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Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks

Godard and the Essay Film offers a history and analysis of the essay film, one of the most significant forms of intellectual filmmaking since the end of World War II. War-ner incisively reconsiders the defining traits and legacies of this still-evolving genre through a groundbreaking examination of the vast and formidable oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard. The essay film has often been understood by scholars as an eccentric development within documentary, but Warner shows how an essayistic process of thinking can materialize just as potently within narrative fiction films, through self-critical investigations into the aesthetic , political, and philosophical resources of the medium. Studying examples by Godard and other directors, such as Orson Welles, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, and Harun Farocki, Warner elaborates a fresh account of essayistic reflection that turns on the imaginative, constructive role of the viewer. Through fine-grained analyses, this book contributes the most nuanced description yet of the relational interface between viewer and screen in the context of the essay film. Shedding new light on Godard's work, from the 1960s to the 2010s, in film, television, video, and digital stereoscopy, Warner distills an understanding of essayistic cinema as a shared exercise of critical rumination and perceptual discovery. http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/godard-and-essay-film

Related Papers

Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez

The beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s essayistic practice is intrinsically linked to the use of the diptych device. Thus, a previous work is the cause of an essay film that aims to reflect on the cinematic practice carried out. This article aims to analyse the use, function, and evolution of this device in the beginning and consolidation of the Godardian essay film. While Camera-eye (1967) offers a prefiguration of this new filmic form in relation to La Chinoise (1967), Letter to Jane (1972) results in its first realisation concerning a previous fiction, Tout va bien (1972), in order to continue the reflection on the intellectuals’ role in revolution. Thanks to the decisive arrival of video technology, essential for the essay film practice, Ici et ailleurs (1976) takes up the material of the never released film Jusqu'à la Victoire to generate self-criticism in militant practice. Finally, with Scénario du film Passion (1982), Godard offers a new subsequent essay film that generates both temporalities, before and after the creation, in order to embody an essential self-portrait of the audiovisual essayist. This series of diptych works reveals a hypertextual audiovisual thinking process that rethinks cinematic practice.

The present article aims to show how the consolidation of the cinematic form of the essay film in Jean-Luc Godard’s work is a consequence of the evolution of his experience in the cinéma militant. This militant cinema emerges from the political and social circumstances that caused May 68 and in the case of the filmmaker is materialized through his participation in the Dziga Vertov Group. The defining elements of the group’s filmic experience –the supremacy of montage, the dialectics between images and sounds and the relevance of the spectator as an active part of a dialogical practice– are the same that bring about the essayistic form when the film is enunciated from the author’s subjectivity. With the analysis of Letter to Jane this paper tries to demonstrate how the irruption of subjectivity in the revolutionary cinematic practice allows the appearance of self-reflexivity and the thinking process that define the cinematic essay. RESUMEN El presente artículo pretende mostrar cómo la consolidación de la forma cinematográfica del film-ensayo en la obra de Jean-Luc Godard es consecuencia de la evolución de su experiencia en el cinéma militant. Un cine militante que surge de las circunstancias político-sociales que dieron lugar a mayo del 68 y que en el caso del cineasta se materializa mediante su participación en el Grupo Dziga Vertov. Los elementos definitorios de la experiencia fílmica del grupo –la primacía del montaje, la dialéctica entre imágenes y sonidos y la relevancia del espectador como parte activa de una práctica dialogística– son los mismos que propician la forma ensayística cuando la obra se enuncia desde la subjetividad del autor. Con el análisis de Letter to Jane pretendemos mostrar cómo la irrupción de la subjetividad en la práctica cinematográfica revolucionaria posibilita la aparición de la auto-reflexión y del proceso de pensamiento definitorios del ensayo cinematográfico.

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, ed. Caroline Eades and Elizabeth Papazian, 28-67. London: Wallflower, 2016.

Rick Warner

Adaptation 6, no. 1 (2013): 1-24.

