.

A diverse range of case studies discloses how the essay can be a medium of thought on the basis of its dialectic use of audiovisual interstitiality. The book shows how the essay film's disjunctive method comes to be realized at the level of medium, montage, genre, temporality, sound, narration, and framing-all of these emerging as ...

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 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.

To consider the complex and elusive question of the essay film's specificity and definition, we propose as a starting point a broader understanding of the 'essayistic' as a mode that can emerge from within films that otherwise belong to the realm of fiction or non-fiction, destabilising conventional distinctions of genre, mode, style and ...

Nora M. Alter is professor of film and media studies in the School of Theater, Film and Media Arts at Temple University. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967-2000 (2002), and Chris Marker (2006), and co-editor (with Lutz Koepnick) of Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004).

The essay—with its emphasis on the provisional and explorative rather than on definitive statements—has evolved from its literary beginnings and is now found in all mediums, including film. 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 ...

The Essay film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments (2009)" In Essays on the Essay Film edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, 183-196. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2017.

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 as Practice Research As a term, the essay film refers to a heterogeneous group of, mostly, nonfiction films that are independent from both the facticity of documentary and the dramatic construction of fiction. The essay film has been defined as being derived from documentary and avant-garde

The essay film, therefore, subverts a common theoretical practice: thought is no longer assumed as a procedure for unveiling an image, but it is rather produced by film forms. We claim that the ...

Features examples from essay film practice as research. Contains interviews with non-western filmmakers, in-depth case studies of global essay film practice and self-reflexive essays by scholars and film practitioners . 978-1-4744-2926-9. Film Studies. Includes well-known and fresh voices of essay film practice from around the world .

With films such as "Personal Belongings", "Delirium", and "A Healthy Baby Girl", family relationships become public, and sometimes painful. Each of these categories can also be an opportunity to either imagine or make a video based on students' own lives, social networks, and concerns. Teachers use these films for other subject ...

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. An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal and informal: formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization ...

The Film Essay: A New Type of Documentary Film" In Essays on the Essay Film edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, 89-92. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2017. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2017.