Why the Essay Film Is the Most Exciting Thing in Cinema
2024-10-06 · 5 min read
The essay film sits at the intersection of documentary, personal narrative, and visual philosophy. It's a form where filmmakers think out loud on screen, using images and sound to explore ideas rather than tell stories. Directors like Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, and Agnes Varda pioneered the form, and a new generation is proving it's the most vital mode of cinema today.
Chris Marker's Sans Soleil from 1983 remains the touchstone. A meditation on memory, travel, and image-making itself, the film moves between Japan, Guinea-Bissau, and Iceland without conventional narrative structure. It's a film that thinks, and watching it teaches you a different way to process visual information.
Contemporary essay filmmakers are expanding what the form can do. Kogonada's After Yang uses science fiction to explore memory and identity. Kevin Jerome Everson documents Black working-class life through fragments and repetitions. Theo Anthony's All Light, Everywhere investigates surveillance technology and the myth of objective vision.
The form is thriving partly because it suits our information-saturated moment. Essay films don't tell you what to think. They model a process of thinking. In an era of hot takes and algorithmic certainty, watching someone genuinely wrestle with complexity on screen feels radical.
The video essay on YouTube is the essay film's digital descendant. Creators like Every Frame a Painting, Nerdwriter, and Lindsay Ellis brought essay-form thinking to massive audiences. The best YouTube video essays, particularly from Folding Ideas and Jacob Geller, achieve genuine artistic ambition.
If traditional narrative cinema is the novel, the essay film is the personal essay: intimate, digressive, and built on the writer's unique way of seeing. Start with Marker's Sans Soleil, then Varda's The Gleaners and I, and let the form reshape how you think about what cinema can be.
