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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Essay Film

Introduction, anthologies.

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• Spectator Engagement
• Personal Documentary
• 1940s Watershed Years
• Chris Marker
• Alain Resnais
• Jean-Luc Godard
• Harun Farocki
• Latin American Cinema
• Installation and Exhibition

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Essay Film by Yelizaveta Moss LAST REVIEWED: 24 March 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 24 March 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0216

The term “essay film” has become increasingly used in film criticism to describe a self-reflective and self-referential documentary cinema that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Scholars unanimously agree that the first published use of the term was by Richter in 1940. Also uncontested is that Andre Bazin, in 1958, was the first to analyze a film, which was Marker’s Letter from Siberia (1958), according to the essay form. The French New Wave created a popularization of short essay films, and German New Cinema saw a resurgence in essay films due to a broad interest in examining German history. But beyond these origins of the term, scholars deviate on what exactly constitutes an essay film and how to categorize essay films. Generally, scholars fall into two camps: those who find a literary genealogy to the essay film and those who find a documentary genealogy to the essay film. The most commonly cited essay filmmakers are French and German: Marker, Resnais, Godard, and Farocki. These filmmakers are singled out for their breadth of essay film projects, as opposed to filmmakers who have made an essay film but who specialize in other genres. Though essay films have been and are being produced outside of the West, scholarship specifically addressing essay films focuses largely on France and Germany, although Solanas and Getino’s theory of “Third Cinema” and approval of certain French essay films has produced some essay film scholarship on Latin America. But the gap in scholarship on global essay film remains, with hope of being bridged by some forthcoming work. Since the term “essay film” is used so sparingly for specific films and filmmakers, the scholarship on essay film tends to take the form of single articles or chapters in either film theory or documentary anthologies and journals. Some recent scholarship has pointed out the evolutionary quality of essay films, emphasizing their ability to change form and style as a response to conventional filmmaking practices. The most recent scholarship and conference papers on essay film have shifted from an emphasis on literary essay to an emphasis on technology, arguing that essay film has the potential in the 21st century to present technology as self-conscious and self-reflexive of its role in art.

Both anthologies dedicated entirely to essay film have been published in order to fill gaps in essay film scholarship. Biemann 2003 brings the discussion of essay film into the digital age by explicitly resisting traditional German and French film and literary theory. Papazian and Eades 2016 also resists European theory by explicitly showcasing work on postcolonial and transnational essay film.

Biemann, Ursula, ed. Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age . New York: Springer, 2003.

This anthology positions Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) as the originator of the post-structuralist essay film. In opposition to German and French film and literary theory, Biemann discusses video essays with respect to non-linear and non-logical movement of thought and a range of new media in Internet, digital imaging, and art installation. In its resistance to the French/German theory influence on essay film, this anthology makes a concerted effort to include other theoretical influences, such as transnationalism, postcolonialism, and globalization.

Papazian, Elizabeth, and Caroline Eades, eds. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia . London: Wallflower, 2016.

This forthcoming anthology bridges several gaps in 21st-century essay film scholarship: non-Western cinemas, popular cinema, and digital media.

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The Best Essay Films, Ranked

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In literature, an essay is a composition dealing with its subject from a personal point of view. The pioneer of this genre, 16th-century French writer and philosopher Michel de Montaigne, used the French word "essai" to describe his "attempts" to put subjective thoughts into writing. Deriving its name from Montaigne’s magnum opus Essays and the literary genre in general, essay films are defined as a self-reflexive form of avant-garde, experimental, sort of documentary cinema that can be traced back to the dawn of filmmaking.

From early silent essay films, like D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera , to in-depth explorations from the second half of the 20th century, these are some of the best essay films ever made, ranked.

8 A Corner in Wheat

The 14-minute short A Corner in Wheat (1909) is considered by many to be the world's earliest essay film. Directed by filmmaking pioneer D. W. Griffith, this shot follows a ruthless tycoon who wants to control the wheat market. A powerful portrayal of capitalistic greed , A Corner in Wheat is a bold commentary on the contrast between the wealthy speculators and the agricultural poor. It is simply one of the best early short films.

7 Two or Three Things I Know About Her

Described by MUBI as "a landmark transition from the maestro’s jazzy genre deconstructions of the 60s to his gorgeous and inquisitive essay films of the future" (such as Histoire(s) du cinéma , Goodbye to Language , The Image Book ), 1967's Two or Three Things I Know About Her is Jean-Luc Godard’s collage of modern life.

Related: The Best Jean-Luc Godard Films, Ranked

The story of 24 hours in the life of housewife Juliette (Marina Vlady), who moonlights as a prostitute, is only a template for the filmmaker’s social observation of 1960s France, sprinkled with references to the nightmares of the Vietnam War. Whispering in our ears as narrator, Godard tells us much more than two or three things about "her," referring to Paris rather than Juliette.

6 F for Fake

Orson Welles’ 1973 essay film F for Fake focuses on three hoaxers, the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory who had a talent for copying styles of noted painters; his biographer Clifford Irving whose fake "authorized biography" of Howard Hughes was one of the biggest literary scandals of the 20th century; and Welles himself with his famous War of the Worlds hoax. One of the best Orson Welles films , F for Fake investigates the tenuous lines between forgery and art, illusion and life.

5 News from Home

An unforgettable time capsule of New York in the 1970s, News from Home features Belgian film director Chantal Akerman reading melancholic, sometimes passive-aggressive letters from her mother over beautiful shots of New York, where Akerman relocated at the age of 21. Released in 1976, after the filmmaker’s breakthrough drama Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles , News from Home makes plain the disconnection in family, while New York and the young artist’s alienating come more and more to the front.

4 As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

Jonas Mekas, the godfather of American avant-garde cinema, made one of the most personal, but at the same time one of the most universal films ever. It is his 2000 experimental documentary As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty . Compiled from Mekas' home movies from 1970-1999, this nearly five-hour essay film shows the loveliness of everyday life. Footage of what Mekas calls "little fragments of paradise," the first steps of the filmmaker’s children, their happy life in New York, trips to Europe, and on and on, are complemented by Mekas’ commentary. It is a poetic diary about nothing but life.

3 Sans Soleil

Directed by Chris Marker, king of the essay film , 1983’s Sans Soleil ( Sunless ) follows an unseen cameraman named Sandor Krasna, Marker's alter ego, who journeys from Africa to Japan, "two extreme poles of survival." The 100-minute poetical collage of Marker’s original documentary footage, clips from films and television, sequences from other filmmakers, and stock videos comes complete with the voice of a nameless female narrator, who reads Krasna's letters that sum up his lifetime's travels.

Like Marker's French New Wave masterpiece La Jetee , Sans Soleil reflects on human experience, the nature of memory, understanding of time, and life on our planet. It is pure beauty.

Made when the filmmaker, Derek Jarman, was dying from AIDS-related complications that rendered him partially blind and capable only of experiencing shades of blue, the great experimental film Blue from 1993 is like no other. Jarman’s 79-minute final feature consists of a single shot of one color — International Klein Blue. Against a blank blue screen, the iconic director interweaves a medley of sounds, music, voices of four narrators (Jarman himself, the chameleonic Tilda Swinton , Nigel Terry, and John Quentin), the filmmaker’s daydreams, adventures of Blue, as a character and color, diary-like entries about Jarman’s life and current events, names of his lovers and friends who had died of AIDS, fragments of poetry, and much more.

Related: 8 Must-Watch Movies From LGBTQ+ Filmmakers

A deeply personal goodbye and a sort of self-portrait, this essay film is dedicated to Yves Klein , the artist who mixed this deep blue hue and said, "At first there is nothing, then there is a profound nothingness, after that a blue profundity".

1 Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov, one of cinema’s greatest innovators, believed that the "eye" of the camera captures life better than the subjective eye of a human. In the 1920s, he started looking for cinematic truth, showing life outside the field of human vision through a mix of rhythmic editing, multiple exposures, experimental camera angles, backward sequences, freeze frames, extreme close-ups, and other "cinema eye" techniques. This is how Vertov’s best-known film, 1929’s Man with a Movie Camera , was made. This narrative-free essay shows the kaleidoscopic life of Soviet cities. An avant-garde urban poem, Man with a Movie Camera makes clear what the beauty of cinema is.

• Movie Lists

The secret history of the essay film

Charting the resurgence of ‘sort of documentaries’ to celebrate chris marker, king of the essay film.

“Essay films are arguably the most innovative and popular form of filmmaking since the 1990s,” wrote Timothy Corrigan in his notable 2011 book,  The Essay Film . True, perhaps, but mention of the genre to your average joe won’t spark the instant recognition of today’s romcoms, sci-fis and period dramas. The thing is, essay films have been around since the dawn of cinema: they emerged not long after the  Lumière brothers  recorded the first ever motion pictures of Lyonnaise factory workers in 1894, yet their definition is still ambiguous.

They are similar to documentary and non-fiction film in that they are often based in reality, using words, images and sounds to convey a message. But according to Chris Darke – co-curator of the Whitechapel Gallery’s current retrospective  of the great essay filmmaker Chris Marker – it is “the personal aspect and style of address” that makes the essay film distinct. It is this flexibility that has appealed to contemporary filmmakers, permitting a fresh, nuanced viewing experience.

Geoff Andrew, a senior programmer at the BFI who helped curate last year’s landmark essay film season, explained, “they are sort of documentaries, sort of non-fiction films.” The issue is that some filmmakers try to provide an objective point of view when it is just not possible. “There’s always somebody manipulating footage and manipulating reality to present some sort of message.” Andrew continued, “So, in a way, all documentaries are essay films.”

But the essay film is particularly resurgent these days, with filmmakers like Michael Moore , Werner Herzog , and Nick Broomfield  molding the genre in their own ways. Their popularity isn’t just due to incendiary topics like men getting eaten by bears as in Herzog’s Grizzly Man  and high school massacres as in Moore’s Bowling for Columbine ; essay films are capable of compelling beauty. Now, with the Whitechapel Gallery ’s retrospective of the late Frenchman, Chris Marker , arguably the greatest essay filmmaker there’s ever been, we take a look at the essay film’s secret history.

1909  -  D. W. Griffith ’s   A Corner in Wheat

Considered by some to be the first essay film ever, A Corner in Wheat  is a little subversive thorn in the side of the man. Lasting only 14 minutes, it tells the tale of a ruthless crop gambler who amasses riches by monopolising the wheat market, exploits the agricultural poor, and is promptly killed under a pile of his own grain. Think twice, greedy capitalists.

1929  -   Dziga  Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera

“The film drama is the opium of the people,” proclaimed Soviet film pioneer  Dziga Vertov , “down with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios.” He was the most radical of his fellow Soviet filmmaker compatriots, and Man with a Movie Camera  was his masterpiece. In it, he tried to create an “international language of cinema” through a beguiling mix of jump cuts, split screens and superimpositions. Vertov’s idea was to uncover the artifice of filmmaking, with one scene of the film depicting a cameraman inside a giant beer.

1940  -  Hans Richter’s The Film Essay

The term “essay film” was originally coined by German artist Hans Richter, who wrote in his 1940 paper, The Film Essay : “The film essay enables the filmmaker to make the ‘invisible’ world of thoughts and ideas visible on the screen... The essay film produces complex thought – reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also be contradictory, irrational, and fantastic.” So while World War II was blazing away, a new cinema was born.

1982  - Chris  Marker’s Sans Soleil

You know that this brilliant, freewheeling travelogue is something special when it suggests that Pac-Man is “a perfect graphic metaphor for the human condition.” It takes in anti-colonial struggles, sumo wrestling, a volcanic eruption in Iceland, the antiquities of the Vatican, Marker’s love of cats and more. An unnamed female narrates a circuitous journey from Africa to Japan, in an engaging style never seen before. Some might say he laid down a marker.

1993  -  Derek Jarman’s Blue

Diagnosed with HIV and beginning to lose his eyesight, Jarman  decided to turn his illness into his art. Although the premise of nothing but a dim, blue background accompanied by voiceovers for 79 minutes might not seem enthralling, it really is. Jarman recalls memories of his past lovers, and his current life of endless pill-popping, with a poignant score by Brian Eno  and Simon Fisher Turner .

1998 - Jean -Luc  Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema

Comprised of hundreds of clips of films, music and poetry, this eight part series – that took over a decade to make – remained a secret seen only at a precious few film festivals thanks to the gargantuan amount of rights needed to be cleared. Histoire(s) du cinema is an epic of free association whose central theme is voyeurism, since Godard believes that cinema consists of a man looking at a woman. Harriet Andersson , topless and alluring on a beach in Ingmar Bergman ’s Monika , is one of many examples.

2004  -  Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11

The most successful documentary at the US box office ever, Fahrenheit 9/11  is a prime example of the essay film’s wild popularisation (it also won the Palme d’Or  at Cannes). Michael Moore ’s swipe at the Republican jugular was a classic example of the essay filmmaker’s prominence, outrightly mocking President George W. Bush and questioning the fairness of his election. Disney refused to distribute the film, and the rest is history.

