Beyond The Essay Film Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology

Beyond the Essay Film
Beyond the Essay Film

Subjectivity, Textuality, and Technology
Edited by
Julia Vassilieva
and Deane Williams
Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Heart of a Dog, Laurie Anderson, 2015
Cover design: Kok Korpershoek

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
isbn 978 94 6372 870 6

e-isbn 978 90 4854 392 2
doi 10.5117/9789463728706
nur 670
© The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.
To the memory of Thomas Elsaesser
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 9
Introduction 11
Julia Vassilieva and Deane Williams
1. 35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable? 33

Raymond Bellour
2. To Attain the Text. But Which Text? 49

Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
3. Compounding the Lyric Essay Film: Towards a Theory of Poetic

Counter-Narrative 75
Laura Rascaroli
4. ‘Every love story is a ghost story’: The Spectral Network of

Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015) 95
Deane Williams
5. Lines of Interpretation in Fields of Perception and

Remembrance: The Multiscreen Array as Essay 111
Ross Gibson
6. Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016): Intellectual

Vagabond and Vagabond Matter 121
Katrin Pesch
7. Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film: The

Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button 141
Belinda Smaill
8. Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant-Garde to the

Audiovisual Essay 165
Julia Vassilieva
9. ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator 189

Richard Misek
10. The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea?Videographic Film Studies
Practice as Material Thinking 199
Catherine Grant
11. The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory

Posthumously 215
Thomas Elsaesser †
Index 241
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to acknowledge the help of all the people involved in
this project and, first of all, the late Thomas Elsaesser. Without his support
and guidance, this book would not have become a reality.
Our sincere gratitude goes to the chapter’s authors for their wonderful
texts.
We would like to thank Janice Loreck for her research assistance in
preparing this volume and the editorial team at Amsterdam University
Press – Maryse Elliot, Mike Sanders, Chantal Nicolaes, and Danielle Carter
– for contributing their time and expertise to this book.
Special thanks are due to Adrian Martin for translating into English,
for the first time, Raymond Bellour’s ‘Trente-cinq ans après: le “texte” a
nouveau introuvable?’, written in 2009, and collected in Raymond Bellour’s
La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L,
2012), pp. 124-137. It is reprinted with permission of the author and publisher.
Catherine Grant’s ‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic
Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking’ was originally published as:
‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as
Material Thinking’, ANIKI: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image 1.1 (2014),
Web. It is reprinted with permission of the author.
Introduction
Julia Vassilieva and Deane Williams
The essay film is in the spotlight. The last 25 years or so saw an explosion in
audiovisual productions from across the globe that belong to this lineage.
Ushered in by the watershed moment of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du
Cinema (1998), other prominent examples of this recent development include
Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles
Plays Itself (2003), Victor Erice’s La Mort Rouge (2006), Patricio Guzmán’s
Nostalgia for the Light (2010), John Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project (2013),
John Hughes’ The Archives Project (2013), and Chantal Akerman’s No Home
Movie (2015). But we can also think of Hito Steyerl’s How Not to be Seen: A
Fucking Didactic Educational (2014), Boris Groys’ Thinking in Loop (2008),
Richard Misek’s Rohmer in Paris (2013), and the critical audiovisual essay
work of Kevin B. Lee, Catherine Grant, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian
Martin, Kogonada, Christian Keathley, and Jason Mittel. Another index
of the current reinvigoration of interest in the essay film is demonstrated
by the elevation of ‘essayistic’ documentaries in polls like the Greatest
Documentaries of All Time. For example, in 2014, Dziga Vertov’s The Man with
the Movie Camera (1929) was rated first in Sight & Sound’s poll, with Chris
Marker’s San Soleil [Sunless] (1983) in second place. As Brian Winston points
out, this rating indicates much about the current status of the essayistic
tradition: ‘Subjectivity is no longer forbidden to the documentarist. The
Vertovian tradition opens the door to it and subjective “essayists” have,
the poll insists, walked through in triumph. Varda, Marker, Guzmàn, for
example, not only appear in the top 10 but they start to dominate.’1
This increased visibility of the essay f ilm has been followed by the
reciprocal intensification of film and media scholarship, including such
signal contributions as Catherine Lupton’s Chris Marker: Memories of the
Future (2004), Michael Renov’s The Subject of Documentary (2004), Thomas
1 Brian Winston, ‘The Greatest Documentaries of All Time: The Sight and Sound 2014 Poll’,
Studies in Documentary Film 8.3 (2014), pp. 267-272 (p. 270).
Vassilieva, J. and D. Williams, Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality, and Technology.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020
doi 10.5117/9789463728706_intro
12 Julia Vassilieva and Deane Williams
Elsaesser’s Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines (2004), Timothy Cor-

rigan’s The Essay Film: From Montaigne to Marker (2011), Nora M. Alter’s
Chris Marker (2006), and Laura Rascaroli’s The Personal Camera (2009)
and How the Essay Film Thinks (2017). More recently, Nora M. Alter and
Timothy Corrigan’s Essays on the Essay Film (2017) has anthologized key
writings in the history of essay-film criticism to firmly establish the field,
while Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstić’s World Cinema and the Essay Film
(2019) foregrounded the transnational reach of the format. These works
have advanced the theorization of the essay film, attending to the issues of
definition, classification, and the historical changes of the format. While
stressing the difficulties of providing an exhaustive definition, scholars
generally agree that the essay film occupies a liminal position between
fiction, non-fiction, and experimental film; that, as a form, it is transgressive
and heretical, both in terms of respecting genre boundaries and established
authorities; that it is distinguished by the presence of subjective vision,
authorial voice, and reflexive standpoint; and that it mobilizes a specific
form of address, granting to the viewer a more involved and critical position.
Our volume represents both a part of and a critical assessment of this
recent upsurge of interest in the essay film. Raising the issue of ‘the beyond’
of the essay film, we aim both to mark this moment of saturation in the
production of and reflection on the essay film and to speculate on the
possible future of the format. Yet, it is not an attempt to ‘take stock’ or to
suggest that the essay film form has exhausted its generative potential. On
the contrary, we aim to follow the lead of Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote about
finalising and initiating art-forms, urging us to attend closely to the seeds
of future developments which can be discerned in the present aesthetic
configurations and thus putting in practice the ‘embryonic approach’.2
Stressing the continuous relevance of Bakhtin’s ideas at the turn of the
21st century, Mikhail Epstein (2004) has reiterated the productive value of
theorising historical changes not in terms of post (postmodern, posthuman,
post-industrial) but, rather, proto, to instigate the shift ‘from finality to
initiation as our dominant mode of thinking’.3 By raising the issue of ‘beyond
the essay film’, we thus seek to speculate about its possible transformation
as we move forward into the uncharted waters of the 21st – digital – century.
We focus on three specific axes that underpin and shape the articulation
2 Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1986), p. 139.
3 Mikhail Epstein, ‘The Unasked Question. What Would Bakhtin Say?’, Common Knowledge
10 (1) (2004), pp. 42-60 (p. 46).
Introduc tion 13
of the essay film as a specific cultural form – subjectivity, textuality, and

technology – to explore how changes along and across these dimensions af-
fect historical shifts within essay-film practice and its relation to other types
of cinema and neighbouring art forms. In our introduction, we outline the
pivotal role of subjectivity, textuality, and technology in the understanding
of the essay-film format, demonstrating how analysis along these three lines
opens the way for articulating the potential of the essay film for epistemic
enquiry, political critique, and ethical reflexion; we also introduce the
questions that contributions to this volume address.
As Timothy Corrigan, Ross Gibson, and others have pointed out so clearly,
the genealogy of the essay film can be best understood in relation to writing:
Michel Montaigne, Jorge Luis Borges, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno.
In his The Essay Film, Corrigan proposes that ‘the most recognizable origin
of the essay is the work of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)’. 4 In setting out
his own essayist lineage, Corrigan places Montaigne at the beginning of a
literary mode of writing, something he terms ‘an evolution from Montaigne
to the essay film’ that, for him, includes James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Borges,
and Umberto Eco, but also ‘drawings, sketches […] even in musical forms’ as
well as ‘photo-essays, essay films, and the electronic essays that permeate the
Internet as blogs and other exchanges within a public electronic circuitry’.5
Yet, Montaigne proves to be significant not only for the development of
an essayistic textual format, but also for the demonstration of how the very
birth of subjectivity as a cultural and historical phenomenon is predicated
on specific literary ways of shaping and expressing it. In his ‘What Do I
Know?: Chris Marker and the Essayist Mode of Cinema’, Ross Gibson invites
readers to consider the relevance of Montaigne in this regard: ‘The reason
that Montaigne is still so fascinating and illuminating nowadays is that he
was historically placed […] in an era of extreme change in the history of
European ideas. He was a sensitive tablet upon which the complexities of
a crucial phase of the history of ideas was scored.’6
As Gibson points out, Montaigne’s writings emerged in the late sixteenth
century, a time ‘when the attitudes about subjectivity, which we now un-
derstand as the modern European ideas of personality and psychology were
just beginning to develop’, as well as enormous technological shifts such
4 Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (London, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), p. 13.
5 Corrigan, The Essay Film, p. 14.
6 Ross Gibson, ‘What Do I Know? Chris Marker and the Essayist Mode of Cinema’, Filmnews
32: 134 (Summer 1987/1988), pp. 26-32 (p. 27).
as ‘the first industrial printing presses, a time of refinement for systems of

perspectival representation, and the era of the great oceanic explorations
of the seafaring powers’.7 For Gibson, Montaigne and the essayistic mode
is of interest to contemporary readers, because ‘Montaigne could discern
a shift in subjectivity, therefore, toward the modern configuration which
could contemplate itself as a distinct unit in a larger objective world’, of
subjective, technological, and textual shifts.8
Subjectivity can be thought of in relation to the essay film from another
angle – the genre’s dialogical structure. In ‘Le livre, aller; retour/The Book,
Back and Forth’, Raymond Bellour stresses that the essay film’s specificity
resides in its addressivity: it gives the right to speak – by giving the right to
representation, or to the image – to a vast number of subjects within the
film, and by doing so also demonstrates its ability to ‘address oneself in
order to move towards others’.9 Reflecting on Chris Marker’s work, Bellour
argues that the essay film’s ‘inner design is an address. […] for an address is
as much a destination as a mode of discourse, it is a physical or moral quality
as much as an informational sign’.10 Following Bellour, Laura Rascaroli in
‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, argues
that it is not only the prominent presence of the authorial I, inscribed in a
distinctive enunciation position, that makes the essay film unique, but also
that this personal authorial voice addresses directly a singular, concrete,
embodied person and not a social subject or a generalized audience, inviting
the individual into a conversation, ‘it opens up problems and interrogates
the spectator’.11 Such conversation is only partially scripted, and therefore
is always unfinished and open. Meanwhile, Timothy Corrigan defines the
essay film as ‘figuration of thinking or thought as a cinematic address and a
spectatorial response’.12 This connection between the essay film and dialogue
might prove decisive not only in understanding the formal qualities of the
genre, but also in unpacking the imbrication of the essayistic, subjective,
and, perhaps, most importantly – its ethical implications.
For Paul Ricouer in Time and Narrative, dialogue represents ‘a radically
different structuring principle’ from monologue and marks the ‘final thresh-
old’ of narrativity, beyond which the mechanics of mimesis – of actions,
7 Gibson, ‘What Do I Know?’, p. 27.

8 Gibson, ‘What Do I Know?’, p. 27.
9 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Book, Back and Forth’, p. 111.
10 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Book, Back and Forth’, pp. 112-113.
11 Laura Rascaroli, ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, Framework:
The Journal of Cinema and Media 49. 2 (2008), pp. 24-47 (p. 35).
12 Laura Rascaroli, ‘The Essay Film’, p. 30.
Introduc tion 15
characters, thoughts, and feelings – become abandoned.13 In dialogue, the

principle of a coexistence of voices substitutes for the temporal configura-
tion of actions. Consequently, the dialogical organisation brings with it
the factor of incompleteness, condemning a composition itself to remain
unfinished. This radical shift from monological narration, or history, to
dialogical synchrony reconfigures textual structures while opening up new
ways for the understanding of subjectivity; as Ricouer enthuses, ‘But who
ever said that narrative was the first and last word in the presentation of
consciousnesses and their worlds?’14
Indeed, for Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogical Imagination, the dialogical
relationship with the other is a necessary condition for the very emergence of
subjectivity: I need the other because the other will give form and meaning
to my life, an acknowledgment and confirmation of my existence. Likewise,
Bakhtin sees aesthetic activity as a form-giving activity, through which
subjects actively produce each other. It gives a spatial, temporal, and axi-
ological centre to one’s self. By ‘embracing’ the content of one’s life from
outside, it externalizes and thus embodies subjectivity – it makes the subject
exist. For Bakhtin, then, the other is a necessary condition of the self, and
dialogue functions as a principal mechanism of properly being human in
the world: we come to ourselves through such encounters with others.15
Yet, a dialogical encounter is predicated on the incommensurability of
different human worlds and such incommensurability cannot be resolved,
even dialectically, but can only presuppose a complex unity of differences.
The logic of dialogue thus requires the move towards provisional synthesis,
of simultaneously holding two positions without merging them into one.
Meanwhile, for Emmanuel Levinas, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond
Essence, the primacy of the other constitutes the basis of an ethical system.
Just as for Bakhtin, so for Levinas, the encounter with the other becomes
foundational for the theorising of ethics and, in particular, what Bakhtin
calls ‘answerability’ and Levinas ‘responsibility’. Both thinkers ground ethics
in otherness as something that is not only distinct from the self but that can
never be assimilated by the self, in principle. As Bakhtin says, ‘there always
remains an unrealized surplus of humanness’ in the dialogic interaction with
others.16 For Levinas, social dialogue ‘has to be conceived as a responsibility
13 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, trans. by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984-1988), p. 97.
14 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, pp. 97-98.
15 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson
and M. Holquist, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
16 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 37.
for the other; it might be called humanity, or subjectivity, or self’.17 Thus, if

dialogical structure is, indeed, the most distinctive aspect of the essay-film
form, then it makes it not only an ideal instrument of thought but also an
ideal instrument for ethical reflection. This seems to be demonstrated by the
history of the form, which, Paul Arthur argues, has frequently articulated
‘politically charged visions’.18 That ethical reflection is deeply characteristic
of the essay film is evident in its characteristic thematic foci: ranging from
the politics of memory and silence to postcolonial and feminist critique, the
essay film has been used extensively to address issues of freedom and oppres-
sion, law and retribution, justice and violence, gratitude and debt, erasure
and forgetfulness. Lately, its scope of ethical enquiry has been enlarged to
acknowledge the fullness of otherness and address non-human others and
the environment at large. Such concerns seem to confirm Adorno’s insight
that ‘the relationship of nature and culture is its [the essay’s] true theme’.19
However, for Adorno, this relationship is not primarily about thematic
focus – rather, it is about the loss of immediate access to nature as a price
of developing human culture: ‘The essay quietly puts an end to the illusion
that thought could break out of the sphere of thesis, culture, and move
into the physis, nature. Spellbound by what is fixed and acknowledged to
be derivative, by artefacts, it honors nature by confirming that it no longer
exists for human beings.’20 Adorno’s point here resonates with the current
debates regarding biopolitics, which, however, would take it not as a final
diagnosis, but rather as a challenge for the political thought that strives to
forge new paradigms to address nature and culture, bios and zoê in such a
way that would refuse ‘capturing’ of bare life within predetermined semantic
categories, social order, and juridical injunctions.21 It is perhaps from this
juncture that the format of the essay film offers the most promising way
to think through the current problematics concerning the human-animal
distinction, as well as the issues inherent in the Anthropocene and the
potential ecological crisis.
In considering the essay film’s epistemic potential, the discussion has to
take into account the relationship between the verbal and the visual. The
17 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis, (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 46.
18 Paul Arthur, ‘Essay Questions: From Alain Resnais to Michael Moore’, Film Comment 39. 1
(2003), pp. 58-63 (p. 58).
19 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 19.
21 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Introduc tion 17
first to raise the issue was Sergei Eisenstein during his period of ‘intellectual’
montage work, notably when he conceived his bold, albeit never-realized
project of filming Karl Marx’s Capital. In his ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’,
Eisenstein argues that, while his third film, October, ‘presents a new form of
cinema: a collection of essays on a series of themes’, Capital would transform
this method into a new type of ‘discursive cinema’.22 At stake in that project
was the ability to communicate abstract thought through the juxtaposi-
tion of images and the possibility to render arguments visually. Eisenstein
suggested that it is precisely the discontinuity, the gap between different
images, images and sound, the visual and verbal flows in film that creates
a condition of possibility for a cinematic thought to emerge. As Christa
Blümlinger would later reiterate in ‘Reading Between the Images’, the essay
film operates through rupture, break, and tear.23
For Jacques Rancière, the relationship between image and text is at
the core of the greatest potential of cinema, as well as being responsible
for its derailment. Rancière argued that, during the 20th century, text
has tended to dominate image in cinema, accounting for what he calls
the ‘thwarted cinematic fable’ – thwarted in the sense of not being able
to fulfil the potential of the cinematic medium inherent in the power of
image – and it is precisely the essayistic mode that proves cinema’s ability
to live up to its promise – a mode that finds its paramount expression in
Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema (1998). If numerous film-makers
‘subjected the “life” of images to the immanent “death” of the text’, according
to Rancière in Film Fables, Godard salvages ‘the history announced by a
century of films, whose power slipped though the fingers of their film-
makers’.24 Through his work, Godard asserts the power and importance
of both image and text and demonstrates that neither is reducible to the
other. By juxtaposing the logic of the visual and the verbal in this way,
the essay film starts functioning as a proper tool of thinking, of grasping
and insight, of generating new knowledge and understanding. As Godard
famously declares via intertitles in Chapter 3A of Histoire(s) du cinema: ‘A
thought that forms / a form that thinks.’ An underside of this statement, of
course, is that thought is impossible outside of form – outside of its rendering
through symbolic and expressive means.
22 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, trans. by Annette Michelson, Jay Leyda, and
Maciej Sliwowski, October 2 (Summer, 1976), pp. 3-26 (p. 9).
23 Christa Blümlinger, ‘Reading Between the Images’, in Documentary across Disciplines, edited
by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), pp. 73-91.
24 Jacques Rancière, Film Fables (London: Berg, 2006), p. 171.
This is also what Theodor Adorno stresses in ‘The Essay as Form’: in

considering the epistemological possibilities of the essay form, it is important
to remember that it takes the mediated nature of thinking as its condition
and its horizon. ‘It does not insist on something beyond mediations.’25 Even
though ‘for the essay all levels of mediation are immediate until it begins
to reflect’, this makes the fact that the essay can only operate through
‘the historical mediation in which the whole society is sedimented’ only
more obvious.26 As such, the essayistic mode is mediated through different
modalities: language, conceptual frameworks, categories, and notions but
also through physical apparatuses of self-expression and communication
– whether paper and pen or camera and film.
The evolution of essay-film production thus has to be considered in rela-
tion to changing cinematic technologies and techniques. The emergence of
handheld cameras, which granted new mobility and access to subject matter,
provided a major boost for the explosion of essay films in the 1960s in the wake
of the emergence of what François Truffaut called la politique des Auteurs
and the rise of cinema verité. Similarly, new digital methods of film-making
open up rich possibilities for essay-film practice and its conceptualisation,
by democratising not only production, distribution, and circulation of media
products, but also facilitating critical engagement with film on an unprec-
edented scale. The rise of the audiovisual scholarly essay over the last ten years
is just one, albeit arguably the most fascinating, development in this context.
However, the digital shift also mounts new challenges to the theorisation
of the essay film. Central to these theoretical debates has been the question
of the digital medium’s realism. Compromising the causal or existential
connections between images and their referents, digital technology also
endangers the image’s long-assumed, as well as long-contested, ability to
provide direct access to reality and its consequent ability to make truth claims.
Yet, the debates about medium ontology might be fundamentally misplaced:
as Stephen Prince argues in ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and
Film Theory’, ‘digital imaging exposes the enduring dichotomy in film theory
as a false boundary’.27 Given the problematisation of the category of truth in
postmodern debates in the humanities more generally (which lately found an
uncanny echo in the new media economy termed ‘post-truth’), the issue of
25 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans.
by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 11.
26 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p.11.
27 Stephen Prince, ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory’, Film
Quarterly 49. 3 (Spring, 1996), pp. 27-37 (p. 34).
Introduc tion 19
truth arises as one of the key loci in which the form of the essay film proves
its increasing relevance at the beginning of the 21st century. The continuous
powerful engagement of the format of the essay film with the idea of truth post
digital transformation demonstrates that the unique film ontology can never
serve as the grounds of truth by virtue of the cinematic image’s veracity and
authenticity, but rather, as Badiou argues, it is precisely the inherent aporia
between ‘being’ and ‘appearing’ that guarantees that the issue of truth will
remain at the very centre of the medium-specific concerns.28 This confirms
the profundity of Adorno’s insight that, while the ‘essay thought divests itself
of the traditional idea of truth’ as a utopian vision of clarity and completeness,
it opens up a way of facing the truth of non-identity, incompleteness, and the
fragmentary nature of the world, providing a means of engaging with the
truth-project from a non-essentialist perspective.29
The digital shift reinforces another tendency, which, as thinkers from
Eisenstein to Badiou have argued, has always been present in cinema: its
impurity, or multimedial nature. From the early days of cinema theory,
the idea that cinema would incorporate and integrate previously existing
arts – literature, painting, music, theatre, ballet – has been prominent, but it
is as a result of the injection of a new degree of digitally afforded freedom in
incorporating elements and layers of various cultural expressions, as well as
spreading the moving image to new platforms and screens, that the notion
of intermediality has gained fresh currency in film studies. The essay film is
arguably the form that has put the digital possibilities of intermedial work
to maximal use: essay films not only frequently incorporate excerpts from
other films, television footage, and theatrical and ballet performances, but
also tend to commingle intertitles and newspaper clippings, diagrams and
photographs, images of paintings and sculptures, justifying their usage by
way of intertextual references, archival testimonies, or poetic association.
Alexander Kluge’s magisterial nine-and-a-half-hour film Nachrichten aus der
ideologischen Antike – Marx/Eisenstein/Das Kapital (News from Ideological
Antiquity: Marx /Eisenstein/Capital) (2008), provides one of the exemplary
demonstrations of how intermediality, enabled by the digital shift, expands
possibilities of the essay film.30
But other examples demonstrating the imbrication of subjectivity, tex-
tuality, and technology in the essay film abound. It was the digital turn
28 Alain Badiou, Cinéma (Oxford: Polity, 2013), p. 207.

30 See also Julia Vassilieva, “Capital and Co: Kluge, Eisenstein, Marx”, Screening the Past, Issue
31, 2011, Web.
that enabled Alexander Sokurov to produce his monumental Russian Ark

(2002) all in one famous extra-long take of 90 minutes, and thus to embody
the aporia of mobilising the cutting-edge technology of reproduction to
amplify the aura of the classical art. Though dealing with a different subject
matter, the same aporia is at the core of Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and
I (2000), which explores subjectivity in the digital age, on the cusp of the
new millennium. As Homay King points out, following Adorno, Varda’s
film is a paradoxical film that deals with the relationship between digital
and material cultures: ‘a film in an [then] ultra contemporary format that
is concerned with the expired and out of date’.31 In this paradox, it is also
possible to see the capturing of a cultural moment where the obsolete and
the discarded are, for Varda, very much part of her world, as is digital video.
This paradoxical culture is rendered effortlessly, affectively, working, as
Annette Hamilton tells us,
with connections in a ripple effect. Images and sequences lead in many

directions. Varda’s reality is cultural and she explores the cultural phe-
nomenon of gleaning, through painting, through the history of cinema,
through provincial life, urban asylum seekers and psychoanalysis. Ethics,
the legal code, self-scrutiny and parody all jostle for position with the
sweet taste of a ripened fig, the beauty of an afternoon light in an apple
orchard and the experience of old age.32
This jostling Hamilton describes is redolent of the essayist mode in the digital
era, but it is also a quality with which the mode prefigured the digital era,
lending itself well to the era. In this regard, an essay film like The Gleaners
and I mirrors the networked exchange of subjectivity, in relation to whatever
is at hand, the digital bricolage at our fingertips.
Arguably, though, nowhere is the potent imbrication of subjectivity,
textuality, and technology in the essay film demonstrated as persuasively
than in the work of Chris Marker. While Letter from Siberia (1959), La Jetée
(1962), Le Joli Mai (1963), and others signaled the playful, ironic, and subjective
nature of Marker’s oeuvre, with the release of San Soleil [Sunless] in 1983,
the full force of Marker’s work as mediated thinking became apparent. A
complicated play of fiction and non-fiction with possible topics such as
31 Homay King, ‘Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I’, Quarterly Review
of Film and Video 24 (2007), pp. 421-429 (p. 421).
32 Annette Hamilton, ‘The Poetics of a Potato: Documentary That Gets Under the Skin’, Metro
[Australia] 137 (2003), pp. 126-131 (p. 129).
Introduc tion 21
Iceland, Japan, San Francisco, Cape Verde, and Paris in the service of ineffable
meta-themes such as memory, history, subjectivity, and cinema, San Soleil
set a compass point for subjective cinema and documentary form, its closing
images dissolving into electronic art, pure representation circa 1983. This
historical point sees Marker at the cusp of electronic computer-generated
representation, drawing on his own subjective history of 16mm filming and
writing to fashion a persona, a film-maker, Sandor Krasna, through whom
to essay modern subjectivity.
Following San Soleil’s rendering of subjectivity at the dawn of the com-
puter age, of a bunch of topics circling around a peripatetic, ruminative
subject, it is possible to see the emergence of the World Wide Web, domestic
computing, and hypertext in the late 1980s as a key moment in the essayistic
tradition. In the years immediately succeeding the release of San Soleil,
scholars sought not just to produce traditional scholarly work – essays, books,
papers – but to engage productively with the possibilities the film and the
moment in which it was released opened up. The 1980s saw the emergence
of digital hypertext; in particular, Apple’s Hypercard, released in 1987, saw
the domestic enthusiasm for database, hypermedia, and hypertext – as
components of what was termed ‘new media’ – increase exponentially. One
example which saw the coincidence of this new media and the ensuing
engagement with Marker and San Soleil was Adrian Miles’ Chris Marker World
Wide Web Site, an early interactive, collaborative, hypertextual database of
words and audiovisual materials devoted to Marker. This scholarly site saw
the melding of critical practice (the site was developed from Miles’ PhD)
and hypertext networking that draws on the essayistic tenor of Marker’s
work grounded in the emergent technology and subjectivity of the 1980s.33
In 1997, Marker himself made a signal contribution to this lineage again
with his millennial CD-ROM, Immemory. In many ways, as Raymond Bellour
points out in ‘Le livre, aller; retour/The Book, Back and Forth’, Immemory
is a summation, a ‘repository of an oeuvre and a life which have taken
this century as a memory palace for all the world’s memories’, at the same
time as it belongs to the tradition we have been sketching here, ‘between
the path of Montaigne […] and the path of Barthes’, where Marker ‘[…]
invents an ambiguous path, which has as much to do with the logic of the
media involved as with his need to write the rules of his own game.’34 Here,
33 Adrian Miles, Chris Marker World Wide Web Site, archived at [http://vogmae.net.au/works/
marker/index.html].
34 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Book, Back and Forth’, in Lauren Roth and Raymond Bellour, Qu’est-Ce
Qu’une Madeleine? A Propos du CD-Rom Immemory by Chris Marker: Essays by Lauren Roth and
Bellour commingles Marker’s oeuvre, and his fictional self-realisation,

with the possibilities afforded by this millennial platform. In seeking an
understanding of Immemory in relation to Marker’s earlier works, Bellour
re-examines André Bazin’s seminal review of Letter from Siberia (1962), in
which ‘Bazin invokes the idea of “horizontal editing” which moves not from
one shot to the next one, but laterally as it were, to what is said about it’.35
For Bellour, Bazin’s description ‘underestimates the degree to which, in
this address, the image has its own force of intelligence, its own gaze, even
if it owes them to the speech that spurs on’.36 Bellour then understands
Immemory’s procedure as a condition of the CD-ROM:
This feeling that image speaks to us is perhaps even stronger in Immemory,

where Marker is content to simply write on the screen that is no longer a
screen, where the image seems to arrive immediately at the whim of the
gestures by which we summon it. The feeling stems from the technical
apparatus, its free and available address, whereby we close ourselves up
with the author in a new pact between viewer and reader.37
As Bellour suggests, Immemory belonged to a broader utilisation of the

technology as well as, invoking Umberto Eco, ‘an open work, or rather, a
work in motion, Immemory is perhaps above all a work in expansion’ as it is
transformed on an Internet site.38 This dynamic and transitive apparatus,
at once culminative and all-encompassing, recalls characterisations of
Marker’s earlier La Jetée (1962), and Sunless, as well as prefiguring later
network models.
As this discussion demonstrates, the essay film emerged as an heir to the
essayistic literary mode critically implicated in the formation of modern
subjectivity with its apparent interiority and singularity. Subjectivity, by way
of being both expressed and constructed through the essay film, through the
creation of a specific enunciation modality, through the use of first-person
address, and by differentiating film essays from other, more objective or
neutral forms of cinematic discourse is rightly acknowledged as one of the
main distinctive features of this type of film-making. At the same time, the
essay-film modality, with its noted protean tendencies and voracious appetite
Raymond Bellour (Paris: Yves Gevaert Éditeur/Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997), pp. 124-125.
Introduc tion 23
in the cannibalisation of other cultural forms – literature, photographs, other

films by way of quotation or pastiche – arguably represents an expression
of postmodern subjectivity par excellence. As we enter the 21st century and
move, in the view of some scholars, to modernism after postmodernism,
presumably seeking once again to re-establish the boundaries around the
subject and subjectivities, this volume seeks to hypothesize what new forms
the writing and performing of subjectivity through the essay film will take.
Furthermore, it seeks to investigate how this symbiotic relationship between
subjectivity and textuality in the essay film penetrates and troubles other
forms of film-making in the 21st century – from documentary to narrative
feature film.
If subjectivity places the essay film into a specific relationship with
the world and our being in the world, textuality bears significantly on the
essay film’s form and the kind of epistemological work that this type of
film-making is uniquely suited to pursue. The essay film has been placed
in both reciprocal and antagonistic relationships with such major textual
forms as narrative, dialogue, and poetry, and minor forms, such as letter
and diary writing. In all these different forms, the textual aspect has been
functioning as the major tool allowing the essay film to work as an instru-
ment of thinking, of grasping and insight, of generating new knowledge
and understanding. At the same time, the cinematic mode of expression
reshapes and purifies the very textual forms that provided a grid for the
essay film in the first place. The digital shift pushes these intertwined
relationships between the verbal and the visual even further. As we are
coming to terms with and discovering new possibilities offered by the digital
revolution, this volume suggests that it is vital to rethink what constitutes
information, memory, and knowledge, reconfiguring traditional notions
of authorship and spectatorship towards intensely dialogical, involved
and critically ambitious notions of participatory media, interactivity, the
prosumer, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.
Each chapter in this collection engages (to various degrees) with the
three parameters foregrounded in the subtitle of the volume: subjectivity,
textuality, and technology. Balancing theoretical discussions and film
case studies, the authors address the transformation of the essay film from
historical, thematic, aesthetic, ethical, and self-reflexive perspectives.
The collection opens with two chapters that face textuality squarely. In
the first chapter, ‘35 Years On: Is the “Text”, Once Again, Unattainable?’, Ray-
mond Bellour reflects on his own classic 1975 essay ‘The Unattainable Text’.
Moving into the 21st century, Bellour considers the paradoxical situation of
cinematic art and film studies in the present, digital era: the filmic text may
have become greatly ‘accessible’ (via DVD, etc.) and freezable, but is it truly
‘graspable’ in a more profound sense? By analysing cross-medial works by
Michael Snow, Bill Viola, Danielle Vallet Kleiner, and James Coleman, as well
as prominent examples of the scholarly ‘video essay’ format, Bellour gestures
to the ways in which cinema, and the special experience of cinema, remain,
in his terms, fundamentally and tantalisingly an ‘unattainable’ phenomena.
‘The Unattainable Text’ also serves as a point of departure for Cristina
Álvarez López and Adrian Martin’s chapter ‘To Attain the Text. But which
Text?’. Álvarez López and Martin note that, whereas the film-text was
once indomitably introuvable (Bellour’s original word) to scholars and
artists alike – variously unfindable, inaccessible, unreachable, unquotable,
unmanipulable – now the situation seems to have changed, placing the
cinematic text within our direct reach. However, Álvarez López and Martin
caution, there are challenges in ‘The Unattainable Text’ that are conveniently
overlooked in this optimistic interpretation arising from our present era, and
their essay teases out these challenges. Attending to a semantic complexity
at work in Bellour’s piece, they explicate three different, principal meanings
attached to the word text. Most simply, there is text in the empirical sense:
an object, in this case, a film. Then there is text as synecdoche for language,
especially written language. Finally, there is text in the expanded, semiotic,
post-structuralist sense that Roland Barthes and many others gave the
term at the end of the 1960s: the text as a ‘methodological field’, a weave
of signifying processes.39 To attain this third type of text in the name of
cinema and its creative analysis, Martin and Álvarez López argue, it cannot
be a straightforward procedure of downloading and re-editing digital files.
Their essay explores what more is at stake, theoretically and practically,
which we need to make explicit in today’s discussion of the audiovisual
essay – an exploration that draws on a range of historical examples as well
as their own experience of producing audiovisual essays.
The next two chapters shift their emphasis towards subjectivity. In
‘Compounding the Lyric Essay Film: Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-
Narrative’, Laura Rascaroli explores the genre of lyric or poetic essay.
Rascaroli notes that, while lyricism is acquiring increasing relevance as
one of the key modes adopted by an artistic practice that is spreading fast
throughout the globe, as a type of the essay film, it is still substantially
undertheorized. Rascaroli speculates that this may be explained by the im-
pression that affect and sublimity are at odds with the essay’s characteristic
39 Raymond Bellour ‘The Unattainable Text’, trans. by Ben Brewster, in The Analysis of Film
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27, (p.21).
Introduc tion 25
rationalism. By contrast, she proposes to look at lyricism not as separate

from, or subordinate to, logical thinking, but rather as enmeshed with and
contributing to argumentation. Her discussion focusses on a case study,
the essayistic cinema of contemporary Italian film-maker Pietro Marcello.
Characterized by a distinctive syncretism of realism and elegy, Marcello’s
cinema mobilizes the lyric not as stylistic cypher, but rather as a means to
produce thought-images and meanings associated with affect. Drawing on
Marcello’s cinema’s counter-narrative lyricism and its elegiac temporality,
Rascaroli’s chapter refines our understanding of the relationship between
narration, lyricism, and argument in the essay film.
Deane Williams’s chapter ‘“Every Love Story is a Ghost Story”: The Spectral
Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015)’ focusses on another
example of the film essay produced in a poetic vein. While Anderson’s film
has been described as ‘a paean to a canine friend’, 40 ‘a meditation on love
and loss’,41 and a collection of ‘eccentric musings on the evasions of memory,
the limitations of language and storytelling’,42 Williams argues that the film
can also be understood as a network of ghost stories. Drawing on Anderson’s
idiosyncratic multimedia technique and conceptualisation of the future,
Williams explores the ways in which the figures of 9/11, Lou Reed, David
Foster Wallace, Gordon Matta-Clark, and the Bardo thread through Heart of
a Dog. Exploring the implications of the juxtaposition of these themes and
Anderson’s oeuvre, including her live performance work and the Downtown
New York artistic milieu she emerged from. Williams positions the film in
relation to a confluence of network theory and hauntology as a particular
rendering of 21st century subjectivity.
More radical forms of non-linear organisation of the essay film – brought
about by technological affordances – are explored by Ross Gibson in his
chapter ‘The Non-Linear Treatment of Disquisition: Multiscreen Installation
as Essay’. Gibson’s analysis is prompted in the first instance by the gallery
demonstration of Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices (1980-1995), the essay f ilm
that documents the loneliness, tedium, and fear in the life of a squadron
patrolling the battle lines of the USSR’s war with Afghanistan. Initially
designed to be shown in a consecutive format, the five episodes of Spiritual
Voices were presented on rare occasions as an installation displaying all
five parts simultaneously and continuously on separate screens. Gibson
40 Steve Rose. ‘Heart of a Dog Review: Paean to a Canine Friend’, The Guardian, 29 May 2016, Web.
41 Susan M. Pollak. ‘A Meditation on Love and Loss: Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog’, Psychology
Today, 17 June 2017, Web.
42 Justin Chang. Film Review: Heart of a Dog’, Variety, 4 September 2015, Web.
argues that the complex multiscreen and polyphonous version changed the
emotional dynamics, conceptual understanding, and embodied reactions
of the viewers, evoking the convulsive, non-linear experience of war much
more vividly than linear presentation. Taking Sokurov’s installation as
a point of departure, Gibson examines the affordances of multiscreen
installation in a documentary context. Also drawing on other works such
as Doug Aitken’s Eraser, Chantal Akerman’s gallery version of From the East,
this chapter analyses the insights that can be garnered from spatialized,
multistranded exposition, as distinct from a conventional, long-form essay
film viewed in a linear development. To grasp the complexity of the affects
and ‘messages’ in the installation works, Gibson mobilizes Benjamin Libet’s
theories of consciousness and the ‘ecology of mind’ principles articulated
by Gregory Bateson.
If ‘ecology of mind’ serves as one of the methodological approaches in
Gibson’s chapter, the next two chapters place ecology at the centre of their
inquiry. In ‘Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016): Intellectual
Vagabond and Vagabond Matter’, Katrin Pesch proposes that, in a time
of anthropogenic climate change, environment has become a contested
concept in academic and public debate. Reflecting critically on the uses of
ecological discourse, Pesch’s chapter puts Stratman’s essay film The Illinois
Parables (2016) in dialogue with contemporary ecological thought and
ecocritical approaches in film studies and investigates connections between
environment and textuality. Without attending directly to environmental
issues, the film evokes environment as a multifaceted, aesthetic concept
that embraces natural and social surroundings and imaginaries as much
as the sensuous and affective properties of filmic space. Pesch’s proposal is
that The Illinois Parables treats the essay film form itself as an environment,
and she demonstrates that, in the space that it opens up between local
specificity and the allegorical reach of parables, the environment is not a
passive backdrop to the human drama but is the force that animates the
textual properties of filmic space.
Belinda Smaill tackles the turn to the Anthropocene in the environmental
humanities from a different angle in her chapter ‘Rethinking the Human,
Rethinking the Essay Film: The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button (2016)’.
Smaill argues that, while the notion of the Anthropocene has focussed
attention on anthropogenic climate change and the impact of human activity
on the non-human environment, it is crucial that such a project does not
cast humans as above and other to the environment, but, rather, that it
acknowledges humanity’s entangled relationship with species, history, and
environment. This is vital for understanding how, as a species, we fit into the
Introduc tion 27
world system in an age of accelerating species extinction. Smaill suggests

that Patricio Guzman’s The Pearl Button elaborates a hermeneutics atten-
tive to the non-human, in order to offer a powerful interpretive paradigm
that decentres the human subject. While The Pearl Button focusses on the
history of Chile, precolonial cultures, and the atrocities of the Pinochet
regime, it recasts this history in a way that encompasses geography and
evolution, employing an associative poetic style. Smaill explores the oceanic
imaginary of The Pearl Button, demonstrating how the film’s essayist style
offers a situated perspective that reflects on a history of human violence
while also moving beyond the human, to place the history of Chile within
a global ecosystem. As such, Smaill concludes, The Pearl Button offers one
example of cogent film-making in the Anthropocene.
The next two chapters explore in depth one of the most promising
ways of going ‘beyond the essay film’ that we have witnessed over the last
decade – the audiovisual scholarly essay, or videographic f ilm studies.
In her chapter ‘Montage Reloaded: from the Russian Avant-Garde to the
Audiovisual Essay’, Julia Vassilieva interrogates the relevance of early
Russian montage theory and practice to new issues raised by the shift from
the essay film to the audiovisual essay. Sergei Eisenstein’s vision of the
new type of cinema of ideas formulated in his project for filming Marx’s
Das Capital, Dziga Vertov’s foregrounding of subjectivity and reflexivity in
The Man with a Movie Camera, and Esphir Shub’s practice of ‘compilation
film’ all contributed to the emergence of the essay film as – to use Godard’s
famous definition – ‘the form that thinks’. The audiovisual essay inherits
from the essay f ilm its raison d’etre: to deliver critical interrogation, as
poignantly foreshadowed by Eisenstein; at the same time, the rich arsenal
of recently produced videographic works demonstrates the relevance of
Lev Manovich’s argument that, while the principles of new media can
be derived from The Man with a Movie Camera, the major challenge for
digital media is not only to convey complex ideas, but to take the spectator
‘along the process of thinking’. Meanwhile, the audiovisual essay’s use
of pre-existing footage and its creative reassembling, raising questions
about the nature of authorship, harks back to Shub’s polemical use of the
compilation film. Vassilieva’s chapter demonstrates that Russian montage
cinema and theory remain critically important for the theorization of the
audiovisual essay.
The next chapter, Catherine Grant’s ‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea?
Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking’, is a careful
consideration of the role of audio-video essayist as a researcher. Grant
is a film scholar who, in the last seven years, has taken up the challenge
of learning to produce, write about, and publish creative-critical digital-

video essays related to film and media-studies subjects, essays that use
footage from the films studied as well as other moving image/sounds from
existing media. Her chapter here considers the pedagogical, critical, theo-
retical, and philosophical threads that surround the audiovisual essay as
it belongs to the tradition of the essay film and as it belongs to the broader
realm of creative practice.
Similar to Grant’s contribution, the last two chapters are written by film
scholars who have moved into creative practices and now speak from the
dual position of critics and practitioners, bringing both their theoretical
knowledge and practical insights to reflect on the issues of textuality, sub-
jectivity, and technology of the essay film mode. In his chapter ‘“All I Have to
Offer is Myself”: the Film-Maker as Narrator’, Richard Misek zooms in on the
implications of audiovisual essayism for the issue of authorship. Reflecting
on his own experience of making essay films, Misek asks, provocatively,
who precisely is the ‘I’ referenced in so many essay film voice-overs? He
suggests that, while it is easy to assume that the narrative ‘voice’ in an essay
film is that of the film-maker, the narrator’s relation to the film is always
ambiguous, even if the audience is, in fact, hearing the film-maker speak.
Misek takes as his starting point Chris Marker’s contradictory claim that all
he has to offer is himself, spoken first in Level Five (1997), and subsequently
quoted by Marker in a letter about the oblique voice-over in Sans Soleil
(1983). Misek’s chapter explores how the aspiration of open and direct ad-
dress tends to be complicated through the various mediations involved in
film-making. Adducing his own film, Rohmer in Paris (2013), Misek raises
the paradoxical possibility that, while essay film-makers can only offer
themselves, they are simultaneously prevented by the form of the essay
film from being themselves.
In the final chapter, Thomas Elsaesser essays his own position of author
and subject in his essay film The Sun Island (2017). He takes a simultaneously
historical and personal approach to the story and own posthumous life of
his grandfather, architect Martin Elsaesser, as it has been constructed by the
research, writing, advocacy and making of the film. For Thomas Elsaesser, the
process of working towards a personal documentary essay film necessitates
a consideration of the ‘posthumous constellation’ to which the film belongs;
of both an ‘île de mémoire’ and lieux de mémoire and the historical pressures
that these entail. Ultimately, it requires understanding the intensity of the
relationship between the intimate private spaces of familial life and the
complicated political and cultural forces that are invariably invoked when
your grandfather is also a public figure.
Introduc tion 29
Thomas Elsaesser passed away on the 4th of December, 2019, while we

were finalizing the manuscript. This book would not have been possible
without his generous support, guidance and contribution. His essay titled
“On Making Memory Posthumously” now acquires an uncanny aura of
premonition and anticipation. In it Thomas writes: “The condition of the
posthumous implies a special relation of past to present that no longer follows
the direct linearity of cause and effect, but takes the form of a loop, where
the present rediscovers a certain past, to which it attributes the power to
shape aspects of the future that are now our present. In other words, we are
in the temporality of the posthumous, whenever we retroactively discover
the past to have been prescient and prophetic, as seen from the point of
view of some special problem or urgent concern in the here and now. We
retroactively create a past, to assure ourselves of the possibility of a future.”
While the field has lost one of its greatest, and Thomas will be missed as a
great and unique mentor, colleague, collaborator and friend, his presence
will endure in the sense articulated by his essay. This book itself now will
become a tribute to Thomas, bringing his voice back from that impossible
point of loss that we all feel so acutely.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, ed. by Rolf Tiede-
mann, trans. by Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life ,
trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 3-23.
Arthur, Paul. ‘Essay Questions: From Alain Resnais to Michael Moore’, Film Com-
ment, 39. 1 (2003), pp. 58-63.
Badiou, Alain. Cinéma. Oxford: Polity, 2013.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist,
trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981).
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. by Vern McGee
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Book, Back and Forth’, in Lauren Roth and Raymond Bellour,
Qu’est-Ce Qu’une Madeleine? A Propos du CD-Rom Immemory by Chris Marker:
Essays by Lauren Roth and Raymond Bellour (Paris: Yves Gevaert Éditeur/Centre
Georges Pompidou, 1997).
Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Unattainable Text’, trans. by Ben Brewster, in The Analysis
of Film (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27.
Blümlinger, Christa. ‘Reading Between the Images’, in Documentary across Disci-

plines, ed. by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), pp. 73-91.
Chang, Justin. Film Review: Heart of a Dog, Variety, 4 September 2015, Web.
Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (London and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Eisenstein, Sergei. ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, trans. by Annette Michelson, Jay
Leyda, and Maciej Sliwowski. October 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 3-26.
Epstein, Mikhail. ‘The Unasked Question. What Would Bakhtin Say?’, Common
Knowledge 10.1, (2004), pp. 42-60.
Gibson, Ross. ‘What Do I Know? Chris Marker and the Essayist Mode of Cinema’,
Filmnews 32. 134 (Summer 1987/1988), pp.26-32.
Hamilton, Annette. ‘The Poetics of a Potato: Documentary That Gets Under the
Skin’, Metro [Australia] 137 (2003), pp. 126-131.
King, Homay. ‘Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I’, Quarterly
Review of Film and Video 24 (2007), pp. 421-429.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. by Alphonso
Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).
Miles, Adrian. Chris Marker World Wide Web Site, Web, archived at [http://vogmae.
net.au/works/marker/index.html].
Pollak, Susan M. ‘A Meditation on Love and Loss: Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog’,
Psychology Today, 17 June 2017, Web.
Prince, Stephen. ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory’,
Film Quarterly, 49. 3 (Spring, 1996), pp. 27-37.
Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables, trans. by Emiliano Battista (London: Berg, 2006).
Rascaroli, Laura. ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Def initions, Textual Commit-
ments’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49. 2 (2008), pp. 24-47.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David
Pellauer, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984-1988).
Rose, Steve. ‘Heart of a Dog Review: Paean to a Canine Friend’, The Guardian,
29 May 2016, web.
Winston, Brian. ‘The Greatest Documentaries of All Time: The Sight and Sound
2014 Poll’, Studies in Documentary Film 8.3 (2014), pp. 267-272.
Vassilieva, Julia. “Capital and Co: Kluge, Eisenstein, Marx”, Screening the Past,
Issue 31, 2011, Web.
About the Authors
Julia Vassilieva is Australian Research Council Research Fellow and lecturer

at Monash University, Australia. Her research interests include narrative
Introduc tion 31
theory, cinema and the mind, cinema and philosophy, and the theory and
practice of Sergei Eisenstein. She is an author of Narrative Psychology (Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2016) and co-editor of After Taste: Cultural Value and
the Moving Image (Routledge, 2013). Her publications have also appeared
in Camera Obscura, Film-Philosophy, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural
Studies, Screening the Past, Critical Arts, Kinovedcheskie Zapiski, Rouge, Lola,
Senses of Cinema, History of Psychology, and a number of edited collections.
Deane Williams is Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash

University, Austrlia. From 2007-2017, he was editor of the journal Studies in
Documentary Film, and his books include Australian Post-War Documentary
Film: An Arc of Mirrors (Intellect, 2008), Michael Winterbottom (with Brian
McFarlane, Manchester University Press, 2009), the three-volume Austral-
ian Film Theory and Criticism (co-edited with Noel King and Constantine
Verevis, Intellect, 2013-2017), and The Cinema of Sean Penn: In and Out of
Place (Wallflower Press, 2016).
1. 35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again,
Unattainable?
Raymond Bellour
Abstract
In this reflection on his classic mid 1970s essay, ‘The Unattainable Text’,
Raymond Bellour considers the paradoxical situation of cinematic art and
film studies in the present digital era: the filmic text may have become
greatly ‘accessible’ (via DVD, etc.) and freezable, but is it truly ‘graspable’
in a more profound sense? By analysing paradoxical, cross-media works by
Michael Snow, Bill Viola, Danielle Vallet Kleiner, and James Coleman, as well
as prominent examples of the scholarly ‘video-essay’ format, Bellour gestures
to the ways in which cinema, and the special experience of cinema, remain,
in his terms, fundamentally and tantalizingly ‘unattainable’ phenomena.
Keywords: digital era, filmic text, audiovisual essay, dispositif
It was 35 years ago, in the full flower of cinema semiology and the ‘analysis of
film’,1 of Roland Barthes’ paradoxical reveries on this word text (definitively
unfashionable today), that I decided to baptize the film text an unattainable
text.2 Because this was a time before either VHS or DVD existed, when it
took considerable effort to arrange (always precarious) access to film prints
and Moviolas alike. But the film text was unattainable, above all, for the
simple reason that it was not truly a text, and thus unquotable. Whereas
it is quite simple, in approaching a literary text, to draw fragments of the
studied work into the thread of one’s own commentary, easily incorporated
Translator’s Notes
1 Bellour here alludes to his own collection of texts from the 1960s and 1970s, The Analysis of
Film, first published in French in 1979, and in English in 2000. See following note for details.
2 ‘The Unattainable Text’, in The Analysis of Film, ed. by Constance Penley trans. by Ben
Brewster (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27, p. 283.
doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch01
34 R aymond Bellour
into the new text elaborated on the basis of the source text, in an endless
accumulation. By contrast, we cannot cite, in the same way, this composite
of images, music, sounds, and speech which is a film. Only, literally, its
dialogues, intertitles, or voice-over commentaries. But the amazing thing is
that, of all the arts, cinema is the only one to push this paradox of quotability
and unquotability to such an extreme.
For, if film is not a text, it nonetheless can become so by virtue of the
simple fact that, of all the spectacles that it belongs with, it is the only
one whose material, like that of the book, is forever fixed – variabilities of
projection and print quality comparable, in the scheme of things, to the
variability of printed editions across time. Whereas all the performing arts
(theatre, opera, dance, etc.) are subject, by their very nature, to a continual
variation that can only be fixed – in an ambiguous doubling which must
draw upon cinema – by being filmed for one manifestation among their
many manifestations. As for music, it is clear that the division at its heart –
between the completed text of its notation (when such a thing exists) and its
performance – declared, for a long time already, by the existence of records or
CDs, is of an entirely different sort, to the extent that the separation in play
between the text’s score and the heterogeneity demonstrated by the acts of
writing that comment on it is legible only to those who can sight-read music
(in the nineteenth century this was, among other things, a class privilege).
Even with the music that we listen to, it is obvious that, in order to study
it, we cannot freeze it – since then we hear nothing. The only kind of quota-
tion that works, as in radio critiques, is sound quoting sound, the specific
difficulty there pertaining to the very fact of quoting time. Very different
in this regard is the heterogeneity that painting (and, to a lesser degree,
photography) imposes upon the writing that seeks to approach it: image
material that print reproduction reduces to the ersatz version of a unique
original, but which is nonetheless testified to, and in a privileged way – for
the work is at least given to us in its entirety, as well as in its detail, as we
can attest in critiques from André Malraux to Daniel Arasse.
Thus only film, of all the art objects assimilated to the status of text, finds
itself in such a mixed situation in terms of the accumulation of materials
that comprise it. Commentary can always cite, to the best of its ability, some
part of the actual text; but it can only with great difficulty evoke sounds,
music, the grain of voices; and, faced with the image, it forever finds itself
in a highly strange entre-deux, whose paradoxical destiny is fixed by that
basic gesture of film analysis: the frozen image. We are thus condemned to
the craziest kind of ekphrasis, determined to reconstitute in written words
a space-time form whose continuity makes it impossible to capture, since
35 Years On: Is the ‘ Tex t’, Once Again, Unat tainable? 35
one can only ever fix it in the mind’s eye; or else we are constrained (and
these two gestures are often inevitably paired) to grab hold, via photographic
reproduction, of those fragments of space, too small and always misleading,
that are known as photograms or screenshots. But these images are, by the
same token, so very precious, in direct proportion to the lack they express.
Unable to truly cite the image’s time-movement, they nonetheless allow us
to capture its visible trace.
Since 1975, we can also be struck by those still rare moments when,
in special TV programmes in the vein of Cinéastes de notre temps,3 true
moments of cinema are given to us – such as the movement, magical in
its fullness and unfolding, of the masked dancer followed in his wayward
path across a ballroom in Max Ophüls’s Le Plaisir (1952). 4 In such cases,
criticism can offer us the full reality of image and sound, just as radio can
offer us the full reality of music and sound. This is the potential that all
those DVD bonuses have squandered, in the same way that so many DVDs
and Internet downloads have trivialized our access to f ilm, at the risk
of completely dissolving the inalienable singularity that is proper to the
experience of the cinema-dispositif.
Now let us examine what has happened since the two, basic ways of
approaching a film – according to the film’s own time, or according to a com-
mentary upon the film in the time-space of its reading – have coordinated
with and completed one another, but without ever ceasing to be in conflict,
thereby exposing the gaping rift in which each mode reveals itself to be
in possession of what the other lacks. This is evident, for instance, in two
analyses that Tag Gallagher has made of four shots showing the meeting
of Donati (Vittorio De Sica) and Louise de … (Danielle Darrieux) at the
beginning of Ophüls’s Madame de … (1953).5 These analyses are identical, in
a certain sense, but each subtracts from the other what is most crucial to it.
On the one hand, a little more than three magazine pages, covering
seven screenshots: four for the first shot, following the stages of Louise’s
3 The celebrated French TV series Cinéastes de notre temps ran from 1964 to 1972, and was
revived as Cinéma, de notre temps in 1989. A selection of episodes is available in a DVD box set
from Potemkine.
4 Max Ophüls ou Le plaisir de tourner (Michel Mitrani, 1965).
5 Tag Gallagher, ‘Max Ophüls: A New Art – But Who Notices?’, Senses of Cinema 22 (Octo-
ber 2002) [http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/ophuls/]; Bellour specifically refers
to the details of its translated presentation in the French publication Cinéma no. 4 (2002), pp. 4-19.
In the screenshot illustrations accompanying Bellour’s essay in La Querelle des dispositifs, one
further photogram from the first shot of the scene is added. Gallagher’s video essay can be found
on the Second Sight (2006) and Criterion (2008 & 2013) DVD releases of Madame de ….
36 R aymond Bellour
passage through customs; and then one screenshot for each of the three
remaining shots. The accompanying text elaborates the clever logic of
the scene, underlining the subtle implications of movement and desire
between the camera and the bodies of the two characters. On the other
hand, one minute and fifteen seconds of film, attempting to convey the
same analysis. An image frozen for five seconds at the outset establishes a
basic idea of the scene and allows the critical commentary, spoken by the
author, to begin its interweaving. Next, the four shots unfold at their normal
speed, for 52 seconds. Then the filmic analysis works back over the shots,
detailing, opposing, juxtaposing in order to illuminate them; but mainly
concentrating its commentary on the first shot, accompanied by constant
visual reprises, more or less detailed, of its successive stages of movement.
Eleven lines here, equivalent to the magazine’s written text (its first 46 lines,
comprising a whole section of the article), are thus joined to the whirling
succession of these repetitions of the first shot.
What is really captivating is the sense of vertigo thereby created. We
can perfectly well feel the physicality of the shot, but to the detriment of
the transparency of those words intended to illuminate it. It is as if these
words were being uttered in the mobile time of the images, charged up
by them, and therefore removed from themselves. Whereas written text
develops the meaning clearly, and above all extends it across the totality
of all four shots, in a way that exceeds the possibility of hearing it; but it is
then unable to really render – beyond using equivalencies in prose aided
by screenshots – the frisson of the dual movement of camera and bodies,
at which Ophüls is such a master.
We touch here the undecidable limit, relating once more to the historical
privilege guaranteed for so long (a psychic as much as a material privilege)
of the written over the oral at the heart of Western culture. In fact, we are
now living through the start of a complete mix-up of these realms, following
logics that are increasingly uncertain. A turning point, impossible to grasp
completely – and so much so that we are spinning in a constant feedback loop,
under the influence of widespread digitization and the unprecedented mixing
of words and images, in line with the ever more immediate and diversified
access to images of all kinds. We can imagine the day when a supposedly
human creature (I’m trying not to say ‘spectator’) will actually believe they
have seen Ophüls’s film on a mobile phone, along with Gallagher’s video
essay – and maybe they will gain ever greater illumination from the latter, since
the voice will help them see what they have only truly glimpsed in the former.
One night in a taxi in Vienna, I remember hearing a low noise that ap-
parently lacked any source – until the moment I perceived, to the right of
the driver, amidst various devices, a small, extremely small, dark screen on
which vague shapes moved and from which the voices that had intrigued
me were blaring (it was, undoubtedly, an Asian action film). The driver
certainly had a vision of his screen a bit less blurry than mine; but I’m still
transfixed by the thought – not to mention the fact that he was driving at
the time – that he was looking, or at least believed he was looking, at a film.
It is clear that the experience of the cinema spectator is, above all, a
process which is a mixture of memory and forgetting, determined by the
requirement of continuous projection proper to the dispositif of theatre and
screening, as much as the psychic and social space – this latter functioning
almost independently of projection mode (mechanical or digital).6 It is this
reality that DVD (or yesterday the VHS cassette, or today/tomorrow the
mobile phone, or the day after that …) contravenes, despite the semblance
of the film that it offers. We can never repeat often enough Chris Marker’s
oft-cited words (from his CD-ROM Immemory): ‘On TV we can see the shadow
of a film, regret for a film, the nostalgia for or echo of a film – but never
the film itself.’ Marker then recalls Godard’s famous belief, to which he
gives voice: ‘The cinema is greater than us, we must raise our eyes to look
at it. In becoming a smaller object that we lower our eyes to see, cinema
loses its essence.’ We can also recall Fellini’s strong words, deploring the
domestication that has dispossessed cinema of its aura:
The cinema has lost its authority, mystery, prestige, magic; this gigantic
screen which dominates an audience lovingly gathered in front of it, filled
with very small people who look, enchanted, at huge faces, huge lips, huge
eyes, living and breathing in another unattainable dimension, at once
fantastic and real, like that of a dream, this large magic screen no longer
fascinates us. We have now learnt to dominate it. We are larger than it.
Look what we have done with it: a tiny screen, no larger than a cushion,
between the bookshelves and a vase of flowers, sometimes put in the
kitchen, near the refrigerator. It has become a household appliance, and
we, in an armchair, clutching our remote, wield over these little images
a total power, fighting against what is alien to us, and what bores us.7
6 Bellour describes this ‘experience of the cinema spectator’ at greater length in Raymond
Bellour, ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of
Cinema, ed. by Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöler, trans. by Adrian Martin
(Vienna: Synema, 2012), pp. 9-21; and reprinted in Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen
Entertainment Reception, ed. by Ian Christie (Amsterdam University Press, 2012).
7 Giovanni Grazzini (ed.) and Joseph Henry (trans.), Federico Fellini: Comments on Film (Fresno:
California State University, 1988), p. 207.
38 R aymond Bellour
So, these three filmmakers recall for us that seeing a film by oneself – with
too few or too many people – in a fake, domestic silence, too close or too far
from a screen that is never big enough (despite some ever more exaggerated
simulations), simply cannot be the same experience of attention, perception,
and memory as that of a theatrical projection, for it does not inscribe in the
same way the appropriate shock induced by (above all) an initial viewing,
which remains essential. (This explains the often makeshift nature of
cultural sensibilities recently accelerated by the acquisition of DVD box
sets.) And also that DVD can clearly, via all the reprises and diversions it
allows, deeply serve this very experience, thanks to the reflection it im-
mediately encourages when it seeks to join, as seems possible, the heart
of the virtual effect of memory and forgetting that is responsible for the
emotion experienced in a theatrical screening.
It is in order to preserve the purity of this experience of the cinema
spectator, and the idea to which it gives rise, that Michael Snow, for instance,
has always been opposed until now to the distribution of Wavelength (1967)
on video cassette or DVD. That’s why, some years back, I felt obliged to
accost Snow, on the occasion of one of his exhibitions, in order to relive
the bothersome experience of having to find a print of this film and look
at it on an editing machine, freezing it at the points where, it seemed to me,
I could verify or amend the notes previously taken in similar conditions.
With his peerless knowledge of temporal movements and the variable
destiny accruing to images, Snow even risked the extraordinary act of
conceiving, almost 40 years after his inaugural masterpiece, a work with
no equivalent, furnishing both an installation and a DVD: Wavelength For
Those Who Don’t Have the Time (also known as WVLNT, 2003), in which the 45
minutes of the original film are divided into three sections of fifteen minutes
each, and then superimposed atop each other. This new work, thus becomes
manipulable at leisure on a player or computer, and can be understood
as a vertiginous and ironic hypothesis, offered to new, pressed-for-time
spectators, concerning the piling up of memory presumed to have been
achieved, until now, by just as many real-virtual spectators of Wavelength.
If we reflect on it, this limit-experience by Snow, taking to an extreme
the aporias of the ‘unattainable text’, is not without analogy to what DVD
(after VHS and before something else) has generally induced in relation to
the reality of films experienced in the cinema situation. DVD in fact validates
the illusion – entirely real in one sense – of a text becoming somewhat less
unattainable, with a graspable familiarity, where the captivating proximity
of film had for so long fallen within the realm of a necessarily distant experi-
ence. By the same token, the double destination of WVLNT – towards either
the personal screen or the museum – provokes the desire for a reflection
on the relations between DVD and installation. Or, more precisely, on the
ways in which, under their diverse lights, contemporary art installations
conceived as image projections can offer the renewed conception of a text
that is otherwise unattainable.
It is not so much a matter of a proper quality of distance, since in an
installation, one can, on the contrary, regard the image according to the
physical circulation that best suits it; but rather, we are confronted by the
fact that every work of this type offers an irreducibly singular configura-
tion, in which the singularities of space intersect with the fatalities of
time. As projections these installations are, in part, only analogues for the
film that they are not, displacing, one by one, according to their particular
dispositif, the conditions of psychic and corporeal experience of perception
and, thus, of memory. If we can claim to know something about what a
cinema spectator is, and what is lost and gained according to the various
positions to which this situation lends itself, we know far less about the
installation visitor-spectator – in strict proportion to the singularity that
accrues to each dispositif, as well as to the diverse treatments that they
make in relation to whether or not the object will involve a process of
recollection.
1. A first, emblematic figure is the projection environment. Emblematic

