Essay Film

Unit 3: Genres and forms of experimental film

Ethnopoetic / anti-ethnographic

Structural film

Queer video / queer underground

The essay film

Unit 1: defining experimental film

strategies of mediation and representational opacity

anti-ethnographic

insistence on its shape or structure

structural film

queer underground video/film

self-reflexivity and auto-fictional elements, lo-fi "trash" aesthetic drawing from pop culture

the essay film?

Sadie Benning, Flat is Beautiful (1998)

Semi-autobiographical, but a fictionalized and objectified version of autobiography

Builds on Benning's earlier performative diary films

Conceptions of history and the self are mediated through the televisual image and pop culture

VHS, MTV, and the emergence of cheap, affordable video

-> Video as a medium of queer and feminist work

Lo-fi form of the work is used to explore intersectional working-class identities

Disidentification (José Esteban Muñoz): how marginalized viewers / consumers negotiate and produce new forms of pleasure and possibility through an engagement with majority culture

Dunye: the history of Fae Richards opens up possibilities for Dunye's own identity and vocation as a Black lesbian filmmaker

Cuthand: the ellen show and TV infomercials become sites for imagining coming out and Two-spirit intimacy

Flat is Beautiful

Pop and commodity culture as sites of constraint and possibility

Not a simple dichotomy of interior/exterior but the interplay between them

A conception of the self dispersed and created from cultural texts

Flatness: of masks, billboards, screens, the pixelvision image

suspicion of surface/depth, inauthentic/authentic relations

All identities are constructed - what notion of the self might emerge from the ruins of post-industrial capitalism?

Chantal Akerman, News from Home (1976)

• Letters from Akerman's mother narrated by Akerman

• Shots of New York that are mostly fixed or static

• Considered a fairly canonical example of the "essay film" or "film essay"

Laura Rascaroli, "The Essay Film"

"...why certain films produce in the spectator the impression of watching an essay, as opposed to a documentary, a fiction, a poem, a travelogue or an experimental film"

• A film form in dialogue with but not identical to experimental film

• Nevertheless, a large majority of essay films are experimental in form and overlap with works considered part of a history of "experimental film"

• What is often considered experimental film today overwhelmingly takes the form of the essay film

"At the level of rhetorical structures, in order to convey such reflection, the filmic essay decidedly points to the enunciating subject, who literally inhabits the text. This enunciator is embodied in a narrator, who (although never un-problematically or unreflexively) is close to the real, extra-textual author. The distance between the two is slight, as the enunciator represents the author’s views, and the narrator is her spokesperson (even when hiding behind a different name, or multiple personae, or when problematising the existence of the subject itself)" (184).

Towards a provisional definition of the essay film (according to Rascaroli):

a personal critical reflection on a problem or set of problems

single authorial voice

an open reflection rather than a proscribed or closed meaning

points to an enunciating subject who inhabits the text, and who is close to its real author

the author problematizes and questions not only her subject matter but also her subjectivity and authorship

attempts to establish a dialogue with an embodied spectator

How does the framework of the essay film help make sense of Akerman's film?

Mekas, Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches (1968)