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THE CINEMATIC ESSAY is perhaps the most exciting genre in contemporary film. Here some informal notes on the genre, followed by a filmography and a bibliography pertaining to it. To down load the document, Macs, option+click; for PC's right click. Download
Cinematic Essay as Word file
THE CINEMATIC
ESSAY CONTENTS OVERVIEW
OVERVIEW In the fourth grade, Miss Rich taught us how to write an Essay. This is what she taught: • no personal experience! (irrelevant), • no personal pronouns! (irrelevant), • don’t state what you think! (who cares?), • state your premise! (which Miss Rich had given us), • gather your evidence! (which Miss Rich had given us), • discuss the premise
by ordering the evidence! (Miss Rich had numbered • make smooth transitions! (up to us), • re-state what you have done. This, then, was her formula for The Essay. It took quite a while to realize that Essays as a genre were only partially served by Miss Rich, as well as by most of the succeeding trustees of the form that I encountered. They were all apologists, without naming it, for the Formal Essay. I didn't know that there was a tradition of the Informal Essay which was personal and always proudly walked tightrope over failure. It was alway a species of Grand Attempt. Indeed, flirting with failure is in the origin of the very word: essai, from essayer-- to attempt, to try--and not necessarily to succeed. The Informal Essay is not a form for the fainthearted; it is for those who have experienced experience, which, as we all know, includes failure. The originator of the modern essay, Michel de Montaigne, used the term essai to describe his writings because they were attempts at understanding that were eclectic and showed great curiosity, love, anger and reverence toward the world and were risky in their personal unzippings. A practitioner of the Informal Essay tradition can therefore treat anything: personal experience, history, culture, his or her own body. Reportage and Journalism are implicated in the Death of the Formal Essay. Journalism started borrowing aspects of the essay in an effort to expand itself while still remaining "objective". In the 1960’s and ‘70’s, the movement called New Journalism expanded the tradition by borrowing from other arts and allowing its writings to become more subjective. It took from Fiction the right to be personal. It took from Travel Literature real events in the world. What came out were marvelous hybrids like the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD. In a time when the written word and its audience is shrinking a bit, when poetry and fiction are becoming more and more academic and chewing off less and less with tinier and tinier bites, the Informal Essay is the genre of choice for writers who want to approach and appropriate the world and their experience. • Flexibility--it can change forms of narrative address on a dime and speak directly and very simply to its audience--unlike a short story author who generally creates a character to be his or her mouthpiece. The essayist can, in other words, step out of character. • Self-reflexivity--it can acknowledge the presence of the author. • Self-criticality --it can acknowedge, analyze and critique its own processes as it writes itself. Its territory can stay small or expand to fit the mind of the essayist as it evolves there. An essay can be linked with other essays and other fictions, or non-fictions. • Blurred narrative boundaries---it can absorb or incorporate different genres and tones and themes. It can incorporate biography, autobiography, history, culture, poetry, fiction, criticism, photographs, drawings, cinema. Cinema? The marvelous, flexible qualities of the contemporary Informal Essay have now found their ways into contemporary cinema in the form of the Cinematic Essay, the newest film genre which incorporates the other three (documentary, fiction, and experimental) as appropriate. How does the Cinematic Essay work? Well, for example, what the previous generation of documentary filmmakers took as their "subject"--a passive subject as compared to the "active" fictional subject--film essayists can now take as their theme in which the subject is a particular development or an interpretation of that theme, and one which has a determining influence upon the form of the film. The theme thereby becomes extremely active in that the cinematic essay is often a meditation on ideas in conflict and these conflicts actually suggest the form that the film might take. "The cinematic revolution now in progress is based on what is essentially a very simple idea: that a subject can engender form and that to choose a subject is to make an aesthetic choice." (Noel Burch, "Non-Fictional Subjects", from THE THEORY OF FILM PRACTICE). Some aspects of the modern Cinematic Essay as a form: • Meditation on a Theme Substituted for Plot • Disunity of Time, Space, Tone, Materials, Style • Modularity • Suspension of Belief (as opposed to Suspension of Dis-belief) • Self Criticism/Self Reflexivity • Non-Anticipatory Camera • Medium shots • Editing strategies varied SOME ANTECEDENTS TO THE CINEMATIC ESSAY GEORGES MELIES 1902 film of Edward VII’s coronation in which real shots of Westminster