because it sets up, at the outset, a conflict between the different screens
that compose the work. Take, for instance, Bill Viola’s Going Forth By Day
(2002), as displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in Berlin.
This immense, rectangular piece carefully arranges five projections.
First, hanging above, framing the entranceway, is Fire Birth, an image of fire
rising from the dark, a vast, variable, red glow, to which one could return,
from time to time, while taking in the entire ensemble. Then, on the left
wall, which tends to be the point of orientation (because the projection, in
the way it unfolds, invites this), The Path, a long, straight image, showing,
along almost the entire length of the wall, men and women of all ages – the
human species, in short, walking in slow motion before the tree trunks
in a forest.
Opposed to these images, and escaping time by virtue of their purely
symbolic nature, are the three remaining screens – one on the wall in front,
the other two on the right wall, respectively The Deluge, The Voyage and
First Light, regulated by a fixed duration of 35 minutes: for, while they draw
upon an intense, spiritual metaphoricity, these compositions, at the same
time, turn out to be fully narrative. In the sense that their simple, always
40 R aymond Bellour
surprising events occur and captivate us, as much in themselves as for the
relations they suggest between the three parable-fictions that rediscover
the classical format of the cinema screen (or of the rectangular painting
frame from which that originates). The diff iculty – and the seductive-
ness – then comes from trying to follow these three image-narratives both
individually, and all together. Thus the position spontaneously adopted by
most spectators, sitting on the floor and forever spinning around, always,
however, missing on one side what they catch on the other, and turning as
well to the parading image of the forest, with which they presumably feel
some solidarity.
In the f ilm Bill Viola: The Eye of the Heart (2003), which documents
several of the artist’s installations, Kidel, while mainly commenting on
chosen extracts from Going Forth By Day, has taken recourse to the simple
principle of showing, in turn, according to a particular form of shot/reverse
shot, spectators in front of the screens, and then the image that they have
presumably just seen. But we keenly sense the problems that pertain to an
in situ vision such as the DVD document proposes, by mentally reinstating
a second screen, one that we can pretend to forget when faced with a film
image on a TV screen or computer: for the unicity of this image as a simple
face-to-face position takes us back, despite everything, to something of the
theatrical projection situation. Then it is the very reality of the physical
experience of the installation which eludes us – however precious the trace
in such footage of what we have already experienced, and what we may also
want to reincorporate.
This is the case for all installation documentation, where the specific
nature of the environment proves to be a little too complex (whether the
document produced is the work of a filming visitor, an artist communicating
the event in whatever way they judge suitable, or a commercial DVD). Con-
sider the document made by Agnès Varda on the occasion of her exhibition
at the Martine Aboucaya Gallery in 2005. At best we see here, for The Widows
of Noirmoutier, the most complex installation, fourteen monitors framing
the central screen, for an audience arrangement of fourteen chairs, each
linked by headphones to one of the monitors, and we observe attentive
spectators; we can fictively enter into this or that monitor or this or that
widow, and then occupy the entire screen, while remaining a more or less
pained witness of the whole experience.
But nothing can convey what the document allows us only to imagine:
the intense, social connection, which, for every in situ spectator, linking
them through headphones to the monitors, can only pass from close-up
to a distant view through the chosen link of the voice – the totality of the
Les Veuves de Noirmoutier [Widows of Noirmoutier] at la Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris in 2005.
dispositif remains invisible, while everywhere so many relations, one by

one, are tied and experienced in solidarity, creating the special conditions
for this experience that invents the reality of another cinema.8
(We can add to this the televised versions of this or that installation. For
example, for The Widows of Noirmoutier, there is the 70 minute documentary
Some Widows of Noirmoutier [Quelques Veuves de Noirmoutier, 2005] shown on
Arte: on the basis of the existing material, but also filming for the occasion
‘three supplementary widows’, Varda conceived a film, by nature more linear,
designed to ‘offer this life experience to a different, wider public than that
which visits art galleries.’)9
Such delicate, ever paradoxical transpositions are the basis for Anne-Marie
Duguet’s wonderful enterprise, her DVD collection ‘anarchive’.10 How, based
on the singularity accorded to each artist, can one conceive an experimental
memory capable of assembling those works, by nature dispersed in museum
collections (and sometimes private collections), known as contemporary
art installations? How to make them visible, imaginable, according to a
process much closer to reading than to any spectacular reality, but able
as well to allow us to experience virtualities that are sensory as much as
conceptual? This is a process, in each case, according to the conception of
8 ‘On Another Cinema’ is the title of a 2000 essay by Bellour also collected in La Querelle des
dispositifs, pp. 152-170.
9 This statement appears in the French press kit for the film, accessible at [http://download.
pro.arte.tv/archives/fichiers/02571978.pdf].
10 The full anarchive catalogue can be consulted at [http://anarchive.net/].
42 R aymond Bellour
the artist associated with the production, of finding an intelligent balance

between texts and images, choice of works, invention of a pathway and
programming options, tools of documentation. So we are both moved and
amused to find in Digital Snow (2002) a long, contextualized extract from
Wavelength (as there already was, a year earlier, in Teri Wehn-Damisch’s
excellent film, On Snow’s Wavelength).
Out of the four titles that have so far appeared in the anarchive series,
it is Title TK (2006), a DVD-book devoted to Thierry Kuntzel, which pushes
furthest, from the level of the image to that of the entire œuvre, the relation
between archive, trace, and creation (thanks to the intimate collaboration
between the producer, the artist, and the digital programmer, Andreas
Kratky). At the outset, a first division brings together, on the one hand,
a DVD and, on the other, a massive, bilingual book, which gathers across
its 648 pages the continual work of texts, notes, and schemas that have
accompanied, from the beginning of Kuntzel’s work, every conception of
an image.
For its part, the DVD is itself divided, in a way that is both clear and a
little bit daunting. For, as soon as you enter, you must choose. Either you
head directly for the index, which unfolds the entirety of the oeuvre, point
by point, looking in each case (video tape, video installation, plastic work),
the most precise strategy for enabling us to imagine the scarcely graspable
reality of its space-time, with the critical documentary apparatus required.
Or instead, you give yourself over to the random interactive pathway, which
will unfold specific to each user, thus suggesting an individual life woven
along the thread of his creations, ceaselessly reinventing itself, via image
flashes and apparitions, traces, apparatuses, words, evoking everything that
is unique in this work which tends towards disappearance, whilst never
ceasing to make disappearance appear. In this case, absolutely, a DVD,
turning in on itself, suddenly forms a work.
2. From the work of Danielle Vallet Kleiner, orientated to the biographical

consciousness of the photographic document, and its quality as anthropologi-
cal and political sign, we recall here, because of their provocative nature,
two films: Escape from New York (1997-2001) and Le jardin qui n’existe pas …
(The Garden That Doesn’t Exist, 2001-2005), installed respectively on two and
three screens, and drawing from that their specific value as unattainable
texts. For, in contrast to the numerous photos exhibited in a simple fashion
(as so many traces of her travel-films), or other films by her, shown on
monitors or, occasionally, projected within art spaces (such as Chemins qui
ne mènant nulle part/Roads That Lead Nowhere, 1991-2007), her two films
conceived in the format of a diptych and a triptych are only ever projected
(and spectacularly so).
Unattainable, these films have become, for me, even more so in that I have
only been able to see them once, on the occasion of the projection organized
at the Pompidou Centre (by Philippe-Alain Michaud and Catherine David)
on 20 and 21 October 2006. And, as for all such works, their projection has
meaning only under conditions that allow them to be presented in line with
the specific dispositif that enables their effect.
On the first of these violent, fascinating films – catalysed, like everything
in her work, by the obstinate experience of decentring and travel – Kleiner
has written:
It is a film that works via perpetually reconnected fragmentations across

non-communicating places and in non-chronological time, where layers
of the past are multiplied thanks to the simultaneous reading of two film
projections, one of which is the inverted arrangement of sequences from
the other. The film presumes a rigorously symmetrical construction, where
each sequence can be linked to the next as much through its beginning
(first shot) as by its ending (final shot). A film which is, in a certain sense,
without either beginning or end, where the single soundtrack counts as
itself an autonomous image, inducing a linearity that is always changing.11
Escape from New York comprises eleven sequences, meaning that the sixth, in
this doubled, inverted unfolding, is the same on both screens. It is, therefore,
the only, temporarily reassuring moment in this contrasted défilement of
images, allowing us to take stock of the whole work’s unusual nature.12
Memory finds itself directly taken apart by this process, accentuated by
the fact that the two frames, their edges touching, are likely perceived as
a single body. Every image, inscribed once on each screen, returns later
on the other screen, cueing a recollection – but all the more unmasterable
in that we never know at which point of the film this will occur, and in
tandem with which other image that we have already witnessed. Then add
to that the ‘characters absent from the image, speaking the same text in
11 Danielle Vallet Kleiner, ‘Projects/Projections: Description of an Inf inite Process’, 2000

conference delivered (in French) at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture in Nancy
(unpublished).
12 Bellour’s use of the term défilement refers both to the technical process of f ilm passing
through the mechanism of a projector, and to the theorization of this term offered by Thierry
Kuntzel in his 1973 essay, ‘Le Défilement’, trans. by Bertrand Augst, Camera Obscura no. 2 (Fall
1977), pp. 50-65.
44 R aymond Bellour
two different languages (one of which is the translation of the other)’.13 The
film thus offers itself to us as a mimetic reconstruction, an excessive, highly
formalized hypothesis of the memory-block that every film (as Kuntzel
well saw) is in itself the index, in the physicality of the film-strip as in the
fleeting reality of film- projection.14
Je Jardin qui n’existe pas … works differently; a Chinese garden forms the
utopian model, the turning centre of a circular voyage around the Yellow
Sea, punctuated by several cities: Nagasaki, Harbin, Peking, Vladivostock.
The method, calling also to the deepening of a memory passing over from
author to spectator, continually striving to construct and modulate itself,
relates here to a variation in the appearance of screens, each in turn filled
and emptied, ceaselessly oscillating from one to three images. Thus, from
one film to the other, the paradox of a film-text that is doubly unattainable
is accentuated – as much by the exceptional nature related to the material
reality of each projection as by the particular difficulty of wresting hold
of, for the purposes of citation or reference, some instant, more than ever
tossed by the incessant swell from which we might dream of removing it.
3. We are familiar with James Coleman’s principle of ‘projected images’.

Rosalind Krauss underlines the fact that this principle has been appropri-
ated in such a way that we should describe it as ‘a “medium” that can only
be practiced by one’ (as is also the case, differently, for Jeff Wall and his
‘light-boxes’).15 The slides which are the principal material of these fictions
are ineluctably ordered, creating a singular film, according to a programme
calculated with a projector that is as audible as it is visible. The theatre
is bare, perfectly isolated, in order to enhance the quality of image and
sound, and the captivating value of the screen – in relation to which each
spectator must choose their own distance, find their own position. Rather
than the usual exhibition stroller, the visitor becomes an obliged spectator,
at least for the indefinite period of time in which they agree to submit to
the narrated enigmas.
13 Kleiner, 1999 notes on Escape from New York (unpublished). For related documentation, see
the artist’s website at [www.daniellevalletkleiner.com].
14 Thierry Kuntzel [1976], ‘A Note Upon the Filmic Apparatus’, in Title TK (Paris: anarchive,
2006), pp. 470-472. The ‘memory-block’ to which Bellour refers here is the metaphor for the
unconscious proposed by Freud, and subsequently adopted by Kuntzel, of the child’s toy known
in English as the mystic writing pad, and in German as Wunderblock. Kuntzel often used the
term Wunderblock in the working notes for his video Nostos (1978-1979).
15 Rosalind Krauss, ‘“… And Then Turn Away?” An Essay on James Coleman’, October 81 (Summer
1997), pp. 5-33 (p. 8).
These enigmas are all the more mysterious for the fact that Coleman, on
principle, never explains his work, and gives no interviews save for those
private conversations in which he briefs the authors whom he has already
chosen to comment on it. The images illustrating his many catalogues are few
in number, and are almost always the same. There is no documentation to
reinforce one’s memory. We recall Coleman’s anger, at documenta 12, over the
texts posted on the Internet that revealed the nature of the text delivered by
Harvey Keitel in Retake with Evidence (2008). So we are reduced to whatever,
at the end of a particular exhibition, we can note down (or photograph,
record, even film – depending on the degree of piracy permitted).
Beyond the phobic nature of such prescriptions, this is all an attempt to
preserve the purity of the desired, absorbing experience for each spectator
that the medium presupposes. An experience whose value as enigma relates
greatly to the wilfully self-reflexive nature of these sequences of images
that contain a rare, plastic intensity; and it is equally related to the unique
movement born of all these accumulated, concatenated images.
If, from among Coleman’s ‘projected images’, we may like to hold a
particular instant – from Charon (1989), for instance – that is because the
mise en abyme has reached its most vital point there, at the same time
as the f iction has been multiplying itself by virtue of the many varia-
tions and fragmentations it has undergone. Everyone who has written on
Charon – Rosalind Krauss, Lynne Cooke,16 and the anonymous author on
Tate Online17 – has been struck by the extreme, puzzling nature of these
fourteen episodes devoted to the different states or modalities character-
istic of photography: from fashion advertising and journalistic or witness
reportage photography to simple amateur photography, not forgetting the
contrasting techniques developed, at leisure, between the pose and the
snapshot. The single, falsely detached voice of the narrator-protagonist
comments on each episode; but in order to trust the meaning of everything
it says, it would need to be, in turn, man and woman, young and old, white
and black. We grasp that such a vacillation of identity is indeed at play
in the experience of taking a photograph in the manner that Coleman
practises it, so as to animate one of the strangest movements that has ever
existed. A movement of sensation, a sensation of movement, becoming
the movement of an idea.
16 See Cooke’s contribution to George Baker (ed.), James Coleman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).
17 Author’s note: On the occasion of the exhibition whose suggestive title is inspired by a
Gary Hill work: Between Cinema and a Hard Place (May-December 2000), in which Charon was
featured.
46 R aymond Bellour
Of all these works, Charon rates among the most intense experiences of
my life as a spectator of images, following the necessarily discontinuous
thread familiar to every museum visitor. I was able to re-see it several times
on the occasion of Coleman’s exhibition at the Chiado Museum in Lisbon
in 2006. I was pulled between the desire to fully re-live the experience, and
the desire to take notes in order to keep some record of it – to think through
it later more effectively, and possibly to write about it. But I strongly felt
that I was on the brink of a mission impossible, as the concatenated slides
kept calmly, implacably clicking by and, above all, the voice-over kept
expanding the circularity of its propositions regarding the very medium
that these images incarnated, in the light of their changing attributes and
diverse fatalities.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) in a situation
in which you could never consult its written text. But here, at least, is a
suggestion of such a record of Charon, reconstituted (and translated) – an
episode (the final one, I believe) of which, as I later realised – determined
as I was then to seize the words – I retain no memory of the accompanying
image:
Photography, she believed, displayed the living proof that death does not
exist. Paradoxically, she believed that death itself is an eternity, since
at the last second, a person’s entire life flashes before their eyes in an
uninterrupted series of images.
Thinking and rethinking about that, she figured that this final moment
of remembered images must have its own memory-image, then this image
has its image, thus composing an endless series of remembered images,
flashback upon flashback. And so she’s convinced that as close to death
as we might be, we never get there.
Sensing death’s approach, she got ready to photograph herself, in order

to prove her argument.18
***
18 At yet a further remove, I have retranslated into English Bellour’s French rendition of these
notes. The passage should thus not be taken or cited as an accurate, verbatim reproduction of
the voice-over text for Charon.
I hardly need to point out, once again, the extent to which these various
examples constitute, in their diverse ways, more or less unattainable ‘texts’.
But we should underline that, historically, it is at the very moment when
film has itself become a text ever less unattainable, in danger of losing
itself as a special gaze within a cinema projection, that projection-based
installations seem to have come to occupy its place somewhat – at the
expense (naturally) of certain possible nuances and gradations brought
about by the major displacement associated with each person’s singular
relationship to these art dispositifs. This is where we find, at the level of
the identity of a real experience, a paradoxical relation of continuity and
overlap being woven between cinema and this other cinema that is hidden
or displayed in contemporary art.
To conjure an image, by creating a point of absurdity also inherent
in these paradoxes of the attainable and unattainable text, I recall the
words of my friend Bert Rebhandl, an Austrian critic living in Berlin.
We passed, at a lively pace, as part of the exhibition Beyond Cinema: The
Art of Projection (Hamburger Banhof, Berlin, 2007), Douglas Gordon’s
installation 24 Hour Psycho (1993). The very excess of this work renders,
by def inition, the text of Hitchcock’s f ilm attainable, in the process of
making itself unattainable – since nobody, it seems, can pretend to have
really seen the piece according to its predetermined duration. And so
Rebhandl remarked: ‘We show up to cram 24 hours of film in the space
of two seconds.’
This essay, written in 2009, is collected in Raymond Bellour’s La Querelle des

dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L, 2012), pp. 124-137.
It is reprinted with permission of the author and publisher.
Original French text © Raymond Bellour and P.O.L, 2009; English transla-
tion © Adrian Martin, 2017.
Bibliography
Anarchive: Archives numériques sur l’art contemporain, Web.

Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Unattainable Text’, in The Analysis of Film, ed. by Constance
Penley, trans. by Ben Brewster (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 2000), pp. 21-27.
Bellour, Raymond. ‘On Another Cinema’, in La Querelle des dispositifs: Cinéma-
Installations-Expositions (Paris: Paul Otchakovsky Laurens [POL], 2012),
pp. 152-170.
48 R aymond Bellour
Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, in Screen Dynamics:

Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. by Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and
Simon Rothöler, trans. by Adrian Martin (Vienna: Synema, 2012), pp. 9-21.
Christie, Ian (ed.). Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment
Reception (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012).
Cooke, Lynne. ‘A Tempered Agnosia’, in James Coleman, ed. byGeorge Baker (ed.)
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 113-138.
Gallagher, Tag. ‘Max Ophüls: A New Art – But Who Notices?’, Senses of Cinema 22
(October 2002), Web.
Grazzini, Giovanni (ed.). Federico Fellini: Comments on Film, trans. by Joseph Henry
(Fresno: California State University, 1988).
Rosalind Krauss, ‘“… And Then Turn Away?”’ An Essay on James Coleman’, October 81
(Summer 1997), pp. 5-33.
Kuntzel, Thierry. ‘Le Défilement’, trans. by Bertrand Augst, Camera Obscura 2
(Fall 1977), pp. 50-65.
Kuntzel, Thierry. ‘A Note Upon the Filmic Apparatus’, in Title TK (Paris: anarchive,
2006), pp. 470-472.
Quelques Veuves de Noirmoutier un Documentaire d’Agnes Varda Press kit. ARTE
France, Web.
About the Author
Raymond Bellour is a French writer, film critic, and theoretician. From

1986, he taught in the department for cinema and audiovisual studies at the
University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, and he has also been a visiting
professor at New York University and the University of California, Berkeley.
He is the Director of Research Emeritus, Centre National de Recherches
Scientifiques (CNRS), Paris. In 1991, he founded the renowned film journal
‘Trafic’ with Serge Daney. His published theory and critical work includes
Le Livre des autres, entretiens, 10/18 (1978), The Analysis of Film (1979; English
trans. 1995), Henri Michaux (1986), Mademoiselle Guillotine (1989), L’Entre-
images: Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo (1990), Jean- Luc Godard: Son + Image 1974 – 1991
(1992), Oubli, textes, La Différance (1992), L’entre-images 2 (1999), Partages de
l’ombre, textes, La Différance (2002) and Le Corps du cinéma (2009). Bellour
has also organized several solo and group exhibitions, such as the landmark
Passages de l’image in Centre Pompidou (1989-1990).
2. To Attain the Text. But Which Text?
Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
Abstract
Raymond Bellour’s 1975 essay ‘The Unattainable Text’ has, in recent years,
enjoyed new life as a founding text of the loose, global movement devoted
to the making and theorizing of audiovisual essays. Where the film-text
was once unattainable to scholars and artists, now we can get our hands
on it thanks to the various technological waves that were once only a
distant dream. However, there are challenges in Bellour’s text that are
conveniently overlooked in its optimistic interpretation; in particular,
the multiple meanings attached to the word text itself. Attaining this
‘text’ is not a straightforward procedure of downloading and re-editing
digital files. What more is at stake that we need to make explicit today
in discussing the audiovisual essay?
Keywords: audiovisual essay, Raymond Bellour, textuality, post-struc-

turalism, montage, film theory
The Revolution Has Been Televised
Raymond Bellour’s short 1975 essay ‘The Unattainable Text’ (which first
appeared in English in the same landmark issue of Screen journal as Laura
Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’) has, in recent years,
enjoyed renewed life as a founding reference text of the loose, global move-
ment devoted to the making and theorizing of the audiovisual essay.1 It
1 Raymond Bellour ‘The Unattainable Text’, trans. by Ben Brewster, in The Analysis of Film
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27. We wish to add that, in discussing several
of Bellour’s essays here, we are not trying to reduce them to inflexible, totalizing positions or
arguments; all his interventions are superbly written mixes of on-the-spot reportage in a swiftly
changing cultural landscape, thought experiment, and exemplary analysis. That his work is so
flexible and responsive is proven, yet again, by his most recent reaction to audiovisual essays
doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch02
50 Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
has also, in a backlash action, provided the basis upon which to criticize
this movement.
Where the film-text was once indomitably introuvable (Bellour’s original
word) to scholars and artists alike – variously unfindable, inaccessible,
unreachable, unquotable, unmanipulable – now, as current wisdom declares,
we can get our hands on it and do what we like with it, mainly thanks to the
various technological waves (VHS, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray, and, less legally,
digital downloading of torrents), which were still only a distant dream for
a film teacher, critic, analyst, or writer in 1975.
Drew Morton, for instance, suggests that ‘videographic film scholar-
ship can redeem visual analysis. We can play out sequences in real time,
pause upon individual frames, weave in primary and secondary research,
and formalize an argument via voice-over commentary’.2 In his account,
audiovisual essays provide (among other things) a way of packaging the
usually live, performative – and therefore also unattainable – practice of
classroom scene analysis.
Taking a somewhat different tack in her video essay ‘Quote Unquote’:
The ‘Unattainable [Film] Text’ in the Age of Digital Reproduction (2009),3
Catherine Grant, one of the field’s major figures, offers a useful audiovisual
survey of the various ways that film is now being used as (in Bellour’s phrase)
‘the medium of its own criticism’4 – whether respectfully or disrespect-
fully, in an unforced side-by-side display/dispositif mode, or through more
interventionist, dissective analysis.
However, there are further challenges in ‘The Unattainable Text’ that are
sometimes conveniently overlooked in the generally optimistic interpreta-
tion arising from our present age of digital reproduction. Let us go straight
to the heart of the difficulty: following brief consideration of a number of
historic precursors of the audiovisual essay, such as segments on the TV
programme Cinéastes de notre temps (1964-1972), Bellour’s essay concludes
with an enigmatic, equivocal question:
as recorded in the introduction to Pensées du cinéma (Paris: P.O.L, 2016); he refers to them as
‘new intelligent objects’, while nonetheless noting in them what he believes is evidence of an
inevitable ‘fracture’ or a ‘back and forth’ between the films and their analysis (p. 11).
2 Drew Morton, ‘Though This Be Madness, Yet There is Method in It: Notes on Producing and
Revising Videographic Scholarship’, The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory in Videographic
Film and Moving Images Studies, September 2014. Accessible at [http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/
audiovisualessay/reflections/intransition-1-3/drew-morton/].
3 Catherine Grant [https://vimeo.com/10059844]. Note that the author presents this video
as the ‘not quite finished draft of my second ever video essay’.
4 Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, p. 27.
To At tain the Tex t. But Which Tex t? 51
Can or should the work, be it image or sound, in its efforts to accede to

the text, that is, to the social utopia of a language without separation, do
without the text, free itself from the text?5
That is, to boil it down more plainly: the work becomes a text by freeing itself
of the text! But this seeming contradiction is not a contradiction at all (nor
is the English translation faulty), because there is a semantic complexity
at work here in Bellour’s piece: at least three different, principal meanings
attached to the word text, all redolent of their era – but far less so of ours.
We must therefore make the effort of imaginative, historical reconstruction/
recreation in order to grasp this complexity that has been variously both
lost and refound today.
Most simply, on a f irst level, Bellour intended text in its empirical
sense: an object, in this case, a f ilm. That much, today, is (in the vast
majority of cases) easily attainable. (Although let us note in passing,
that the latest paradox introduced in the age of Netflix streaming and all
similar services internationally: fewer people now seek to possess films
materially, instead opting for the ease of simply watching them on demand.
In a certain sense, f ilms have thus become, once again, unattainable,
while being perfectly accessible!) Then, on a second level, there is text
as synecdoche for language, especially written language – a nuance that
comes to the fore in Bellour’s 2009 reconsideration, ‘35 Years Later: Is
the “Text”, Once Again, Unattainable?’, which explicitly considers some
burgeoning practices of the audiovisual essay. We shall return to the
argument of that piece.
Finally – and most occulted today – is the third level of text. It is the
expanded, semiotic, post-structuralist sense that Roland Barthes and many
others gave it at the end of the 1960s, in the form that Bellour fondly recalls,
in his 2009 retrospection, as ‘paradoxical reveries’ that are today ‘definitively
unfashionable’.6 This is the notion of the text as a ‘methodological field’,7 a
weave of signifying processes, a cultural miasma of potentiality (that ‘social
utopia of a language without separation’)8 above and beyond any single,
empirical text-object. To attain that type of text, in the name of cinema and
its creative analysis, cannot be a straightforward procedure of downloading

6 Bellour, ‘35 Years On: Is the “Text”, Once Again, Unattainable?’, see this volume, p. 33. This
volume after completion.
and re-editing digital files. And it may indeed remain, at some fundamental
level, ungraspable (another translation of introuvable).
What more is at stake, theoretically and practically, that we need to make
explicit today in discussion around the audiovisual essay, in the light of these
textual ambiguities and complexities? Although our contribution to this
discussion here will be mainly theoretical, centred around the discussion of
written texts that we take to be key reference points (some already judged
canonical, others not) rather than the analysis of particular audiovisual
works, we do insist, at the outset, that it is the actual practice of making
audiovisual essays which has led us to these thoughts and positions.
Noli Me Tangere
In 1979, only four years after the publication of ‘The Unattainable Text’,
Bellour already declared a decisive step forward both in his thinking, and
in the transitional state of play in the audiovisual culture that he was closely
monitoring. It was the intervening years of video art that emboldened him
to make this move.
In the introduction (titled ‘A Bit of History’) to his collection The Analysis
of Film, containing ‘The Unattainable Text’ as its subsequent, opening
chapter, Bellour proclaims: ‘To the difficulties proper to all analysis, I see
only one real, if partial, response: that of cinema itself.’9 Once its ‘bases, or
at least a sort of intellectual imaginary’ have been established, he envisages
‘a keener, more precise and much more systematic possibility of a true
discourse of film on film’ operating with a ‘greater freedom of approach
from now on’.10
This practice will reproduce, he predicts, the ‘fusional doubling of
discourse’11 that has long characterized the written analysis of literature.
Fusional doubling may strike one as a paradoxical entity (is it one or two?),
but it makes perfect sense within Bellour’s general frame of reference here:
literary criticism is both its own writing, as well as the writing it contains,
but from which it simultaneously marks its distance. Bellour (inspired by
the early example of Thierry Kuntzel’s now lost 1974 video piece La rejetée,
a reworking of Chris Marker’s short 1962 film La Jetée) goes on to evoke a
9 Bellour, ‘A Bit of History’, in The Analysis of Films, ed. by Constance Penley, trans. by Mary
Quaintance, (Bloomington and Illinois: Bloomington University Press, 2000), pp. 1-20 (p. 18).
10 Bellour, ‘A Bit of History’, pp. 18-19.
11 Bellour, ‘A Bit of History’, p. 19.
form for film-on-film in which, ‘within the apparatus itself, through its
contrivance […] the work of thought is performed’.12
Over three decades on from that statement, the landscape has changed
greatly. Bellour testifies both to the awesome – but also cheapening – avail-
ability of cinema (via video and digital supports), and to what he sadly
sees as the squandering (in DVD bonuses and the like) of the type of film-
through-film critique pioneered by Cinéastes de notre temps. Now another
crucial aspect of Bellour’s thought comes to the fore: his somewhat surprising
point (or wish) in 2009 that films remain unattainable – the very contrary
of celebrating (as many audiovisualists do) their easy-to-hand graspability
and manipulability.
How does Bellour reach this position? Through an extended and intensive
meditation on cinema itself (gathered in three books published between
2009 and 2016, Le Corps du cinéma, La Querelle des dispositifs, and Pensées
du cinéma)13 as well as an integrated examination of both the aesthetics of
the medium and the conditions of its spectatorship. As summarized in the
essay ‘The Cinema Spectator – A Special Memory’,14 Bellour comes to defend
(to some extent against the incursions of the digital era) the more-or-less
classical, cinema-viewing experience: projection in a dark room, for a fixed
period of time. At the level of sensory and psychic perception, this imposes
an elusive richness, a combination of remembering and forgetting that can
touch us to the core.
All criticism, then – whether purely written or in more hybrid, audio-
visual forms – seeks to capture, or recapture, the complex and evanescent
experience of a film, tracking it (as Bellour so magisterially does in Le Corps
du cinéma) to the tiniest material fluctuations and vibrations. It is this
evanescence that now comes to saturate the idea of an unattainable text
with a new and positive meaning.
‘35 Years Later: Is the “Text”, Once Again, Unattainable?’ is mainly about
contemporary artworks that find ingenious ways to make themselves un-
documentable – and hence also imposing, in their diverse ways, that special
12 Bellour, ‘A Bit of History’, p. 19.

13 Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, emotions, animalités (2009), La Querelle des
dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions (2012), and Pensées du cinéma (2016), all published
by Paris: P.O.L.
14 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, in Screen Dynamics: Mapping
the Borders of Cinema, ed. by Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöler, trans. by
Adrian Martin (Vienna: Synema, 2012), pp. 9-21; reprinted in Audiences: Defining and Researching
Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. by Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2012).
memory characteristic of cinema as a proudly and gloriously unattainable

text. Whether it is Agnès Varda’s use of multiple monitors each linked to
its own, audio headphone output; James Coleman’s nothing-but-the-show,
media-blackout policy; Danielle Vallet Kleiner’s multiscreen projections; or
(in a more conceptual and humorous vein) Michael Snow’s video stacking
of three fifteen-minute parts of his classic film Wavelength (1967), some-
thing happens that is both – as in cinema – technologically fixed and yet
unrepeatable, a unique moment demanding to be experienced again, but
differently. The memory we hold of such works is the only guarantee of
their fragile attainability.
Bellour also considers, in this vein, some rare experiments in the inven-
tive, digital presentation of an entire oeuvre, such as Thierry Kuntzel’s DVD
Title TK (2006) – which evokes, in its possibilities for interactive engagement,
another kind of experimental memory for the spectator. But what draws
our attention here is Bellour’s discussion of the burgeoning audiovisual
essay format of the 21st century – in its more individualistic and expressive
forms, generally unconstrained by commercial or industrial dictates – and
specifically the example of Tag Gallagher’s analysis of Max Ophüls’s Madame
de … (1953).
Two Times, One Word
Bellour wondered in 1975 whether ‘oral language’ – in the form of the

type of erudite voice-over commentary used in some Cinéastes de notre
temps episodes – will ‘ever be able to say what written language says?’15
He returns to this problematic via a comparison of a section of Gallagher’s
written essay ‘Max Ophüls: A New Art – But Who Notices?’ (2002) and the
2003 video adaptation of it – two texts Bellour asserts to be ‘identical, in
a certain sense’.16 In the latter, Gallagher’s written text (delivered by him
in a voice-over) is highly condensed and telegrammatic; as Bellour points
out (and as many beginning video essayists fail to grasp), it is impossible
to hear a densely written text when it is simply read out on a soundtrack
(or gabbled at a conference!).
In comparing the two pieces by Gallagher, Bellour is struck by a double
lack: ‘each subtracts from the other what is most crucial to it’.17 The move-

16 Bellour, ‘35 Years On’, p. 35.
17 Ibid., p. 35.
ment that is so crucial to Ophüls’s cinematic art (‘the frisson of the dual
movement of camera and bodies, at which Ophüls is such a master’)18 finds
itself somewhat dissipated and drained when overlaid by commentary and
fragmented by the analytic operations of editing; while the amplitude of
argument in the written text (and even our basic apprehension of it as a
text) is necessarily amputated.
This leads Bellour to the crucial distinction that there are ‘two, basic ways
of approaching a film’ and, specifically, two operative regimes of time in play
here: ‘according to the film’s own time’ (as we view it in cinema projection),
or according to ‘the time-space of its reading’, the act and process of its
analysis.19 Bellour implicitly questions whether these two times can ever
be successfully collapsed in the format of the audiovisual essay.
Making such essays certainly brings one quickly to the impasse already
made evident by audio commentaries for f ilms on DVD or Blu-ray: to
simply follow or accompany a complicated, multilevel movement, in the
mode of speaking in a voice-over as it plays through, never allows one
enough time (or space) to remark on everything that is truly going on
in the f ilm. Not even marking the cuts, as in a tabulated shot list, can
easily or effectively be carried out in this verbal mode. This is the illusory
folly, which also takes a literary form in criticism, dubbed as scanning:
the notion that, if you rap along with a film from beginning to end, as it
unfolds, you are somehow closer to its material and artistic truth than if
you break it up and rearrange it in any of the classical, analytical ways.20
Gallagher (who uses, as Bellour notes, screenshots and reprises as well as
integral play-through) has his own, personal variation of scanning: his
commentary is almost always keyed to the unfolding mood, psychology,
and viewpoint (real or projective) of the on-screen characters and what
they are supposedly feeling from moment to moment.21 In this sense, it is
absolutely true that a difference yawns open between the duration of a
film and the time-space of its reading.
But we are compelled to question the way in which Bellour has posed this
comparative argument – even as he explicitly worries about ‘the historical
privilege guaranteed for so long (a psychic as much as a material privilege)
18 Ibid., p. 36.
19 Ibid., p. 35.
20 See Adrian Martin, ‘Scanning Godard’, Screening the Past, no. 10 (2000), [http://www.
screeningthepast.com/2014/12/scanning-godard/].
21 For more on this point, see Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, ‘Writing in Im-
ages and Sounds’, Sydney Review of Books, 1 February 2017, [http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/
writing-in-images-and-sounds/].
of the written over the oral at the heart of Western culture’.22 Why is the
central struggle at stake necessarily that between a written, poetic/literary
analysis (which is ample) and a spoken/recorded oral analysis (delivered as
a voice-over)? Why is the language of the word, whether written or spoken,
privileged here, precisely? What Bellour sidesteps is the possibility (which
he raised in 1975) of ‘do[ing] without the text’23 – and thus the question
of what else could carry its multiple functions of argument, comparison,
elucidation, style, rhythm, affect, and so on.
Back in 1975, Bellour had entertained a bolder thought, half playfully
and half seriously: ‘We might […] ask if the filmic text should really be
approached in writing at all’.24 He then deepens the reverie: ‘This is a seri-
ous question – economic, social, political, profoundly historical – since
it touches on the formidable collusion of writing and Western history in
which the written alternately or even simultaneously performs a liberating
and repressive function.’25 This dual nature of liberation and repression is
another important 1970s legacy we have largely lost in our current debates
and discussions.
Writing is liberatory, in this context, because it allows and creates pos-
sibilities for textuality in the strongest sense: variously and simultaneously,
writing incites invention, elaboration, play, distance, ornamentation, and
reflexivity. But it is repressive because it imposes a stern hierarchy, with
writing set on a top rung above all other possible modes of communications
and their expressive means.
This repression was already the central concern of f ilm-maker and
theorist Jean Epstein, from the early 1920s to his death in 1953. In a sec-
tion from his book The Devil’s Cinema (1947) that is startling to read today,
Jean Epstein argues that our collective mind is coerced into ‘valuing only
that part of itself formulated according to the classical rules of spoken
and written expression’.26 However, as Epstein asserts: ‘In frequenting the
cinemas, the public have unlearned to read and think as they read or write;
it grows accustomed to looking and thinking and simply as it sees.’27 This
is a marvellous, tantalizing formulation, suggesting there are more ways
22 Bellour, ‘35 Years On’, p. 36.

23 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, p. 27.
26 Jean Epstein, ‘To a Second Reality, a Second Reason’, in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New
Translations, ed. by Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2012), p. 325.
27 Jean Epstein, ‘To a Second Reality, a Second Reason’, p. 327.
to ‘read and think’ other than through word-based reading and writing.
Epstein relates this development to changes in media, such as newspapers
and street posters:
Already, the newspapers present their accounts rendered like ‘f ilms’

of this or that, composed in a telegraphic style, in which, moreover, as
many words as possible are replaced by pictures. Already, wall abound
with posters meant to be understood by passers-by who don’t have to
stop or slow down, and which employ all methods of the moving image:
close-ups, superimpositions, parts bigger than the whole, etc.28
What else can carry the effects of language? For us, at least, the answer to this
question is crystal clear: it is montage, considered in all its diverse forms, or
what we have elsewhere described (in reference to James Elkins’s pioneering
but also cinema-less work in ‘visual studies’) as a ‘writing in images and
sounds’.29 Of course, it is not a matter of now banishing language in any or
all of its forms for the sake of some spuriously pure audiovisuality (which
does not truly exist). By the same token, it does well to remember that one
of the most celebrated essay-films in cinema history, namely Dziga Vertov’s
Man with a Movie Camera (1929), elaborates entirely lucid montage phrases
progressively built into a complex but immediately comprehensible global
montage structure, with scarcely the recourse to a single word! (For more
on this, see Julia Vassilieva’s chapter in this volume).
But let us now return to the theory wars.
Dazed and Confused
In ‘A Bit of History’, you will recall, Bellour refers to the need for an ‘intel-
lectual imaginary’ in order to reach ‘a true discourse of film on film’, adding
that this discourse would thus ‘reunit[e] a bit mythically the conditions
of commentary and the objects of its reading’.30 These implicit notes of
tentativeness (concerning the imaginary and myth) are significant – an
element of dream or fantasy-projection is involved, maybe even essential
for the dream or utopia of audiovisuality to take place.
28 Jean Epstein, ‘To a Second Reality, a Second Reason’, pp. 326-327.

29 Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, ‘Writing in Images and Sounds’; James Elkins’
extensive website of writings is at: [http://www.jameselkins.com/].
30 Raymond Bellour, ‘A Bit of History’, pp. 18-19.
This is the point where the complexities of the text concept begin to
emerge in a theoretical and philosophical sense. Is what Bellour called
fusional doubling – between anyone and anything – really possible, and
in what sense? Let us mark the importance of an idea of fusion in the
recent development of the audiovisual essay – another video by Catherine
Grant, for instance, taking its inspiration from the haptic theory of Laura
U. Marks, is titled Touching the Film Object? (2011).31 The call to haptically
fuse with cinema is itself a polemical or revisionary gesture against the
long-entrenched (and often gender-coded) tradition of critical distance
in studies of all media.32 In a similar vein, critic-practitioners (including
ourselves) have posed the ‘renewed intimacy with materials’33 afforded
by digital re-editing against the prevalent tendency towards second-order
abstraction in much mundane, written film criticism. Finally, what piece
of richly descriptive or ekphrasistic criticism – film writing in its most
expressive and ambitious forms – does not, in some sense, labour to be
adequate to, to grasp and to evoke, or to fuse with its absent object? In all
these cases, the hope to fuse is also a will to strategically confuse categories
and positions normally held far apart.
Yet, if we are to attempt to take on board the full poststructuralist load of
the text as an idea and as a legacy of the 1960s and 1970s, we may well find
ourselves at the antipodes of anything resembling fusion, or even give-and-take
reciprocity (in which the filmic materials resist us as much as we manipulate
them). Thinking now more of figures such as Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blan-
chot, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy rather than Barthes,
we discover an elaborate (and itself often poetic) terminology of separation,
spacing, interval, doubling, mise en abyme … Within this world-view, we cannot
hope to touch or fuse with anything; all representation is doomed to fail; it
is shadow play. This often rather melancholic model is something well (even
inherently) accommodated by literary commentary, but it does not take so
readily in the audiovisual domain, where closeness to the film is an eminently
practical matter before it is anything else. Yet this hands-on experience of
empirical-digital proximity cannot, in itself, entirely dispel theoretical doubt.
31 Catherine Grant, Touching the Film Object? (2011), accessible at [https://vimeo.com/28201216];

accompanying text essay at [https://f ilmanalytical.blogspot.com.es/2011/08/touching-f ilm-
object-notes-on-haptic-in.html].
32 See Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion
Books, 2006).
33 See Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, ‘The File We Accompany’, in Martin, Mysteries
of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982-2016 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2018), pp. 385-412 (p. 385).
Luka Arsenjuk’s 2016 ‘Notes in the Margin of the New Videographic

Tendency’ offers, to date, the lengthiest, poststructurally orientated critique
of the assumptions underlying audiovisual essay practice.34 Arsenjuk begins
from two premises that, he claims, define our ‘post-Romantic, modern
horizon’, and thus both the general field of the essay film and the particular
case of the videographic (or, as we prefer to say, audiovisual) essay.35 The
first (and, in this, Arsenjuk accords with the work of Tiago Baptista)36 is
‘formal reflexivity’, which amounts to an ‘attempt in which cinema is, from
the perspective of its limit, turned upon itself in a manifest desire to bring
to light its non-classifiable capacities’.37
Closely allied to this non-classifiability is Arsenjuk’s second premise,
more finely poststructuralist than modernist, in which a ‘form presents
itself as something possible only if it passes through or touches on the point
of its impossibility’.38 This echoes Chris Fujiwara’s recent, richly paradoxical
assessment of the future of every type of film criticism: ‘to apprehend and
live through the experience of the end of criticism by becoming incapable
of speaking of cinema […] it is still to happen, now that it has become
impossible’.39
For Arsenjuk, as for many poststructuralists, ‘non-identity’ is a sweet
agony, productive of a truly endless textuality: commentary will never
touch its object, cinema cannot touch itself, we cannot touch the screen,
the Imaginary will never meet the Real, etc, etc. His position goes, indeed,
a step further than Baptista’s in its announced radicality: ‘Reflexivity does
not name the form’s operation of circular closure. Any reflexive movement
namely necessarily implies a certain doubling, division, splitting, heterogene-
ity – an impossibility of the reflected thing to ever simply coincide with
itself.’40 Arsenjuk rejects what he sees as the cosy confusion between subject
and object suggested, in the name of a reclaimed cinephilia, by practitioners
such as Catherine Grant; instead – and this is an objection one often hears
today in video essay forums – we must start (or restart) from ‘the critical
34 Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”: Notes in the Margin of the New
Videographic Tendency’, in The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, ed. by Elizabeth A. Papazian
and Caroline Eades (London: Wallflower Press, 2016), pp. 277-301.
35 Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, p. 278.
36 See Tiago Baptista, Lessons in Looking: The Digital Audiovisual Essay, Doctoral thesis,
Birkbeck, University of London (2016), [http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/215/].
39 Chris Fujiwara, ‘The Critical Event of Director Ozu Yasujiro’, LOLA, 7 (November 2016),
[http://lolajournal.com/7/hasumi_fujiwara.html].
distance, which the negative gesture of thought assumes in relation to the

aesthetic object’. 41 Only negativity, lack, and impossibility will save us!
Arsenjuk’s assessment of the impossible in action is less flexible than
Fujiwara’s. His two central premises are hardened into a relentlessly reiter-
ated dogma: if it is not reflexive and if it is not (to some extent) impossible
in its non-identical splitting, then it is not an essay in the truest and most
worthwhile sense. This leaves us, predictably, with virtually a single, cultur-
ally approved, auteur masterpiece standing alone in the field when all other
pretenders to the crown are vanquished: the generally rather overworked
reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), which seems
to us (for all its undoubted brilliance) an eccentric and quite unrepeatable
model to which to hold all current efforts in audiovisuality. But, within the
logic of Arsenjuk’s argument, it is the perfect exemplar, just as the category
of desktop cinema becomes the perfect exemplar (and triumphant historic
fulfilment) for Baptista’s art theory-influenced model of audiovisuality as
(above all) the circular closure of modernist reflexivity.
Arsenjuk wants to drive a wedge or ‘poke a hole’42 between the necessary
trials of poetic essayism and the currently pervasive, institutional injunc-
tions tied to measurable knowledge production within the bureaucratized
university system. In this, we can certainly sympathize with him since,
personally, we oppose, on principle, the new university economy based
on calculable credit points for academic work. However, Arsenjuk further
hardens his argument with an ironclad appeal to the – again, poststruc-
turalist – truth of desire itself and its workings: ‘desire that must somehow
take up a position in relation to this loss’ (i.e., loss of any stable referent or
object).43 Audiovisual practitioners hence display a ‘relatively tame essayistic
desire’ and revel in this desire’s ‘closure’. 44 This amounts to a veritable
Law of Desire. Arsenjuk is right to criticize what he sees as a tendency (for
instance, in Morton) to celebrate an already (and rather swiftly) achieved
utopia of omni-attainability and manipulability, a utopia ‘taken as simply
realised’. 45 But he then forecloses the issue by declaring:
Why would the case of the film-analytic utopia be any different from the
fate of other utopias, all of which suffer from the inherently paradoxical

nature of fulfilment: namely, that the realisation of utopia abolishes the

very desire which is was possible to sustain in its absence, while the reality
of utopia remained merely an imaginary projection?46
Arsenjuk facilely mocks what he sees as a rhetoric of oneness, consistency,

reassurance, comfort, and reconciliation in the works of and on audiovisual-
ity by Catherine Grant and Christian Keathley – an overdetermined analysis,
which tramples much nuance in the pieces he references. 47 ‘Notes in the
Margin of the New Videographic Tendency’ is a classic example, to our
minds, of a theory-driven (in fact, dogma-driven) argument with little or
no purchase on what it is to actually make or create audiovisual works. To
consider any possible rapprochement between theory and practice, we must
skip to a style of poststructuralist thought that is less doxic and more poetic.
Ashes to Ashes
The Australian-based scholar William Routt has always insisted on a post-

structuralist perspective in relation to film analysis: ‘Getting closer to the
essence of the film – everyone knows that is not how postmodernism or
deconstruction really work.’48 The most complete statement of his position
can be found in a 1985 essay co-written with Richard J. Thompson, in part
formulated as a response to yet another oft-cited, short, and suggestive Bellour
essay published in English in that same year, ‘Analysis in Flames’. 49 In an
announced first gesture of their text ‘Keep Young and Beautiful’, Routt and
Thompson endeavour to ‘bring back the ashes’ of the analytic enterprise.50
In their discussion, Routt and Thompson rightly identify a trait that, we
believe, has metamorphosed considerably in Bellour’s work since 1985: the
binding association (strongly influenced by the writings of Serge Daney
throughout that decade) of the critical act with the moment of freezing, in

47 Luka Arsenjuk, ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”’, pp. 285-287, 295-296.
48 Deane Williams, ‘“We Might Leave It There”: An Interview with William D. Routt’, Screening the
Past, 26 (September 2010) [http://www.screeningthepast.com/2015/01/’we-might-leave-it-there’/].
49 Raymond Bellour, ‘Analysis in Flames’, reprinted in his collection Between-the-Images
(Zürich: JRP/Ringier, 2012).
50 William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson, ‘“Keep Young and Beautiful”: Surplus and
Subversion in Roman Scandals’, History on/and/in Film, ed. by Tom O’Regan and Brian Shoesmith
(Perth: History and Film Association, 1987), pp. 31-44. Another, later version of this text appears
under the same title in Journal of Film and Video, 42. 1 (1990), pp. 17-35.
which the freeze-frame is to be understood not only literally but also, and
perhaps more importantly, as a conceptual metaphor.
All the same, there are ‘two kinds of time’ posited by Bellour’s 1985 discus-
sion, a distinction of ‘absolute opposition’ that Routt and Thompson, for
their part, find ‘invidious’: ‘duration, which is the time of the film, and serial
time, which is the time of the analysis’.51 For Bellour, in that period, the
analysis which does not manage to freeze a film is doomed to be ‘illusory’
because – and now the famous terms of ‘The Unattainable Text’ return – it
pursues an ‘elusive body’ that ‘cannot really be quoted or grasped’.52
In fact, this distinction between ‘two kinds of time’ is another aspect of
Bellour’s thought that undergoes a later evolution and elaboration in his
trajectory. For what is here summarized by Routt and Thompson as serial
time – comprised, as it were, of the laborious, discontinuous animation of
instants of stillness – is quite different, we feel, from the more fluid, expan-
sive, and creative ‘time-space of […] reading’ that Bellour proposed in 2009
as the alternative to the experience of film-time, and that he demonstrated
magisterially in the 1992 text ‘The Film We Accompany’, a discontinuous,
walk-through analysis of Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960).53
Let us nonetheless stick, for a moment, with Routt’s and Thompson’s
polemical insistence, because it opens some interesting paths. For them, the
essence of cinema (and cinema criticism) is movement over stillness, or (as
Routt put it in reaction to a presentation on audiovisual essays in 2015) process
over object, event over text in any simplistically fixed and material sense.
For us the base unit of analysis is the shot, not the frame. That is, for film
as distinct from other cultural products, duration is a constituent of the
basic unit (the shot is a wave as well as a particle). Film analysis, as distinct
from the analysis of some other cultural products, should arise out of the
irreducible duration of the shot, should be grounded in the elusiveness
of its object, should eschew quotation or the attempt to fix a meaning.54
51 William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson, ‘“Keep Young and Beautiful”’, p. 31.
52 William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson, ‘“Keep Young and Beautiful”’, p. 31.In the
fascinating, book-length interview conducted by Alice Leroy and Gabriel Bortzmeyer, Dans la
compagnie des œuvres (Aix-en-Provence: Rouge profond, 2017), Bellour remarks: ‘Generally, as is
well known, every critical act presupposes a certain murder of its object; but, at the same time,
this murder is the precondition for its resurrection. Critical texts have no vocation apart from
reviving the object, by giving it new dimensions, perhaps another body’ p. 9 (our translation).
53 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Film We Accompany’, Rouge, trans. by Fergus Daly and Adrian
Martin), 3 (2004) [http://www.rouge.com.au/3/film.html].
Indeed, Routt and Thompson go onto argue for the vital role of madness
in film analysis, in the process détourning several phrases from Bellour’s
1985 essay:
That analysis which has as its goal the production of a template of a film
has, indeed, no future. Again we assert, it never did. But that analysis the
goal of which is the recognition of the madness at the heart of the work
does have a future, is the future. For it is the analysis which adopts the
pose of its object, which moulds itself to iconicity and analogy, which
pushes language into check, which respects and welcomes polysemy.55
Making audiovisual essays can directly cause any of its practitioners to relive,
in this sense, the historic combat (and changeover) between structuralist
and poststructuralist approaches to cinema and criticism. In this arena, the
temptation to stillness directly confronts the seductiveness of movement.
There are, in fact, dangers on both sides of this divide – traps of either
dissecting to kill versus just going with the flow. But let us first take stock
of what is at stake in this debate, within the imaginary parliament of a
philosophical aesthetics of film.
In an important text of 1981, Alain Masson proposes, in a somewhat
surprising formulation, that film form can be grasped not at the typical,
coded levels of découpage and montage (such as Bellour had worked with
meticulously in the 1960s and early 1970s), but in the interplay between three
domains: décor, as configured by camera angle; characters, ‘who only become
intelligible through being followed’; and camera movements, ‘apprehended in
their continuity or discovered across the intervals which separate successive
shots’. ‘Form’, he concludes, ‘results from the changing relations between
places, gestures, and camera viewpoints’. He prefaces this summary proposal
with the assertion: ‘These elements can be rightly characterized by their
various kinds of mobility within a mode of representation where movement
constitutes the principal authority.’56 Masson’s approach here is backed up
by the work carried out by his senior colleague at Positif, Gérard Legrand,
concretized in the latter’s classic 1979 book, Cinémanie.57
As a whole, Masson’s critical work expresses the intuition that is given
shape in this schema: form is fugitive in cinema, it can only be apprehended
56 Alain Masson, ‘Le boxeur transf iguré (Raging Bull)’, Positif, 241 (April 1981), p. 48 (our
translation).
57 Gérard Legrand, Cinémanie (Paris: Stock, 1979).
on the run. Form dissolves at the very instant that it appears to coalesce
or materialize, since the film itself always moves on, and thus scrambles
its momentary, shape-making tendencies of symmetry, echo, inversion,
and so on. Form is always a shape-shifting phantasm projected, at each
instant, into the mind of the spectator – inaccessible (unattainable) in any
one place, and yet a phantasm that has a material (and verifiable) basis. It
is along this same line that Masson claims, 37 years later, in his review of
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017): ‘It can only exist in the
spectator’s memory, i.e., over the hours and days in which the facts and
things that occupied the screen become indistinct.’58
This is, of course, the paradox (of a type to which Bellour is himself keenly
sensitive) common to all time-based art and media, whether re-playable,
like cinema or recorded music, or not, like live theatre and performance.
But, as the rich, many-media-in-one art that cinema is, and given that, as a
material object, it can indeed be played, replayed, frozen, and broken down
in so many analytical ways, it pushes this paradox to the limit.
This is why cinema at once both invites and mocks all properly struc-
turalist attempts to pin down the total system of a f ilm in a semantic
table, dimensional diagram, or annotated shot-list – everything that falls
under the heading of what Routt and Thompson call ‘the production of a
template of a film’.59 For – as every teacher knows – the simple, brute fact
of unveiling such a template or snapshot of a film’s formal system to even
the most attentive spectator or listener achieves nothing but puzzlement
or anti-climax; the only thing that matters is the patient labour – the
extended time-space of reading – that goes into the individual or collective
formulation of this kind of skeletal summary, the process that arrives at
it. The analytical freeze, in whatever literal or metaphoric sense, can only
be a provisional moment of closure, in the sense in which Hervé Joubert-
Laurencin describes this state of provisionality in the critical writing of
André Bazin.60
58 Alain Masson, ‘Le couturier et la cuisinière’, Positif, 684 (February 2018), p. 10 (our translation).
59 William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson, ‘“Keep Young and Beautiful”’, p. 31. On the
intriguing topic of structuralist diagrams, see David Plante, ‘The Real Thing: An Interview
with Rosalind E. Krauss’, artcritical, 30 August 2013 [http://www.artcritical.com/2013/08/30/
rosalind-krauss-interview/]; and David Carrier, Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical
Art Criticism: From Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism (Westport: Greenwood, 2002), online
at The Internet Archive [https://archive.org/].
60 See Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (eds.), Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory
and Its Afterlife (London: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 200-202; and Adrian Martin, Mysteries
of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982-2016 (Amsterdam, Amsterdam
University Press, 2018), pp. 371-375.
Bellour’s more recent insistence on the dual psychism of memory and

forgetting inherent in cinema viewing accords both with Masson’s belief in
the principal authority of movement in this phantasmatic medium, as well
as Josef von Sternberg’s remarkable statement in a 1960 letter sent to the
scholar Rafael Bosch (helpfully titled ‘On Resonance’) of his core aesthetic
principles as a film-maker, which are profoundly tuned to the matter of
fugitive form:
I attempt to make my work completely homogenous. Image, sound,

abstraction, and the effect of these on the beholder are interlaced and
must follow an inner rhythm and an orchestration which, though it
vanishes with the film, remains as a Nachklang [literally: echo]. It is this
‘after-timbre’, this ghost-resonance I seek – though I may not achieve it.61
Yet how, ultimately, are we to deal with movement – other than merely to refer
to it, eulogize it as an ideal, or quote it holus-bolus in an audiovisual essay?
The Permanent Text of Pleasure?
There is another key text of film-thinking written in the mid 1970s that
is far less referred to today than either Bellour’s ‘Unattainable Text’ or
Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure’ – and never, so as far as we know, in relation to
the field of the audiovisual essay, even though the main film it discusses,
Vincente Minnelli’s musical The Band Wagon (1953), has often popped up
in analytical videos, especially in the wake of the release of La La Land
(David Chazelle, 2016).
The text is ‘Show-Making’ by Dennis Giles, a gifted American scholar
who died in 1989 at the age of 45. This study of musicals takes its place
alongside similar psychoanalytically- informed studies he wrote concerning
the genres of horror, pornography, melodrama, and the videophobia of the
1980s surrounding television and its assumed effect on children.62
The connection we sense between an article on (predominantly) Fred
Astaire musicals and the field of audiovisual essays may not be immediately
61 Reprinted in Herman G. Weinberg, Josef von Sternberg: A Critical Study (New York: E.P.
Dutton, 1967), p. 138.
62 Dennis Giles (1975-1976), ‘Show-Making’, reprinted in Genre: The Musical, ed. by Rick Altman
(London: Routledge/British Film Institute, 1981), pp. 85-101. Most of Giles’ work is gathered
(with links to articles) in this CV tribute assembled by Kimberly Neuendorf of Cleveland State
University: [http://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/GilesVitae/GilesVitae.pdf].
The Band Wagon (Vincente Minelli USA 1953), screenshot.
apparent – bear with us for a moment. Giles makes an intense and elaborate
argument about the significance of showing something in cinema – in the
strong sense (common to the musicals he discusses) of putting on a show.
Showing is more than a mere spectacle or attraction; it is the entire act and
action of mounting, presenting, offering to the gaze, a process that Giles names
show-making or (after Freud) show-work – a series of steps he finely mimics
in the ascending parts, stages, and levels of his own text. (‘The crime of the
musical is not murder but love – a form of love that we must approach through
circuitous routes until we can show it openly.’)63 There is an entire language
or code for this aptly named show business, which all good performers know
intuitively as well as in the particulars of their specific craft – an accumulated
professional folk wisdom which film theory continues to ignore at its own peril.
The type of show which Giles richly evokes in his essay is all about the
particular experience or essence of fusion evoked in the highest moments of
song-and-dance performance in cinema, typically associated with Astaire,
Cyd Charisse, and other icons of what Giles perceptively tags the ‘pre-Fosse
musical’.64 This erotic fusion between male and female performers does
not rely upon narrative contrivance – he rejects, in a 1982 sequel essay to
‘Show-Making’, Rick Altman’s conventional ideal of the ‘integrated musical’
in which narrative and musical numbers are smoothly entwined – rather,
for Giles, show trumps story in all the best cases.65
63 Dennis Giles, ‘Show-Making’, pp. 87-88.

