The Essay Film – described as a ‘hybrid form that crosses boundaries and rests somewhere in in-between fiction and nonfiction cinema. Essentially, an essay film classifies the new type of documentaries which utilise the filmmakers own personal reflections and experiences. Before continuing, I think that these would make for interesting documentaries, however, I get the feeling that there are generally some problems with this type of film.

So essentially, the essay film is not bound by the constraints of formal cinema, but rather, allows the filmmaker to employ avant-garde and their own artistic flare. “The essay film…is transgressive both structurally and conceptually, it is self-reflective and self-reflexive.”

So it seems as if the essay film is a bit of a headache for filmmakers who like to stick to the rules and do everything by the book. If you were a bad filmmaker and accidentally repeated sections, had fragmentation, digression and dispersion, you could get away with your documentary being classified as an essay film. If we  struggle to classify a film at the present time, it eventually gets lumped into the category of essay film; this is not a good thing, because it eventually means that works which are simply too hard to place in a genre will all just be classified as essay films and there will be no clear distinctions.

The essay film relieves the filmmaker of the responsibilities of sticking to the rules and parametres of traditional documentary practise (such as chronological sequencing). It allows the filmmaker to run free with their imagination and artistic potential.

Is that not the idea of korsakow films in a nutshell? K films are not always chronological, they don’t aways make sense, their material is fragmented and doesn’t have to link and it times, it can contradict itself.

I think that it is fascinating how the idea of emotion being introduced within a documentary can destroy its professional position. Yes, I’ll admit that before I came to university and learnt the many different avenues of what a documentary could be, I did simply just associate the word ‘documentary’ with David Attenborough’s voice. His films would be honest, all claims backed up by evidence. With the essay film, the filmmaker may introduce their own emotions and background, and so, how can we really say that everything we are watching is fact or an accurate representation of everything which is supposed to occur.

The pathway for the essay film has been nurtured by the developments in distribution. To view entertaining media, we no longer have to go to just a cinema, but we can now access media through our televisions, mobile phones and laptops. This means that material doesn’t need to strictly suit a mainstream audience.

The scriptwriter needs to merge with the filmmaker in order for essay films to work. The pen needs to meet the image. Phillip Lopate claims that “an essay film must have words, in the form of a text, either spoken, subtitled, or intertitled…[which must] represent a single voice… it must have a strong personal point of view.” This idea from Lopate comes from mimicking the essay itself.

Timmothy Corrigan’s list of dominant characteristics of an essay film:

• generally a short documentary subject
• the lack of a dominant narrative organisation
• the interaction of a personal voice or vision