Screening List: The Essay Film

In my fifth year as a lecturer, I reached my ultimate goal — I created an experimental documentary production course for my department that focused on my area of study/practice, the Essay Film.

Course Description: “This upper-division production workshop focuses on the Essay Film, a poetic and lyrical genre that sees cinema as thought and promotes personal work as an opportunity for exploration, reflection, and discovery. Tracing the history and key films of the Essay genre, including work by Chris Marker, Raoul Peck, Jenni Olson, and more, we will have the opportunity to create a number of short works that serve as exercises to explore creative voice, expressive imagery and sound design, and voiceovers that draw connections between personal histories, poetic and philosophical themes, and objective research. The central project of the course is a personal 5-10 minute essay film, which we will follow from treatment stage, to two script drafts, a rough cut, and a final cut. An intimate, small workshop, our focus will be on developing a creative community that, like the Essay film itself, fosters a spirit of inquiry, exploration, and deep reflection and feedback.”

I am passionate about the essay film for several reasons, the greatest of which is that it has an incredibly rich history that is very rarely introduced in film schools. Despite this, it remains one of cinema’s most elastic and liberating forms — an art of thinking in image & sound, where the subjective, objective, and poetic are woven together. Marginalized filmmakers have turned to the essay film as both a refuge and weapon, a medium where the personal and political can merge without the pressure or permission of commercial storytelling. Its porous boundaries invite voices excluded from dominant narratives to speak in their own rhythms, to dismantle official histories, and to craft cinematic arguments that are both experimental and intimate.

In the essay film, thought and ‘official history’ is not fixed, it is assembled through the genre’s three modes of address:

• Direct / Personal (Subjective) Address –
  This mode highlights the autobiographical, diaristic, self-questioning perspective of the film through personal stories and memories, dreams, family histories, thoughts, and feelings. In these moments, the filmmaker speaks in the first person, openly acknowledging their own presence, perspective, and partiality.

• Investigative / Factual (Research-Based) Address –
  This mode engages with research, evidence, archives, or reportage, but without the rigid neutrality of traditional documentary. The filmmaker often still shows their hand in the research process, choosing stories and statistics that poetically align with the film’s problematic, and sometimes even interrogating the process of investigation itself.

• Poetic / Universal Address –
  This mode moves beyond the individual to contemplate broader, often poetic, philosophical, or lyrical themes. The tone in these moments is less about information and more about evocation, rhythm, and associative meaning-making.

I organized this class around several key subgenres in the discipline: Travelogues, Portraits, Investigative, Diary, Narrative, and Refractive. Within each section, we spent two weeks looking at essay works that played within that genre, and students created a 1 minute essay film that worked with its major themes and essayistic signatures. By the end of the class, students had created and shared 5 low-stakes, small essay films that allowed them to explore the diverse reaches of the genre, develop a creative voice and perspective, and reflect on subjects and themes that were important to them. This culminated in a longer form 5 minute film, where students could select any subgenre and subject and create a fine-tuned essay work. The result of this structure was a dynamic, low-stakes (this was essential) space of experimentation. I made films alongside them, we shared our work with one another regularly, and we all explored themes of identity, family & community, politics, and personal histories. The films produced were intimate, almost breathtakingly so, and it floored me how open and vulnerable my students got with one another, sharing works that uncovered deep wrestling, love & dreams, painful histories, and hopes for the future.

It is also important to note that this course was interrupted by the Covid pandemic — while we spent the first 8 weeks on campus, the remainder of the course was held via Zoom, with students sequestered in their respective homes during the height of lockdown. I have a strong memory of being in our first Zoom class when Mayor Breed announced the San Francisco city-wide lockdown, us all taking in the information together. In the months following, it was a joy to see them each and every week, and for this class to be a touchstone for all of us amidst the fog and anxiety. Students often expressed gratitude for one another and the space of the class, for giving them something on their schedule to look forward to and an outlet for their thoughts, introspection, and fears. I could never have anticipated this when I designed the course, but I felt equally grateful to be in community with them, exploring the essay film together in such a charged moment. In that context, what could have been a more fitting and beautiful practice to share?

While I only got to teach this course one time before stepping away from academia, I think about it as the cornerstone of my career and cannot wait to offer it again in whatever capacity I can figure out.

The Idea of North (Rebecca Baron, 1995)

Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, 1989)

Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)

The Royal Road (Jenni Olson, 2015)

Lumumba: La Mort du Prophète (Raoul Peck, 1990)

November (Hito Steyerl, 2004)

Universal Hotel (Peter Thompson, 1986)

Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1956)

Handsworth Songs (The Black Audio Film Collective, 1986)

Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda, 2008)

Lost, Lost, Lost (Jonas Mekas, 1976)

F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973)

La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)

AKA Serial Killer (Masao Adachi, 1969)

Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)

News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1977)

Surname Viet Given Name Nam (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989)

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (Errol Morris, 2003)