The BFI Sight and Sound magazine article ‘The Essay Film’ refers to the film critic and theorist André Bazin, to define the essay film as an ‘intervention’, which ‘moves blithely between the realms of fiction and non-fiction, while complicating both realms, through a ‘reflective voice’ that makes room for ‘negotiation between active choice and passive possession’.[1]
At the time of making the following presentation, in 2016, it was unknown to me that I was producing an essay film, but I was aware that I was forming a film montage with a documentary point of view. Made-up from a collection of borrowed moving images, taken from Ingmar Bergman’s, 1966 film, ‘Persona’, my loosely structured selection of frames are overlaid with meanderings that bring together connected viewpoints within the field of psychology, philosophy, film theory and the materiality of film, which subsequently, has helped me to think-through and contextualize my own art practice.
https://youtu.be/kVe9E1c9UWI?si=wb7NyCfOUhdvad6Y
The script, that accompanies this presentation, is available to download here.
[1] Geoff Andrew et al., ‘The Essay Film’. Online Source: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/deep-focus/essay-film. Aug 2015. Source Cited: Dec 2016