SESSION: The essay-film, then and now
First theorised in the early decades of the twentieth century, by filmmakers, artists and literary critics including Sergei Eisenstein (1928), Hans Richter (1940) and Alexandre Astruc (1948), the essay film emerged across disciplinary borders as a key form through which to use film, in conjunction with music, text and typically highly affective imagery, to express and stimulate critical thought. Importantly developed in French films of the 1950s by filmmakers including Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Georges Franju, from the 1960s onward the essay film was also taken up in decolonial contexts, emerging as what has been termed a ‘cinema of liberation’ (Solanas and Getino, 1969); while in the 1980s it took on critical edge in the UK, for example in the pioneering work of the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC). As film and video became increasingly widespread media in the artworld, the ‘documentary turn’ heralded in 2002 by documenta 11 brought new energy and perspectives from a range of international figures. As noted by video artist Ursula Biemann (2003), the essay ‘has always distinguished itself by a non-linear and non-logical movement of thought that draws on many different sources of knowledge’, making it particularly apt for artists wishing to expand beyond conventional models of documentary. In contemporary art, as Nora Alter has argued (2018), the essay film has become a preeminent form, explored in richly diverse ways by leading artists including John Akomfrah, Elizabeth Price, Hito Steyerl and Johan Grimonprez. What does the essay film mean today, and how are artists using it to address contemporary political problems? How does the interdisciplinary history of the essay film shed new light on its contemporary versions in the artworld? What is distinctive about the essay film, in relation to other models of documentary practice employed in art, and what does it specifically enable?
This session invites papers which examine the essay film, in historic or contemporary practice, and which consider questions such as (but not limited to): the development of distinctive forms of political critique and the form’s contribution to political struggle, the role of music and affect, different uses of still and moving images, theorisation of distinctive forms of montage, the shaping of critical ‘voice’, environmental activism and forms of more than human collectivity, the uses of dystopian fiction and the development of forms of futurity, and any other themes which emerge from examination of examples of specific artistic and filmmaking practice.
Session Convenors:
Tamara Trodd, University of Edinburgh
Session Speakers:
Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Edinburgh
The Essay Film on Repetition: Two Takes on the American Family
This paper brings together two essay films, separated by thirty years, that take a long durée look at the family in America: Alan Berliner’s The Family Album (1986, 60 min) and Zoe Beloff’s A Model Family in a Model Home (2015, 22 min). Berliner’s essay film is a bold montage of discarded home movies and separate recordings from the 1920s to the 1950s. Beloff’s essay film connects the American family as self-exiled, as Bertolt Brecht saw it in the 1940s, to the fate of the ordinary family after the US subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 and the global financial crisis of 2008. Berliner’s essay film was made in the mid-1980s at the apogee of the postmodernist aesthetic of the disconnected fragment, while Beloff’s essay film is all about obtaining a big picture that subtly connects the family to capital as crisis.
The paper asks whether, by using the family as a theme, the two essay films reflect on two different kinds of repetition that mark life under capitalism. The Family Album revisits the birth-to-death linearity of ‘normal’ family lives that are suffocatingly interchangeable, suggesting, perhaps, that it is no wonder so many families get rid of their home movies in flea markets and yard sales. A Model Family in a Model Home, on the other hand, scripts – through the eyes, voice, thought and life of Bertolt Brecht – the fate of the ‘American Dream’ family as one defined by the inevitable repetition of financial crashes as historic events. Are the repetitions captured by the essay films somehow connected?
Lina Alam, University of Michigan
The Essay Film After Video Surveillance: On Harun Farocki’s CCTV Installations
When German filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944–2014) began exhibiting his work at contemporary art biennales, museums, and galleries, he didn’t simply abandon the cinema and the genres of the essay film and documentary. Instead, he adapted them for his moving image installations, developing a spatialized montage technique called “soft montage” to explore the relationships between images and text across multiple screens or projections. In my paper, I examine the enduring contributions and intersections of the essay film and documentary genres in relation to Farocki’s late work at the turn of the twenty-first century. More specifically, I examine Farocki’s corpus of CCTV installations and trace the development of his appropriation of video surveillance footage from the years 2000-2007. I argue that his essayistic and documentary approaches to video in these works pushed, on the one hand, against the long-standing connection between video art and broadcast television, and on the other, against discourses around the medium’s democratic, participatory ethos unfolding at the end of the Cold War. Alongside close readings of individual artworks, I contextualize Farocki’s transition into his new institutional setting within the discourses and practices of the so-called “documentary turn” in contemporary art. Furthermore, I consider his essayistic installations in relation to the rapidly developing media and politics of mass surveillance in the early 2000s. Farocki’s corpus of CCTV installations not only advances our understanding of the artist’s oeuvre, but also critically reconfigures the politics of video in contemporary art more broadly.
