17 Essential Movies For An Introduction To Essay Films

Created by Igor_Brynner.

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Put most concisely by Timothy Corrigan in his book on the essay film: ‘from its literary origins to its cinematic revisions, the essayistic describes the many-layered activities of a personal point of view as a public experience’.

Perhaps a close cousin to documentary, the essay film is at its core a personal mode of filmmaking. Structured in a breadth of forms, a partial definition could be said to be part fact, part fiction with an intense intimacy (but none of these are necessarily paramount).

Stemming from the literary essay as a form of personal expression borne from in-depth explorations of its chosen topic, the essay film can be agitprop, exploratory, or diaristic and generally rejects narrative progression and concretised conclusions in favour of a thematic ambivalence. Due to its nature as inherently personal, the term itself is as vague and expansive as the broad collective of films it purports to represent.

To borrow Aldous Huxley’s definition, the essay is a device for saying almost everything about almost anything. In built then is an inherent expansiveness that informs a great ambition in the form itself, but as Huxley acknowledges it can only say almost anything; whether extolling the need for a socialist state (Man with a Movie Camera), deconstructing the power and status of the image itself (Histoire(s) du Cinema, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Los Angeles Plays Itself) or providing a means to consider ones of past (Walden, News from home, Blue), the essay film is only the form of expression, which unlike any other taxonomic term suggests almost nothing about the film itself other than its desire to explore.

Below is an 17 film introduction to the essay film that cannot be pinned down and continue to remake and remodel itself as freely as it sheds connections between any of the films within its own canon.