64 Dennis Giles, ‘Show-Making’, p. 101.
65 Dennis Giles (1982), ‘The Show of Love: Some Functions of Spectacle in the Hollywood
Musical’, unpublished ms., p. 9. See note 62 for CV link.
This show is not static; in fact, it moves and modulates itself a great deal.
But it strives to attain the ultimate effect of a pose in the most elevated and
imaginary sense: a moment of bliss and absolute fusion beyond time. The
very first subheading in Giles’ essay is ‘The Permanent Show’. In his later
consideration of these issues, he explicitly relates his idea of the pose as
a sequence of positions to Roland Barthes’ uses of figures in his A Lover’s
Discourse.66
Furthermore, Giles speaks of the show, in an almost philosophical
sense, as a text, and of the drive ‘to freeze the moment of jouissance into
a permanent text of pleasure’.67 This use of text again relates to the post-
structuralist era (Giles used it often, as when he analysed pornographic
‘texts of desire’),68 but marks out a fourth meaning or inflection of the term
related closely to Bellour’s three earlier meanings. Here, the permanent
text is a virtually mythic state of being, the other-worldly realm of the
gods – Giles quotes Plato’s The Phaedrus to the effect that Eros gives humans
the power ‘to become like gods, to free themselves from the constraints of
the everyday lived-world’.69 And, for him, the musical is finally no less than
‘the story – and finally the show – of Eros’.70 And yet worldly culture, too,
seeps into this internalization of the mythic realm that movies (among
other phenomena) encourage: it is a text, too, in the sense of a book (Giles
refers to the narrative of a musical, in the language of theatre, as its book)
that is learned and repeated by rote, over and over …
Of course, this frozen text of permanent pleasure is impossible, an illu-
sion: it must deny age, interpersonal difference, quotidian reality, and the
inevitable waning of energies. But, as a dream, it is precisely that magnificent
‘idealisation of cinema’ that Godard once invoked (also, as it happens, in
relation to the musical).71 This type of ecstasy is one of the affective experi-
ences or dimensions that most defines cinephilia, with its magic moments
and unforgettable, ever-replayable fragments. We stand apart here from
Arsenjuk, in whose anti-videographic argument we find cinephilia as, in
Grant’s phrase, affective knowledge, conventionally registered and dismissed
66 Dennis Giles (1982), ‘The Show of Love’, pp. 6-8; see Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse,
trans. by Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), pp. 3-8.
68 In 1976, Giles wrote ‘Angel on Fire: Three Texts of Desire’, and, in 1977, ‘Pornographic Space:
The Other Place’. See note 62 for CV link.
71 Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, trans. by Tom Milne (London: Secker & Warburg,
1972), p. 87.
as either ‘too full’ because it is purely subjective and thus untransferable,

or ‘too empty’ for the exact same reason.72 Always too much and yet not
enough!
How can this be related to the audiovisual essay? For us, in the context of
audiovisual essay culture, Giles’ critical parable of show-making is a lesson
in rhetoric. An assembled essay – whether in prose or audio-vision – is a
demonstration, a performance. It, too, seeks to evoke an eternally frozen
moment: of pleasure, and also of knowledge, of appreciation. It is what our
vernacular language calls the ‘ah ha!’ or light-bulb moment: when you are
filled with the realization or recognition of an apparently timeless truth.
And perhaps not even for the first or last time: maybe you have forgotten
it from before, and maybe you will forget it again afterwards, precisely
(unconsciously) in order to have the thrill of experiencing it again. Like many
things in life, melodrama, as Giles has remarked elsewhere,73 is revolution,
but the revolution that never comes once and for all, that must instead
be aspired to and imagined ecstatically, over and again – that permanent
revolution, like the permanent show, which the Surrealists consecrated.
Giles asserts:
[T]he search for love and the search for theatrical expression are both at-
tempts to find an appropriate language which will ‘speak’ passion directly.
Love can be properly expressed only when it is displayed – articulated as
melodic and rhythmic spectacle.74
Giles’s ultimate aim is to discuss the workings of fantasy in the psychoana-

lytic sense – i.e., to circumscribe a complex that is impossible in reality,
and achievable only in fantasy. Is the audiovisual essay, too – and the ideal
experience of it that we crave and promote – a fantasy? A symptom of
this might be the note of anxiety that constantly circles, at present, the
production of audiovisual essays, even among the most fervent champions
of the form. It is rare even to simply show (to screen) a work of this type
and let it stand by itself. ‘Like all fantasies, this show is timeless’, writes
Giles.75 But the show-making of the audiovisual essay seems to demand
verificatory words that stretch out another time on the stage of rhetoric:

73 Dennis Giles (1980), ‘Revenge and Revolution: A Study in Melodrama’, unpublished ms.,
pp. 13-14. See note 62 for CV link.
74 Dennis Giles, ‘The Show of Love’, p. 2.
verbal introductions, post-screening analyses, written explanations. Another

version, in a sense, of the time-space of reading – or teaching.
Arsenjuk faults [in]Transition journal (wholly devoted to audiovisual
essays), for example, for heavily overdetermining the supposedly pure lan-
guage of image and sound with curators’ introductions, makers’ statements,
published referee reports, and, last but not least, user comments (usually also
by insiders of the audiovisual scene).76 He has a point: certainly, there is a note
of institutional anxiety – specifically, legitimation anxiety – involved in this
overloading of the audiovisual with explanatory, written utterances; a worry
that the fledgling form cannot stand on its own, which puts further stress on
the ‘fracture’ between film and critique of which Bellour speaks today.77 But
we would not employ these symptomatic, institutional behaviours as any
kind of final, damning word on the possibilities of the audiovisual form itself.
Increasingly, we encounter the complaint (in the vein of Arsenjuk) that
audiovisual essays are merely illustrations of their accompanying written
text (a text that is, certainly in our experience, often deemed obligatory by
editors or publishers of such work, rather than initiated by its makers) – and
thus epiphenomena of a rationalist, language-bound theory. James Elkins
wields the following test or criterion to judge all manner of experimental
visual study: if what it says can also be expressed or discussed in words, then
it is not doing anything that is not already linguistic by nature.78 Yet, this
reasoning seems to us a hierarchical fallacy of the sort that Bellour also,
in passing, promulgated. Sure, anything can be written about, expressed,
translated into words – but that will be, above and beyond anything else, a
translation into the terms and domain of literature, not an equivalence to
audiovisuality, and still less something inherently superior (as argument) to it.
Why always this recourse to the literary as the highest court of appeal?
For us, the crux of the matter – to lean on Giles one last time – is this
‘articulat[ion] as melodic and rhythmic spectacle’ that the audiovisual essay
enables. Yes, there is an inevitable (even necessary!) element of fantasy in
every dream of fusion with the object. Sure, rhetoric (written, spoken) is
our indispensable ally at various moments and levels of the public life of
these works. But there is also the material reality of the audiovisual show
itself: its forms, textures, elements, and associations.

77 See note 1.
78 See the Introduction in James Elkins and Kristi McGuire (eds.), Theorizing Visual Studies:
Writing Through the Discipline (London: Routledge, 2013, p. 3-15); we also thank James for his
personal correspondence on this point. Our position is outlined in ‘Writing in Images and
Sounds’.
Wind back to Bellour’s 1979 comment on Kuntzel’s La rejetée: ‘within

the apparatus itself, through its contrivance […] the work of thought is
performed’.79 30 years later, the same idea returns in his description of the
unique slide-projections of James Coleman: ‘A movement of sensation, a
sensation of movement, becoming the movement of an idea.’80
Bellour sets a good tone here. Because today, it seems, much workaday
commentary on the audiovisual essay is fixated on the Kantian gesture of
categorisation (into types, model forms, genres, subgenres … ), disputes
over the correct genealogy of its influences (in experimental f ilm, art,
advertising, pedagogy, criticism … ), and the mapping of its institutional
coordinates (online, academic, commercial … ).81
A more useful intervention, at this time, would be to cut across these
various categories, genealogies, or sites, and attempt to formulate the gesture
(in the sense Vilém Flusser theorizes this word) of what it means to take
and reassemble pre-existing images and sounds within the contemporary,
digital landscape.82 A 21st- century gesture in which montage gives the
movement of ideas.
© Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, September 2018
Bibliography
Álvarez López, Cristina and Adrian Martin. ‘Writing in Images and Sounds’, Sydney
Review of Books, 1 February 2017, Web.
Álvarez López, Cristina and Adrian Martin. ‘The File We Accompany’, in Adrian
Martin, Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture
1982-2016 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), pp. 385-412 (p. 385).
79 Raymond Bellour, ‘A Bit of History’, p. 19.

80 Raymond Bellour, ‘35 Years On’, p. 45.
81 See, inter alia, Thomas van den Berg and Miklos Kiss (2016), Film Studies in Motion: From
Audiovisual Research to Academic Research Video [http://scalar.usc.edu/works/film-studies-in-
motion/]; Conor Bateman, ‘The Video Essay as Art: 11 Ways to Make a Video Essay’, 22 May 2016
[http://norbateman.co/11-ways-to-make-a-video-essay/]; and Jessica McGoff, ‘Text vs. Context:
Understanding the Video Essay Landscape’, 4:3, 27 February 2017 [https://fourthreef ilm.
com/2017/02/text-vs-context-understanding-the-video-essay-landscape/]. Our response to
the McGoff appears at [https://cristinaalvarezlopez.wordpress.com/2017/03/09/a-response-to-
jessica-mcgoffs-text-vs-context-understanding-the-video-essay-landscape/].
82 See Vilém Flusser, Gestures, trans. by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2014).
Andrew, Dudley and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (eds.). Opening Bazin: Postwar Film
Theory and Its Afterlife (London: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Luka Arsenjuk. ‘“To Speak, to Hold, to Live by the Image”: Notes in the Margin of
the New Videographic Tendency’, in The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia,
ed. by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades (London: Wallflower Press,
2016), pp. 277-301.
Tiago Baptista. Lessons in Looking: The Digital Audiovisual Essay, Doctoral thesis,
Birkbeck, University of London (2016), Web [http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/215/].
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse, trans. by Richard Howard, (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1978).
Bateman, Conor. ‘The Video Essay as Art: 11 Ways to Make a Video Essay’,
22 May 2016, Web.
Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Unattainable Text’, ed. by Constance Penley, trans. by Ben
Brewster, The Analysis of Film (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000),
pp. 21-27.
Bellour, Raymond. ‘A Bit of History’, in The Analysis of Films, ed. by Constance
Penley, trans. by Mary Quaintance (Bloomington and Illinois: Bloomington
University Press, 2000), pp. 1-20.
Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Film We Accompany’, Rouge, trans. by Fergus Daly and
Adrian Martin, 3 (2004), Web.
Bellour, Raymond. Le Corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, emotions, animalités (Paris:
P.O.L, 2009).
Bellour, Raymond. La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions
(Paris: P.O.L, 2012).
Raymond Bellour. ‘Analysis in Flames’, Between-the-Images, ed. by Lionel Bovier
(Zürich: JRP/Ringier, 2012).
Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, in Screen Dynamics:
Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. by Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and
Simon Rothöler, trans. by Adrian Martin (Vienna: Synema, 2012), pp. 9-21.
Bellour, Raymond. Pensées du cinema (Paris: P.O.L, 2016).
Carrier, David. Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From
Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism (Westport: Greenwood, 2002).
Elkins, James and Kristi McGuire. ‘Introduction’, in Theorizing Visual Studies:
Writing Through the Discipline, ed. by James Elkins and Kristi McGuire (London:
Routledge, 2013), pp. 3-15.
Epstein, Jean. ‘To a Second Reality, a Second Reason’, in Jean Epstein: Critical Es-
says and New Translations, ed. by Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2012), pp. 321-328.
Flusser, Vilém. Gestures, trans. by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014).
Fujiwara, Chris. ‘The Critical Event of Director Ozu Yasujiro’, LOLA, 7 (Novem-
ber 2016), Web.
Giles, Dennis. ‘Angel on Fire: Three Texts of Desire’, The Velvet Light Trap (Fall
1976): 41-45.
Giles, Dennis. ‘Pornographic Space: The Other Place’, ‘Film: Historical-Theoretical
Speculations’ in The 1977 Film Studies Annual. Part 2 (Pleasantville, NY: Redgrave
Press, 1979), pp. 52-65.
Giles, Dennis. ‘Show-Making’, reprinted in Genre: The Musical, ed. by Rick Altman
(London: Routledge/British Film Institute, 1981), pp. 85-101.
Giles, Dennis. ‘Revenge and Revolution: A Study in Melodrama’, (1980) unpublished
ms, Web [https://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/giles/giles80unpub.pdf].
Giles, Dennis. ‘The Show of Love: Some Functions of Spectacle in the Hollywood
Musical’, (1982) unpublished ms, Web [https://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/
giles/giles82SCS.pdf].
Godard, Jean-Luc. Godard on Godard, trans. by Tom Milne, (London: Secker &
Warburg, 1972).
Grant, Catherine. ‘Quote, Unquote: The Unattainable Film Text in the Age of Digital
Reproduction’, (2009), Web.
Grant, Catherine. Touching the Film Object? (2011), Web [https://vimeo.com/28201216].
Grant, Catherine. ‘Touching the Film Object: Notes on the “Haptic” in Videographical
Film Studies’, Filmanalytical (2011), Web.
Legrand, Gérard. Cinémanie (Paris: Stock, 1979).
Leroy, Alice and Gabriel Bortzmeyer, Raymond Bellour: Dans la compagnie des
œuvres (Aix-en-Provence: Rouge profond, 2017).
Martin, Adrian. ‘Scanning Godard’, Screening the Past, no. 10 (2000), Web.
Martin, Adrian. Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture
1982-2016 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018).
Martin, Adrian and Cristina Álvarez López. ‘A Response to Jessica McGoff’s “Text
vs. Context: Understanding the Video Essay Landscape”’, Cristina Álvarez López,
2017, Web.
Masson, Alain. ‘Le boxeur transfiguré (Raging Bull)’, Positif, 241 (April 1981), p. 48.
Masson, Alain. ‘Le couturier et la cuisinière’, Positif, 684 (February 2018), p. 10.
McGoff, Jessica. ‘Text vs. Context: Understanding the Video Essay Landscape’, 4:3,
27 February 2017, Web.
Morton, Drew. ‘Though This Be Madness, Yet There is Method in It: Notes on
Producing and Revising Videographic Scholarship’, The Audiovisual Essay:
Practice and Theory in Videgraphic Film and Moving Images Studies, Septem-
ber 2014, Web.
Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion
Books, 2006).
Plante, David. ‘The Real Thing: An Interview with Rosalind E. Krauss’, artcritical,
30 August 2013, Web.
Routt, William D. and Richard J. Thompson, ‘“Keep Young and Beautiful”: Surplus
and Subversion in Roman Scandals’, in History on/and/in Film, ed. by Tom
O’Regan and Brian Shoesmith (Perth: History and Film Association, 1987),
pp. 31-44.
van den Berg, Thomas and Miklos Kiss, Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual
Research to Academic Research Video (2016), Web.
Weinberg, Herman G. Josef von Sternberg: A Critical Study (New York: E. P. Dutton,
1967).
Williams, Deane. ‘“We Might Leave It There”: An Interview with William D. Routt’,
Screening the Past, 26 (September 2010), Web [http://www.screeningthepast.
com/2015/01/’we-might-leave-it-there’/].
About the Authors
Adrian Martin is Adjunct Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies at

Monash University, Australia and a teacher at the EQZE Film School, Spain.
He is the author of eight books, most recently Mysteries of Cinema: Reflec-
tions on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982-2016 (Amsterdam University
Press, 2018). His audio commentaries appear on BFI, Arrow, Masters of
Cinema and Indicator releases; and he writes for Trafic, Metro, Sight and
Sound and Caiman, among others.
Cristina Álvarez López is a film critic and teacher at the EQZE Film School,
Spain. She was co-founder of the Spanish online film journal Transit: Cine y
otros desvíos, and has written for Sight and Sound, MUBI Notebook, Shangri-
la, LOLA, Screening the Past, and Screen Education, and in books on Chantal
Akerman, Bong Joon-ho, Philippe Garrel and Paul Schrader. Her solo audio-
visual essays have appeared in The Third Rail, the ICA (London) website,
and Indicator DVD/Blu-ray releases.
Álvarez López & Martin’s collaborative audiovisual essays appear
regularly in De Filmkrant (Holland) and MUBI Notebook (USA); as well as
in Sight and Sound, The Third Rail, [in]Transition and 16:9; on DVD/Blu-ray
releases from Criterion, BFI, Kino Lorber, Carlotta, Masters of Cinema and
Belgian Cinematek; and online commissions for Queensland Art Gallery
and Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
3. Compounding the Lyric Essay Film:
Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-
Narrative
Laura Rascaroli
Abstract
Both artists and critics refer more and more to a diverse range of contempo-
rary films as lyric or poetic essays. Lyricism is indeed acquiring increasing
relevance as one of the key modes adopted by an artistic practice that is
spreading fast throughout the globe. Yet, the lyric essay is still substantially
undertheorized. This chapter aims to refine the theoretical and analytical
tools that are at our disposal to think about the lyric essay film, and to
expand our understanding of how lyricism is used by film-makers to create
audiovisual spaces for thought. In doing so, it draws on a specific case
study, the cinema of contemporary Italian film-maker Pietro Marcello,
whose experimental essayistic work is elegiac and political all at once.
Keywords: Lyric essay film, poetic essay film, elegy, Pietro Marcello, The
Mouth of the Wolf, Lost and Beautiful
Artists and critics increasingly refer to a diverse range of contemporary

films as lyric or poetic essays – from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Forgetting Vietnam
(2016) to Patricio Guzmán’s The Pearl Button (2015), from Alexander Sokurov’s
Francofonia (2015) to Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015), to cite some
of the most recent and better-known examples. Lyricism is indeed acquir-
ing increasing relevance as one of the key modes adopted by an artistic
practice that is spreading fast throughout the globe. Yet, the lyric essay is still
substantially undertheorized. This may be explained by the impression that
distinctive features of the lyrical, such as affect and sublimity, are at odds
with the essay’s characteristic rationalism. While acknowledging that the
doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch03
76 L aur a R ascaroli
essay film’s voiceover can include the lyrical mode, for instance, Timothy
Corrigan describes the lyrical as being almost at odds with the essayistic:
With a perplexing and enriching lack of formal rigor, essays and essay
films do not usually offer the kinds of pleasure associated with tradi-
tional aesthetic forms like narrative or lyrical poetry; they instead lean
toward intellectual reflections that often insist on more conceptual or
pragmatic responses, well outside the borders of conventional pleasure
principles.1
The lyric, however, may be said to be at the root of the essay as form, if
we consider that linguistic eloquence is one of its constitutive features, so
prominent that Max Bense, in a 1947 contribution, described the literary
essay as existing on the frontier between prose and poetry.2 In ‘On the
Nature and Form of the Essay’, György Lukács refers to poetry as the ‘sister’
of the essay,3 and to essays as ‘intellectual poems’. 4 From Horace, with his
Epistles and Ars Poetica, to Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism and Essay on
Man, from Thomas de Quincey to Virginia Woolf to Aleksandr Blok, many
are authors who wrote essays in the form of poems or in a lyrical prose.
In film, then, the lyric is clearly distinguishable throughout the history of
the form, as testified by the examples of Chris Marker, Marguerite Duras,
Alain Resnais, Forough Farrokhzad, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Agnès Varda,
Jean-Daniel Pollet, Joris Ivens, and Manoel de Oliveira, among others.
The apparent contradiction between lyricism and argumentation – also
emphasized by literary critics, who believe the term ‘lyric essay’ carries
a ‘slight implication of literary nonsense’5 – may promote a view of the
lyric as a simple addendum, an aesthetic surplus that does not partake
of the logical argument. A similar attitude of relegation may be observed
1 Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 5.
2 Max Bense, ‘From “On the Essay and Its Prose”’, in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our
Time, ed. by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012),
pp. 71-74. (p. 72).
3 György Lukács, ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay: A Letter to Leo Popper’, in Soul &
Form, trans. by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010),
pp. 16-34, (p. 29).
4 György Lukács, ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay: A Letter to Leo Popper’, in Soul &
Form, trans. by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010),
pp. 16-34, (p. 34).
5 John D’Agata, ‘Introduction’, in We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay, ed. by John D’Agata
(New York: Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press, 2014), pp. 5-10 (p. 7).
Compounding the Lyric Essay Film 77
in relation to the narrative component of essay f ilms, which is often

characterized as a mere f ictional layer superimposed on documentary
matter – a layering that has frequently been described as the essence
itself of the essay f ilm, in a way that presupposes the primacy of the
nonfictional. Conversely, I argue that the essay film is not merely a hybrid,
a documentary film with an added fictional ingredient; rather, narration
is a constitutive element of the essay’s epistemological and signifying
strategies. Argumentation and narration are not in contradiction; as
Harun Farocki has remarked: ‘to me, narration and argumentation are
still very closely linked. I strongly hold that discourses are a form of
narration’.6 Narration, indeed, is discourse. Needless to say, narration
is not simply equivalent with narrative voice and, thus, written text;
narrative mode and style, point of view, focalization, ordering of events,
and temporality are some of the elements that participate in the telling
of a story. And this telling can, of course, be shaped by its encounter
with the lyric.
But what is the relationship between narration, lyricism, and argument
in the essay film? With its effects of textual fragmentation, incompleteness,
and lacuna, and its emphasis on affect and sublimity, the lyric may be
described as a counter-narrative mode. Here, I will discuss how lyricism
works at once with and against the essay film’s narrative strategies, thus
contributing to essayistic discourse. In so doing, I wish to expand on a first
reflection on this topic, which I began elsewhere, to examine lyricism as
a locus of textual affect, seen as a powerful epistemological tool, and as a
mode that runs contrary to the essay’s scepticism, thus creating a dialectics
that contributes to argument.7 The aims of this chapter, accordingly, are
to refine the theoretical and analytical tools that are at our disposal to
think about the lyric essay film, and to expand our understanding of how
lyricism is used by filmmakers to create audiovisual spaces for thought. In
so doing, I will draw on a specific case study, the films of contemporary
Italian filmmaker Pietro Marcello, whose experimental essayistic work is
elegiac and political all at once. I will begin by briefly discussing lyricism
in cinema, and in the lyric essay film in particular.
6 Harun Farocki and Rembert Hüser, ‘Nine Minutes in the Yard. A Conversation with Harun
Farocki’, in Harun Farocki. Working on the Sightlines, ed. by Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2004), pp. 279-314, (p. 313).
7 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2017), pp. 143-163.
Thinking Poetically
I have submitted above that the impression of an inherent contradiction

between lyricism and essayism may, in part, explain the lack of theoretical
work on the lyric essay film. Another reason could be the difficulty in
pinpointing the lyrical itself, in literature and even more so in cinema, with
its characteristic multichannel textuality. The discussion of the poetic in
film has often relied on analogy. Filmmakers and film historians alike have
most frequently associated the lyric with avant-garde films made since the
1920s, although this association becomes less prominent by the late 1960s.
Abstract, experimental films without apparent or strong narratives have
been likened to poetry, an analogy based on the fragmentation, symbolism,
and evocative aestheticism of these films, which seemed to be more akin
to poetic composition than to narrative. Although most of the existing
literature focusses on avant-garde cinema, a lyrical tone or approach is
not confined to these forms, and the term lyrical has been paired to many
narrative films, especially those that include poetry in verse, or in which
narrative is de-emphasized. Writing on Andrej Tarkovski, for instance,
Stephanie Sandler comments that ‘the judgment that a film is poetic usually
means that the story-line has been displaced by an emphasis on mood
or atmosphere’.8 Indeed, lyricism and narrative in film have often been
deemed to be at odds. These discussions, however, have tended to remain
impressionistic, with some notable exceptions that display attention for
structures and the specificity of film language, starting from Maya Deren’s
famous distinction between ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ meaning in literature
and in film, ‘horizontal being the forms of meaning made clear through the
developing narrative of a work, and vertical the multiple layers of meaning
that accrue in forms of expression normally considered poetic’.9 One of the
most thorough (and controversial) readings of lyric cinema is Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s article ‘The Cinema of Poetry’, which, with its focus on film semiot-
ics and the ‘free indirect point-of-view shot’, corresponding to free indirect
discourse in literature, attempted a theorization of an authorial art cinema.10
Through the crafting of obsessive techniques that coalesce into a personal
8 Stephanie Sandler, ‘On Grief and Reason, On Poetry and Film: Elena Shvarts, Joseph Brodsky,
Andrei Tarkovsky’, The Russian Review 66.4: (2007), pp. 647-670, (p. 649).
9 Scott MacDonald, ‘Poetry and Film: Cinema as Publication’,Framework: The Journal of
Cinema and Media 47: 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 37-58, (p. 40).
10 Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘The ‘Cinema of Poetry’, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, ed.
by Louise K. Barnett, trans. by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 167-186.
style, the cinema of poetry, for Pasolini, allows for a counter-narrative subjec-
tive expression in which the ways of seeing character, camera, and author
are aligned in the optical point-of-view shot. P. Adams Sitney then drew on
both Pasolini and Gilles Deleuze to analyse poetic temporal and camera
techniques in narrative and experimental films that mediate individual
consciousness.11 The accent, as can be seen, is always on the expression of
a singular authorial stance and a personal poetics that places the director
at the centre of a creative discourse of idiosyncratic individual expression.
It must be noted that none of these reflections pertain to documentary as
a discrete category.
Literature on poetic nonfiction has tended to highlight its connections
with the modernist avant-garde. In particular, Bill Nichols describes the
‘poetic mode’ of documentary, an example of which is Joris Ivens’s Rain
(Regen, 1929), in terms of its renunciation of the conventions of continuity
editing and of the construction of a clear spatio-temporal narration, and
its reliance on patterns, rhythms, and associative links:
The poetic mode is particularly adept at opening up the possibility of

alternative forms of knowledge to the straightforward transfer of informa-
tion, the prosecution of a particular argument or point of view, or the
presentation of reasoned propositions about problems in need of solution.
This mode stresses mood, tone, and affect much more than displays
of knowledge or acts of persuasion. The rhetorical element remains
underdeveloped.12
In relation to the essay film, then, references to a lyrical component may

be traced as early as André Bazin’s article on Chris Marker’s Letter from
Siberia (Lettre de Sibérie, 1957), famous for being one of the earliest critical
interventions on the form. Bazin therein describes Letter from Siberia as ‘an
essay at once historical and political, written by a poet as well’.13 For Bazin,
Marker’s film places the intelligence of language at the core of its essayistic
argument; however, Bazin does not comment further on the lyrical aspect.
A recent article, also on Chris Marker, offers, to the best of my knowl-
edge, the most articulated discussion to date on poetry and the essay film.
11 P. Adams Sitney, The Cinema of Poetry (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
12 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 2001), p. 103.
13 André Bazin, ‘Bazin on Marker’, trans. by David Kehr, Film Comment 39.4 (2003), pp. 44-45
(p. 44).
Focussing on Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik, 1993), David

Foster claims that, in this film, ‘Marker interweaves analysis of historical
and political issues with the metaphorical connections, reflexivity, and lyric
subjectivity characteristic of poetry’.14 In his discussion of Marker’s practice,
Foster draws on Gerhard Richter’s definition of Denkbild, or ‘thought-image’,
as practised by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer, a
method that ‘brings together the critical and philosophical mode of essayistic
writing with the personal and experiential mode of lyric poetry in dialectic
tension’.15 Foster stresses that Denkbild is, firstly, a practice employed to
produce a subjective voice (and it must be noted that the subjective voice
is key, not only to the experience of the lyrical, but of the essay, too). The
lyric’s function, however, extends beyond it: ‘One of the central lyrical
features of the Denkbild that Richter identifies in Benjamin’s work is the
negotiation of the rechten Abstand or the “right distance” and the richtigen
Bickwinkel or the “proper perspective”.’16 Distance is crucial to the adoption
of a critical stance that must mediate the subjective involvement of the
essayist in the subject matter. Thus, for Foster, the notion of Denkbild can
support an understanding of the function of lyricism in the essay film as a
way to guarantee a balance between subjectivity and critique – the same
balance that Marker strived to reach in his portrait of his friend, Soviet
filmmaker Alexandre Medvedkin, in The Last Bolshevik.
Foster’s discussion is a useful starting point for two reasons; first, because
it references dialectics, which I have come to understand as central to the
workings of the essay film.17 Dialectics is also a resource of poetry. In an
article on the blog, for instance, Sven Birkerts uses the term ‘lyrical’ to refer
to essays that,
do not necessarily march forward logically but present their elements

associatively, sometimes without obvious connective tissue; or they
combine their materials more in the manner of collage, juxtaposing
several themes or kinds of narrative sequences. In some ways, they adopt
the resources of poetry.18
14 David Foster, ‘“Thought-Images” and Critical-Lyricisms: The Denkbild and Chris Marker’s
Le Tombeau d’Alexandre’, Image & Narrative 10.3 (2009): 3-14 (p. 4), Web.
15 David Foster, ‘“Thought-Images” and Critical-Lyricisms’, p. 6.
16 David Foster, ‘“Thought-Images” and Critical-Lyricisms’, p. 5.
17 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2017).
18 Sven Birkerts, ‘For Cyberwriters, a Lyrical Link’, The Times Higher Educational Supplement,
20 October 2006, Web, accessed 30 July 2016.
Indeed, I see lyricism in the essay film as a counter-narrative strategy, one

of the many strategies that the essay may use to create a dialectical tension
and, as a result, textual interstices within which new audiovisual thinking
can emerge. And poetic fragmentariness is a structure of gap that can be
imitated by the essay, as Ander Monson has indicated:
In order to accommodate gap, the essay must ape the poem – it must
create an openness, an attention to beauty rather than meaning, at least
on the micro-scale, it must jump through gaps and continue on, an elision
of the white space on the page.19
The second reason for which Foster’s article is useful is because it emphasizes
the question of the fashioning of subjectivity, ultimately attracting attention
to further important gaps: those between essayist and narrator, and between
narrator and subject matter. The subjective stance is crucial to the essay
film, which must embrace a contingent perspective, yet also attain critical
distance. The lyric, then, is shown to have a structural functioning in the
special textuality of the essay film.
Starting from these premises, in what follows I will make sustained
references to the literary theory of the lyric with a view to advancing our
understanding of just such structural function. My interest lies in under-
standing the role of lyricism in shaping the essay film’s thinking – hence,
in its capacity for thought. As already mentioned, my hypothesis is that the
lyrical in the essay film is not subordinate to logical thinking or separate
from it as an addendum or a supplement; rather, it is argument and instru-
ment of argumentation.
Learning from Pietro Marcello: Lyric Counter-Narrative, Elegiac

Reversibility
My discussion will draw on the cinema of Italian filmmaker Pietro Marcello.

Since 2003, when he directed his first shorts, Marcello has authored several
nonfictions, including Crossing the Line (Il passaggio della linea, 2007), first
presented at Venice Film Festival; The Mouth of the Wolf (La bocca del lupo
2009), Best Film and FIPRESCI Award at the 27th Turin Film Festival, and
recipient of a number of other prizes including the Teddy Award – the official
queer award at the Berlin International Film Festival; The Silence of Pelešjan
19 Ander Monson, ‘Essay as Hack’, 2008, Web, accessed 30 July 2015.

(Il silenzio di Pelešjan, 2011), on the cinema of Armenian auteur Artavadz

Pelešjan, first presented as a special event at the 68th Venice Film Festival;
and the docu-fiction Lost and Beautiful (Bella e perduta, 2015), which screened
in the main competition at the 2015 Locarno International Film Festival.
Frequently described as neither wholly documentary nor wholly fictional,
with its noteworthy mix of vérité, performativity, and lyricism, Marcello’s
work raises questions, on the one hand, on the nature of nonfiction in its
relationship to the historical world and, on the other hand, on the conception
of the essay film as a form of logocentric and rational audiovisual thinking.
Before I start to examine the role of the lyric in his films’ thinking, I want
to debunk the conception that poems are a highly subjective form that is in
radical contradiction with documentary. In doing this, I draw on Jonathan
Culler who, in his major intervention on the theory of the lyric, writes that
‘Poems are real-world utterances, albeit of a special kind’.20 Lyrics offer
truths about our world, and, in this, they are not unlike documentary:
The epideictic element of lyric, which certainly involves language as

action but not of a fictionalizing kind, is central to the lyric tradition
[…]. Lyrics do not in general performatively create a fictional universe,
as novels are said to do, but make claims (quite possibly figurative ones)
about our world.21
This concept is key to my understanding of the lyric essay, and of Marcello’s

nonfiction cinema. Lyricism, in this sense, is part of his films’ real-world
utterances, though it is different in status from their vérité components.
I will focus here on two of Marcello’s films, starting with The Mouth of
the Wolf, commissioned by the Genoese Jesuit community Fondazione San
Marcellino. Most reviewers touched upon its poetic images, its soundtrack,
and its elegiac tone. The film was mostly seen as a hybrid of documentary
and fiction containing two distinct narratives. It was described as follows,
for instance, for its exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) on 4 – 10 August 2011:
Pietro Marcello’s hauntingly beautiful debut feature interweaves two

love stories: the 20-year romance between a Sicilian tough guy [Vincenzo
Motta aka Enzo] and a transsexual former junkie [Mary Monaco] whom
he met in prison, and a poetic reverie of the Italian port town of Genoa,
20 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 128.
21 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 128.
depicted in all its mysterious, fading glory. […] The Mouth of the Wolf
masterfully combines documentary with fiction and melancholy home
movies from the past century with poetic images, sounds, and music of
the waterfront today.22
The so-called ‘poetic reverie’, which is made up of three sections placed at

the beginning, middle, and end of the film, has generally been seen as the
fictional part of the film, versus the nonfictional story of Enzo and Mary.
This description, however, is unsatisfactory, given that the real story of Enzo
and Mary is told not only via traditional, vérité documentary elements, but
also with fictional tools such as stylized reconstructions and re-enactments,
and references to narrative cinema and popular culture, for instance in the
presentation of Enzo almost as a figure out of a gangster film. Conversely,
the visual track of the reverie sequences is entirely nonfictional, based on
documentary images and archival material, in particular amateur and
industrial films. Lyricism, however, is confined to the reverie sequences, and
this seems to be the reason why critics have described them as fictional – in
accord with the assumption that the lyric is at odds with documentary.
The presence of the lyric in the film is most evident in the poetic voice-
over commentary, written by Marcello and voice acted by Franco Leo. As
Culler writes, ‘The production of first-person speakers has been central to
the lyric tradition’.23 Poems are the statement of a subject; such speakers,
of course, are not a personal ‘I’, but a linguistic function, although, as Paul
de Man has argued, ‘The principle of intelligibility, in lyric poetry, depends
on the phenomenalization of the poetic voice’.24 In the cinema, of course,
such a phenomenalization is not just performed by the spectator but can
be actualized by the film through voice-over, as happens in The Mouth
of the Wolf. The male voice-over, which opens the film, re-emerges in its
middle (which I will refer to as the ‘Intermezzo’ sequence), and closes it, is
clearly situated. It speaks with elegiac pathos and a Genoese accent, and
posits itself as a lyric ‘I’ stemming from the city, implying that the film as
a whole emanates from such an ‘I’. The text it recites is inherently lyrical.
Published as verses in the book that accompanies the Feltrinelli-published
edition of the DVD, it may be described as an epic. The pathos with which
the voice actor delivers it only strengthens the impression. This poetic text
22 ‘MoMA Presents: Pietro Marcello’s The Mouth of the Wolf ’, 2011, MoMA, Web, accessed
30 June 2017.
24 Quoted in Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 35.
is oracular in character and delivers truth statements about our world, such
as, in relation to a group of homeless people who find fragile shelter on a
beach: ‘The new cave dwellers: / They are no fishermen / Neither are they
sedentary / They are men who migrate. / We do not know their stories / We
know they have chosen […] found this place, and not others / To feel safe,
not far off a road which turns into city’.25
The lyric, however, does not just reside in the pleasure of the words,
figures of speech, alliterations, images, and metaphors. The poetic text is
filmically woven with images and sounds. The image track draws both from
original footage of the Genoa shore, with its ‘caves’ inhabited by ‘abandoned
castaways’ (as the voice-over also calls the homeless), and from grainy
archival footage of the town, its seashore, its port and factories, extracted
from a range of amateur and industrial films. The soundtrack includes
music that intensifies the pathos of the sequences, as well as the sound
patterning of sea waves. The sound of rolling waves is indeed central to the
film’s lyricism, as it produces rhythm, which is a fundamental component
of the lyric. Images also create rhythm; this can be seen, for instance, in the
grainy archival footage of the opening title sequence, with the repetitive
gesture of diving bodies in slow motion, which may be said to operate as
a rhyme. In the Intermezzo sequence, then, the images shot from a train
travelling on a bridge create patterns of light and shadow and evoke the
sound of carriages on tracks, even without including it. The train sequence,
incidentally, is reminiscent of another film by Marcello, Crossing the Line,
which exploits the rhythmic sound of travelling trains for lyrical purposes.
In The Mouth of the Wolf, the reverie segments are characterized by an
oracular, meditative rhythm made up of words, sounds, and image patterns.
The repetitiveness of rhythm, like refrain, ‘disrupts narrative and brings it
back to a present of discourse’, as Culler writes.26 Similarly, the production
of a lyric ‘I’ attracts attention to the act of enunciation, as does the breaking
of continuity, contributing to the film’s self-reflexivity. The Mouth of the
Wolf is, indeed, a profoundly self-reflexive text, which nods to a number of
genres and forms, including realism, melodrama, the gangster movie, cinema
vérité, the cinema of peripheries and slums, Fassbinder, and Pasolini. Here,
however, I am not interested in highlighting the components of the film’s
self-reflexivity, rather, I stress the effect of narrative disruption introduced
by the lyrical, and reflect on how this disruption contributes to the film’s
thinking.
25 Daniela Basso, ed. Genova di tutta la vita (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2018), p. 167 (my translation).
The story told by the film is that of Enzo and Mary’s extreme marginal-
ity, of their relegation due to their outcast, lumpenproletariat status, and,
especially in Mary’s case, non-normative sexual and gender identity. The film
constructs a slow, progressive revelation of their story, and of Mary’s voice
and body in particular. Mary’s voice, indeed, floats, unanchored to a body,
until the very last section of the film, when she finally appears on screen
as herself, next to Enzo. In his discussion of Marcello’s film, Oliver Bretthas
described this process of revelation as a ‘désacousmatization’, connecting
it to Mary’s lack of diegetic speech in the first part of the film (for much of
the film, she is only heard in voice-over) and her concomitant occasional,
inconspicuous visual appearance as ‘an unnoticeable “object among other
objects”’27 – a strategy that makes it impossible for the spectator to connect
her voice to her body until late in the narrative. Narrative construction and
dramaturgy, then, underline the issue of the inaudibility of queer voices and
invisibility of non-aligned bodies, while telling Enzo’s own story in a linear
fashion. His is a chronological biography of lost childhood, early involvement
in crime, a fateful shoot-out with the cops, a series of convictions, as well as
the unconventional, redeeming love story with Mary, and his present life
with her in their shared house. But the film comes across as much more than
a documentary on Enzo, his biography, and his relationship with Mary. So,
the film’s argument is made somewhere else. I argue it is the disjunction
between the lyrical, on the one hand, and the vérité elements and re-enacted
scenes, on the other hand, that delivers what I will describe as a utopian
political argument. The lyric, accordingly, is not a supplement, or aesthetic
excess, or individualistic stylistic marker, but is necessary to the essayistic
argument, which would not be in the film without it.
At a first, self-evident level, the lyricism of the film, with its high regis-
ter and aestheticizing power, lends nobility to the social actors and their
stories, which would normally be regarded as belonging to the realm of the
unsightly and the grotesque, and thus deserving of a lower register. The
reverie sequences, then, with their oracular force, hyperbolic language,
and the sublime power of rhythm, break the documentary narration and
its chronological temporality, with its dramaturgy of progressive revelation,
thus connecting Enzo’s biography not only to the history of Genoa, which
is a linear story too, but also to the eternal, circular struggle of human
life. Enzo and Mary, and Genoa and its inhabitants, therefore, become
the representatives of the cyclical human story of homelessness and
27 Oliver Brett, ‘The Performance of (Dis)orientation; A Queer Reading of Pietro Marcello’s La

Bocca Del Lupo (2009)’, Gender/Sexuality/Italy, no. 2. (2015), p. 53, Web, accessed 30 July 2016.
precariousness, displacement and fight for survival. Furthermore, Enzo,

Mary, and the ‘abandoned castaways’ are not the only fragile, unsightly
subjects aggrandized by the film’s lyricism. The Mouth of the Wolf, indeed,
places the ephemerality of humans and that of film on the same level, thus
raising the aesthetic dignity of amateur and industrial footage, normally
seen as banal, imperfect, and even unsightly. So, the invisible bodies and
inaudible voices of both outcast characters and outcast footage are redeemed
by the lyric.
Such redemption is part of the film’s broader reflection on time and
the passing of all human things, including the end of the historical epoch
of the industrial expansion of the port of Genoa. This is a meaning that
develops in the gap between the reverie sequences and the documentary
parts of the film. If the narrative constructed by the documentary sections
is chronological, the reverie sections break and reverse the narrative order
by going back in time, from today to the 20th-century history of Genoa,
to the history of the unification of the country, back to a mythical past.
Through the reveries, the film reverses its forward narrative movement,
as becomes visible in the Intermezzo, in which a piece of amateur footage,
shot in the old city’s alleyways at night, is literally reversed, so that the
camera moves back from its subjects, some prostitutes waiting for clients.
This literal and narrative backward movement of the reverie sequences, a
form of counter-narration that undoes the forward chronological movement
of the documentary narration, replicates the structure of elegy, which
‘replaces an irreversible temporal disjunction, the movement from life to
death, with a reversible alternation between mourning and consolation,
evocations of absence and presence’.28 The human beings’ stories, thus, are
at once situated in the historical time that produced the conditions of their
existence and woven into the cyclical temporality of human experience.
With this, the film does not refer to an a-historical condition, however, but
to a perpetual situation of exclusion and marginalization of the weakest
subjects in society, from the humble redshirts who answered Garibaldi’s
call and did not return from Sicily, to the homeless of both the past and the
present building fragile shelters to cope with the winter, to Enzo who was
introduced to illegality as a child by his father, to Mary who was exiled by
her middle-class family on account of her gender transgression.
I claimed earlier that the lyric gives a voice to the inaudible, as well as
visibility to the unsightly and the unseen. With this, I did not mean to say
that the voice-over replaces the marginal subjects’ voices with a display

Lyricism of found footage. La bocca del lupo [The Mouth of the Wolf] Pietro Marcello, Italy, 2010)
Indigo Film. Screenshot.
of rhetorical prowess. The film emanates from a collective lyric subject

that uses the first-person plural, ‘we’. This collective subject could be seen
as the voice of the city, or of humanity itself, or of the poet as cantor or
chorus, and calls on us, the audience, to feel at one with the lyrical voice,
which speaks for us too, as we speak through it. Thus, when a recording of
Enzo’s voice addressing his loved one starts straight after the first reverie,
it is instantly lent the authority to speak and to be listened to, in a film
in which voices are allowed to tell their own stories, entirely in their own
words. So, the lyrical in the film is at the core not of an aestheticizing/
consoling function, or of the construction of an authorial style, but of a
political argument about the inaudibility of marginal voices and, ultimately,
of the value even of lives that are always in danger of being swallowed by
the mouth of the wolf.
The redemption of inaudible subjects is equally at the core of Lost and
Beautiful. The voiceless here are, primarily, Sarchiapone, a young male
buffalo who is literally meat for slaughter, because it cannot produce milk
and is, therefore, unprofitable and unwanted, and, at a broader level, the
beautiful and lost country of the film’s title, an echo of the fatherland invoked
in Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco (‘Oh mia patria, sì bella e perduta’ / ‘Oh my
country, so beautiful, and lost’), as well as the title of an important historical
treatise by Lucio Villari on the Italy of the Resurgence.29 With ‘country’,

however, the film refers not so much to nation, but to a multilayered entity
that includes the nature and culture of a territory. These terms, too, require
clarification. Nature, in this film, is the natural world deeply wounded by
human exploitation and, specifically, the so-called Triangle of Death (Terra
dei fuochi), an area in the Italian province of Campania poisoned by Camorra-
run illegal landfills and fires of toxic refuse, which registers higher levels
of cancer-related mortality than the rest of Italy. Meanwhile, culture refers
to both the regional culture of agricultural and artisanal traditions, dialect
and expression, habitus and worldview, and the artistic patrimony, here
represented by the Bourbon Royal Estate Reggia of Carditello, an abandoned
seventeenth-century hunting lodge designed by a pupil of Vanvitelli, and
by hidden antique treasures subtracted by tomb raiders. Another inaudible
subject in Lost and Beautiful is Tommaso Cestrone, known as the Angel of
Carditello, a local herdsman who took care of the Reggia on a voluntary
basis starting in 2011, finally dying of a heart attack there on the night of
Christmas 2013, after fighting, amidst threats to his person and family, to
protect it from looting and to keep it clean of the refuse that littered the
estate. Cestrone repeatedly attempted to sensitize the Italian authorities
to the importance of restoring the Reggia and open it to the public, which
eventually happened after his death, in 2017.
The film is a startlingly hybrid text that mixes vérité, fable, and lyrical
elements. The documentary material includes footage of public protests,
archival and amateur images of farm work in the area and of the theft
of archaeological artefacts, and images of and interviews with Tommaso
Cestrone, who is followed around the Reggia by the camera. After Ces-
trone’s sudden death, however, the dominant tone of the f ilm became
that of the fable. The Neapolitan mask of Pulcinella was introduced, in his
original role of intermediary between the dead and the living. Pulcinella
(Sergio Vitolo) is tasked to take Cestrone’s young buffalo Sarchiapone to
safety, and accompanies him north, f inally leaving him with Gesuino
Pittalis, who plays himself as a poet and a shepherd of the Maremma
region. Pulcinella, who is f irst seen in a liminal world in the depths of
Mt. Vesuvius, is designated as a servant without free agency, but is able
to hear Sarchiapone’s voice and talk to him. Once Pulcinella decides to
break free from his servitude and become a man, however, he loses his
faculties, and Sarchiapone is abandoned to his destiny of certain death
in the slaughterhouse.
29 Lucio Villari, Bella e perduta: l’Italia del Risorgimento (Rome: Laterza, 2009).
If the fable as a genre typically anthropomorphizes and animates inani-

mate objects, thus giving a voice to the voiceless, the purpose and tone of
Marcello’s film is not moralistic. The lyric too, of course, is a form that gives
voice to those who lack one, and, in this film, it sides with the fable, while
also going beyond it, thus pushing Lost and Beautiful into the realm of elegy.
The most evident lyrical elements of the film include poetic language, in the
form of both poetry (in particular, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poem ‘Settembre’,
recited by Gesuino Pittalis) and of lyrical prose, which characterizes Sar-
chiapone’s speech, as well as an excerpt of ‘Il silenzio della ragione’ (‘The
Silence of Reason’), a short story by Anna Maria Ortese originally published
in 1953, here read by a woman from the past most likely representing Ortese
herself (Anna Redi), who appears one night in a farmhouse bedroom where
Pulcinella lies asleep.30 The ghostly woman describes the ‘hidden ministry for
the defense of nature from reason’, a ‘maternal genius of unlimited power’.
The lyrical may also be said to reside elsewhere, for instance in the use of a
different grain of the image, due to expired 16mm stock, or to the insertion
of newsreel and amateur footage, and in the elegiac use of classical music.
The lyric import of the film was broadly recognized by critics. Claudio
Panella, for instance, identified in the lyrical both the dominant tone and the
underlying structure of the film, suggesting that it is precisely the lyrical that
keeps the radically hybrid materials and formats of Lost and Beautiful together:
At a visual level, Marcello bravely manages to hold together the POV shots
of the buffalo, made with an old crank camera, the travelling shots in
the meadows in front of the Reggia, some inserts from amateur archives
and various other shots in different formats. All this is accompanied
by a soundtrack comprising mainly classical music that, more than
re-formalizing the ‘wilderness’ of nature and of the casting of peasant
non-actors, aims to support the purely poetic taste that dictates the pace
and development of the film.31
30 Anna Maria Ortese, Il mare non bagna Napoli (Milan: Edizioni Adelphi, 1994).
31 Claudio Panella, ‘Lost and Beautiful. Un film di Pietro Marcello’, CultFrame (November 2015),
Web, accessed 30 June 2017 (my translation).
Original Text: ‘Sul piano visivo, Marcello riesce coraggiosamente a tenere insieme le soggettive
del bufalo realizzate con una vecchia macchina da presa a manovella, le carrellate nei prati
davanti alla Reggia, alcuni inserti provenienti da archivi amatoriali e altre varie riprese in
differenti formati. Il tutto è accompagnato da una colonna sonora comprendente prevalentemente
musica classica che più che ri-formalizzare il ”selvaggio” della natura e del cast di non attori
contadini e pastori ha lo scopo di sostenere il gusto prettamente poetico che detta l’andatura e
lo sviluppo del film.’
In what follows, however, I will focus not on the unifying function of the
lyric, but on its disruptive potential and its ability to produce argument.
The tone of the f ilm is deeply elegiac. As mentioned, elegy replaces
the irreversible temporal disjunction caused by death, and the forward
linear progression of narrative, with a reversible temporality, thus creat-
ing an alternation of mourning and consolation. Lost and Beautiful fully
embraces such reversibility. Death is a pervasive element of the film – from
the placards with photographs and names of the ill and deceased of the
Triangle of Death region, carried by their protesting relatives, to the death
of Tommaso Cestrone, which threatens to put an end to the film itself, to
the ultimate fate of Sarchiapone, which dominates the entire narrative
from the start. Yet, neat divisions are subverted, first and foremost by the
character of Pulcinella, who can equally communicate with the living
and with the dead. We also see a dead tree on a hill that is said to be a
shortcut to the underworld, and tomb raiders from both the present and
the past enter and exit graves, defying separations. Evocations of absence
and presence, then, are the context of the apparition of the ghostly female
figure from the past.
Beyond the fable-like elements of the film, however, the most significant
infringement of the linear temporal progression from life to death is that
of Tommaso, who continues to inhabit the Reggia even after his passing,
becoming a silent figure that haunts the film, as an elegiac counter-narrative
element. Tommaso reappears, for instance, at the end of the ‘Silence of
Reason’ sequence, as if evoked by Ortese’s words. He also appears at the
very end of the film, in images from his screen tests. In these images, his
silence is eloquent and his image powerfully interpellates us.
Voice and voicelessness are central to the film’s narrative and argument,
if we only think that Sarchiapone is abandoned to his destiny of death in
the slaughterhouse once Pulcinella is no longer able to hear him speak. If, in
The Mouth of the Wolf, the lyric voice was a singular though collective one, in
Lost and Beautiful, it is multiform and distributed; it emerges from a range
of subjects, from Tommaso to Sarchiapone, to the ghostly woman. A key
point in the film is made by Sarchiapone, when he remarks on the absurdity
of man’s conviction to be the only being with a soul in the immensity of
the universe. It is a conviction with fateful consequences, for it delivers
man from his responsibility towards non-human animals, nature, and the
territory, all of which can be enslaved and exploited as non-verbalizing
and, therefore, supposedly non-sentient entities. The film’s utopian counter
argument is made precisely through the creation of a multi-voiced lyrical
subject. By creating a distributed lyrical ‘I’, that lets nature, as well as both
human and non-human animals’ voices be heard, Lost and Beautiful redeems
the voiceless, endowing them with an oracular poetic power that lifts them
above their enforced inaudibility.
This poetic power, in both The Mouth of the Wolf and Lost and Beautiful,
does not change the contingent reality in which the marginal subjects of
these films live and die – like Enzo and Maria, Tommaso and the buffalos,
Genoa’s abandoned castaways and the inhabitants of the Triangle of Death.
Nonetheless, elegy inserts their lives and deaths into a different, broader
reversible temporality, which subverts their finitude while denouncing the
forces and institutions that silence and relegate them.
The Aestheticizing Power of the Lyric Essay Film
Marcello’s cinema is essayistic in the tradition of an experimental, intel-

lectual cinema of test and trial, which combines hybrid materials, from
original footage shot both in digital and celluloid, to amateur, industrial,
and archival films, and radically different modes, from cinema vérité to
re-enactment to fiction. Its powerful lyrical components reside not only
in words and voiceover, but also in the rhythm of image and of sound and
in an elegiac arrangement of temporality. The lyric in Marcello’s cinema
is not supplement, tone, or stylistic signature, but goes right to the core
of the essayistic gesture. An elegiac lyricism is introduced as a form of
counter-narration, an undoing of the logic of documentary storytelling and
its progressive linear narrative; as such, it produces gaps within which a
multi-voiced, utopian political argument on the invisibility and inaudibility
of marginalized subjects can emerge.
Marcello’s cinema, in other words, provides a compelling, though by no
means unique or exhaustive, example of the role of the lyric in the essay
film. The lyric is a real-world utterance of a special kind, to use Culler’s
expression, and, as such, I have argued, it is not in contradiction with the
essay in its role of commentary on our world. It can be used to shape the
nature of subjectivity and enunciation, audiovisual rhythm and temporality;
it can work against a film’s linearity and/or logic, undermining its rationality
and its scepticism, and mobilizing affect (on a spectrum that goes from rage
to mourning) to produce intelligence. In all cases, the lyric is endowed with
an aestheticizing power that introduces in the essay film ineffable visual
and auditory pleasures for the spectator; such pleasures, however, are not
simply an addendum, a superimposed fictional layer, but are inextricably
enmeshed in the essayistic argument.
Bibliography
Basso, Daniela, ed. Genova di tutta la vita (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2018).

Bazin, André. ‘Bazin on Marker’, trans. by David Kehr. Film Comment 39.4 (2003),
pp. 44-45.
Bense, Max. From “On the Essay and Its Prose”, in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne
to Our Time, ed. by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French (Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 2012), pp. 71-74.
Birkerts, Sven. ‘For Cyberwriters, a Lyrical Link’, The Times Higher Educational
Supplement, 20 October 2006, Web.
Brett, Oliver. ‘The Performance of (Dis)orientation; A Queer Reading of Pietro
Marcello’s La bocca del lupo (2009)’, Gender/Sexuality/Italy, no. 2. (2015), p. 53,
Web.
Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2015).
D’Agata, John. ‘Introduction’, in We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay, ed. by John
D’Agata (New York: Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press, 2014), pp. 5-10.
Farocki, Harun and Rembert Hüser. ‘Nine Minutes in the Yard. A Conversation
with Harun Farocki’, in Harun Farocki. Working on the Sightlines, ed. by Thomas
Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), pp. 279-314.
Foster, David. ‘“Thought-Images” and Critical-Lyricisms: The Denkbild and Chris
Marker’s Le Tombeau d’Alexandre’, Image & Narrative 10.3 (2009): 3-14, Web.
Lukács, György. ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay: A Letter to Leo Popper’, in
Soul & Form, trans. by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010), pp. 16-34,
MacDonald, Scott. ‘Poetry and Film: Cinema as Publication’, Framework: The
Journal of Cinema and Media, 47:2 (Fall 2006), pp. 37-58
‘MoMA Presents: Pietro Marcello’s The Mouth of the Wolf ’. MoMA. 2011, Web.
Monson, Ander. ‘Essay as Hack’. 2008, Web.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2001).
Ortese, Anna Maria. Il mare non bagna Napoli (Milan: Edizioni Adelphi, 1994).
Panella, Claudio. ‘Lost and Beautiful. Un f ilm di Pietro Marcello’, CultFrame
(November 2015), Web.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo. ‘The Cinema of Poetry’, in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Em-
piricism, ed. by Louise K. Barnett, trans. by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 167-186.
Rascaroli, Laura. How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2017).
Sandler, Stephanie. ‘On Grief and Reason, On Poetry and Film: Elena Shvarts,
Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Tarkovsky’, The Russian Review, 66:4 (2007), pp. 647-670.
Sitney, P. Adams. The Cinema of Poetry (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2015).
Villari, Lucio. Bella e perduta: l’Italia del Risorgimento (Rome: Laterza, 2009).
About the Author
Laura Rascaroli is Professor of Film and Screen Media at University College

Cork, Ireland. She is the author of The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema
and the Essay Film (Wallflower Press, 2009) and, with Ewa Mazierska, From
Moscow to Madrid: European Cities, Postmodern Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2003),
The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: Dreams and Diaries (Wallflower Press, 2004),
and Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie
(Wallflower Press, 2006). She has edited The Cause of Cosmopolitanism:
Dispositions, Models, Transformations (Peter Lang, 2010), with Patrick
O’Donovan; Antonioni: Centenary Essays (Bloomsbury, 2011), with John
David Rhodes; and Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the
Web (Bloomsbury, 2014), with Gwenda Young and Barry Monahan. Her
most recent book, How the Essay Film Thinks, was published in 2017 by
Oxford University Press. She is general editor of Alphaville: Journal of Film
and Screen Media.
4. ‘Every love story is a ghost story’: The
Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s
Heart of a Dog (2015)
Deane Williams
Abstract
While it has been described as ‘a paean to a canine friend’ and ‘a medita-
tion on love and loss’, Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2016) can also
be understood as a network of ghost stories. Drawing on Anderson’s
idiosyncratic multimedia technique (foregrounding technology) and
conceptualizing of the future, this chapter explores the ways in which the
figures of 9/11, Lou Reed, David Foster Wallace, Gordon Matta-Clark, and
the Bardo course through Heart of a Dog. Exploring the implications of the
juxtaposition of these themes and Anderson’s oeuvre, Williams positions
the film in relation to a confluence of network theory and hauntology as
a particular rendering of 21st-century subjectivity.
Keywords: network, sashaying, subjectivity, ghosts, the Bardo, voice
In an article entitled ‘Ghostly Origins of a Phrase’ in The New Yorker, D.T.

