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ESSAYS ON THE ESSAY FILM FILM AND CULTURE ESSAYS ON THE ESSAY FILM EDITED BY NORA M. ALTER AND TIMOTHY CORRIGAN Columbia University Press New York Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Alter, Nora M., 1962– editor. | Corrigan, Timothy editor. Title: Essays on the essay film / edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2017 | Series: Film and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016040210 (print) | LCCN 2016056155 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231172660 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231172677 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231543996 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Experimental films—History and criticism. | Documentary films—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.E96 E88 2017 (print) | LLC PN1995.9.E96 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/611—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040210 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America cover design: Lisa Hamm CONTENTS INTRODUCTION NORA M. ALTER AND TIMOTHY CORRIGAN1 PART I. FOUNDATIONS 1. “ON THE NATURE AND FORM OF THE ESSAY” GEORG LUKÁCS21 2. THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES ROBERT MUSIL41 3. “ON THE ESSAY AND ITS PROSE” MAX BENSE49 4. “THE ESSAY AS FORM” THEODOR W. ADORNO60 VICONTENTS 5. “PREFACE TO THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY” ALDOUS HUXLEY83 PART II. THE ESSAY FILM THROUGH HISTORY 6. “THE FILM ESSAY: A NEW TYPE OF DOCUMENTARY FILM” HANS RICHTER89 7. “THE FUTURE OF CINEMA” ALEXANDRE ASTRUC93 8. “BAZIN ON MARKER” ANDRÉ BAZIN102 PART III. CONTEMPORARY POSITIONS 9. “IN SEARCH OF THE CENTAUR: THE ESSAY-FILM” PHILLIP LOPATE109 10. “THE POLITICAL IM/PERCEPTIBLE IN THE ESSAY FILM: FAROCKI’S IMAGES OF THE WORLD AND THE INSCRIPTION OF WAR” NORA M. ALTER134 CONTENTSVII 11. “ESSAY QUESTIONS” PAUL ARTHUR161 12. “THE ELECTRONIC ESSAY” MICHAEL RENOV172 13. “THE ESSAY FILM: PROBLEMS, DEFINITIONS, TEXTUAL COMMITMENTS” LAURA RASCAROLI183 14. “OF THE HISTORY OF THE ESSAY FILM: VERTOV TO VARDA” TIMOTHY CORRIGAN197 15. “THE CINEMA AND THE ESSAY AS A WAY OF THINKING” RAYMOND BELLOUR227 16. “THE ESSAY FILM: FROM FILM FESTIVAL FAVORITE TO FLEXIBLE COMMODITY FORM?” THOMAS ELSAESSER240 PART IV. FILMMAKERS ON THE ESSAYISTIC 17. “PERFORMING BORDERS: TRANSNATIONAL VIDEO” URSULA BIEMANN261 VIIICONTENTS 18. “PROPOSAL FOR A TUSSLE” JEAN-PIERRE GORIN269 19. “THE ESSAY AS CONFORMISM? SOME NOTES ON GLOBAL IMAGE ECONOMIES” HITO STEYERL276 20. “ON WRITING THE FILM ESSAY” LYNNE SACHS287 21. “TRAMP STEAMER” ROSS MC ELWEE292 22. “THE ABCs OF THE FILM ESSAY” HARUN FAROCKI AND CHRISTA BLÜMLINGER297 23. “RIDDLES AS ESSAY FILM” LAURA MULVEY314 24. “CERTAIN OBLIQUENESSES” RENÉE GREEN323 25. “ESSAY DOCUMENTARY: THE DISEMBODIED NARRATOR AND AN UNCLAIMED IMAGE THAT FLOATS THROUGH SPACE AND TIME” REA TAJIRI333 CONTENTSIX 26. “FROM TEN THOUSAND WAVES TO LINA BO BARDI, VIA KAPITAL” ISAAC JULIEN335 Bibliography 345 Contributors 351 Permissions 361 Index 363 ESSAYS ON THE ESSAY FILM INTRODUCTION NORA M. ALTER AND TIMOTHY CORRIGAN Essays have a history as long as human expression itself. For some, the essayistic form has its roots in Platonic dialogues and Roman epistles; for most, Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon are the modern forefathers of the genre in their explicit use of the term “essay” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Perhaps the most commonly agreed-on origin of the essay is the work of Montaigne (1533–1592). For him, the word “essays” emphasizes their provisional and explorative nature as “attempts,” “tries,” or “tests” that produce views of, comments on, and judgments of his falter- ing memory, love, friendship, lying, a “monstrous childe,” and a plethora of other common and uncommon questions picked almost haphazardly from a mind observing the world passing before and through it. Imag- ined, to some extent, as an active intellectual exchange with his deceased friend Étienne de La Boétie, Montaigne’s essays describe not only the con- stant changes and adjustments of a mind as it defers to experience but also the transformation of the essayistic self as part of that process. Over the following centuries, the essay evolved from its literary precedents to include the photographic essays of the twentieth century, from Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), through James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), to Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974–1975). Currently, the essayistic idea informs museum installations like John Akomfrah’s Unfinished Con- versation (2012) and Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves (2010), as well as 2INTRODUCTION many digital platforms, including Chris Marker’s Second Life and Kos- inski’s Channel on YouTube. Amid this proliferation, the essay film has emerged as one the its most creative, ubiquitous, and important forms in modern media history. Central to this expansion, the global reach of the contemporary essay film has become well established through films and commentaries from Africa, East Asia, and South Asia. A SHORT HISTORY Even through the relatively short span of the past 120 years of film history, the essay film itself accounts for myriad formal and cultural practices and changing definitions. A case can certainly be made for the early signs of the essayistic genre in the short travelogues, topicals, and lecture films of the late 1890s, as these documentary-style and educational films are less about entertainment and more about the dissemination of information and ideas. A review in 1909 of D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat, about the capitalist exploitation of the wheat trade, aligns that early film explic- itly with an intervention in the public domain associated with editorials and essays: “The picture . is an argument, an editorial, an essay on a vital subject of deep interest to all. [Yet] no orator, no editorial writer, no essayist, could so strongly and effectively present the thoughts that are conveyed in this picture. It is another demonstration of the force and power of motion pictures as a means of conveying ideas.”1 By the 1920s and 1930s, key film practices begin to appear at the inter- section of documentaries and avant-garde cinema, an intersection that for some scholars and critics lays the groundwork for the essay film. Often noted are Sergei Eisenstein’s early references to the essay film and his unachieved desire to make Marx’s Capital into a political and social science argument on film. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, “city” films, such as Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Jean Vigo’s Apropos of Nice (1930), and Luis Buñuel’s sar- donic travelogue Land Without Bread (1933) begin to ironize, personalize, and aestheticize documentary subjects (daily life in a Russian metropo- lis, the strata of society in a French resort town, and impoverished rural INTRODUCTION3 communities in Spain) in a manner that suggests another focus of the essay film: an oblique cinematic encounter with everyday realities. Even in these early experiments in cinematic representation, many of the defining features of the essay and essay film begin to appear: the blending of fact and fiction, the mixing of art- and documentary-film styles, the foregrounding of a personal or subjective point of view, a focus on public life, a dramatic tension between audial and visual discourses, and a dialogic encounter with audiences and viewers. In the following decades, essay films grow increasingly visible and more commonly defined as cinematic versions of the literary and photo essay. In Listen to Britain (1942) and A Diary for Timothy (1945), film- maker Humphrey Jennings creates versions of the essay film as complex and particularly literary reflections on the public crisis of England during World War II through the lens of a personal voice-over struggling to make sense of that war. In 1948, French filmmaker Alexandre Astruc coins the term caméra-stylo as “a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel.”2 By the 1950s, the Cinématheque français, founded by Henri Langlois in 1936 with filmmaker Georges Franju, becomes the most prominent product of the ciné-club tradition inherited from the 1920s, a tradition that ushered in changes and new directions in the spectatorial dynamics as a dialogic exchange of ideas and commentary between the film and its audience. By 1955, the European confederation Cinéma d’art et d’essai helps to shape what is sometimes called “advanced European art cinema,” and by the mid-1950s, the term essai cinématographique is in frequent use in France. Perhaps most important in the postwar emergence of the essay film, in 1958 the profoundly influential André Bazin famously character- izes Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia (1958) as a new form of cinema that he designates the essay film. Meanwhile, various new-wave cinemas around the world begin to move away from explorations of alternative narrative forms and to embrace an essayistic reformulation of documentaries and other formats, often in the service of progressive ideologies or politics. French filmmaker and Cahiers du cinéma writer Jacques Rivette cites the groundwork of the Italian neorealist movement and, specifically, Roberto Rossellini as shap- ing a new essayistic perspective on film. Reconfiguring the implications 4INTRODUCTION of the short film in April 1955, Rivette’s essay “Letter on Rossellini” identi- fies a trend that would characterize even longer films as cinematic drafts or sketches. In these films, he argues, “the indefatigable eye of the cam- era invariably assumes the role of the pencil,” so that “a temporal sketch is perpetuated before our eyes.”3 Specifically in Rossellini’s Paisa (1946), Germany, Year Zero (1948), and Europa ’51 (1952), there is “the common sense of the draft.
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  • A Mode of Production and Distribution

    A Mode of Production and Distribution

    Chapter Three A Mode of Production and Distribution An Economic Concept: “The Small Budget Film,” Was it Myth or Reality? t has often been assumed that the New Wave provoked a sudden Ibreak in the production practices of French cinema, by favoring small budget films. In an industry characterized by an inflationary spiral of ever-increasing production costs, this phenomenon is sufficiently original to warrant investigation. Did most of the films considered to be part of this movement correspond to this notion of a small budget? We would first have to ask: what, in 1959, was a “small budget” movie? The average cost of a film increased from roughly $218,000 in 1955 to $300,000 in 1959. That year, at the moment of the emergence of the New Wave, 133 French films were produced; of these, 33 cost more than $400,000 and 74 cost more than $200,000. That leaves 26 films with a budget of less than $200,000, or “low budget productions;” however, that can hardly be used as an adequate criterion for movies to qualify as “New Wave.”1 Even so, this budgetary trait has often been employed to establish a genealogy for the movement. It involves, primarily, “marginal” films produced outside the dominant commercial system. Two Small Budget Films, “Outside the System” From the point of view of their mode of production, two titles are often imposed as reference points: Jean-Pierre Melville’s self-produced Silence of 49 A Mode of Production and Distribution the Sea, 1947, and Agnes Varda’s La Pointe courte (Short Point), made seven years later, in 1954.