i How the Essay Film Thinks ii iii How the Essay Film Thinks Laura Rascaroli 1 iv 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rascaroli, Laura author. Title: How the essay film thinks / Laura Rascaroli. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2017. Identifiers: LCCN 2016044879 (print) | LCCN 2017006161 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190238247 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190238254 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190238261 (updf) | ISBN 9780190656393 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Experimental films—History and criticism. | Documentary films—History and criticism. | Motion pictures—Aesthetics. | BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / History & Criticism. | PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / Screenwriting. | ART / Film & Video. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.E96 R37 2017 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.E96 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/611—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016044879 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printed by Webcom, Inc., Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America v CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction— Openings: Thinking Cinema 1 1. Medium: Liquid Image, Fluid Cinema 23 2. Montage: Essayistic Thinking at the Juncture of Images 47 3. Genre: The Speck of Irony and the Ethnolandscape in Ruins 69 4. Temporality: The Palimpsestic Road and Diachronic Thinking 93 5. Sound: The Politics of the Sonic Interstice and the Dissonance of the Neutral 115 6. Narration: Epistolarity and Lyricism as Argumentation 143 7. Framing: Looking for an Object, or The Essay Film as Theoretical Practice 165 Conclusion— Reframing 187 Bibliography 191 Index 201 vi vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My journey toward this book began after the publication ofThe Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film in 2009. Although for some time I believed that my new work on the topic consisted in an extension of the theses I had put forward in that book, in particular on the communica- tive structures of first- person cinema, I eventually came to realize that my focus had shifted to questions of usage and functioning, thus prompting a new understanding of the essay film’s method and practices, which is at the basis of the present monograph. This process was aided and, indeed, catalyzed by the work that I have been invited to present and publish since The Personal Camera, and so, at the end of this journey, I gratefully acknowledge those who have given me precious opportunities to discuss my ideas with diverse audiences, to be challenged by them, and to receive their responses. My conversations with Kieron Corless and Chris Darke at an essay film season held at the British Film Institute, London, in August 2013 were particularly illuminat- ing; I thank them and David Edgar for inviting me, as well as the wonder- fully cinephile BFI audience for the exciting discussion that followed my presentation. I enjoyed equally stimulating debates at Visible Evidence XX, Stockholm, where Malin Wahlberg, Anu Koivunen, and Patrik Sjöberg gen- erously asked me to deliver a keynote address; at the “The Self- Portrait in the Moving Image” event organized by Laura Busetta, Marlène Monteiro, and Muriel Tinel- Temple at the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image in March 2014, London; at the 2014 Avant Festival in Cork, on the invitation of Sarah Hayden; at an event on Pier Paolo Pasolini organized by Giuliana Pieri and James Williams at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, London, in October 2014; at the 2015 PLASTIK Festival of Artists’ Moving Image in Galway curated by Megs Morley; at the 2015 Essay Film Festival organized by the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, an invitation for which I am indebted to Laura Mulvey and Michael Temple; at the 5th Association of Moving Image Researchers Annual Meeting, Lisbon, where I was asked to deliver a keynote by Tiago Baptista and Susana Viegas; at the Architecture viii | Essay | Film Symposium, organized at the Bartlett School of Architecture by Anna Andersen, Penelope Haralambidou, and Nguyen Phuong- Trâm in April 2016. A very special thank you goes to Susana Barriga and to the stu- dents of the Maestría Cine Ensayo at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV for the two unforgettable weeks of intensive teaching and learning on the essay film that we shared in San Antonio de Los Baños, Cuba, in spring 2016. I am equally indebted to the colleagues and friends who invited me to present my developing work on the essay film at their universities over the past few years: Efrén Cuevas (Universidad de Navarra), Cecilia Sayad (University of Kent), Liz Greene (Dublin City University), Alisa Lebow (University of Sussex), John David Rhodes (University of Cambridge), and Alison Smith, Lisa Shaw, and Tom Whittaker (University of Liverpool). A heartfelt thank you goes to Matt Carter and Adam Jones for gener- ously granting me access to LUX’s film archives; to Ilona Jurkonyte for our conversations on the essay film under totalitarian regimes; to Juan Antonio Suárez for letting me have an offprint of his inspirational work on noise in experimental film; to Gianluca Pulsoni for sharing his thoughts on a num- ber of essayists; to Mary Thompson for generously engaging in dialogue on Peter Thompson’s films; and to Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Rebecca Baron, Irina Botea, Mohammadreza Farzad, and Nguyễn Trinh Thi for granting me access to their wonderful work and for discussing their films so produc- tively and so generously with me. An early version of Chapter Two was first published inHolocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium, edited by Axel Bangert, Robert Gordon, and Libby Saxton and published by Legenda in 2013. I thank the editors for inviting me to contribute to their volume and Graham Nelson at Legenda for generously granting permission to republish my work here. Working with Oxford University Press has been a privilege. I thank Brendan O’Neill for commissioning the book, Suzanne Ryan, Editor in Chief, Humanities, for so sensitively engaging with the manuscript during the refereeing process, and Norman Hirschy for being such a responsive and supportive editor. Of all the friends and dear friends who have sustained me in precious ways while writing this book, I thank in particular Alba Bariffi, Cristiana Longo, and Maria Mantovani for always being unfailingly and lovingly there; Pierluigi Laffi for our inspiring conversations on film technique and for being such a wonderful human being; Ewa Mazierska for her contin- ued openness to our precious, ongoing dialogue; Jill Murphy for being such a constant collaborator and point of reference; and Gwenda Young for enduring the toughest part of the past few years with me. Stefano Baschiera knows why he’s being thanked here. [ viii ] Acknowledgments ix Finally, it is with infinite tenderness that I express my gratitude to my family for their love—in particular, Mum and Dad, Luca, Paola, my mag- nificent Alice, and my funny, clever nieces and nephew, both Irish and Italian— Gemma, Aileen, Tullio, and Claudia. My last thoughts are for my darling aunt Carla, for her capacity for love, her generosity, her life of work, her hidden cigs, the bottle of mint syrup, our chats on the swing; and for my dearest Eugenio, who knew what mat- ters most in life, and with whom it was always possible to talk both as an uncle and as a friend. Ciao zii. Acknowledgments [ ix ] x 1 Introduction— Openings Thinking Cinema The “essayist” approach is not to impose a definitive meaning to the images, but to create an open- ing. (Tode 1997– 1998, 41) ess than a decade ago, the expression “essay film” was encountered only sporadically; today, the term has been widely integrated into film criti- cismL and is increasingly adopted by filmmakers and artists worldwide to characterize their work—while continuing to offer a precious margin of resistance to closed definitions. Examples of filmmaking that have been called essayistic (even if the term itself has not always universally been used) have existed since at least the 1930s, although it was groundbreak- ing, reflexive work by filmmakers and intellectuals, in France especially, in the 1950s that made of the essay film, whether so called or not, an appre- ciable strand of nonfiction since then— examples include Jean- Isidore Isou with Traité de bave et d’éternité (Venom and Eternity, 1951), George Franju with Hôtel des Invalides (1952), Alain Resnais with Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues also Die, 1953), Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), and Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), Chris Marker with Dimanche à Pekin (1956) and Lettre de Sibérie (Letter from Siberia, 1957), Agnès Varda with L’Opéra- mouffe (Diary of a Pregnant Woman, 1958), Jean Cocteau with Le Testament d’Orphée (Testament of Orpheus, 1959), and Guy Debord with Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, 1959).