Essay film

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The essay film (from French essai 'attempt') is an experimental film form between the film genres of feature film and documentary film , in which the director breaks out of the constraints of narrative patterns with an emphatically subjective approach . The essay film is therefore regarded as an open work that, with distributed attention and multiple perspectives in the search for context, claims an artistic freedom that defies the conventions of filmmaking. The tone is of paramount importance; often the free-flowing reflections are held together by a narrator. Another characteristic of the essay film is the break with the principles of coherence , causality, and continuity of space and time and the formation of image metaphors .

Characteristic

The essay film highlights in his Assembly often the associations of the author by "outside the plot to disintegrate into fragmentary ideas, impressions, memories and deliberately manipulative image additions." In Hartmut Bitomsky's Das Kino und der Tod  (1988), the fading of a cigarette is used metaphorically for a dying person. This analogy creates a new “tension between polar pairs of terms”; for example people-things, nature-culture, life-death, war-peace or remembering-forgetting. As a pair of opposites, light and darkness come into question: In Derek Jarman's film The Last of England  (1987) there is “as a contrast to the optimistic, 'enlightening' period of reason and as a sign of the end times ” no natural light around the erosion process of the English To address culture and the impending “darkness”. In these parallel formations , the Kuleschow effect becomes clear as an element of the essay film , which makes the effect of a scene dependent on the context in which it is shown.

The erratic rhythm of essay films is often absorbed by the explanatory voice of a narrator , who supports the visual with letters , diaries , experienced speech , inner monologue or stream of consciousness , so that the sound level draws level with the visual level in terms of its meaning. Based on the compilation film , the images shown are often scenes from existing fictional or documentary archive material and serve as evidence or objet trouvés . The film itself can ironically cancel or alienate the realistic character. In Sans soleil  (1983) director Chris Marker examines the concepts of reality , persistence and forgetting in a process of self-discovery . The meditative film about the nature of human memory is held in a "peculiar limbo between past and present " through the self-critical commentary on life episodes of a fictional character who is identical to the director .

history

Even in the early years of the then new medium of film , essayistic stylistic features can be discerned: the pre-documentary style of the Lumière brothers in contrast to Edison's artificial studio recordings and the later productions by Georges Méliès also in connection with the cinema of attractions offered space for the in the transitions Essay film . Its subjectivist narrative and reflection impulses permeated the great documentaries and their alleged realism of images, such as in Walter Ruttmann's film Berlin: The Symphony of the Big City  (1927). Here the presentation goes beyond the mere chronology of the day; the film illustrates “the inner way of life of the city, the pathology of the city dwellers as well as their longings ”. The film already fulfills the requirements that the German film avant-garde Hans Richter later placed on the essay film : To make invisible ideas, thoughts and ideas visible.

In the 1960s, the essay film became topical again in Germany through Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz . With Farewell to Yesterday  (1966), Kluge introduced associative montage and mixed documentary and staged elements under the “direction” of the narrator, which  was further developed in later films by Kluge, such as Die Macht der Emotions (1983). In Godard's cinematic work , elements of the essay film can also be determined, which is expressed in unusual picture constellations, self-reflexivity and breaks with the conventional rules of illustration of banal realism . Furthermore, even convinced documentary filmmakers like Joris Ivens have devoted themselves to the essay form. Ivens most recently in his late work Eine Geschichte über den Wind  (1988), in which the focus of the portrayal is always on the director himself; the aged man in the face of death, who waits for the wind in the desert, as a haunting cipher for the insignificance of man in relation to the great nature.

literature

  • Christa Blümlinger, Harun Farocki : An ABC of the essay film. Harun Farocki Institut / Motto Books, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-2-940524-68-6 .
  • Christa Blümlinger, Constantin Wulff (ed.): Writing, pictures, speaking. Texts on the essayistic film . Special number, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-85449-038-0 .
  • Sven Kramer , Thomas Tode (ed.): The essay film. Aesthetics and topicality. UVK, Konstanz 2011, ISBN 978-3-86764-110-4 .
  • Hanno Möbius: The adventure essay film . In: moment. Marburg booklets on media studies . 10: The Essay Film , June 1991, p. 10-24 . (on-line)
  • Phillip Lopate: In Search of the Centaur: The Essay Film. In: Beyond Document. Essays on Nonfiction Film. Edited by Charles Warren. University Press of New England, Hanover / London 1996, ISBN 0-8195-6290-4 , pp. 243-270.
  • Astrid Ofner (Ed.): The way of the termites. Examples of essayistic cinema 1909–2004; a film show curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin; a retrospective of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum, October 1 to 31, 2007. Schüren, Marburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-89472-535-8 .
  • Christina Scherer: Ivens, Marker, Godard, Jarman. Memory in the essay film . Fink, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-7705-3576-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Möbius, p. 10ff.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Thomas Koebner: Essay film . In: Thomas Koebner (Hrsg.): Sachlexikon des Films . 2nd Edition. Reclam, 2006, ISBN 978-3-15-010625-9 , pp. 175 f .
  3. ↑ Adorno sees the “real theme” of the literary essay in the “relationship between nature and culture”. Theodor W. Adorno: The essay as form . In: Notes on literature . Frankfurt am Main 1958, p. 41 .
  4. ↑ Möbius, p. 16f.
  5. ↑ Möbius, p. 20f.
  6. ↑ See Vsevolod Pudowkin: The model instead of the actor . In: The time in close-up . Berlin 1983, p. 353 ff .
  7. ↑ Chris Marker: Sans soleil . Hamburg 1983, p. 3 .
  8. ↑ Tom Gunning: Before the Documentary: Early Non-Fiction Films and the Aesthetics of "View". In: KINtop 4: Beginnings of Documentary Film , 1995, pp. 111–121.
  9. ^ Wanda Strauven: The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded . Amsterdam University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-90-5356-945-0 , pp. 12 ff .
  10. ↑ See Blümlinger, 1992