Max writes,
For much of the time I worked on my biography of David Foster Wallace I

had no title. Then, in 2011, Alice Elman, the wife of the late writer Richard
Elman, sent me copies of the letters David had written to Richard, with
whom Wallace studied in the University of Arizona M.F.A. program. In a
letter from 1986 I found the phrase ‘every love story is a ghost story.’ I was
smitten; it smote me. When you write a biography, there are moments when
you feel that your subject is thinking things just for you to find them out.1
1 D.T. Max, ‘Tracing the Ghostly Origins of a Phrase’, The New Yorker, 11 December 2011, Web.
doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch04
96 Deane Williams
Max goes on to describe the trail he followed to locate this phrase, back to
Elman, to Virginia Woolf via Johnny Carson and her biographer Hermione
Lee, to Australian author Christina Stead, and to Stanley Burnshaw via
Jonathan Franzen and Stead’s biographer Hazel Rowley, not so much to
find an origin for it, to authorize it, but to invoke a network of forces, a
collection of spectral figures.2
The title of Max’s biography of Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story,
was also the working title for Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2016) an essay
film drawing on Anderson’s idiosyncratic multimedia performance technique,
lending itself well to this network model. Commissioned by Luciano Rigolini
for Arte – France’s La Lucarne creative documentary series, Anderson’s film
is structured around a collection of stories principally about the deaths of her
and partner musician Lou Reed’s pet rat-terrier dog, Lolabelle; Anderson’s
mother; Anderson’s long-time friend, conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark;
and ultimately, although less directly, Lou Reed himself. Adopting the essayist
filmic mode, Heart of a Dog also ranges across ideas about the rise of surveil-
lance society, cloud and data mining, the Buddhist concept of The Bardo, but
also deeply personal issues of language, knowledge, identity, death, and love.
Downtown Scene
For Laurie Anderson aficionados, Heart of a Dog is a strangely familiar

audiovisual work. Some of this familiarity stems from the film’s use of images
and songs gleaned from Anderson’s earlier works (more of this later) but also
a mode and set of concerns that we have seen from Anderson since the 1970s.
Roselee Goldberg links Anderson’s practice back to the 1970s New York City
downtown scene: ‘Downtown artists encouraged one another not to choose
between disciplines. Composers, choreographers, architects, film-makers,
sculptors and painters borrowed freely from various media.’3 Alongside
friends choreographer Trisha Brown and artist Gordon Matta-Clark (invoked
in Heart of a Dog), performance artists Barbara Dilley and Tina Girouard,
musicians Arthur Russell and Rhys Chatham, and many others, and centred
around venues such as The Kitchen in lower Manhattan, Anderson began
reworking, reimagining, and re-invoking a series of works in music, sculpture,
drawing, video, performance, spoken word, and more. Goldberg locates in
2 Special thanks to Thomas Elsaesser, Gertrud Koch, and Michael Renov for invaluable
feedback on some of the ideas in this chapter.
3 Roselee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), p. 12.
‘Every love story is a ghost story’ 97
this ‘downtown’ moment a prefiguring of Anderson’s autobiographical work,

an inkling of her examination of contemporary subjectivity in the digital
era, and possibly a description of her essayistic mode:
Scrutiny of appearances and gestures, as well as the analytical investiga-

tion of the fine edge between an artist’s art and his or her life, became the
content of a large body of work loosely referred to as ‘autobiographical’.
Thus, several artists recreated episodes from their own life, manipulating
and transforming the material into a series of performances through film,
video, sound and soliloquy. […] Anderson used ‘autobiography’ to mean
the time right up to the actual presentation of the performance, so that
a work often included a description of its own making. 4
This self-reflexive, performative, autobiographical aspect of Anderson’s

work is central to understanding Heart of a Dog, not only in an authorial
sense but in a structural and philosophical one as well.
Sashaying
Goldberg describes Anderson’s oeuvre after witnessing a 1983 performance

of United States I-IV at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York:
[Anderson] had utilized a variety of media with ease and invented a

repertory of her own. She had sashayed between disciplines, creating
seamless borders by frequently crossing them, and she had provided an
iconography of visual references that would keep art historians busy for
years to come – houses, the sea, mountains, dogs, airplanes, telephones,
televisions, metronomes, violins, the face of a wall plug, a light bulb,
clocks, maps, the American flag, the open road, clouds, sky, the head of a
president engraved on a coin […] each had appeared in her earliest work,
whether in the handmade books of the early 1970s or in performances that
she toured continuously on several overlapping circuits to American and
European art schools, museums, and galleries throughout the decade. And
each was a signpost for the future, since every one of them has continued
to appear in Anderson’s work to the present day.5
4 Roselee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1979), p. 111.
5 Roselee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson, p. 12.
98 Deane Williams
Goldberg’s use of the word ‘sashayed’ to describe Anderson’s transdisci-

plinarity is also a lovely term for the manner in which she proceeds in
Heart of a Dog and, in combination with her description of Anderson’s
early autobiographical temporality, makes for a couple of useful spatial
and temporal analogies. To sashay, a derivation of the French term chasse,
meaning to chase or hunt, refers to the ways in which a dancer’s feet follow
each other in a two-step motion in order to glide across the floor effortlessly.
It also refers to the resulting diagonal or sideways pattern resulting from
a sequence of sashays such as in an American Squaredance.6 I like that
‘sashaying’ sounds a little like ‘essaying’. This idea of sashaying rhymes well
with two ways that we can think about Heart of a Dog as an essay film as it
belongs to Laurie Anderson’s spectral performance work. These are: first, the
essay film’s hybrid, non-linear effect, and, second, the temporal unorthodoxy
that is evident in the essay film, and is redolent of Anderson’s oeuvre.
Anderson’s Voice
As I have suggested, a key element of Heart of a Dog’s essay mode is Anderson’s

voice. It is, at once, an organizing element, but one that puts into play, as we
have seen, a host of figures – some personal, such as Lou Reed, Matta-Clark,
Julian Schnabel, and Anderson’s family – invoked through the repurposing
of 8mm family movies. In tandem with her own musical pieces, Anderson’s
voice draws on these figures, at once to sketch out her own personal his-
tory – for example, her being at art school with Gordon Matta-Clark, that
Schnabel is a friend, that Anderson herself is also a Midwesterner – but also
as a means to play off the downtown scene with her upbringing. In her ‘The
Performer and the Machine: Some Aspects of Laurie Anderson’s Stage Work’,
Silvija Jestrovic proposes that, ‘the theatricality of Anderson’s performances
springs from two sources: the storytelling tradition and the new electronic
media. Although her narration is fragmented and double-voiced, it preserves
the storytelling pattern in the minimalist performances and hi-tech operas
alike’.7 Anderson herself has located her storytelling within a tradition
that includes Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Laurence Stern, while
6 The sashay patterning has, of course, more recently, coming out of hip-hop culture, been
used to describe an elaborate, assertive, or ostentatious moving of the hips from side to side in
order to attract attention.
7 Silvija Jestrovich, ‘The Performer and the Machine: Some Aspects of Laurie Anderson’s Stage
Work’, Body, Space, & Technology Journal 1.1 (2000), Web.
her embrace of digital technology, particularly in live performance, is ap-

parent.8 We need only think of her use of a vocal filter to lower the octave
of her voice to create The Voice of Authority in United States I-IV, which
developed into the figure of Fenway Bergamot, the mustachioed masculine
alter ego in Homeland (2010). As Henry M. Sayre points out, the utilization of
a harmonizer to alter her voice into The Voice of Authority was ‘an attempt
to create a corporate voice, a kind of “Newsweekese” […] the product of
“high tech” manipulation that its authority becomes synonymous with
technology’.9 In Heart of a Dog, the electronic filtering of her voice is subtler
yet is similarly conditioned, contributing to a voice that has a naïve, yet ironic
tone, described by Michelle Orange as being ‘plush (sometimes too plush),
intimate, oddly syncopated’.10 But it is also, in its digitized treatment, voicing
a spectral persona, in its breathy immediacy radiating a certain intensity,
particularly over extended periods, when accompanied by emotive music
and sound effects.11 Some of this immediacy and intensity may stem from
the proximity of Anderson’s mouth to a microphone and/or to the volume
at which it is recorded. In this immediacy and naïve ironic tone, Anderson
brings from her performance work a variation to the essayist voice-over.
In ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, Laura
Rascaroli points to how the ‘presence-absence of the enunciator is a key point
of the essay film’.12 In describing this ‘inscription of subjectivity’, Rascaroli
insists on the direct address to the receiver of the essay film in contrast to
the kind of the narration described by Bill Nichols as ‘the voice of God’ in
his expository mode of documentary.13 While the address is direct, it is not
necessarily uncomplicated. In Heart of a Dog, the figure of Laurie Anderson
is ever-present, directly addressing the spectator. Her ironic, electronically
treated voice-over, between traditions in storytelling and digital filter, and
between larger historical events and personal fragments is at the forefront
of the filmic elements, yet its irony and playfulness in its sing-song quality
8 Roselee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson, p. 25

9 Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 150.
10 Michelle Orange, ‘Dog-Seeing Eye: The Cinematic Work of Laurie Anderson’, Virginia
Quarterly Review 92.1 (Winter 2016), pp. 193-196 (p. 194).
11 A 2007 performance of Anderson’s Homeland that I attended was punctuated by an exasper-
ated, untimely scream from an audience member in the depths of Melbourne’s Hamer Hall,
when, it seemed, an audience member couldn’t cope with the intensity of the stories, of the
images and sounds all organized around Anderson’s distinctive narration.
12 Laura Rascaroli, ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, Framework:
The Journal of Cinema and Media 49.2 (Fall 2008), pp. 24-47, (p. 38).
13 Laura Rascaroli, ‘The Essay Film’, p. 38.
100 Deane Williams
undermine the kind of authority that can be associated with the voice-over.
Anderson’s personal tone could be understood as unreliable, not necessarily
conveying facts about the historical world but of a world filtered through
Anderson’s particular storytelling. The voice-over emerging as it does out
of Anderson’s avant-garde, mixed-media, and performance background
further destabilizes the documentary intent of the film, locating it at the
edge between the essay film and, in tandem with fragmentary montage
method, the experimental digital audiovisual work.
Essay Film’s Non-Linearity
As Laura Rascaroli tells us in How the Essay Film Thinks, the essay film has
a ‘tendency to use hybrid materials, to be transmedial, and, indeed, to be
nonhierarchical and nonsequential’.14 Following on from the sashay analogy,
and with Anderson’s ethereal voice-over in mind, Heart of a Dog, like many
essay films, such as Chris Marker’s San Soleil [Sunless] (1983), moves effort-
lessly from topic to topic and medium to medium. Across Heart of a Dog, we
hear stories about Anderson’s dog Lolabelle, the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan,
Gordon Matta-Clark’s death, Anderson’s mother’s death, Anderson’s rescue
of her brothers from drowning; these are the major ones while many more
minor ones emerge. Heart of a Dog is also composed of mobile-phone footage,
8mm home movies, domestic-grade digital video, found footage, animation,
digital graphics, and more. In one sequence, we shift from a story about the
United States government’s data-collection storage facilities to one about
the biblical figure Moses working as a telephone repairman, separated by a
brief ellipsis combining the images of clouds with the notion of ‘the cloud’,
an idea that lends itself to a cynicism about the contemporary digital age,
something that would probably appeal to Anderson in her suggestive remix
procedure. As we have seen, Anderson’s essayistic mode, inherent in all
her work, emerged in the 1970s, prefiguring the digital era’s intensification
of this tradition in the cinema. In a mirror to Anderson’s own interest in
spoken and written language, Rascaroli points to the essay film’s ‘textual
interstitiality’ as it ‘creates discontinuities that subvert the sequentiality of
film language’.15 For Rascaroli, interstices draw attention to the textuality
of images and, in their separation, as critique, the relationship between
14 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks (London and New York: Oxford University Press,
2018), p. 1.
15 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks, p. 5.
images. In this instance, Anderson’s rhyming of ‘the cloud’ with images of

clouds in the sky brings together an ineffable imaging of the digitization of
enormous amounts of data with the dream-like image of clouds, recalling
the earlier sequence about Lolabelle’s learned fear of predators from the sky
as an analogy for the terror sparked by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade
Center in Manhattan. Rascaroli describes these kinds of montage moments
as ‘encounters’ that lie at the heart of the essay film’s raison d’etre. These are
multivalent and important to the mode’s critical unorthodoxy. These are
encounters between the past and the present, between cultures, between
value systems, between species, of a narrator with an image.16
Essay Film’s Temporal Unorthodoxy
Anderson’s insistence on putting, side by side, images and stories of our

contemporary world and the ancient world, as in a telephone repairman
named Moses or a comparison of the Egyptian pyramids and the American
government’s Iron Mountain data-collection storage facilities, is also indica-
tive of the temporal unorthodoxy of Heart of a Dog. As Goldberg suggests,
Anderson’s work prefigured the possibilities afforded by the digital era, and it
is possible to see in the film how she draws on the past and projects into the
future on her oeuvre. It is also characteristic of Anderson’s use of dialectical
images as a subtler critical mode. Heart of a Dog utilizes the songs ‘Beautiful
Pea Green Boat’ from her 1994 album Bright Red, ‘The Lake’ and ‘The Flow’
from Homeland (2010), and excerpts from the 2012 recording of Landfall
with the Kronos Quartet. It also uses the lines from Søren Kierkegaard
about how ‘life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived
forwards’; it seems of interest to Anderson as much for its allusion to hip-hop
and remix culture as it does to theories of history. Kierkegaard’s words are
juxtaposed with CCT footage of figures in public played in reverse, while
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s phrase ‘If you can’t talk about it, it just doesn’t exist’,
revisited from United States I-IV Live (1982), is compared to the advice from
Homeland Security instructions, Anderson says: ‘If you see something, say
something.’ Sounds like something the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein
might say. And his books are full of cryptic sentences about logic. And about
16 Jean Luc Godard’s essay film Adieu au Langage [Goodbye to Language] (2014) is structured
as a set of encounters between, for example, a man and a woman and the city and the country,
all facilitated by a dog.
102 Deane Williams
how language has the power to actually create the world. ‘If you can’t talk
about it,’ he says, ‘it just doesn’t exist.’
In Anderson’s use of ancient history and immediate contemporary events;
in her use of her own songs, stories, and aphorisms; in her use of quotes from
philosophers; in her use of an evolving method that commenced in the early
1970s that prefigured and now revels in the affordances of digital technology,
a contemporary bricolage method emerges, one that is suggestive of what
we are subjected to in digital culture. In these ways, Heart of a Dog aligns
itself with Rascaroli’s characterization of ‘the essay film as a metahistorical
form, which critically and self-reflexively comments on its own activity as
it reorders, reframes and reinterprets history’.17 Across a varied, multimedia
essay film, the film-maker foregrounds the ellipses between the stories as
much as the stories themselves that, following Rascaroli again, drawing on
Roland Barthes and Michael Renov, emphasizes the temporal and spatial
in-betweenness of the essay film.18
The Bardo
In his ‘Laurie Anderson: Miracle in Milan’, Germano Celant writes,
Every event, musical or visual, is for her an open transparent instrument

not only bound to her identity, but ready to dissolve to give way to a
powerful current of real energy. She thus keeps a distance from the visual
ostentation of self and narcissistic self-gratification and favors instead
the irruption of a hidden condition of being. This brings Anderson in
her relationship with theatricality, to conceive of the stage space is a
participatory perimeter, in which the profound reality of life offers itself
to perception and to the gaze of all.19
This suitably ghostly usage of an ‘open transparent instrument […] ready

to dissolve to give way to a powerful current of real energy’ that Celant
proposes recalls a kind of luminosity, a supernatural presence, as well as
sharing the same spectral etymology. Following Celant’s terminology, the
17 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks, p. 18.

18 Anderson thanks Chris Marker Alan Berliner and Philip Lopate in the credits. Lopate’s ‘In
Search of the Centaur: The Essay Film’, published in the Threepenny Review in 1992 was one of
the early signal writings on the essay film.
19 Germano Celant, ‘Laurie Anderson: Miracle in Milan’, in Laurie Anderson, Dal Vivo, ed. by
Germano Celant (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1998), n.p.
derivation of the term ‘spectral’ is close to the word ‘speculate’, from the
Latin verb specere, to see or to look at. Speculate is closely linked to the essay
mode, but also to terms such as perspective, spectrum, and prospect.20
This speculative mode of Heart of a Dog draws on the three principal ghost
stories: Lolabelle’s, Anderson’s mother’s, and Gordon Matta-Clark’s. Most of
the first part of the film concerns stories based on Lolabelle: her birth, the
trip to the ‘northern mountains of California’, Lolabelle and industrial puppy
breeding, Lolabelle’s family, Lolabelle and the West Village, Lolabelle’s piano
lessons and concerts. Anderson’s mother’s death, the second story, is introduced
early in the film, when the phrases ‘tell all the animals […]’, ‘is it a pilgrimage?
Towards what?’ are first heard before they form the coda to the film. Gordon
Matta-Clark’s life and death is the central story of the film, because it initiates
a lengthy (nearly ten-minute) sequence and develops into a reflective hiatus
or interlude, an audio-visualization of the Buddhist concept of the Bardo (or
the gap) as described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a time after death and
before rebirth, where we witness images and sounds from earlier in Heart of
a Dog, reworked and projecting forward to what turn out to be later images in
the film. This ‘Bardo’ sequence is fundamental to the film’s spectral network.
The first part of the film works through the roughly sixteen stories alluded
to above, including those about Lolabelle, the 9/11 attacks, Matta-Clark’s
death, Anderson’s mother’s death, Anderson’s rescue of her brothers from
drowning, with some brief interludes or gaps, which include moments
where fragmented typewritten text appears. Following the introduction
of minimalist artist Matta-Clark through a couple of biographical stills at
around 38 minutes, Anderson tells us ‘Gordon Matta-Clark died young and
he died in an amazing way. Gordon was a good friend of mine and he was
a sculptor’. She then tells us about Matta-Clark reading to his friends in
hospital and how the two lamas stood beside his deathbed and shouted into
his ears as part of a ritual invoking The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Immediately
following this sequence, the film shifts slightly at 39:46 as the image of the
spinning Tibetan Prayer Wheels fades.
Over the black-and-white image of an interior with an open window on the
right and a closed door on the centre-left, Anderson tells us ‘I’ve seen three
ghosts in my life now and the first was Gordon a few hours after he died. He
appeared on the back porch of a commune I was living in. “Every love story
is a ghost story”, said David Foster Wallace’ (voice-over accompanying the
text of these words). This last phrase, rhyming with an early epiphany about
love and death, is accompanied by muttered echoed voices as an image of
20 Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

104 Deane Williams
‘Lolabelle in The Bardo’ in Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson USA France 2015) Canal Street
Communications. Screenshot.
a sprightly dog leaping onto a platform behind a water-drop-coated glass

appears. Anderson continues over industrial sounds, murmurs,
After death, according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, all creatures then
spend 49 days in the Bardo, and the Bardo isn’t a place, it’s more like a
process, that lasts 49 days as the mind dissolves and, as the Tibetans
believe, the consciousness, or let’s say the energy, prepares to take another
life form. Leap, leap. All goes to darkness and the next thing you see is your
next life, a slow awakening to this world or another world. [over colour
8mm images of children in red-and-white striped tops playing in and
around a boat] Now you’re in another form without a body. Recognize this.
The cities, the mountains, [sepia-toned images of skyscrapers shot from
below] the rooms, the trees, the trains. Optical illusions. [image of a man
in a kayak moving through reeds on a lake with dog aboard] Not there.
Like dreams made of nothing. [cut to image of chef Kurt Gutenbrunner]
Things that you love, living things, move with a different speed. They
disappear, echo, repeat. [images of cloth floating in the breeze on a wire
followed by a single prayer wheel against a gold backdrop with audio of
voices in reverse] Anger turned to liberation. Earth into water. Water into
fire. Fire into air. Air into consciousness.
For the consideration of space, I will leave the description there, suffice to
say that this haunting, poetic sequence continues for some time, including
images of tigers, horses being ridden in reverse, Lolabelle’s point of view
of as a dog in the West Village and playing the piano in concert, power
lines, Lou Reed in extreme close-up, a shot of Matta-Clark in mock threat
towards Caroline Goodden taken from Food (1972),21 and much more. The
phrase ‘recognize this’ recurs several times. This sequence utilizes the
Bardo as an audiovisual network of Anderson’s personal history (family,
Food, Matta-Clarke, Reed).
These last few lines – ‘Anger turned to liberation. Earth into water. Water
into fire. Fire into air. Air into consciousness’ – paraphrase The Tibetan Book
of the Dead’s ‘The Great Liberation by Hearing’, encapsulating the dissolution
of the five elements. According to the Book, these words are to be uttered ‘by
a spiritual teacher, a student, or a spiritual sibling who was a close friend’ to
remind the dying person of ‘the introduction to inner radiance of the ground’
by a spiritual teacher.22 The dying person is reminded to recognize (‘recognize
this’ as Anderson’s voice-over intones) ‘the inner radiance of the ground, attain
the uncreated Buddha-body of Reality’ in order to arrive at liberation from a
cyclic existence of death and birth and, consequently, all forms of suffering.23
Bardo as Interstice: ‘Beyond Logocentrism’
The Bardo section of Heart of a Dog can be understood as a representation

of the transition between death and liberation, a kind of ghost story. It is
also a structural gap, or, following Rascaroli, an in-between space, interval,
or interstice:
the dialectical disjunction that is at the basis of the essay form creates
in film in-between spaces that must be accounted for, inasmuch as they
are central to the essay film’s functioning. It is this in-betweenness that
calls for investigation […] my interest […] lies in addressing the dialectical
tension between juxtaposed or interacting filmic elements and, more
precisely, the gaps that its method of juxtaposition opens in the text.
Studying these in-between spaces is key if we wish to move beyond
21 Food (1972) is a documentary, shot by Robert Frank, about Matta-Clark, Goodden, and other
members of the Anarchitecture collective such as Anderson, Tina Girouard, Richard Landry,
and others who established the eponymous restaurant in Soho in 1971, adapting the space for
the needs of experimental art.
22 The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation by Hearing in The Intermediate States,
comp. by Padmasambhava, ed. by Graham Coleman with Thuuten Jinpa, trans. by Gyurme
Dorje, intro. by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (London and New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 226-230.
23 The Tibetan Book of the Dead, p. 227.
106 Deane Williams
logocentrism and to understand how the essay film thinks – because its
thinking capitalizes on discontinuity.24
Rascaroli’s insistence on shifting scholarship ‘beyond logocentrism’ by focus-

sing on the dialectical characteristic of essay films, is instructive in examining
Heart of a Dog. As alluded to already, Anderson’s film is replete with dialectical
images and has been a mainstay of her work. One of the most explicit dialecti-
cal images in Anderson’s oeuvre is the song ‘The Dream Before (For Walter
Benjamin)’ from the Strange Angels album (1989). The first part of the song is a
tale about ‘Hansel and Gretel are alive and well and they’re living in Berlin. She
was a cocktail waitress. He had a part in a Fassbinder film’, while the second
part is a paraphrasing of Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’,
including the lines ‘She said: what is history? History is an angel being blown
backwards into the future’. Australian film-maker John Hughes’ dialectical
film essay One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin (1992) takes up this
dialectical approach, bookending his film with the two parts of the song.
Hauntology
In seeking what I think of as a cultural understanding of Heart of a Dog, a

speculation on why this film operates in the way it does, it is useful to invoke
some ideas about hauntology through the work of Steven Shaviro and Mark
Fisher, both drawing on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx.25
Drawing on Rascaroli’s notion of in-betweenness, of Anderson’s work
‘between disciplines’, ‘between an artist’s art and his or her life’, between
storytelling and digital media, of the essay film’s in-betweenness, of Heart of a
Dog’s elliptical structure, of the Bardo and of Lolabelle, Matta-Clark and Lou
Reed, as in-between figures, Heart of a Dog lends itself to the deconstructionist
character of the spectre, the presence and non-presence that Derrida proposes
as a way of thinking about, in his case, the deconstruction of Marxist thought
as well as the ever-present legacies of Marx. Steven Shaviro tells us that:
What draws these two strands – the deconstruction of Marx’s metaphysics,

and the welcoming nonetheless of a Marxist inheritance – together is the
figure of the specter, or ghost: a figure that Derrida traces throughout
24 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks, pp. 10-11.

25 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).
Marx’s texts and many others (most notably Hamlet). The specter is some-
thing that is not present, not real, not there, but that nonetheless enters
into (and disrupts the closure and self-presence of) whatever is present,
real, and there. The ghost addresses us, interrogates us with its voice and
its gaze; it’s a call from Otherness to which we must respond, even though
we are unable to adequately respond.26
Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog, of course, draws on the non-Western

Buddhist figure of the Bardo, a space between the recently departed life
and the next life, which, in its opaqueness and influence, takes in the whole
of Heart of a Dog. It may be possible to think about the whole film in terms
of the Bardo as a deconstructive figure. Similarly, Lolabelle, a dog that, in a
dream, Anderson had sewed into her stomach, so that she could give birth
to her, is a dog that is canine but not canine, not human, but non-human,
posthuman, between Anderson and her barely present, ever-present, hus-
band, Lou Reed. Both the Bardo and Lolabelle, and Lolabelle in the Bardo,
are hauntological/ deconstructive figures.
Mark Fisher proposes that Derrida’s work can be used to understand
what Fisher calls the disappearance of the future, writing,
The future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already

impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating
cultural production. What hauntological music mourns is less the failure
of a future to transpire – the future as actuality – than the disappearance
of this effective virtuality.27
Writing about electronic music, of Burial, The Caretaker, Philip Jeck, the
Ghost Box label, but also about cinema, Fisher proposes that the inability of
electronic music to sound futuristic, signalled a ‘cultural impasse’ whereby
the futures we were encouraged to anticipate, by various cultural forms in
the 20th century, have been lost and that,
More broadly, and more troublingly, the disappearance of the future meant
the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to
conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently
live.28
26 Steven Shaviro, ‘Specters of Marx’, The Pinocchio Theory, Web.

27 Mark Fisher, ‘What is Hauntology?’, Film Quarterly 66.1 (2012), pp. 16-24. (p. 16).
28 Mark Fisher, ‘What is Hauntology?’, p. 16.
108 Deane Williams
Fisher’s conception, for me, is productive in thinking about Heart of a Dog,

particularly because of what I had understood to be Anderson’s future
orientation, her use of digital technologies and avant-garde sensibility. Yet
Anderson’s work, following Fisher, may be as hauntological, as nostalgic for
modernism, as much as postmodern (as she was incessantly characterized
in the 1980s), or at least nostalgic for modernist dialectical approaches. As
Julia Vassilieva, in ‘Capital and Co.: Kluge/Eisenstein/Marx’, reminds us, the
cinema is always spectral, and we could understand the Bardo sequence
in particular as experimental cinema par excellence: ‘Cinema as a dying
medium has its own ghostly underside – as an art of light and shadow,
disappearing images and ever dying sounds.’29
As we have seen, the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan figure strongly in Heart
of a Dog, signalling, as Anderson’s voice-over tells us, that ‘we had passed
through a door and we’d never be going back’. In this schema, the 9/11 attacks,
the ultimate media event, provided not so much the break, the rupture of
the continuity of neoliberal capital, but in its collapse of time and space,
its inevitable acceleration. I wonder, following Heart of a Dog’s speculative
mode, if Anderson’s nostalgic overtone, in tandem with her hauntological
deconstruction, is orientated towards the future, or more of a mourning
for a time that never was.
The Future
Following the release of Heart of a Dog, Lolabelle in the Bardo went back
on tour and, at the time of writing, is currently on show at the Massachu-
setts Museum of Contemporary Art. Prior to the film’s release, Anderson
and Reed performed their Concert for Dogs on the steps of the Sydney
Opera House, one of a series of concerts that she continued until 2015,
encouraging everyone to bring their pets along. More recently, Anderson
has released a CD of Landfall, her cycle of songs about Hurricane Sandy, a
project commenced in 2011, which was also included on the soundtrack for
Heart of a Dog and released in its fullest form yet in a 2018 CD release. To
accompany the music, Anderson also released All the Things I Lost in the
Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language, and Code30, a collection of writings,
29 Julia Vassilieva, ‘Capital and Co.: Eisenstein, Kluge, Marx’, Screening the Past 31 (2011), Web,
accessed 10 August 2018.
30 Laurie Anderson, All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language, and Code
(New York: Rizzoli-Electa, 2018).
photos, images, and drawings in what some commentators have called

a summation of her work to date. Anderson is currently touring a live
version of the book. I wonder if it will become something else? A film, an
installation, an exhibition?
Over the last 40 years, it could be said that Laurie Anderson has been
essaying (or sashaying) across music, sculpture, drawing, video, performance,
installation, spoken word, software design, and more, working backwards,
forwards, and sideways. Heart of a Dog is merely one aspect of a continually
overlapping, remixed, multimedia spectral network that will continue to
unfold in coming years.
Bibliography
Anderson, Laurie. All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language,
and Code (New York: Rizzoli-Electa, 2018).
Celant, Germano. ‘Laurie Anderson: Miracle in Milan’, in Laurie Anderson, Dal
Vivo, ed. by Germano Celant (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1998), n.p.
Coleman, Graham with Thuuten Jinpa (eds.). The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great
Liberation by Hearing in The Intermediate States, comp. by Padmasambhava, ed.
by Graham Coleman with Thuuten Jinpa, trans. by Gyurme Dorje, intro. by His
Holiness the Dalai Lama (London and New York: Penguin, 2008).
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and
the New International (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).
Fisher, Mark. ‘What is Hauntology?’, Film Quarterly 66.1 (2012), pp. 16-24.
Goldberg, Roselee. Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1979).
Goldberg, Roselee. Laurie Anderson (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000).
Jestrovich, Silvija. ‘The Performer and the Machine: Some Aspects of Laurie
Anderson’s Stage Work’, Body, Space, & Technology Journal 1.1 (2000), Web.
Max, D.T. ‘Tracing the Ghostly Origins of a Phrase’, The New Yorker, 11 December 2011,
Web.
Orange, Michelle. ‘Dog-Seeing Eye: The Cinematic Work of Laurie Anderson’,
Virginia Quarterly Review 92. 1 (Winter 2016), pp. 193-196.
Rascaroli, Laura. ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’,
Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49.2 (Fall 2008), pp. 24-47.
Rascaroli, Laura. How the Essay Film Thinks (London and New York: Oxford
Sayre, Henry M. The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
110 Deane Williams
Shaviro, Steven. ‘Specters of Marx’, The Pinocchio Theory, Web.

Vassilieva, Julia. ‘Capital and Co.: Eisenstein, Kluge, Marx’, Screening the Past 31
(2011), Web.
About the Author
Deane Williams is Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash

University, Austrlia. From 2007-2017, he was editor of the journal Studies in
Documentary Film, and his books include Australian Post-War Documentary
Film: An Arc of Mirrors (Interllect, 2008), Michael Winterbottom (with Brian
McFarlane, Manchester University Press, 2009), the three-volume Austral-
ian Film Theory and Criticism (co-edited with Noel King and Constantine
Verevis, Intellect, 2013-2017), and The Cinema of Sean Penn: In and Out of
Place (Wallflower Press, 2016).
5. Lines of Interpretation in Fields of
Perception and Remembrance:
The Multiscreen Array as Essay
Ross Gibson
Abstract
Referring to artworks such as Doug Aitken’s Eraser, Chantal Akerman’s
gallery-version of From the East, Kogonada’s split-screen essays, and my
own installation entitled Street X-Rays, this chapter analyses the insights
that can be garnered from spatialized, multistranded exposition, as
distinct from the linear disquisition afforded by the conventional film
essay. To grasp the complexity of the affects and ‘messages’ generated by
the installation works, the chapter draws on ‘ecology of mind’ principles,
as best represented by the writing of Gregory Bateson and Vannevar Bush.
Keywords: installation, non-linearity, complexity, ecology, multiple

screens
Alexander Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices was shot during an 18-month period

in the mid 1990s. In this extraordinarily patient and compassionate work,
Sokurov accompanies an army platoon patrolling the battle lines of Russia’s
war with Afghanistan. Scrutinizing the gestures, rituals, and emotions of
the homesick young soldiers, he develops a deep understanding of squadron
life, compiling a meditation on tedium, fear, and a cognitive static that
scratches and randomly flares into occasional paroxysms of excessive
alarm igniting every soldier’s sensorium. The themes are philosophical,
existential, and political, but the viewer comprehends them in a mode that
is – remarkably – as emotional as it is intellectual, as felt as it is thought.
Even so, the feelings that Sokurov captures and evokes are structured rather
than scattershot. Spiritual Voices is exquisitely composed and analytical.
doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch05
112 Ross Gibson
The five instalments of Spiritual Voices were originally shown in a serial

programme spanning consecutive sessions, as a long, poetic video essay
displayed in cinema festivals and on television. Then, during a brief period in
the early 2000s, Sokurov endorsed some experimentation into how the work
functions when it is encountered as a multiscreen installation that displays
all five channels simultaneously and continuously. He granted once-only
exhibition licences to two museums – the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum
in San Francisco and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI)
in Melbourne – permitting display of the work in the five-screen format
so that the images were spanned in a concave configuration stretching to
the edges of the spectator’s peripheral vision.
With its polyphony and its interlacing panoply of imagery, the five-screen
array generates a pulsive and sometimes convulsive representation of war
as a non-linear phenomenon. Scanning the five screens, trying but failing
to take in all the information at once, the viewer bounces attention from
screen to screen – sometimes prompted by noises, sometimes by movement,
sometimes by stillness, sometimes by conscious deliberation – piecing
together an appropriately discontinuous and selective but aesthetically
integrated representation of war. In consonance with the soldiers rendered
on the screens, the viewer experiences versions of the low-level fear, plus
the sudden flares of terror bursting out of dull repetition and deprivation,
plus the bewilderment, the personal rituals (and the anomie) as well as
the squalls of urgent action and reaction. Each viewer’s assemblage of the
replete experience is unique within the overall design of the work.
One is reminded of James Agee’s great description of human consciousness
in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
here at the center is a creature: it would be our business to show how

through every instant of every day of every year of his existence alive he
is from all sides streamed inward upon, bombarded, pierced, destroyed
by that enormous sleeting of all objects forms and ghosts how great how
small no matter, which surround and whom his senses take.1
Within the arc of the five screens of Spiritual Voices, one discerns thematic
patterns that are radically different from the topics of concealed executive
power and endured futility that emerge as the main concerns of the long-form
linear version of the work when it is viewed serially over consecutive nights.
1 James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1988 [first published 1941]), p. 110.
Lines of Interpre tation in Fields of Perception and Remembr ance 113
Installation view of Spiritual Voices, Alexander Sokurov. Installed at the Australian Centre for the
Moving Image, Melbourne, 2002. Photograph by the author.
To the extent that it ‘tries out’ the idea of war in a startling new way,
the installation version of Spiritual Voices is definitely part of the essay
tradition, albeit a peculiar innovation. One of the most striking peculiari-
ties is the way the installation presents an experience that feels like a
memory charged daydream that floats adrift from mundane sequential
experience. This contrasts with the long-form version, which carries the
viewer in a more focussed line of selective causation and step-by-step
disquisition. The installation version is more of an experiment in sensory
impressionism that blends memory with cognition to immerse the viewer
in a distilled, survivable version of war, while the long-form version is more
like a traditional essay unfurling a singular thesis about power, servitude,
and the role of warfare in nationhood.2 Even so, the installation version is
2 On this issue of nationalism and warfare: in a public conversation that I conducted with
Sokurov via a video link at a symposium at the Australian National University in 2004, he
114 Ross Gibson
an essay too, an essay about apprehension in extremis, an essay that tries

out the notion that the understanding of intense, dynamic, and complex
experiences necessarily blends inspective, retrospective, and prospective
time frames all at once, as the viewer makes sense of the experience by
selecting details from the perceived present moment and conjoining
them with personally stored memories of past signif icance to conjure
instantaneous projections about imminent prospects. So, yes, the instal-
lation version of Spiritual Voices is also an essay, but a new kind, an essay
that activates a mode of cognition that is not linear and disquisitional so
much as it is spatial, associative, and endlessly hypothetical.
Some context: I was creative director at ACMI at the time of the Sokurov
installation. Not only did this give me the thrill of corresponding with
Sokurov; it also meant that I spent dozens of hours with the multiscreen
version of Spiritual Voices and gained some insights into the way a spatialized
and multistranded image system works in ways that are different from the
long-form single-screen essay.
My deep encounter with Spiritual Voices was unfolding at the same time
as I observed the rise of multiscreen video and cinematic installations in
art galleries and education-focussed museums around the world. In many
instances, the projects were in the traditions of ‘expanded cinema’ and
‘world-fair’ and ‘expo’ extravaganzas from previous decades. But there
was clearly something new happening as well. It was not just that the new
technology made it easier to mount, align, and synchronize multiscreen ar-
rays, it was also evident that audiences were craving and becoming evermore
adept at a new kind of apprehension and cognition availed by the relational,
heuristic protocols of the World Wide Web as well as by lifelong habituation
to the constant slippages of multicultural value settings in immigrant and
cosmopolitan communities.
While ACMI was developing its own policies and programmes for dis-
playing screen culture in all its formats, older, more traditional museums
everywhere were staging impressive exhibitions celebrating and investigat-
ing the rise of multiscreen video art. Paramount among these was the superb
Stedelijk Museum show Cinema Cinema: contemporary art and the cinematic
experience, which was staged in 1999 and spotlighted the crucial work of
artists such as Eija-Lisa Ahtila, Pierre Huyghe, and Sharon Lockhart. At this
time, too, gallery visitors around the world were encountering immensely
mentioned how centuries of Russian involvement in warfare have produced a situation in which
the men from his society look truly ‘Russian’ only when they are in military regalia.
impressive multiscreen installations such as Chantal Akerman’s The East

and Doug Aitken’s Eraser.
More than art-world modishness, there was something real-world and
philosophical galvanizing all these multiscreen installations. A zeitgeist
was afoot and it was animated by a couple of big, inextricably entwined
themes: complexity and human consciousness.
Complexity was addressed in all these installations not only to the extent
that the viewer was always encouraged to be an immersed participant
rather than a detached appreciator, but also in the ways the works repaid
frequent revisitation and showed how every perceptible phenomenon effects
different meanings and affections depending on the points in space and the
strands of time from which the possible meanings are apprehended. Again
and again, I was struck by the canniness of David Rokeby’s observation, in
his celebrated essay ‘Transforming Mirrors’, that immersive, multifaceted
installations were proliferating and were avidly embraced, because they
afford participants the means of abiding safely and reflectively within
emergent-dynamic situations; such installations helped participants grasp
how complex systems tend to emerge as the perceiver shifts around in the
space and time of the phenomenon while observing and also influencing the
non-stop braiding together of the experience. (Let’s not forget that the word
‘complexity’ is derived from the Latin plectare: to braid many constituent
parts together continuously within the frame of a loom.) As Rokeby so
pithily writes, ‘rather than creating finished artworks, the installation artist
strives to create relationships’.3 Once aware of the array of relationships
within an aesthetic and semantic system, the participant is more or less
obliged to behave in a restlessly heuristic manner, testing out particular
conjunctions, then essaying new interlacings of interpretation, then others,
then others again, and so on, to see what can be learned by such selections
and combinations amongst the arrayed screens.
This is exactly how one becomes immersed in the five-screen version of
Spiritual Voices. (Ditto with Akerman’s The East, and with Aitken’s Eraser.)
Over time, via extended heuristics – by testing how this selected factor
relates to that selected factor within an experimental period of time, and
by testing the cogency of such durational conjunctions repeatedly but
always with variations that lead to cross-referencing of new delineations
against previous ones – a participant in the installation begins to develop
3 David Rokeby, ‘Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and Control in Interactive Media’, Critical
Issues in Electronic Media, ed. by Simon Penny (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995),
p. 152.
116 Ross Gibson
a rudimentary wisdom about the multifarious causes that give rise to the
complex phenomena being investigated.
To emphasize a notion that I will return to with more attentiveness
soon, the essayistic participant in a multiscreen installation draws a line
of sequential experience out from the field of options that are afforded by
the artwork. Then, another line is drawn out whilst the previous line is
remembered; then another line, with memory still operating; and another;
and so on, such that, over time and with the application of memory al-
lowing all the lines to interweave within one’s curious consciousness, the
investigator generates a relational and ever-evolving understanding of the
worldly phenomenon that is being evoked by the artwork and which is
necessarily always relationally meaningful and ever evolving within the
ceaseless dynamics of complex circumstances.
As for the second theme – human consciousness – installations such
as Spiritual Voices encourage participants to become increasingly adept
at operating within what the neurologist Benjamin Libet has dubbed ‘the
conscious mental field’ or CMF. 4 A particular subset of the neuroscientific
research enterprise known generally as ‘field theories of consciousness’,
CMF theory describes a kind of generative faculty that seems to be univer-
sally deployed by human beings when they enact conscious responses to
the stimuli of lived experience. To explain less abstractly: Libet contends
that consciousness arises within every individual as a result of a broiling
and continuous interplay amongst three time-governed faculties that
entangle within every sense-seeking consciousness: (1) perception of the
ever-unfolding present, conveyed via all the senses; (2) remembrance of
all previous experiences that the perceiver has lived through thus far in
their life; and (3) an imaginative postulation of ‘what might be imminent’
as the present stimuli roll into the future while each perceived moment
passes. Let’s use visual metaphors to help clarify this tripartite action: a
conscious person is constantly commingling inspection with retrospection
in order to experience the continuously flickering prospection that allows
conscious, decisive actions to occur at the bequest of the actor. Libet’s
crucial contention is that the inspection occurs within a field of present
stimuli at the same time that retrospection is drawing on a field of memory,
even as each specified remembrance tends to try to play out as a sequential
line of event. As one inspects a field of present stimuli, a field of retrieved
memories stipples responsively in one’s preconscious or intuition. This
4 See, especially, Benjamin Libet’s, Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness, (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
latter, mnemonic f ield is dense and highly compressed; and, mostly, it

broils not as reasoned thought but as agitated feelings that are energetic,
outbursting, non-hierarchical and non-perspectival, constellated across
an array of urgent availability within an alerted consciousness. All these
feelings present themselves out of the past while the decision-making
person applies what Libet terms ‘conscious veto’, deliberately declining
to give play to memory after memory as a legion of retrospection flickers
in the f ield of consciousness until one particularly relevant memory or
stored interpretation is allowed to cash out in the imagination so that the
endorsed memory changes from being a compacted and urgent memory-
feeling and becomes a more attenuated and f inessed line of thinking.
It becomes a prospective narrative, in fact. This endorsed memory is
then adapted to the specif ics of the present moment as it becomes the
consciously speculative version of what is about to happen, the version
upon which the person makes their willed, interpretive decision to act
in a particular manner.
For the purposes of our study of multiscreen artworks, the crucial idea
is Libet’s insistence that cognition, which arises from consciousness, is
inherently and inextricably both spatial and delineated. As are multiscreen
installations. Whether in the larger world or within a multiscreen instal-
lation, a curious and conscious person is constantly ‘snapshotting’ from
fields of stimuli whilst also trying to stay wide open to a field of constel-
lating memories even as one is also driven to extract a line of narrative
or disquisition for the overlaid fields. The most dramatic instance of such
cognition is on display in speed-based sporting performances – basketball
or football, let’s say – when the athlete is constantly hoping to slip into ‘the
zone’, to be graced in that place-and-time where perception (of the present
situation) and remembrance (of training and past actions) are lucidly wide
open to their respective fields and where the line of sequential, eventful
action occurs with maximum speed, optimal eff iciency, and complete
efficacy. To be ‘in the zone’ means to be at the apogee of acumen, to be
laser-focussed but never overthinking, to be carried along in a homeostatic
poise amongst the fields and lines that are the prerequisites of conscious-
ness. From such poise, interpretations flow out so that cognition coheres,
interpretation insists, and informed actions can follow. Amidst such ‘zoned’
poise, each interpretation is a kind of essay, a trying-out extracted from an
array of fields, a trying-out that is enacted by the participant in the hope
and expectation that the inspected world has been properly parsed and the
ensuing action will resonate to the generative code that impels experience.
When this parsing works effectively, a kind of aesthetic and semantic
118 Ross Gibson
homeostasis occurs within and around the interpreting participant. And,

in this homeostasis, the participant experiences what Gregory Bateson has
called an ‘ecology of mind’,5 a continuously active and adaptive, functionally
coherent consciousness that eventfully unfurls as a line of experience
traced through a highly complex and dynamic stratification of fields that
host coruscating present stimuli as well as glimmering stored memories.
So this is what occurs in a well composed multiscreen essay: a judiciously
designed array of fields is offered by the artist in such a manner that the
immersed participant is able to generate and examine an unstinting flow
of interpretive lines that sequence out from the profusion of audiovisual
relationships prevailing across the gestalt of the installation. These lines of
interpretation are drawn out by the immersed investigator once they have
been filtered through two selective modes: (i) firstly, through an inspective
focus that has been applied to all the stimuli percolating in every snapshot-
ted field appearing in the present, (ii) and, secondly, through a process of
conscious veto that has been applied to the profuse memories that offer
themselves all at once, out of a participant’s stored past, as soon as the
participant has focussed on the selected present stimuli. This is happening
at quite a prodigious speed, considering how much cognitive processing
has to operate in order for this to happen. And, even more prodigious and
impressive, when such interpretations get generated within an artwork such
as a multiscreen installation, the sense-making is not only semantic but also
aesthetic, perceptible not only by ratiocination but also by pattern-seeking
emotions.
In effect, a well composed multiscreen essay helps participants gather
and try out the optimal skein of interpretive lines that can be extracted
from the fields both of perception and of remembrance that the on-screen
content activates. Therefore, a good multiscreen essay helps participants
braid as many lines as they need so that some wise comprehension of the
complex world – a comprehension that is both felt and thought – can begin
to emerge and cohere. Complex and galvanizing of consciousness, the
multiscreen audiovisual essay is an art form germane to right now.
5 See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry,
Evolution and Epistemology (London: Intertext Books, 1972).
Bibliography
Agee, James and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1988).
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology,
Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (London: Intertext Books, 1972).
Libet, Benjamin. Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
Rokeby, David. ‘Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and Control in Interactive
Media’, Critical Issues in Electronic Media, ed. by Simon Penny (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 133-158.
About the Author
Ross Gibson is Centenary Professor in Creative & Cultural Research at

the University of Canberra, Australia. His work spans several media and
disciplines. Recent projects include the multimedia installation ‘Protection’
(University of Queensland Art Museum, with Carl Warner, 2011, re-installed
2016); the books, The Summer Exercises (2008), 26 Views of the Starburst
World (2012), Changescapes (2015), and Memoryscopes (2015), all published
by UWAP; and the public-art installation ‘Bluster Town’ at Wynyard Rail
Station, Sydney (five-year duration from 2017).
6. Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois
Parables (2016): Intellectual Vagabond
and Vagabond Matter
Katrin Pesch
Abstract
This chapter analyses how geographic modes of telling in Deborah
Stratman’s film The Illinois Parables (2016) unmoor the essay film from
its anthropocentric bearings. Rather than reading the essay as a form
of subjective expression, as is often the case, I argue that Stratman’s
film embraces a mode of telling that includes human and non-human
voices alike, thus shifting the focus from individual subjectivity to a
distributed form of agency. Looking at the film through a new materialist
lens allows me to show how The Illinois Parables moves the essay’s alleged
humanism toward an understanding of a posthumanist essay.
Keywords: subjectivity, agency, new materialism, non-human,

posthumanism
The camera quivers as it slowly lifts up over the Illinois landscape. Soon, we
look down on a familiar pattern of chequered land, rectangular fields in a
pallet of browns and greens and ochres of all shades, shaped by industrial
agriculture’s need for efficiency. The geometric pattern is cut through by
streets and broken up by patches of forest and lakes. A bit further, grids of
residential areas are framed by industrial parks. The suburban structure of
single-family home subdivisions is laid out in roads leading through parcels
of land. Straight lines with branches ending in circles, that, at least from
above, look not unlike geoglyphs or ancient ground drawings, prehistoric
inscriptions onto the land, especially in those places where roads lie wait-
ing for homes that have yet to be built. The sound of cello music sets in,
doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch06
122 K atrin Pesch
half-foreboding and half-melancholic. Image and sound are severed. While

the natural movement of the camera draws us into the image, the music
shuts us out. Up above the land – not quite disconnected but not integrated
either – we are floating in between earthly and spiritual spheres. Dusted
in mist, the horizon is slightly curved. The view conjures an image of the
discrete object that, in English, is referred to as Earth.
The flight seems to set the tone and to reveal the premise. Landscape
appears as ‘a “social hieroglyph”’, as W. J. T. Mitchell has put it elsewhere,
channelling Marx, ‘an emblem of the social relations it conceals’.1 The film,
the opening shots suggest, will take us on a journey across landscapes
waiting to be deciphered and read like a book. But, while the scene evokes
the sovereign gaze associated with Western landscape traditions, it also
undermines the subject position identified with this perspective.2 The
subtle movement of the camera, placed on unsteady ground in a hot-air
balloon, envelops the viewer in the air’s motion through the atmosphere.
Rather than prompting us to see the earth below as a disconnected other
in an exercise of visual control, the film promises an embodied, dialogic
experience.
Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables visits eleven sites connected
to communities or events on the land that, today, is called Illinois. Histori-
cally charged places kick off an interlocking suite of ‘regional vignettes’
that question the ideological forces crystalizing in the guise of morality.3
Though concerned with human struggles and convictions, the parables are
anchored in particular places, attentive to encounters between human and
non-human beings that often span long stretches of time. Vignette II, set in
Alton, for instance, involves a dragon-like creature painted on a cavernous
bluff. Signs on a closed forest path warn of the deer that may have inspired
it some 350 years ago. It is not clear whether the bird creature and the deer
are guarding or haunting the territory, or both. Inside the cave, we can
hear the sound of water and feet touching rocks. Rays of light illuminate
the scene. A montage of old etchings cut like a film is accompanied by a
voice-over narration reading a missionary’s encounter with the original
painting. Judging from Father Jacques Marquette’s detailed description from
1 W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 2nd Edition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002),
p. 5.
2 For a comprehensive summary of the notion of landscape as ideology, see Alan Wallach,
‘Between Subject and Object’, in Landscape Theory, ed. by James Elkins and Rachel DeLue (New
York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 315-312 (p. 317).
3 Deborah Stratman, ‘The Illinois Parables, 2016, 60 min, 16mm: Synopsis’ [http://www.
pythagorasfilm.com/the-illinois-parables.html].
DEBORAH STRATMAN’S THE ILLINOIS PARABLES (2016) 123
1673, the creature has since lost its companion and acquired wings. It also
moved, I learn later, to another bluff about 100 yards upstream.
The Illinois Parables does not orientate us in these places through explana-
tion. Historical information is distributed sparsely, in fragments. Instead,
the film recounts, reimagines, or facilitates encounters. More than mere
background to human drama, physical environments step to the fore; parts
of the vignettes are told in long static shots of the sites and surrounding areas,
while elaborate soundscapes capture the atmosphere. At once terrain and
territory, the land captured in The Illinois Parables is both affective and deeply
political; it may instil hope or amplify despair, it may be imbued with promise
or violence. Exodus, the mass movement of peoples or religious and social
communities, emerges as a central theme of the film. Whether it is motivated by
religion, utopia, or the struggle for survival, faith too becomes a theme. Forcibly
removed from their homeland in the south-eastern United States, the Cherokee
on the Trail of Tears cross the Ohio River at Golconda, where the dead of winter
took its toll. Mormons fleeing religious discrimination in neighbouring Missouri
founded the city of Nauvoo; faced with more violence, they passed it on to the
Icarians, French emigrants who sought to build a utopian commune. Another
vibrant community that populated Nauvoo more recently is not composed
of people but of insects – ‘Nauvoofun’ a billboard promises. Thousands of
mayflies have followed the invitation and have temporarily taken over an
otherwise deserted go-cart ring. They gather around a floodlight, a huge
swarm buzzing with an energy that borders desperation. Like the Mormons
and Icarians before them, they’ll soon disband, in this case, facing collective
death. The go-cart ring perished too, a quick Internet search shows. Sitting at
my desk about a thousand miles away, I wonder who inhabits the land now.
Shifting registers from the triumph and tribulations of community to the
belief in technology and its corresponding military climate, Vignette VII
begins with a re-enactment showing a nuclear physicist – no less than the
Nobel Prize-winning ‘architect of the Atomic Bomb’ Enrico Fermi – writing
a mathematical equation on critical mass and nuclear fission. The equation
presented a scientific breakthrough that led to the construction and testing
of the first nuclear reactor in 1942.4 Moving from the manicured lawns and
stately buildings at the University of Chicago, where the reactor was first
conceived, the vignette takes us to the former test site, an overgrown park
reached on a trampled path where its remains lie buried underground.
4 The New York Times, ‘Enrico Fermi Dead at 53; Architect of the Atom Bomb’, The New York
Times, 29 November 1954 [https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/
onthisday/bday/0929.html].
124 K atrin Pesch
Over the course of the sequence, abstract thought materializes in white

chalk marks on a blackboard and then takes on new life in animations and
technical drawings. The actual reactor itself – an underground structure
built from stacked uranium-fitted and dead-uranium graphite bricks –
remains unseen.5 All that is left to the human eye is a formation of stone
markers indicating its location. The reactor’s by-product, deposited in the
earth, is invisible as well. Though the presence of radioactive material, far
from reaching its half-life, is literally written in stone. An inscription on
one of the boulders cautions the public not to dig.
In relinquishing part of the narration to places, critters, and climates,
The Illinois Parables makes temporal landscapes and political temperatures
palpable, inviting us to partake in encounters with places, and the ideas,
animals, and people that populate them. Yet, beyond the call emanating
from landscapes and things, viewers are confronted with layered images
that combine multiple modes of representation. Viewers are constantly made
aware of the filmic construction as they process a dense mix composed of
records of actual spaces; voice-over narration; historical and contemporary
sound recordings; reproductions of paintings, maps, graphs, official docu-
ments, and newspaper clippings; chance encounters and re-enactments.
As in the opening sequence, we are simultaneously drawn into the image
and kept at bay.
The Illinois Parables can be situated at the junction of documentary and
experimental film, and it has been referred to as an essay film. Stratman
herself is wary about the question of distinct genres. ‘I wish we could just
say “film”’, she answered when asked about the different designations.6 Her
film employs strategies frequently associated with the essay film, such as
textual layering and the combination of different forms of representation.
But it also makes moves the essay film is said to avoid, for instance, following
a chronological order.7 Already judging by its title, The Illinois Parables
seems fundamentally at odds with the idea of the essay, as parables usually
tell rather than probe, instruct rather than attempt. Indeed, the parable’s
function to simply illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson contradicts the
essay’s tendency to ask questions that are left unanswered. And yet, no
lessons are told in the film. Inquisitive in nature, Stratman’s parables are
5 Dead uranium bricks are extracted from depleted uranium mines.

6 Erika Balsom, ‘The Illinois Parables: Deborah Stratman on her Histories of the Land’, Sight &
Sound, 10 October 2016 [https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/
deborah-stratman-illinois-parables].
7 Arthur Paul, ‘Essay Questions’ in Essays on the Essay Film, ed. by Nora M. Alter and Timothy
Corrigan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 161-171 (p. 163).
The Illinois Parables (Deborah Stratman, USA, 2016). Film still courtesy of Deborah Stratman.
not expressions of spiritual or moral values. The chronology of moments

in the state’s history merely presents a ‘structural ruse,’ as she puts it, for
an investigation of how communities shape and are shaped by underlying
systems of belief.8 Manoeuvring in the space that opens up between local
specificity and allegorical reach, the film’s dominant mode, then, is one of
enquiry. And, just as the essay film relies on the spectator to make meaning,
the film’s parables ultimately leave it for the viewer to decide what lessons
there are to take away. In this, the film takes up the essay’s dialogic quality.
Authorship is partially transferred to the audience, which assumes the role
of co-creator.
Beyond camouflaging its inquisitive spirit and dialogic commitment as
morals drawn from history, The Illinois Parables also complicates another
characteristic of the essay film, its particular manifestation of subjectiv-
ity. In the vein of Michel de Montaigne’s famous self-assessment that his
essays are more about himself than any other topic, the essay film is often
conceptualized as a form of subjective expression that reflects on its own
mode of utterance. Christa Blümlinger, for instance, has described the
8 Stratman, ‘The Illinois Parable Synopsis’.

126 K atrin Pesch
essay as an ‘intellectual vagabond’ venturing across unknown paths.9 Along

the way, the essay f ilm reflects on its own journey, inviting the viewer
to participate in thinking through the social realities they encounter.
Within this exchange, the division of thinking between the ‘self’ and the
‘other’ dissolves. Two influential contributions on subjectivity in the essay
film come from Laura Rascaroli and Timothy Corrigan. With a focus on
spectatorial address and self-conscious meditation respectively, both look
at how the essay f ilm stages a dialogic encounter between the interior
self and the world outside. As a reflection on the human condition and a
shared human experience, both authors situate the essay film within the
project of humanism.10
Rascaroli, in The Personal Camera, discusses the essay film as a form
of dialogue in which an enunciator who represents the director directly
addresses an embodied spectator. The essay’s authorial voice, though it
might be articulated through multiple personas, represents an individual
voice rather than a collective. ‘The “I” of the essay film always clearly and
strongly implies a “you”’, Rascaroli argues, ‘called upon to participate and
share the enunciator’s reflections’.11 In The Essay Film: From Montaigne,
After Marker, Corrigan describes the essay film as an encounter between the
self and the public sphere.12 Rather than an expression of the autonomous
Cartesian subject, the figure of self-performance in the essay is one that is
fragmented and unstable, while the essay itself straddles different forms
and genres. Placed on unsteady ground, the viewer is invited to partake in
thinking through worlds and ideas.13
9 Christa Blümlinger, ‘Zwischen den Bildern/Lesen’, in Schreiben Bilder Sprechen: Texte zum
Essayistischen Film, ed. by Christa Blümlinger and Constantin Wulf (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1992),
pp. 11-31 (p. 17), (my translation).
10 Laura Rascaroli, ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, Framework
49.2 (2008), pp. 24-47 (p. 37); Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 199.
11 The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2009), p. 35.
12 Corrigan, The Essay Film, p. 17.
13 While the subjective dimension of the essay film as theorized by Rascaroli and Corrigan is
still an important touchstone, I would be remiss not to point out that both authors have since
conceptualized the essay from vantage points less concerned with the subjective expression
of an enunciator. In How the Essay Film Thinks, Rascaroli shifts her focus on how the essay
film’s formal construction enables expressivity in modes of perception and affect, including
non-vococentric modes of telling. In a different approach, Corrigan has explored how ‘essayism’
as a form of intellectual, digressive inflection can emerge within the constraints of conventional
narrative film. See Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks (New York: Oxford University Press,
2017); Corrigan, ‘Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative’, in The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics,
While enunciation in The Illinois Parables is equally shifting and unstable,

probing and inviting, the essay’s narrating ‘I’ is absent from Stratman’s
film. Neither expressive nor self-reflective, subjectivity in the film is not
individually located. Instead, subjectivity always refers to a collective. This
is not unlike Bill Nichols’s idea of the ‘social subjectivity’ performed in
documentary, which goes beyond that of the individual.14 Here, we can see
Stratman’s affinity with documentary traditions. What The Illinois Parables
takes from the essay is its dialogic structure and mode of spectatorial ad-
dress. However, what makes thinking about the film as an essay particularly
productive is its treatment – or, rather, dissolution – of subjectivity. While
the fixed gaze of the camera, often at eye level, suggests a universal subject,
forms of knowing are distributed among a multiplicity of voices on- and
off-screen – ranging from missionaries to nuclear physicists, from FBI
agents to a girl endowed with supernatural powers – but also among human
and non-human actors – from prehistoric mounds to riverbanks, from the
ice floating in the Ohio River to the northern cardinal, the bird chosen
to symbolize the state of Illinois. Social subjectivity, The Illinois Parables
suggests, is not limited to a human collective; the voices speaking through
the film are more than human.
The Illinois Parables visits places charged with history, where the living
might sense the historical weight residing in these sites. Stratman calls them
‘thin places’, although not in the Jesuit sense, which describes places where
the border that separates the living from the divine as malleable.15 Seen
from a secular perspective, thin places such as the Cahokia mounds or the
Trail of Tears are animated by civilizations long gone or peoples dispersed.
Stratman’s film can be read in the lineage of the political landscape film,
which is characterized by its attention to socio-historical inscriptions that
mark the physical environment. Indeed, as Leo Goldsmith has pointed out,
landscape in Stratman’s film wears history on its sleeve.16 How, then, does
materiality figure in a film concerned with how expressions of ideology,
morality, and faith shape the history of a state, its land and inhabitants?
As we shall see, The Illinois Parables does more than laying bare man-made
Utopia, ed. by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades (London and New York: Wallflower
Press, 2016), pp. 15-27.
14 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana
15 Nick Pinkerton, ‘Interview: Deborah Stratman’, Film Comment, 17 November 2016 [https://
www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-deborah-stratman/].
16 Leo Goldsmith, ‘The Face of the Earth: Surface and Image in Landscape Documentary’,
Documentary Surfaces panel, SCMS conference, Toronto, 14-19 March 2018.
128 K atrin Pesch
traces inscribed in the land. Instead, the film is attuned to agency of the
natural environment, which takes on the role of an interlocutor and sto-
ryteller. If the historical weight of the past is particularly palpable in the
places visited in the film, as Stratman says, so is their hybridity. The border
between present and past is as porous as that between nature and culture.
This questioning of the nature of subjectivity positions The Illinois
Parables in conversation with recent new-materialist thought on agency,
or, more specifically, the question of who or what expresses agency and
– by extension – counts as a subject. Contesting the modern notion of
nature as passive, new materialisms are concerned with the entanglements
of living and non-living matter and the collaborative actions of human
and non-human beings. Jane Bennett’s notion of a ‘distributive agency’ is
particularly useful here. In her proposal for a vital materialism, Bennett
urges us to divert attention from human subjectivity to the agential force of
things. ‘Another way to cultivate this new discernment’, she writes, ‘might
be to elide the question of the human. Postpone for a while the topics of
subjectivity or the nature of human interiority’.17 Stratman’s essay film
concurs with this assertion. In listening to the land rather than giving it a
voice, The Illinois Parables sidelines subjectivity and reflection in favour of
a more encompassing understanding of agency and knowledge.
Admittedly, looking at the essay through a new-materialist lens may seem
misguided, given its much commented-on discursive and logocentric traits.
Based on the essay’s commitment to language and intellectual discourse,
Arthur Paul, for instance, has framed his thoughts on essayistic expression
blatantly under the heading ‘Mind over Matter’.18 In The Illinois Parables,
however, the material and the discursive are intertwined. In speaking about
the film, Stratman frequently describes its cinematic language as connected
to the earth’s physical features and substance. Indeed, Stratman seems to
share new materialisms’ scepticism about the centrality of language in
post-structuralist thought. ‘But its telling doesn’t have to involve language’,
she says about her film, ‘the mounds, the scouring of the tornado or the Trail
of Tears are geographical or physical modes of telling’.19
The Illinois Parables’ trust in the expressive capacity of things and natural
forces may allow us to regard, for a change, the essay less as an intellectual
17 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke
18 Arthur Paul, ‘Essay Questions’, in Essays on the Essay Film, ed. by Nora M. Alter and Timothy
Corrigan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 161-171 (p. 162).
19 Balsom, The Illinois Parables.
vagabond and more as ‘vagabond matter’, to evoke another materialist

concept used by Bennett.20 Focussing on the terrain of the human body,
Bennett refers to the transient quality of matter in her discussion of the
metabolization of food. She describes the process of digestion as an intimate
encounter of human, organic, and inorganic substances, thus defying the
hierarchical understanding of the human body’s power to shape edible
matter. Bennett takes the idea of a vagabond materiality from Gilles Deleuze.
In a meditation on brass music and metallurgy, Deleuze describes matter
as ‘a bearer of active traits of expression’, capable of handling information
rather than being given form.21 Leaving musical performance and digestive
processes behind, the present encounter with vagabond matter occurs in the
realm of essayistic enunciation. More specifically, the following discussion
of essayistic expression shifts the focus from individual subjectivity to a
distributed form or agency. Looking at the film through a materialist lens
allows us to see how The Illinois Parables unmoors the essay film from its
anthropocentric bearings.
***
From the slight swaying movement in the opening sequence that had
smoothed the borders of the frame, we are thrown behind the camera at
the edge of a field of combed earth that is arrested in a static shot. The music
has stopped, wind and insects are now responsible for the sound. The small
mound in the centre of the image touches the horizon. The grey plane of a
cloud holds it in place between earth and sky. It’s a relic left from another
time, holding its ground. The mound, which seemingly has no purpose, is
juxtaposed with the uniform furrows of the ploughed field. Altogether, four
mounds in varying sizes are shown, captured centre frame. Two are covered
under thick blankets of grass, embedded in their surroundings. The fourth
one reveals the magnitude of the complex. Like a tall building, the majestic
structure overlooks the land. A parking lot in the foreground confirms it
as a destination. While the panoramic view from the top of the mountain
is withheld, the mound is clearly presented as a vista itself. And yet, the
mounds appear to withhold something, something in their material being
– just as their historical function – escapes the camera’s grasp. ‘Landscape’,
as Jennifer Jane Marshall points out, ‘invites the projections of cultural
20 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 49.

