Why the Essay Film Is the Most Exciting Thing in Cinema

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.

Marker's other essential film is 28 minutes long and made almost entirely of still photographs. La Jetee, from 1962, tells a time-travel story in frozen images with a single moving shot, and Terry Gilliam remade it as 12 Monkeys. Criterion pairs it with Sans Soleil on one disc, which is the cheapest way in and the right order to watch them: the short first, then the sprawl.

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.

Varda made The Gleaners and I in her early seventies with a small consumer DV camera she could hold in one hand, and the cheap camera is as much the point as the subject. It let her film her own ageing hand mid-shot and turn that into an argument about time. Harun Farocki went the opposite way and worked almost entirely with images other people had made, surveillance stills, factory training footage, aerial reconnaissance photographs of Auschwitz, on the principle that the interesting question is what a picture was made for.

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.

Access is easier than the reputation suggests. UbuWeb hosts a large avant-garde archive free, MUBI and the Criterion Channel both keep essay-film strands, and the best of the YouTube generation costs nothing by definition: Folding Ideas' Line Goes Up runs over two hours on cryptocurrency art markets and holds attention throughout. The failure mode is obvious once you have seen a few. An essay film with a subject but no argument is a mood, and no amount of drifting drone footage rescues it.

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.

https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-essay-film