2010  -  Errol Morris’ Tabloid

Tabloid is the outrageous story of a former Miss Wyoming, Joyce McKinney, who was alleged to have kidnapped an American mormon missionary living in England, handcuffed him to a bed in a Devonshire cottage and made him a sex slave. The woman claimed she was saving the man from a cult, but then fleed to Canada wearing a red wig, where she posed as part of a mime troupe. As ever, Errol Morris  deftly offers alternate explanations, which led to McKinney suing him after the release of the film.

2014  -  Hito Steyerl’s How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educationa l

After touring galleries of the world and a recent stint at the ICA, Hito Steyerl ’s How Not To Be Seen made waves as “an art for our times”. It is a disembowelling satire that mocks the idea that it we can become invisible and have genuine privacy, in this digital age. If we want to disappear, it suggests, we should become poor, or hide in plain sight, or get “disappeared” by the authorities.

Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat is on until 22 June at  Whitechapel Gallery

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• Archive Blog

Essays on the Essay Film

About the author.

In addition to his long career in film archiving and curating, Jan-Christopher Horak has taught at universities around the world. His recent book, Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design (2014) was published by University Press of Kentucky.

"Archival Spaces" Blog - Ithaca College

Sans soleil   (1983)

For decades, I’ve been interested in the essay film, ever since I fell in love with Jean-Luc Godard’s work from the 1960s, like Pierrot le fou (1965), Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), but especially since the 1990s, when I wrote about Godard’s colleague Chris Marker, whose Sans soleil (1983) is a masterpiece of the genre.  Recently, I discussed Saul Bass’ Why Man Creates (1968) as an essay film.  But is it a genre?  Straddling documentary and fiction, the subjectivity of the author and the objectivity of the filmed image, vacillating between image and sound, visuality and the word, essay films in many ways defy definition.  Jean-Pierre Gorin, himself a film essayist, writes in Essays on the Essay Film (ed. Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, Columbia University Press, 2017): “They come in all sizes, shapes, and hues – and they will continue to do so... How can one even attempt to draw its floor plan, sketch its history and catalog the idiosyncratic products that appear in its inventory?” (p. 270).

Such semantic nebulousness already held true for the literary essay, as this anthology documents.  Max Bense notes that essays always imply a level of experimentation, because they are exploring various forms of subjectivity.  Similarly, the essays in this volume experiment with possible definitions of film essays.  Essays on the Essay Film is accordingly divided into four sections:  1. Theoretical essays on the essay as a literary form by Georg Lukács, Robert Musil, Max Bense, Theodor W. Adorno and Aldous Huxley.  2. Previously published essays on the essay film by Hans Richter, Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin.  3. Analytical essays by Phillip Lopate, Paul Arthur, Michael Renov, Timothy Corrigan and Raymond Bellour.  4. Essays by filmmakers of the form, including Gorin, Hito Steyerl, Ross McElwee, Laura Mulvey and Isaac Julien.

Pierrot le fou (1965)

The editors make a wise decision to include writings on the literary essay, since many of its characteristics can be applied to essay films.  Georg Lukács, for example, supposes that the essay is not an act of creating the new, but rather only of reconfiguring previously known information.  Max Bense defines essays as a form of experimental writing that eschews absolute statements in the interest of exploring parameters and possibilities.  Theodor Adorno takes Bense a step further by connecting the essay to anti-Platonic values, such as the ephemeral, the transitory, and the fragmentary.  Given the ambiguity of the image, the push and pull between the filmmaker’s subjectivity and the objectivity of the image, are not such values integral to the cinema experience?

The earliest theoretical statements about the essay film come from experimental filmmaker and artist Hans Richter, who in his 1939 tract, Struggle for the Film: Towards a Socially Responsible Cinema , foresees a new form of documentary that has the ability to visualize thought.  Alexander Astruc, an early member of the French New Wave , theorized the future of cinema in neither documentary nor fiction films, but rather in filmmakers who use the camera as a pen— le camera au stylo— for the expression of authorial subjectivity.  Phillip Lopate, on the other hand, defines five characteristics for the essay film:  1. It has to communicate through language, whether spoken or written.  2. It must be the work of a single author.  3. It must set itself the task of solving a specific problem or problems.  4. It must be a wholly personal point of view.  5. It must be eloquent and interesting.  Like Lopate, the late film critic and essayist Paul Arthur focuses on the film auteur, insisting that the essay film must give evidence a critical, self-reflexive author who is able to communicate through word and image.

Timothy Corrigan contributes a historical analysis of the essay film, from Dziga Vertov to Agnès Varda, agreeing with Lukács’ thesis that the essay film indeed creates no new forms, but remixes and recontextualizes ideas that are already in circulation.  The final part of his essay focuses on a close reading of Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000).

Again and again the authors of the volume emphasize the essay film’s openness of form and always-tentative contours that defy any absolute definitions.  Thus, the authors of Essays , as well as the even more subjective contributions of the filmmakers, discuss definitions and characteristics of a genre that isn’t one, unable or unwilling to draw definite conclusions.  They are consciously circling around an indefinable object.  The pleasure here is not to be found in the end goal, but rather in the intellectual journey.  Nevertheless, it would have been nice if there had at least been agreement about when the essay film first appeared in film history, whether with Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Georges Franju’s Le sang des bêtes (1949) or Chris Marker’s Lettre de Sibérie (1958).  A filmography of the essay film would have helped readers visualize the parameters of what films are considered essay films, a common ground for further discussion.  Personally, I would have also liked to have read more about the aesthetics of the essay film, its visual and emotional appeal, not just intellectual pull.  In retrospect, I remember the tactile sensuality of images in many of the films discussed, scenes that evoke emotion.  I also question whether the essay or essay film is mainly a remix, and not in some way an independent creation of aesthetic value.  Despite these slight reservations, this volume is eminently readable and a contribution to understanding a form of cinema that continues to morph and grow.

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• Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media
• The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments
• Laura Rascaroli
• Wayne State University Press
• Volume 49, Number 2, Fall 2008
• 10.1353/frm.0.0019
• View Citation

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• Laura Rascaroli (bio)

The label "essay film" is encountered with ever-increasing frequency in both film reviews and scholarly writings on the cinema, owing to the recent proliferation of unorthodox, personal, reflexive "new" documentaries. In an article dedicated to the phenomenon that he defines as the "recent onslaught of essay films," Paul Arthur proposes: "Galvanized by the intersection of personal, subjective and social history, the essay has emerged as the leading non-fiction form for both intellectual and artistic innovation." 1 Although widely used, the category is under-theorized, even more so than other forms of non-fiction. In spite of the necessary brevity of this contribution, by tracing the birth of the essay in both film theory and film history, and by examining and evaluating existing definitions, a theory of the essay film can be shaped, some order in its intricate field made, and some light shed on this erratic but fascinating and ever more relevant cinematic form.

Most of the existing scholarly contributions acknowledge that the definition of essay film is problematic, and suggest it is a hybrid form that crosses boundaries and rests somewhere in between fiction and nonfiction cinema. According to Giannetti, for instance, "an essay is neither fiction nor fact, but a personal investigation involving both the passion and intellect of the author." 2 Arthur's framing of such in-betweenness is particularly instructive: "one way to think about the essay film is as a meeting ground for documentary, avant-garde, and art film impulses." 3 Nora Alter insists that the essay film is " not a genre, as it strives to be beyond formal, conceptual, and social constraint. Like 'heresy' in the Adornean literary essay, the essay film disrespects traditional boundaries, is transgressive both structurally and conceptually, it is self-reflective and self-reflexive." 4 [End Page 24]

Transgression is a characteristic that the essay film shares with the literary essay, which is also often described as a protean form. The two foremost theorists of the essay are, as is well known, Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács; both describe it as indeterminate, open, and, ultimately, indefinable. According to Adorno, "the essay's innermost formal law is heresy" 5 ; for Lukács, the essay must manufacture the conditions of its own existence: "the essay has to create from within itself all the preconditions for the effectiveness and solidity of its vision." 6 Other theorists and essayists make similar claims: for Jean Starobinski, the essay "does not obey any rules" 7 ; for Aldous Huxley, it "is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything" 8 ; for Snyder, it is a "nongenre." 9 As these examples indicate, many existing definitions of both literary and filmic essays are simultaneously vague and sweeping. Indeed, elusiveness and inclusiveness seem to become the only characterizing features of the essayistic; as Renov observes: "the essay form, notable for its tendency towards complication (digression, fragmentation, repetition, and dispersion) rather than composition, has, in its four-hundred-years history, continued to resist the efforts of literary taxonomists, confounding the laws of genre and classification, challenging the very notion of text and textual economy." 10

As José Moure argued, the fact that we resort to a literary term such as "essay" points to the difficulty that we experience when attempting to categorize certain, unclassifiable films. 11 This observation flags the risk that we accept the current state of under-theorization of the form, and use the term indiscriminately, in order to classify films that escape other labeling, as the following remark appears to endorse: "The essayistic quality becomes the only possibility to designate the cinema that resists against commercial productions." 12 The temptation of assigning the label of essay film to all that is non-commercial or experimental or unclassifiable must, however, be resisted, or else the term will cease being epistemologically useful, and we will end up equating very diverse films, as sometimes happens in the critical literature—for instance, works such as Sans Soleil/Sunless (Chris Marker, FR, 1983) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, US, 2004), which have very little in common aside the extensive voice-over and the fact that they both...

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Video essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent

In a world bedazzled by intractable images, do we need the essay film now more than ever? As S&S explores its art in our latest Deep Focus primer and BFI Southbank season, Kevin B. Lee weighs up this distinctively self-aware, searching form of cinema through both video and text.

Kevin B. Lee Updated: 22 May 2017

I cannot recall how the term ‘video essay’ came to be the adopted nomenclature for the ever-increasing output of online videos produced over the past few years by an ever-growing range of self-appointed practitioners (including myself). My own entrance into this field was an organic synthesis of my backgrounds as a film critic and a filmmaker, two modes that had competed with each other in my mind until I started to pursue the possibilities of critically exploring cinema through the medium itself. This practice is readily possible in an age when digital technology enables virtually anyone with a computer (not even a video camera, as images are overly abundant and accessible) to produce media with nearly as much ease as it is to consume it.

The Sight & Sound Deep Focus season Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film runs at BFI Southbank 1-28 August 2013, with a keynote lecture by Kodwo Eshun on 1 August, a talk by writer and academic Laura Rascaroli on 27 August and a closing panel debate on 28 August.

Does this type of production herald an exciting new era for media literacy, enacting Alexandre Astruc ’s prophecy of cinema becoming our new lingua franca? Or is it just an insidious new form of media consumption? At least that’s how much of what lately is termed ‘video essay’ strikes me: an onslaught of supercuts, list-based montages and fan videos that do less to shed critical insight into their source material than offer a new way for the pop culture snake to eat its long tail.

Minding the as-yet-unfulfilled potential of critical online media, I take great interest in the BFI Southbank’s August S&S Deep Focus series on essay filmmaking as a much-needed occasion to reflect on the significance of this word ‘essay’ in relation to film and video. However, having watched and re-watched most of the films in the series, and engaged with several critical texts on the essay film, I’m no longer even certain if most of the videos I’ve produced over the years qualify as ‘essayistic’.

I pondered this when encountering essay film scholar Laura Rascaroli’s disqualification of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 as an essay film :

“Spectators are asked to follow the facts, to watch and listen, and progressively discover an objective truth, to which the author holds the key.”

Much writing on essay films espouse a resistance to the didactic, the pedagogical (which my work has been described, and not always in tones of approbation), or the polemical, while embracing the form’s ability, through the combination of images, sounds and words, to express the process of subjective thought. In the words of Hans Richter , who coined the term in 1940, the essay film:

“allows the filmmaker to transgress the rules and parameters of the traditional documentary practice, granting the imagination with all its artistic potentiality free reign.”

However, these grandiose assertions confound as much as they clarify what constitutes an essay film. Rascaroli’s dismissal of Moore underestimates how his blunt-force polemics elicit (and even solicit) an active response from the audience, stimulating a critical engagement with the film and its political discourse, a strategy akin to the incendiary film essays of Santiago Álvarez (featured in the BFI series).

Richter’s definition doesn’t help much to differentiate the essay form from much of experimental cinema. And, as pointed out in the essays The Essay as Conformism by Hito Steyerl and Deviation as Norm by Volker Pantenburg, the common notion of the essay film as a form for free-flowing, subjective non-conformity, a concept borrowed from literary conceptions of the essay that are as old as Michel de Montaigne , has itself become a convention bordering on cliché.

My own working definition of the essay film errs on the side of inclusion at the expense of qualitative judgment or inflated promises of uniqueness: for me, an essay film explicitly reflects on the materials it presents, to actualise the thinking process itself. This gives a firmer delineation against a more general conception of experimental or documentary film practices, while also entertaining other films that one might otherwise neglect as ‘essay films’. Looking at the top results of last year’s S&S Greatest Films of All Time poll , one finds no-brainer examples like Sans soleil and Histoire(s) du cinema , but one should certainly also include the likes of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera , Tarkovsky’s Mirror – and why not Malick’s The Thin Red Line ?