Abby are mixed with a reconstruction in Paris of the coronation. BERTOLT BRECHT Brecht’s Epic Theater: he strove for a "demonstrating", non-illustionistic style of presentation, which broke stories into modular units or central moments. Brecht wanted to use documentary film in theater as a kind of "optical chorus". That is to say, documentary film would function like a commentary medium. This is a surprising use of documentary because we tend to think of the genre of documentary as objective, factual. Brecht wanted to "undocument" the genre, to subject its subject to overt manipulation by the filmmaker. Hans-Berhard Moeller: "Brecht and ‘Epic" Film Medium" in WIDE ANGLE: "The salient point in the documentary chorus example, in Brecht’s incorporation of film projections into plays and in the Brechtian film is the separation of elements." "The basic method of the Brechtian film is thus to polarize action, sound, accompanying music and the narrative voice, to bring them into conflict. Unity should be discontinuous, contradictory, dialectical". George Lellis: "I am convinced that in terms of what kind of fiction films should be made, Brecht is the theorist to contend with. The central question of how form affects content is one of the knottiest of our time, and no other writer about theatrical aesthetics calls into question what the relationship between film and spectator should be with the same degree of modernity." SOME POST-BRECHTIAN FILMMAKERS ALEXANDER KLUGE’s separation of elements in "Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed" (1968) used footage of Hitler reviewing the Wehrmacht accompanied by the Beatles’ music. MICHEL VERHOEVEN’s "Matings" (1968). Scenes are depicted in completely different color gels. In "The Ditch" (1971) the protagonists break character and discuss problems confronting them in their professional lives. In "OK" (1970) the actors are introduced into the film, play their parts, and then are reintroduced back out into the real world at the end of the film. It is a Vietnam film played in Bavaria with the GI’s speaking Bayerisch with intertitles and voice over narration. STRAUB-HUILLET’s films. SOME THEORETICAL TOOLS SERGEI EISENSTEIN "A COURSE IN TREATMENT" (1932) Nothing gets created from pre-conceived methodological positions. Nothing gets created from the tempestuous stream of creative energy unregulated by method. E. excoriates the short film for the graduate student. Useless. E. wonderfully describes the course of thought in creating a screenplay. p. 105. This is E.’s theory of the "inner monologue" in action and it is right out of the literary tradition of stream of consciousness (see also "Film Form: New Problems", below). "FILM FORM: NEW PROBLEMS" (1935) E. tries to rationalize the loss of the formal brilliance of early Soviet films because Soviet filmmakers are now absorbed in "deepening and broadening the thematic and ideological formulation of questions and problems...." (Note: this was the time E. was filming "Bezhin Meadow".) E. questions his prior formulation of Intellectual montage which had as its task "restoring emotional fullness to the intellectual process." E. now feels that intellectual montage represented a hypertrophy of the montage concept. The specific content of intellectual montage--the movement of thoughts as the substitute for story (an exhaustive replacement of content) does not justify itself. The theory of the inner monologue now replaces the theory of intellectual montage--sensual image thought processes, embodied thinking, are the base of creation of form. (For an example of what E. means by "inner monologue", see p. 105 of "A Course in Treatment", above. The inner monologue is within the tradition of "steam of consciousness".) E. then looks at synecdoche (the substitution of a part for a whole and uses as his example the doctor's pince-nez in "Potemkin".) The effectiveness of a work of art is built on a dual unity: the penetration of sensual thinking into consciousness by means of the structure of the form. George Lellis: "I am convinced that in terms of what kind of fiction films should be made, Brecht is the theorist to contend with. The central question of how form affects content is one of the knottiest of our time, and no other writer about theatrical aesthetics calls into question what the relationship between film and spectator should be with the same degree of modernity." SIGFRIED KRACAUER Sigfried Kracauer in his THEORY OF FILM comments on the "found story": one in which the filmmaker discovers patterns in an open-ended way, unstaged, indeterminate (what Paul Rotha called the "slight narrative"). Kracauer's comments on the "sleuthing motif", which is that of seeking out the truth and driving the filmmaker into the raw material of life and upholding the importance of the world. The sleuthing motif involves the accidental, refers to scientific inquiries as a model, looks to material clues closely, and involves the chase. CINEMATIC
ESSAY FILMOGRAPHY Chantal Ackerman, LETTERS FROM
NEW YORK
Alexandre Astruc, "The
Birth of the New Avant-Garde: La camera-stylo", in THE NEW WAVE,
Doubleday, NY 1968. (classic article written in 1948 which began it all...)
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