The BFI Sight and Sound magazine article ‘The Essay Film’ refers back 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, complicating the terms of both’, where a ‘reflective voice’ makes room for the ‘negotiation between active choice and passive possession’.[1] At the time of making the following presentation in 2016, it was unknown to me at that time that I was producing an essay film, but I was aware that I was forming a film montage, that offered a documentary point of view. Made-up from a collection of borrowed and appropriated moving images taken from Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film ‘Persona’, I loosely structured a selection of frames from this film, to think-through and contextualize my own art practice.
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