21 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Metal, Metallurgy, Music, Husserl, Simondon’, Les Cours des Gilles Deleuze,
Cours Vincennes (1979), trans. by Timothy S. Murphy [https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/186].
130 K atrin Pesch
fantasies, while never fully capitulating to their ideological imperatives’.22

While the mounds provoke speculation about their purpose in an ancient
civilization long since passed, they also withdraw and remain inaccessible.
Where, then, does land – as the solid matter of the earth’s surface – end,
in these images, and where does landscape – as a specific type of scenery
or, in a less textual and more materialist sense, temporality – begin? It’s
not history that is speaking to us, but something else. The mounds are
man-made artefacts and objects of representation, but they belong to a
more-than-human world. In a place that is, at the same time, ruinous and
alive, their material being speaks of more than the civilization that created
them or the meanings we assign to them.
Moving back and forth between the material and the discursive, The
Illinois Parables constantly changes its alliances. On the one hand, it fore-
grounds the agency of the land, merely recording how the natural environ-
ment inserts itself into a cultural product that is not of its own making.
On the other hand, the film is concerned with systems of representation
and carefully puts in place its own framing devices. Well into the first
vignette, for instance, a black frame, cut in half by a white bar, interrupts
the sequence. It’s only when we arrive at the second graphic insertion that
the abstract shape becomes legible as a Roman numeral that announces,
belatedly, the film’s second vignette.23 The ordering gesture is delayed in
more than one way. Though organized chronologically, the film withholds
periodization, as the geographic location and dates of all sites and historic
events are revealed only at the very end of the film. The earthen mounds
are remains of an urban complex of the prehistoric Mississippian culture
(600-1400 CE) in what is today the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site and
a UNESCO-designated World Heritage site. But, for the time being, the
explanation is left to the mounds themselves. The Illinois Parables doesn’t
rely on linguistic or graphic representation alone to provide historical
data. In its sketching of distinct events in the state’s history, the film is
just as attentive to material, physical forms of telling. In these instances,
the landscape looks back, directly addressing us. This challenges common
22 Jennifer Jane Marshall, ‘Toward Phenomenology: A Material Culture Studies Approach to

Landscape Theory’, in Landscape Theory, ed. by James Elkins and Rachel DeLue (New York:
Routledge, 2008), pp. 195-203 (p. 196).
23 Throughout the film, vignettes are identified as such only after they begin. The soundscape
associated with a particular vignette sets in over the last images of the previous one. While the
numerals piercing the screen clearly distinguish each section, the way they flow into each other
suggests historical continuity. Beyond keeping viewers on their toes, the film’s formal structure
contradicts the idea of neatly packaged ‘historical lessons’.
understandings of landscape as a form of representation that assigns the

spectator a privileged position in a fixed, binary relationship: ‘“me – it”,
self and other, viewer and viewed, spectator and spectacle’.24 The mounds’
epistemological function, then, is not dependent on the spectator. Instead,
they are shown as active participants in the production of knowledge.
Distributed among human and non-human beings, knowledge – and, by
extension, subjectivity – is co-created in an encounter where the material
and the discursive meet.
However, highlighting the agency expressed through the mounds’
material properties does not diminish their historical import or cultural
significance. Beyond their plain materiality, the mounds carry a record of
social organization and the interconnection of place and power, a central
concern of Stratman’s practice. Her film echoes media theorist Jussi Parikka’s
contention that geology can’t be thought of apart from morality and the world
of thought.25 With a focus on the geological foundations of media, Parikka
joins writers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Donna Haraway,
Bruno Latour, and Jane Bennett in rethinking the modern division between
natural and social realms. As an academic discipline, geology is part of the
sciences, while the critical analysis of social values and morals is relegated to
the already assailed humanities. Not only are these disciplinary boundaries
constantly – and necessarily – overstepped, Parikka notes, they also hold
on to a separation that is not tenable in view of the current environmental
crises affecting the Earth. In vignettes such as the ones on the Piasa Bird, the
mounds in Cahokia, the Manhattan Project, or the Trail of Tears, The Illinois
Parables makes palpable the inseparability of geophysical and geopolitical
space and the cultural practices that help forge these connections: cavernous
cliffs and missionary ambitions, earthen mounds and outstanding universal
values, dead uranium graphite bricks and military climates, hazardous
terrains and legal documents are all shown as deeply intertwined.
While the first part of Vignette I invites the viewer to engage with both
the material and discursive potentialities of the site, the second part listens
to those inhabiting the space and emphasizes the ethical dimension of this
encounter. Preceded by the sound of his song and his drum, a man appears
in the frame and walks past the mound, reclaiming the space. His song
and his initial words, the first spoken in the film, are in a language I – and
presumably the majority of viewers – can’t understand. He introduces himself
24 Alan Wallach, ‘Between Subject and Object’, in Landscape Theory, ed. by James Elkins and
Rachel DeLue (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 315-312 (p. 317).
25 Jussi Parikka, Geology of Media (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2015), p. vii.
132 K atrin Pesch
as Ravenwolf. Looking straight into the camera, at us, he throws back the
ordering gaze that takes stock of the landscape. It’s a corrective that leaves its
mark on the film and helps guide the viewer as well. For Ravenwolf is not here
to claim, he is here to receive. ‘I come here to Monks Mound to gain strength
and energy’, he states, ‘to gain their acceptance, and their guidance. The song
that I play is to receive, to receive their honour, to receive their gifts, and to
receive their strength and wisdom’. It’s left open who the ‘their’ is that he
refers to here: the ancestors or the ancestral lands. Ravenwolf’s voice comes
from off-screen, he is speaking at his own image. Yet, his performance – or
re-enactment, as Stratman calls it – carries on. While his space as a Shaman
may be invaded, his aura stays intact. Looking at us, silently, he illuminates his
ritualistic practice, addressing us from a different space. In the background,
barely visible, visitors explore the top of Monks Mound.
By employing geographical modes of telling, the first vignette relies
on material forms of knowing in pro-filmic space. In Vignette V, which is
dedicated to the 1925 Tri-State Tornado, material potentialities issue from
the layering of different soundtracks in the post-production process. Here,
sound emerges as a manner of thinking. In general, sound plays a crucial
role in for Stratman, who does the sound design for most of her films herself.
In The Illinois Parables, densely packed layers of voice and music, location
and abstract sounds take on a material quality. Vignette V is ushered in by
off-screen voices speaking over the shots of the buzzing swarm of mayflies
in Nauvoo. Speaking with a strong dialect, they recount the first-hand
experience of a devastating natural disaster that erased their homes: the
tornado that crossed Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri in 1925. Moving at
an average speed of 60 miles per hour, the storm cut a swath through the
landscape that was up to a mile wide, erasing whole neighbourhoods in
its path.
At first sight, the vignette mostly uses conventional documentary strate-
gies: a montage of testimonials of survivors, headlines and newspaper articles
pulled from the archives, and aerial views of the aftermath in pixilated
black-and-white footage of old newsreels salvaged from YouTube. Yet, more
than reconstructing the aftermath of a major natural disaster through
archival documents, The Illinois Parables attends to the storm by creating
a soundscape from a variety of sources and shifting intensities. As in other
sequences, the event is brought to life acoustically, in a process Stratman
describes as the ‘geological layering’ of different soundtracks.26 The story of
a parrot singing Sweet Hour of Prayer amidst the rubble prompts a rendition
26 Pinkerton, ‘Interview: Deborah Stratman’.

of the song. The evocation is interrupted by sirens and talked over by the
official emergency response. The main actor is the one to appear last. The
vignette reaches its end with the growling of a tornado that is interjected
by the desperate shouts and cries of two people caught in the midst of a
storm. One enunciator among others, the tornado joins a cacophony of
human and non-human voices.
A driving force of the film, the soundscape in The Illinois Parables not
only participates in world-building but also carries part of the narration.27
In his critique of the essay film’s vococentric tendency, David Oscar Harvey
contends that, one can not only ‘essay via images’ but also through a ‘cin-
ematic voice cultivated outside the linguistic register’.28 The Illinois Parables
certainly doesn’t relinquish the essay’s verbose inclinations completely;
throughout the film, the intellectual vagabond makes her voice heard in
testimonials and voice-over narration. Even so, Stratman’s film strongly
supports Harvey’s assertion that the ‘subjective expressive (sic) needn’t solely
be addressed linguistically’.29 For instance, the transition from the first to
the second vignette, to use another example, also happens acoustically: as
Ravenwolf’s voice melds into the surrounding sounds – wind, maybe, or cars
passing by on a nearby road – a woodwind sets in with a restrained melody,
slowly moving back and forth between two bars. There are other sounds
supplementing the instrument woven into a sonic carpet that transports
us to a new place, a new imaginary.
As occurs often in the film, sounds are indistinguishable, and the informa-
tion they share is unstable. There’s something that resembles the creaking of
wood, maybe caused by steps on squeaking floorboards or the slow opening
of a door. Yet the sound is severed from the scene unfolding on-screen,
which shows the series of etchings that open the story of the missionaries’
encounter with the Piasa bird in Alton. Deprived of referentiality, the sound
takes on an eerie quality. Once we enter a stone cave in Alton, sound ap-
proximates the image again and becomes concrete: small pebbles roll over
27 The analysis of the film’s musical score is beyond the scope of the present chapter.
28 David Oscar Harvey, ‘The Limits of Vococentrism: Chris Marker, Hans Richter and the Essay
Film’, SubStance 41.2, Issue 128 (2012), pp. 6-23. I am thankful here to Laura Rascaroli for her
reference to Harvey’s text in How the Essay Film Thinks, which introduced me to his writing.
Rascaroli explores how complex sound environments in films by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Pier
Paolo Pasolini, and Santiago Alvarez allow us to move beyond the logocentric conception of the
essay. In contrast to my attempt to rethink instances of subjective expression in the essay film,
Rascaroli focusses on how sound activates meaning and mobilizes affect in the viewer, rather
than embodying a non-human form of expression and practising meaning-making itself.
29 Harvey, ‘The Limits of Vococentrism’, p. 19.
134 K atrin Pesch
rocks and the dripping of water sculpts the domed, reverberating space.
An intricate non-vococentric narration precedes the voice-over of Father
Marquette. Sounds acquire agency and assume a subjective dimension.
While Vignette V exemplifies the geological layering of sound at play in
The Illinois Parables, the opening sequence of Vignette III, focussing on the
Trail of Tears, allows us think about the materiality of media more broadly.
The images that transition into the third vignette are among the most
haunting in the film. A fluoroscopy, or real-time radiograph, of a living bird
is juxtaposed with a fabricated Northern Cardinal that accessorizes a serene
diorama of Cherokee Indians. Scientific and cultural representations clash
in a gesture that is incommensurate with the erasure of life on the Trail of
Tears. Fluoroscopic imaging of animals is typically performed for biotech-
nological research or for diagnostic reasons. No matter the purpose, the act
that produces the image is incredibly violent: a living, moving creature is
penetrated by X-rays that are converted into visible light. The camera not
only reveals the bone structure of the bird but also records its movements
and pumping heart as the bird flutters back and forth in a constricted space.
The circular mask evokes the technical apparatus producing the image;
the numbers inscribed on the frame show the scientific categorization
that is retrospectively assigned to the action. Watching the bird’s efforts to
thwart the machinic gaze that turns living things into facts is excruciating.
Its hectic movements tell of its struggle to resist the eye of the machine
that inscribes the bird into a social order, that strips it of its autonomy.
The piercing electronic sound heightens the intensity of the image seen. A
synthesizer wails over what sounds like a collage of human and non-human
vocal expressions: I register the shrieking of a bird, the muffled breathing of
a mammal, and the mutter of a human voice. But actually, I’m not sure what
I am hearing at all. In their obscurity, the sounds are even more disturbing
than the image.
The contrast to the diorama is extreme. The sound stops abruptly. The
cardinal, stuck on a branch, is immobile. Before the scenes of domestic
Indian life are presented in their entirety, mannequins and props are
shown in fragments. Each shot is heralded by the sound of a bell, which
accentuates the funereal nature of a museum space that renders culture
dead rather than bringing it to life. Body parts and tools hover in space:
a branch, a pot, a foot, hands holding a basket with a f ish whose hard,
plastic body reflects the artif icial light. The torso of a mannequin is
turned gracefully as if in a dance pose, thick black shiny hair covers the
side of the head. Drops of paint have dried on its chest, and now look like
beads of sweat, or tears. Time is frozen, arrested in the colonial fantasy
of a past that never existed. The soft gradation of the celluloid film stock
brings out the nostalgic charm of the colour scheme: warm shades of
reds and brown with subdued blues and greens. After the sensory shock
of the X-ray vision, I f ind myself relieved to be on stable ground again.
Soothed into a false sense of harmony, I also find myself complicit in the
continuing erasure of Native American history. This visitor space in front
of the brightly lit diorama is dim. The lighting produces a cinematic effect
and establishes a hierarchal relationship between those who are viewing
and those who are seen. Watching from the safe space of their privileged
viewing position, spectators are forced to assume the paternalizing gaze
with which the colonizers of this land othered Native bodies. In contrast-
ing two technologies of seeing, the diorama and the fluoroscopy, the
vignette’s opening sequence records the fallacies of historic and f ilmic
representation and brilliantly plays on the viewer’s susceptibility to
media manipulation.
The gesture brings to the fore media’s capacity to act as a framing device
embedded within the technoscientific and cultural regimes of dominant
society. It also provides a striking example of the film’s engagement with
the materiality of non-human agency. We are presented with technologies
of seeing that are employed to represent animate and inanimate bodies, a
living animal as in the case of the fluoroscopy and mannequins depicting
humans and animals in the diorama. A paradoxical tension ensues, as the
containment is both successful and forever bound to fail: while the bird is
trapped and the image of the Indians arrested, the bird actively escapes the
static gaze and the plastic material of the mannequins silently exposes the
failure to visualize a fantasy. The fluoroscopy, but also the diorama, call
to mind Parikka’s concept of medianatures. Parikka proposes a geological
media model that is twofold: on the one hand, the earth is mediated through
technology – Parikka lists mapping, for instance, or sonification, but we
might as well add here fluoroscopic imaging and dioramas. On the other
hand, media technologies are dependent on material resources – say, miner-
als, rocks, or physical structures. The sphere of medianatures thus exists
in a double bind, creating a permanent tension between ‘the materiality of
the uncontained’ and the ‘operations of framing’.30 While media technolo-
gies have an ordering function, they are enabled first by the very material
substances they help to frame.
Part of Parikka’s argument is that media itself is manipulated matter.
Scholars such as Nadja Bozak and Sean Cubitt have also pointed out the
30 Parikka, Geology of Media, p. 13.

136 K atrin Pesch
different ways in which film and media depend on geology and the earth’s
natural resources.31 This, of course, is true for f ilm in general, not just
Stratman’s. But the materiality of media, whether analogue or digital,
visual or acoustic, carries particular weight in The Illinois Parables. We
can see this from the textual and ‘geological’ layering of the individual
vignettes down to the choice of the film’s material base. The assemblage
of plastic, gelatine, and silver crystals that constitutes the film stock, for
instance, was chosen for its particular sensitivity to light. Stratman, who
works with both film and video, selected 16mm for this project, because
of ‘the way celluloid acts as a witness. It’s the light from that place, at that
time, physically hitting and altering the film’. Her word choice to describe
f ilm’s sensory faculty seems pertinent here: witness derives from wit,
which denotes ‘the faculty of thinking and reasoning in general; mental
capacity, understanding, intellect’.32 More than a medium or an aesthetic
choice, celluloid is a sensing actor, which speaks about place with and
through light. As a technology, film exists in the sphere of medianature.
It simultaneously relies on and frames geophysical substances that sustain
and inspire us. The Illinois Parables consciously operates in this collective
material-discursive space.
Furthermore, Parikka’s medianature is based on Donna Haraway’s
influential concept of natureculture, which emphasizes the inherent
interconnection and inseparability of nature and culture.33 Natureculture
thus contests the Cartesian framework that uses binary structures, such
as nature versus culture and mind versus matter, as its ordering principle.
Natureculture (as well as medianature) considers the material non-human
realm as inextricably linked to sociopolitical and economic power structures.
Importantly, natureculture is also an effort to decentre the human subject.
It’s a gesture that calls into question the privileged space of the human in
favour of a broader understanding of who and what belongs to the social
collective. In Stratman’s case, the film elides questions of human subjectivity
in favour of a form of agency that is distributed among people, animals, and
the earth as well as the beliefs, moral values, and creative practices that
connect and sustain them.
31 Nadja Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2012); Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital
Technologies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).
32 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘witness, n.’.
33 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness
(Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p. 9.
The Illinois Parables thus moves the essay’s alleged humanism toward
an understanding of a posthumanist essay. Building on the literary essay’s
foundation in Enlightenment traditions, which presumes an autonomous,
self-determined human subject, the essay has generally been situated
– whether explicitly or implicitly – within a humanist tradition. As a recent
feature in Sight & Sound put it, the essay f ilm exemplif ies ‘the spirit of
humanistic inquiry’, a statement that echoes Rascaroli’s and Corrigan’s
earlier pronouncements.34 As is often noted, the term essay derives from
‘assay’, which connotes a trial or attempt. Nora M. Alter has pointed to
the etymological lineage of this term to agens, which anchors the essay
within the ‘problem of human agency’.35 The agency performed in the essay
film is commonly validated and historicized through both representatives
and critics of humanism, ranging from Michel de Montaigne, Giacomo
Leopardi, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to Marquis de Sade, Georg Lukacs,
Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes, to borrow Alter’s
list – a gendered directory that any history of the film essay could easily
help extend.36 Even though the essay’s alliance with humanist thought
may be an uneasy one, the essay’s anthropocentric bearings remain largely
intact.
In contrast, The Illinois Parables can be seen in light of recent posthuman-
ist thought that questions the universal subject implicit in humanism. Rosi
Braidotti, a major proponent of this emerging approach, describes life as
something that surpasses the individual and presents a non-personal force
of creativity Building on critics of humanism’s anthropological dogma, a
posthuman theory of subjectivity postulates a continuum of human and
non-human nature. This interconnection is a crucial feature of The Illinois
Parables, where agency is distributed among natural and social realms.
Going beyond the essay film’s dissolution of the border between self and
the other where the implied other is human, the subject position put forth
in the film is more than human. As I have argued here, Stratman’s film
embraces a material-discursive mode of telling that includes human and
non-human voices alike. In its essayistic journey through sites and events
in the state’s history, The Illinois Parables joins the intellectual vagabond
with vagabond matter.
34 Andrew Tracy, Ginette Vincendeau, Katy McGahan, Chris Darke, Geoff Andrew, Olaf Möller,
Sergio Wolf, Nina Power, and Nick Bradshaw, ‘The Essay Film’, Sight & Sound, 2015 [https://www.
bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/deep-focus/essay-film].
35 Nora M. Alter, ‘Translating the Essay into Film and Installation’, Journal of Visual Culture
6.1 (2007), pp. 44-57 (p. 45).
36 Alter, ‘Translating the Essay’, p. 45.
138 K atrin Pesch
Bibliography
Alter, Nora M. ‘Translating the Essay into Film and Installation’, Journal of Visual
Culture 6.1 (2007), pp. 44-57.
Balsom, Erika. ‘The Illinois Parables: Deborah Stratman on her Histories of the
Land’, Sight & Sound, 10 October 2016, accessible online at [https://www.bfi.
org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/deborah-stratman-
illinois-parables].
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2016).
Blümlinger, Christa. ‘Zwischen den Bildern/Lesen’, in Schreiben Bilder Sprechen:
Texte zum Essayistischen Film, ed. by Christa Blümlinger and Constantin Wulf
(Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1992), pp. 11-31.
Bozak, Nadja. The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).
Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
Corrigan, Timothy. ‘Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative’, in The Essay
Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, ed. by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades
(London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2016), pp. 15-27.
Cubitt, Sean. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).
Deleuze, Gilles. ‘Metal, Metallurgy, Music, Husserl, Simondon’, Les Cours des Gilles
Deleuze, Cours Vincennes (1979), trans. by Timothy S. Murphy. Web. [https://
www.webdeleuze.com/textes/186].
Goldsmith, Leo. ‘The Face of the Earth: Surface and Image in Landscape Docu-
mentary’, Documentary Surfaces panel, Society of Cinema Studies annual
conference, Toronto, 2017.
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant
Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
Harvey, David Oscar. ‘The Limits of Vococentrism: Chris Marker, Hans Richter and
the Essay Film’, SubStance 41.2, Issue 128 (2012), pp. 6-23.
Marshall, Jennifer Jane. ‘Toward Phenomenology: A Material Culture Studies
Approach to Landscape Theory’, in Landscape Theory, ed. by James Elkins and
Rachel DeLue (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 195-203.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Landscape and Power, 2nd Edition (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 2002).
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
The New York Times, “Enrico Fermi Dead at 53; Architect of the Atom Bomb”, The
New York Times, 29 November 1954. Web. [https://archive.nytimes.com/www.
nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0929.html].
Oxford English Dictionary, ‘witness, n.’, (Oxford University Press, online edition,
2018).
Parikka, Jussi. Geology of Media (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2015).
Paul, Arthur. ‘Essay Questions’, in Essays on the Essay Film, ed. by Nora M. Alter
and Timothy Corrigan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 161-171.
Pinkerton, Nick. ‘Interview: Deborah Stratman’, Film Comment, 17 Novem-
ber 2016. Accessible online at [https://www.f ilmcomment.com/blog/
interview-deborah-stratman/].
Rascaroli, Laura. ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’,
Framework 49.2 (2008), pp. 24-47.
Rascaroli, Laura. The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009).
Rascaroli, Laura. How the Essay Film Thinks (New York: Oxford University Press,
2017).
Stratman, Deborah. ‘The Illinois Parables, 2016, 60 min, 16mm: Synopsis’. Web.
[http://www.pythagorasfilm.com/the-illinois-parables.html].
Tracy, Andrew et al. ‘The Essay Film’, Sight & Sound, 5 August 2015. Web. [https://
www.bf i.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/deep-focus/
essay-film].
Wallach, Alan. ‘Between Subject and Object’, in Landscape Theory, ed. by James
Elkins and Rachel DeLue (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 315-312.
About the Author
Katrin Pesch is an artist, film-maker, and writer. She received her doctorate
in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a Concentration in Art Practice
from the University of California San Diego, USA, and has participated in
the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Situated at the
intersection of material culture studies and the environmental humanities,
her work engages with questions of nature and the social, ecology, and
cultural memory. She has exhibited work and curated exhibitions and film
programmes at international institutions. Her writing has been published
in Studies in French Cinema and Anthropology and Humanism, and several
edited collections. Her films are distributed by Arsenal Institute for Film
and Video in Berlin.
7. Rethinking the Human, Rethinking
the Essay Film: The Ecocritical Work of
The Pearl Button
Belinda Smaill
Abstract
In the essayistic mode, the performance of selfhood frequently questions
the logic of subjectivity and its relation with the world. Taking up this
core property of the essay f ilm, this chapter explores its potential to
further ecocritical approaches in film studies. It asks how grappling with
non-human themes and aesthetics might further complicate and rethink
not just the sovereign subject in documentary, but the status of the human
more fundamentally. These questions are taken up through a close reading
of Patricio Guzmán’s The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar, Chile, 2015), a film
that examines post-dictatorship Chile by criss-crossing multiple spheres
of interest, including the events of the military dictatorship, cultures and
the impact of colonialism, astronomy, Chilean natural geography, with
water as structuring concern across all.
Keywords: essay f ilm, water, non-human, memory, humanism,

cosmopolitics
Near the beginning of his essay ‘On Repentance’, Michel de Montaigne

contemplates the interaction between the subjective experience of time
passing and the inevitable flux of the world:
Now, though the features of my picture alter and change, ‘tis not, however,
unlike: the world eternally turns round; all things therein are incessantly
moving, the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of Egypt, both
by the public motion and their own. Even constancy itself is no other but
doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch07
142 Belinda Smaill
a slower and more languishing motion. I cannot fix my object; ‘tis always
tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness […].1
Montaigne’s sixteenth-century essay brings into focus one of the central

propositions of the essayistic form, demonstrating Timothy Corrigan’s point
that ‘the essayistic indicates a kind of encounter between the self and the
public domain, an encounter that measures the limits and possibilities
of each as a conceptual activity’.2 In the essay film, the performance of
selfhood, whether as embodied narrator, diarist, archivist, or sojourner
functions as a hinge that links fragments of external reality, narrative, and a
direct appeal to the viewing subject. Montaigne’s words are significant for my
purposes, moreover, because they express not only the encounter between
self and public, but also between self and the materiality, conditionality,
and planetary magnitude of the natural world.
Over the last decade, popular commentary about and awareness of
climate crisis has produced a critical new cultural imaginary. Further,
allegiances between the sciences and humanities are newly confronting the
problems of the Anthropocene in ways that denaturalize and recontextual-
ize the Anthropos, a project that, in many ways, builds on the 20th century’s
critique of Enlightenment humanism.3 Working to situate the f ield of
animal studies in relation to the humanities, or the ‘posthumanities’, Cary
Wolfe proposes that, rather than break with the legacy of humanism, we
need ‘to attend to that thing called the “human” with greater specificity,
greater attention to its embodiment, embeddedness, and materiality, and
how these in turn shape and are shaped by consciousness, mind and so
on’. 4 For Wolfe, this allows us to consider attributes, such as language, as
indicating the work of evolution in ways that resist the ontological separation
of the human and other living creatures. This signals the possibility of
perceiving the human in ways that move beyond (human) subject-centred
paradigms.
1 Michel de Montaigne, Michel de Montaigne: Selected Essays (Dover, MA: Courier Corporation,
2013), p. 172.
2 Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), p. 6.
3 The term ‘Anthropocene’ was f irst introduced by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel-prize winning
atmospheric chemist, and Eugene Stoermer, an ecologist, in 2000. It designates a new post-
Holocene epoch marked by human-induced geological change. For an insightful account of the
multidisciplinary circulation of this term, see Jamie Lorimer, ‘The Anthropo-scene: A Guide for
the Perplexed’, Social Studies of Science 47.1 (2017), pp. 117-142.
4 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010),
p. 120.
Re thinking the Human, Re thinking the Essay Film 143
Describing the recent shift in the humanities towards a ‘geo-centred

perspective’ as a ‘conceptual earthquake’, Rosi Braidotti offers a further
context for rethinking our conception of nature and subjectivity:
The earth or planetary dimension of the environmental issue is indeed

not a concern like any other. It is rather the issue that is immanent to all
others, in so far as the earth is our middle and common ground. This is the
‘milieu’ for all of us, human and nonhuman inhabitant of this particular
planet, in this particular era. The planetary opens onto the cosmic in an
immanent materialist dimension. My argument is that, again, this change
of perspective is rich in alternatives for a renewal of subjectivity. What
would a geo-centred subject look like?5
I am interested in how this represents a challenge for understanding how

the human subject might be constituted in non-anthropocentric ways,
whether through considering a relationship with posthumanism, geo-
centred subjectivity or another similar formation.6 The ramifications for
the essay film are significant – now is the time to call for an ecocritical
consideration of the speaking subject that is pivotal to the form. Such a
project is necessary to bring the study of the essay film in line with other
areas of the humanities, which are interrogating what Donna Haraway
refers to as ‘human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old
saws of Western philosophy and political economics’.7
The subjective voice of the essay film is frequently a questioning one and,
in this respect, it contrasts with expository documentary’s authoritative
and universalizing voice of God, and thus challenges dominant notions
of how voice-over functions in non-fiction. As Laura Rascaroli writes, the
‘antisystematic, subjective, nonmethodic method’ inheres with radical
potential.8 With evocative juxtapositions, ruminative tonality, and a focus
on ideas rather than factual information, the subjective compass of the
essay already undercuts settled understandings of the sovereign subject.
Due to this, examples of the form are frequently employed in the service
of generating a new logic and often crafted into politically significant ways
5 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (London: Polity Press, 2013), p. 81.

6 This term signals a move that understands human as not only social agents but as geological
agents, with their actions impacting on the non-human environment as well as the human one.
7 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke
8 Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Cinema: Subjective Cinema and The Essay Film (London:
Wallflower Press, 2009), p. 38.
144 Belinda Smaill
of seeing. The explicit performance of personal vision or voice in film is

already decentred in the sense that it is situated and perspectival. For this
reason, there is great scope to probe the heuristic of essayistic subjectivity
further, asking how the context of the non-human might further complicate
and rethink not just the sovereign subject, but the status of the human and
human exceptionalism more fundamentally.
I refer to this as an approach that endeavours to move beyond anthro-
pocentrism in ways that explore how essayistic examples might contest or
refigure humanism. This is not a move to institute a new mode – scholars
such as Rascaroli, Corrigan and others have accomplished much in mapping
the various distinctions between, for example, travel film, diary films,
interview films, or personal and essayistic films. The essay film ‘beyond
anthropocentrism’ potentially extends across all of these, offering an
epistemological provocation, rather than a stylistic category. This opens an
avenue to investigate how our place in relation to what Braidotti describes,
as noted above, as our earthly ‘common ground’, might also compel a re-
consideration of the precepts of non-fiction film and media more broadly.
While the essay film already challenges the assumptions that underpin
orthodoxies of classical documentary, such as objectivity and authority,
I am interested in how a close consideration of non-human nature might
incite a challenge, particularly to the expository documentary, in ways that
expand our understanding of the essay film.
While Montaigne provides a useful sixteenth-century precedent for my
discussion, there are a range of more recent essay examples, indeed essay films,
that might generate the epistemological provocation that I describe. Werner
Herzog’s oeuvre presents the most well-known essayistic contemplations of
the non-human. His films frequently feature individuals who are defined by
their relationship with nature, whether the landscape or animals. Herzog is
not concerned with exploring the ecological place of Anthropos. Instead, his
approach begins with what might be considered a romantic impulse, exploring
how the natural world can be rendered in ways that express the complexities
of human psychology and sociality. Grizzly Man (2005) is the most discussed
model of this impulse. It sits alongside other examples such as Encounters at
the End of the World (2006) and The White Diamond (2004). All convey a natural
world that is indifferent to the many humans who are drawn to it. Other
filmic examples that also highlight the human as a site of enquiry include
Georges Franju’s Le San Des Bêtes (Blood Of The Beasts, 1949); Chris Marker’s
La Jetee (1962); and, more recently, Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015);
Jennifer Baichwal’s film about the work of Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured
Landscapes (2006); and Peter Brosens and Dorjkhandyn Turmunkh’s State of
Dogs (1998). It is not my intention to suggest that all these examples institute
a reconsideration of the anthropocentric subject in the same way or with
equal intensity, but rather that they all press further investigation of the
place of the human as the primary concern for politics. From this archive
of examples, I choose to focus on the work of Chilean film-maker Patricio
Guzmán, specifically his 2015 film, The Pearl Button.
The dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), while over, has
left an ongoing legacy of political conflict, unsolved crimes, and enduring
suffering and trauma for the Chilean people.9 El botón de nácar (The Pearl
Button) returns to the problem of how to represent the meaning of the suf-
fering that still characterizes post-dictatorship Chile. It would be a mistake,
however, to understand the film as only, or even primarily, focussed on the
legacy of Pinochet’s regime. The film’s lyrical essayist form crisscrosses
multiple spheres of interest, including the events of the military dictatorship,
the culture of Indigenous people and the impact of colonialism, astronomy,
Chilean natural geography, and the way water is a structuring concern across
all of these things. In what follows, I explore how each of these different
threads and their formal expression recasts the relation between the human
and human events, and the non-human environment. I focus specifically
on subjectivity and humanism, drawing out the ecocritical potential of The
Pearl Button and the essay film more broadly.
9 As Antonio Traverso observes, in post-dictatorship society, ‘it has been documentary film-
makers who have most readily and extensively embraced the public memory project in this South
American country’. Antonio Traverso, ‘Nostalgia, Memory, and Politics in Chilean Documentaries
of Return’, in Dictatorships in the Hispanic World: Transatlantic and Transnational Perspectives,
ed. by P. Swier and J. Riordan-Goncalves (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), pp. 49-78,
(p. 50). Patricio Guzmán’s long and prolific film-making career spans five decades and, although
working largely in exile, he has become Chile’s most internationally renowned f ilm-maker.
His epic three-part documentary, La batalla de Chile/The Battle of Chile (1975-1979), cemented
a place for him not only in Latin American cinema, but also in the canon of documentary film
history. The film encompasses the rise of Salvador Allende’s socialist government, the political
tensions that led to a coup d’état, and the establishment of Augusto Pinochet’s U.S.-backed
military dictatorship. His more recent films, those that Traverso describes as ‘memory films’
(Traverso, p. 51), include Salvador Allende (2004), Chile: Memoria obstinada (Chile: Obstinate
Memory, 1997), El caso Pinochet (The Pinochet Case, 2001), and Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia
for the Light, 2010). There has been a significant amount of scholarship attending to Guzman’s
oeuvre. Studies that address his more recent films include works by Antonio Traverso and Kristi
Wilson (eds.), Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America (London: Routledge, 2016); Juan
Carlos Rodríguez, ‘Framing Ruins: Patricio Guzmán’s Postdictatorial Documentaries’, Latin
American Perspectives 40.1 (2013), pp. 131-144; David Martin-Jones, ‘Archival Landscapes and a
Non-Anthropocentric “Universe Memory”’, Third Text 27.6 (2013), pp. 707-722; and Nilo Couret,
‘Scale as Nostalgic Form: Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2011)’, Discourse 39.1, (2017),
pp. 67-91.
146 Belinda Smaill
The Pearl Button: Framing Humanism
The Pearl Button begins with an ancient drop of water that, as the narrator
(Guzmán) describes, is trapped in a 3000 year-old block of quartz that was
found in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Set against blackness and removed from
any identifiable context, the quartz, with its square edges, resembles a block
of ice. The beginning of the film registers its focus on water, place, and time
(whether historical time or memory). From the block of quartz, The Pearl
Button then expands outwards to a commentary on the galaxy and then
returns to the islands and ice formations of western Patagonia. As sequences
progress, the viewer is gradually introduced to the other threads that weave
through The Pearl Button, principally the precolonial water-bound histories
of Indigenous cultures, the decimation brought by Chilean settlers, and the
present-day recollections of individual interviewees. Following this, the
atrocities of Pinochet’s military come into view, in particular the practice
of tying murdered prisoners to steel rails and interring them deep in the
Pacific Ocean. The different elements and entities in the film continue to
weave together as the viewer is challenged to find clear pathways through
Guzmán’s narration, a series of interviews, archival photographs, and striking
images of the natural world. These images encompass glaciers and ice floes,
satellite photography of the Chilean coast, and constellations of stars.
Meditations on geology, astronomy, and personal recollections infuse
the representation of national political history. This inclusive logic could
easily be read as one that produces indulgent tangents that distract from the
documentary focus on the Pinochet regime and its human rights abuses. In
reviewing the film, Max Nelson alludes to this possible reading: ‘It may be
curious that the 1973 coup that overthrew Allende happened to coincide with
the birth of a supernova, but insisting on this coincidence, as Guzmán does
at one point in the new film, does more to cloud the coup’s complex nexus of
economic, social, and political causes than to clarify them.’10 This reading,
I suggest, rests on an assumption that a non-fiction film that confronts the
national political weight of a military dictatorship will take up the tools of
expository documentary. Following this stylistic expectation, a film about
the Pinochet regime would draw out the clear logic of human rights, with
10 Max Nelson, ‘In Dreams begin Responsibilities: The Films of Patricio Guzmán’, Cinema
Scope 63, 2015, pp. 13-15 (p. 15). However, when Guzmán was asked about the poetic style he has
adopted in films that address the Pinochet era, he responded by saying that, as time passes,
leaving that era behind, new ways of representing its repercussions are needed. See British Film
Institute, Patricio Guzmán talks about The Pearl Button: BFI London Film Festival [online video],
2015, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF2-kCU7wz0], accessed 18 December 2017.
the narrator positioned as the subject or source of knowledge explicating the

meaning and detail of historical events, fulfilling the documentary ‘desire
for a certainty of the knowable, of the world as testable’.11 This style, and the
expectations that accompany it, are tied to a particular humanist project
that places the sovereign subject in a God-like position – the transcendental
ground, the sovereign originator of meaning and truth.
It should be noted that this conception of documentary holds true only
for expository modes and then only in very orthodox cases. Documentary
is not a singular category, nor does it transparently represent the real of the
historical world. As Michael Renov describes, ‘nonfiction contains a number
of “fictive” elements, moments at which a presumably objective representa-
tion of the world encounters the necessity of creative intervention’.12 The
degree to which this intervention is exercised exists as a spectrum, with
essayist forms and expository documentary sitting well removed from one
another. Nevertheless, observing the relationship between the two, I wish to
pursue the analytical possibilities that emerge when the essay film, and The
Pearl Button in particular, is posed as a challenge to the humanist project
associated with documentary. I marry this with, moreover, an ecocritical
approach that challenges human exceptionalism.
From the ancient drop of water, the opening sequence of the film inau-
gurates a sensibility that is anchored in nature and devoted to the lines
of association that place Chile geographically, from the coastline to the
stars. Images of the powerful telescopes located in the Atacama Desert and
featured in Nostalgia for the Light begin the sequence and reference the
earlier film, hinting at the ties that bind the two. The narration explains:
‘There’s water in the planets. There is water vapor in some nebula. There is
water on other celestial bodies. On earth, it is vital for life to exist.’ There
is a visual dynamic that occurs here through editing and images, one that
takes the viewer from the desert telescopes to the stars and gradually back
to terrestrial concerns when we see the coastline of Chile through layers of
clouds from a satellite perspective. The narration turns to the geomorphology
of the nation: ‘Water, Chile’s longest border, forms an estuary known as
western Patagonia. Here, the Cordillera of the Andes sinks into the water and
reemerges as thousands of islands. It is a timeless place, an archipelago of
rain.’ The camera brings the viewer closer to Earth and in greater proximity
11 Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011), p. 86.
12 Michael Renov, ‘Introduction: The Truth about Non-fiction’, in Theorizing Documentary,
ed. by M. Renov (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1-12 (p. 2).
148 Belinda Smaill
to different textures of water: ‘When water moves, the cosmos intervenes.

Water receives the force of the planets, transmits it to the earth and to all
living creatures. Water is an intermediary force between the stars and us.’
The narration subsides for a few minutes as the striking environment of
western Patagonia fills the frame, from the mountains of the Andes amongst
the clouds, wind, and cliff rock, to still glaciers, to an iceberg-like crystals,
with violin music accompanied by the sound of cracking ice as it melts. This
initial sequence announces that the natural world is a critical concern in
the film. Moreover, it hints at what is to come by emphasizing the ontology
of water and drawing it into the metaphysical ruminations of the essay.
The cinematography also, inevitably, evokes associations with the visual
vocabulary of blue chip nature documentary. These associations present a
suggestive comparison: the nature documentary, or natural history film,
offers perhaps the purest contemporary form of expository documentary.
With spectacular images elucidated by a consistent voice-over, the narrator
of a blue chip nature series is not only the source of knowledge, but also
the classifier, authorized to name and to categorize, as well as to narrate
the scientific story of other species and geological events. As a classifier,
they take a place above nature. Yet, unlike an example such as the BBC’s
Frozen Planet (2011), The Pearl Button eschews explanatory detail. Guzmán’s
voice-over makes proclamations that are impressionistic, personal, and leap
from earth to space and back, exploring the poetics of geography rather
than explicating its conditions.
Guzmán is in nature, alongside it. He adds his own sensory experience of
water when he says: ‘Some distant relatives of mine lived here. They had a
zinc roof and the raindrops made a noise that reassured and protected me.
That sound has followed me all my life.’ In The Pearl Button, the authorial
subject of science is replaced by the impressionistic leaps of the narrator, for
whom ‘It seems that water comes from outer space, and life was brought to
earth by the comets that shaped the seas’. In an interview with Eric Hynes,
Guzmán describes how the voice-over is distinct from more authoritative
modes: ‘It’s a voiceover that’s not pedagogical, not something clearly defined.
Sometimes it’s like an ornament, it’s part of the landscape. It’s not like
voiceovers that are very concrete, rational, specific and direct. It’s completely
the opposite.’13 Rather than above nature, as its classifier, Guzmán’s words
encompass nature as partly observed reality (including memory), partly
science (whether anthropology or astronomy), and partly mythical.
13 Eric Hynes, ‘Interview: Patricio Guzmán’, Film Comment [website] 2015, [https://www.
filmcomment.com/blog/interview-patricio-guzman/], accessed 4 December 2017.
The opening sequence of The Pearl Button (Patricio Guzmán, Chile, Atacama Productions, 2015)
draws associations between the terrestrial, the cosmic and vast expanses of time by emphasizing
the ubiquity of water and drawing it into the metaphysical ruminations of the essay. Screenshot.
With this movement across a seemingly disjunctive thematic terrain,

The Pearl Button offers a ‘lyrical’ formulation of the essay film, one that, as
Rascaroli writes, ‘apparently contradicts both rational thought and narrative
structuring’.14 With a style closer to poetry than the prose, for Rascaroli, the
lyrical presents one manifestation of the essay film as a ‘form that thinks’ – the
idea also developed in her chapter in this volume. Drawing on Harun Farocki’s
notion that ‘discourses are a form of narration’, Rascaroli expands on how
the discourse of the lyric essay film includes not only the voice-over but a
combination of interviews, images, sound, and other formal elements.15 The
disjunctive poetry of The Pearl Button allows the film to think in a specific
way, enabling a rethinking of humanism through, in the first instance, a
commentary on natural history that displaces the pedagogical narrator. Thus,
the film institutes a narration that is ‘part of the landscape’ rather than above it.
Ecological Existentialism and the Speaking Subject
Jettisoning the certainty of the sovereign subject, the lyrical essay film
might be understood as a highly existential endeavor, one that questions
the meaning of human experience. I am interested in Deborah Bird Rose’s
14 Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks, p. 163.

15 Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks, p. 162.
150 Belinda Smaill
adoption of this term, highlighting its implications that ‘there is no pre-

determined essence of humanity, no ultimate goal toward which we are
heading, and that we experience what appears to be astonishingly open
ways of being and becoming human. My use of the term is clearly situated
within the intellectual history that asks what humanity is and can be.’16
Elaborating humanism’s existentialism as a collective loneliness in the face
of a recognition of the absence of God and an indifferent universe, Rose
proposes an ‘ecological existentialism’. This term signals a recognition of
how, rather than being isolated, we are entangled in the connectivities
of life on earth. Although connected, there remains no predetermined
essence or destiny within this ‘kinship of becoming’.17 I want to draw out
two crucial consequences of Rose’s notion of ecological existentialism. It
signals a move away from the dualistic thinking that places humans as
separate and above all else on earth. With a focus on uncertainty as part of
the existential condition, it also challenges modes of determinist prediction,
or the absolute knowledge of the speaking subject.
It is tempting to consider the formal elements that contribute to the
lyricism of The Pearl Button as a kind of ecology. However, this would be
erroneous – ecologies have particular spatio-temporal qualities. They are
of ongoing duration and are of unfathomable complexity, making them
a poor metaphor for cinema. It is more fruitful to explore how the values
and agency of human existence might be rethought in the film and placed
within a planetary, geomorphic frame in a way that references ecological
existentialism as a condition of the essayist subject. The past and present
of the Indigenous culture of Patagonia is a central concern in the film. Like
every other concern in The Pearl Button, it is blended with the ontology
of water, highlighting the connectivity between human and non-human.
The representation of Indigenous culture also comes with the commentary
provided by various non-Indigenous experts. However, these experts are
ambivalently positioned – they are both the source of knowledge and yet
this knowledge is undercut by the film’s discursive structure.
As the film shifts from a focus on the spectacle of nature to the Indigenous
histories of Patagonia, a chronology that includes human events starts to
crystallize in the film. Beginning with references to precolonial times,
the narration states: ‘Before the white man arrived, the first inhabitants
of Patagonia lived in communion with the cosmos. They carved stones
16 Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2011), p. 43.
17 Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming, p. 44.
to ensure their future. They travelled by water. They lived submerged in

water. They ate what the water supplied.’ The accompanying images show
the textures of stone implements, possibly museum pieces, and black and
white photographs of Indigenous peoples posed in traditional dress, before
returning to the mountains and the oceans. The rhythm of the voice-over
is broken with the first interview of the film. The viewer sees Martin G.
Calderón sanding his canoe before his face enters the frame. A descendent
of the Kawésqar peoples of Patagonia, Calderón describes how, even though
he crossed Cape Horn in a boat with his father at the age of 12, the small
vessel he has built is prohibited on the water due to maritime regulations.
‘I grew up by the sea. I’d like to be able to travel by boat but there are too
many restrictions […] We are barely allowed in the sea.’ Guzmán’s voice
follows later in the sequence: ‘We still don’t know how they were able to
predict the weather. It is estimated that in the nineteenth century, there
were 8000 people with 300 canoes.’
The Kawésqar interviewees, Martin G. Calderón, Gabriela Paterito,
and Cristina Calderón, recount stories about their lives and their families,
mostly stories tied to the oceans. Guzmán does not ask them to describe
Indigenous mythologies or philosophies. In this respect, he avoids the
formulation Rose describes as the temptation ‘often labeled Romanticism,
that would see others as having insights that civilization has occluded for
us. According to the Romantic vision, the primitive, like the child, has a
clearer vision of reality than does the civilized person or the adult.’18 Rather
than explications of (more) authentic reality from an Indigenous point of
view, the insights Guzmán seeks from Calderón are largely experiential. It is
Guzmán’s narration, in this instance, that offers historical anthropological
knowledge, yet in ways that also point to gaps in the anthropological record.
The recurring reference to water is given a different, more sonic tenor
when anthropologist Claudio Mercado appears in the film. Mercado (a
scholar of Indigenous culture, the viewer is informed) is filmed amongst
trees and bushes, with consistent cutaways to flowing water, which har-
monizes with his words. He offers philosophies about water that dovetail
with Guzmán’s own poetic commentary, linking the earth, water, and the
stars. Rather than a conventional interview setting, he moves about amongst
grasses and trees, his embodied presence congruent with his discussion
of nature. Then he notes, ‘I listened to the sound of water and suddenly
heard music. A river sounds like a thousand sounds at the same time.’ In a
medium shot, Mercado stands with his eyes closed and begins to chant in

152 Belinda Smaill
a consistent tone. Other sounds chime in on the soundtrack, including an

electronic rendering of water trickling. The frame is filled with the motion
movement of drops of water. In the hands of Werner Herzog, this moment
would be conveyed as a parody of the eccentric expert, but, for Guzmán,
it becomes an evocation of the sonic beauty of water. It blends the formal
potential of sound and image with the narrative focus on the ontology of
water. Moreover, it re-modulates the human voice into a human, technologi-
cal, and aquatic synthesis of sound. A different tone of chanting takes the
viewer into the next sequence, which soon morphs into whispering, as
eerie black and white images fill the screen, images of men with stars, dots,
and stripes painted on their bodies. Guzmán’s narration informs us that
these Selk’nam men lived in the remotest part of Patagonia and believed
they would become stars after death. But, he states, ‘We still don’t know
the meanings of these drawings. Perhaps Chilean poet, Raul Zarita, might
be able to help us […]’ Zarita then appears on screen, in a garden setting,
speaking to the camera.
Trinh T. Min-Ha argues that interviews in a documentary function ‘in
terms of authenticating information; validating the voices recruited for the
sake of the argument the film advances […]; and legitimating an exclusionary
system of representation based on the dominant ideology of presence and
authenticity – [these] are actually sophisticated devices of fiction’.19 The
interviews in The Pearl Button are orientated away from legitimizing a
particular ideology and exist more to contribute to an expressive weaving
together of ideas. In this sense, they might be described more as explicitly
partial, rather than fictional. Rather than absolute knowledge, the film’s
voices speak to science, experiential knowledge, and mystery.20 In Rose’s
terms, this is a process by which ‘mystery is brought back into human
thought as an essential element of our lives, a part of thought rather than an
enemy to be vanquished’.21 Just as it eschews scientific explication of the
natural world, the film references but does not convey settled anthropologi-
cal knowledge about Indigenous peoples. Nor does it turn to the romantic
‘pre-modern’ knowledge of the native. Instead, it turns to the chanting
anthropologist, the poet, the Indigenous boat builder, and Guzmán’s own
questioning voice.
19 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Framer Framed (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 13.

20 This mystery should be considered not as contrary to the earth and biological sciences, but
integral to its processes. Scientific enquiry is characterized by partial knowledge, uncertainty,
and estimations of probability. Science does not fully understand the complexity of ecosystems,
with its many biological and microbiological processes.
In her discussion of environmental documentary, Helen Hughes identi-

fies how the image and its frame not only represents the landscape, but also
the place of the human within it. She draws on the well-known chart by film
scholars David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson that describes various shots,
from extreme long shot to extreme close-up, only in relation to the frame of
the human body. Hughes describes how ‘a shift in the spectrum is created
by the increasing use of more categories in which the distance between
the body and the camera are increased. These categories are: the aerial
shot, satellite photography and space photography.’22 The long shot enables
greater attention to that which is beyond the human, but, with space and
satellite photography, humanity, in the case of the former, disappears or,
in the latter, ‘pattern and broad contrasts become more dominant and
humanity begins to appear as a species’.23 The Pearl Button begins by cycling
through images of the stars, the ocean, and the coastline of Chile. Human
scale is dwarfed in ways that require a reimagining of human agency and
scale, thus offering visual representation of Rose’s notion that we are
enmeshed in a larger process. I suggest that the sequence of interviews that
follows extends this existential contemplation of scale to a metaphorical
as well as visual representation – rather than the capacity to sit above
nature that epistemological certainty brings, the human is decentred by
Guzmán’s refiguring of the interview subject of documentary. While these
voices eschew transcendental knowledge, that is not to say that The Pearl
Button forgoes fact purely for the stuff of mystery. Central to the film is
the violence of Chilean history and, in this respect, it is concerned with
human politics and conveying knowledge about the realities of the past.
Matter and Politics
Early in The Pearl Button, Guzmán describes how the five tribes of Patagonia,
the Kawésqar, Selk’nam, Aoniken, Hausch, and Yámana, navigated the
country’s coasts and waterways. It is not until halfway through the film that
the viewer is told that there are only 20 direct descendants of these peoples
left. Guzmán describes the decimation of those who died of disease on
missions or were murdered by ‘Indian Hunters’ seeking the trifling bounties
that were awarded in return for body parts. Black and white photographs of
the missions are replaced by others that depict men in a field with guns. One
22 Hughes, Green Documentary, p. 49.

23 Hughes, Green Documentary, p. 50.
154 Belinda Smaill
shows a corpse at the feet of hunters. All images appear with the measured
pace that structures the rhythm of the film. Colonial culture and nature are
violent in different ways. This is also a point of investigation for Guzmán:
‘I ask myself, have the same things happened on other planets? Have the
strongest dominated everywhere?’ To understand the human, he looks
beyond the human, and even beyond the earth. However, the most obvious
hinge in the narration, one that brings the elements and entities of the film
together is apparent in Guzmán’s statement about the sea as an alienating
force in his own life:
But I as a Chilean don’t feel so close to the sea. For the ocean I feel
admiration, and at the same time, fear. This is because of a childhood
memory. One summer, one of my friends was swept away by the sea. He
was jumping from rock to rock, amongst the waves, that rushed, in claw
like, between the reefs. His body was never recovered. He was my first
disappeared person.
Following on from the sequences detailing the violence of colonialism, the

recollection brings together this violence, Guzmán’s subjective experience
of the sea, and the ‘disappeared’ victims of Pinochet’s regime.
As Guzmán describes the memory and how it has shaped his relationship
with the ocean, images fade between old photographs of a group of boys
and a moving, glistening sea. At times superimposed on one another, the
surface of the photos move like the sea or like ocean spray against rocks. The
textures and movement of the surface of the ocean animates the archive (the
photographs) while also offering visual representation of the unrecovered
remains of the boy that lie beneath the surface. I propose that this scene
encapsulates the ways in which visible evidence is pivotal to its address to
the viewer. This evidence serves to rethink humanist paradigms further
by evoking, in material ways, the continuity between the human and the
non-human.
If Rose advocates an ecological existentialism, and a kinship with
life on earth, the notion of ‘cosmopolitics’ extends this connectivity to
a consideration of politics, and the politics of the Chilean dictatorship
more specifically. Rather than the universe beyond earthly concerns, the
notion of the cosmos I refer to encompasses human politics in nature’s
full diversity. Bruno Latour understands cosmopolitics as a process not
yet realized but one in which a ‘common good world’ is at stake, one that
embraces infinite entities:
The presence of cosmos in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of politics

to mean the give-and-take in an exclusive human club. The presence of
politics in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of cosmos to mean a finite
list of entities that must be taken into account. […] if cosmos is to mean
anything, it must embrace, literally, everything ‒ including all the vast
numbers of nonhuman entities making humans act.24
The history and legacy of the politics of colonialism are part of this cosmo-
logical frame. Details about the Pinochet regime that are expanded in the
later part of the film should also be understood as part of the interconnected
cosmopolitical world the film elaborates.
The Pearl Button turns its attention to the brutality of the Pinochet regime
most fully in the final third of the film. After having directed numerous
films concerned with the dictatorship and its legacies, in this film, Guzmán
casts this period in relation to colonial histories and Chile’s expansive
coastline and proximity to the sea. Indeed, the ocean is tied into the cause
and effect of national political history. This sequence begins with a group of
survivors of the Dawson concentration camp (once an Indigenous mission),
gathered in a room. As they pose for a photo, the voice-over states: ‘They
were victims of the violence the Indigenous peoples knew only too well. In
Chile, impunity accumulated over centuries.’ Shifting to a satellite view of
the Chilean coastline, Guzmán’s voice-over goes on to describe how, during
the years of the regime, a body washed up in the same region where his
friend had vanished:
It wasn’t the body of a child. It was the body of a woman. Nobody knew
who she was. People began to suspect that the ocean was a cemetery.
Thirty years later, several off icers of the dictatorship confessed that
perhaps a few people had been thrown into the sea. One of them was
Maria Ugarte, the woman from the beach.
The lawyer hired by Maria’s family describes the body, ‘Her eyes are open,
and she is looking at us. Her eyes are intact, which is unusual for a body a
long time underwater.’ A black and white photo of Maria’s face appears on
screen for a few seconds.
The body of Maria Ugarte mirrors the body of the unnamed Indigenous
man shown earlier in The Pearl Button at the feet of an Indian hunter.
24 Bruno Latour, ‘Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of
Ulrich Beck’, Common Knowledge, 10.3 (2004), pp. 450-462 (p. 454).
156 Belinda Smaill
Both appear to the viewer in grainy, static monochrome. Photographs

of corpses do not produce images of the dead in the manner that images
of death in process do. As Vivian Sobchack describes, the abrupt action
imposed on the lived body to bring about death is a ‘transformation of the
animated body into an inanimate corpse [that] denies formal reason’.25
The photograph of the corpse, while equally jarring, highlights the lived
body’s status as matter.
In Nostalgia for the Light, Guzmán presents traumatic human ex-
perience through the spoken word in the form of interviews with the
relatives of people who had disappeared or with those who had been
imprisoned. In The Pearl Button, however, there are no such interviews.
Instead, evidence relating to the Pinochet regime revolves around the
material verif ication of death and dying. This is evident in the lawyer
recounting the appearance of Maria’s face and eyes. This description is
echoed by an even more macabre sequence, one in which Guzmán asks
a journalist (who clearly has some knowledge of the process) to re-enact
how prisoners were killed by lethal injection, tied to a steel rail, and then
wrapped up, ready to be dropped into the ocean from a helicopter. Three
men carry out this ritual on screen. They are in a room with a dummy
dressed in a blue shirt and jeans laid out on a trolley. The dummy is
eventually wrapped in plastic bags and sacks. The journalist then recounts
how Maria, to wash ashore, must have regained consciousness in the
helicopter, been unwrapped, killed, and then not rewrapped properly
before being interred in the sea. Guzmán then tells us that ‘According to
judicial reports, the Chilean Armed Forces dropped between 1,200 and
1,400 people into the ocean, dead or alive. They were assisted by many
civilians. They hoped the sea would keep a secret of the crime.’ The visual
exploration of matter – objects, bodies (real or virtual), and the process
of dying combines with the spoken descriptions to compel the viewer to
contemplate mortality. The statistics that follow must then be seen in
the light of this individual death, multiplied.
At the outset of the sequence, Guzmán states that he ‘decided to recon-
struct the last moments of a victim in order to believe it’. The purpose of
the re-enactment, I suggest, is to believe the ‘truth’ of what happened and
to make it knowable. Extending the existential questioning of the essay
film, this focus on materiality is also about how people die, as well as how
they look when they are dead or decaying. Pivotal in this context is death
25 Vivian Sobchack, ‘Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and
Documentary’, Quarterly Review of Film & Video 9.4 (1984), pp. 283-300 (p. 290).
as the result of murder, the brutality of human actions, and our material
existence in the face of this.
This existentialism becomes ecological or cosmological in the way it is
tied to the ocean. This is particularly evident later, near the end of the film,
when a diver tasked with finding the rails decades later finds a rail with a
button fused to the steel. With underwater photography, we are taken into
the depths of the ocean, and, in this otherworldly place, the button, joined
to encrusted rusted metal, fills the screen. The camera lingers on a rail
after it is brought ashore, an artefact that is richly textured with colours of
corrosion as if they are sedimented layers. The voice-over states,
Forty years later the rails have become covered with marks. Water and
its creatures have engraved these messages. Here are the secrets that
the bodies left on the rails before melting into the ocean and taking on
the shape of the ocean. Observing each of the rails, other remains were
discovered. […] This button is the only trace of someone who had been
there.
The person attached to the rail has long since decayed, their matter becoming
part of the ocean. The button evokes multiple meanings – the loss of an
individual, the savage way they died and their remains disposed of, and
the constancy and secrecy of the deep sea. Most significantly, however, it
evokes a humanism, and a way of being human that highlights mortality,
a lack of agency in the face of the cosmos, and the continuity between
humans and other forms of life as matter. The Pearl Button again adjusts
human scale by reducing human existence to matter, suggesting the process
by which victims are absorbed by the ocean’s volume. This sits against the
references to the actions of the armed forces, which register darker ways
of being human.
In his discussion of Nostalgia for the Light, Nilo Couret describes the
debates that have criticized Guzmán for shifting away ‘from the more
explicit radical politics of his early work to […] an introspective filmmaking
defined by a nostalgia symptomatic of the isolation and privatization of
neoliberalism’.26 Couret describes how this is also posed as a move away
from collective identity and towards the experiential and the personal. As
Couret appropriately argues, ‘This supposes that the politics of the image is
only a function of its explicit content; that is, presenting the public and the
26 Couret, ‘Scale as Nostalgic Form’, p. 72.