Essay film candidates in the top 250 of Sight & Sound’s 2012 Greatest Films of All Time poll

8.   Man with a Movie Camera

19.   Mirror (1974)

48.   Histoire(s) du cinema

69.   Sans Soleil (1982)

102.   Two or Three Things I Know About Her…

127.   Hiroshima Mon Amour

=183.   Listen to Britain

=183.   The Thin Red Line

202.   Russian Ark

235.   The House is Black

To pose a more critical question than “are they or aren’t they?”, I wonder if the habitual exclusion of the aforementioned titles from the essay film conversation has to do with an urge to reserve the distinction for films and filmmakers who more thoroughly occupy a fringe area existing outside of conventional film genres. On this score the cause célèbre is Chris Marker , who figures prominently in the theorising done to date by essay film scholars such as Rascaroli, Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan, as well as in Andrew Tracy’s feature article on the subject in the August 2013 issue of Sight & Sound.

Tracy’s essay gives a compelling account of the evolution of what in hindsight came to be known as the essay-film form, which, according to his telling, seems to culminate with the Left Bank triumvirate (amply represented in the BFI series) of Marker, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda , with their interrogations of a world of images – and of the power of the moving image itself – characteristically set to literate voiceovers of wilful indeterminacy.

To be sure, these works amount to a defining moment in the evolution of the form but not the defining moment; the three decades since Sans soleil have seen a veritable explosion of essayistic filmmaking that Tracy’s account neglects to acknowledge. Perhaps Marker’s recent passing moves us to attend to his sui generis contributions to cinema – but at the recent Flaherty Film Seminar on documentary film, the halo cast around Marker’s memory was so thick as to be suffocating. His legacy has become so firmly tied with the essay film that many presume a subjective voiceover narration is essential to such works. But over the last 30 years, the centrality of the essay film voiceover has been thoroughly complicated (cf. the Black Audio Film Collective’s masterfully polyphonal Handsworth Songs ), subverted (Ben Rivers’ faux-anthropological Slow Action ) or altogether abandoned (Jose Luis Guerin’s wordlessly analytical Train of Shadows ).

To Tracy’s credit, he links the use of voiceover to a purpose that he and I both consider essential to essay filmmaking – in his words, “to interrogate the image, to dispel the illusion of its sovereignty.” This discontentedness with the cinema, and all that it has promised us over the past century (total entertainment, total art, total Bazinian reality), is one of the profoundest subtexts to Tracy’s piece, a drop-kick through the looking glass of the screen into the world around it, a world it has done as much to distort or distract us from as it has revealed and connected back to us.

Where Tracy and I seem to differ is in the necessity of literary techniques such as the voiceover in determining cinema’s capacity to interrogate itself; where he seems to hold that such interpolations are necessary to create the necessary critical distance to cinema that enables the essayistic mode, I hold out that moving images on their own contain tremendous as-yet-untapped potential to shed critical light on themselves. To quote no less a Marker enthusiast than Kodwo Eshun of the Otolith Group [ homepage ]:

“To me, the essayistic is not about a particular generic fascination for voiceover or montage, the essayistic is dissatisfaction, it’s discontent with the duties of an image and the obligations of a sound.”

Here it’s worth mentioning another figure who has done as much as Marker to define essay filmmaking practice over the last 30 years: Harun Farocki , who has spent a lifetime unpacking images as embodiments of social systems (from prison surveillance videos to business presentations to football broadcasts), and as systems of meanings in themselves. He once described his practice as “images commenting on images”, an analytic technique that, through its resourcefulness and simplicity, frequently yields eloquence.

He is represented in the BFI series by How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany , a perversely inspired selection, given how much more overtly essayistic some of Farocki’s other films are compared to this Wiseman -esque observational chronicle of behavioural training sessions (birthing lessons, police drills, a striptease rehearsal). But there’s no question that over the accumulation of scenes, a socially critical discourse emerges, in a mode that’s highly relevant to critical (or uncritical) media today: the film plays like an extended supercut of real-life scripted events.

In his own way, Farocki’s work fulfils another wish for the essay film expressed by Tracy that I share, to see the image “as part of a matrix of meaning that extends beyond the screen.” This takes me back to this article’s starting point in the contemporary morass of online clip compilations and fan tributes that pass as essays, and what alternative mode of media could place us in a more critically aware position with regard to how media functions in our lives, where it comes from, what larger forces are behind its dissemination and our consumption of them.

In this way, the essay film might realise a greater purpose than existing as a trendy label, or as cinema’s submission to high-toned and half-defined literary concepts. Instead, the essay film may serve as a springboard to launch into a vital investigation of knowledge, art and culture in the 21st century, including the question of what role cinema itself might play in this critical project: articulating discontent with its own place in the world.

Sight & Sound: the August 2013 issue

In this issue: Frances Ha’s Greta Gerwig – the most exciting actress in America? Plus Ryan Gosling in Only God Forgives, Wadjda, The Wall,...

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Further reading

The essay film

Andrew Tracy , Katy McGahan , Olaf Möller , Sergio Wolf , Nina Power

What I owe to Chris Marker

Patricio Guzmán

The world at sea: The Forgotten Space

His and her ghosts: reworking La Jetée

Melissa Bradshaw

At home (and away) with Agnès Varda

Daniel Trilling

Out of the ether: Hito Steyerl’s In Free Fall

The land still lies: Handsworth Songs and the English riots

John Akomfrah’s Hauntologies

Laura Allsop

Muck and brass: Bill Morrison and Jóhann Jóhannsson on The Miners’ Hymns

Project me: the Jarman Award 2009

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Introduction

• Published: July 2019
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In this introductory chapter readers are made familiar with the expanding research field of essayistic filmmaking in world cinema-contexts around the globe. Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstíc argue that the essay film is a privileged political and ethical tool by means of which filmmakers around the world approach historically specific and locally, geographically concrete issues against larger global issues and universal concerns. The chapter also includes a genealogical overview of important moments in the development of essay filmmaking, particularly during the 1920s and 1960s, and provides readers with short abstracts on the individual chapters and their specific transnationally inflected case studies on essay film practitioners from around the world.

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Defining the Cinematic Essay: The Essay Film by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades, and Essays on the Essay Film by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan

When it came time for the students to create their own documentaries, one of my policies was for them to “throw objectivity out the window”. To quote John Grierson, documentaries are the “creative treatment of actuality.” Capturing the truth, whatever it may be, is quite nearly impossible if not utterly futile. Often, filmmakers deliberately manipulate their footage in order to achieve educational, informative and persuasive objectives. To illustrate, I screened Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North and always marveled at the students’ reactions when, after the screening, I informed them that the film’s depiction of traditional Inuit life was entirely a reenactment. While many students were shocked and disappointed when they learned this, others accepted Flaherty’s defence of the film as true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Inuit’s vanishing way of life. Another example that I screened was a clip from controversial filmmaker Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002) which demonstrated how Moore shrewdly used editing to villainise then-NRA president Charlton Heston. Though a majority of the class agreed with Moore’s anti-gun violence agenda, many were infuriated about being “lied to” and “misled” by the editing tactics. Naturally these examples also raise questions about the role of ethics in documentary filmmaking, but even films that are not deliberately manipulative are still “the product of individuals, [and] will always display bias and be in some manner didactic.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 193.)

To further my point on the elusive nature of objectivity, I screened Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard ( Night and Fog , 1956), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008.) Yet at this point I began to wonder if I was still teaching documentary or if I had ventured into some other territory. I was aware that Koyaanisqatsi had also been classified as an experimental film by notable scholars such as David Bordwell. On the other hand, Nuit et brouillard is labeled a documentary film but poses more questions than answers, since it is “unable to adequately document the reality it seeks.” (Alter/Corrigan p. 210.) Resnais’s short film interweaves black and white archival footage with colour film of Auschwitz and other camps. The colour sequences were shot in 1955, when the camps had already been deserted for ten years.   Nuit et brouillard scrutinises the brutality of the Holocaust while contemplating the social, political and ethical responsibilities of the Nazis. Yet it also questions the more abstract role of knowledge and memory, both individual and communal, within the context of such horrific circumstances. The students did not challenge Night and Fog’s classification as a documentary, but they wondered if Waltz with Bashir and especially Sans Soleil had entirely different objectives since they seemed to do more than present factual information. The students also noted that these films seemed to merge with other genres, and wondered if there was a different classification for them aside from poetic, observational, participatory, et al.  Although it is animated, Waltz with Bashir is classified as a documentary since it is based on Folman’s own experiences during the 1982 Lebanon War. Also, as Roger Ebert notes, animation is “the best way to reconstruct memories, fantasies, hallucinations, possibilities, past and present.” 2 However, it is not solely a document of Folman’s experiences or of the war itself. It is also a subjective meditation on the nature of human perception. As Folman attempts to reconstruct past events through the memories of his fellow soldiers, Waltz with Bashir investigates the very nature of truth itself. These films definitely challenged the idea of documentary as a strict genre, but the students noticed that they each had interesting similarities. Aside from educating, informing and persuading, they also used non-fiction sounds and images to visualise abstract concepts and ideas.

Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983)

Sans Soleil has been described as “a meditation on place […] where spatial availability confuses the sense of time and memory.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 117.) Some of my students felt that Marker’s film, which is composed of images from Japan and elsewhere, was more like a “filmed travelogue”. Others described it as a “film journal” since Marker used images and narration to describe certain experiences, thoughts and memories. Yet my students’ understanding of Sans Soleil was problematised when they discovered that the narration was delivered by “a fictional, nameless woman […] reading aloud from, or else paraphrasing, letters sent to her by a fictional, globe-trotting cameraman.” 3 Upon learning this, several students wondered if Sans Soleil was actually a narrative and not a documentary at all. I briefly explained that, since it was also an attempt to visualise abstract concepts, Sans Soleil was known as an essay film. Yet this only complicated things further!  The students wondered if other films we saw in the class were essayistic as well. Was Koyaanisqatsi an essay on humanity’s impact on the world? Was Jesus Camp (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2006) an essay on the place of religion in society and politics?  Where was the line between documentary and the essay film? Between essay and narrative? Or was the essay just another type of documentary?  Rather than immerse myself in the difficulties of describing the essay film, I quickly changed the topic to the students’ own projects, and encouraged them to shape their documentaries through related processes of investigation and exploration.

If I had been able to read “Essays on the Essay Film” by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades before teaching this class, I still may not have been able to provide definitive answers to my students’ questions. But this is not to say that either of these books are vague and inconclusive! Each one is an insightful collection of articles that explores the complexities of the essay film. In her essay “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments” featured in Alter and Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” Laura Rascaroli wisely notes that “we must resist the temptation to overtheorise the form or, even worse, to crystallise it into a genre…” since the essay film is a “matrix of all generic possibilities.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) Fabienne Costa goes so far as saying that “The ‘cinematographic essay’ is neither a category of films nor a genre. It is more a type of image, which achieves essay quality.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) It is true that filmmakers, critics, and scholars (myself included) have attempted to understand the essay film better by grouping it with genres that bear many similarities, such as documentary and experimental cinema. Yet despite these similarities, the authors suggest that the essay film needs to be differentiated from both documentary and avant-garde practices of filmmaking. Both “Essays on the Essay Film” and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” illustrate that this mutable form should not be understood as a specific genre, but rather recognised for its profoundly reflective and reflexive capabilities. The essay film can even defy established formulas. As stated by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin in his essay “Proposal for a Tussle” the essay film “can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 270.)

Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” consists of writings by distinguished scholars such as Andre Bazin, Theodore Adorno, Hans Richter and Laura Mulvey, but also includes more recent work by Thomas Elsaesser, Laura Rascaroli and others. Although each carefully selected text spans different time periods and cultural backgrounds, Alter and Corrigan weave together a comprehensive, yet pliable description of the cinematic essay.

“Essays on the Essay Film” begins by including articles that investigate the form and function of the written essay. This first chapter, appropriately titled “Foundations” provides a solid groundwork for many of the concepts discussed in the following chapters. Although the written essay is obviously different from the work created by filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Trinh T. Minh-ha, Alter and Corrigan note that these texts “have been influential to both critics and practitioners of the contemporary film essay.” (p. 7) The articles in this chapter range from Georg Lukacs’s 1910 “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” to “Preface to the Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley” which was published in 1960. Over a span of fifty years, the authors illustrate how the very concept of the essay was affected by changing practices of art, history, philosophy, culture, economics, politics, as well as through modernist and postmodernist lenses. However, these articles are still surprisingly relevant for contemporary scholars and practitioners. For example, in an excerpt from The Man Without Qualities , Robert Musil writes that, “A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?” (p. 45.) Naturally, this reminded me of my class’s discussion on Sans Soleil and Waltz with Bashir. It concisely encapsulates the difficulties that arise when the essay film crosses boundaries of fiction and non-fiction. However, in his 1948 essay “On the Essay and its Prose”, Max Bense believes that the essay lies within the realm of experimentation, since “there is a strange border area that develops between poetry and prose, between the aesthetic stage of creation and the ethical stage of persuasion.”  (p. 52.)  Bense also notes that the word “essay” itself means “to attempt” or to “experiment” and believes that the essay firmly belongs in the realm of experimental and avant-garde. This is appropriate enough, given that writers, and more recently filmmakers and video artists have pushed the boundaries of their mediums in order to explore their deepest thoughts and emotions.