Though it stubbornly resists classification, the essay in cinema still tends to be approached as a genre or quasi-genre constituted through recurring structural traits. This article develops an alternative view by stressing the adaptive principles of the form, specifically as they concern citation, self-portraiture, and an implicit running dialogue with a spectator who potentially shares in the intellectual labor of montage. I offer a pointed discussion of the Essais of Montaigne in order to draw attention to the activity of essaying over time, in and across multiple works. Then, while extending this conception to several of the cinema's most prolific essayists, I focus on how Jean-Luc Godard takes up a Montaignian sense of the practice in his late endeavors of self-portrayal, most notably in his film JLG/JLG: Autoportrait in December and in his video series Histoire(s) du cinéma. Ultimately I argue that what distinguishes the most capable essayists working with sounds and images is a " pedagogical " mission to pass on to the spectator not simply ideas and arguments but a particular way of seeing, a means of investigation to be incisively replayed and re-tested.

The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema, ed. Seung-hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski, 61-78. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Columbia University Press

Hunter Vaughan

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967); and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and The War Is Over (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists.

Critical Quarterly

Marcia Landy

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, co-edited by Elizabeth A Papazian and Caroline Eades. London: Wallflower Press, November 2016 (ISBN: 9780231176958 (pbk), 9780231176941 (hbk), 9780231851039 (e-book).

Elizabeth A Papazian , Caroline Eades

With its increasing presence in a continuously evolving media environment, the essay film as a visual form raises new questions about the construction of the subject, its relationship to the world, and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. In this volume, authors specializing in various national cinemas (Cuban, French, German, Israeli, Italian, Lebanese, Polish, Russian, American) and critical approaches (historical, aesthetic, postcolonial, feminist, philosophical) explore the essay film and its consequences for the theory of cinema while building on and challenging existing theories. Taking as a guiding principle the essay form's dialogic, fluid nature, the volume examines the potential of the essayistic to question, investigate, and reflect on all forms of cinema—fiction film, popular cinema, and documentary, video installation, and digital essay. Includes contributions by Luka Arsenjuk, Martine Beugnet, Luca Caminati, Timothy Corrigan, Oliver Gaycken, Anne Eakin-Moss, Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Laura U. Marks, Laura Rascaroli, Mauro Resmini, and Eric Zakim.

Journal of Film and Video

This article argues that video technology plays a decisive role in Godard’s double movement toward the “cinematic” and the “post-cinematic” as demonstrated in his videographic essay Histoire(s) du Cinéma. It claims that Godard’s videographic refashioning of cinema in the technical, ontological, and philosophical manners necessarily involves bringing cinema to its limits. As this article will discuss in the ensuing two parts, video’s material and technical elements transform the methods of cinematic montage and the ontological status of the films extracted from disparate sources extensively. As a result, video in Histoire(s) ultimately serves both as a tool for the postcinematic expansion of montage and as a “synthesizer” of discrete images (films, paintings, photographs) and soundtracks whose affiliated media are originally distinct from each other.

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• performing arts

Godard and the Essay Film

A Form That Thinks

by Rick Warner

Imprint: Northwestern University Press

288 Pages , 6.00 x 9.00 in , 49 b-w images

• 9780810137370
• Published: July 2018
• 9780810137387
• 9780810137394
• Description

RICK WARNER is an assistant professor of film in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

“ Godard and the Essay Film is a first-rate piece of scholarship that makes substantial contributions on a variety of topics, including the essay as literary and cinematic form, film and philosophy, and the study of the indispensable oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard.” —Michael Renov, author of The Subject of Documentary    ". . . a superb piece of work, reaffirming cinema as a (potentially) philosophical machine that can lead us to think (that we have not yet begun thinking)." — Studies in European Cinema

“ Godard and the Essay Film is an exceptionally innovative and fresh study that manages to rethink one of the most important and challenging filmmakers in cinema history. In the process, Warner has also engaged one of the most important and prominent waves in modern filmmaking, the essay film. While there is a growing body of scholarship on this subject, Warner’s more focused engagement offers keen new insights that extend beyond Godard’s work.” —Timothy Corrigan, author of The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker

"It is made clear in Godard and the Essay Film, through meticulous close readings of scenes and techniques, that Godard's primary goal in his essay films is to establish a conversation with the viewer. Such a dialogue, where the viewer is asked to decode montaged connections, identify references and provide answers to posed scenarios, is understandably difficult and ultimately always unfinished . . . Also unique to this book is the emphasis on co-filmmaking . . ." —Yelizaveta Goldfarb Moss, Screen "There is no shortage of books on provocative French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, but this one serves the additional function of intervening in discussion of a difficult-to-define type of move: the essay film . . . The book's strongest discussions are those in which Warner opens up Godard's work to its contexts, and a particular highlight is the chapter on couples and coupling, which deals with Godard's collaborations with Anne-Marie Miéville." —K. M. Flanagan, George Mason University, CHOICE

