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How the Essay Film Thinks
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Book Presentation:
• Offers a new theoretical framework dedicated to showing how film can be a medium of thought
• Features a new approach that brings issues of practice and praxis to the fore
• Includes new critical discussion of recent experimental film, alongside historically significant instances of essay film
This book offers a novel understanding of the epistemological strategies that are mobilized by the essay film, and of where and how such strategies operate. Against the backdrop of Theodor W. Adorno's discussion of the essay form's anachronistic, anti-systematic and disjunctive mode of resistance, and capitalizing on the centrality of the interstice in Gilles Deleuze's understanding of the cinema as image of thought, the book discusses the essay film as future philosophy-as a contrarian, political cinema whose argumentation engages with us in a space beyond the verbal. A diverse range of case studies discloses how the essay film can be a medium of thought on the basis of its dialectic use of audiovisual interstitiality. The book shows how the essay film's disjunctive method comes to be realized at the level of medium, montage, genre, temporality, sound, narration, and framing-all of these emerging as interstitial spaces of intelligence that illustrate how essayistic meaning can be sustained, often in contexts of political, historical or cultural extremity. The essayistic urge is not to be identified with a fixed generic form, but is rather situated within processes of filmic thinking that thrive in gaps.
About the Author:
Laura Rascaroli, Professor of Film and Screen Media, Univerity College Cork Laura Rascaroli is Professor of Film and Screen Media at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author and editor of several volumes, including The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (2009), Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (2006), co-written with Ewa Mazierska, and Antonioni: Centenary Essays (2011), co-edited with John David Rhodes. She is the General Editor of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media.
Press Reviews:
"Whether considering Aleksandr Sokurov's Elegy of a Voyage (2001) or the experimental films of Harun Farocki, Rascaroli delivers detailed, sharply observant insights. With its international focus, this book offers perhaps the best overview to date on the subject.-" - G. A. Foster, CHOICE
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
> From the same author:
Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art (2020)
Expanding Cinema
Dir. Jill Murphy and Laura Rascaroli
Subject: Theory
Crossing New Europe (2006)
Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie
by Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli
The Cinema of Nanni Moretti (2004)
Dreams and Diaries
by Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli
Subject: Director > Nanni Moretti
> On a related topic:
Beyond the Essay Film (2020)
Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology
Dir. Julia Vassilieva and Deane Williams
Subject: Theory
The Cinema of Discomfort (2023)
Disquieting, Awkward and Uncomfortable Experiences in Contemporary Art and Indie Film
by Geoff King
Subject: Genre > Independent cinema
The Age of New Waves (2013)
Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization
Subject: Genre > Independent cinema
World Cinema and the Essay Film (2019)
Transnational Perspectives on a Global Practice
Dir. Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstic
The Essay Film (2016)
Dialogue, Politics, Utopia
Dir. Elizabeth Papazian and Caroline Eades
Subject: Theory
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