Alter and Corrigan follow this chapter with “The Essay Film Through History” which details the evolution of the essay film. Writing in 1940, Hans Richter considers the essay film a new type of documentary and praises its abilities to break beyond the purportedly objective goals of documentaries in an attempt to “visualize thoughts on screen.” (p. 91) Eighteen years later, Andre Bazin celebrates Chris Marker’s thought-provoking voice-over narration as well as his method of “not restricting himself to using documentary images filmed on the spot, but [using] any and all filmic material that might help his case.” (p. 104) Bazin even compares Marker’s style to the work of animator Norman McLaren, supporting the idea of the essay film’s use of unfettered creativity. By the time the reader gets to the third chapter, “Contemporary Positions”, he or she is well aware of the capricious and malleable nature of the essay film. As Corrigan remarks:

As it develops in and out of those documentary and avant-garde traditions, the history of the essay film underlines a central critical point: that the essayistic should not necessarily be seen simply as an alternative to either of these practices (or to narrative cinema); rather it rhymes with and retimes them as counterpoints within and to them. Situated between the categories of realism and formal experimentation and geared to the possibilities of “public expression,” the essay film suggests an appropriation of certain avant-garde and documentary practices in a way different from the early historical practices of both, just as it tends to invert and restructure the relations between the essayistic and narrative to subsume narrative within that public expression. The essayistic play between fact and fiction, between the documentary and the experimental, or between non-narrative and narrative becomes a place where the essay film inhabits other forms and practices. (p. 198)

Alter and Corrigan’s volume implies that the essay can inhabit many forms, styles or genres. More importantly is the idea that it should be recognised for its intentions and capabilities. Whatever form it takes, the essay is an attempt to seek, explore, understand, visualise and question, without necessarily providing clearly defined answers. The essay film also places considerable value on the intellect and opinion of the viewer, since it is an invitation to reflect on the thoughts, experiences, emotions and perceptions that are being conveyed. “Essays on the Essay Film” sensibly concludes with the chapter entitled “Filmmakers on the Essayistic”. Notable filmmakers, such as Lynn Sachs and Ross McElwee provide valuable insight into their own practices. The featured filmmakers, documentarians and video artists in this chapter do not focus specifically on what form their work takes, but what they are trying to achieve. For instance, in her article “On Writing the Film Essay,” Lynn Sachs proclaims that “My job is not to educate but rather to spark a curiosity in my viewer that moves from the inside out.” (p. 287.) Admittedly, Sachs’s statement contradicts the idea that documentary films seek to educate, inform and persuade, which I taught in my own classes. Yet Sachs’s insights, as well as those of the many other filmmakers in “Essays on the Essay Film” demonstrate how the camera is as versatile as the pen when communicating thoughts, emotions and ideas.

Tree of Life (Malick, 2011)

Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades have also compiled several surprising, challenging and thoroughly captivating articles that exemplify the many forms that the essay film can take. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia includes articles by several prominent scholars that explore the essay film’s place throughout history as well as within various cultural settings. Like Alter and Corrigan, they also present a convincing argument that the essay film is distinct from both documentary, avant-garde and narrative filmmaking, since it is “characterized by a loose, fragmentary, playful, even ironic approach […] and raises new questions about the construction of the subject, the relationship of the subject to the world and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema.” (Papazian/Eades, p. 1) Papazian and Eades explore how essayistic tendencies can manifest in narrative, documentary, avant-garde, and even video art through careful analyses of specific films and videos. The book opens with Timothy Corrigan’s “Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative” which explores how the essayistic can inhabit narrative film, specifically through Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross , both released in 2011. Corrigan observes that The Tree of Life “continually seems to resist its own narrative logic” (p. 18) by presenting a highly fragmented and non-linear plot.  Instead of placing it into the hybrid realm of experimental-narrative, however, Corrigan argues that:

Rather than locate a linear connection between past, present and future, the narrative flashbacks in The Tree of Life become a search for genesis – or more accurately many geneses – which might be better described as disruptive recollections that never adequately collect and circulate, as fractured and drifting images and moments producing not evolutionary lines, but the spreading reflective branches of essayism. (p. 19-20.)

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia continues with essays by other acclaimed, yet indefinable filmmakers such as Jean Luc-Godard and Claire Denis. Essays by Rick Warner and Martine Beugnet explore how these filmmakers defy closure and continuity, even while appearing to work within established forms and genres. Ann Eaken Moss explores the essayistic approach that Chantal Akerman imbues within her experimental “home movies.”   News from Home (1977) is a meditation on Akerman’s own sense of dislocation from her home in Belgium while she adapts to life in New York City. In “Inside/Outside: Nicolasito Guillen Landrian’s Subversive Strategy in Coffea Arabiga” Ernesto Livon-Grosman investigates Landrian’s means of furtively including his own political agenda within a government-sanctioned documentary. What was meant to be a propagandistic documentary about the benefits of Cuban coffee plantations becomes an essayistic critique on the power structure of Fidel Castro’s government. (Livon-Grosman.) Papazian and Eades conclude their volume with an afterward by Laura Rascaroli, affirming that “it is with the potentiality of all essay films to question and challenge their own form”. (p. 300) The essay film may be distinct from narrative, documentary and the avant-garde, but it itself has no discernable style or formula. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia clearly illustrates how the essay film, although bordering on established genres “must create the conditions of its own form.” (pp. 301-302.) Every filmmaker’s unique thoughts, experiences, meditations, questions and perceptions cannot neatly fit into a strict set of generic guidelines. However, this does not make the essay film more difficult to understand, but further implies that it is a unique practice rather than a specific form.

News from Home (Akerman, 1977)

Even with the insight provided by these two volumes, I do not regret introducing the essay film to my documentary students, despite their questions and confusion. As illustrated throughout Essays on the Essay Film and The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia it has typically been an esoteric and transgressive form, and perhaps including it with better known genres such as documentary and experimental films could be an effective way of introducing it to beginning filmmakers and scholars. Then again, perhaps it should be taught as a form separate from documentary, narrative and the avant-garde. I do wish that I was able to speak more about it at length during that particular instance, since the essay film deserves a considerable amount of thought and attention. Whether or not there is a correct pedagogical approach to teaching the essay film, both of these volumes are tremendously illuminating, but also open the door to further discussion about this compelling form of cinema.

• Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary , 2nd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010). ↩
• Roger Ebert, “Waltz with Bashir”, rogerebert.com , January 21, 2009, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/waltz-with-bashir-2009 ↩
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Personal Effects: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans Soleil”, The Criterion Collection , June 25, 2017, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/484-personal-effects-the-guarded-intimacy-of-sans-soleil ↩

17 Essential Movies For An Introduction To Essay Films

Put most concisely by Timothy Corrigan in his book on the film: ‘from its literary origins to its cinematic revisions, the istic describes the many-layered activities of a personal point of view as a public experience’.

Perhaps a close cousin to documentary, the film is at its core a personal mode of filmmaking. Structured in a breadth of forms, a partial definition could be said to be part fact, part fiction with an intense intimacy (but none of these are necessarily paramount).

Stemming from the literary as a form of personal expression borne from in-depth explorations of its chosen topic, the film can be agitprop, exploratory, or diaristic and generally rejects narrative progression and concretised conclusions in favour of a thematic ambivalence. Due to its nature as inherently personal, the term itself is as vague and expansive as the broad collective of films it purports to represent.

To borrow Aldous Huxley’s definition, the is a device for saying almost everything about almost anything. In built then is an inherent expansiveness that informs a great ambition in the form itself, but as Huxley acknowledges it can only say almost anything; whether extolling the need for a socialist state (Man with a Movie Camera), deconstructing the power and status of the image itself (Histoire(s) du Cinema, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Los Angeles Plays Itself) or providing a means to consider ones of past (Walden, News from home, Blue), the film is only the form of expression, which unlike any other taxonomic term suggests almost nothing about the film itself other than its desire to explore.

Below is an 17 film introduction to the film that cannot be pinned down and continue to remake and remodel itself as freely as it sheds connections between any of the films within its own canon.

1. Man with a Movie Camera (1929) dir. Dziga Vertov

An exercise in technical experimentation, Man with a Movie Camera is the pioneering, not to mention most lauded, of Vertov’s filmic polemics: espousing not only a new, necessary way of life, but a means of living that is created through cinema.

Shot by Maurice Kaufman, brother of Vertov, the film is a portrait of a city across 24 hours via bold experimentation based on Vertov’s staunchly Marxist ideologies. Its propagandist structure does not however belie its beauty.

Through masterful technique it became the defining film of 1920’s Soviet Union (perhaps on a par with Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin). Its propagation of film as the means through which life is realised, that the camera is now an unequivocal feature of modernity and too a powerful political tool, creates a filmic love letter to industrialisation and the humanist elements of physical labour.

In opposition to Eisenstein, Vertov is a master of his own brand of idiosyncratic montage which, with its sublime manipulative technique combined with realist images, rejects the opiate affects of traditional narrative cinema, attempting to create instead a cinematic language in which the camera becomes the pen of the 20th century.

2. A Propos de Nice (1930) dir. Jean Vigo

Shot by Boris Kaufman, brother of Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera), A Propos de Nice is a satirical portrait of life in 1920’s Nice. The leisurely upper classes of French society are the subjects of a portrayal the blind escapism and ignorance created by modernity.

Vigo thus contrasts the bourgeois culture of relaxation with the daily grind of the poor in society. The parodic form of the travelogue as anthropological study is employed as a means of document increasing social and economic disparities which Vigo sought to present as necessitating a revolutionary stance (the likes of which cinematographer Kaufman glean from his brother’s agit-prop, propagandist Kino-Pravda series).

Engrained in the very structure of modern society is, for Vigo, deep social inequality; life in this case masks its own inequalities through ignorance and selfishness. Images of women energetically dancing are reduced to slow modern and thus arises from them the absurdity of inherent inequalities.

Like a Jay Gatsby party, the excitement and laughter only serves to mask a profound emptiness whose own ridiculousness is an unacknowledged form of societal freakshow, which only those on the outside can perceive.

3. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) dir. Jean-Luc Godard

In a year of 3 Godard diatribes against neo-capitalism, 2 or 3 Thing I Know About Her is the most contemplative; if La Chinoise a document of the soon to be riotous students, 2 or 3 is the suburban families watching the events unfold on their television screens.

Fraught with concern for the disintegration of lexical meaning, Godard’s collage of modern life follows the existentially empty Julitte Jeanson, a bourgeise housewife-come-prostitute, as she contemplates her preconceived societal role and the deadened collective consciousness of everyone whom Godard’s camera encounters.

If language is the house one lives in, as Juliette informs her son, then the house is subject to the blind whims of suited right wing repo men.

The portrait of Juliette is a composite sketch of the modern citizen, replaceable, replicable to the extent that Godard introduces Juliette first as Marina Vlady, the actress who plays her, before acknowledging her as a fictional creation; a less subtle evocation of the resignation to role playing in post-war France, watching death in Vietnam while decided whether or not to go and wash the car.

4. Walden; Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1969) dir. Jonas Mekas

Walden is the film in its most diaristic form. Essentially a suitably handsome extended home video, Mekas’s film, shot from 1964-1969, features a series of chronologically edited video diaries that span from eating Chinese food with John Lennon, footage from the Velvet Underground’s first performance, or just the filmmaker eating a croissant in Marseille.

Given the length, the film could be criticised as an epic exercise in self-gratification (the filmic equivalent of continuous name dropping), or simultaneously as an invitation into the expansive but hermetic world of the New York art scene in the late 60’s, of which Mekas’ himself was a central fixture.

As with Akerman’s News From Home, it is the film’s internal focus, an exposure of the personal, wherein its interest lies. Mekas’ ability to construct a montage that appears at ease with itself in all its fragmentation, relying on meticulous in-camera precision, creates a sea images which with each wave comes harmony and contrast. Walden emerges then as an unpretentious acknowledgment of the inextricability of experience and image, finding within it celebrations of life’s variety and extended harmonies.

5. F for Fake (1973) dir. Orson Welles

Welles’s final film is an explosive and intelligent scrutinisation of the filmmaking process and the concept of authenticity in art. Centrally presenting Elmyr de Hory’s career as an art forger, F for Fake transcends basic narrative or documentary expositions to instead philosophise on the ontology of authorship.

Increasingly Welles rejects infallibility in favour of a profound ambivalence that is read across the careers of various forgers to eventually become, as is naturally the case for such a sublime example of the film, a personal contemplation of his own career and his self-definition as a perpetual sceptic.

Through rhythmic montage editing and questioning of the structure and the power of the image itself, F for Fake eulogizes the image as a consistently fallible, or deconstructible form, and in true Wellesian style, given it is the form that its director made his career,cannot help but find humour within.

6. Le Fond de l’air est rouge/A Grin Without a Cat (1977) dir. Chris Marker

Widely acknowledged as the master of the film, Le fond de l’air est rouge is a personal rumination of discontent on the progression and dissolution of left-wing politics from Vietnam up until the films release in 1977.