158 Belinda Smaill
collective is enough to make the film and its politics public and collective’.27
The problem of politics is again tied to the formal structures of the lyrical
essay, a mode that is ruminative rather than explanatory. Like any art
form, it invites the viewer to participate in the construction of meaning,
interpreting the relationships that contribute to its entanglement of ideas,
images, and questions. In The Pearl Button, even more than in Nostalgia for
the Light, Guzmán attempts a far reaching political project. Not only does
he represent Chile’s difficult and violent past, he does so by reframing and
exploring ways of being human, linking the two in a cosmopolitics. Questions
of human scale and materiality, and knowledge about both, interact to tie
existential questioning to ontological concerns, to the problem of what
exists and the ongoing relationships between and across the human and
the non-human.
Simultaneous Duration
In closing, I return to Montaigne and his reflection on how the ‘the world
eternally turns round’, as his own corporeal reality shifts and changes with
time. This not only poses the subjective experience of time passing against
the observable change of the natural world, it also indicates the essay’s
capacity to grapple with complex notions of time. Expository documentary,
to return to this comparison again, often conveys history as a series of
past events that are retrieved in their fullness upon retelling, presenting a
more or less linear account of cause and effect. The imaginative form of the
lyrical essay, as Sarah Shoenburn notes, ‘sets off on an uncharted course
through interlocking webs of ideas, circumstance, and language ‒ a pursuit
with no foreknown conclusion, an arrival that might still leave the writer
questioning’.28 Inevitably, such an ‘uncharted course’ will unsettle the notion
that history is composed as a singular arrow of time. My discussion of The
Pearl Button has referred to the past in relation to the film’s movement from
a representation of nature, histories of colonialism, and then the military
dictatorship. This infers a chronological notion of the past in which one
event follows another. While The Pearl Button follows this chronology, to
understand the film via a linear course would be misleading – the film

28 Sarah Shoenburn, ‘The Seneca Review: Introducing, Def ining, and Promoting the Lyric
Essay’, Essay Daily [website] 2010, [http://www.essaydaily.org/search?q=Stephen+Kuusisto+a
nd+Ralph+James+Savarese], accessed 4 December 2017.
also, I suggest, asks the viewer to perceive these histories as a simultaneous

duration. By way of conclusion, I build on the points I have made so far about
the unsettling of humanism and the centrality of the human subject, and
extend them into a consideration of the film’s temporal address.
Not only does The Pearl Button offer memory an important place in
its discourse (the recollections of interviewees and Guzmán himself), it
also, as I have noted, forgoes the expert accounts of historical events and
replaces them with subjective commentary about the meaning of Chile’s past.
Moreover, it ties this meaning into the ontology and past of the non-human
world. Memory (and nostalgia) has been a key concern of Guzman’s work
and scholars have theorized this focus in his film-making. Nostalgia for the
Light has garnered perhaps the most intense scrutiny in this respect due
to its explicit meditation on time. With its essayist style, a concern with
astronomy and the relatives and survivors of the Pinochet regime, it stands
as a companion piece to The Pearl Button. Couret discusses Nostalgia for the
Light in terms of the intersection between cinema and astronomy, exploring
how the film plays with issues of scale: ‘its thematic and formal registers,
toggling between the human, the geologic, and the cosmic in order to tease
out the corporeal implications of scale and its relation to the past’.29 While
I am also interested in scale, I understand The Pearl Button, as I have noted,
as more concerned with rethinking the centrality of the human rather
than posing scale as a transcendent measure. David Martin-Jones asserts
a more non-anthropocentric function for Nostalgia for the Light, observing
how memory is a ‘much larger phenomenon’, encompassing the different
elements of the film, from the Chilean diaspora, prehistoric humans, and
the origins of life on earth: ‘It is not simply that the personal extends into
the political in terms of a collective or national identity, but into a universal
(in the literal sense) concern with history, and humanity’s place in it.’30 I
take Martin-Jones interpretation even further, exploring how The Pearl
Button not only figures the place of humanity in history, but recasts and
displaces it through a particular evocation of duration.
The Pearl Button begins with the block of quartz with a drop of water
trapped in it, signifying a 3000-year relationship of stasis and mutuality.
It ends with references to water and the stars. The different and mutable
states of water fill the screen as Guzmán narrates: ‘They say that water has
memory. I believe it also has a voice. If we were to get very close to it we’d
be able to hear the voices of each of the Indians and the disappeared.’ This

30 Martin-Jones, ‘Archival Landscapes and a Non-Anthropocentric “Universe Memory”’, p. 710.
160 Belinda Smaill
is followed by shots of the Kawésqar interviewees looking silently at the

camera as it zooms out. The haunting faces of the Selk’nam men again fill
the screen as the narration states:
The Indians of Patagonia believed that souls didn’t die, and that they
could live again, as stars […] Not long ago, very far away, a Quasar was
discovered full of water vapour. It holds 120 million times more water
than all of our seas. How many wandering souls might find refuge in this
vast ocean that’s drifting in the void?
These statements are not simply about the past, they are also about the
present and durational time, or time passing, in ways that perceive the
past as a condition for the present. The memory that Guzmán attributes to
water is not an anthropomorphic fantasy, but rather refers to controversial
research into how water molecules change depending on the objects they
have come into contact with.31 For Guzmán, there is the possibility that
water carries the ‘memory’ of the humans it has come into contact with,
and he bends this with an aural apparition (the voices of the disappeared)
in ways that echo the earlier sequence exploring the sonic synthesis of the
human and the aquatic.
With memory and voices attributed to water, the film’s ending suggests
that there is an aquatic continuity, one that maintains awareness of and
testifies to the violence of human events. Likewise, the faces of the Kawésqar
interviewees affirm, even challenge, the viewer not to recognize that, rather
than lost and past, their cultures exist in the present, either as watery voices
or living descendants. The photographed faces of the Selk’nam men are
static in comparison but Guzmán’s treatment, because it unquestioningly
conveys the possibility, that they might persist, existing as part of the Quasar,
suggests they are also not relegated only to the past. The different human
entities in this cosmopolitics exist alongside one another, with the relation
between nature and culture one of consequence and elaboration, a form of
mutual emergent complexity in the present.
Henri Bergson, a philosopher primarily concerned with the metaphysics
of time, holds that duration must always be regarded as a continuity in
31 In 1988, French immunologist, Jacques Benveniste, published findings in the prestigious

science journal Nature that water retained a ‘memory’ of substances previously dissolved
in it even after multiple dilutions. This supported the premise of homeopathy. The f indings
were controversial and, despite numerous attempts, the findings have not been replicated by
subsequent studies under controlled conditions.
the present instant. The ‘present necessarily occupies a duration’ that is

a singular whole.32 When duration is interrupted, it becomes time. I am
interested in how the final sequences point to the multiple durations of
the film, with Indigenous culture, the events and atrocities of the Pinochet
regime, and the continuities of geography, ocean, and the stars registering
interlocking duration, an unbroken present moment. Elizabeth Grosz’s
description of Bergson’s duration encapsulates this possibility:
Duration is both singular and a multiplicity. Each duration, each move-

ment, each act forms a continuity, a single indivisible whole; and yet,
there are many simultaneous durations, as many perhaps as there are
actions, which implies that all durations participate in or can be linked
through a generalized cosmological duration, which allows them to be
described as simultaneous.33
If the film asks the viewer to register simultaneous duration where geologi-
cal or evolutionary duration is concerned, as Grosz also notes, we ‘may
def ine the present in terms of centuries or even millennia’.34 What are
the ramifications of understanding The Pearl Button’s conception of time
as a simultaneous cosmological present? For my purposes, one of the
most significant issues is the decentring of human duration, understand-
ing it to be subordinated to, and witnessed by, the open duration of the
non-human.
The focus on the matter of the rails, the button, and the corpse (and the
objects that facilitate death) infer the concrete duration of ‘things’, rather
than memory, tying them into the continuum of material universe. If the
expert and their incontrovertible knowledge is disrupted by the film, this
is done in ways that locate their subjectivity alongside nature not only
spatially (in the garden settings Guzmán prefers), but also temporally, in a
simultaneous duration, rather than suspended in time, above, removed, and
classifying nature. I suggest the lyricism and associations of the essay film
allow this simultaneous duration to emerge precisely because it elaborates
a web of ideas, juxtaposing different events rather than seeking the causal
relationships that structure linear history.
32 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. by Nancy Margaret Paul (New York: Zone Books,
1988), p. 137.
33 Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Crow’s Nest, NSW:
Allen & Unwin, 2004), p. 183.
34 Grosz, The Nick of Time, p. 177.
162 Belinda Smaill
Bibliography
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory, trans. by Nancy Margaret Paul (New York:
Zone Books, 1988).
British Film Institute. ‘Patricio Guzmán talks about The Pearl Button: BFI London
Film Festival’. BFI YouTube Channel. 16 October 2015. [https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=HF2-kCU7wz0], accessed 18 December 2017.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman (London: Polity Press, 2013).
Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford
Couret, Nilo. ‘Scale as Nostalgic Form: Patricio Guzmáns Nostalgia for the Light
(2011)’. Discourse 39.1 (2017), pp. 67-91.
Cowie, Elizabeth. Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2011).
de Montaigne, Michel. Michel de Montaigne: Selected Essays (Dover, MA: Courier
Corporation, 2013).
Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Crow’s Nest,
N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2004).
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2016).
Hughes, Helen. Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary in the 21st Century
(Bristol: Intellect Books, 2014).
Hynes, Eric. ‘Interview: Patricio Guzmán’. Film Comment, 22 October 2015.
[https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-patricio-guzman/], accessed
4 December 2017.
Latour, Bruno. ‘Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace
Terms of Ulrich Beck’. Common Knowledge 10.3 (2004), pp. 450-62.
Lorimer, Jamie. ‘The Anthropo-scene: A Guide for the Perplexed’. Social Studies of
Science 47.1 (2017), pp. 117-142.
Martin-Jones, David. ‘Archival Landscapes and a Non-Anthropocentric “Universe
Memory”’. Third Text, 27.6 (2013), pp.707-722.
Nelson, Max. ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: The Films of Patricio Guzmán’. Cin-
ema Scope 63 (2015), pp. 13-15.
Rascaroli, Laura. How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Rascaroli, Laura. The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film
(London: Wallflower Press, 2009).
Renov, Michael. ‘Introduction: The Truth about Non-fiction’, in Theorizing Docu-
mentary, ed. by Micheal Renov (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1-12.
Rodríguez, Juan Carlos. ‘Framing Ruins: Patricio Guzmán’s Postdictatorial Docu-
mentaries’. Latin American Perspectives 40.1 (2013), pp. 131-144.
Rose, Deborah Bird. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2011).
Shoenburn, Sarah. ‘The Seneca Review: Introducing, Defining, and Promoting the
Lyric Essay’. Essay Daily, 10 November 2010. [http://www.essaydaily.org/search?
q=Stephen+Kuusisto+and+Ralph+James+Savarese], accessed 4 December 2017.
Sobchack, Vivian. ‘Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representa-
tion, and Documentary’, Quarterly Review of Film & Video 9.4 (1984), pp. 283-300.
Traverso, Antonio. ‘Nostalgia, Memory, and Politics in Chilean Documentaries of
Return’, in Dictatorships in the Hispanic World: Transatlantic and Transnational
Perspectives, ed. by Patricia Swier and Julia Riordan-Goncalves (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), pp. 49-78.
Traverso, Antonio, and Kristi Wilson (eds.). Political Documentary Cinema in Latin
America (London: Routledge, 2013).
Trinh, T Minh-Ha. Framer Framed (London: Routledge, 1992).
Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2010).
About the Author
Belinda Smaill is an Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies at

Monash University, Australia. Her research interests encompass women
and cinema, Australian film and television, and documentary film. Most
recently, she has been researching non-fiction screen media, animals, and the
environment. She is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary
Moving Image (SUNY Press, 2016), and co-author of Transnational Australian
Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).
8. Montage Reloaded: From Russian
Avant-Garde to the Audiovisual Essay
Julia Vassilieva
Abstract
In this chapter, I explore the relevance of early Russian montage theory
and practice to new issues raised by the shift from the essay film to the
audiovisual essay. I investigate how, specifically, Sergei Eisenstein’s vision of
the new type of cinema of ideas formulated in his project for filming Marx’s
Das Kapital, Dziga Vertov’s foregrounding of subjectivity and reflexivity in
The Man with a Movie Camera, and Esphir Shub’s practice of ‘compilation film’
contributed to the emergence of the essay film and continue to stimulate
the theory and practice of the audiovisual essayism.
Keywords: Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Esphir Shub, montage, audio-

visual essay, compilation film
One of the most promising ways of going ‘beyond the essay film’ that we have
witnessed over the last decade is that of the audiovisual scholarly essay, or
videographic film studies. Taking the field of audiovisual production as its
sole, albeit complex and diverse, object of interest, the audiovisual essay uses
the possibilities of the medium itself to conduct a range of analytical, critical,
reflexive, or aesthetic procedures on this object, resulting in an impressive
array of ‘works’. Its genealogical link to the essay film in all these respects is
evident and has been widely acknowledged. Arguably, the audiovisual essay
has emerged from the productive encounter between cinephilia and the
analytical impulse to investigate those parameters of cinematic experience,
that, in Paul Willemen’s words, often ‘escape the existing networks of critical
discourse and theoretical frameworks’.1 Capitalizing on the new technical
1 Paul Willemen, ‘Through the Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered’ (interview with Noel
King), in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomington: Indiana
doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch08
166 Julia Vassilieva
possibilities afforded by the digital revolution, the burgeoning and varied

field of audiovisual criticism operates at the intersection of film theory,
pedagogy, and creative practice, producing hundreds of works, dedicated
online platforms that curate and present such works, and an ever growing
array of names carrying an impressive cache of audiographic auteurism.
However, theorizations of the audiovisual critical essay have been lagging
behind its practical experiments. This chapter therefore aims to situate
current discussion of the genre within a longer history of 20th-century
film-making and scholarship and asks, specifically, how the legacy of the
Russian montage school of cinema can inform an understanding of the
audiovisual essay.
Montage, indeed, has emerged as one of the key factors in the pro-
duction of the audiovisual essay. Regardless of the taxonomies used
to differentiate types of audiovisual essays – ranging from Christian
Keathley’s simple binary division of the f ield into ‘explanatory’ and
‘poetic’ audiovisual essays2 to the more complex taxonomies suggested
by Thomas van den Berg and Miklós Kiss3 – audiovisual essays in each
and every category rely on the radical, resolute, and challenging use of
montage procedures. As Tony Zhou puts it in his audiovisual essay ‘F for
fake’ (1973): How to structure a video essay (2015): ‘It’s not what you get,
it’s how you cut it.’
In order to situate this discussion more specifically in the landscape of
contemporary debates on the genealogy and transformation of cinematic
language, I want to place my ideas in dialogue with David Bordwell’s notion
of ‘intensified continuity’, a notion that Bordwell introduced to describe
the changing character of narrative film style at the beginning of the 21st
century. I would like to propose that the strategies of the audiovisual essay
can be aptly characterized as intensified discontinuity. Just as intensified
continuity is produced through the use of fairly traditional techniques at
a different level of intensity, the audiovisual essay uses a well-established
technique of montage; however, in this case, the montage is amped up and
raised to a higher pitch of emphasis. Yet, if, in introducing his polemical
term, Bordwell aims to defend feature films against accusations of narrative
incoherence and stylistic fragmentation, likewise, I want to demonstrate that
2 Christian Keathley, ‘La Caméra-stylo: Notes on video criticism and cinephilia’, in The
Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. by Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton, (London and
New York: Routledge, 2011).
3 Thomas van den Berg and Miklós Kiss, Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to
Academic Research Video (Scalar, 2016).
Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant- Garde to the Audiovisual Essay 167
the intensified discontinuity of the audiovisual essay achieves a remarkable

synthesis of meaning despite its apparently disjunctive nature. 4
Given the possibilities of non-linear editing afforded by the new generation of
software, the format of the audiovisual essay allows the author to recut footage
of the film under scrutiny, often with the addition of textual commentaries
either in the form of intertitles or voice-over narration, to explore, demonstrate,
and comment on a range of interesting or significant features of that film or to
make more complex arguments concerning film aesthetics, history, reception,
or politics. For the audiovisual essay, montage thus serves not only as a formal
strategy or as a representational device, but also as a distinct meaning-making
analytics. It is both the aesthetic and the conceptual possibilities of montage as
a strategy in a broad sense that I investigate in this chapter. What interests me
is how uses of montage are changing with the transition from the essay film to
the audiovisual essay, and how the recourse to early theory and practice can
help us understand better the advantages and limitations of the audiovisual
essay genre. I specifically focus on the legacy of three Russian early montage
practitioners: Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Esphir Shub.
Vertov
It has become customary to include The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) as
a major reference point in the genealogy of the essay film. The film is often
described as a ‘city-symphony’, and yet, Vertov announces in the opening
credits of the film that is an ‘Excerpt from a diary of a cameraman’. As John
MacKay’s analysis demonstrates, Vertov originally conceived it as a film about
film – so much so that it was ‘justified to the Ukrainian censorship board as
another film on the “production” thematic – that is, as an educational film
about film production’.5 As MacKay argues further ‘it turns out that an interest
in the dynamic interaction between camera/film and reality’ informed Vertov’s
ideas from the outset. He first proposed the title Man with a Movie Camera in
a notebook jotting from 27 December 1925, where he suggested ‘subsuming
the rest [of the film’s] themes to [the theme of “man with a movie camera”]’.6
Hence, the heightened, carefully planned self-reflexivity of the film, in which
4 David Bordwell, ‘Intensified Continuity. Visual Style in Contemporary American Film’, Film
Quarterly 55. 3, (2002), pp. 16-28.
5 John MacKay, Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), An Introduction, [https://
www.academia.edu/4090580/_Man_with_a_Movie_Camera_An_Introduction_], p. 7.
6 John MacKay, Man with a Movie Camera, p. 11.
the cinematic apparatus is itself the main theme, visual motif, and narrative
motor. From shooting to editing and projection, the processes of cinematic
production are given the same weight, screen presence, and significance
in the film as the various aspects of early Soviet life depicted in it. MacKay
remarks that ‘Few films, […], are so effective at making us aware of their
representational and “constructed” or rhetorical levels simultaneously’.7
Moreover, in Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov investigates and, at the
same time, constructs new kinds of vision and perception. It is in this sense
that the film is radically experimental – beyond the narrow definition of
‘experimental cinema’ developed in the disciplinary context of film stud-
ies. As Vertov states in the opening credits: ‘This film is an experiment in
cinematic communication of observable events.’ Vertov interrogates the
role of cinema as an instrument of vision and tests hypotheses about how
the sensual sphere is transformed as a result of the increased mediation,
instrumentalization, and acceleration brought about by modernity. The new
vision mediated by what Vertov famously called the ‘cine-eye’ heralds new
ways not only of perceiving the world, but of engaging with it more broadly in
mechanically empowered, socially liberated, and aesthetically creative ways.
Covering various spheres of contemporary Soviet life – from industrial
production to recreation and sport, and from transportation to commerce
and domestic arrangements – Vertov integrates them within a unified
image of life on the go, in its unfolding, in its perpetual movement forward,
as registered by the camera. As MacKay suggests, this is achieved to a large
degree through the use of rhythm – the legacy of Vertov’s preoccupation
with sound, music, and poetry early in his career:
Vertov uses visual rhythms as a strategy for binding viewers together and
to the new, ‘superhuman’ tempi of modern industrial technology. Rhythm
in Vertov’s films – which I would define simply as a demonstratively rigor-
ous patterning of film footage, involving any number of configurations of
difference and similarity – this rhythm mediates between free creativity
and productive labor, to be sure, but also between people as social beings,
and indeed between human beings and non-human things.8
If these three aspects of Vertov’s work – its heightened self-reflexivity,

its experimental nature, and its use of rhythm as a broad aesthetic and
philosophical strategy – exerted a significant influence on the development

of the essay film, their relevance to the format of the audiovisual essay
can be seen as definitive. The audiovisual essay capitalizes on the potent
way in which self-reflexivity can be achieved through montage methods
heralded by The Man with a Movie Camera. While montage, of course, is
not a sole means of achieving self-reflexivity in cinema, from Bergman and
Godard to Kiarostami, film history provides many powerful examples of
mobilizing montage’s ability to juxtapose and contrast points of views and
perspectives, to rapture the film texture by inserting an authorial figure
or voice to achieve self-reflexive distancing.
The audiovisual essay takes this attitude even further, dramatizing the
split between being and observing even more radically: epistemology, in
this case, precedes ontology, as powerfully demonstrated by Richard Misek’s
The Definition of Film (2015). For the audiovisual essay, self-reflexivity is
not just a strategy, it is its raison d’être. The audiovisual essay announces
itself unambiguously as a commentary, an investigation, or an analysis of
a media text delivered from a distance. And yet, it is also always driven by
another tendency, which can be described as a desire to ‘inhabit’ the media
text under investigation.9 Thus, the practice of the audiovisual essay tends
asymptotically towards merging with the film it reflects upon but never quite
reaches that vanishing point, always remaining at least once removed from
the original – an ‘unattainable text’ in Raymond Bellour’s terminology.10
Furthermore, while the essay film has often been loosely subsumed under
the category of experimental cinema, the audiovisual essay returns us to
experimental practice in this early Vertovian sense. Armed with their ‘digital
stylos’, the practitioners of audiovisual essayism often set out to explore what
can be seen with the use of the new technological instruments and which
couldn’t be seen before. And they often explicitly describe their practice as an
experiment whose hypotheses are only vaguely formulated at the outset, if not
altogether absent, such that the experiment takes the form of an open-ended
exploration. As Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin note about the work
of Catherine Grant, one of the leading practitioners of audiovisual essayism:
For Grant, ‘essay’ means ‘experiment’ – as in the laboratory-like assembly

of film/media samples, music, and text in various formats (graphic as well
9 I am drawing an analogy here with Timothy Corrigan’s use of the term ‘inhabit’ to describe
the essay film’s relationship to its theme. See Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne,
After Marker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
10 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, in The Analysis of Film, trans. by Ben Brewster,
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27.
as spoken). Her experiments frequently take a very contemporary artistic

form: the dispositif, a game-structure in which parameters are set and
then patiently carried out, with the results to be studied and sometimes
tinkered with and taken further, perhaps in a future audiovisual piece.11
Finally, rhythm, in the form pioneered by Vertov in The Man with a Movie
Camera and described by MacKay ‘as a demonstratively rigorous patterning
of film footage, involving any number of configurations of difference and
similarity’, has become one of the main strategies of the audiovisual essay.
It facilitates the exploration of specific regularities in a film-maker’s style
and visual motifs as, for example, in Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian
Martin’s Melville Variations (2013), Kogonada’s Ozu//Passageways (2012), or
Kogonada’s Breaking Bad//POV (2012). Rhythm has acquired such a powerful
role in structuring the audiovisual essay precisely because of its ability
(highlighted by MacKay in relation to Vertov) to mediate between differ-
ent sets of materials, transferring ‘patterns’ from one to another ‘without
abolishing their differences’.12 However, if for Vertov, this capacity of rhythm
has broader anthropological, social, and political meaning, the audiovisual
essay typically mobilizes rhythm as an aesthetic strategy, often to reinforce
the aesthetic potential of the material it explores.
Vertov’s expertise in music facilitated his virtuoso use of rhythm in film,
and it was also from music that he derived his notion of the interval as an
organizing principle of montage. As in music, the concept of interval in
Vertov’s cinema simultaneously implies difference and similarity, break
and resonance. Vertov argues that:
‘Film-Eye’ builds ‘film-things’ out of shots according to the ‘theory of

intervals’. This theory is based on the perceptual relationship of one shot
composition to another; on the transition and juxtaposition between
visual impulses. This connection between the shots based on ‘intervals’
is very complex, and consists of many interactions. Among the most
important are: (1) the interaction of shot scales (close-up, medium-shot,
etc.), (2) the interaction of angles, (3) the interaction of movements
within the shots, (4) the interaction of light and dark, (5) the interaction
of shooting speed.13
11 Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, ‘The audiovisual essay as art practice’, NECSUS,
Spring 2015, ‘Animals’, Web.
13 Quoted in Vlada Petric, ‘Dziga Vertov as Theorist’, Cinema Journal 18.1 (1978), pp. 29-44 (p. 36).
In her recent book How the Essay Film Thinks, Laura Rascaroli invokes
Vertov’s concept of interval as the first attempt to foreground, investigate,
and mobilize filmic ‘in-betweenness’ as an instrument of thinking. For
Rascaroli, in-betweenness as a condition of disjuncture is at the very core
of the essay film. She writes: ‘It is through a disjunctive practice, I argue,
that the essay film articulates its thinking and, in particular, its nonverbal
thinking. […] What I want to investigate in this book is how disjunction is to
be found at the core of the essay film’s diverse signifying practices, among
which the verbal is only one of several levels of intelligence.’14
In-betweenness is also central to the practice of the audiovisual essay
and, arguably, it works by stretching and amplifying the intervals that
can be found in the original text while preserving some correspondences
of the initial organizing principles. Such ‘disjunctive practice’ works by
mobilizing not only intervals between shots within the same film but often
‘intervals’ between different films, turning gaps into radical breaks that
become the sources of new dialectical juxtapositions and new resonances.
Margarida Leitão’s Gestures of Realism (Gestos do realismo, 2016), which
explores Stromboli (Stromboli, terra di dio, Roberto Rosselini, 1950) and At
Land (Maya Deren, 1944), and Cristina Álvarez López’s Games (2009) on
Germany, Year Zero (Germania anno zero, Roberto Rossellini, 1948) and
Ivan’s Childhood (Ivanovo detstvo, Andrei Tarkovski, 1962) use this strategy
to establish powerful and unexpected resonances between the films coming
from what is customarily believed to be vastly different traditions.
Eisenstein
At this point, we might invoke another great master of cinema and the
most profound theoretician of montage: Vertov’s perennial opponent,
Sergei Eisenstein. While producing his early silent films – Strike (1924),
Battleship Potemkin (1925), and October (1927) – Eisenstein also formulated
and developed the tenets of his montage theory. In doing so, he strove to
elaborate a taxonomy of montage methods and also to account for the
mechanisms, both cinematic and psychological, of montage’s effectiveness.
Eisenstein differentiated five types of montage: metric, rhythmic, tonal,
overtonal, and intellectual montage. Introducing metric montage, Eisenstein
states that ‘The fundamental criterion for this construction is the absolute
length of the pieces. The pieces are joined together according to their lengths,
14 Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017), p.17.
in a formula-scheme corresponding to a measure of music. Realization is in

repetition of these “measures”’.15 Examples of metric montage can be found
in Vertov’s The Eleventh Year (Odinadzatyi, 1928), in the scene of patriotic
demonstration in Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (Konetz St
Peterburga, 1927), and in the ‘lezginka’ sequence in Eisenstein’s October.
Eisenstein’s second montage method, rhythmic montage is based on both
length and content. Eisenstein explains: ‘Here the actual length does not
coincide with the mathematically determined length of the piece according
to a metric formula. Here practical length derives from the specifics of
the piece, and from its planned length according to the structure of the
sequence.’16 The most famous use of this type of montage is, of course, in
the ‘Odessa steps’ sequence in Potemkin.
According to Eisenstein, tonal montage, as his third type of montage,
departs from strictly mechanical movement that is instrumental in both
metric and rhythmic montage, and is instead based on dominant mood:
‘In tonal montage, movement is perceived in a wider sense. The concept
of movement embraces all affects of the montage piece. Here montage is
based on the characteristic emotional sound of the piece – its dominant.
The general tone of the piece.’17
Such emotional effect is generated by light and graphic movement within the
filmic sequence, and Eisenstein argues that he achieved the clearest realization
of this type of montage in the ‘fog sequence’ (preceding the scene of mourning)
in Potemkin. The stillness, the ‘optical light-vibrations (varying degrees of “haze”
and “luminosity”)’, and a minor harmony in music are artfully combined in
this sequence to produce the sense of a pause filled with tragic anticipation.18
Eisenstein was fully aware, however, that it is neither possible nor desir-
able to employ just one montage method. Indeed, in film-making practice,
they overlap, with each consecutive method subsuming, integrating, and
reconfiguring the economy of the previous one. These considerations led
him to examine the issue of the ‘dominant’ as a method of controlling
meaning produced through montage. He came to the conclusion that, while
‘orthodox montage is montage on dominant’, his work required a more
nuanced, complex, and diversified use of montage.19
15 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Methods of Montage’, in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949), pp. 72-83 (p. 72).
16 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Methods of Montage’, p. 74.
19 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema’, in Sergei Eisenstein, Writings, 1922-1934,
Vol. I, ed. by Richard Taylor, pp. 181-194, p. 182.
For this reason, Eisenstein introduced the notion of the overtonal method
of montage, based on the more subtle expressive resonances of ‘overtones’
and ‘undertones’ – a method he pioneered in his Old and New (Staroye i
Novoe, 1929) also known as The General Line. Eisenstein argued that overtonal
montage ‘is not constructed on the individual dominant but takes the sum
of stimuli of all the stimulants as the dominant’,20 and he conceptualized
such organization in political as well as aesthetic terms: ‘The “aristocracy”
of unambiguous dominants was replaced by the method of “democratic”
equal rights for all the stimulants, viewed together as a complex.’21 This
definition anticipates Jacques Rancière’s discussion of the political implica-
tions of vertical (centralized) versus horizontal (decentralized) discursive
arrangements, whereby he describes the latter as a ‘topography that does not
presuppose [a] position of mastery’.22 For Rancière, as for Eisenstein before
him, the horizontal arrangements are valuable because they facilitate new
distributions ‘of the visible’, allowing things that were previously invisible
to come into focus, both literally and metaphorically.
There is thus a tension inherent in montage, as the meanings produced
through montage are not stable. Eisenstein himself acknowledged this
indeterminacy when he emphasized that the dominant aspect of a shot is not
‘independent, absolute and invariably stable’ but ‘variable and profoundly
relative’, concluding: ‘A shot will never become a letter, but remains a poly-
semous hieroglyph.’23 The polysemous nature of montage juxtaposed with
its didactic intention to convey a specific message can be thought of both as
the greatest aporia and the greatest potential of montage. While considerable
emphasis has been placed on the role of montage editing in Eisenstein’s
films in realizing a didactic intention, or concretizing a particular theme
or idea, montage could also facilitate opening up an indeterminate range
of potential readings, thus being inherently disruptive.24
The distinct advantage of using montage as an organizing principle of
the audiovisual essay can thus be related to montage’s ‘capacity to generate
analytics and anti-analytics while maintaining a space for the invisible’.25
20 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema’, p. 183.

22 Jacques Rancière (trans. Gabriel Rockhill), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the
Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 49.
24 See also Julia Vassilieva, ‘Sergei Eisenstein and Philosophy’, Film and Philosophy, ed. by
Bernd Herzogenrath, Minnesota University Press, 2017.
25 Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev, ‘Introduction’, in Transcultural Montage (Oxford, New
York: Berghahn Books, 2013), p.1.
For many authors and consumers of audiovisual essays, this ‘invisible’ that
the format allows to capture goes to the very core of cinematic experience –
variously described as cinephiliac moments, epiphany, or photogenie. The
format of the audiovisual essay allows the essay to address them effectively
and precisely by creating the space for the invisible and the unsaid, which
is achieved, by and large, by using montage procedure.
Eisenstein’s methods can be easily recognized in contemporary audio-
visual criticism, which routinely uses the metric, graphic, and rhythmic
techniques of montage to demonstrate recurrent stylistic patterns, while
mobilizing tonal and overtonal montage to explore regularities in subject
matter across a number of films. Richard Misek’s Mapping Rohmer (2012)
exemplif ies how tonal montage can be used to explore a f ilm-maker’s
thematic concerns across a body of works, while Catherine Grant’s Ne Me
Quitte Pas (2018) amps up ‘subtle expressive resonances of overtones and
undertones’ already established between Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)
and Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015) in her earlier work Therese & Carol & Alec &
Laura (A Brief Encounter) (2017) to intensify the dialogue between the two
films separated by 70 years.
Returning to Eisenstein’s original conceptualization of montage methods
can be helpful in understanding the implications of their use, especially
when considering how an audiovisual essay can be caught between its
author’s desire to make an argument – to provide a strong structure based
on dominants – and their attempt to capture and convey what Roland
Barthes described as a ‘third’ or ‘obtuse’ meaning, beyond the information or
symbolism that the film imparts – a meaning that resists signification (and
which Barthes first identified while writing about Eisenstein’s cinema).26
Arguably, however, most relevant to the form of the audiovisual essay
is the fifth principle of Eisenstein’s montage theory: intellectual montage.
The idea of intellectual montage occurred to Eisenstein while he was
working on October and beginning to consider how he could possibly
film Karl Marx’s Capital.27 Commenting on Eisenstein’s efforts to present
montage as a privileged mode of analytic investigation, Annette Michelson
writes:
Eisenstein worked in October to develop, as ‘a ladder to a completely dif-

ferent idea of cinema’, the technique which could induce a cognitive grasp,
26 Roland Barthes (trans. Stephen Heath), Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana), 1977.
27 See also Julia Vassilieva, “Capital and Co: Kluge, Eisenstein, Marx”, Screening the Past, Issue
31, 2011, Web.
not only of abstract concepts as such, in the material concreteness of their

class determination, but of the very forms and methods of discourse.28
Eisenstein saw October as a departure from narrative descriptive cinema

towards discursive cinema, which paves the way for a future move towards
the ‘film treatise’– cinema operating with abstract concepts:
After the drama, poem, ballad in film, OCTOBER presents a new form
of cinema: a collection of essays on a series of themes that constitute
OCTOBER. Assuming that in any film work, certain salient phrases are
given importance, the form of a discursive film provides, apart from
unique renewal of strategies, their rationalization which takes these
strategies into account. Here’s a point of contact already with completely
new film perspectives and with the glimmers of possibilities to be realized
in CAPITAL, a new work on a libretto by Karl Marx. A film treatise.29
Here Eisenstein identifies the radical difference between this new, ‘treatise’
cinema and previous forms of cinema: the new films would provide not only
new strategies but also ‘their rationalization which takes these strategies
into account’. Such cinema becomes reflexive in a fundamental sense – it is
the film that simultaneously ‘thinks’ its theme, capital, and ‘thinks itself’,
or the possibilities of its own medium. Eisenstein’s early thoughts regarding
intellectual montage thus anticipated what Lev Manovich describes as a
challenge of multimedia writing: ‘Not only to convey complex ideas through
multimedia, but to take the reader along the process of thinking.’30
In its most radical experiments and theoretical reflections, the contem-
porary audiovisual essay strives to put Eisenstein’s ideal of intellectual
montage into practice. An impressive example of getting close to intellectual
montage can be found in Christian Keathley’s Pass the Salt (2017), which
combines the multifaceted and multimedial exploration of material elements
and historical laws to illuminate the hidden semantics of the mise en scène.
Yet, Eisenstein’s epic failure to realize this project himself by filming
Capital can be taken as a lesson here: intellectual montage may mark the
highest point in the development of montage theory, its limit case, but, at the
same time, its impasse. For all the calls to supplant analytical, discursive,
28 Annette Michelson, ‘Reading Eisenstein, Reading Capital’, October 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 26-38,
(p. 31).
29 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, October 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 3-26, (p.4)
(bold in original).
30 Lev Manovich, ‘Jump over Proust: Toward Multimedia Writing’ (1997). Web.
rational construction of arguments by the visual, the phenomenological,

the representable in film studies, Eisenstein’s failure to do so in the realm
of political economy and philosophy can serve as a cautionary tale. Further
cautions can be derived from the practice of Esphir Shub.
Shub
An editor and, later, a documentary film-maker in her own right, Esphir

Shub’s name is most commonly associated with the notion of the ‘compilation
film’, which is recognized as a significant predecessor of the audiovisual
essay. Compilation film is also one of the oldest cinematic genres. Film
history shows that compilations appeared almost as soon as cinema itself – as
films left the production laboratory and entered the realm of commercial
circulation, they were often recut and rearranged as ‘new products’. As
Jay Leida observes in Films Beget Films: ‘As the sources multiplied with
the growth of the new business, such second hand uses proliferated with
astonishing speed, making combinations in which the cameramen of Edison
and Pathé were later hard-pressed to recognise their own work.’31 Shub,
however, took compilation to a new level, demonstrating rich possibilities
inherent in re-editing for the purposes of historical, political, and philosophi-
cal commentaries.
A friend of Mayakovski, Eisenstein, Vertov, Shklovsky, and Pudovkin,
Shub entered the Soviet film industry in 1922, focussing initially on re-
editing and subtitling foreign films and pre-revolutionary Russian films
for Soviet audiences. As Yuri Tsivian noted, such activity was widespread
in the young Soviet film industry: the shrinking production of local films
had to be compensated by imports, yet, these imported films had to be
re-edited to make them ideologically compatible with the Bolshevik political
vision.32 This was achieved in a variety of ways. Subtitles, for example,
were of crucial importance: by changing dialogues and commentaries, the
meaning of a film could be changed markedly. But narrative development
in the imported films was routinely mutilated as well: the happy ending
had to be eliminated as a positive resolution was deemed impossible under
capitalism. Often, however, re-editing went beyond the ideological agenda
and reflected more subtle aesthetic differences and choices. For example,
31 Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 13.
32 Yuri Tsivian, ‘The Wise and Wicked Game: Re-editing and Soviet Film Culture of the
1920s’, Film History 8.3 (1996), pp. 327-343.
discussion raged over whether Soviet re-editors should adopt the faster
cross-cutting favoured by American film-makers or the slower editing pace
preferred by the Europeans.
The re-editing culture also served as a fertile ground for the formulation
of ambitious projects capitalizing on the possibilities offered by re-cutting,
some of them strikingly similar to the ideas of audiographic film criticism
that have blossomed in the early 21st century. As Tsivian noted, in 1926, the
LEF film critic Viktor Pertsov published an article entitled ‘Film as Review’
(Film-retsenzija), which can be read as prophetic of audiovisual essayism.
Pertsov proposed that, alongside fiction cinema, the film industry should
produce films about fiction films that can be used as a visual means of
educating cinema audiences. His article suggested specific strategies for
conducting film criticism with visual means:
The shots of such film will be similar to quotations, analogies, emphases

or examples of regularities. Each intertitle of a film like that will work
as a thesis. By intercutting some most representative fragments, this
film-as-review will be able to compare different styles of direction and
add filmic commentaries to them.33
The early Russian re-editing culture not only directly anticipated the
emergence of audiovisual criticism, but gave birth to theoretical debates
that rehearsed many issues that the practice of audiovisual essayism is
currently grappling with, such as authorship and creativity. One such issue
falls within the domain of philosophical inquiry into what is known as
creativity under constraint. It could be said that, in their practical work,
re-editors were testing the claim that creativity finds a condition of pos-
sibility in constraints – in this case, constraints imposed not only by various
ideological demands, but also by a delimited, pre-existing material. For
the authors of audiovisual essays today, constraint similarly functions as a
given, at once a limitation and a challenge. In this respect, their experience
corresponds to the wide spread understanding of re-editing as a quest or a
salvation, as when re-editors were called upon to ‘save’ the film ruined by
the studio directors. Victor Shklovsky, a famous literary critic and an author
of the influential concept of defamiliarization, in particular developed a
reputation for being talented in finding effective and unorthodox ways to
salvage ruined films, with various studios competing for his help.
33 Yuri Tsivian, ‘The Wise and Wicked Game’, p. 338.

Another notable aspect of the early Russian re-editors’ work that anticipated
contemporary audiovisual essayism was their understanding of re-cutting
as a game, their acknowledgement of the playfulness inherent in montage.
Eisenstein characterized re-editing as ‘a wise and wicked game’, emphasizing
how much ‘wit’ went into effective re-editing solutions.34 His assessment
foregrounds montage’s subversive potential as a source of reinvention, rebel-
lion, and freedom. As Eisenstein recalled, there was always a sense of dare,
of an almost impossible challenge, and an exhilarating sense of triumph in
producing a successful re-cut that would be narratively plausible, aesthetically
coherent, and ideologically sound under the tightly constrained conditions
of the Soviet regime. Enjoying the privilege of laptop digital sampling and
editing software, today’s audiovisual essay makers have embraced the ‘game’
and ‘dare’ of re-cutting with a vengeance, turning long frustrated desires to
explore alternative arrangements of the film material into reality.
Eisenstein himself had a taste of re-editing working alongside Esphir Shub
when, in March 1924, they re-cut Fritz Lang’s Doctor Mabuse: The Gambler
(1922) together for Russian release under the title Golden Rot.35 The fact that
Eisenstein undertook this project in 1924, prior to making Strike, attests to
the importance of re-editing as a laboratory, a learning experience, and as
an experimental space for montage theory and practice. It is also significant
that Eisenstein collaborated in this re-cutting with Shub, indicating that
he had a deep appreciation and respect for her craft.
Indeed, Shub quickly accumulated a wealth of experience; according to
several sources, she re-cut approximately 200 films during the early years of
her career. However, Shub’s most significant works were the three compilation
films on Russian history which she conceived, researched, and produced. The
Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Padenie dinastii romanovykh) of 1927, The Great
Road (Veliky put’) also of 1927, and The Russia of Nicholas II and Lev Tolstoi
(Rossiya Nikolaya II i Lev Tolstoi) of 1928 explore and provide a visual account
of Russian history from the end of the nineteenth century through the October
Revolution to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The production
of the films was a major research exercise: as Vlada Petric reports, prior to
producing these films, Shub located and viewed almost a million metres of
newsreel footage, from which she selected shots to be included in the final
34 Yuri Tsivian, ‘The Wise and Wicked Game’, p. 337.

35 Golden Rot was screened in Russian cinemas, but the print didn’t survive. Two versions of
intertitles in Russian that Eisenstein and Shub produced for the film are preserved in the Russian
Government Archive of Literature and Art and were published in Kinovedcheskie Zapiski, no. 58,
2002.
versions of her three films, compiling 6000 metres of eight hours’ duration
altogether. As Petric notes, Shub structured these films as ‘cinematic essays’
and, in this respect, her work differed radically from other compilation films
of the period: while the film chronicles were composed of newsreel footage
merely illustrating various contemporary events, Shub’s compilation films
were informed by ideological attitude or a broader theme.36 Shub had to
recode the pre-revolutionary newsreels produced to create a picture of a
prosperous country under the enlightened and benevolent rule of a monarch,
into a persuasive picture of imperial Russia’s decline and disintegration,
leading inevitably to the communist revolution as the only possible historical
solution. She explained her objectives unambiguously: ‘The intention was,
not so much to provide the facts, but to evaluate them from the vantage point
of the revolutionary class. This is what made my films revolutionary and
agitation – although they were composed of counter-revolutionary material.’37
Shub’s success in this enterprise was at once impressive and chilling: it
demonstrated clearly, and ahead of the debate in film scholarship concerning
‘documentary’ truth and cinematic access to reality, that representations are
not only constructed but can be reconstructed radically, altering the under-
standing of historical ‘facts’ fundamentally. In celebrating the freedom and
power of re-editing afforded by the new generation of digital tools, the video
essayists should perhaps take Shub’s example as a cautionary tale, demonstrat-
ing that, while new perspectives can be opened up by re-editing, there is also
a real danger of losing the original vision of the film under investigation. Yet,
on the other hand, one has a powerful sense in watching Shub’s compilation
films that history, ‘irreducibly complex, full of details, and objectively existing
outside of artistic will’,38 can shine through her re-editings, overcoming a
circumscribed ideological meaning imposed on the footage and testifying
to Shub’s commitment to the ‘ontological authenticity’ of the medium.39
Shub’s practice is instructive for contemporary audiovisual essayism in
yet another regard. Uninterested in theorizing montage in the ways that
Kuleshov, Vertov, and Eisenstein did, Shub developed what can be described
as a ‘montage mode of thinking’ – a practical, embodied, intuitive way of
36 Vlada Petric, ‘Esther Shub: Cinema Is My Life’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3.4 (1978),
pp. 429-448 (p. 441).
37 Quoted in Petric ‘Esther Shub’, p. 431.
38 Anastasiya Osipova, ‘Difficult Facts. Esfir Shub and the Problem of Realism’, The Brooklyn
Rail, September 2011, Web.
39 Shub insisted: ‘Authentic material [podlinnii material] is something that gives life to a
documentary film, regardless of the fact that it might be composed of archival footage or shot
by the filmmaker’, quoted in Petric, ‘Esther Shub’, p. 437.
working with footage on the editing table, where ‘manual thinking’ often
went ahead of rationalization. While she was never able to formulate the
rules of effective montage, she insisted that the only way of mastering it
was through practice:
I began by simply watching films in the auditorium, then analyzing them on

the editing table, which is essential for every director. This helped me to learn
how to judge correctly the technical execution and composition of the shot.
Slowly, I developed the capacity of memorizing each shot, particularly its
inner content, rhythm, movement and tempo in general. Then, there always
arrived a moment when I began to feel sure at what point it was necessary
and imperative to cut from a long to a medium shot, or from a medium to
close-up, and vice versa. Finally, I became fully aware of the magic power
of the scissors in the hands of a man who uses montage to express himself
visually as he uses the alphabet to express himself verbally.40
Shub’s investment in working manually with film anticipated the rethinking

of the relationship between the optical and the haptic in film practice and
theory that would emerge much later through the work of such theorists as
Vivian Sobchack and, especially, Laura Marks, whose notion of haptic visuality
has influenced the field of audiovisual essayism. As Catherine Grant suggests
in her essay ‘Touching the Film Object’, Marks’s ideas resonate within the field
because the new editing software provided unprecedented opportunities for
manipulating the film material, making ‘touching’ the film-object possible.
While, for Marks, ‘touching with the eye’ implies a largely metaphorical
displacement of hapticity onto the faculty of vision, however, for the authors
of audiovisual essays, vision is displaced non-metaphorically into hapticity,
into a possibility of slowing down, pausing, eliminating, or modifying foot-
age, bringing an audiovisual author close to position of mastery previously
available only to professional editors. Yet, despite the euphoric fantasy of total
control over the film that this close contact produces, access to film footage
generates more questions than it does answers. As Catherine Grant asks:
But, are there other ways in which “touching film” is just a fantasy? In
videographic film studies, do videographers actually touch or handle the
real matter of the film? Or are we only ever able to touch upon the film
experience? Our film experiences? Do video essays only make objects of,
40 Quoted in Petric, ‘Esther Shub’, p. 438.

or objectify, our film experiences, our insuperable memories of them, our

own cinematic projections?41
Shub would probably have responded to such questions with the title of
her only book, Cinema is my Life, implying that experience and reflection,
practice and theory, the personal and the professional, were for her not
separate but, rather, soldered together – an attitude that resurfaces time
and again in the contemporary field of audiovisual essayism.
Coda
In conclusion, I offer some reflections on how the legacy of the Russian

montage school can inflect our understanding of the issues of subjectivity,
textuality, and technology raised in the contemporary practice of audiovisual
essayism. In doing so, I’ll be drawing on the ideas of contemporary media
theorists and philosophers, Lev Manovich, Giorgio Agamben, Sean Cubitt,
and Mikhail Epstein.
In his watershed study, The Language of the New Media, Lev Manovich
used Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera to demonstrate how montage
cinema anticipated and foreshadowed the five basic principles of the new
media. These principles can be summarized as follows. First, new media
utilize numerical representation: new-media objects exist as data. Second,
new media are organized according to a modularity principle: the differ-
ent elements of new media exist independently. Third, new media rely on
automation: new-media objects can be created and modified automatically.
Fourth, new media are characterized by variability: new-media objects exist
in multiple versions. And, fifth, new media mobilize transcoding: a direct
digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another. 42
As distinctly new-media objects, audiovisual essays illustrate how
Manovich’s principles operate in action, and, while some of these f ive
principles provide what can be described as affordances on a technical
level, others have some interesting and profound philosophical implications.
Naturally, an offspring of the digital revolution, the audiovisual essay breaks
away from its celluloid – as well as its paper – antecedents and exists only
in the digital (data) format. Yet, the ontology of the audiovisual essay has
41 Catherine Grant, ‘Touching the Film Object? Notes on the “Haptic” in Videographical Film
Studies’, Filmanalytical, Monday, 29 August 2011, Web.
42 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
attracted little attention so far – surprisingly so, given anxieties about

the death of cinema due to its relocation onto digital platforms. While
the shift towards the digital has been problematized, questioned, and,
at times, catastrophized as undermining the very capacity of cinema to
produce truthful statement, the use of digital technology in the case of the
audiovisual essay has been glorified, celebrated, and militantly advocated
as a major breakthrough for film studies as a discipline. The underlying
assumption here – one that should itself be problematized – is that while
digital (in contrast to analogue) means lead to the ontological break between
the reality of the world and its cinematic representation, the essayistic
use of the same digital technology is seen as guaranteeing the ontological
continuity between the film-object and its critical appropriation (despite
the fact that many films that are subjected to audiovisual criticism were
initially produced on celluloid).
The second new-media principle outlined by Manovich, that of modular-
ity, has equally interesting ramifications for the audiovisual essay. For the
most part, audiovisual essays are constructed of excerpts, or modules,
extracted from films, rearranged and brought into a new configuration
with sound and text. The presence of these relatively independent modules
and their rearrangements – which rely heavily on associative thinking,
recombination, and parallel simultaneous processing – can be thought of,
not only as representing the principle of modularity, but also as embodying
the more general ‘data-base’ logic outlined by Lev Manovich.
However, these modules, as excerpts, have a peculiar, ‘double’ nature. The
analytical procedures used to extract elements from a film for the audiovisual
essay and to assign them different meanings include fragmentation and
splintering. As a result, the excerpts have a double function: while they
represent a quotation from the original film, they simultaneously acquire a
metonymic or metaphoric meaning, standing for the whole film and serving
as a marker of regularity or offering a comparison or a sign of exception. To
paraphrase another new-media theorist, Mikhail Epstein, we are dealing
here not with translation or description but with a stereo-textual effect: one
and the same module or sign is brought simultaneously into at least two dif-
ferent contexts creating multidimensional, multilingual, ‘culturally curved’
discourse.43 The reading of an audiovisual essay thus relies, by necessity, on
a parallax effect: an acknowledgement and negotiation of a displacement in
the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight.
43 Mikhail Epstein, ‘The Unasked Question: What Would Bakhtin Say?’, Common Knowledge 10.1
(2004), pp. 42-60.
While, at first sight, the primary function of extracting an excerpt is to

give an example, the practice of audiovisual essayism demonstrates that this
process is far from straightforward. Giorgio Agamben’s ideas about the rela-
tionship between example and paradigm can provide further insight here.44
Agamben points out that the act of giving an example is semantically rich and
analytically complex, because it entails simultaneously constituting the set
to which an example belongs (a paradigm) and defining its intelligibility. Yet,
the paradigm is based on analogical rather than on deductive or inductive
reasoning, reasoning which moves from singularity to singularity, eliminating
the dualism of the general and the particular. Locating an example within a
paradigm allows us to establish novel groupings and envision new patterns
of connection without reassigning those singular objects into rigidly fixed
sets or classes. Giving an example is therefore not a simple procedure of
extracting and demonstrating, but rather involves establishing the borders
of a particular phenomenon – in our case, most often, thematic, stylistic, or
narrative regularity – and suggesting a way of conceptualizing this regularity.
The decision of the audiovisual essayist to mobilize a particular excerpt as
an example thus becomes a critical and creative – in a deepest sense of the
word – act. Significantly, if we follow the logic of paradigm and example
outlined by Agamben, such a decision is always provisional – provisionality
being the ethos to which audiovisual criticism aspires.
In placing excerpts alongside one another, the audiovisual essay often
disregards linear, cause-and-effect narrative logic and leans, instead, to-
wards the logic of the database. In doing so, the audiovisual essay not only
corresponds to Manovich’s principles of new-media organization but also
reveals their implications for reading and writing. Sean Cubitt notes that,
in digital objects, the data storage and retrieval are not structured in time
linearly, as in narrative, but spatially, as a matrix or thesaurus. The kinds
of operations that this data organization presupposes – such as navigation,
search, and surfing – are radically different from the literary principles
of textual organization – and this is, as Cubitt concludes, for two reasons:
‘First, […], they are spatial rather than temporal metaphors; and secondly
they are eschatological not teleological.’45 Drawing on these ideas, I suggest
that the semantic field that the audiovisual essay creates is not a field of
narrative but rather that of a thesaurus, which produces not a progressive
44 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is a Paradigm?’, in The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans.
by Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Atell (New York: Zone Books, 2009).
45 Sean Cubitt, ‘Spreadsheets, Sitemaps and Search Engines’, in New Screen Media: Cinema/
Art/Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 2002), p. 7.
movement towards a preconceived goal but a field of meaning pulsating

with new possibilities, offering renewal through a (partial) annihilation of
the original meaning.
Further implications of audiovisual essayism for textuality, subjectivity,
and authorship can be unpacked by referring to the work of Mikhail Epstein.
Drawing on Bakhtin’s ideas, Epstein has recently articulated a vision for
the humanities in the 21st century in a manifesto that is a call to arms to
mobilize their transformative potential. A contemporary of Eisenstein,
Vertov, and Shub, Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about finalizing and initiating art
forms, foregrounding their potential for radical renewal. Epstein’s manifesto
is helpful for placing the practice of the audiovisual essay in the broader
context of the digital turn in the humanities.
Epstein has proposed to reconceptualize the current historical moment,
largely defined for him by the digital revolution, by using not the prefix post
(postmodern, posthuman, post-industrial) but, rather, proto. Such a shift of
perspective allows him to see changes in the cultural sphere as emergent,
future-orientated, and in need of attentive, yet flexible reflection. Among a
number of proto developments that Epstein identifies, two are particularly
relevant for my discussion: the transformations of textuality and authorship.
Epstein raises the question of ‘whether the traditional notion of text, central to
the humanities, remains intact in the digital era’.46 He suggests that it might
be that ‘the immutable, self-identical text now gives way to more flexible,
dynamic, nomadic text-like formations that wander from site to site and
are modified by their users’.47 Rather than lamenting such a loss of stabil-
ity, authenticity, and originality, Epstein sees it as the seed of a promising
development and argues that, ‘while preserving their loyalty to textuality, the
humanities can offer a synthetic, rather than analytic, approach to language
and initiate language games of their own designed to expand the field of the
speakable and thinkable. Language is approached here as a form of life that
needs permanent expansion and revitalisation.’48 This shift is paralleled by
radical changes in the conditions of authorship. ‘The death of the author’
announced by post-structuralist critique is not the end for Epstein – rather,
it is the ‘beginning of a new epoch of hyperauthorship’, achieved through the
proliferation of multiple avatars and conceptual personae.49 Such a transforma-
46 Mikhail Epstein, The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (London, New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2012), p. 19.
47 Mikhail Epstein, The Transformative Humanities, p. 19.
tion of authorship is reinforced by the redistribution of intellectual resources,

including information, memory, and access, allowing Epstein to speculate that,
‘The future of humankind can be envisioned as noocracy – that is, the power
of the collective brain rather than separate individuals and social groups’.50
Epstein’s ideas can be extended to consider the implications of audiovisual
essay practice for the issues of textuality and authorship in cinema studies.
If the notion of an immutable text has been questioned in film scholarship
for a long time – as the existence of multiple film versions historically made
the use of the concept of ‘the text’ tenuous – the practice of audiovisual
essayism, which physically disassembles the original and releases its parts
into independent existence, stages an even stronger challenge to the idea of
the text. Similarly, if the notion of authorship in cinema theory has long been
a vexed one, since collective conditions of authorship have often been seen
as compromising the notion of the author as a singular, creative individual,
audiovisual essayism forces the problematization of authorship even further.
Yet, the notion of ‘hyperauthorship’ achieved through audiovisual criticism
redeems the questionable position of those who work alongside the director
and introduces a constructive way to re-conceptualize authorship rather
than lament the loss of the original authorial vision. Together, these two key
transformations bring about a much-needed revitalization of film studies
and, indeed, contribute to an expansion of the speakable, the demonstrable,
and the thinkable in this field.
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. ‘What is a Paradigm?’, in The Signature of All Things: On Method,

trans. by Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Atell (New York: Zone Books, 2009).
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana),
1977.
Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Unattainable Text’, in The Analysis of Film, trans. by Ben
Brewster, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-27.
Bordwell, David. ‘Intensified Continuity. Visual Style in Contemporary American
Film’, Film Quarterly 55.3 (2002), pp. 16-28.
Cubitt, Sean. ‘Spreadsheets, Sitemaps and Search Engines’, in New Screen Media:
Cinema/Art/Narrative, ed. by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp (London: British
Film Institute, 2002).

