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The Essay As a Literary, Cinematographic and Videographic Form

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The Essay As a Literary, Cinematographic and Videographic Form Compilation and Critique: The Essay as a Literary, Cinematographic and Videographic Form Alex Fletcher September 2018 Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University, for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Abstract This dissertation critically engages the meaning and scope of the category of the ‘essay film’; a term that has gained increasing currency in recent decades in film studies and contemporary art to group a diverse array of moving-image works. Departing from recent literature on the essay film, the essay, as I argue, should be conceived less as a stable generic category, than as a dynamic form and experimental mode of writing and filmmaking, which employs and cuts across diverse literary, cinematic and televisual genres and sub-genres, and which is historically subject to critical transformation as it encounters new social, technological and cultural forms and mediums. The introduction provides a critical survey of some of the leading proponents of the essay film, and outlines a working definition of the essay as a literary and cinematographic form. Chapter 1 examines the history of the essay and criticism as a literary and philosophical form, focusing on the essayistic and critical writings of Michel de Montaigne, the early German Romantics, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Roland Barthes. Central to the critical and experimental nature of the essay, as the chapter underlines, is the deployment of various indirect, allegorical, and modernist rhetorical and poetic strategies and devices – such as citation, irony, fragmentation, and parataxis – which attempt to engage the reader in the text’s reflective process through the constellation of enigmatic and disjunct moments and perspectives. Chapter 2 explores the emergence of various essayistic forms in the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s, relating debates around the privileging of literary and photographic documentary montage practices in Soviet Factography to Esfir Shub’s historical compilation films, Dziga Vertov’s experimental newsreels, and Sergei Eisenstein’s project to make a plotless film-essay based on Karl Marx’s Capital. Chapter 3 focuses on Jean-Luc Godard’s film and video essays – from Camera Eye (1967) to Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) – delineating the crucial shifts in Godard’s various attempts to present a critical discourse on cinema and the media through the montage of image and sound. Chapter 4 investigates the essay films, archival video essays, and essayistic video installations of Harun Farocki, attending to how his works endeavour to render the ciphered social life of images and the historical transformations in technologies and techniques of seeing and imaging available for critical interpretation. Central to my account of the essay as a literary, cinematographic, and videographic form is the question of compilation; namely, how (from Montaigne to Farocki) knowledge and history (whether in the form of text or image) is archived and assembled through the juxtaposition and critical weighing of disparate citations and images. Paramount in relation to Godard and Farocki, as I underscore, is their respective shifts to working with video technology, which afforded both filmmakers the capacity to more freely combine and analyze images from divergent media sources, as well as to devise novel forms of videographic montage based on the construction of historical correspondences between audio-visual elements. I conclude the dissertation with a consideration of the impact of digital technology on contemporary essayistic audio-visual practices, and how issues raised in the preceding chapters – around audio-visual criticism, the spatialization of montage in moving-image installation work, and documentary and archival film practices – have been affected by such technological and cultural shifts. 1 Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge the Arts and Humanities Research Council for awarding me with a three-year full time grant to work on this dissertation, as well as the TECHNE consortium, Kingston University, and the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy for their financial assistance with a number of research trips. This dissertation has greatly benefited from contributions made by many staff and students at the CRMEP. I am especially grateful to Peter Osborne for his incisive comments and guidance. Special thanks are also owed to Maria Chehonadskih, Eric-John Russell, John Douglas Millar, and Oliver Fuke for their comments on various chapters. Many thanks to Elsa de Seynes and Volker Pantenburg for their assistance on my visit to the Harun Farocki Insitut, and to Antje Ehmann for kindly making Farocki’s work available to me. I am immensely indebted to my parents for their ongoing support. Finally, thanks to Elisa for being there through it all. 2 Contents List of Illustrations…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..4 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….5 Chapter 1. The Essay as a Philosophical and Critical Form.