Corrigan - Essay Film

THE ESSAY FILM

FROM MONTAIGNE, AFTER MARKER

Timothy Corrigan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Corrigan, Timothy.
The essay film : from Montaigne, after Marker / Timothy Corrigan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-978169-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-19-978170-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Experimental filmsHistory and criticism. I. Title.
PN1995.9.E96C67 2011
791.43611dc22 2011006312

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

THE ESSAY FILM

WHEN I BEGAN to work on this book in the 1990s, the phrase essay film was a fairly cryptic expression that normally required more than a little explanation. Since then, both the phrase and the films have become increasingly visible, and although for many the notion of an essay film remains less than self-explanatory, this particular mode of filmmaking has become more and more recognized as not only a distinctive kind of filmmaking but also, I would insist, as the most vibrant and significant kind of filmmaking in the world today.

Some versions of the essay film arguably extend back at least to D. W. Griffiths 1909 A Corner in Wheat, a sharp social commentary on the commodity wheat trade, or, more convincingly, to the 1920s and Sergei Eisensteins various cinematic projects, such as his never-completed film adaptation of Marxs Capital. Especially since the 1940s, however, more and more filmmakers from Chris Marker to Peter Greenaway have described their own films as essay films, joining numerous film critics, theoreticians, and scholars who, since Hans Richter and Alexandre Astruc in the 1940s, have hailed the unique critical potentials and powers of this central form of modern filmmaking. Whereas Richter and Astruc can be considered two of the earliest filmmaker/critics to identify and argue the specific terms of the essay film, critical attention by critics and filmmakers alike has continually expanded and accelerated: from Andr Bazins comments in the 1950s and Godards in the 1960s through the work of contemporary scholars such as Nora Alter,

In the last thirty years, essay films have followed this growth of attention and moved decisively from the margins to the center of film culture, capturing headlines (Michael Moores 2007 Sicko) and Academy Awards (Errol Morriss 2003 Fog of War). Often with the look of a documentary filtered through a more or less personal perspective, these sometimes perplexing movies have always been difficult to classify, sometimes difficult to understand, and often difficult to relate to each other. Many of the challenges they pose and misunderstandings they provoke, however, can be mitigated or overcome, I argue, by locating these films specifically within the long and varied tradition of the essay.

Part of the reason for the lack of attention to these filmscompared to both narrative fiction films and traditional documentary cinemais the more general suspicion about the essay itself. More often than not, essays have been considered eccentric, a degenerate, impossible genre, not very serious and even dangerous (quoted in Bensmaa 9697); for many filmgoers, essay films have the confusing distinction of suggesting Jean-Luc Godards goal of combining the personal with actuality. While other forms of writing and filmmaking elicit a certain respect associated with their privileged value as aesthetic or scientific practices, essays are usually (and not necessarily incorrectly) associated with mundane or quotidian activities such as school assignments and newspaper commentaries. Presumably, anyone can write an essay on any topic, and because of their broad and often indiscriminate reach, essays have sometimes been perceived as a merely prosaic activity. Indeed, precisely because of the tendency of the essay to respond to and depend on other cultural events that precede themcommenting on or criticizing a political event or a theatrical performance, for instanceessays have frequently been viewed as a parasitic practice, lacking those traditional forces of originality or creativity that, since the late eighteenth century, valorize works of art like paintings or poems.

Part of the power of the essay, however, lies precisely in its ability to question or redefine these and other representational assumptions (frequently enlisted with Romantic aesthetics) and to embrace its anti-aesthetic status. The difficulties in defining and explaining the essay are, in other words, the reasons that the essay is so productively inventive. Straddling fiction and nonfiction, news reports and confessional autobiography, documentaries and experimental film, they are, first, practices that undo and redo film form, visual perspectives, public geographies, temporal organizations, and notions of truth and judgment within the complexity of experience. With a perplexing and enriching lack of formal rigor, essays and essay films do not usually offer the kinds of pleasure associated with traditional aesthetic forms like narrative or lyrical poetry; they instead lean toward intellectual reflections that often insist on more conceptual or pragmatic responses, well outside the borders of conventional pleasure principles.

Besides the centrality of essay films in contemporary film culture, two overarching motifs inform this study: the importance of differentiating the essay film from other film practices and the importance of recognizing an overlooked literary heritage in this particular film practice. First and most prominently, I contend that the essay film must be distinguished from broad models of documentary or experimental cinema and must be located in a more refined historical place that does justice to its distinctive perceptions and interactions. Documentaries, especially experimental documentaries, such as Jean Vigos A propos de Nice (1930) or Luis Bunuels Land without Bread (1933), are clearly important precursors. Yet, despite the many attempts to fold essay films into those longer traditions, these attempts to see film history as a continuity with variations are limited in their ability to fully acknowledge the critical intervention that the essay film makes in the history of cinema. Just as important, essay films must be distinguished from the multitude of more conventional or differently innovative contemporary documentaries, reality television, and other measures of the recent fascination with and resurgence of a documentary tradition.