The Film Essay

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Hans Richter – The Film-Essay: A new type of Documentary (1940)

“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 be contradictory, irrational, and fantastic.”

Alexandre Asrtuc –  The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo (1948)

“The cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, […] After having been successively a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or a means of preserving the images of an era, it is gradually becoming a language […] a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of camera-stylo (camera-pen). This metaphor has a very precise sense. By it I mean that the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.”

Films driven by an essayistic imperative

• an unsystematic experience of the world: an active and assertive consciousness that tests, undoes or re-creates itself, undoing its own -drive toward categorization

• an invention for intervention. creating meaning precisely by eating away at its own boundaries - amorphous sensibility on the nature of inquiry.