Grant, Catherine. ‘Touching the Film Object? Notes on the “Haptic” in Videographi-
cal Film Studies’, Filmanalytical, Monday, 29 August 2011, Web.
Eisenstein, Sergei. ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, October, no. 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 3-26.
Eisenstein, Sergei. ‘The Fourth Dimension in Cinema’, in Sergei Eisenstein, Writ-
ings, 1922-1934, Vol. I, ed. by Richard Taylor, (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2010) pp. 181-194.
Eisenstein, Sergei. ‘Methods of Montage’, in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed.
and trans. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949), pp. 72-83.
Epstein, Mikhail. ‘The Unasked Question: What Would Bakhtin Say?’, Common
Knowledge 10.1 (2004), pp. 42-60.
Epstein, Mikhail. The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (London, New York:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), p. 19.
Keathley, Christian. ‘La Caméra-stylo: Notes on video criticism and cinephilia’,
in The Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. by Andrew Klevan and Alex
Clayton (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).
Leyda, Jay. Films Beget Films (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964).
López, Cristina Álvarez, and Adrian Martin. ‘The audiovisual essay as art practice’,
NECSUS, Spring 2015, ‘Animals’, Web.
MacKay, John. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), An Introduction,
[https://www.academia.edu/4090580/_Man_with_a_Movie_Camera_An_In-
troduction_], p. 7.
Manovich, Lev. ‘Jump over Proust: Toward Multimedia Writing’ (1997), Web.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
Michelson, Annette. ‘Reading Eisenstein, Reading Capital’, October no. 2 (Summer
1976), pp. 26-38.
Osipova, Anastasiya. ‘Difficult Facts. Esfir Shub and the Problem of Realism’, The
Brooklyn Rail, September 2011. Web.
Petric, Vlada. ‘Dziga Vertov as Theorist’. Cinema Journal 18. 1 (1978), pp. 29-44.
Petric, Vlada. ‘Esther Shub: Cinema Is My Life’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3.4
(1978), pp. 429-448.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans.
by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004).
Rascaroli, Laura. How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017).
Suhr, Christian, and Rane Willerslev. ‘Introduction’, in Transcultural Montage, ed.
by Christan Suhr and Rane Willerslev (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2013).
Tsivian, Yuri. ‘The Wise and Wicked Game: Re-editing and Soviet Film Culture of
the 1920s’, Film History 8.3 (1996), pp. 327-343.
Vassilieva, Julia. ‘Sergei Eisenstein and Philosophy’, Film and Philosophy, ed. by
Bernd Herzogenrath, Minnesota University Press, 2017.
Vassilieva, Julia. ‘Capital and Co: Kluge, Eisenstein, Marx’, Screening the Past, Issue
31, 2011, Web.
van den Berg, Thomas and Miklós Kiss. Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual
Essay to Academic Research Video (Scalar, 2016). Web.
Willemen, Paul. ‘Through the Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered’ (interview
with Noel King), in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film
Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
About the Author
Julia Vassilieva is Australian Research Council Research Fellow and lecturer

at Monash University, Australia. Her research interests include narrative
theory, cinema and the mind, cinema and philosophy, and the theory and
practice of Sergei Eisenstein. She is an author of Narrative Psychology (Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2016) and co-editor of After Taste: Cultural Value and
the Moving Image (Routledge, 2013). Her publications have also appeared
in Camera Obscura, Film-Philosophy, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural
Studies, Screening the Past, Critical Arts, Kinovedcheskie Zapiski, Rouge, Lola,
Senses of Cinema, History of Psychology, and a number of edited collections.
9. ‘All I have to offer is myself’:
The Film-Maker as Narrator
Richard Misek
Abstract
Who precisely is the ‘I’ referenced in so many essay films’ voice-overs?
It is easy to assume that it refers to the film-maker, but, even if the voice
that we hear is the film-maker’s own, an essay film’s narrative ‘voice’ is
always ambiguous. Starting from Chris Marker’s contradictory claim in a
letter about Sans Soleil (1983) that all he has to offer is himself, the chapter
explores how the aspiration of open and direct address is complicated
through the various mediations involved in film-making. With particular
focus on my own film, Rohmer in Paris (2013), it raises the paradoxical
possibility that essay f ilm-makers can only offer themselves, but are
prevented by the form of the essay film from doing so.
Keywords: essay film, reflexivity, documentary, narration, voice-over
‘Contrary to what people say, using the first person

in films tends to be a sign of humility: “All I have to
offer is myself.”’
‒ Chris Marker 1
Whenever we read a piece of non-fiction writing that begins with an ‘I’,

it is fair to assume that the writer is referring to himself or herself. It is
similarly fair to assume, whenever we hear the word ‘I’ in the voice-over
of a non-fiction film, that, in the absence of contrary evidence, the voice
1 [http://chrismarker.org/chris-marker/notes-to-theresa-on-sans-soleil-by-chris-marker/].
Accessed 14 March 2018.
doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch09
190 Richard Misek
is that of the f ilm-maker. Yet, even if we are in fact hearing the f ilm-
maker speak, the identity of this ‘I’ is typically more ambiguous than
it seems. In this chapter, I look briefly at the slippery brilliance of the
voice-over in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and then reflect on the far
less successful engagement with voice-over in my own film Rohmer in Paris
(2013), focussing in particular on two questions: who is the ‘I’ referenced
in an essay film’s voice-over, and how is the narrator’s identity affected
by who is actually speaking the words? By recounting the trouble that
these questions caused me, I hope to demonstrate how central both the
constructed identity of the narrative ‘I’ and the actual identity of the
person saying ‘I’ are to the underlying question of how to communicate
thought processes in film. Inevitably, this chapter touches on a range of
def initional issues around the essay f ilm, but I have made the choice,
in this instance, not to engage directly with academic discourse on the
subject. Instead, I just offer myself.
Citing Robert Musil’s comment that the written essay is a form of ‘live
thought’ and so must involve an ‘I’, Harun Farocki suggests that the same is
true of essay films, ‘But this does not have to be the “I” of a man or a woman
who made the film. It is rather the “I” of the film construction’.2 Though
Farocki’s sui generis filmic ‘I’ seems well-suited to essay films, it sidesteps
a pragmatic problem. Films themselves do not speak; voice-over narration
is the utterance of a human. Even the synthesized speech of bots is, for the
time being, still sampled from human voices. If a film is to have a voice-over,
and often it simply must, the film-maker has to choose who will speak it.
Documentary conventionally offers a set menu of alternatives: for example,
the voice can be that of the film’s non-fictional ‘subject’, or the film-maker,
or it can be a metaphoric ‘voice of God’ played by a voice artist. ‘I’ may play
a role in the first two options, but, in each case, the referent is typically
unambiguous: it is the film’s subject or its maker. Beyond the confines of
conventional documentary, the choices are not so simple. Narration in an
essay film can take various forms: for example, film-makers can speak their
own words, get another (or others) to speak them, use on-screen text, or
choose not to use their own words at all. When a first-person voice-over is
used, its ‘I’ may point in different directions. For example, it may refer to
the film-maker, the performer saying the words, a persona based on the
film-maker, or a wholly fictional character; alternatively, its referent may
be changeable or entirely ambiguous.
2 Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, Essays on the Essay Film (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2017), p. 303.
‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narr ator 191
Aldous Huxley famously suggested that essays exist within a ‘three-poled’

frame of reference: ‘There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographi-
cal; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete particular;
and there is the pole of the abstract-universal.’3 Huxley’s view is that the
most ‘richly satisfying’ works encompass at least two, if not all three, poles:
‘Freely, effortlessly, thought and feeling move in these consummate works of
art, hither and thither between the essay’s three poles – from the personal
to the universal, from the abstract back to the concrete, from the objective
datum to the inner experience.’4 How to find a single voice that can move
between these poles? It seems an impossible aspiration, yet Sans Soleil pulls
it off, thanks, in large part, to its narration. A female narrator reads extracts
from a letter by a fictional cinematographer, Sandor Krasna. Because the
text is presented as a letter written to a friend, it is personal; but, because its
utterance has two degrees of separation from Marker himself – it is narrated
by a woman, quoting a fictional man – there is also a universal element to
it. In effect, the film has two simultaneous narrators – one identified, one
not – whose parallel utterances allow it not only to move ‘hither and thither’
from pole to pole, but also to occupy more than one pole at the same time.
As Jonathan Rosenbaum notes, by creating a narrative distance between
the speaking voice and the subjects of the film, Marker is able to fill the film
with his images, his experiences, his reflections, and even his own artworks,
while the whole time also effacing himself.5 The self-exposure underlying
Marker’s concealment (or perhaps, rather, the concealment underlying his
self-exposure) is perfectly encapsulated by the quotation at the top of this
article. At first glance, when Marker writes ‘“All I have to offer is myself”’
(a line spoken first in Level 5 and subsequently quoted by him in a letter
about the voice-over in Sans Soleil), it seems refreshingly honest. But look
again – he places the words inside quotation marks, as if quoting someone,
perhaps himself, perhaps the narrator of another of his works, though it’s
impossible to know, as he does not cite his source. By obscuring who is
saying ‘All I have to offer is myself’, Marker slyly transforms a confession
into a paradox. This paradox of course echoes the paradoxical narration of
Sans Soleil itself, in which Marker goes to great lengths not to offer himself.
A female voice artist, playing a nameless female narrator, reads fragments
3 Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1958), pp. vi-vii.
4 Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1958), pp. vi-vii.
5 Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Personal Effects: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans Soleil’, [https://www.
criterion.com/current/posts/484-personal-effects-the-guarded-intimacy-of-sans-soleil] (2007).
Accessed 9 March 2018.
192 Richard Misek
of letters by a male cinematographer called Sandor Krasna, who is also

credited as the film’s cinematographer (but who is, in fact, Marker himself).
The narrator discusses the film’s composer, Michel Krasna, and the digital
artist, Hayao Yamaneko, within the film as well (although Marker is also, in
reality, the composer and digital artist). By using alternative names within
the film, Marker can state his intentions with a directness that would have
been ludicrously egotistical had he done so in the first-person.
For all the film’s other qualities, it perhaps, above all, the narration – and,
in particular, the voice-over – that allows Sans Soleil to move between
Huxley’s three poles: calm, mature, erudite, yet not patriarchal; with a
subtle and non-threatening American accent, it feels urbane but also
sincere, critical but empathetic. Its qualities are so well-suited to essay
f ilm-making, that, in the three and a half decades since Marker’s f ilm
was made, it has repeatedly reappeared in essayistic non-fiction films,
as if there were an acting course somewhere that specialized in training
students to speak with a ‘Sans Soleil voice’. Indeed, over recent years, the
‘Sans Soleil voice’ has become so prolific as to be a veritable signifier of the
essayistic, encompassing works including Paul Bush’s experimental anima-
tion Babeldom (2012), Duncan Campbell’s single-screen video installation
It for Others (2013), Kogonada’s video essay Auteur in Space (2015), and Theo
Anthony’s documentary Rat Film (2016). Though each film-maker’s choice
of voice artist was presumably made for reasons particular to the work, it
is impossible not to hear in every use of the ‘Sans Soleil voice’ a 35-year-old
echo of Marker’s film. It is no coincidence that all of the above works exist
in the now expansive liminal space between documentary film-making and
artist practice that Sans Soleil itself helped establish; like Sans Soleil itself,
they all use voice-over to problematize meaning as well as to state it. It is
also no coincidence that the above films were all made by men. The use of
a female voice-over emphasizes that this is not the film-maker speaking; it
creates a lacuna whose presence signals that the film is not a conventional
documentary. Rejecting both an authoritative, male ‘voice of God’ and their
own voice, the above film-makers each use the ‘Sans Soleil voice’ to evoke
the kind of self-generated narrative ‘I’ hypothesized by Farocki. But what
worked for Marker does not always work for those who have followed. By
choosing to conceal themselves, by abnegating personal responsibility for
their own words, the risk is that the film-makers simply replace the male
‘voice of God’ with a female one speaking a man’s words. It is no coincidence
that many political documentaries, including Mark Achbar and Jennifer
Abbott’s The Corporation (2003) – films made to persuade – also use the
‘Sans Soleil voice’.
The popularity of the ‘Sans Soleil voice’ among non-fiction film-makers

demonstrates that the question of who speaks a film-maker’s text is just as
important as the broader question of what metaphoric ‘voice’ – what tone – a
film should have. In contrast to the literary essay, in which the written word
is a natural and necessary means of expressing ideas, the options open to
essay film-makers for verbalizing their ideas need to be carefully weighed.
A voice artist may misinterpret a film-maker’s writing, put emphasis in the
wrong place, bring in unwanted associations, or simply overact. A film-
maker, however, may be too close to the text to do it justice with their own
voice; or perhaps their voice risks generating unwanted associations based
on what it says about their nationality, age, and socio-economic background;
or perhaps it may simply be too dull. On-screen text may truncate a film-
maker’s ideas, while no text avoids the danger of simplification but leaves
open the possibility that – unanchored in language – the film-maker’s
‘thinking-through’ may be misunderstood. It is perhaps not surprising, then,
that many essayistic film-makers, including Marker, Farocki, and Godard,
have, over the course of their careers, frequently moved between different
ways of incorporating words into their films, as if unable to decide what
the best option is, or acknowledging that there is none.
Rohmer in Paris was (perhaps inevitably, given it was my first feature-
length essay film) heavily influenced by Sans Soleil; it takes a lot of self-
assurance as a film-maker in this field to escape Marker’s orbit, and I have
yet to do it. Often, when I hit a wall, I would look to Sans Soleil for inspiration,
and, of all its formal elements, it was the oblique narration that I most took
inspiration from. However, in contrast to Marker’s assured, and clearly
ambiguous, mélange of self-revelation and self-effacement, I eventually
became trapped in my narrative persona. Rohmer in Paris (2013) evolved
from a sixteen-minute video essay entitled Mapping Rohmer (2011), which
focussed on Eric Rohmer’s cartographic approach to filming Paris. Mapping
Rohmer was an output from a research project and was also my first video
essay. I narrated it myself, without even realizing there were other choices,
and aimed for the same ‘academic’ tone that I aim for whenever I give a
conference presentation: authoritative but not imperious, objective but
not dogmatic, and, above all, impersonal.6 Like most academics, in the
6 Of course, it is never quite so simple, as Ian Garwood’s video essay The Place of Voiceover
in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism (2016) demonstrates. Garwood’s seminal
contribution to the discussion of voice-over in video essays demonstrates that academic video
essayists are also not immune from having to consider the effects and implications of how they
make use of language in their work.
194 Richard Misek
hope that the ideas would speak for themselves, I tactfully avoided the
first-person. In the months after I posted the video, I continued to work
on it. As it got ever-longer, eventually teetering on the brink of becoming
‘feature-length’, I made the decision to add a layer of fictional narrative,
and to transform my own voice-over into that of a character. I started by
providing this character with an imaginary backstory, notably that he had
once walked in front of Rohmer’s camera during the filming of Rendez-vous
in Paris (1995), and had become an accidental extra in the film. In tandem, I
searched the film for a passer-by who could credibly pass as the narrator, a
real extra to provide my character with a face. As soon as I found him, to my
mind, at least, the identity of the film’s ‘I’ was settled: it was the man who
walks in front of the camera exactly 38 minutes into Rendez-vous in Paris.
Finding a face for my narrator was easy. Finding a voice for him was far
more difficult. I cycled among all of the options mentioned above. Un-
able to dispense with words, but unable to settle on a satisfactory way to
give them life, I eventually decided that my narrator needed the voice of
a professional actor. After weeks of searching, I settled on an actor with a
mild French accent, who had worked extensively on BBC Radio. He was
articulate, sometimes ironic, sometimes impassioned, always responsive
to my notes, incredibly generous with his time, and completely wrong for
the film – though I only realized this after the entire voice track had been
recorded and cut into the film’s timeline. Having run out of money and
motivation to keep searching for the ideal voice, and not trusting myself to
recognize it even if I heard it, I settled on the least-bad option available: I
recorded the voice-over myself. Out of necessity, I myself played the narrator.
It should be emphasized that my creation of a fictional narrator did not
suddenly turn Rohmer in Paris into a fiction film. Later, reading Timothy
Corrigan’s The Essay Film, I found a line that perfectly encapsulated what
I had done: ‘Essayistic expression (as writing, as film, or as any other rep-
resentational mode) […] demands both loss of self and the rethinking and
remaking of the self.’7 Through the narrator, I both erased myself (as an
academic who had been interested in Rohmer’s films since adolescence)
and remade myself (into a character whose chance discovery of himself
in a Rohmer film turns him into a film critic). If anything, this process of
remaking myself embedded the film even more firmly within the essayistic
mode. Naïvely, I assumed that my own clarity about the film’s essayistic
nature would be shared by its audiences, and that they would understand
7 Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), p. 17.
the narrator to be a persona. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the film’s

viewers understood the opposite: almost all assumed that the ‘I’ referenced
in the film was me.
How could it be that the film’s viewers, all culturally aware film festival-
goers, could have made such a basic mistake? The answer, I realized, was
that they hadn’t. The mistake had been mine: I had assumed people would
understand that they were watching an essay film, and so hold back from
making assumptions. Having myself assumed too much, I did not flag the
fictional element in any way, I did not explicitly problematize the film’s ‘I’, set
up identity as a theme, or, at any point, refer to Rohmer in Paris as an ‘essay
film’ (either within the film or in surrounding publicity material). Without
realizing it, I had made a film that was – at least initially – indistinguishable
from an arts documentary. By the point in its running time when it began to
follow a different path, it was too late: most viewers had already categorized
it as one. And, historically, when documentarians have used the word ‘I’,
they have meant themselves. Had the narration been delivered by a voice
artist (a more suitable voice artist), viewers might have intuited that the
words were being performed, and so question the narrator’s identity. As it
was, the film’s voice-over, too unprofessionally delivered to be that of anyone
but the film-maker himself, provided further evidence that the narrative ‘I’
was me. The film was labelled by programmers and reviewed by critics as a
documentary, and so – from the outside at least – it became a documentary.
This mistaken identity was reinforced by the fact that the film typically
screened at documentary festivals. Documentary festivals, including Hot
Docs, True/False, CPH:DOX, FID Marseille, and Thessaloniki, now use the
term ‘documentary’ in a flexible and inclusive sense.8 In response, many
essay film-makers whose work does not easily fit within extant industry
forms have gladly accepted this institutional embrace. One might imagine
that, when conventional documentaries and essay f ilms are screened
together, a degree of contamination might take place. One might further
imagine that, in this era of creative reflexivity, the essay film’s ambiguity
might have permanently contaminated our understanding of what a docu-
mentary is. Perhaps this has indeed happened in certain contexts, but, with
Rohmer in Paris, the opposite happened – the truth claims of documentary
contaminated my essay film. It did not matter that my narrator’s backstory
of urban flânerie and chance connections was suspiciously Rohmeresque.
Nor did it matter that the extra whose identity I had adopted, and who
8 In 2013, Danis Tanovic’s An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker was nominated for the main
festival award at CPH:DOX, though it is a fiction film.
196 Richard Misek
often appeared on-screen barely two minutes after I had introduced the
film in person, looked nothing like me. Despite overwhelming evidence to
the contrary, almost everybody – audiences, festival programmers, even
friends – assumed that I had indeed crossed paths with Rohmer in 1995.
Too late, I tried to back pedal and emphasize that the film was not a
documentary. After its f irst screenings at CPH:DOX and International
Film Festival Rotterdam, I rewrote the press kit so that it referred to ‘the
narrator’ as one would a character; I added a ‘written by’ credit at the end
of the film; I even, for a time, searched for another voice artist. But nothing
I did could undermine the film’s documentary credentials. So, accordingly,
I myself began to play the role of documentarian: in Q&A sessions, I would
skim over the question of narration and instead discuss Rohmer’s life and
work. About half a year and a dozen screenings after the film’s première,
an audience member (a real documentarian, I later discovered) came up
to me after the film and hesitantly voiced her suspicion that it had not
been me on-screen. ‘He was quite a large man…’ she observed, ‘…and you
are not’. With overwhelming gratitude and relief, I immediately admitted
that it was indeed not me. The following day, in the Q&A after the film’s
repeat screening, for the first time, I confessed that I had never crossed
paths with Rohmer. To my surprise, an immediate charge of excitement
surged through the audience. People sat up in their seats, laughed, or turned
and whispered to their companions. Some even gasped. It took a full 30
seconds for the audience to settle, and, even when they did, an atmosphere
of pleasurable complicity continued to hang over the auditorium. From
then on, I went out of my way to attend as many screenings as I could. The
film developed a live coda, a final fifteen minutes of narration played out
during the Q&A, which – though improvised – always culminated in the
same revelation. Occasionally, I sensed individuals within the audience
bristling at the discovery that they had been misled. But, most of the time,
people expressed nothing but pleasure at having had their assumptions
reflected back at them.
As a result of these months spent in conversation with audiences, I have
come to suspect that, for almost everyone except those who make them and
write about them, essay films do not exist. Ironically, we who most celebrate
essay films’ ambiguities are perhaps the only people who classify them as
such. Everywhere else, essay films are typically perceived as a subset, or at
least a variant, of documentary. And, personally, I have no problem with this.
That’s not to say I don’t still feel a mild regret when I think of all the people
who were led by various textual and extra-textual cues to watch Rohmer in
Paris as a straight documentary, and never got to see it as anything else; I still
wish there had been some way I could have reflected viewers’ assumptions
about the narrative’s truthfulness back at them within the film, rather than
after it. At the same time, had the film not been labelled a documentary
in the first place, it would not have been able to reflect their assumptions
back at them at all. For this reason, but this time not by accident, I currently
feel quite happy to make ‘documentaries’ in the future. And again, and this
time not as a last resort, I also feel quite happy to narrate them using my
own voice. After all, ‘All I have to offer is myself’.
Bibliography
Alter, Nora M. and Timothy Corrigan. Essays on the Essay Film (New York: Columbia
Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford
Huxley, Aldous. Collected Essays (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1958).
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. ‘Personal Effects: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans Soleil’
(2007), Web.
About the Author
Richard Misek is a film-maker and Senior Lecturer in Film at the University

of Kent, UK. His interests focus on montage and appropriation, cities and
space, colour and light. He is the author of Chromatic Cinema (Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), and his articles have been published in journals includ-
ing October, Screen, and the New Review of Film and Television. He is a regular
video essayist and his essay film Rohmer in Paris (2013) has been exhibited
in five continents and received widespread critical acclaim. He has been
Primary Investigator on two Arts and Humanities Research council projects
exploring audiovisual film and media studies (2016-2018), and is currently
producing a series of virtual reality video essays in collaboration with
Melbourne-based VR studio Vrtov and the British Film Institute.
10. The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea?
Videographic Film Studies Practice as
Material Thinking 1
Catherine Grant
Abstract
This chapter carefully considers the practice of the audio-video essayist,
reflecting on the topics of subjectivity, textuality, and technology. Grant
is a film scholar who, in the last ten years, has begun to produce, write
about, and publish creative-critical digital-video essays on film and media
studies subjects, essays that use footage from the films studied, as well as
other moving image/sounds from existing media. Her chapter examines
the critical and theoretical threads that surround the audiovisual essay
as it belongs to the tradition of the essay film and as it belongs to the
broader realm of creative practice. She also thinks through some of the
spectatorial implications of her online practice as research.
Keywords: audiovisual essay, film and media studies, creative critical

practice as research, material thinking
I.
‘In the face of the seemingly limitless possibilities, practice cannot know
or preconceive its outcome. Rather, the new emerges through process as
a shudder of an idea […].’2
1 This article was originally published as follows: Catherine Grant, ‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac
Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking’, ANIKI: Portuguese Journal of
the Moving Image 1.1 (2014), Web.
2 Barbara Bolt, ‘The Exegesis and the Shock of the New’, Text 3 (2004) Web. Accessed
30 December 2013.
doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch10
200 Catherine Gr ant
‘In a sense, the cinephiliac moment may be understood as a kind of mise-

en-abyme wherein each spectator’s obsessive relationship with cinema
is embodied in its most concentrated form. […] But if we see cinephiliac
moments as the flashes of another history, how to develop that history?’3
‘[I]t is in the joining of hand, eye and mind that material thinking occurs,
but it is necessarily in relation to the materials and processes of practice,
rather than through the “talk”, that we can understand the nature of
material thinking. Words may allow us to articulate and communicate
the realizations that happen through material thinking, but as a mode
of thought, material thinking involves a particular responsiveness to or
conjunction with the intelligence of materials and processes in practice.’4
Long after the advent of the digital era, while the overwhelming majority of
university-based film studies academics still choose to publish their critical,
theoretical, and historical research in conventional written formats, a
small but growing number of scholars working on the moving image have
begun to explore the online publication possibilities of the digital video
essay. This multimedia form has come to prominence in recent years in
much Internet-based cinephile and film critical culture.5 Interestingly,
at least in relation to its transfer to an academic context, some of the
video essay’s emergent modes are especially indebted to the ‘provisional
and subjective’ traditions of the essay film, much studied in written film
scholarship.6 Indeed, the video essay format can inspire compelling work
not only because, with its possibilities for direct audiovisual quotation, it
can enhance the kinds of explanatory research that have always been car-
ried out on films, but also precisely because of its potential for more ‘poetic’,
creative, and performative critical approaches to moving image research.7
This new form also raises issues of medium-specif icity in a context of
long-established academic assessment standards and practices: for example,
3 Christian Keathley, ‘The Cinephiliac Moment’, Framework 42 (2000), Web. Accessed

30 December 2013.
4 Barbara Bolt, ‘The Magic is in Handling’, in Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts
Enquiry, ed. by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 27-34 (p. 30).
5 Christian Keathley, ‘La Caméra-Stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia’, in The
Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. by Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan (London: Routledge,
2011), pp. 176-191.
6 Christina Scherer, Ivens, Marker, Godard, Jarman – Erinnerung im Essayfilm (Munich:
Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001), p. 14.
7 Catherine Grant, ‘Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies’,
Mediascape (Winter, 2013), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.
The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? 201
should we aim to ‘translate’ the (often unspoken) norms and traditions

of written film studies into audiovisual versions, or should we embrace
from the outset the idea that we are creating ontologically new scholarly
forms?8
While these questions are important and pressing, what I elect to focus on
in this written reflection is less the finished forms of the emerging range of
videographic film studies, less on their status as research outcomes, ‘outputs’,
or scholarly communications, as it were, and more on my experience of the
‘original and originary’ audiovisual research processes involved in their
production.9 One of the most important informants of my discussion here
is the artist, fine art theorist, and proponent of practice-based approaches
to research in the arts Barbara Bolt. Bolt has persuasively argued that
philosopher Martin Heidegger’s elaboration of handlability provides ‘a key
to rethinking the conditions of possibility of creative practice’10 as a form
of understanding with the hands and eyes, which ‘operates in a different
register from the representational paradigm of man-as-subject in relation
to objects’:11 ‘For Heidegger, handling is a relation of care and concernful
dealings, not a relation where the world is set before us (knowing subjects)
as an object.’12
In what follows, I will consider, above all from a personal perspective
looking back at just two of the 60 or so videos that I have made, some of
the possibilities that their processes of handling offer for the production
of new knowledge in research into cinephile practices and experiences,
research that is forged out of the conjunction of the film object(s) to be
studied, digital technologies of reproduction and editing tools, and the
facticity of the researcher(s). I will argue that digital video is usefully seen
not only as a promising communicative tool with different affordances
than those of written text, but also as an important emergent cultural
and phenomenological field for the creative practice of our work as film
scholars.
8 Catherine Grant, ‘How Long is a Piece of String? On the Practice, Scope and Value of Vide-
ographic Film Studies and Criticism’, Presentation at the Audiovisual Essay Conference, Frankfurt
Filmmuseum/Goethe University, 23-24 November 2013, Web. (Subsequently published as ‘How
long is a piece of string? On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and
Criticism’, The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory of Videographic Film and Moving Image
Studies (September 2014), Web.
9 Barbara Bolt, ‘The Magic is in Handling’, p. 27.
10 Barbara Bolt, ‘Heidegger, Handlability and Praxical Knowledge’ (Australian Council of
University Art and Design Schools Conference, 2004b), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.
11 Barbara Bolt, ‘Heidegger, Handlability and Praxical Knowledge’.
12 Barbara Bolt, ‘Heidegger, Handlability and Praxical Knowledge’.
II.
‘[T]here is always a personal edge to the mix of intellectual curiosity and

fetishistic fascination.’13
Unsentimental Education (2009; see Figure 8) was my first, rather tentative at-
tempt to make a film-critical video essay for free online distribution. As I look
back at it now, I can see that this turn in my work was partly inspired by some
of my earlier research on the emerging connoisseur culture of DVD ‘extras’.14
This had focussed on the relationship between voiceover commentary and
audiovisual extracts from the film deployed in many of those formats, and
had examined how this digitally-enabled contiguity might help to turn ‘the
“original” (theatrical) experience of watching the film as fiction into one of
watching it “re-directed” or literally “re-performed”, as a documentary, one
in which the film’s existing visual track is employed as graphic illustration
of a teleological story of its own production.’15 I was, of course, familiar with
Laura Mulvey’s ground breaking written work, around ten years ago, on the
new (and existing) material qualities of film in the age of video and digital
technologies, and about ‘the space and time’ new digital affordances seem
to offer ‘for associative thought, [for] reflection on resonance and connota-
tion, [for] the identification of visual clues, the interpretation of cinematic
form and style, and, ultimately, personal reverie’.16 I had also seen one of
the digital video experiments Mulvey had directed.17 Like other scholars,
I had begun to connect some of the developments she examines with the
burgeoning examples of videographic film studies appearing online from
2005 onwards, which were clearly part of a much wider field of production
in online cinephile remix and film critical culture18 and I had begun to
explore these latter forms, in theory at least, on my research blog.19 I would
never have predicted that I would go on to create such artefacts myself,
however. I had always been a fairly conventional Film Studies academic: I
13 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books,
2006), p. 145.
14 Catherine Grant, ‘Auteur machines? Auteurism and the DVD’, in Film and Television After
DVD, ed. by James Bennett and Tom Brown (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 101-115.
15 Catherine Grant, ‘Auteur machines? Auteurism and the DVD’, p. 111.
16 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, p. 146-147.
17 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, p. 172.
18 Christian Keathley, ‘La Caméra-Stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia’.
19 Catherine Grant, ‘Online Film Audio-Commentaries and Video Essays of Note’, Film Studies
For Free (28 November 2008), Web.
Screenshot from Unsentimental Education (Catherine Grant, 2009) | © Paris Film/Panitalia.
saw writing about films and film culture as my ‘work’, and I was generally
keen to maintain the usual separation between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. But,
as Maria H. Loh notes, in an inspiring published conversation with Mulvey,
‘curiosity is the drive that can build a new kind of interactive spectatorship’
(my emphasis).20 As I was deeply curious about these new forms, and about
what one might be able to explore with them, I very readily became an
especially active kind of interactive and also, of course, at once ‘possessive’
and ‘pensive’ spectator.21
What surprised me, after I had embarked on the necessary processes of
sourcing, converting, importing, exploring, playing with, and re-editing
digitized film footage, was not only how straightforward it was to do all
this, given the relatively user-friendly digital format-conversion and edit-
ing software that nowadays is available for free with many computers or
online;22 but also how much more I went on to learn about the form of the
Claude Chabrol film that I had chosen to examine in these ways, as well as
about my personal response to it. Les Bonnes femmes (The Good Time Girls,
1960) is a movie I have taught many times. I thought that I knew it very well,
which was one of the reasons I had chosen to work on it. What I realized
afterwards was that I had also been motivated by a desire to engage even
20 Maria H. Loh, ‘Still Life: An Interview with Laura Mulvey’, The Art Book 14.1 (2007), Web.
Accessed 30 December 2013.
22 Jason Mittell, ‘How to Rip DVD Clips’, The Chronicle of Higher Education [Professor Hacker Col-
umn], 12 August 2010, Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.
more closely with this film’s strangeness – its beguiling yet disturbing affect
– a quality to which I have always been (perhaps obsessively) drawn, and
one that neither I nor my students had been able to account for effectively
in words, to my satisfaction at least, in numerous individual sequence
analyses in university seminars.
Working closely on the digitized version of the film in my chosen iMovie
video editing programme, in some ways, felt very much like studying it frame
by frame on a flatbed editing table, as in the Film Studies classes of a mostly
bygone era. It certainly introduced me to what Annette Michelson once
described as the ‘heady delights […] the euphoria one feels at the editing
table […] a sharpening cognitive focus and […] a ludic sovereignty, grounded
in that deep gratification of a fantasy of infantile omnipotence’.23 Using
this non-linear editing software also created the sensation of ‘touching the
film object’,24 at least virtually, as a digital, or digitized, artefact accessed
through a graphical user interface. Of course, this sensation did indeed
turn on an active handling of it, one that involved eye/ear-hand-touch
pad-virtual object/screen coordination and interaction, similar to the
DVD-handling conjunction of eye-hand-remote control-virtual object/
screen. But non-linear editing obviously offers the additional and constitu-
tive affordances of extraction and re-formation of the component parts of
the film object. The extra ability to manipulate audiovisual material from
the f ilm in order to serve durational, motional, spatial, and locational
experiments – including: randomly generating a whole suite of frozen
moments from its entire duration in the form of thumbnail images, and
then regenerating these at different frame rates; freezing and zooming in
or out of full frames; playing with different forms of altered motion and
superimpositions; detaching the soundtrack and moving it around; creating
new image-sound, image-image, and sound-sound juxtapositions – helped
me to arrive at a much more detailed, paradigmatic understanding of Les
Bonnes femmes, of its constant moves from high to low, and its graphic
matching, through these moves, of key shapes, like that of the statue at the
beginning of the film. It also made the film’s brilliant thematic exploration
of subjective experiences of spatio-temporality much more palpable, as I
shall go on to describe.
23 Annette Michelson, ‘The Kinetic Icon in the work of Mourning: Prolegomena for the Analysis
of a Textual System’, October 52 (Spring 1990), pp. 16-39 (pp. 22-23), Cited by Laura Mulvey, Death
24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, p. 193.
24 Catherine Grant, ‘Bonus Tracks: The Making of Touching the Film Object and Skipping ROPE
(Through Hitchcock’s Joins)’, Frames 1.1 (2012a), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.
When I produced this first essay, though, I didn’t have enough confi-
dence in the process of making it to allow a completely intuitive, creative
understanding of the film to emerge in the finished video. Unsentimental
Education tries very hard (possibly too hard) to hit a lot of the bases I’d
covered in my years of teaching the film – re-presenting knowledge about
it that I already knew. It also feels quite long to me now, at thirteen and a
half minutes. Even its fairly sparse voiceover commentary (which, rather
than pre-scripted, was at least largely improvised to accompany the re-
editing – in other words, it was created as a kind of ‘antiphonal’ response
to what I was handling) seems too wordy to me now. But, regardless of its
shortcomings as a finished essay, it was the practical experience of having
to work through, construct, and then convey or perform a meaningful
analysis by re-editing the film for its making that completely convinced
me of the merits of videographic approaches as analytical, pedagogical,
and creative research processes. The more I allowed myself to respond
freely to the material as I was experiencing it through the audiovisual,
spatio-temporal affordances of my editing programme with ‘a gestural use
of editing’25, the more new knowledge about the film I seemed to produce.
How better to understand the intense affective charge of the moment
in the final sequence of Chabrol’s film when a previously unseen character
breaks the film’s ‘fourth wall’ (see Figure 9), I found, than to experiment
with reframing it, attempting to retain the feeling of that charge in the
new form of a transformative work? This sequence had never really come
up much in my classes; it isn’t the most famous, or the most representative,
example of direct address in Nouvelle Vague cinema by some distance.26
But it had obsessed me in my viewings of the film over the years, and this
obsession returned, and even redoubled, at my iMovie-editing interface.
Reworking this extracted scene, reacting to it materially, first by crafting
a verbal accompaniment and then by performing it vocally, precisely, over
the very instant of eye contact, was exactly where I relived an especially
dramatic ‘cinephiliac moment’27 as the ‘shudder of an idea’.28 This (for me,
uncanny) experience of repeatedly handling the sequence in and out of
25 Stefano Basilico, ‘The Editor’, in Cut: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video, ed. by
Stefano Basilico (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2004), pp. 29-45 (p. 30).
26 See, for instance, Tom Brown, Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), for more prominent examples.
27 Christian Keathley, ‘The Cinephiliac Moment’.
28 Barbara Bolt, ‘The Exegesis and the Shock of the New’, echoing Kierkegaard; see Carol
Olson, ‘Re-Searching Unique Experience for Our Experience: Kierkegaard’s Question and
Method’, Phenomenology and Pedagogy 3.2 (1984), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.
Screenshots from Unsentimental Education (C. Grant, 2009). | © Paris Film/Panitalia. The re-edited
sequence from Les Bonnes femmes features Karen Blanguernon’s uncredited performance as ‘La
fille du bal’.
its original context did indeed produce new affective knowledge about it
regarding the film’s explorations of temporality and temporal experience
throughout its duration, and particularly about the implacable logic of its
film characters’ captivity in human (and cinema) time:
On high, the glitterball doesn’t just glitter; it mirrors. It witnesses and

fragments what lies beneath: the ‘special occasion’ that punctures
the endless dull time, which imprisons us all. But we are held by the
spectacle, waiting for something to happen. And then it does: the
troubling moment when the character – as in so many other New Wave
films – returns our gaze. What does she want to happen? And what do
we want to happen? (Voiceover excerpt from Unsentimental Education,
2009)
Working towards the production of a video essay that, like the film itself,
culminated in this moment of spatio-temporal, or spectatorial, ‘puncture’
materialized this knowledge, and made me perform it affectively, as
videographical thinking-feeling ‘with rhythm and timing’29 – that is to
say, poetically. Looking back now at this work, the creative digital context
of the research allowed space for the establishment and working through
of an unusually vivid relationship of aesthetic reciprocity with Les Bonnes
femmes. Producing Unsentimental Education as an explanatory but
also cinephiliac study helped me both to seek ‘the “film behind the film”
[…] the main aim of textual analysis’30, and, more unusually, to bring my
version of that ‘hidden film’ into audiovisual existence.
29 Matthias Stork and Janet Bergstrom, ‘Film Studies with High Production Values: An Interview
with Janet Bergstrom on Making and Teaching Audiovisual Essays’, Frames Cinema Journal
(2012), Web.
III.
‘Part of what I love about Vine is its in-the-moment-ness, which harkens

back to the ol’ days of shooting one-reel films, where you only have one
shot to get what you want, and if you miss it, it’s gone.’31
‘The blessed damozel leaned out

From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even […].’32
At some point in the first half of 2013 (around four years, and some 50 or so
further video experiments under my belt after Unsentimental Education
later), I heard about Vine, one of a number of emergent mobile device ap-
plications for creating very short looping videos to share with fellow app
users, as well as online. Flora Magdalena Olszanowski and Will Lockett
describe the app’s affordances, in their contribution to a collection of studies
on Vine at In Media Res (2013), as follows:
[T]he video recording begins as the user touches the screen of their mobile
device, and the recording takes place only so long as they’re touching
the screen. Given this touch-and-hold interface, there’s no [in-app] post-
production editing: edits can be made by letting go of the touch before
the end of the six seconds, framing a new shot, and then touching again
to capture the next image in the montage.33
Vine appeared in mobile application stores in January of that year, and

had caught on particularly quickly with Twitter users, partly because of
the app’s easy integration with its parent platform.34 By September, once
again driven by the curiosity of Mulvey’s ‘pensive spectator’, I decided to
play with it, particularly to see what kinds of film studies research, if any,
31 Jennifer Proctor, ‘That’s a really interesting [comment]’, In Media Res: Vine and the Short-Form
Video [November 4-November 8] (4 November 2013), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.
32 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘The Blessed Damozel [1850]’, in The Poetical Works, 2 vols., ed. by
William Michael Rossetti (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1913), pp. 1-7.
33 Flora Magdalena Olszanowski, with Will Lockett, ‘Rhythm Aesthetics: Vine & contempo-
rary mobile moving image production practices’, In Media Res: Vine and the Short-Form Video
[November 4-November 8] (5 November 2013), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.
34 Jordan Crook, ‘Twitter’s 6-Second Video Sharing App, Vine, Goes Live In The App Store’, Tech
Crunch (24 January 2013), Web. Accessed 30 December 2013.
Screenshots from The Chosen Maiden (Catherine Grant, 2013) | © Paris Film/Panitalia.
could be carried out within the constraints of the app’s six seconds-long,
square-framed video loops.
Inspired by Kenneth Goldsmith’s academic and pedagogical experi-
ments with ‘Uncreative Writing’ – forms of material textual exploration
and re-performance through, inter alia, reflexive transcription techniques,
including direct replication and ‘patchwriting’35 – I settled on the technique
of re-filming film footage using my mobile phone video camera, difficult
in itself with a hand-held device, but even trickier within Vine because the
square shape of its viewfinder necessarily entails choices about what to
select within any (usually rectangular) cinematic aspect ratio. Very quickly,
I realized that the app would provide an interesting way of focussing in on,
capturing, and then looping cinematic gestures, such as that of Jean-Paul
Belmondo running his thumb over his lips in A Bout de souffle (Jean-Luc
Godard, 1960), the subject of my first Vine (Belmondo as Bogie in A BOUT
DE SOUFFLE (Godard, 1960), 2013).
For my second experiment, perhaps dissatisfied by the fact that, in the
Belmondo sequence, I had chosen to re-film, the actor who addresses his
own reflection, not the camera or the spectator. I returned to my ‘cinephiliac
moment’ at the end of Les Bonnes femmes (see Figure 3). Or, rather, I went
back to my remaking of that moment in my Unsentimental Education video,
a copy of which was what I actually had at hand when I was messing around
with Vine at that point. I played the video essay on my computer screen and
tried to capture the moment of ‘contact’ of the character’s direct address.
No conscious preconceptions about ‘(un-) creativity’ or even about ‘film
studies’ got in the way. I just tried as best I could to capture the look of ‘La
fille du bal’ in a way that satisfied me – a very close-up, rapidly moving shot
of both her eyes was what I intuitively set out to achieve. It took only two
takes – the six second duration of the necessarily moving, handheld shot
35 Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011).
does ensure that somewhat involuntary, purely reactive techniques are

in the ascendant. The second, successful, attempt was thrilling and, for
me, insightful. As with my earlier voiceover discovery in Unsentimental
Education, my inexpert yet lucky handling of the re-filming tools at once
re-performed and recorded the precariousness of achieving the moment of
ocular contact, thus making it much more palpable.
The shudder of an idea produced by this, in every sense, ephemeral re-
search process was a new material understanding of the personal charge of
this particular instance of direct address. In this moment, the film not only
opened up a surprising and compelling space for character-spectator in-
timacy (a quality frequently connected with examples of ‘breaking the
cinematic fourth wall’, as Tom Brown argues in his magisterial study of this
phenomenon),36 but also for a particularly captivating and uncanny coup
de foudre-like encounter: the eyes of this anonymous female character will
always meet and magically mirror mine (and yours, if you look, too) across
our separate, crowded worlds. Just as, in the film’s diegesis, she waits to be
singled out and chosen to dance by a dark-haired stranger in a troubling
repetition of the film’s earlier plot (as we may notice while we try to work
out why we haven’t seen these characters earlier in the film), we spectators
are made to wait for meaning by the film, and are rewarded by being singled
out and chosen (individually and en masse) to return her gaze. In its original
duration, the scene powerfully stages, for me at least, an instance of, as well
as an occasion for, what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has called the
‘aesthetic moment’, when ’the subject is captured in an intense illusion of
being selected by the environment for some deeply reverential experience’37,
a concept I happened to have been exploring in relation to other cinephile
experiences in recent research.38
My material thinking-through of this sequence did not end there, though.
Unusually, for a Vine, I went on to re-edit my first recording on my mobile
phone to add music that wasn’t taken from the original film sequence. Then
I re-filmed the result, and finally shared the video as a loop. For the new
soundtrack, I used the first six seconds of a piano recording of La Damoiselle
élue (‘The Blessed Damozel’), Debussy’s 1888 work originally intended for two
36 Tom Brown, Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema.
37 Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (London:
Free Association Books, 1987), p. 39.
38 Catherine Grant, ‘Uncanny Fusion? Remixing Childhood Cinephilia’, and, ‘How long is
a piece of string? On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and Criti-
cism’, The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies,
September 2014, Web.
soloists, a female choir, and an orchestra. I thought of this favourite piece

of music for this purpose primarily because of its apt title (which I alluded
to when I named the Vine The Chosen Maiden [2013]), but also because of
the overall mood of La Damoiselle élue, with the contemplative spacing
of its first notes, which also seemed to suit the re-filmed images. As I was
preparing to write this reflection, I discovered that Debussy had based
his cantata on Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1850 poem
‘The Blessed Damozel’, which he also later illustrated in an oil painting by
the same title in 1875-1878. Curiously, and (consciously) unbeknown to me
when I made the Vine, all these works turn out to stage an uncanny ocular
encounter – and a direct address – across a normally unbreachable divide:
a prematurely deceased Damozel looks down from heaven to observe her
still earth-bound, still alive lover, and expresses her unfulfilled yearning
for their reunion.
As my discussion above reveals, as does the sheer number of audiovisual
studies involving moments of direct address that I have been drawn to
making, I believe that cinephiliac videographic explorations are par-
ticularly generative when it comes to the working through (or the acting
out) of (my) unconscious spectatorial processes.39 Although I’m still not
sure why I (and presumably others, judging by the relative ubiquity of
these moments in the cinema, at least) may be so deeply and at times
uncannily attached to ‘breaking the fourth wall’ moments, I will undoubt-
edly go on to produce much more exploratory ‘talk’ about this. But, in
the meantime, it is clearer to me that The Chosen Maiden loop, the final
sequence of Unsentimental Education before it, and many of my other
videos have bought into being perhaps insubstantial yet always material
traces of what Paul Sutton has called the dynamic, ‘reconstructive and
creative’ aspects of ‘Nachträglichkeit spectatorship’, following Freud’s
concept of afterwardsness:
This process of spectatorship recreates the f ilms it ‘remembers’ and

articulates a certain kind of love at first sight (always already at second
sight) of the cinema, the expression of a kind of après-coup of the coup
de foudre. 40
39 See Catherine Grant, ‘Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address and Metalepsis in the
Cinema and other Media’, Film Studies For Free, for some examples; Catherine Grant ‘How long
is a piece of string?’
40 Paul Sutton, ‘Afterwardsness in film’, Journal for Cultural Research 8.3 (2004), pp. 385-405,
(p. 386).
My Vine experiment, my f irst video essay, and many others since, do

seem to me effectively to record and re-perform the ‘flashes of another
[more subjective] history’. 41 Viewed together, they are forging an ongoing
cinephiliac archive for my creative explorations of spectatorial experiences
in the (post-) digital age. For now, I know that, in placing my facticity as a
researcher and cinephile in relation to the at once ‘possessive’ and ‘pensive’
handling affordances of digital editing technology, I, like others, have been
able to reveal and materially think through knowledge (‘possession’ by a
cinematic look?) that I would have once disavowed, or denied, as I searched
for much more ‘acceptable’ scholarly objects.
Filmography
A Bout de souffle [feature film] Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Société Nouvelle de Cinéma-
tographie/Productions Georges de Beauregard/Impéria, France, 1960. 87 mins.
Belmondo as Bogie in A BOUT DE SOUFFLE (Godard, 1960) [user-generated content,
online] Creat. Catherine Grant. 16/09/2013, 6 secs [looping], [https://vine.co/v/
hnUUtKIiV96]
Les Bonnes femmes [feature film] Dir. Claude Chabrol. Paris Film/Panitalia, France/
Italy, 1960. 100 mins.
The Chosen Maiden [user-generated content, online] Creat. Catherine Grant.
22/09/2013, 6secs [looping], [https://vine.co/v/hrZHqnQ9Wam]
Cinematic Direct Address Part One: Mapping the Field [user-generated content,
online] Creat. Catherine Grant with Tom Brown. 25/3/2013, 17mins 28secs,
[https://vimeo.com/62652453]
Cinematic Direct Address Part Two: You Looking at Me? [user-generated content,
online] Creat. Catherine Grant with Tom Brown. 9/4/2013, 18mins 40secs, [https://
vimeo.com/63654511]
Unsentimental Education [user-generated content, online] Creat. Catherine Grant.
30/06/2009, 13mins 32secs, [https://vimeo.com/5392396]
You Looking at Me? [user-generated content, online] Creat. Catherine Grant.
24/2/2013, 2mins 42secs, [https://vimeo.com/60388474]
41 Christian Keathley, ‘The Cinephiliac Moment’.

Bibliography
Basilico, Stefano. ‘The Editor’, in Cut: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video,
ed. by Stefano Basilico (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2004), pp. 29-45.
Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought
Known (London: Free Association Books, 1987).
Bolt, Barbara. ‘Heidegger, Handlability and Praxical Knowledge’, Australian Council
of University Art and Design Schools Conference, 2004, Web.
Bolt, Barbara. ‘The Magic is in Handling’, in Practice as Research: Approaches to
Creative Arts Enquiry, ed. by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2007), pp. 27-34.
Brown, Tom. Breaking the Fourth Wall: Direct Address in the Cinema (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
Crook, Jordan. ‘Twitter’s 6-Second Video Sharing App, Vine, Goes Live In The App
Store’. Tech Crunch (24 January 2013), Web.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
Grant, Catherine, ‘Online Film Audio-Commentaries and Video Essays of Note’. Film
Studies For Free (28 November 2008), Web.
Grant, Catherine. ‘Auteur machines? Auteurism and the DVD’, in Film and Television
After DVD, ed. by James Bennett and Tom Brown (London: Routledge, 2008),
pp. 101-115.
Grant, Catherine. ‘Bonus Tracks: The Making of Touching the Film Object and Skip-
ping ROPE (Through Hitchcock’s Joins)’. Frames 1.1 (2012), Web.
Grant, Catherine. ‘Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film
Studies’. Mediascape (Winter 2013), Web.
Grant, Catherine. ‘How Long is a Piece of String? On the Practice, Scope and Value of
Videographic Film Studies and Criticism’, Presentation at the Audiovisual Essay
Conference, Frankfurt Filmmuseum/Goethe University, 23-24 November 2013,
Web. Subsequently published as ‘How long is a piece of string? On the Practice,
Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and Criticism’. The Audiovisual
Essay: Practice and Theory of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies
(September 2014), Web.
Grant, Catherine. ‘The Use of an Illusion: Childhood cinephilia, object relations, and
videographic film studies’. Cinea, 19 June 2014. Web. https://cinea.be/the-use-an-
illusion-childhood-cinephilia-object-relations-and-videographic-film-studies/
Keathley, Christian. ‘La Caméra-Stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia’,
in The Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. by Alex Clayton and Andrew
Klevan (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 176-191.
Keathley, Christian. ‘The Cinephiliac Moment’. Framework 42 (2000), Web.
Loh, Maria H. ‘Still Life: An Interview with Laura Mulvey’. The Art Book 14.1 (2007),
Web.
Michelson, Annette. ‘The Kinetic Icon in the work of Mourning: Prolegomena for
the Analysis of a Textual System’. October 52 (Spring 1990), pp. 16-39; cited by
Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, p. 193.
Mittell, Jason. ‘How to Rip DVD Clips’. The Chronicle of Higher Education [Professor
Hacker Column], 12 August 2010, Web.
Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reak-
tion Books, 2006).
Olszanowski, Flora Magdalena, with Will Lockett, ‘Rhythm Aesthetics: Vine &
contemporary mobile moving image production practices’, In Media Res: Vine
and the Short-Form Video [November 4-November 8] (5 November 2013), Web.
Proctor, Jennifer. ‘That’s a really interesting [comment]’. In Media Res: Vine and the
Short-Form Video [November 4-November 8] (4 November 2013), Web.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. ‘The Blessed Damozel [1850]’, in The Poetical Works, 2 vols.,
ed. by William Michael Rossetti (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1913), pp. 1-7.
Scherer, Christina. Ivens, Marker, Godard, Jarman – Erinnerung im Essayfilm
(Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001).
Sutton, Paul. ‘Afterwardsness in film’. Journal for Cultural Research 8.3 (2004),
pp. 385-405.
About the Author
Catherine Grant is Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck

College, University of London, UK. A prolific video essayist, and writer about
video essays (among other subjects), as well as a publisher and curator of
such works (including at the annual ICA/Birkbeck Essay Film Festival,
Film Studies For Free, and Audiovisualcy), she is founding co-editor of the
first peer-reviewed publication for audiovisual essays on film and media
studies topics, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image
Studies, which was awarded the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Anne
Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award of Distinction for 2015.
11. The Home Movie as Essay Film:
On Making Memory Posthumously
Thomas Elsaesser †
Abstract
The chapter outlines the posthumous constellations that led to the making
of Thomas Elsaesser’s essay film The Sun Island, about his grandfather,
Martin Elsaesser, chief city architect in Frankfurt during the Weimar
Republic. It reflects on the migration of non-theatrical film material into
archives and art spaces, encouraging the emergence of found footage
as essay film, but it also makes a case for The Sun Island as ‘home mov-
ies re-purposed’ in order to highlight the specifics of home movies as a
historically and politically important practice. While acknowledging his
father as ‘author’, whose images the film ‘appropriates’, The Sun Island also
revisits topics associated with Thomas’s own film historical writings:
family melodrama; German cinema; media archaeology; history, memory,
and trauma.
Keywords: home movies, ethics of appropriation, Weimar/Nazi Germany,

architecture, Frankfurt, Berlin
The Past and the Posthumous
In 2007, through circumstances not entirely of my own choosing, I found

myself resurrecting a family ancestor, my grandfather, the architect, Martin
Elsaesser.1 I was asked to write a biographical essay for a catalogue accom-
panying a retrospective of his work at the Deutsche Architekturmuseum
1 Martin Elsaesser (1884-1957), German architect, author, and university professor. See
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Elsaesser]; [http://www.architekten-portrait.de/
martin_elsaesser/].
doi 10.5117/9789463728706_ch11
216 THOMAS ELSAESSER
Frankfurt. The exhibition honoured him as one of the chief city architects
in Frankfurt between 1925 and 1932, during the peak years of what came to
be called Das Neue Bauen.2 His key building from the period, the Frankfurt
Central Market, had been acquired by the European Central Bank in 2004
as the site of the Bank’s new headquarters. Although a listed building and
therefore protected as a national monument, the Grossmarkthalle was
under threat: the plans envisaged by the Central Bank – along with the
notoriously deconstructionist impulses of the star architect designing the
ensemble – meant that the integrity of the building, and thus its value
as a historical landmark had to be sacrificed.3 The general context of the
retrospective was therefore as much an act of compensation or restitution as
it was of celebration and recognition: the temporary nature of the exhibition
and the online existence of the Foundation had to substitute for the physical
survival of the architect’s most famous building.
These, at times, painful encounters with an all-but-forgotten past and its
retroactive reappearance, touched on several general issues. 4 For instance,
I had to ask myself what does it mean to claim for someone the status of the
posthumous? According to the dictionary, posthumous refers to something
‘arising, occurring, or continuing after one’s death’,5 such as an award
being given to someone posthumously, or a reputation being shattered
posthumously. In which case, it also connotes something more troubling
than an afterlife, something to do with another kind of life after death: an
unquiet, restless undead-ness, something unresolved or unredeemed that
returns to haunt the living.
Such a version of the posthumous is introduced by Jeremy Tambling, in
his book Becoming Posthumous.6 Tambling makes a distinction between
writers and works we consider classics: immediately accessible, recognized
as relevant today as they were in their time (he mentions Shakespeare
and Jane Austen). On the other hand, there are writers or works that were
‘already not quite alive in [their] own time’, and whose afterlife requires
2 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Building Blocks for a Biography’, in Martin Elsaesser and the New Frankfurt,
ed. by Peter Cachola Schmal, Thomas Elsaesser, Christina Graewe, and Jörg Schilling (Tübingen:
Wasmuth, 2009), pp. 21-29.
3 Prominent voices of protest were the architecture critic Dieter Bartetzko, ‘Der EZB Neubau
– Ein Euro-Krüppel’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21 Febrary 2007, and the architect Christoph
Mäckler [http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/grossmarkthalle-frankfurt-zerstoerung-
im-namen-der-avantgarde-1380634.html].
4 [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fmarkthalle_(Frankfurt_am_Main)]
5 [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/posthumous]
6 Jeremy Tambling, Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously 217
or must benefit from a special kind of constellation.7 This would be the

condition of the posthumous in the case of the extraordinary fame of
Franz Kafka in the 1950s and 1960s, or of Walter Benjamin’s reputation
since the mid-1970s.
The condition of the posthumous implies a special relation of past to
present that no longer follows the direct linearity of cause and effect, but
takes the form of a loop, in which the present rediscovers a certain past, to
which it attributes the power to shape aspects of the future that are now
our present. We are in the temporality of the posthumous, whenever we
retroactively discover the past to have been prescient and prophetic, as seen
from the point of view of some special problem or urgent concern in the here
and now. In other words, we retroactively create a past and a predecessor, in
order to assure ourselves not only of a pedigree, but to legitimate the present.
The particular constellation, which made the condition of the posthumous
a pressing concern for me, thus went beyond writing the catalogue entry. To
assist the curators of the exhibition, I had gone through my father’s family
albums and photo collection in search of visual material that could illustrate
my grandfather’s life. That’s when I came across my father’s home movies
from the 1940s, which we saw as children projected on a makeshift screen.
Remembering that some of them featured my grandfather, I managed to
edit together two seven-minute video loops. These home movies proved a
major attraction for the visitors; even though the time was ten years after
his Frankfurt period, and the place appeared to be his summer house on
an island near Berlin.
Tasked with establishing a Martin Elsaesser archive and with promoting
the foundation, I decided the home movies might make a film that com-
memorates his life to complement the scholarly focus on his work in the
catalogue and other publications.8 As a historian with a predilection for early
cinema and some knowledge of German film history, I had already been
publishing on non-theatrical films, such as industrial films and instructional
films, including on documentaries about architecture and urbanism.9
7 Tambling, Becoming Posthumous, p. 4.

