What is essay film

When film was invented it was made from cellulose nitrate, but modern day film is made from either a cellulose acetate or polyester base with a coating of light sensitive minerals — namely silver salts. The start of a project varies, but generally will begin with development of a script, be that an existing script, a book, a brief story outline.

Movies have always entertained us, whether in cinemas or at home. When the movies are good, you love to see them over and over again. You even think about the characters even after the movie is over. A lot of talent and creativity goes on to making a great movie. A conversation between two characters is called dialogue. Good dialogue performs four functions — it provides information, exposes emotion, advances the plot and reveals character.

Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Originally conceived as commissions by various French government or government-affiliated bodies, the Resnais-Marker films famously ran into trouble from French censors: Les statues meurent aussi for its condemnation of French colonialism, Night and Fog for its shots of Vichy policemen guarding deportation camps; the former film would have its second half lopped off before being cleared for screening, the latter its offending shots removed.

Night and Fog Appropriately, it is at this moment that the emphasis of the essay film begins to shift away from tactile presence — the whirl of the city, the rhythm of the rain, the workings of industry — to felt absence.

The montagists had marvelled at the workings of human creations which raced ahead irrespective of human efforts; here, the systems created by humanity to master the world write, in their very functioning, an epitaph for those things extinguished in the act of mastering them. The image and sound captured at the time of filming offer one facet of reality; it is only with this lateral move outside that reality that the future reality it conceals can speak.

What will distinguish the essay film, as Bazin noted, is not only its ability to make the image but also its ability to interrogate it, to dispel the illusion of its sovereignty and see it as part of a matrix of meaning that extends beyond the screen. No less than were the montagists, the film-essayists seek the motive forces of modern society not by crystallising eternal verities in powerful images but by investigating that ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic relationship between our regime of images and the realities it both reveals and occludes.

Few documentaries have achieved the cult status of the minute A propos de Nice, co-directed by Jean Vigo and cameraman Boris Kaufman at the beginning of their careers. Occasionally the filmmakers remind us of the sea, the birds, the wind in the trees but mostly they contrast people: the rich play tennis, the poor boules; the rich have tea, the poor gamble in the then squalid streets of the Old Town.

The message is clear, even if it has not been heeded by history. The subjectivity and speculative approach maintained throughout are more akin to the essay tradition than traditional propaganda in their rejection of mere glib conveyance of information or thunderous hectoring. Instead Jennings invites us quietly to observe the nuances of everyday life as Britain enters the final chapter of the war.

Against the momentous political backdrop, otherwise routine, everyday activities are ascribed new profundity as the Welsh miner Geronwy, Alan the farmer, Bill the railway engineer and Peter the convalescent fighter pilot go about their daily business.

He worked across film, painting, photography, theatrical design, journalism and poetry; in Diary his protean spirit finds expression in a manner that transgresses the conventional parameters of wartime propaganda, stretching into film poem, philosophical reflection, social document, surrealistic ethnographic observation and impressionistic symphony.

Managing to keep to the right side of sentimentality, it still makes for potent viewing. The success of the campaign contributed to a golden age of short filmmaking that would last a decade and form the crucible of the French essay film. Les statues meurent aussi co-directed with Chris Marker explored cultural memory as embodied in African art and the depredations of colonialism; Night and Fog was a seminal reckoning with the historical memory of the Nazi death camps.

His hand, seen in close-up, is one of many in the film; rather than objects of medical curiosity, these hands — some fingerless, many distorted by the disease — are agents, always in movement, doing, making, exercising, praying. Posing a question of aesthetics, The House Is Black uses the contagious gaze of cinema to dissolve the screen between Us and Them. Between and , Godard and Gorin made films collectively as part of the Dziga Vertov Group before they returned, in , to the mainstream with Tout va bien , a big-budget film about the aftermath of May featuring leftist stars Yves Montand and Jane Fonda.

It was to the latter that Godard and Gorin directed their Letter after seeing a news photograph of her on a solidarity visit to North Vietnam in August And what of her expression of compassionate concern? Those who insist it was all downhill for Orson Welles after Citizen Kane would do well to take a close look at this film made more than three decades later, in its own idiosyncratic way a masterpiece just as innovative as his better-known feature debut.

Mankiewicz had been the real creative force behind Kane. As a riposte to that thesis albeit never framed as such , F for Fake is subtle, robust, supremely erudite and never once bitter; the darkest moment — as Welles contemplates the serene magnificence of Chartres — is at once an uncharacteristic but touchingly heartfelt display of humility and a poignant memento mori.

And it is in this delicate balancing of the autobiographical with the universal, as well as in the dazzling deployment of cinematic form to illustrate and mirror content, that the film works its once unique, now highly influential magic. The Bundesrepublik Deutschland is shown as a nation of people who can deal with everything because they have been prepared — taught how to react properly in every possible situation.

Whatever job we do, we know it by heart; we also know how to manage whatever kind of psychological breakdown we experience; and we are also prepared for the end, and even have an idea about how our burial will go. This is the nation: one of fearful people in dire need of control over their one chance of getting it right. Viewed from the present, How to Live in the German Federal Republic is revealed as the archetype of many a Farocki film in the decades to follow, for example Die Umschulung , Der Auftritt or Nicht ohne Risiko , all of which document as dispassionately as possible different — not necessarily simulated — scenarios of social interactions related to labour and capital.

This is no ars combinatoria but systems of collision and harmony; organic in their temporal development and experimental in their procedural eagerness. Both anthologies dedicated entirely to essay film have been published in order to fill gaps in essay film scholarship.

Biemann brings the discussion of essay film into the digital age by explicitly resisting traditional German and French film and literary theory. Papazian and Eades also resists European theory by explicitly showcasing work on postcolonial and transnational essay film.

Biemann, Ursula, ed. New York: Springer, In opposition to German and French film and literary theory, Biemann discusses video essays with respect to non-linear and non-logical movement of thought and a range of new media in Internet, digital imaging, and art installation. Papazian, Elizabeth, and Caroline Eades, eds.

London: Wallflower, This forthcoming anthology bridges several gaps in 21st-century essay film scholarship: non-Western cinemas, popular cinema, and digital media. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Lasting only 14 minutes, it tells the tale of a ruthless crop gambler who amasses riches by monopolising the wheat market, exploits the agricultural poor, and is promptly killed under a pile of his own grain.

Think twice, greedy capitalists. The essay film produces complex thought — reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also be contradictory, irrational, and fantastic. An unnamed female narrates a circuitous journey from Africa to Japan, in an engaging style never seen before. Some might say he laid down a marker.