10 years after the Marker conceived Loin du Vietnam, a protest film against the Vietnam war structured in segments from a wealth of French Filmmakers including Godard, Resnais, Lelouch, Varda and Klein, the film is markedly more melancholic, plagued by a scepticism highlighted in the French title (directly translated as the essence of the air is red) that implies the socialist sentiment only ever existed in the air.

Opening with shots from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Marker’s mastery of the appropriated image emerges. The film’s first four minutes are perhaps the finest montage sequence of post-war cinema, commending the bravery of those who fought for the socialist ideal but ultimately acknowledging the inevitability of its failure at the hands of right wing opposition, whose growth in power Marker sees as masked by the outward protests of the left.

Behind closed doors centre right solidarity, particularly in Marker’s native France, was only increased in the face of a scattered, disorganised and self-destructive shouts for power from the left.

Marker’s film is archival re-appropriation at its most controlled, his erudition and poetic narration reinforcing the notion of history itself as recreated and retold by individuals, always having an agenda.

7. News From Home (1977) dir. Chantal Akerman

Borne from the influence of the structuralist filmmakers Akerman encountered in New York (see Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton), News from Home is a portrait of a city as seen through the eyes of a foreigner, as she attempts to come to terms with her new surroundings and the contrast to the life she left in Brussels (constantly referenced in the letters from her mother that are used to narrate the film).

Akerman films New York with the intricate eye of someone completely out of their depth, attempting to survive in a city they hardly know, emphasised by the concern of the letters from her mother. News from Home is a contemplation of the inescapability of the past and how it informs the present viewed from a perspective of awe, confusion and intense deliberation.

Akerman’s stares at New York as if to glean some meaning from its landscape as the letters from her mother cannot help make her feel at once a child and to the unchartered explorer entering a new terrain with bravado and wonder.

8. Koyaanisqatsi (1982) dir. Godfrey Reggio

Koyaanisqatsi, meaning life out of balance, is a poetic ode to absurdity constructed through cinematographic deconstructions of time and space. By slowing down images or speeding them up via time-lapse techniques, Reggio presents the fog of modernity as a means to highlight the absurdity of purported meanings, whether it is mass production of hot dogs or humanities destructive capabilities life lived blindly, perceived without questioning, is insignificant.

The film’s rejection of language forces full focus onto the status and power of imagery, especially when contorted, to suppose passivity and acceptance as a way of life, unsurprisingly drawing influence, like Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, going as far as to acknowledge him in the credits along with fellow critics of mass communications, big society and the power of technology, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich and Leopold Kohr.

As with Godard’s concern for the disintegration of language into base semiotic signifiers, evocative of nothing but materials and the literal, Koyaanisqatsi presents ‘a state of life that calls for another way a living’; a visually stunning but essentially aggressive denouncement of advanced capitalism, its pretence to knowledge and its ability to create an omnipresent complacency that drapes life in a visually pleasing veil, underneath which lies a profound nothingness.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, black writers week, reflexive memories: the images of the cine-essay.

While the video essay form, in regards to its practice of exploring the visual themes in cinematic discourse, has seen a recent surge in popularity with viewers (thanks to invaluable online resources like indieWIRE’s Press Play, Fandor’s Keyframe and the academic peer-reviewed journal [in]Transition), its historical role as a significant filmmaking genre has long been prominent among film scholars and cinephiles.

From the start, the essay film—more affectionately referred to as the “cine-essay”—was a fusion of documentary filmmaking and avant-garde filmmaking by way of appropriation art; it also tended to employ fluid, experimental editing schemes. The first cine-essays were shot and edited on physical film. Significant works like Agnès Varda ’s "Salut les Cubains" (1963) and Marc Karlin’s "The Nightcleaners" (1975), which he made in collaboration with the Berwick Street Film Collective, function like normal documentaries: original footage coupled with a voiceover of the filmmaker and an agenda at hand. But if you look closer and begin to study the aesthetics of the work (e.g. the prolific use of still photos in "Cubains," the transparency of the “filmmaking” at hand in "Nightcleaners"), these films transcend the singular genre that is the documentary form; they became about the process of filmmaking and they aspired to speak to both a past and future state of mind. What the cine-essay began to stand for was our understanding of memory and how we process the images we see everyday. And in a modern technological age of over-content-creation, by way of democratized filmmaking tools (i.e. the video you take on your cell phone), the revitalization of the cine-essayists is ever so crucial and instrumental to the continued curation of the moving images that we manifest.

The leading figure of the cine-essay form, the iconic Chris Marker, really put the politico-stamp of vitality into the cine-essay film with his magnum-opus "Grin Without A Cat" (1977). Running at three hours in length, Marker’s "Grin" took the appropriation art form to the next level, culling countless hours of newsreel and documentary footage that he himself did not shoot, into a seamless, haunting global cross-section of war, social upheaval and political revolution. Yet, what’s miraculous about Marker’s work is that his cine-essays never fell victim to a dependency on the persuasive argument—that was something traditional documentaries hung their hats on. Instead, Marker was much more interested in the reflexive nature of the moving image. If we see newsreel footage of a street riot spliced together with footage from a fictional war film, does that lessen our reaction to the horrific reality of the riot? How do we associate the moving image once it is juxtaposed against something that we once thought to be safe or familiar? At the start of Marker’s "Sans Soleil" (1983), the narrator says, “The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.” It’s essentially the perfect script for deciphering the cine-essay form in general. It demands that we search and create our own new realities, even if we’re forced to stare at a black screen to conjure up a feeling or memory.

Flash forward to 1995: Harun Farocki creates "Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik," a video essay that foils the Lumière brothers’ "Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory" (1895) with countless other film clips of workers in the workplace throughout the century. It’s a significant work: exactly 100 years later, a cine-essayist is speaking to the ideas of filmmakers from 1895 and then those ideas are repurposed to show a historical evolution of employer-employee relations throughout time. What’s also significant about Farocki’s film is the technological aspect. Note how his title at this point in time is a “video essayist.” The advent of video, along with the streamlined workflow to acquiring digital assets of moving images, gave essayist filmmakers like Farocki the opportunity for creating innovative works with faster turnaround times. Not only was it less cumbersome to edit footage digitally, the ways for the works to be presented were altered; Farocki would later repurpose his own video essay into a 12-monitor video installation for exhibition.

Consider Thom Andersen’s epic 2003 video essay "Los Angeles Plays Itself." In it, Andersen appropriates clips from films set in Los Angeles from over the decades and then criticizes the cinema’s depiction of his beloved city. It’s the most meta of essay films because by the end, Andersen himself has constructed the latest Los Angeles-based film. And although Andersen has more of an obvious thesis at hand than, say something as equally lyrical and dense as Marker’s "Sans Soleil," both films exist in the same train of thought: the exploration of the way we as viewers embrace the moving image and then how we communicate that feeling to each other. Andersen may be frustrated with the way Hollywood conveys his city but he even he has moments of inspired introspection towards those films. The same could be said of Marker’s work; just as Marker can remain a perplexed and often inquisitive spectator of the moving images of poverty and genocide that surround him, he functions as a gracious, patient guide for the viewer, since it is his essay text that the narrator reads from.

Watching an essay film requires you to fire on all cylinders, even if you watch one with an audience. It’s a different kind of collective viewing because the images and ideas spring from an artifact that is real; that artifact can be newsreel footage or a completed, a released motion picture that is up for deeper examination or anything else that exists as a completed work. In that sense, the cine-essay (or video essay), remains the most potent form of cinematic storytelling because it invites you to challenge its ideas and images and then in turn, it challenges your own ideas by daring you to reevaluate your own memory of those same moving images. It aims for a deeper truth and it dares to repurpose the cinema less as escapist entertainment and more as an instrument to confront our own truths and how we create them.

RogerEbert.com VIDEO ESSAY: Reflexive Memories: The Images of the Cine-Essay from Nelson Carvajal on Vimeo .

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Godard and the Essay Film

A Form That Thinks

by Rick Warner

Imprint: Northwestern University Press

288 Pages , 6.00 x 9.00 in , 49 b-w images

• 9780810137370
• Published: July 2018
• 9780810137387
• 9780810137394
• Description

RICK WARNER is an assistant professor of film in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

“ Godard and the Essay Film is a first-rate piece of scholarship that makes substantial contributions on a variety of topics, including the essay as literary and cinematic form, film and philosophy, and the study of the indispensable oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard.” —Michael Renov, author of The Subject of Documentary    ". . . a superb piece of work, reaffirming cinema as a (potentially) philosophical machine that can lead us to think (that we have not yet begun thinking)." — Studies in European Cinema

“ Godard and the Essay Film is an exceptionally innovative and fresh study that manages to rethink one of the most important and challenging filmmakers in cinema history. In the process, Warner has also engaged one of the most important and prominent waves in modern filmmaking, the essay film. While there is a growing body of scholarship on this subject, Warner’s more focused engagement offers keen new insights that extend beyond Godard’s work.” —Timothy Corrigan, author of The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker

"It is made clear in Godard and the Essay Film, through meticulous close readings of scenes and techniques, that Godard's primary goal in his essay films is to establish a conversation with the viewer. Such a dialogue, where the viewer is asked to decode montaged connections, identify references and provide answers to posed scenarios, is understandably difficult and ultimately always unfinished . . . Also unique to this book is the emphasis on co-filmmaking . . ." —Yelizaveta Goldfarb Moss, Screen "There is no shortage of books on provocative French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, but this one serves the additional function of intervening in discussion of a difficult-to-define type of move: the essay film . . . The book's strongest discussions are those in which Warner opens up Godard's work to its contexts, and a particular highlight is the chapter on couples and coupling, which deals with Godard's collaborations with Anne-Marie Miéville." —K. M. Flanagan, George Mason University, CHOICE

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Review: Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker

2011, Critical Quarterly

Related Papers

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, ed. Caroline Eades and Elizabeth Papazian, 28-67. London: Wallflower, 2016.

Rick Warner

Malcolm Cook

Andrea Mariani

Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez

The present article aims to show how the consolidation of the cinematic form of the essay film in Jean-Luc Godard’s work is a consequence of the evolution of his experience in the cinéma militant. This militant cinema emerges from the political and social circumstances that caused May 68 and in the case of the filmmaker is materialized through his participation in the Dziga Vertov Group. The defining elements of the group’s filmic experience –the supremacy of montage, the dialectics between images and sounds and the relevance of the spectator as an active part of a dialogical practice– are the same that bring about the essayistic form when the film is enunciated from the author’s subjectivity. With the analysis of Letter to Jane this paper tries to demonstrate how the irruption of subjectivity in the revolutionary cinematic practice allows the appearance of self-reflexivity and the thinking process that define the cinematic essay. RESUMEN El presente artículo pretende mostrar cómo la consolidación de la forma cinematográfica del film-ensayo en la obra de Jean-Luc Godard es consecuencia de la evolución de su experiencia en el cinéma militant. Un cine militante que surge de las circunstancias político-sociales que dieron lugar a mayo del 68 y que en el caso del cineasta se materializa mediante su participación en el Grupo Dziga Vertov. Los elementos definitorios de la experiencia fílmica del grupo –la primacía del montaje, la dialéctica entre imágenes y sonidos y la relevancia del espectador como parte activa de una práctica dialogística– son los mismos que propician la forma ensayística cuando la obra se enuncia desde la subjetividad del autor. Con el análisis de Letter to Jane pretendemos mostrar cómo la irrupción de la subjetividad en la práctica cinematográfica revolucionaria posibilita la aparición de la auto-reflexión y del proceso de pensamiento definitorios del ensayo cinematográfico.

The British Journal of Aesthetics

Anna Christina Ribeiro

Quarterly Review of Film and Video

The beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s essayistic practice is intrinsically linked to the use of the diptych device. Thus, a previous work is the cause of an essay film that aims to reflect on the cinematic practice carried out. This article aims to analyse the use, function, and evolution of this device in the beginning and consolidation of the Godardian essay film. While Camera-eye (1967) offers a prefiguration of this new filmic form in relation to La Chinoise (1967), Letter to Jane (1972) results in its first realisation concerning a previous fiction, Tout va bien (1972), in order to continue the reflection on the intellectuals’ role in revolution. Thanks to the decisive arrival of video technology, essential for the essay film practice, Ici et ailleurs (1976) takes up the material of the never released film Jusqu'à la Victoire to generate self-criticism in militant practice. Finally, with Scénario du film Passion (1982), Godard offers a new subsequent essay film that generates both temporalities, before and after the creation, in order to embody an essential self-portrait of the audiovisual essayist. This series of diptych works reveals a hypertextual audiovisual thinking process that rethinks cinematic practice.

Beckett and nothing

Matthijs Engelberts

Radical Philosophy

Esther Leslie

Film as document The moment when Siegfried Kracauer knew that he wanted to write of film as what he terms the ‘Discover of the Marvels of Everyday Life’ is relayed in his introduction to the Theory of Film from 1960.1 Kracauer recalls watching a film long ago that shows a banal scene, an ordinary city street. A puddle in the foreground reflects the houses that cannot be seen and some of the sky. A breeze crosses the site. The puddle’s water trembles. ‘The trembling upper world in the dirty puddle – this image has never left me’, writes Kracauer. In this trembling, which is the moment of nature’s uninvited intervention, its inscription as movement on film, everything, from nature to culture, ‘takes on life’, he notes. What is important about film is its presentation of this given life indiscriminately. The puddle, this unworthy spillage, is redeemed in the low art of cinema. Both cinema and puddle are elevated from the ground. The upper world is brought down to earth as image. Fixed ...