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• Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks

In this Book

• Rick Warner
• Published by: Northwestern University Press

Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
• pp. vii-viii
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Text
• Introduction
• 1. Research in the Form of a Spectacle
• 2. A Critical Poetics of Citation
• 3. Refiguring the Couple: Love, Dialogue, and Gesture
• pp. 111-152
• 4. To Show and Show Oneself Showing: Essayistic Self-Portrayal
• pp. 153-194
• Coda: Stereoscopic Essays for the New Century
• pp. 195-222
• pp. 223-254
• pp. 255-276

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Godard and the essay film : a form that thinks

• Introduction
• Research in the form of a spectacle
• A critical poetics of citation
• Refiguring the couple: love, dialogue, and gesture
• To show and show oneself showing: essayistic self-portrayal
• Coda. Stereoscopic essays for the new century.

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• The films of Jean-Luc Godard : seeing the invisible Sterritt, David PN1998.3.G63 S73 1999
• Jean-Luc Godard : interviews Godard, Jean-Luc, 1930-2022 PN1998.3.G63 S74 1998
• Godard and the essay film : a form that thinks Warner, Rick, 1977- PN1998.3.G63 W37 2018
• Two bicycles : the work of Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville White, Jerry, 1971- PN 1998.3.G63 W45 2013
• Encounters with Godard : ethics, aesthetics, politics Williams, James S., 1963- PN1998.3.G63 W55 2016

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How the Essay Film Thinks

Professor of Film and Screen Media

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Less than a decade ago the expression "essay film" was still encountered only sporadically; today, the term has been widely integrated into film criticism, and is increasingly adopted by filmmakers and artists worldwide to characterize their work-while continuing to offer a precious margin of resistance to closed definitions. Eschewing essentialist notions of genre and form, and bringing issues of practice and praxis to the fore, this book offers a novel understanding of the epistemological strategies that are mobilized by the essay film, and of where such strategies operate. On 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 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.

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Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks Hardcover – Illustrated, 15 July 2018

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Through fine-grained analyses, this book contributes the most nuanced description yet of the relational interface between viewer and screen in the context of the essay film. Shedding new light on Godard's work, from the 1960s to the 2010s, in film, television, video, and digital stereoscopy, Warner distills an understanding of essayistic cinema as a shared exercise of critical rumination and perceptual discovery.

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Northwestern University Press
• Publication date 15 July 2018
• Dimensions 15.88 x 2.54 x 22.86 cm
• ISBN-10 0810137380
• ISBN-13 978-0810137387
• See all details

Product description

"There is no shortage of books on provocative French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, but this one serves the additional function of intervening in discussion of a difficult-to-define type of move: the essay film . . . The book's strongest discussions are those in which Warner opens up Godard's work to its contexts, and a particular highlight is the chapter on couples and coupling, which deals with Godard's collaborations with Anne-Marie Miéville." --K. M. Flanagan, George Mason University, CHOICE " Godard and the Essay Film is an exceptionally innovative and fresh study that manages to rethink one of the most important and challenging filmmakers in cinema history. In the process, Warner has also engaged one of the most important and prominent waves in modern filmmaking, the essay film. While there is a growing body of scholarship on this subject, Warner's more focused engagement offers keen new insights that extend beyond Godard's work." --Timothy Corrigan, author of The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Northwestern University Press; Illustrated edition (15 July 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0810137380
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0810137387
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.88 x 2.54 x 22.86 cm

About the author

Rick warner.

http://rickwarner.web.unc.edu

Rick Warner is a Film Studies professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His essays have appeared in several edited collections, as well as in New Review of Film and Television Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Adaptation, Critical Quarterly, Post-Script, The Cine-Files, Senses of Cinema, La Furia Umana, and Journal of Popular Film and Television. His writings have focused on such topics as the essay film, slow cinema, film performance, New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s, East Asian art cinema, surrealism, “old” versus “new” media, and screen-based installation art. He is currently working on a book that examines “contemplative” styles in global art cinema from 1945 to the present.

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