……………………………………………………………..38 1.1 Between Mode and Genre: Montaigne’s Essais and Bacon’s Essayes……………………………………….39 1.2 A ‘feeling for fragments’: The Fragment, Criticism and Irony in Early German Romanticism…....50 1.3 Allegorical Constellations: The Critical and Feuilleton Writings of Walter Benjamin………….….….63 1.4 The Essay Form in Theodor W. Adorno……………………………………………………………………..…….….......77 1.5 Dispersing the Text: Writing and Criticism in Roland Barthes…………………….……………………………..87 Chapter 2. From Plotless Prose to Plotless Films: The Essay Form in the Soviet Avant-Garde…………100 2.1 Reportage or Portrayal: The Ocherk, the Photo-Series, and the Montage of Facts in Soviet Factography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….101 2.2 A ‘card catalogue in the gutter’: Esfir Shub’s Historical Compilations and Dziga Vertov’s Newsreel Film-Things………………………………………………………………………………………………………………117 2.3 Intellectual Attractions: Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project……………………………………………………..144 Chapter 3. Essaying Cinema and the Media in the Work of Jean-Luc Godard………..……………………….163 3.1 Camera Eye and Radio Ear……………………………………………………………………………………………………….165 3.2 Sound and Image in the Dziga Vertov Group……………………………………………………………………………173 3.3 Videographic Thinking in Sonimage…………………………………………………………………………………………180 3.4 Essaying Cinema in Godard’s Video-Scenarios………….……………………………………………………………..195 3.5 Self-Portraiture, Phrases, and Allegorical Images in ‘late-style’ Godard…………………………………..204 3.6 A ‘form that thinks’: Histoire(s) du cinéma………………………………………………………………………………218 Chapter 4. Dialectic of Enlightenment: The Essay Form in Harun Farocki………………………………………248 4.1 Narration and Argumentation: Industry and Photography………………………………………………………250 4.2 As You See and Images of the World…………………………………………………………………………….…………261 4.3 Compiling History and Representing Labour in Farocki’s Archival Video Essays………….…………..276 4.4 The Right Distance: Soft Montage and Operative Images……………………………………………………….289 Conclusion: Digital Constellations..……………………………………………………………………………………………….312 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….325 Filmography………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….353 3 List of Illustrations Figure 1. Esfir Shub, The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, 1927 Figure 2. Dziga Vertov, Man With a Movie Camera, 1929 Figure 3. Dziga Vertov, Leninist Kinopravda, 1925 Figure 4. Dziga Vertov, A Sixth Part of the World, 1926 Figure 5. Dziga Vertov, The Eleventh Year, 1928 Figure 6. Sergei Eisenstein, October, 1927 Figure 7. Sergei Eisenstein, October, 1927 Figure 8. Jean-Luc Godard, Camera Eye, 1967 Figure 9. Jean-Luc Godard, Camera Eye, 1967 Figure 10. Jean-Luc Godard, Le gai savoir, 1968 Figure 11. Jean-Luc Godard, Le gai savoir, 1968 Figure 12. Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, Letter to Jane, 1972 Figure 13. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Ici et ailleurs, 1974 Figure 14. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Ici et ailleurs, 1974 Figure 15. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Ici et ailleurs, 1974 Figure 16. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Numéro deux, 1975 Figure 17. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Comment ça va?, 1976 Figure 18. Jean-Luc Godard, Scénario du film Passion, 1982 Figure 19. Jean-Luc Godard, Lettre à Freddy Buache, 1981 Figure 20. Jean-Luc Godard, JLG/JLG, 1995 Figure 21. Jean-Luc Godard, JLG/JLG, 1995 Figure 22. Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1998 Figure 23. Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1998 Figure 24. Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1998 Figure 25. Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1998 Figure 26. Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1998 Figure 27. Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1998 Figure 28. Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1998 Figure 29. Harun Farocki, Inextinguishable Fire, 1969 Figure 30. Harun Farocki, Industry and Photography, 1979 Figure 31. Harun Farocki, Still Life, 1997 Figure 32. Harun Farocki, As You See, 1986 Figure 33. Harun Farocki, As You See, 1986 Figure 34. Harun Farocki, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988 Figure 35. Harun Farocki, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988 Figure 36. Harun Farocki, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988 Figure 37. Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory, 1995 Figure 38. Harun Farocki, The Expression of Hands, 1997 Figure 39. Harun Farocki, Interface, 1995 Figure 40. Harun Farocki, On the Construction of Griffith’s
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