Original scientific paper
The Film as Essay: Theoretical Aspects of Discoursive Structures in Film Media
Ivana Keser Battista
Abstract
In film studies the essay-film is considered a kind of non-fictional film and its
characteristics similar to a documentary even though it differs from a typical
documentary as it is not a witness to real events but indirectly reflects or refers to
them. Studying the features of an essay-film in this work is directed by one goal:
to explain the relation of the essay-film according to existing film types: documentary,
feature and experimental film, as well as to clarify its autonomous position.
At the same time, the essay-film cannot represent a genre or subgenre of any
of the film types, as is usually presumed, rather an anti-genre because of its hybridity.
Elements of essayism can be found in all three film types and essayistic
elements in film can, moreover, be considered a unique starting point of film creation.
The essay-film can use various elements: archival shots, digressions, multivocal
stories, but also dramatization of events, the mixing of fiction and reality
which means the use of methods used by documentary, experimental and feature
films and makes it difficult to affix it to one of the existing film types.
The essay-film is most often characterized by its apparent disunity of time, space,
sound, film material and style. The presence of the author in an essay-film is of
key significance which is distinguished by the author’s gesture or emphasized
stance towards the theme or subject being pursued. The author makes use of essayistic
strategies: the work becomes a place of instability, re-examination, revision
of thoughts, starting from the author’s self-reflexivity, reflection and selfcriticism.
The essay-film represents a process whose goal is exploration and not
necessarily a rounded-off film work with a single meaning and explicit statement.
It also represents an experiment, which is set forth by the very idea of an essay,
adopted from literature, and which denotes an “attempt” in its essence. Directors
of essay films give greater emphasis to the strategies of editing film material than
to filming their own material.
Essay-films dissolve cinematic presentation boundaries and can absorb or incorporate
different genres and themes through: biography, autobiography, history, culture,
fiction, criticism, poetry, photography, illustration and film itself. The essayfilm’s
character is constitutively informal, and as such is not clearly defined in film studies. Namely, the essay-film often presents a meditation on a specific
theme instead of the causal-effect sequence of a story as is expected in fictional
film.
This means that the essay-film is structured using fragments and that it's every
segment, in most cases, can function independently. The processual and exploratory
character of the essay-film gives preference to the fragment over the whole,
preferring plurality over hierarchy, calling for contradiction over unconditional
explicitness, which makes the essay as a procedure a more desirable expressive
means not only during the interpretation and understanding but in the creation of
the film piece. The constitutive informal character of the essay film is manifested
through the presence of the following cinematic-essayistic elements which make
this film discussable: associative presentation, dialogism, distortion of classification,
discursiveness, fragmentariness, non-linearity, reflexivity, reflection, rhizomatic
treatment, rumination.
Keywords
essay; film; fragment; archive; document; collage; autoreflexion; reminiscence; intermediality; discursivity
Hrčak ID:
58487
URI
Publication date:
25.7.2010.
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