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (32) 4, 2012: 637-639

Dagmar Brunow

Nicholas Baer

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13. The Essay film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments (2009)

From the book essays on the essay film.

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Chapters in this book (33)

A Closer Look at the Film Rating of “Forrest Gump”

This essay about the film rating of “Forrest Gump” explains why it received a PG-13 designation from the Motion Picture Association of America. It details the aspects of the film that led to this rating including its depiction of drug use sexual content and brief strong language. The essay underscores the film’s exploration of significant themes such as destiny love and historical events through the protagonist’s unique perspective. It also discusses how the film balances serious topics with humor and light-hearted moments making it suitable for teens and adults. The essay concludes by reflecting on the movie’s broad appeal and its potential as a tool for family discussions about various moral and historical topics.

How it works

Since its 1994 premiere “Forrest Gump” has enthralled viewers as a masterpiece of film. The film directed by Robert Zemeckis tells the story of a guy with a low IQ who unintentionally influences major historical events in the United States during the 20th century. Tom Hanks plays the lead character which many regard as his career-defining performance. Due to its blend of humor drama and romance understanding the film’s rating is crucial for audiences looking to appreciate its depth and nuances.

The movie is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). This rating was assigned because “Forrest Gump” contains some content that parents might find inappropriate for children under 13. The reasons for this rating are manifold involving the movie’s depiction of drug use some sexual content and brief strong language. The film does not shy away from presenting complex and sometimes controversial issues in a manner that is accessible yet profound.

The PG-13 rating serves as a guide to inform parents that some material in the film may be unsuitable for children. It indicates that parental guidance is recommended when young viewers watch the film. This rating strikes a balance allowing teenagers and adults to appreciate the richness of the film’s narrative while alerting parents to potential sensitive content.

“Forrest Gump” explores themes of destiny and the randomness of life as seen through the eyes of Forrest himself. Despite his limited intellectual abilities Forrest leads an incredibly rich life meeting historical figures influencing popular culture and experiencing firsthand pivotal moments in history. His love story with Jenny his childhood friend serves as the film’s emotional backbone and presents themes of loyalty love and loss.

The decision to rate the film PG-13 was also influenced by its treatment of war and violence. Forrest’s participation in the Vietnam War and his subsequent coping with its effects are depicted with a certain level of intensity although not graphically violent it is emotionally stirring. The film manages to convey the horrors of war and the pain of loss without resorting to explicit scenes which makes it suitable for a younger audience albeit under parental supervision.

Additionally “Forrest Gump” includes some comedic and light-hearted moments that balance its more serious elements. Forrest’s naive worldview leads to humorous interpretations of significant historical events from teaching Elvis Presley a dance move to inadvertently exposing the Watergate scandal. These moments of levity are crucial in making the film accessible and enjoyable for a wider audience which aligns well with its PG-13 rating.

Critically “Forrest Gump” was a monumental success sweeping the Academy Awards with six wins including Best Picture Best Director and Best Actor for Tom Hanks. Its blend of technical prowess and narrative depth creates a cinematic experience that resonates with a diverse audience. The film’s rating is just right to ensure that its profound messages reach a broad audience while keeping the younger viewers safeguarded from its mature themes.

In conclusion the PG-13 rating of “Forrest Gump” is indicative of a film that deals with complex themes in a thoughtful manner. It is a movie that parents can watch with their older children using it as a springboard for discussions about history morality and personal values. Forrest’s journey through a turbulent American landscape with all its ups and downs makes for a compelling watch that is as educational as it is entertaining. This film with its careful balance of content and audience accessibility remains a beloved staple in the annals of American cinema.

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Film Analysis

What this handout is about.

This handout introduces film analysis and and offers strategies and resources for approaching film analysis assignments.

Writing the film analysis essay

Writing a film analysis requires you to consider the composition of the film—the individual parts and choices made that come together to create the finished piece. Film analysis goes beyond the analysis of the film as literature to include camera angles, lighting, set design, sound elements, costume choices, editing, etc. in making an argument. The first step to analyzing the film is to watch it with a plan.

Watching the film

First it’s important to watch the film carefully with a critical eye. Consider why you’ve been assigned to watch a film and write an analysis. How does this activity fit into the course? Why have you been assigned this particular film? What are you looking for in connection to the course content? Let’s practice with this clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Here are some tips on how to watch the clip critically, just as you would an entire film:

• Give the clip your undivided attention at least once. Pay close attention to details and make observations that might start leading to bigger questions.
• Watch the clip a second time. For this viewing, you will want to focus specifically on those elements of film analysis that your class has focused on, so review your course notes. For example, from whose perspective is this clip shot? What choices help convey that perspective? What is the overall tone, theme, or effect of this clip?
• Take notes while you watch for the second time. Notes will help you keep track of what you noticed and when, if you include timestamps in your notes. Timestamps are vital for citing scenes from a film!

For more information on watching a film, check out the Learning Center’s handout on watching film analytically . For more resources on researching film, including glossaries of film terms, see UNC Library’s research guide on film & cinema .

Brainstorming ideas

Once you’ve watched the film twice, it’s time to brainstorm some ideas based on your notes. Brainstorming is a major step that helps develop and explore ideas. As you brainstorm, you may want to cluster your ideas around central topics or themes that emerge as you review your notes. Did you ask several questions about color? Were you curious about repeated images? Perhaps these are directions you can pursue.

If you’re writing an argumentative essay, you can use the connections that you develop while brainstorming to draft a thesis statement . Consider the assignment and prompt when formulating a thesis, as well as what kind of evidence you will present to support your claims. Your evidence could be dialogue, sound edits, cinematography decisions, etc. Much of how you make these decisions will depend on the type of film analysis you are conducting, an important decision covered in the next section.

After brainstorming, you can draft an outline of your film analysis using the same strategies that you would for other writing assignments. Here are a few more tips to keep in mind as you prepare for this stage of the assignment:

• Make sure you understand the prompt and what you are being asked to do. Remember that this is ultimately an assignment, so your thesis should answer what the prompt asks. Check with your professor if you are unsure.
• In most cases, the director’s name is used to talk about the film as a whole, for instance, “Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo .” However, some writers may want to include the names of other persons who helped to create the film, including the actors, the cinematographer, and the sound editor, among others.
• When describing a sequence in a film, use the literary present. An example could be, “In Vertigo , Hitchcock employs techniques of observation to dramatize the act of detection.”
• Finding a screenplay/script of the movie may be helpful and save you time when compiling citations. But keep in mind that there may be differences between the screenplay and the actual product (and these differences might be a topic of discussion!).
• Go beyond describing basic film elements by articulating the significance of these elements in support of your particular position. For example, you may have an interpretation of the striking color green in Vertigo , but you would only mention this if it was relevant to your argument. For more help on using evidence effectively, see the section on “using evidence” in our evidence handout .

Also be sure to avoid confusing the terms shot, scene, and sequence. Remember, a shot ends every time the camera cuts; a scene can be composed of several related shots; and a sequence is a set of related scenes.

Different types of film analysis

As you consider your notes, outline, and general thesis about a film, the majority of your assignment will depend on what type of film analysis you are conducting. This section explores some of the different types of film analyses you may have been assigned to write.

Semiotic analysis

Semiotic analysis is the interpretation of signs and symbols, typically involving metaphors and analogies to both inanimate objects and characters within a film. Because symbols have several meanings, writers often need to determine what a particular symbol means in the film and in a broader cultural or historical context.

For instance, a writer could explore the symbolism of the flowers in Vertigo by connecting the images of them falling apart to the vulnerability of the heroine.

Here are a few other questions to consider for this type of analysis:

• What objects or images are repeated throughout the film?
• How does the director associate a character with small signs, such as certain colors, clothing, food, or language use?
• How does a symbol or object relate to other symbols and objects, that is, what is the relationship between the film’s signs?

Many films are rich with symbolism, and it can be easy to get lost in the details. Remember to bring a semiotic analysis back around to answering the question “So what?” in your thesis.

Narrative analysis

Narrative analysis is an examination of the story elements, including narrative structure, character, and plot. This type of analysis considers the entirety of the film and the story it seeks to tell.

For example, you could take the same object from the previous example—the flowers—which meant one thing in a semiotic analysis, and ask instead about their narrative role. That is, you might analyze how Hitchcock introduces the flowers at the beginning of the film in order to return to them later to draw out the completion of the heroine’s character arc.

To create this type of analysis, you could consider questions like:

• How does the film correspond to the Three-Act Structure: Act One: Setup; Act Two: Confrontation; and Act Three: Resolution?
• What is the plot of the film? How does this plot differ from the narrative, that is, how the story is told? For example, are events presented out of order and to what effect?
• Does the plot revolve around one character? Does the plot revolve around multiple characters? How do these characters develop across the film?

When writing a narrative analysis, take care not to spend too time on summarizing at the expense of your argument. See our handout on summarizing for more tips on making summary serve analysis.

Cultural/historical analysis

One of the most common types of analysis is the examination of a film’s relationship to its broader cultural, historical, or theoretical contexts. Whether films intentionally comment on their context or not, they are always a product of the culture or period in which they were created. By placing the film in a particular context, this type of analysis asks how the film models, challenges, or subverts different types of relations, whether historical, social, or even theoretical.

For example, the clip from Vertigo depicts a man observing a woman without her knowing it. You could examine how this aspect of the film addresses a midcentury social concern about observation, such as the sexual policing of women, or a political one, such as Cold War-era McCarthyism.

A few of the many questions you could ask in this vein include:

• How does the film comment on, reinforce, or even critique social and political issues at the time it was released, including questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality?
• How might a biographical understanding of the film’s creators and their historical moment affect the way you view the film?
• How might a specific film theory, such as Queer Theory, Structuralist Theory, or Marxist Film Theory, provide a language or set of terms for articulating the attributes of the film?

Take advantage of class resources to explore possible approaches to cultural/historical film analyses, and find out whether you will be expected to do additional research into the film’s context.

Mise-en-scène analysis

A mise-en-scène analysis attends to how the filmmakers have arranged compositional elements in a film and specifically within a scene or even a single shot. This type of analysis organizes the individual elements of a scene to explore how they come together to produce meaning. You may focus on anything that adds meaning to the formal effect produced by a given scene, including: blocking, lighting, design, color, costume, as well as how these attributes work in conjunction with decisions related to sound, cinematography, and editing. For example, in the clip from Vertigo , a mise-en-scène analysis might ask how numerous elements, from lighting to camera angles, work together to present the viewer with the perspective of Jimmy Stewart’s character.

To conduct this type of analysis, you could ask:

• What effects are created in a scene, and what is their purpose?
• How does this scene represent the theme of the movie?
• How does a scene work to express a broader point to the film’s plot?

This detailed approach to analyzing the formal elements of film can help you come up with concrete evidence for more general film analysis assignments.

Reviewing your draft

Once you have a draft, it’s helpful to get feedback on what you’ve written to see if your analysis holds together and you’ve conveyed your point. You may not necessarily need to find someone who has seen the film! Ask a writing coach, roommate, or family member to read over your draft and share key takeaways from what you have written so far.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Aumont, Jacques, and Michel Marie. 1988. L’analyse Des Films . Paris: Nathan.

Media & Design Center. n.d. “Film and Cinema Research.” UNC University Libraries. Last updated February 10, 2021. https://guides.lib.unc.edu/filmresearch .

Oxford Royale Academy. n.d. “7 Ways to Watch Film.” Oxford Royale Academy. Accessed April 2021. https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/7-ways-watch-films-critically/ .

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Step By Step Guide to Writing an Essay on Film

By Film Threat Staff | December 29, 2021

Writing an essay about a film sounds like a fun assignment to do. As part of the assignment, you get to watch the movie and write an analytical essay about your impressions. However, you will soon find that you’re staring at an empty sheet of paper or computer screen with no idea what to write, how to start writing your essay, or the essential points that need to be covered and analyzed. As an  essay writing service proves, watching the movie countless times isn’t all there is to write a film analysis essay. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you with an essay service :

1. Watch the Movie

This is the obvious starting point, but surprisingly many students skip this step. It doesn’t matter if you’ve watched the movie twice before. If you’re asked to write an essay about it, you need to watch it again. Watching the film again allows you to pay more attention to specific elements to help you write an in-depth analysis about it.  

Watching the movie is crucial because it helps you not specific parts of the movie that can be used as illustrations and examples in your essay. You’re also going to explore and analyze the movie theme within your structured plan. Some of the critical elements that you have to look out for while watching the movie that may be crucial for your essay are:

• Key plot moments
• Editing style
• Stylistic elements
• Scenario execution
• Musical elements

2. Introduction

Your introduction will contain essential information about the film, such as the title, release date, director’s name, etc. This familiarizes the reader with the movie’s primary background information. In addition, researching the filmmaker may be crucial for your essay because it may help you discover valuable insights for your film analysis.

