User:Aitantv/Laura Rascaroli (2017) How the Essay Film Thinks

Rascaroli, L (2017) How the Essay Film Thinks. Oxford University Press, Oxford

the future film / Adorno, The Essay as Form (1984) / anachronism

• "The possibility of making a cinema less conditioned by mainstream forms of signification and industrial systems of financing and production has obvious political implications. To say “I” or “we” is, first, a gesture of responsibility and accountability, in filmmaking too. The moment of the essay film is, therefore, politically inflected. Precisely for this reason, we can venture, the essay film first boomed worldwide in the 1960s, a decade marked by a widespread desire for increased participation, democracy, and self- expression; and it also explains why previous embodiments tended to coincide with examples of dissident analysis of actualities." (Rascaroli 2017 p.5)
• "transgression and crossover of generic boundaries, inventiveness and freedom from conventions and expressive constraints, complexity and reflexivity." (Rascaroli 2017 p.3)
• "In each decade since the 1940s, critics have saluted the essay film as an utterly novel and revolutionary form, mostly on the

basis of its ability to bring the cinema closer to a medium at once personal and intellectual, such as writing. The utopian nature of this idea can be seen in a crucial aspect of all of these theories: on each occasion, the possibility of the essay film’s coming- into- being is linked to the precondition of almost futuristic technological development." (Rascaroli 2017 p.4)

• "Returning to the cinema, then, the anachronistic matrix of the form is at the basis of the argument that the essay film is the future film, the film of tomorrow. It is so not only because it will always be the technology- to- come that will make it possible for filmmakers to use their cameras like pens, to mobilize the personal camera, to an increasing extent, but also because the essay is against its time and, thus, it is not of the “now”; it is future philosophy." (Rascaroli 2017 p.6)

The method of between, interstice, disjunction, differentiation (as opposed to suture)

• "Rather than copying its object and offering a closed argument about it, then, the essay operates on its object’s scattered parts. In this way, the essay shuns suture and works in a regime of radical disjunction. “Discontinuity” (Adorno 1984, 164) and “juxtaposition” (170) are terms also used by Adorno, which emphasize break and the contrasting positioning of elements that characterizes the essay’s argument." (Rascaroli 2017 p.7)
• "Although I continue to acknowledge the centrality of dialogue to the essay form, and to the spectatorial experience of the

essay film, my interest in this book 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" (Rascaroli 2017 p.8)

• Deleuze interstice - Here and Elsewhere - "In writing on this film, Deleuze introduced the concept of interstice, which, drawing on the complexity of film language, he described as spacing “between two actions, between affections, between perceptions, between two visual images, between two sound images, between the sound

and the visual”" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)

• "With the breaking of the sensory- motor linkages typical of the movement- image, the interval is set free; what emerges is the irrational cut, which stands on its own. Images are no longer linked to each other; the chains of images are broken and the fissures between them become larger." (Rascaroli 2017 p.9)
• Deleuze - The Time Image (v. the Movement Image) - "Given one image, another image has to be chosen which will induce an interstice between the two. This is not an operation of association, but of differentiation, as mathematicians say, or of disappearance, as physicists say: given one potential, another one has to be chosen, not any whatever, but in such a way that a difference of potential is established

between the two, which will be productive of a third or of something new. (179– 80; emphasis in the original)" (Rascaroli 2017 p.10)

• "Deleuze (1989) himself clarifies the point: “Interstices thus proliferate everywhere, in the visual image, in

the sound image, between the sound image and the visual image. That is not to say that the discontinuous prevails over the continuous” (181)" (Rascaroli 2017 p.11) + many variants of interstitiality - black screens, white screens, heterogenity (e.g. the image and voiceover becoming progressively disjunct)

• "Accordingly, I am not claiming that the method of interstitiality is unique to the essay film. Rather, I say that the essay film, as thinking cinema, thinks interstitially— and that, to understand how the essay film works, we must look at how it forges gaps, how it creates disjunction." (Rascaroli 2017 p.11)
• "This structure is often complicated by the presence of multiple or split narrators. Because the essay’s enunciator is never a generalized authority (unlike in more traditional nonfiction), however, but a subject who speaks in the first person, takes responsibility for his or her discourse, and overtly embraces his or her contingent viewpoint, it follows that he or she does not speak to an anonymous audience. The argument of the essay film addresses a real, embodied spectator, who is invited to enter into a dialogue with the enunciator, to follow his or her reasoning, and to respond by actively participating in the construction of meaning. Hence, the essay film is a fragile field because it must accept and welcome the ultimate instability of meaning and embrace openness as its unreserved ethos." (Rascaroli 2017 p.15-6)
• "Rather than “pretend to discover things,” as in Montaigne’s (1700) famous saying, “I do not pretend to discover things, but to lay open my self ” (254), thus camouflaging a perfected and closed reflection as an open- ended process of uncovering, the essayist asks many questions and only offers few or partial answers. These are allowed to emerge somewhere else: in the position of the embodied spectator. It is around this textual structure, which translates in a constant address of the I/ essayist to the

You/ spectator, that the experience of the essay film materializes and our impression of being summoned to participate in the construction of essayistic meaning is achieved." (Rascaroli 2017 p.16)

• "By virtue of their scope, the chapters will explore a number of essay forms, including the travelogue, the lyric essay, the epistolary essay, the ethnographic essay, the diptych and the hypertextual essay" (Rascaroli 2017 p.17)
• "Essay films are performative texts that explicitly display the process of thinking; their reflexive and self- reflexive stance implies that issues of textual and contextual framing are at the center of their critical practice. To frame is, ultimately, to detach an object from its background and, thus, to create a gap between object and world." (Rascaroli 2017 p.20)
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Essay Film Watch List

• Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia,
• Leo Hurwitz’s Strange Victory (1948)
• Khaneh siah ast [The House Is Black, 1963] by Forugh Farrokhzad
• (La rabbia [Rage, 1963] by Pier Paolo Pasolini
• Argentina (La hora de los hornos [The
• Hour of the Furnaces, 1968] by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino),
• Armenia (Menq [We, 1969] by Artavazd Peleshian)
• R -
• George Franju’s Blood of the Beasts and Hôtel des Invalides
• Holocaust essay films - Chapter 2 - Harun Farocki’s Aufschub (Respite, 2007) and Arnaud des Pallières’s Drancy Avenir (1997)
• Essay ethno-fiction - Chapter 3 - Luis Buñuel’s 1933 Las Hurdes, Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana (1971), and Ben Rivers’s Slow Action (2011) - discourses of otherness, nature, culture, power, imperialism, ecology, and sustainability are both foregrounded and called into question.
• Diptychs - Chapter 4 - diptych by Cynthia Beatt, Cycling the Frame (1988) and The Invisible Frame (2009); Davide Ferrario’s La strada di Levi (Primo Levi’s Journey, 2007)
• Sound - Chapter 5 - Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley (2013) by Lawrence Abu Hamdan; Erik Gandini’s Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers (2003)
• Narrative/Letters - Chapter 6 - Lettres de Panduranga (Letters from Panduranga, 2015), by Nguyễn Trinh Thi, and the lyric essay via a study of The Idea of North(1995), by Rebecca Baron.
• Framing - Chapter 7 - Irina Botea’s Picturesque (2012); Mohammadreza Farzad’s Gom o gour (Into Thin Air, 2010) and Peter Thompson’s Universal Diptych (1982)