Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Powell, Larson

Titel

The Essay Film: Dialogue/Politics/Utopia ed. by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades, and: Essays on the Essay Film ed. by Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan, and: The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction by Nora Alter (review)

Ist Teil von

• German Studies Review, 2018-10, Vol.41 (3), p.667-671

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Even art film, once seen as the opposite of genre cinema, has been treated as a genre. Since film scholars first turned toward questions of genre in the later 1960s, a considerable body of work on the topic has been produced, along with continued work on literary genres. Unsurprisingly, the only film the various authors unanimously agree on calling an essay film is Chris Marker's Sans soleil (1983). [...]on many formal aspects of the essay film, these authors often contradict each other. In Essays on the Essay Film, Paul Arthur asserts that "essays confound the position of untroubled authority or comprehensive knowledge that a singular mode of address projects onto a topic" (164), yet in other chapters, Phillip Lopate links the essay film to "first person narration" (125), and Laura Rascaroli claims that the essay film's choice of narration "is personal and individual, rather than social and collective" (185). [...]in The Essay Film Eric Zakim tellingly concludes, "While purely formal considerations have done little to advance a definition of the essay film, a focus on the (more abstract) act of the filmmaker … dominates most understandings of the essay film. [...]this play between expressive sound and a collage of public images anticipates the essayistic in both its restraint and its dispersion of a communal expressivity into the crisis of public life" (207).