Abstracts of Papers
Björn Wieders:
The Essayistic Film: Memory, Experience, and the Construction of Poietic Space
Essay-film as a genre has been and is still an elusive subject. Texts written about it often state the impossibility to define clearly what could characterize essayistic films. However, the question of clear-cut boundaries might turn out not to be the central concern once we acknowledge that there is a body of films that has been and is subsumed under the label 'essay-film' and that these films are reaching increasingly wider audiences by being broadcast on television (although they are still seen only by a limited number of people.)
In this paper, I will take a closer look at some examples of essayistic films - from well-known and widely discussed works such as Sans Soleil (Chris Marker 1982), F for Fake (Orson Welles 1973) and Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (Agnes Varda 2000) to lesser known films such as These Are Not My Images (Irit Batsry 2001), Still (Wendy Oberlander 2001) and Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (Trinh T. Minh-Ha 1989) - in order to analyze signifying strategies, ways of representing world-views. My basic assumption will be that in essayistic films, room for imagination is created between the poles of the images, original (but not necessarily synchronous) sound and voice-over commentary. Text (written and spoken) and image form the basic fabric out of which poietic spaces are formed.
However, what is the relation between poiesis and mimesis in the genre essay-film? In most of the cases, the filmed or photographed images used are what we usually call documentary-footage, i.e. footage of events that are not exclusively set in scene for the camera. While the definition that is often given for this kind of 'non-fiction' footage - the event would also have happened if the camera had not been there - is highly questionable, it still holds true that documentary films are consumed as if having a stronger indexical link to their represented subjects than fiction films. In essayistic films, however, the purportedly mimetic quality of the documentary image is set into a critical perspective with the help of montage, non-synchronous sound, voice-over commentary and other techniques. Through these filmic practices, experienced life is remembered and offered to the audience as a space for imagination, thinking, questioning etc. In my paper, I will try to analyze processes that are part of this transformation of 'reality.'
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