Essays on the Essay Film / Nora M. Alter, Timothy Corrigan.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Alter, Nora M., 1962-

Corrigan, Timothy.

Series:

Film and culture.

Film and Culture Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Experimental films--History and criticism.

Experimental films.

Documentary films--History and criticism.

Documentary films.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (377 pages).

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

System Details:

text file

PDF

Summary:

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, 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-film styles, the foregrounding of subjective points of view, a concentration on public life, a tension between acoustic and visual discourses, and a dialogic encounter with audiences.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. It features texts on the foundations of the essay film by writers such as Hans Richter and André Bazin; contemporary positions by, among others, Phillip Lopate and Michael Renov; and original essays by filmmakers themselves, including Laura Mulvey and Isaac Julien.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

Part I. Foundations

1. On The Nature and Form of The Essay

2. From The Man without Qualities (1930 - 1943)

3. On The Essay and Its Prose (1948)

4. The Essay as Form (1958)

5. Preface to The Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley (1960)

Part II. The Essay Film through History

6. The Film Essay: A New Type of Documentary Film

7. The Future of Cinema (1948)

8. Bazin on Marker (1958)

III. Contemporary Positions

9. In Search of The Centaur: The Essay-Film (1992)

10. The Political Im/Perceptible in The Essay Film: Farocki's Images of The World and The Inscription of War (1996)

11. Essay Questions (2003)

12. The Electronic Essay (1995)

13. The Essay film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments (2009)

14. Of The History of The Essay Film: Vertov to Varda (2011)

15. The Cinema and The Essay as a Way of Thinking (2011)

16. The Essay Film: From Film Festival Favorite to Flexible Commodity Form? (2015)

Part IV. Filmmakers on The Essayistic

17. "Performing Borders: Transnational Video (2003)

18. Proposal for a Tussle (2007)

19. The Essay as Conformism? Some Notes on Global Image Economies (2011)

20. On Writing The Film Essay (2016)

21. Tramp Steamer (2016)

22. The ABCs of The Film Essay (2015)

23. Riddles as Essay Film (2016)

24. Certain Obliquenesses (2016)

25. Essay Documentary: The disembodied narrator and an unclaimed image that floats through space and time (2016)

26. From Ten Thousand Waves to Lina Bo Bardi, via Kapital (2016)

Bibliography

Contributors

Permissions

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed Feb. 24, 2017)

ISBN:

9780231543996

0231543999

OCLC:

965543947