Zhining Ding, Courtauld Institute of Art
The Politics of Infrastructure in the Chinese Essay Film: A Case Study of Liu Chuang and Cao Fei
The theme of infrastructure has become a critical subject in contemporary Chinese art. This paper argues that the essay film is a crucial rhetorical strategy adopted by contemporary Chinese artists, significantly expanding its aesthetic and political possibilities. Artists leverage this form to examine infrastructure’s visibility (including soundscapes) and develop a unique visual rhetoric informed by cross-disciplinary theories. Through visual-rhetorical analysis of works by Liu Chuang and Cao Fei, this paper clarifies how the infrastructure theme and the essay film mutually expand each other’s formal and conceptual boundaries. The essay film provides a distinctive site for memory and political intervention. In post-socialist China, infrastructure is tightly linked to the nation-state, progressivist grand narratives, and propaganda film, resulting in an ideologically charged hyper-visibility where its image becomes ubiquitous propaganda. To counter this, artists deploy the essay film’s non-linear, speculative, and fragmented rhetoric. By incorporating historical archives and socialist-era ruins—memories and unfulfilled futures excluded from official narratives—these films redistribute the politics of visibility, transforming infrastructure imagery into a platform for memory traversal, critique, and emotional mobilization. Methodologically, this approach adopts a mesoscopic perspective informed by science and technology studies and media theory, linking macro-systems, such as planetary networks, with micro-material dimensions, such as mineral elements. The coexistence of these visual scales serves as a radical critique and necessary reflection on the nation-state’s totalizing vision, revealing the layered ideologies, material entanglements, and heterogeneous modernities embedded in “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”
Ian Rothwell, University of Edinburgh
Internet Cinema and Fascistic Dream Machines
Given the widespread tendency amongst the far-right to share AI-generated imagery, it has been labelled a “new aesthetics of fascism”. In this view, these tools for image generation have no documentary value; they are “fascistic dream machines”, able to conjure bespoke moving-image scenarios that can illustrate a particular ideological position and diagnoses of social malaise. Whilst we might see the prominence of AI-generated imagery in far-right circles as circumstantial, it can also be seen, at a deeper, more structural level, as fascistic, or at least nihilistic, given the technology’s fundamentally destructive nature. Its visual culture carries a definite echo of Walter Benjamin’s famous claim regarding the “aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism”. These AI “dream machines” generate images of “self-alienation”, which in turn become strange new forms of aesthetic pleasure. This paper will examine how a number of contemporary artists are reimagining the “essay-film” within this context, as “internet cinema” that appropriates the style of algorithmic content on platforms such as TikTok and integrates AI-generated imagery in an experimental manner. Examples of this include Dana Dawud’s Open Secret (2024), Angelicism01’s Film01 (2023), and Undead Internet Theory (2025) by Y7. I will explore how these artists use the “essay-film” as a springboard to confront the “fascistic dream machine” of AI, whilst retaining a formal commitment to its affective visual language. Benjamin memorably called for a politicization of art in response to the fascist aestheticization of politics: I will ask if there is any way “internet cinema” can be imagined in these terms.
Kareem Estefan, University of Cambridge
Rehearsing Emergence: Disjuncture and Opening in Contemporary Decolonial Feminist Essay Films
Examining recent essay-films on the subject of anticolonial women’s movements by British-Nigerian artist Onyeka Igwe (A Radical Duet, 2023) and Palestinian filmmaker Mahasen Nasser-Eldin (Silent Protest – Jerusalem 1929, 2019), both of whom conduct research for their films in British colonial archives, this paper identifies a critical element of the decolonial feminist essay-film: the artists’ presentation of a disjuncture between the imperial archive and what exceeds it, between the ‘past’ as sedimented on paper by male colonial officials and as rehearsed by Global Majority women for ongoing practices of refusal. As a form concerned with rehearsal, which connotes both repetition (with difference) and practice (or essaying), the essay-film permits artists like Igwe and Nasser-Eldin, firstly, to respond to the violence of archival capture with a view to overturning imperial temporality, and, secondly, to revisit and revise previous anticolonial mo(ve)ments for their weaknesses and lacunae on gender. Disjunctures between the past and present, archival record and oral testimony, image and sound, narrator and addressee, in these essay-films, become openings for worldmaking. The two films’ distinct forms of what I call ‘rehearsing emergence’ converge in their uses of fabulation, time travel, self-reflexivity and much else, but also importantly differ, in ways that I explore to theorize disjuncture, rehearsal, and emergence as key features of the decolonial feminist essay-film.