8 See also Hermann Hipp and Roland Jäger (eds.), Haus K. in O. 1930-32. Eine Villa von Martin
Elsaesser für Philipp F. Reemtsma (Hamburg: Gebrüder Mann, 2005); Thomas Elsaesser, Jörg
Schilling, and Wolfgang Sonne (eds.), Martin Elsaesser, Schriften (Zurich: Niggli Verlag, 2014);
and Elisabeth Spitzbart Jörg Schilling, Martin Elsaesser Kirchenbauten, Pfarr- und Gemeinde-
häuser (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2014).
9 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Die Stadt von Morgen: Bauen und Wohnen im nicht-fiktionalen Film
der 20er Jahre’, in Der Dokumentarfilm in Deutschland: 1919-1933, ed. by K. Kreimeier (Stuttgart,
Leipzig: Reclam, 2005), pp. 381-409.
We all dream of making our own Sans Soleil (Chris Marker’s seminal,
moving, and poetic essay film) and I greatly admired Respite/Aufschub (2008),
Harun Farocki’s found footage reconstruction of life in a Nazi deportation
camp in the Netherlands in 1944.10 But I began to orientate myself more by
the personal documentaries embedded in larger histories, for instance, those
by Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March, 1985; Bright Leaves, 2003) and Alan
Berliner (The Family Album, 1986; Nobody’s Business, 1996). I also studied Su
Friedrich’s Sink or Swim (1990), Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect (2003), and
Doug Block’s 51 Birch Street (2003).
These films by professional directors and visual artists quickly made me
realize that there was no way I was going to turn myself into a film-maker: I
just needed to make a film. The problem: I did not have a story. Or rather, I
had two stories that had little to do with each other: one set in Frankfurt, in
the present, and centred on the fate of my grandfather’s landmark building,
on the lawsuit, the protests, the out-of-court settlement, the exhibition, and
the setting up of the foundation. And that other story which may or may not
be hidden in the two hours’ worth of uncut home-movies material, mostly
shot between 1940 and 1944, and set in and around Berlin.
This other story involved not just my grandfather, but also my grand-
mother, my father, his two sisters and younger brother, my future mother, her
brother, and their mother. Overshadowing these members of my extended
family was another person, also an architect, and my grandmother’s great
love and long-time lover, Leberecht Migge. Anxiety over my family-centred
self-indulgence was aggravated by the fear of indiscretion – of betraying
the dead, rather than rescuing them: feelings which I tried to keep at bay by
persuading myself that there were extenuating circumstances and mitigating
factors that had forced my hand. First, both my grandfather (entirely thanks
to the ECB’s controversial plans for their acquisition) and my grandmother’s
lover (rediscovered as one of the fathers of the green movement in Germany
because of his fervent advocacy of urban gardening, waste recycling, and
ecological sustainability) had attained a certain topicality. Second, another
protagonist, my grandmother, perhaps deserved a place in posterity and
in the public domain, precisely because she is just one of the many women
from the first half of the 20th century who were instrumental in bringing
about changes in all kinds of fields, but who have remained in the shadow of
their more famous, but often also more fallible men. For her, the posthumous
10 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Holocaust Memory as an Epistemology of Forgetting –Harun Farocki’s

Respite’, in Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom?, ed. by Antje Ehmann and Kodwo
Eshun (London: Koenig Books, 2009), pp. 57-68.
comes as a way of making amends, or, in the words of Hannah Arendt: such
posthumous fame is ‘the lot of the unclassifiable ones […] those whose work
neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself
to future classification’.11
The Essay Film
Even if not conceived as an essay film in the manner of Marker or Farocki,

I still wanted to sustain a personal point of view that relied less on the
single voice – embodied in the obligatory off-screen commentary – but
instead present a subjectivity that was manifest more in the tonality of the
tentative exploration, in the cautious steps moving forward, across briefly
glimpsed traces of past events, while interrogating the historical footage,
yet letting the images speak about what they wanted to say (or carefully
tried to hide). But I also intended to question the epistemological status
of the home-movie scenes – whether caught on the fly or carefully staged:
their truth status and evidentiary force. I wanted to involve the spectator
in the process of discovery, as well as borrow the essay film’s constitutive
reflexivity and self-reference. Reflexivity, in that I am not just showing
these images because they evoke a bygone age, or present my family as if
still alive: I am re-presenting this footage for a purpose, even if I did not
yet quite know what this purpose was. And self-reference, because these
images are the material residue of an act of f ilming, itself inflected by
intention and purpose, and not pretending to deliver transparent access
to the reality they depict, or open a window on a world as it once was, and
that is now lost forever.
The editing phase was productive (and painful) in that it made me
focus on the differences between documentary, essay f ilm, and home
movie, as well as between making a film for myself and making a film for
television. And it obliged me to think more critically about the relation
between today’s film culture and practical film-making, as the distinction
between amateur and professional has become less a matter of craft and
inspiration, and more a matter of capital and resources; less about access
to tools and technology and more about access to institutions and insiders.
In short: when – thanks to digital software and the Internet – everyone
can be a film-maker and upload their work on Vimeo or YouTube, what is
11 Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Jonathan Cape,

1970), pp. 1-51 (p. 3).
an author, what is art, and what is self-advertising? Acting on behalf of the

Martin Elsaesser Foundation to promote its goals, my task was to access
the institution, which is to say, television and, through television, try to
reach the public sphere, and not to claim avant-garde status or to expect
auteur treatment.
Lieux de Memoire between the Materiality of Memory and

Historical Topographies
If now – after many screenings of the film and after its television broadcast
– I return once more to the external circumstances and posthumous constel-
lation that made me make The Sun Island, it is to resume my role as film
historian and theorist. I had begun to draw some further conclusions about
the stakes involved, when utilizing found footage, incorporating amateur
film, or when grappling with the ethics of appropriation.12 On the face of
it, The Sun Island belongs to the by-now almost clichéd genre of the ‘family
film’, in which sons or daughters make a film about their fathers, mothers,
or parents, by sifting through home movies, letters, and family albums that
have been passed down to them. Often, in such films, the memory of the
dead becomes a mirror for the film-makers’ fragile egos: to study who they
are, to ponder the roads not taken, or to reflect on what they have become.
The genre, therefore, is part of the broader movement of identity politics:
we are a culture mindful of our precariousness, fearful for our future, and
are forever searching for ‘roots’. Yet, for this self-scrutiny or self-affirmation,
we increasingly draw on audiovisual sources, as the lived embodiment and
visible complement to the genes, the bloodlines, and DNA that biologically
bind us to past generations.
On the other hand, the quest for roots and personal identity is, in
turn, embedded, especially in Europe, in the general memory discourse,
which, in Germany, is inescapably shaped by and caught up in the various
12 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Die Geschichte, das Obsolete und der found footage Film’, in Ortsbestim-
mungen: Das Dokumentarische zwischen Kino und Kunst, ed. by Eva Hohenberger, Katrin Mundt
(Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2016), pp. 135-155; and Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Film Heritage and the Ethics of
Appropriation/ Filmska bastina i etika prisvajanja’, in Muzej filma – Film u Muzeeju (Informatica
Museological 47), ed. by in Lada Drazin Trbuljak (Zagreb: MDC, 2017), pp. 6-13. Also published
as: ‘La ética de la apropiación: El metraje encontrado entre el archivo e internet’, in [http://
foundfootagemagazine.com], ed. by César Ustarroz and as ‘Zur Ethik der Aneignung: Found Foot-
age’, (Berlin-DokuArts: Fachtagung ‘Recycled Cinema’, Zeughaus Kino, Berlin 11 September 2014)
[http://doku-arts.de/2013-14/content/sidebar_fachtagung/Thomas-Elsaesser.pdf].
The Sun Island (Thomas Elsaesser, Germany, 2017), screenshot.
‘mastering-the-past’ cultures of commemoration, beginning in the 1970s

but taking off in earnest after reunification in 1990.13 And, while in my
case, there was no ‘quest for personal identity’ that initiated the film, it
would have been foolish of me not to own up to the memory and identity
discourses that The Sun Island now finds itself part of. Indeed, one of the
outcomes of the give-and-take between the producer and myself was that
the film became ever more ‘personal’, even autobiographical: fully cognisant
of the fact that it had to be the ‘family film’ genre which would serve as the
matrix of recognition by which a German television audience could make
affective and interpretative contact with The Sun Island.
One of the strongest discourses of memory and remembrance since the
1990s has been Pierre Nora’s notion of the ‘lieu de mémoire’ (the site of
memory).14 On a much smaller scale, both temporally and geographically,
but partly inspired by Nora, I tried, in The Sun Island, to reconstruct, but,
in the end, also to invent, the memory map of an ‘île de mémoire’ (an island
13 See for instance, Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions,
Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Thomas Elsaesser, German
Cinema – Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945 (New York: Routledge 2015).
14 Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-1992).
of memory), based on this actual island located not far from Berlin, where,
to quote Marina Warner, ‘ecology and stewardship’ were ‘interconnected
with memory and stories’.15 This particular lieu de mémoire appears to the
eye – and from the air – as a site of pristine nature, but turns out to be a
site that bears its own scars of memory and traces of a once-lived history.
In the course of plotting and recording these slow cycles of regenerative
destruction, I discovered several other cycles of value creation and value
destruction, binding together nature and culture. It turned out that the
photographs, letters, administrative records, and home movies from which
I had to piece together the story of The Sun Island, both metaphorically
and literally, prolonged this transfer of decay and regeneration, insofar as,
especially my father’s home movies and my grandmother’s letters, gave
another twist to the human-history/natural-history interface, when I began
to restore decaying film stock and had to decipher Gothic script. Digitizing
both the images and the letters added another layer to the value exchange:
the gain in legibility was a loss in authenticity, and yet, it is invariably the
intervention of a new technology that confers added value to an object’s
obsolescence.16
The Sun Island as a lieux de mémoire is intimately linked to another
historical topography: Berlin. Berlin has engendered its own cultural
memory, made up of images and music, buildings and ruins, clichés and
discoveries, f iction and critical discourse. As almost everyone writing
about the city notes, it is a very peculiar kind of chronotope. 17 In fact,
ever since the nineteenth century, Berlin has been a city of multiple
temporalities, and of diverse modalities: virtual and actual, divided and
united, created and destroyed, repaired and rebuilt. Living in a perpetual
mise en scène of its own history, a history it both needs and fears, reinvents
and disowns, Berlin is a city of superimpositions and erasures, full of the
ghosts and ‘special effects’ that are the legacy of Nazism and Stalinism,
obliged to remember totalitarian crimes while still mourning socialist
utopias.18
15 Marina Warner, ‘What are Memory Maps’, [http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/m/

memory-maps-about-the-project/].
16 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Media Archaeology and the Poetics of Obsolescence’, in At the Borders
of Film History, ed. by Alberto Beltrame, Giuseppe Fidotta, and Andrea Mariani (Udine: Gorizia
Film Forum, 2014), pp. 103-116.
17 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination:
Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84-258.
18 See Andrew J. Webber, Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011).
What Marina Warner presumably also means by ‘stewardship’ – and it

applies with singular force to film, one of the most physically fragile and yet
imaginatively powerful archives of evidentiary ‘presence’ – is stewardship
as a form of trust, nowhere more so than in my particular instance, where
most of the materials I depended on for The Sun Island film do not belong
in the public domain, but are, in every sense, ‘private property’. Not only is
the island private property (which I ‘trespassed’, when filming there), but
the home movies and amateur photographs – which I complemented by
drawing on personal correspondence, love letters, and poems – concern
public persons at moments when they were at their most intensely private
and vulnerable.
Yet the realities they document also belong to a collective ‘history’,
insofar as these letters and movies, these literary and photographic tokens
of friendship and rivalry, of courtship and passion, of tragedy and trauma,
are also the only extant evidence and testimony to an ‘experiment in living
differently’: Migge’s project of urban self-sufficiency, refuse recycling, and of
a maintenance-and-sustainability economy that was meant to be emulated,
propagated, and made public. In inspiration, location, and implementation,
the island experiment thus belongs to the history of Berlin and of German
modernism, to the extent that one family’s filmic memories can mutate
and metamorphose into a historical topography.
The Home Movie as Discourse and Practice
It is partly this historicity and the peculiarly specif ic acts of symbolic

transfer and material-immaterial exchange, which – in my contest with
the producer over the f ilm’s formal structure and narrative arc – per-
suaded me that it was ultimately in the film’s best interest not to insist
on making it the sort of essay f ilm I had once imagined and had even
sketched out on paper. Instead, it is worth examining more closely the
original discourse and practice into which my father’s f ilms inscribe
themselves, before they became The Sun Island, namely, that of the home
movie. Here, then, are some of the defining criteria, as well as the points
of contention that arise when home movies are re-edited, repurposed,
and re-presented.19
19 In what follows, I have chosen to engage in an extended dialogue with Roger Odin. Not only
is he the writer who has thought more systematically and penetratingly about home movies
than anyone I know, he is also a friend and colleague – with whom I once had a memorable
How Do We Identify and Recognize a Home Movie?
Roger Odin, probably the world’s foremost scholar of home movies puts it
crisply and succinctly:
Nothing resembles a home movie as much as another one. […] The same
ritual ceremonies (marriage, birth, family meals, gift-giving), the same
daily scenes (a baby in his mother’s arms, a baby having a bath), the same
vacation sequences (playtime on the beach, walks in the forest) appear
across most home movies.20
In this respect, the footage left to me by my father answers very precisely to

this description: he recorded family meals, several birthdays, and different
leisurely pursuits. Prominent in these home movies are the Boccia games
so beloved by my grandfather, a volleyball game when my father’s work
colleagues came for the weekend, and, as for playtime on the beach, there
is the frolicking in the lake, caught in glorious Kodak colour by a camera at
water level. Regarding ‘a baby in his mother’s arms, a baby having a bath’:
these scenes, too, are duly present. It is as if Odin was describing my father’s
films, but that is exactly the point he is making: he has seen them, because
‘once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all’.21
discussion regarding home movies. Odin’s major publications on the topic are: Roger Odin (ed.),
Le film de famille usage privé, usage public (Paris: Meridien-Klincksieck, 1999); Roger Odin, ‘Ch
5: Espace de communication et migration: L’exemple du f ilm de famille’, in Roger Odin, Les
espaces de communication (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires des Grenoble), pp. 103-122; Roger
Odin, ‘Reflections on the Family Home Movie as Document: A Semio-Pragmatic Approach’,
in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories, ed. by Karen
Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmerman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 255-271;
Roger Odin, ‘The Amateur in Cinema, in France, Since 1990: Definitions, Issues, and Trends’,
in A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, ed. by Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle
Moine, and Hilary Radner (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 590-610.
20 Roger Odin, in Mining the Home Movie, p. 261.
21 Scholarly interest in amateur film-making and home movies has grown substantially in the
last decades. Besides Odin, Patricia Zimmerman has been a major pioneer: her Reel Families:
A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) was followed
by Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmerman (eds.), Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into
Historical and Cultural Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Other important
collections are Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young, and Barry Monahan (eds.), Amateur Filmmak-
ing: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and two
monographs in German: Alexandra Schneider, Die Stars sind wir: Heimkino als filmische Praxis
(Marburg: Schüren, 2004) and Martina Roepke, Privat-Vorstellung: Heimkino in Deutschland vor
1945 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2006).
Who Makes Home Movies?
Odin also offers a definition of the home movie as a family film (in French,
home movies are ‘films de famille’), namely ‘a film that is contrived to
function within the space of familial communication: it is made by one
member of a family for the other members of the family, about the history
of the family’.22 This, too, applies to my father’s material: 70 per cent of what
I have takes place and was shot on the island, about 10 per cent on skiing
trips in the Alps, and the rest indoors or at other locations.
Where my father’s home movies differ is that, traditionally, it is the father
who films his own family and thereby affirms, consolidates, or enforces
his own authority. In my case, it was the son who filmed the family, and,
once he had his own family, he seems to have lost interest in filming. As
it happens, the island was a matriarchal space, and my grandfather – the
father figure who should have been behind the camera – had already given
up or lost his paternal authority.
But ‘who makes home movies’ also points to another factor. In the 1930s
and 1940s, portable cine-cameras were still a rarity and a luxury item, making
home movies of that period indicators of a well-to-do bourgeois family.
This is evidently the case with my grandfather, a renowned if unemployed
and unemployable architect during the time in question. Yet his son – a
passionate photographer, owner of an expensive Rolleiflex since his fifteenth
birthday – seems to have acquired the cine-camera quite late, only once he
had settled in his first real job and was earning a salary.
Since then, the class-index of home movies has all but vanished. The
advent of video and the camcorder meant that anyone can and does make
home movies, which may or may not affect their value as documents. The
arrival of more affordable equipment and the exponential increase in the
quantity of amateur film, has given their celluloid-based precursors, such as
those standard 8 film strips of my father’s from the 1940s, an extra distinction
of scarcity value, quite apart from the fact that they were silent witnesses
or unwitting observers of one of the 20th century’s most momentous and
catastrophic historical decades. After the camcorder came the mobile
phone: this latest shift in technology – taking movies with your smartphone
– not only makes of home movies a corpus so vast that no human and only
machines can keep track of their proliferation. It also confers on home movies
from these earlier technologies yet another value: that of obsolescence,
which registers as a precious materiality, a guarantee of authenticity, and
22 Roger Odin, in Companion to French Cinema, p. 591.

a promise of pristine veracity, all gained through hindsight, and subject to

the posthumous.
Who Speaks in the Home Movie and to Whom is it Addressed?
I’ve long puzzled over this question – whom do my father’s home movies
address? Odin is quite clear and categorical: in home movies, the family
speaks to itself about itself; they are entirely self-referential. But, inside this
self-reference, there are nuances and enigmas, tensions and even contradic-
tions. In my father’s case, it is possible and even likely that different events
and circumstances occasioned the individual pieces of footage, because,
with some notable exceptions, all of which I use in The Sun Island, the films
are neither edited nor do they follow a discernible narrative arc. Odin offers
a persuasive explanation:
To function well, the family film needs to be compiled as a non-organized

succession of shots that present mere snippets of family life so that each
member is free to construe the family’s story in their own way, while
sharing a reconstruction of the family’s story with the other members.
In summary, the family film must not have an author if it is to allow the
family to speak across itself: this is its ideological function ‒ to produce
a consensus in order to perpetuate the family.23
I shall come back to the question of authorship, but, what cannot be empha-
sized enough is that, in my case, the son and not the father shot the films. For
a long time, therefore, I thought he used the island and the family as a mere
pretext, because what really fascinated him was the wind-up cine-camera,
the machine itself, and what one could do with the apparatus: especially
given that he was an engineer by profession, and a bricoleur by passion. In
the film, I point out that this may have predicated him for making home
movies, the bridge being ‘montage in its original meaning’.24
23 Roger Odin, in Companion to French Cinema, p. 592.

24 What also struck me is how, in the scene shot among the boats in the lake, my father must
have stood in the water with his precious camera, even using expensive and rare colour stock, to
film the mixed company ducking and diving in the waves of the lake, so close to the water level
that one is almost afraid of the water ruining the camera. What must have been exhilarating
is the extreme mobility of the handheld device, comparable to today’s camcorders or mobile
phones. The Cine-Kodak had a clockwork wind-up mechanism: no need for a battery or any
other electric source.
However, this does not exhaust the possibilities of whom the home movies
address. In The Sun Island, for instance, I tentatively make the case that my
father used his camera to woo his future wife, who, at that time, was still
nurturing the hurt of a broken engagement. As her letters attest, she was
more attracted to the dashing writer who occasionally visited the island
with his wife, and even to Sebastian (eleven years her junior) than she was
to my father, whom she considered socially inept, chaotic, and nerdy. Three
of the plainly ‘staged’ films are meant to win her over: one paints the idyll
of a couple in love, the other shows them enjoying the domestic bliss of
getting up on a sunny morning in their joint apartment, and the third has
the two of them sharing Sunday brunch on the island.
While making the film, yet another possible addressee imposed herself:
the short instruction films I call ‘docu-manuals’, which show Leberecht
Migge’s patented settler implements in action – tent hut, cold frames,
compost silo, dry toilet – are clearly meant to honour my grandmother’s
dead lover, and are therefore addressed to her, by way of document, homage,
and monument. At once very personal gifts, the historical value of these
sequences is nonetheless considerable, since they confirm that the Sun
Island was indeed an experimental laboratory station, and not just a love
nest (during the 1930s) and a refuge (in the 1940s).
What is the Documentary Status of Home Movies?
Given the cliché situations and repetitions of events, the direct informational
value of home movies would seem to be low. Home movies are a little like
dreams: fascinating or troubling to the dreamer (the members of the fam-
ily), tediously repetitive or inconsequential to anyone outside. Yet, the
world at large (and not just film historians) seems to have recognized the
documentary value of home movies in a variety of ways. To be noted is the
remarkable migration of home movies and amateur film-making from the
attics, shoeboxes, and flea markets to film archives, special collections, and
institutions expressly set up to preserve such materials. One can easily list
some two dozen archives in France, Germany, Belgium, Britain, the United
States, but also in Cambodia, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada that
specialize in home movies or amateur films. The same archival impulse
animates institutions dedicated to regional history: important centres
of home-movie collections in the United Kingdom, for instance, are the
East Anglia Film Archive, the North West Film Archive in Manchester,
and the Scottish Film Council. Then, there is a special urgency to preserve
amateur film in countries that have suffered historical disasters – civil

war, genocide, ethnic cleansing – which may explain the existence of the
Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh (Cambodia), set
up by the film-maker Rithy Panh, his country’s foremost director of films
about cultural memory and national trauma.
Are Home Movies Counter Narratives?
In the case of Cambodia, as in many other countries, an interest in the

archiving of amateur films and home movies may well be guided by the
need to possess non-canonical representations and thereby also to col-
lect non-official sources of information. These often serve in the salvage
or construction of a counter-memory, which, in turn, can be a powerful
instrument in uncovering forgotten, repressed, or obliterated events in
the lives of nations or individuals. More than oral testimony and less than
evidence before a court of law, such documents have a potency of their own
when enlisted in struggles for minority rights or restorative justice, after
civil wars, or religious or ethnic conflict. One of the reasons why there has
been such an interest in home movies is that epithets such as ‘alternative’,
‘resisting’, ‘anti’, and ‘counter’ lend themselves quite readily for this corpus,
in line with a more general tendency to ‘activate the archive’.25
Home Movies are the Sunday Edition
However, an equally productive approach to locating the ‘political’ signifi-

cance might be to dwell on the discrepancy, so typical of home movies,
between what is in the picture and what is kept off-frame. This can be
extremely frustrating to historians, so much so that many professionals
dismiss home movies as unreliable or even misleading evidence. Yet, the
discrepancy can also offer unexpected benefits, since these gaps, once
recognized as such, create openings in other directions. Quite generally,
the intense public interest in home movies, family histories, found footage,
vintage postcards, and photographs is not only due to a nostalgic appetite
for a past we always imagine more authentic than the present, or to the hope
25 See the conference ‘Activating the Archive: Audio-Visual Collections and Civic Engagement,
Political Dissent and Societal Change’ held at the EYE, Amsterdam, 26-29 May 2018 [https://
www.eyefilm.nl/themas/eye-international-conference-2018].
of recovering there the voices of the silenced and oppressed. It also signals
the broader cultural shift in favour of audiovisual, rather than written
documents, as physical evidence for this past. We are now so used to having
everything that matters recorded and stored in sound and images, that
the written word, along with the material world, increasingly comes to be
seen (and be used as) corroborating illustration of the audiovisual record.
Gone is the time when images were regarded as merely the representation
of a pre-existing reality, of which they were expected to be the faithful and
truthful servants.
Such an almost ontological switch depends quite clearly on a different set
of default values. The visual record will be preferred for its special qualities:
of self-evidence, of immediacy, of presence and authenticity. These qualities
are, of course, not necessarily historical or epistemological – indeed, they
are primarily aesthetic. Once we accept that home movies euphemize,
select, and filter, we can look for their ‘truth’ somewhere other than in their
‘representational’ veracity. They force us to shift from a realist paradigm to
a different hermeneutic strategy: we need to develop special skills to read
and interpret the visual record, perhaps especially in the case of home
movies and other non-canonical materials from the archives and the attics.
As Roger Odin puts it: it is always possible that ‘a film of minor importance
can suddenly become a fabulous document when the historical context of
reading changes’.26
If we are, indeed, in the aesthetic regime, as Jacques Rancière would
claim,27 new frames of reference come into view: first of all, any re-viewing of
home movies made 70 years ago – even prior to any editing and compilation
– constitutes a reframing. Secondly, such reframing requires a hermeneutics
that not only reads what is there, in the light of hindsight and present preoc-
cupations, but also interprets absences as having their own kind of presence.
Correspondingly, the challenge for the curator-film-maker when reframing
home movies in their own work, is to make silences become eloquent, but
not to fill them with words (or more images). A reading against the grain,
a reading that engages the home movie or amateur film in what it does not
say outright, means listening to what it cannot say, but nonetheless gives
away or conjures up through absence.28
26 Roger Odin, in Mining the Home Movie, p. 262.

27 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 9-46.
28 Here and elsewhere, I use home movies and amateur film as if they were interchangeable,
ignoring that there is a body of writing that tries to draw clear distinctions. For Liz Czach, for
instance, amateur films tend to be evaluated for their aesthetic qualities and technical ambitions,
while the generally less technically accomplished home movies are appreciated for their cultural
The Sun Island tries to be mindful of this challenge. For instance, the
description of a horrific night of firebombing in Berlin, and an equally
horrific incident of shot-down British pilots being left to rot in the sun on
a Berlin square runs parallel with images of morning gymnastics on the
island. More generally, the war, as, indeed, the entire Nazi regime, seems
to be happening off-screen, and must be inferred from scant mention in
the letters and a few words of commentary, such as the observation that we
are in the third year of the war, and women now do men’s work, while we
see three women in headscarves and aprons saw logs and chop firewood.
This virtual absence of the signs of Nazi rule and the war’s invisible
presence on the island is both faithful to the material – there is no extant
footage among my father’s films of military parades or street scenes with
jubilant crowds giving the Nazi salute – and a deliberate aesthetic choice,
hard-fought-for in my confrontations with the producer. I have been criti-
cized for this, also by audiences, notably in Germany and Britain, though
not in New York or Tel Aviv. The main argument is that I am too soft on
my family, who seems to have survived the war unscathed, and that I do
not press them too hard or come clean about their political views. I merely
mention that one son was part of the occupying forces in Paris, that the
daughters were in the compulsory Reich Labour Service, that the family’s
writer-friend was killed by a partisan sniper in Italy, that my father served
a few weeks in a communication battalion on Czech-Polish border, and that
my grandfather was drafted into the Volkssturm, the local militia, in the
last months of the war and spent time as a Soviet prisoner. ‘Where is the
“Kristallnacht”, where the Jews brutally pulled out of their Berlin homes,
where is Auschwitz?’ They ask. ‘Not in my father’s films’, I am obliged to
answer. Let each member of the audience draw their own conclusion, for
it was my experience while making The Sun Island that home movies give
away most, when one lets them speak in their own idiom. Much of this
idiom, as Odin reminds us, is celebratory in tone and tenor.
In The Sun Island, I call this ‘the Sunday edition of the family’. But given
the polysemic nature of the f ilmic image, there is nonetheless enough
evidence of realities outside – outside the frame and outside the island – to
be found right inside the images themselves, if one cares to look. Historians
or historical significance. ‘Home Movies and Amateur Film as National Cinema’, in Amateur
Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, ed. by Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young,
and Barry Monahan (New York, London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 27- 37. The hermeneutics I am
proposing can apply to both but may seem to favour the home movie. See also Carlo Ginzberg,
as well as symptomatic reading for structuring absences, and ‘the dogs that did not bark’ theory,
which takes me to ‘media archaeology’.
speak of documents as providing witting and unwitting testimony.29 What

is of interest here is the unwitting evidence – not necessarily in the sense of
a ‘gotcha!’ moment, not even primarily about the Nazi regime, but merely
pointing to some silent witness present, or to a shift in attention brought
about by the distance of the 70 years that separates us from these images. To
give just one example of the silent witness, providing unwitting testimony:
in one scene depicting my grandfather reading the papers, a radio can be
glimpsed on the shelf, which is unmistakably a Volksempfänger, the people’s
radio, introduced by the Nazi regime in much the same way it promoted
the ‘Volkswagen’, the people’s car. Except that the Volksempfänger was a
propaganda instrument, but also a surveillance apparatus for the State. Its
portable version, operated by batteries, without connection to the electricity
net – and clearly the version used on the island – carried a warning: ‘If used
to tune in to enemy broadcasts, owner will be liable to severe penalties,
including prison.’ Indices such as these resonate with the notion that home
movies have a special ‘reality effect’ because of their peculiarly ‘accidental
relationship with history’.30
The Traumas
This accidental relationship must, in certain cases, be given a stronger

reading: as the traces of a catastrophe that cannot but keep its origins
and consequences buried. Another name for such disasters, which only
manifest themselves in the form of accidents or parapraxes – slippages,
non-sequiturs, chaotic or congested images – is ‘trauma’: a familiar trope
in the discussion around the home movie. For instance, what in part oc-
casioned (and animates) the collection Mining the Home Movie is the film
Something Strong Within by Karen L. Ishizuka and Robert A. Nakamura,
which deploys amateur film and home movies to document the traumatic
impact of the WW II internment camps in California on Japanese families,
of which the home movies’ apparent normalcy is the numb testimony. In a
more theoretical essay, co-editor Patricia Zimmermann touches on trauma
via the ‘repressed’, the ‘absent’, ‘failure’, and ‘unresolved phantasmatics’:
29 The term ‘unwitting testimony’ comes from Arthur Marwick: ‘from at least the time of
Frederick Maitland (1850-1896), historians have been using unwitting testimony to establish
the beliefs and customs of past societies’. [https://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Whatishistory/
marwick1.html].
30 I take the phrase from Karen Shopsowitz, director of My Father’s Camera, quoted in Catherine
Tunnacliffe, ‘Filmmaker re-appraises home movie’, Eye vol. 10 issue 30 (5 March 2001).
Amateur films do not deploy any systematic cinematic language. They

reverse the relationship between text and context. Facts reveal fantasies,
and fantasies expose facts. They present psychic imaginaries of real
things, and figure material objects as psychic imaginaries. As a result, it is
necessary to cross-section the sedimentary layers of historical context to
deconstruct what is repressed and absent. Amateur films are often viewed
as cinematic failures infused by an innocent naivety and innocence, a
primitive cinema without semiotic density. Amateur films appear to lack
visual coherence because they occupy unresolved phantasmatics. These
lacks and insufficiencies create collisions between the political and the
psychic, between invisibility and visibility.31
In the context of German home movies from the period I am concerned

with, trauma is inevitable, and it is invariably linked to the Holocaust, or,
more particularly, the trauma of the eviction, deportation, and destruction
of hundreds of thousands of Jewish families and individuals from Germany.
By contrast, the disasters that befell the Germans themselves in the last
years of the war and in the years immediately after – the deaths of their
loved ones in a senseless and criminal war, the firebombs that destroyed
their homes, the mass expulsions from the East, the punitive rape of German
women – this could not be discussed and certainly not dignified with the
word ‘trauma’. Against this background, The Sun Island could be seen as part
of a kind of revisionist rewriting, where the Germans are finally allowed
to have their traumas and also feel like victims. Having written an entire
book on these issues, I am, of course, more than aware of such pitfalls, and
have been quite careful to make sure that the traumas in my film are of
a very personal and private nature, having to do with love and betrayal,
with a death foretold and inconsolable mourning – before these domestic
traumas reveal themselves to have connections with the historical traumas
after all, through my mother and maternal grandmother.
Framed by these different sets of references and reading contexts, several
layers of hypothetical narratives emerged from the moments of life frozen in
time and captured by my father in sometimes filtered, sometimes fortuitous
images. The overall horizon referenced, is, of course, the Second World War,
a concentration of an event of such enormous historical significance that
their all-but-total absence from more than two hours of film is itself one
of the most astounding fact about this footage. But, as pointed out above,
31 Patricia Zimmerman, ‘Morphing History into Histories: From Amateur Film to the Archive
of the Future’, Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in History and Memory, pp. 276-277.
there are ways of locating signs of presence, even in the absence of any
visible evidence of how we picture Hitler’s Germany.
An important reading context touches on the role these films played
within my own family: my sister and I, as children, grew up with these
films. They were shown on holidays, birthdays, when guests came, or as
a special treat. We loved the anticipation of the performance in the living
room, the white sheet that was hung up as the screen, the home-made stand
for the rattling projector, the tiny little reels, how delicately they had to
be threaded up, and how often the projection had to be stopped, because
there was a break in the brittle celluloid. I can still smell the acetate used
to glue them back together.
I now know that we did not see all of the films, and, for us, as children,
these moving images told the love story of our parents. It was especially
thrilling to see our parents, before they were our parents, and to see them
so happy and relaxed. By the 1950s, when we watched the films, this wasn’t
always the case. Like most families, ours faced some very tough times,
with my father out of work for several years, and us having to survive in
very provisional accommodation on the outskirts of the industrial town of
Mannheim. It took its toll on my mother and on the marriage. Surprisingly,
my father never seemed to have bothered to edit the footage into some kind
of coherent narrative; the reels were projected more or less as he had filmed
them, and in random order, and without contextualizing commentary. From
the late 1950s onwards, he lost interest in amateur movies, or found us as
a family not that inspiring, and so, from the time I was in my early teens,
the films faded from memory.
Only decades later did another layer come to surface. It was in 1989, when
I wanted to pay tribute to my mother for her 80th birthday, and had asked
my father’s permission to transfer the films to video. I put together a life
of my mother in photos, and then made a compilation of the scenes from
the home movies, where I thought the budding love between my parents
became most apparent. To my deep disappointment, my mother was not at
all pleased with my offering. As a surprise gift, we showed the film to a large
gathering of friends and family, but my mother felt it was an unauthorized
invasion of her privacy, that we had inadvertently revealed much more of
her personal life than she was willing to share.
It was then that I realized that the island had been not just a location
she happened to be during the war years, but a hideout, a place where she
could recover, in the company of an older woman, from the pain of a broken
engagement. As the daughter of a mixed marriage, she was not allowed to
marry an Aryan, and her Catholic fiancé had broken off the engagement very
suddenly, dropping her without word, making her wait and wait. With the
help of her brother, a university friend of my future father, she found a new
home on the island, shielded and protected from anti-Semitic persecution.
In other words, inside the parental love story that we children thought we
saw in the home movies, there was the personal tragedy and trauma of our
mother. Something she obviously did not wish to relive or expose to the
world. Now traumatized as well, I put the film material aside and did not
touch it, until about fifteen years later, when embarking on the Sun Island
film, I came to realize that, beneath my mother’s tragic love story, there
was another love story, also tragic and traumatic: that of my grandmother.
This story also emerged by accident, around 2005, after a lecture of mine
on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht’s Kuhle
Wampe (Who Owns the World?, 1932) at the Free University of Berlin. A young
man from Philadelphia, David Haney, introduced himself to me afterwards,
and asked if, by any chance, I was related to the architect Martin Elsaesser.
I answered in the affirmative, and he then wanted to know if the name
Leberecht Migge meant anything to me, since he was writing his PhD thesis
on the garden architect Migge, and he had come across the name Elsaesser,
as the city architect who had given Migge important commissions first in
Frankfurt and then in Hamburg. I said I had heard about Migge, but not in
connection with my grandfather, and more as the great passion and love of
my grandmother. I vaguely remembered a hush-hush story that it was for
Migge that my grandmother had left her husband and four children in the
late 1920s or early 1930s. David was dumbfounded, because he had never
heard about this liaison. All he knew was that Migge was a married man with
seven children living in Worpswede near Bremen, where, supposedly, he had
also died. The fact that he had actually died in a Flensburg clinic, with my
grandmother by his side, remains hidden to this day, and is struck from the
record. But, that his widow destroyed everything she could lay her hands on,
in the hope not only of obliterating every trace or memory of the affair, but
also of Migge’s life work, adds dimensions of anger and revenge, of despair
and grief that certainly traumatized my grandmother until she slipped into
dementia, but that must have traumatized the Migge family as well.
The Question of Authorship and Anonymity: Television and Art

Spaces
Even though The Sun Island was made for television and with television
money – which brought its own sets of constraints, some that were creative,
some that had to be resisted – I had few illusions about the chances of secur-
ing theatrical distribution for my film, and I was well aware that television
tends to use home movies in historical documentaries mainly because they
are cheap. But television also exploits home movies and amateur productions
as a shortcut to truth and authenticity, creating a kind of collusion with the
viewer. Odin sums it up:
[Television shows] invite me to see these images as images shot by people

‘like me’ (vs. professionals). Since then, these images appeal to me differ-
ently: they possess an emotional force specific, a force that pushes me to
accept them as they are, without questioning their enunciator in terms of
truth (their origin is the pledge of their innocence). I call this the mode of
authenticity, the mode which, while inviting me to construct or imagine
a real enunciator, forbids me to question him in terms of truth.32
Questioning the enunciator is indeed a major problem when dealing with

home movies. All too often, television instrumentalizes home movies to
the point of ‘harvesting’ them for a whole range of authenticity effects. Yet,
one wonders whether home movies fare much better when remediated and
repurposed by film-makers or in installation pieces. There, too, the tendency
is to anonymize them into found footage, to obfuscate their origins, the
easier to manipulate the material and make it serve new objectives
Yet, as Odin also reminds us: ‘the family film must not have an author if
it is to allow the family to speak across itself: this is its ideological function
(to produce a consensus in order to perpetuate the family)’.33 As indicated,
this was true in the case of my father, who rarely edited the footage he
shot, and it was true when screening the films among us family members:
everyone talked, interjected, pointed out what was coming next, or started
to tell an anecdote – except my father, who stayed silent: a mourner among
the socializing family and guests.
In the f ilms themselves, my father often put himself in the picture,
as if to disperse the enunciative instance, but not unlike a director who
32 Roger Odin, Les espaces de communication, p. 108. Odin goes on to praise Peter Forgacs for
using extensive post-production (sound, music, commentary) in order to turn this authenticity
effect into a reflexivity mode: ‘In the Bartos family, the use of family films, far from blocking the
question of truth, places it at the heart of the film, but it took a lot of cinematographic work to
achieve this result. The task involved analyzing the family film as an ideological operator that
reveals the behaviour of a class – here the European bourgeoisie’s indifference or obliviousness
to fascism.’ Roger Odin, Les espaces de communication, p. 114.
33 Roger Odin, in A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, (p. 592).
stars in his own movie, perhaps his authorship is thereby claimed more
effectively. I show my father ‘direct’ even when he is in the frame, and I
show him entering the frame when the camera is on a tripod and already
running.
But where do I stand? Am I using my father to appropriate the films,
putting myself in his place, looking over his shoulder, retroactively guid-
ing his hand by editing his ‘authorless’ films into a coherent narrative?
Even if I didn’t make an essay f ilm, did I manage to make an authored
film after all? It is a legitimate question, to which I only have an oblique
answer: The Sun Island certainly connects with my more academic work
in many clearly discernible ways, since several of my own theoretical
preoccupations converge with the f ilm. First, The Sun Island relates to
German cinema, notably Weimar Cinema and the transition to the Nazi
period, where I suggest that, in matters concerning cinema, the rupture
from politically progressive Weimar culture to repressive Nazi anti-culture
is less clearly marked than one might imagine, notably in the genres of
documentary, instruction, and propaganda.34 The Sun Island is also related
to my research on family melodrama and trauma studies. Several people
have responded to The Sun Island by calling it a family melodrama. Who
are the heroes of this story? Each one a personal tragedy, each one has
their reasons – much like the melodramas of Sirk or Minnelli that I wrote
about in the early 1970s. Finally, my preoccupation with media archaeology
plays a role in this film. In the film, I use the layer-upon-layer metaphor:
I call it ‘unreeling and unpeeling’. It is also a sort of mise-en-abyme, by
embedding the island story in the Frankfurt story: the ‘homecoming trope’
for me and the homelessness of Migge, but especially of Liesel – exiled
from the island, and feeling like a widow next to her husband. Media
archaeology is also present when material objects serve as internal indices
and silent witnesses; for instance, the books briefly glimpsed as presents
in the birthday scene. I managed to identify them, and this allowed me
to ‘contextualize’ the scene. Other scenes I was able to synchronize with
letters or postcards that had survived, permitting me to date and to locate
certain film fragments, and, with them, other scenes that were preserved
on the same reel.
34 See, for instance, ‘Lifestyle Propaganda: Modernity and Modernisation in Early Thirties
Films’, in Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After (London: Routledge 2000), pp. 420-443, and
Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Propagating Modernity: German Documentaries from the 1930s: Information,
Instruction, and Indoctrination’, in The Oxford Handbook on Propaganda, ed. by Jonathan
Auerbach and Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 233-256.
Conclusion: Return to the Posthumous
Provisionally, I can summarize my findings about the posthumous as fol-

lows: one of the perceptual-experiential grounds on which the posthumous
emerges is the growing prestige of images, and especially of moving im-
ages, in our general awareness of both past and present. The liveness, the
evidentiary authenticity and presence, but also the uncanny undead-ness
and untapped energies emanating from our photographic and cinematic
archive have created powerful new forms of presence, where the agency
of things and of images almost count as equivalent to that of people and
individuals. This, too, emerges from the close reading of my father’s home
movies, where presence and absence, on-screen and off-screen turn out to
be potent vectors, reintroducing the nominally absent Leberecht Migge
into the picture, and redefining the presence of both my mother and my
grandmother, as crucial narrative agents, in a story that was supposedly
about the architect of a Frankfurt building, itself made posthumous by an
act of architectural vandalism, which, with hindsight, it is hard to know
whether to be outraged by, or grateful for.
The historical-political ground in this particular case, however, is the
massively posthumous presence of Nazism, the Holocaust, and the Second
World War, under whose retroactive presence we still seem to live, or at
least, under whose uncanny, traumatic, and often unexpected forms of
posthumous agency, our current obsession with history and memory still
plays itself out.
Martin Elsaesser, though not a victim of the Holocaust and only ignored
by the Nazi regime rather than actively persecuted, has belatedly benefitted
from this pervasive posthumousness: the City of Frankfurt – just like the
ECB on their website – is now proud to be associated with the growing
retroactive reputation of the architect Martin Elsaesser.
Furthermore, the last building that Elsaesser had a part in design-
ing – the 1931 annex to the Palmengarten-Gesellschaftshaus and whose
budget-overrun was used, at the time, as one of the excuses to get rid
of him, has been carefully restored by the prestigious British architect
David Chipperfield. This building entered the history books as the work of
Ernst May, the architect generally associated with the New Frankfurt, and
among the leading figures of International Modernism in architecture. I
was therefore not a little surprised, when a newspaper article, ahead of the
official reopening, captioned its picture with the words ‘Elsaesser-Anbau’
(‘Elsaesser-annex’), retroactively re-attributing ownership to my grandfather,
and thus inadvertently undoing a past injustice, one depicted in a 1931
cartoon, sarcastically expressing the city’s Schadenfreude of finally having

managed to send him packing.
In this sense, my father’s home movies and photographs captured a
presence – life on the island – which may have nothing to do with Frankfurt
or the ECB, but had hidden the differently tragic pasts of my mother and
grandmother, and thus managed to preserve nonetheless the traces of
things to come, in the sense that these images not only give added life to
my grandfather’s claim to posthumous recognition, but their uncanny
agency has projected me into several family histories, all now demanding to
have a future in a media memory that only chance encounters, contingent
conjunctures, and a posthumous constellation have even made thinkable.
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. ‘Introduction’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London:

Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 1-51.
Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media,
Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Bakhtin, Mikhail. ‘Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981), pp. 84-258.
Bartetzko, Dieter. ‘Der EZB Neubau – Ein Euro-Krüppel’. Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung 21 Febrary 2007, Web.
Elsaesser, Thomas. German Cinema – Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since
1945 (New York: Routledge 2015).
Elsaesser, Thomas, Jörg Schilling, and Wolfgang Sonne (eds.). Martin Elsaesser,
Schriften (Zurich: Niggli Verlag, 2014).
Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Die Stadt von Morgen: Bauen und Wohnen im nicht-fiktionalen
Film der 20er Jahre’, in Der Dokumentarfilm in Deutschland: 1919-1933, ed. by in
K. Kreimeier (Stuttgart, Leipzig: Reclam, 2005), pp. 381-409.
Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Building Blocks for a Biography’, in Martin Elsaesser and the New
Frankfurt, ed. by Peter Cachola Schmal, Thomas Elsaesser, Christina Graewe,
and Jörg Schilling (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2009), pp. 21-29.
Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Die Geschichte, das Obsolete und der found footage Film’, in
Ortsbestimmungen: Das Dokumentarische zwischen Kino und Kunst, ed. by Eva
Hohenberger and Katrin Mundt (Hsg.) (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2016), pp. 135-155.
Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Film Heritage and the Ethics of Appropriation/ Filmska bastina
i etika prisvajanja’, in Muzej filma – Film u Muzeeju (Informatica Museological
47), ed. by Lada Drazin Trbuljak (Zagreb: MDC, 2017), pp. 6-13. Also published as:
‘La ética de la apropiación: El metraje encontrado entre el archivo e internet’, in

[http://foundfootagemagazine.com], ed. by César Ustarroz and as ‘Zur Ethik der
Aneignung: Found Footage’ (Berlin-DokuArts: Fachtagung ‘Recycled Cinema’,
Zeughaus Kino, Berlin 11 September 2014), Web.
Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Holocaust Memory as an Epistemology of Forgetting –Harun
Farocki’s Respite’, in Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom?, ed. by Antje
Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (London: Koenig Books, 2009), pp. 57-68.
Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Media Archaeology and the Poetics of Obsolescence’, in At the
Borders of Film History, ed. by Alberto Beltrame, Giuseppe Fidotta, and Andrea
Mariani (Udine: Gorizia Film Forum, 2014), pp. 103-116.
Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Propagating Modernity: German Documentaries from the
1930s: Information, Instruction, and Indoctrination’, in The Oxford Handbook
on Propaganda, ed. by Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 233-256.
Elsaesser, Thomas. Weimar Cinema and After (London: Routledge 2000).
Hipp, Hermann, and Roland Jäger (eds.). Haus K. in O. 1930-32. Eine Villa von Martin
Elsaesser für Philipp F. Reemtsma (Hamburg: Gebrüder Mann, 2005).
Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young, and Barry Monahan (eds.). Amateur Filmmaking:
The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web (New York, London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
Nora, Pierre. Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard 1984-1992).
Odin, Roger (ed.). Le film de famille usage privé, usage public (Paris: Meridien-
Klincksieck, 1999).
Odin, Roger. ‘Reflections on the Family Home Movie as Document: A Semio-
Pragmatic Approach’, in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and
Cultural Memories, ed. by Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmerman (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), pp. 255-271.
Odin, Roger. ‘The Amateur in Cinema, in France, Since 1990: Definitions, Issues,
and Trends’, in A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, ed. by Alistair Fox,
Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell,
2015), pp. 590-610.
Odin, Roger. Les espaces de communication (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires des
Grenoble, 2011).
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004).
Roepke, Martina. Privat-Vorstellung: Heimkino in Deutschland vor 1945 (Hildesheim:
Georg Olms Verlag, 2006).
Schneider, Alexandra. Die Stars sind wir: Heimkino als filmische Praxis (Marburg:
Schüren, 2004).
Spitzbart Jörg Schilling, Elisabeth. Martin Elsaesser Kirchenbauten, Pfarr- und
Gemeindehäuser (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2014).
Tambling, Jeremy. Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural
Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Tunnacliffe, Catherine. ‘Filmmaker re-appraises home movie’, Eye vol. 10 issue 30
(5 March 2001).
Warner, Marina. ‘What are Memory Maps’, Web. N.d.
Webber, Andrew J. Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Zimmerman, Patricia (ed.). Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and
Cultural Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
Zimmerman, Patricia. ‘Morphing History into Histories: From Amateur Film to
the Archive of the Future’, Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in History and
Memory, pp. 276-277.
Zimmerman, Patricia. Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995).
About the Author
Thomas Elsaesser (†) was Professor Emeritus at the Department of Media

and Culture of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since 2013,
he was Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Among his recent books
are The Persistence of Hollywood (Routledge, 2012), German Cinema – Terror
and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945 (Routledge, 2013), Film Theory – An
Introduction through the Senses (with Malte Hagener, 2nd revised edition,
Routledge, 2015), Körper, Tod und Technik (with Michael Wedel, Konstanz
University Press, 2016), and Film History as Media Archaeology (Amsterdam
University Press, 2016). His latest book is European Cinema and Continental
Thought (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is also the writer and director of The Sun
Island (2017), a documentary essay film produced for ZDF/3Sat.
Index
Notes are referenced by ‘n.’ and the relevant page and note numbers, for
example ‘35 n.3’ indicates note 3 on page 35.
accessibility of film: 24, 37–38, 50–51, 53 Birkerts, Sven: 80

Adorno, Theodor: 13, 16, 18–19, 80 Blümlinger, Christa: 17, 125–26
Agamben, Giorgio: 183 Bolt, Barbara: 201
Agee, James: 112 Bordwell, David: 153, 166–67
agency Braidotti, Rosi: 137, 143–44
distributive: 128–30, 135–37, 237
posthumous: 29, 237–38 Capital (Marx), Eisenstein film: 17, 27, 174–75
Aitken, Doug Celant, Germano: 102–03
Eraser: 26, 115 Charon (Coleman): 45–46
Akerman, Chantal Chile, portrayed in The Pearl Button: 27,
From the East: 26, 115 145–61
Alter, Nora M.: 137 Cinéastes de notre temps: 35 n.3, 53–54
anarchive series: 41–42 cinematic technologies and techniques: 18–
Anderson, Laurie: 25 21; see also audiovisual essays; digital
Heart of a Dog: 25, 95–109, 144 technology; DVD; videographic film studies
Anthropocene: 26–27, 142 cinema-viewing experience: 23, 27, 34–41,
appropriation, ethics of: 215–38 53–54
Arendt, Hannah: 219 cinephilia: 59–60, 67–68, 174, 200, 210–11
Arsenjuk, Luka: 59–61, 67–69 cinephiliac moments: 205–06, 208–10
art installations: 39–42, 44–47; see also climate change: 26–27, 142
multiscreen installations Coleman, James: 44–46, 54, 70
attainability see unattainable text compilation film: 27, 176–81; see also
audiovisual essays: 18, 24, 26–28, 33–47, audiovisual essays
49–70, 165–85 complexity
essayist practice: 27–28, 199–211 of affects and messages: 26, 115–18
modularity: 181, 182–84 semantic: 24, 51–52, 67
and montage: 27, 57, 165–81 conscious mental field (CMF) theory: 116–18
and new-media principles: 181–84 Corrigan, Timothy: 12–14, 76, 126, 137, 142, 194
see also lyric essay film; multiscreen cosmopolitics: 154–55, 158, 160–61
installations Couret, Nilo: 157–58, 159
authorial voice: 12, 14, 28, 189–97 creative critical practice as research: 28,
lyric ‘I’: 83–84, 87, 90–91 199–211
see also narration Cubitt, Sean: 135–36, 183
authorship: 27–28, 125, 177, 184–85, 234–36 Culler, Jonathan: 82–84, 91
culture see nature and culture, relationship of
Badiou, Alain: 19
Bakhtin, Mikhail: 13, 15, 184 Deleuze, Gilles: 79, 129
Baptista, Tiago: 59–60 Denkbild: 80
Bardo, the: 25, 102–08 Deren, Maya: 78
Barthes, Roland: 24, 33, 51, 67, 174 Derrida, Jacques: 106–07
Bateson, Gregory: 26, 118 dialogical structure: 14–16, 23, 122, 124–27
Bazin, André: 22, 64, 79 digital technology: 18–23, 27, 50, 114–15, 167,
Bellour, Raymond: 14, 21–24, 61–65, 67, 69–70, 179, 181–84
169 digital video
reflections on his ’unattainable text’ in creative practice of film scholars: 27–
essay: 24, 33–47, 49–58 28, 199–211
Benjamin, Walter: 13, 80, 106, 217 DVD: 24, 35, 37–42, 53, 55, 202
Bennett, Jane: 128–29 see also video essays
Bergson, Henri: 160–61 dispositifs: 33–47
Berlin, in The Sun Island: 218, 222–23, 230–32 distributive agency: 128–30, 135–37
242 Index
documentaries: 11, 77, 79, 82–83, 124, 143–47, Frankfurt: 216, 218, 237–38
195, 202 From the East (Akerman): 26, 115
environmental: 148, 153 Fujiwara, Chris: 59–60
interviews in: 152–53 fusional doubling: 52, 58
narration: 189–97
personal essay films: 28–29, 215–38 Gallagher, Tag: 35–36, 54–55
polls (ratings): 11 Germany, Weimar/Nazi period, in The Sun
see also essay film Island: 215–38
Duguet, Anne-Marie: 41–42 ghost stories, network of: 25, 95–109
DVD: 35, 37–42, 53, 55, 202 Gibson, Ross: 13–14, 25–26
Giles, Dennis: 65–69
ecological existentialism: 149–54, 156–57 Gleaners and I, The (Varda): 20
‘ecology of mind’ principles: 26, 118 Godard, Jean-Luc: 37, 67, 101 n.16, 193
Eisenstein, Sergei: 17, 27, 165, 171–76, 178–79 Histoire(s) du cinema (1998): 17, 60
Capital: 17, 27, 174–75 Goldberg, Roselee: 96–98
October: 17, 172, 174–75 Grant, Catherine: 50, 58–59, 61, 169–70, 174,
Elsaesser, Martin: 28, 215–18, 234, 237–38 180–81
essay film on: 28, 217–36 videographic film studies practice: 27–28,
Elsaesser, Thomas: 29, 215, 218 199–211
Sun Island, The: 28, 215, 217–36 Grosz, Elizabeth: 161
environmental documentaries: 148, 153 Guzmán, Patricio: 145 n.9
Epstein, Jean: 56–57 Nostalgia for the Light: 147, 156–59
Epstein, Mikhail: 12, 182, 184–85 Pearl Button, The: 26–27, 145–61
Eraser (Aitken): 26, 115
Escape from New York (Kleiner): 42–44 Hamilton, Annette: 20
essay film: 11–23 Haney, David: 234
definitions: 12, 14, 77 haptic theory: 58, 180
digital shift: 18–20 Haraway, Donna: 136, 143
home movies as: 215–38 Harvey, David Oscar: 133
instrument of thought: 16–19 hauntology: 25, 106–08
interest in: 12–13 Heart of a Dog (Anderson): 25, 95–109
intermediality: 19 Heidegger, Martin: 201
lineage: 13–23 Herzog, Werner: 144
narration: 189–97 Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard): 17, 60
non-linearity: 17, 25–26, 100–01, 113–16 home movies: 215–38
temporal unorthodoxy: 101–02 authorship and anonymity: 234–36
thematic foci: 16 characteristics: 224–25
see also audiovisual essays; lyric essay film; counter narratives and historical
multiscreen installations; subjectivity; evidence: 228–31
textuality documentary status: 227–28
essay forms: 22–23, 76, 191 domestic traumas: 231–34
ethical reflection: 15–16 makers: 225–26
ethics of appropriation: 215–38 speakers and addressees: 226–27
existentialism: 149–53 Hughes, Helen: 153
experimental cinema: 100, 168–70 human consciousness: 116–18
humanism: 137, 142–61
family film genre: 220–23, 225; see also home Huxley, Aldous: 191–92
movies hyperauthorship: 184–85
Farocki, Harun: 77, 149, 190, 192–93, 218
Fellini, Federico: 37 I (authorial voice): 14, 28, 189–97
film criticism: 58–63, 69–70, 177 lyric ‘I’: 83–84, 87, 90–91
film form: 63–64 Illinois Parables, The (Stratman): 26, 121–37
film theory: 49–70 image and text, relationship of: 16–18; see also
filmic text see textuality; unattainable text textuality
film-maker as narrator: 28, 189–97 Immemory (Marker): 21–22, 37
film-making see cinematic technologies and iMovie video editing programme: 204–05
techniques installations
Fisher, Mark: 107–08 art installations: 39–42, 44–47
form in cinema: 63–64 multiscreen: 25–26, 42–44, 54, 111–18
Foster, David: 80–81 intellectual montage: 17, 174–76
Index 243
intermediality: 19 Martin-Jones, David: 159

‘interval’ concept: 170–71 Marx, Karl
Capital: 17, 27, 174–75
jardin qui n’existe pas …, Le (The Garden That Masson, Alain: 63–65
Doesn’t Exist) (Kleiner): 42–44 material thinking: 199–211
Jetée, La (Marker): 22, 46, 52, 144 materiality: 130–31, 142–43, 156–57
of media: 134–36
Keathley, Christian: 61, 175 new materialism: 128–37
Kleiner, Danielle Vallet: 42–44, 54 vagabond: 129
Kluge, Alexander: 19 Matta-Clark, Gordon: 25, 96, 98, 103, 105–06
Krauss, Rosalind: 44–45 Max, D.T.: 95–96
Kuntzel, Thierry: 42, 44 n.14, 52, 54, 70 medianatures concept: 135–36
memory
landscape and geographic modes of telling see memory films: 145 n.9
The Illinois Parables; The Pearl Button in The Pearl Button: 145–61
language, oral and written: 36, 54–57, 184 site of memory: 220–23
meanings of ‘text’: 24, 51–52, 67 metric montage: 171–72, 174
relationship between verbal and Michelson, Annette: 174–75, 204
visual: 16–18, 56–57 Migge, Leberecht: 218, 223, 227, 234, 237
Wittgenstein on: 101–02 Min-Ha, Trinh T.: 152
see also textuality; writing Misek, Richard: 169
Last Bolshevik, The (Le Tombeau d’Alexandre) Mapping Rohmer: 174, 193
(Marker): 80 Rohmer in Paris: 28, 189–97
Latour, Bruno: 154–55 modularity: 181, 182–84
Letter from Siberia (Lettre de Sibérie) Monson, Ander: 81
(Marker): 20, 22, 79 montage: 17, 27, 57, 63, 100–01, 165–85
Levinas, Emmanuel: 15–16 Eisenstein types: 171–76
Libet, Benjamin: 26, 116–17 ‘montage mode of thinking’: 179–80
‘lieu de mémoire’ (site of memory): 220–23 Montaigne, Michel de: 13–14, 125, 141–42,
literary essay form: 13, 22–23, 76, 191; see also 144, 158
essay film Morton, Drew: 50, 60
Lolabelle (dog) see Heart of a Dog (Anderson) Mouth of the Wolf, The (La bocca del lupo)
López, Cristina Álvarez: 170–71 (Marcello): 81, 82–87, 91
on Grant: 169–70 multimedial nature of cinema: 19
on textuality: 24, 49–70 multiscreen installations: 25–26, 42–44, 54,
Lost and Beautiful (Bella e perduta) (Mar- 111–18; see also art installations
cello): 82, 87–91 Mulvey, Laura: 202–03
lyric essay film: 24–25, 75–91 music and sound: 34–35
argumentation and narration: 25, 76–81 musicals: 65–69
Marcello case study: 81–91
Pearl Button, The: 145–61 narration: 15, 28, 76–78, 99–100, 143, 147
counter-narrative: 25, 77–81, 228
MacKay, John: 167–68, 170 narrative ‘voice’: 28, 189–97
Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov): 11, 27, 57, sound in The Illinois Parables: 124,
167–71, 181 132–34
Manovich, Lev: 27, 175, 181–83 see also voice-overs
Mapping Rohmer (Misek): 174, 193 nature and culture, relationship of: 16, 88,
Marcello, Pietro: 25, 77, 81–91 135–36, 160, 222
Marker, Chris: 14, 20–22, 28, 37, 46, 52, 79–80, natureculture concept: 136
189–90, 193 nature documentaries: 148, 153
Immemory: 21–22, 37 network theory and hauntology: 25, 95–109
Jetée, La: 22, 46, 52, 144 new materialism: 128–37
Letter from Siberia: 20, 79 new media: 21, 27, 181–84; see also audiovisual
Sans Soleil: 11, 20–22, 100, 190–93, 218 essays
Tombeau d’Alexandre, Le (The Last Nichols, Bill: 79, 99, 127
Bolshevik): 80 non-human themes: 26–27, 141–61
Marks, Laura: 58, 180 non-human voices: 90–91, 121–37
Martin, Adrian: 170 Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz)
on Grant: 169–70 (Guzmán): 147, 156–59
on textuality: 24, 49–70
244 Index
October (Eisenstein): 17, 172, 174–75 sashaying: 97–98, 100, 109

Odin, Roger: 223 n.19 scholarly essays, audiovisual: 18, 24, 27–28;
dialogue with: 224–35 see also audiovisual essays
Ophüls, Max: 35–36, 54–55 self-reflexivity: 84, 96–97, 102, 167–69
otherness: 15–16, 137 Shaviro, Steven: 106–07
overtonal montage: 173–74 Shklovsky, Victor: 177
Shoenburn, Sarah: 158
Panella, Claudio: 89 show-making: 65–69
Parikka, Jussi: 131, 135–36 Shub, Esphir: 27, 176–81
Pasolini, Pier Paolo: 78–79, 133 n.28 site of memory (‘lieu de mémoire’): 220–23
Patagonian indigenous people, in The Pearl Snow, Michael: 38–39, 42
Button: 145–61 Wavelength: 37, 42, 54
Paul, Arthur: 16, 128 Sokurov, Alexander
Pearl Button, The (El botón de nácar) (Guz- Russian Ark: 20
man): 26–27, 145–61 Spiritual Voices: 25–26, 111–17
Pertsov, Viktor: 177 sound environments in films: 133 n.28
Petric, Vlada: 178–79 spectatorship: 23, 27, 34–41, 53–54
photography: 44–46 projection environment: 39–47
Pinochet regime, Chile, portrayed in The Pearl Spiritual Voices (Sokurov): 25–26, 111–17
Button: 145–61 Sternberg, Josef von: 65
poetic essay film see lyric essay film Stratman, Deborah
poetry: 76, 78–80, 82–83, 89, 149 Illinois Parables, The: 26, 121–37
polls (film ratings): 11 subjectivity: 11–16, 19–28, 80–81, 141–45, 184
posthumanism: 137, 142–43 and Heart of a Dog: 95–109
posthumous condition: 28–29, 216–17, 219, and The Illinois Parables: 121–37
237–38 and The Pearl Button: 141–59
post-structuralism: 24, 51–52, 58–61, 67, 128, Sun Island, The (T. Elsaesser): 28, 219–36
184 Sutton, Paul: 210
projection environment: 39–47; see also
spectatorship technology see cinematic technologies and
proto concept: 12, 184–85 techniques; digital technology
television: 37–38, 234–35
Rancière, Jacques: 17, 173, 229 text (word)
Rascaroli, Laura meanings: 24, 51–52, 67
on essay film: 14, 99–102, 105–06, 126, 137, textuality: 23–24, 33–47, 49–70, 100–01,
143, 171 184–85
on lyricism: 24–25, 75–91, 149 Thompson, Richard J.: 61–64
on sound in essay film: 133 n.28 thought, instrument of: 16–19
Reed, Lou: 25, 96, 98, 106–08 time
re-editing and duration in The Pearl Button: 158–61
digital: 24, 58, 203, 205 temporal unorthodoxy of essay
in Soviet film industry: 176–81 film: 101–02
reflexivity: 12, 59–60, 175, 189–97, 219–20 ways of approaching a film: 35–36, 55, 62
self-reflexivity: 84, 96–97, 102, 167–69 Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (Marker): 80
rhythm: 168, 170 tonal montage: 172, 174
rhythmic montage: 172, 174 truth: 18–19, 82, 179, 229, 235
Richter, Gerhard: 80 Tsivian, Yuri: 176–77
Ricouer, Paul: 14–15
Rohmer in Paris (Misek): 28, 190, 193–97 unattainable text: 23–24, 33–47, 49–70, 169;
Rokeby, David: 115 see also textuality
Rose, Deborah Bird: 149–50, 151–54
Routt, William D.: 61–64 Varda, Agnès: 40–41, 54
Russian Ark (Sokurov): 20 Gleaners and I, The: 20
Russian montage cinema: 17, 27, 57, 167–85 verbal and visual, relationship of: 16–18; see
also textuality
Sandler, Stephanie: 78 Vertov, Dziga: 172, 179
Sans Soleil (Marker): 11, 20–22, 100, 190–93, 218 Man with a Movie Camera: 11, 27, 57,
‘Sans Soleil voice’: 192–93 167–71, 181
Index 245
video essays: 24, 27–28, 50, 54–55, 179 Wallace, David Foster: 25, 95–96
essayist practice: 27–28, 199–211 water theme in The Pearl Button: 145–61
narrative ‘voice’: 189–97 Wavelength (Snow): 37, 42, 54
see also audiovisual essays; digital video Winston, Brian: 11
videographic film studies: 27–28, 50, 199–211 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: 101–02
Vine app: 207–11 Wolfe, Cary: 142
Viola, Bill: 39–40 World Wide Web: 21, 114
voice writing
authorial: 12, 14, 28, 83–84, 87, 90–91, and filmic text: 36, 54–57, 69
189–97 and lineage of essay film: 13–14
non-human: 90–91, 121–37 see also language, oral and written;
voice-overs: 28, 45–46, 54–55, 143 textuality
Laurie Anderson: 98–100, 103–04
in Marcello’s films: 83–87 Zimmermann, Patricia: 231–32
‘Sans Soleil voice’: 192–93
sound in The Illinois Parables: 121–37
see also narration

Beyond The Essay Film Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Beyond The Essay Film Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Beyond the Essay Film

Beyond the Essay Film

Amsterdam University Press

Cover design: Kok Korpershoek

isbn 978 94 6372 870 6

© The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020

1. 35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable? 33

2. To Attain the Text. But Which Text? 49

3. Compounding the Lyric Essay Film: Towards a Theory of Poetic

4. ‘Every love story is a ghost story’: The Spectral Network of

5. Lines of Interpretation in Fields of Perception and

6. Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016): Intellectual

7. Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film: The

8. Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant-Garde to the

9. ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator 189

11. The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory

Elsaesser’s Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines (2004), Timothy Cor-

of the essay film as a specific cultural form – subjectivity, textuality, and

as ‘the first industrial printing presses, a time of refinement for systems of

7 Gibson, ‘What Do I Know?’, p. 27.

characters, thoughts, and feelings – become abandoned.13 In dialogue, the

for the other; it might be called humanity, or subjectivity, or self’.17 Thus, if

This is also what Theodor Adorno stresses in ‘The Essay as Form’: in

28 Alain Badiou, Cinéma (Oxford: Polity, 2013), p. 207.

that enabled Alexander Sokurov to produce his monumental Russian Ark

with connections in a ripple effect. Images and sequences lead in many

Bellour commingles Marker’s oeuvre, and his fictional self-realisation,

This feeling that image speaks to us is perhaps even stronger in Immemory,

As Bellour suggests, Immemory belonged to a broader utilisation of the

in the cannibalisation of other cultural forms – literature, photographs, other

rationalism. By contrast, she proposes to look at lyricism not as separate

world system in an age of accelerating species extinction. Smaill suggests

of learning to produce, write about, and publish creative-critical digital-

Thomas Elsaesser passed away on the 4th of December, 2019, while we

Blümlinger, Christa. ‘Reading Between the Images’, in Documentary across Disci-

About the Authors

Julia Vassilieva is Australian Research Council Research Fellow and lecturer

Deane Williams is Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash

Keywords: digital era, filmic text, audiovisual essay, dispositif

1. A first, emblematic figure is the projection environment. Emblematic

dispositif remains invisible, while everywhere so many relations, one by

the artist associated with the production, of finding an intelligent balance

2. From the work of Danielle Vallet Kleiner, orientated to the biographical

It is a film that works via perpetually reconnected fragmentations across

11 Danielle Vallet Kleiner, ‘Projects/Projections: Description of an Inf inite Process’, 2000

3. We are familiar with James Coleman’s principle of ‘projected images’.

Sensing death’s approach, she got ready to photograph herself, in order

This essay, written in 2009, is collected in Raymond Bellour’s La Querelle des

Anarchive: Archives numériques sur l’art contemporain, Web.

Bellour, Raymond. ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory’, in Screen Dynamics:

About the Author

Raymond Bellour is a French writer, film critic, and theoretician. From

Keywords: audiovisual essay, Raymond Bellour, textuality, post-struc-

The Revolution Has Been Televised

Can or should the work, be it image or sound, in its efforts to accede to

5 Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, p. 27.

12 Bellour, ‘A Bit of History’, p. 19.

memory characteristic of cinema as a proudly and gloriously unattainable

Two Times, One Word

Bellour wondered in 1975 whether ‘oral language’ – in the form of the

15 Bellour, ‘The Unattainable Text’, p. 27.

22 Bellour, ‘35 Years On’, p. 36.

Already, the newspapers present their accounts rendered like ‘f ilms’

1. 35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable? 33

2. To Attain the Text. But Which Text? 49

9. ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator 189