The World Essay Film and the Politics of Traceability

Genèse d’un repas(Moullet, 1979), Ananas(Gitai, 1984) and The Forgotten Space (Burch & Sekula, 2010) constitute three cinematic attempts at representing the global production and distribution networks of commodities. Giorgio Avezzù and Giuseppe Fidotta argue in this chapter that these films, due to their central concern with late capitalism and globalisation, can be labelled ‘World Essay Films’. They question, however, the multi-layered dynamics of global economy and cinema from the standpoint of Cultural Geography and Visual Studies. Although the World Essay Film’s central question pertains to the ways in which the interconnectedness of the world can be made visible, material, spatial, these films also play, as they argue, on the anxieties related to the invisibility of late-capitalist world, whose flows and networks seem to escape conventional representation. This inherent contradiction poses a challenge to realistic aesthetics and the documentary.

Cottonopolis: Experimenting With the Cinematographic, The Ethnographic and the Essayistic

Cathy Greenhalgh considers the making of her essay film Cottonopolis(90’, 2020). The film combines memories of three different yet interconnected ‘Manchesters’, that is historical mega-textile cities Manchester (England), Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India) and Łódź (Poland), with observations of contemporary handloom and power loom cotton manufacture. In her anticipated film Greenhalgh employs documentary techniques, reflexive essay and meditation, sensory and material culture ethnography, as well as oral historiography and experimental visual immersion. She sets out to discuss film production concerns related to questions of the cinematographic, ethnographic and essayistic. Her analysis is underpinned by a practice point-of-view, conversations with Indian film colleagues and various theories of essay, ethnographic and documentary film practice, eco-criticism, world cinema and diaspora aesthetics.

Accented Essay Films: The Politics and Poetics of the Essay Film in the Age of Migration

Igor Krstić brings together the notion of ‘accented cinema theory’ (Hamid Naficy) with the category of the essay, in order to conceptualise a burgeoning body of film, video, and other moving image practices in what sociologists have termed ‘the age of migration.’ Through this confluence of a supposedly generic category (the essay film) with a theory that has been of great importance to film scholarship since its emergence, Krstić provides new perspectives on an emerging transnational body of films, all of which have been produced by diasporic, exilic or interstitial documentary and/or essay filmmakers in the recent past. In applying Naficy’s terminology, one can describe these examples as ‘accented essay films’, because they all deal with displacement, exile or migration in the essayistic format. His study includes readings of The Nine Muses(Akomfrah, 2009),Grandmother’s Flower(Jeong-Hyun Mun, 2007), Home (Hruza, 2008) and A Hungarian Passport(Kogut, 2001).

Introduction

In this introductory chapter readers are made familiar with the expanding research field of essayistic filmmaking in world cinema-contexts around the globe. Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstíc argue that the essay film is a privileged political and ethical tool by means of which filmmakers around the world approach historically specific and locally, geographically concrete issues against larger global issues and universal concerns. The chapter also includes a genealogical overview of important moments in the development of essay filmmaking, particularly during the 1920s and 1960s, and provides readers with short abstracts on the individual chapters and their specific transnationally inflected case studies on essay film practitioners from around the world.

Strangely Real: A Reassemblage From the Film Forgetting Vietnam

Photo-essay by Trinh T. Minh-ha. All stills are from her essay film Forgetting Vietnam.

Lovers in Time: An Essay Film of Contested Memories

This chapter is in two parts – part one is by Thomas Elsaesser commenting on the unstable form of the essay film and making the case for practice based research to count as an essayistic form, exemplified by Agnieszka Piotrowska’s film Lovers in Time or How We Didn’t Get Arrested in Harare (2015) and her complementary book Black and White: Cinema, Politics and the Arts in Zimbabwe (2016). Part two consists of Piotrowska’s reflections on the making of her film, on the nature of postcolonial trauma in psychoanalytical terms and to what extent it can be worked through or ameliorated by creative collaborations. Piotrowska offers some further ‘behind the scenes’ insights into the experience of making a film in a post-colonial, post-traumatic environment, and the knowledge gained through this experience.

Essay Films about Film: The ‘Filmed Correspondence’ Between José Luis Guerin and Jonas Mekas

One of the most enlightening examples of essay films exploring filmmaking is the unique dialogue between José Luis Guerín and Jonas Mekas. Taking part in the larger Todas las cartas. Correspondencias fílmicas project, the two directors exchanged nine video letters from December 2009 to April 2011. In his chapter Fernando Canet embarks on a close analysis of this filmed correspondence. It quickly transpires that both filmmakers are cinephilic and fervent enthusiasts of their trade; they live by and for the cinema, and typically express their personal reflections on cinema in or through their filmmaking practice. Their filmed letters generate ‘ideas’ about film as a reflective and critical response as well as an alternative approach to traditional criticism.

‘Image-Writing’: The Essayistic/Sanwen in Chinese Nonfiction Cinema and Zhao Liang’s Behemoth

This chapter explores ‘image writing’, an independent nonfiction film practice of experimenting with and ‘writing’ through moving images as an artistic expression and cultural intervention in contemporary mainland China. As a concept similar to caméra-stylo that was advocated by Alexandre Astruc in his influential article ‘The Future of Cinema’ (1948), its motivation and aesthetic features are culturally and socially rooted in Chinese reality. The aesthetic form associated with yingxiang xiezuo can be understood as ‘essayistic’ in the sense that it is influenced by a Chinese literary essay tradition, Chinese language expression and socio-political conditions in China. Kiki Tianqi Yu argues that current criticism and theorisation around the essay film is largely rooted in western film studies; and that features of the essayistic or the ‘screen-writing’ process in cultures with different literary traditions, socio-political contexts and linguistic structures, such as those in China, require different methods of interrogation. The chapter includes a close reading of Chinese Zhao Liang’sBehemoth (2015), foremost his use of parallelism and juxtaposition.

No Man’s Zone: The Essay Film in the Aftermath of the Tsunami in Japan

Produced in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami and earthquake that hit Japan on the 11th of March 2011, Toshi Fujiwara’s film No Man’s Zone(Mujin Chitai, 2012) is a portrait of a country coming to terms with the nuclear fallout in Fukushima. Interviews are interlaced with long takes of the post-apocalyptic landscape and subtle observations that point to the suffering and trauma by the people living in, or uprooted from, the area near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The film also questions the role of images of the disaster and indeed the role of the filmmaker creating these very images. Marco Bohr highlights how the philosophical debate about the role of images produced in a disaster zone is primarily facilitated through the aesthetic, formal and structural device of the essay film.Its self-reflexivity is deployed here as a strategy to provoke the viewer in seeing representations of the disaster in a new light.

‘Time Turning Into Space’: Innocence of Memories’ Prismatic Istanbul

This chapter argues for a complex spatialisation of time and memory in Grant Gee’s essay film Innocence of Memories (2019). Focusing on issues of narrative, the indexical and memory, the author sees Gee’s film functioning in multiple registers, principally as a kind of palimpsest, referring to and writing over Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence (2009) and also referencing in multi-layered and intricate ways the real museum of the same name, located prominently in the centre of Istanbul. Both film and novel, as Tim O’ Farrell shows in an extended reading of the works, straddle a deep love of the past, a desire to preserve and understand it, and a fascination with the inexorability of time, transformation and notions of progress. Fact and fiction are thereby multiply entangled, produced by and supporting the disjunctive practice and interstitiality of the essay film, as the author points out with reference to Laura Rascaroli’s theoretical work How the Essay Film Thinks (2017).