The introduction should also mention the movie’s central theme and explain why you think it was made that way.

Do not forget to include your thesis statement, which explains your focus on the movie.

3. Write a Summary

According to an  essay writing service  providing students   help with essays , a movie summary comes after the introduction. It includes the film’s basic premise, but it doesn’t have to reveal too many details about the film. It’s a summary, after all. Write the summary like your readers have not heard about the movie before, so you can mention the most basic plots but assume you have minimal time so you won’t be going into great details.

4. Write Your Analysis

This is the central part of the essay in which you analyze the movie critically and state your impressions about the film. Ensure to support your claims with relevant materials from the movie.

There are also several creative elements in a movie that are connected to make the film a whole. You must pay attention to these elements while watching the movie and analyze them in this part of the essay.

In this, you are looking out for the dialogs, character development, completion of scenes, and logical event sequences in the film to analyze.

Ensure you try to understand the logic behind events in the film and the actor’s motives to explain the scenario better.

The responsibility of different parts of the movie, such as plan selection and scenario execution, falls on the director. So, your analysis here focuses on how the director realized the script compared to his other movies. Understanding the director’s style of directing may be crucial to coming up with a conclusion relevant to your analysis and thesis.

The casting of a film is a significant element to consider in your essay. Without a great actor, the scriptwriter and director can’t bring their ideas to life. So, watch the actor’s acting and determine if they portrayed the character effectively and if their acting aligns with the film’s main idea.

• Musical element

A movie’s musical element enhances some of the sceneries or actions in the film and sets the mood. It has a massive impact on the movie, so it’s an essential element to analyze in your essay.

• Visual elements

This includes special effects, make-up, costumes, etc., which significantly impact the film. These elements must reflect the film’s atmosphere. It is even more crucial for historical movies since it has to be specific about an era.

Ensure to analyze elements relevant to your thesis statement, so you don’t drift from your main point.

5. Conclusion

In concluding your essay, you have to summarize the primary concepts more convincingly to support your analysis. Finally, you may include a CTA for readers to watch or avoid the movie.

These are the crucial steps to take when writing an essay about a film . Knowing this beforehand prevents you from struggling to start writing after watching the movie.

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It’s really amazing instructions! I have got the great knowledge.

[…] now and then. Unfortunately, not all of us can afford to get cinema tickets to do so.  Some…Writing an essay about a film sounds like a fun assignment to do. As part of the assignment, you get…Since a few decades the film and entertainment sector have undergone some drastic transformation. […]

I can’t list the number of essays that don’t follow this format in the least. But then I find most reviews of movies terrible and most people who purport themselves to be writers as people who need to spend more time drafting and editing before publishing.

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Film Analysis: Example, Format, and Outline + Topics & Prompts

Films are never just films. Instead, they are influential works of art that can evoke a wide range of emotions, spark meaningful conversations, and provide insightful commentary on society and culture. As a student, you may be tasked with writing a film analysis essay, which requires you to delve deeper into the characters and themes. But where do you start?

In this article, our expert team has explored strategies for writing a successful film analysis essay. From prompts for this assignment to an excellent movie analysis example, we’ll provide you with everything you need to craft an insightful film analysis paper.

• 📽️ Film Analysis Definition

📚 Types of Film Analysis

• ✍️ How to Write Film Analysis
• 🎞️ Movie Analysis Prompts
• 🎬 Top 15 Topics

📝 Film Analysis Example

• 🍿 More Examples

🔗 References

📽️ what is a film analysis essay.

A film analysis essay is a type of academic writing that critically examines a film, its themes, characters, and techniques used by the filmmaker. This essay aims to analyze the film’s meaning, message, and artistic elements and explain its cultural, social, and historical significance. It typically requires a writer to pay closer attention to aspects such as cinematography, editing, sound, and narrative structure.

Film Analysis vs Film Review

It’s common to confuse a film analysis with a film review, though these are two different types of writing. A film analysis paper focuses on the film’s narrative, sound, editing, and other elements. This essay aims to explore the film’s themes, symbolism , and underlying messages and to provide an in-depth interpretation of the film.

On the other hand, a film review is a brief evaluation of a film that provides the writer’s overall opinion of the movie. It includes the story’s short summary, a description of the acting, direction, and technical aspects, and a recommendation on whether or not the movie is worth watching.

Wondering what you should focus on when writing a movie analysis essay? Here are four main types of film analysis. Check them out!

📋 Film Analysis Format

The movie analysis format follows a typical essay structure, including a title, introduction, thesis statement, body, conclusion, and references.

The most common citation styles used for a film analysis are MLA and Chicago . However, we recommend you consult with your professor for specific guidelines. Remember to cite all dialogue and scene descriptions from the movie to support the analysis. The reference list should include the analyzed film and any external sources mentioned in the essay.

When referring to a specific movie in your paper, you should italicize the film’s name and use the title case. Don’t enclose the title of the movie in quotation marks.

📑 Film Analysis Essay Outline

A compelling film analysis outline is crucial as it helps make the writing process more focused and the content more insightful for the readers. Below, you’ll find the description of the main parts of the movie analysis essay.

Film Analysis Introduction

Many students experience writer’s block because they don’t know how to write an introduction for a film analysis. The truth is that the opening paragraph for a film analysis paper is similar to any other academic essay:

• Start with a hook to grab the reader’s attention . For example, it can be a fascinating fact or a thought-provoking question related to the film.
• Provide background information about the movie . Introduce the film, including its title, director, and release date. Follow this with a brief summary of the film’s plot and main themes.
• End the introduction with an analytical thesis statement . Present the central argument or interpretation that will be explored in the analysis.

Film Analysis Thesis

If you wonder how to write a thesis for a film analysis, we’ve got you! A thesis statement should clearly present your main idea related to the film and provide a roadmap for the rest of the essay. Your thesis should be specific, concise, and focused. In addition, it should be debatable so that others can present a contrasting point of view. Also, make sure it is supported with evidence from the film.

Let’s come up with a film analysis thesis example:

Through a feminist lens, Titanic is a story about Rose’s rebellion against traditional gender roles, showcasing her attempts to assert her autonomy and refusal to conform to societal expectations prevalent in the early 20th century.

Movie Analysis Main Body

Each body paragraph should focus on a specific aspect of the film that supports your main idea. These aspects include themes, characters, narrative devices , or cinematic techniques. You should also provide evidence from the film to support your analysis, such as quotes, scene descriptions, or specific visual or auditory elements.

Here are two things to avoid in body paragraphs:

• Film review . Your analysis should focus on specific movie aspects rather than your opinion of the film.
• Excessive plot summary . While it’s important to provide some context for the analysis, a lengthy plot summary can detract you from your main argument and analysis of the film.

Film Analysis Conclusion

In the conclusion of a movie analysis, restate the thesis statement to remind the reader of the main argument. Additionally, summarize the main points from the body to reinforce the key aspects of the film that were discussed. The conclusion should also provide a final thought or reflection on the film, tying together the analysis and presenting your perspective on its overall meaning.

✍️ How to Write a Film Analysis Essay

Writing a film analysis essay can be challenging since it requires a deep understanding of the film, its themes, and its characters. However, with the right approach, you can create a compelling analysis that offers insight into the film’s meaning and impact. To help you, we’ve prepared a small guide.

1. Understand the Prompt

When approaching a film analysis essay, it is crucial to understand the prompt provided by your professor. For example, suppose your professor asks you to analyze the film from the perspective of Marxist criticism or psychoanalytic film theory . In that case, it is essential to familiarize yourself with these approaches. This may involve studying these theories and identifying how they can be applied to the film.

If your professor did not provide specific guidelines, you will need to choose a film yourself and decide on the aspect you will explore. Whether it is the film’s themes, characters, cinematography, or social context, having a clear focus will help guide your analysis.

2. Watch the Film & Take Notes

Keep your assignment prompt in mind when watching the film for your analysis. For example, if you are analyzing the film from a feminist perspective, you should pay attention to the portrayal of female characters, power dynamics , and gender roles within the film.

As you watch the movie, take notes on key moments, dialogues, and scenes relevant to your analysis. Additionally, keeping track of the timecodes of important scenes can be beneficial, as it allows you to quickly revisit specific moments in the film for further analysis.

3. Develop a Thesis and an Outline

Next, develop a thesis statement for your movie analysis. Identify the central argument or perspective you want to convey about the film. For example, you can focus on the film’s themes, characters, plot, cinematography, or other outstanding aspects. Your thesis statement should clearly present your stance and provide a preview of the points you will discuss in your analysis.

Having created a thesis, you can move on to the outline for an analysis. Write down all the arguments that can support your thesis, logically organize them, and then look for the supporting evidence in the movie.

4. Write Your Movie Analysis

When writing a film analysis paper, try to offer fresh and original ideas on the film that go beyond surface-level observations. If you need some inspiration, have a look at these thought-provoking questions:

• How does the movie evoke emotional responses from the audience through sound, editing, character development , and camera work?
• Is the movie’s setting portrayed in a realistic or stylized manner? What atmosphere or mood does the setting convey to the audience?
• How does the lighting in the movie highlight certain aspects? How does the lighting impact the audience’s perception of the movie’s characters, spaces, or overall mood?
• What role does the music play in the movie? How does it create specific emotional effects for the audience?
• What underlying values or messages does the movie convey? How are these values communicated to the audience?

5. Revise and Proofread

To revise and proofread a film analysis essay, review the content for grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Ensure the paper flows logically and each paragraph contributes to the overall analysis. Remember to double-check that you haven’t missed any in-text citations and have enough evidence and examples from the movie to support your arguments.

Consider seeking feedback from a peer or instructor to get an outside perspective on the essay. Another reader can provide valuable insights and suggestions for improvement.

🎞️ Movie Analysis: Sample Prompts

Now that we’ve covered the essential aspects of a film analysis template, it’s time to choose a topic. Here are some prompts to help you select a film for your analysis.

• Metropolis film analysis essay . When analyzing this movie, you can explore the themes of technology and society or the portrayal of class struggle. You can also focus on symbolism, visual effects, and the influence of German expressionism on the film’s aesthetic.
• The Godfather film analysis essay . An epic crime film, The Godfather , allows you to analyze the themes of power and corruption, the portrayal of family dynamics, and the influence of Italian neorealism on the film’s aesthetic. You can also examine the movie’s historical context and impact on future crime dramas.
• Psycho film analysis essay . Consider exploring the themes of identity and duality, the use of suspense and tension in storytelling, or the portrayal of mental illness. You can also explore the impact of this movie on the horror genre.
• Forrest Gump film analysis essay . If you decide to analyze the Forrest Gump movie, you can focus on the portrayal of historical events. You might also examine the use of nostalgia in storytelling, the character development of the protagonist, and the film’s impact on popular culture and American identity.
• The Great Gatsby film analysis essay . The Great Gatsby is a historical drama film that allows you to analyze the themes of the American Dream, wealth, and class. You can also explore the portrayal of the 1920s Jazz Age and the symbolism of the green light.
• Persepolis film analysis essay . In a Persepolis film analysis essay, you can uncover the themes of identity and self-discovery. You might also consider analyzing the portrayal of the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, the use of animation as a storytelling device, and the film’s influence on the graphic novel genre.

🎬 Top 15 Film Analysis Essay Topics

• The use of color symbolism in Vertigo and its impact on the narrative.
• The moral ambiguity and human nature in No Country for Old Men .
• The portrayal of ethnicity in Gran Torino and its commentary on cultural stereotypes.
• The cinematography and visual effects in The Hunger Games and their contribution to the dystopian atmosphere.
• The use of silence and sound design in A Quiet Place to immerse the audience.
• The disillusionment and existential crisis in The Graduate and its reflection of the societal norms of the 1960s.
• The themes of sacrifice and patriotism in Casablanca and their relevance to the historical context of World War II.
• The psychological horror in The Shining and its impact on the audience’s experience of fear and tension.
• The exploration of existentialism in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind .
• Multiple perspectives and unreliable narrators in Rashomon .
• The music and soundtrack in Titanic and its contribution to the film’s emotional resonance.
• The portrayal of good versus evil in the Harry Potter film series and its impact on understanding morality.
• The incorporation of vibrant colors in The Grand Budapest Hotel as a visual motif.
• The use of editing techniques to tell a nonlinear narrative in Pulp Fiction .
• The function of music and score in enhancing the emotional impact in Schindler’s List .

Check out the Get Out film analysis essay we’ve prepared for college and high school students. We hope this movie analysis essay example will inspire you and help you understand the structure of this assignment better.

Film Analysis Essay Introduction Example

Get Out, released in 2017 and directed by Jordan Peele, is a culturally significant horror film that explores themes of racism, identity, and social commentary. The film follows Chris, a young African-American man, visiting his white girlfriend’s family for the weekend. This essay will analyze how, through its masterful storytelling, clever use of symbolism, and thought-provoking narrative, Get Out reveals the insidious nature of racism in modern America.

Film Analysis Body Paragraphs Example

Throughout the movie, Chris’s character is subject to various types of microaggression and subtle forms of discrimination. These instances highlight the insidious nature of racism, showing how it can exist even in seemingly progressive environments. For example, during Chris’s visit to his white girlfriend’s family, the parents continuously make racially insensitive comments, expressing their admiration for black physical attributes and suggesting a fascination bordering on fetishization. This sheds light on some individuals’ objectification and exotification of black bodies.

Get Out also critiques the performative allyship of white liberals who claim to be accepting and supportive of the black community. It is evident in the character of Rose’s father, who proclaims: “I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could” (Peele, 2017). However, the film exposes how this apparent acceptance can mask hidden prejudices and manipulation.

Film Analysis Conclusion Example

In conclusion, the film Get Out provides a searing critique of racial discrimination and white supremacy through its compelling narrative, brilliant performances, and skillful direction. By exploring the themes of the insidious nature of racism, fetishization, and performative allyship, Get Out not only entertains but also challenges viewers to reflect on their own biases.

🍿 More Film Analysis Examples

• Social Psychology Theories in The Experiment
• Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader: George Lukas’s Star Wars Review
• Girl, Interrupted : Mental Illness Analysis
• Mental Disorders in the Finding Nemo Film
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Film: Interpretive Psychological Analysis
• Analysis of Spielberg’s Film Lincoln
• Glory – The Drama Movie by Edward Zwick
• Inventors in The Men Who Built America Series
• Crash Movie: Racism as a Theme
• Dances with Wolves Essay – Movie Analysis
• Superbad by G. Mottola
• Ordinary People Analysis and Maslow Hierarchy of Needs
• A Review of the Movie An Inconvenient Truth by Guggenheim
• Chaplin’s Modern Times and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau
• Misé-En-Scene and Camera Shots in The King’s Speech
• Children’s Sexuality in the Out in the Dark Film
• Chinese and American Women in Joy Luck Club Novel and Film
• The Film Silver Linings Playbook by Russell
• The Role of Music in the Films The Hours and The Third Man
• The Social Network : Film Analysis
• My Neighbor Totoro : Film by Hayao Miyazaki
• Marriage Story Film Directed by Noah Baumbach

❓ Film Analysis Essay: FAQ

Why is film analysis important.

Film analysis allows viewers to go beyond the surface level and delve into the deeper layers of a film’s narrative, themes, and technical aspects. It enables a critical examination that enhances appreciation and understanding of the film’s message, cultural significance, and artistic value. At the same time, writing a movie analysis essay can boost your critical thinking and ability to spot little details.

How to write a movie analysis?

• Watch the film multiple times to grasp its key elements.
• Take notes on the story, characters, and themes.
• Pay attention to the film’s cinematography, editing, sound, message, symbolism, and social context.
• Formulate a strong thesis statement that presents your main argument.
• Support your claims with evidence from the film.

How to write a critical analysis of a movie?

A critical analysis of a movie involves evaluating its elements, such as plot, themes, characters, and cinematography, and providing an informed opinion on its strengths and weaknesses. To write it, watch the movie attentively, take notes, develop a clear thesis statement, support arguments with evidence, and balance the positive and negative.

How to write a psychological analysis of a movie?

A psychological analysis of a movie examines characters’ motivations, behaviors, and emotional experiences. To write it, analyze the characters’ psychological development, their relationships, and the impact of psychological themes conveyed in the film. Support your analysis with psychological theories and evidence from the movie.

• Film Analysis | UNC Writing Center
• Psychological Analysis of Films | Steemit
• Critical Film Analysis | University of Hawaii
• Questions to Ask of Any Film | All American High School Film Festival
• Resources – How to Write a Film Analysis | Northwestern
• Film Analysis | University of Toronto
• Film Writing: Sample Analysis | Purdue Online Writing Lab
• Film Analysis Web Site 2.0 | Yale University
• Questions for Film Analysis | University of Washington
• Film & Media Studies Resources: Types of Film Analysis | Bowling Green State University
• Film & Media Studies Resources: Researching a Film | Bowling Green State University
• Motion Picture Analysis Worksheet | University of Houston
• Reviews vs Film Criticism | The University of Vermont Libraries
• Television and Film Analysis Questions | University of Michigan
• How to Write About Film: The Movie Review, the Theoretical Essay, and the Critical Essay | University of Colorado

Descriptive Essay Topics: Examples, Outline, & More

371 fun argumentative essay topics for 2024.

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YouTube film essay pioneers 'Every Frame a Painting' are back

And the duo behind it will release a short film on july 20..

Between 2014 and 2016, a YouTube channel called Every Frame a Painting posted 28 video essays critiquing movies and dissecting different aspects of filmmaking before it went silent. Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou, the people behind the channel, talked about how Robin Williams was a master at blocking and using movement to portray his characters, as well as how Steven Spielberg does one long takes all the time that tend to go unnoticed by the public, among many other topics. Now, the duo is back, promising another series of video essays followed by the debut of a short film at Fantasia International Film Festival on July 20.

Ramos and Zhou wrote and directed their upcoming film called The Second starring Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Ethan Hwan. They didn't share a lot of details about the movie, but the film festival's website says it's about "an alternate version of today’s world where dueling is still acceptable" in which Philip "must perform the role of 'Second' on the day of his only son's duel."

Every Frame a Painting has over 2 million subscribers on YouTube and was one of the creators that helped legitimize video essays on the website. Ramos and Zhou also created the Netflix series Voir , produced by David Fincher, which featured video essays about film, as well. Seeing as they promised new posts on YouTube before their film premieres, we'll likely see them upload a fresh batch of videos in the coming days.

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Damon Lindelof Says Joe Biden Has To Go & Dems Need To Wake Up; “Stop Giving” Money, Top Donor Insists – Guest Column

By Damon Lindelof

Damon Lindelof

Editor’s note:  Damon Lindelof has been a significant contributor to Democrats up and down the ballot for years, including to the campaigns of President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden . However, after Biden’s stumbling debate performance last week, the Emmy-winning Lindelof writes that the Dems need to replace Biden soon if they want to have any chance of beating Donald Trump in November.

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There is a choice before us and the choice is this – Do we leave our pitcher on the mound or do we go to the bullpen for relief?

Our president’s debate performance has been characterized in many ways; disappointing, upsetting, terrifying… but for me it was simply game-changing. So yes, let’s go with the bullpen please. Let’s go with relief.

I voted for Joe. I wept when the election was called for him and whooped out of the windows of my wife’s car as she honked the horn in joy, the streets filled with revelers, all celebrating a return to decency. Joe is a good man and a great president. And he has risen to leadership despite a level of loss and suffering that would bring me to my knees. I believe in Joe Biden. I believe in him so much that we wrote him a sizeable check as recently as two weeks ago. We had to considering his opponent.

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The liar. The cheater. The rapist. The felon. Immune, immune, immune, courtesy of the highest court in the land. If elected, he would replace the two most conservative justices on that court with two who are thirty years younger. Which means my teenaged son will be SEVENTY before there’s even a chance at a balanced court. So … what is the remedy for imbalance?

The checks give us access to power and it is power that is needed to persuade our pitcher to come out of the game, because dammit, even four runs down with the bases loaded and no outs, he still feels like he’s got good stuff. Yet we’re just here in the stands. We can shout as much as we want, but the pitcher will ignore us despite our checks. Fortunately, he’s not the only one we’re writing them to.

His teammates are right there next to him. If they can be compelled to walk over to the mound, not just one or two of them, but the manager and the catcher and the entire infield… maybe, just maybe, he will hand them the ball. And we can get our reliever in.

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And so, I propose a DEMbargo. No checks written. No ActBlue links clicked. For anyone.

When a country is not behaving how we want them to, we apply harsh economic sanctions. It’s a give and take — Short term hurt for long term healing.

Is it misguided to punish the entire team for the stubbornness of the pitcher? Maybe. But it’s also common sense that if he stays in, they will also lose. A rising tide lifts all boats. A falling Biden sinks them.

Some will say it is too late. That no team has ever come back from four down in the ninth. To them I say HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A SPORTS MOVIE?!? 

Others will say it cannot be done. That our bullpen is so packed with talented pitchers it will be impossible to choose which one is ideal. To them I say, YOU’RE TELLING ME OUR PROBLEM IS TOO MANY GREAT PITCHERS?!? COME ON. LET’S GO!

I will admit, I am driven by the hubris implicit in thinking anything a Hollywood Elite says will matter to anyone. But I am also driven by purpose. And the polling. Oh God, the polling . He was behind before the debate. And it will not get better.

So it has to be now and we have to move fast.

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When they text you asking for cash, text back that you’re not giving them a penny and you won’t change your mind until there’s change at the top of the ticket. And when Joe finally leaves the mound, I will stand and applaud. Because he truly pitched a great game. 

But I’m ready to hear the walkout song for our closer. And once I do, I’m going to double the size of the checks… I’m going to write so many damn checks my hand will cramp.

God bless you for making it through this stream of conscientious consciousness … and God bless America.

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‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ Review: Alien Invasion Prequel Arrives Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

Instead of providing answers or much in the way of suspense, director Michael Sarnoski’s contribution stars Lupita Nyong'o as a terminally ill cat owner tiptoeing through a mostly off-screen apocalypse.

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As it happens, director John Krasinski’s excellent 2020 sequel flashed back to Day One, revealing the pandemonium the aliens’ arrival caused for unsuspecting humans, before jumping forward more than a year in the “Quiet Place” chronology. In theory, what “Day One” promises — but doesn’t actually deliver — is a more expansive look at the mayhem. Most of the action occurs off-screen, and no one (not even the authorities) so much as attempts to fight back.

What about cats? Is Frodo ever really at risk? For the curious, Sarnoski includes a tough-to-decipher scene where a trio of aliens feed on what looks like a feathered version of the ovomorphs from “Alien.” Perhaps this explains why the Death Angels are so aggro: They didn’t pack enough snacks for their intergalactic mission, and Earth doesn’t have what they need. But what do they want?

Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, “Day One” is served up as a disaster movie, à la Roland Emmerich’s “Independence Day,” with money shots of the Brooklyn Bridge collapsing into the East River and deserted streets that suggest “I Am Legend” by way of 9/11. Where did everybody go? “Day One” makes it look like just a few hundred people call Manhattan home. Surely New York would be crawling with residents, pouring out of the skyscrapers and into the streets, or else retreating into their apartments. It’s Day One of the invasion, and the city is a ghost town.

It’s kind of a fluke that Samira agreed to come along for a field trip to a Manhattan marionette theater, led by a nurse (Alex Wolff) who should have worn quieter clothes. When the aliens land, they immediately start picking off the noisiest humans. Scream, and you’re toast. Call out for your missing partner or child, and a Death Angel is guaranteed to spring from off-screen and rip you in half. While the characters try their best to keep silent, the film’s sound designers do the opposite, using low tones to make the whole theater rumble (Imax and 4DX viewers can literally feel the attack unfolding off-screen).

In the two previous films, the thrill came from watching how characters reacted to these sinewy, double-jointed monsters, whose rattling, Venom-looking heads fold open in a series of flaps as they stop to listen. The terrifying creatures can’t see, but their sense of hearing is hyper-acute, which is why our world went quiet . For some reason, all that stuff it took humans 474 days to learn in the other movies is already known by the characters in this one (like using running water to confound the aliens).

As Samira hides out in the marionette theater with a crowd of strangers (including Djimon Hounsou, the film’s lone connection to the previous installment), military choppers fly overhead, broadcasting instructions: Keep silent. Stay off the bridges. Carefully make your way to the South Street Seaport, where ships are standing by to evacuate people. As an inexplicably small crowd of survivors move south, Samira and Frodo walk in the opposite direction. She wants that pizza.

Through it all, she remains more committed to protecting her cat — which is ironic, since the animal seems all but guaranteed to attract the wrong kind of attention. It is Frodo who finds Eric and leads him to Samira. Their instant bond feels contrived, though a more charitable viewer might be moved by this nothing-to-lose connection between two lonely souls — what writer-director Lorene Scafaria called “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.”

To his credit, Sarnoski orchestrates a few high-tension set-pieces. But there aren’t nearly enough of these for a movie set in the “Quiet Place” world, as Sarnoski (who put Nicolas Cage through all kinds of nonsensical behavior in “Pig”) winds up putting sentimentality ahead of suspense.

Just compare these movies to the century’s best zombie franchise: “A Quiet Place” ranks up there with “28 Days Later” in its immersive, world-turned-upside-down intrigue. “Part II” was bigger and scarier, à la “28 Weeks Later.” “Day One” ought to have been the mind-blowing origin story, and instead it’s a Hallmark movie, where everyone seems to have nine lives — not just that darn cat.

Reviewed at AMC The Grove, Los Angeles, June 26, 2024. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time:

• Production: A Paramount Pictures release and presentation, in association with Michael Bay, of a Platinum Dunes, Sunday Night production. Producers: Michael Bay, Andrew Form, Brad Fuller, John Krasinski. Executive producers: Allyson Seeger, Vicki Dee Rock.
• Crew: Director: Michael Sarnoski. Screenplay: Michael Sarnoski; story: John Krasinski, Michael Sarnoski, based on characters created by Bryan Woods & Scott Beck. Camera: Pat Scola. Editors: Andrew Mondshein, Gregory Plotkin. Music: Alexis Grapsas.
• With: Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff, Djimon Hounsou.

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