The Essay Film: When Cinema Becomes Reflective Thought

An Introduction to the Essay Film

To begin, it is important to note that the search for the origins of essay writing not only draws us into the realm of literature, but also immediately confronts us with a concept that, in its very definition, implies uncertainty, incompletion, and subjectivity. Essay writing in the European tradition—particularly with the advent of modernity—emerged alongside philosophical self-awareness and the rise of individuality, in contrast to definitive and dogmatic expressions of an all-knowing narrator. Among the key figures in this emergence is Michel de Montaigne, often regarded as the founder of the essay form. In the 16th century, he composed a series of "essais"—literally meaning "attempts"—establishing a form of writing in which, above all else, the mind is seen in the act of thinking, doubting, and experimenting with ideas. Unlike scholastic treatises, this type of writing does not seek to prove a theory, but to depict the process of thought itself—where writing is considered a mode of thinking.

It is through the word “essay” (from essai) that we can understand the nature of this form as deeply tied to subjectivity, doubt, and even poetic reflection. The essay becomes a space of exploration, observation, and intuition—a space in which boundaries between thought and feeling, reality and imagination, the personal and the public, are blurred.

From the 19th century onward, the essay form, particularly within traditions such as German Romanticism, French confessional literature, and American free-form prose, gradually adopted narrative qualities, autobiographical elements, and fluidity across genres. Unlike academic or scientific writing, the essay is an open form. The writer may move freely between memoir, philosophical reflection, personal contemplation, and poetic description.

These fluid and hybrid features position the essay in a space that invites dialogue with other art forms—especially cinema. Just as the essay in modern literature is flexible, subject-oriented, and multifaceted, its cinematic counterpart also took shape. The term “Essay Film,” which gained traction in the mid-20th century, refers precisely to this transposition of the essay form from written language into visual language. Cinema—an art that has always oscillated between recording reality and reinterpreting it, between narrative and deconstruction, between documentary and fiction—provides an ideal ground for the development of the essayistic form.

Historical Link Between the Essay and the Essay Film

The roots of the Essay Film can be traced to the works of some of the most significant filmmakers of the 20th century—films that emerge at the crossroads of fiction and documentary, aiming not to present a closed and coherent narrative, but to directly engage with the fragmented, complex modern world through an open, hybrid, and reflective structure.

Historically, the Essay Film has been shaped by intellectual traditions such as Marxism, existentialism, and deconstruction. Like the written essay, the cinematic essay serves as a tool for critical thought, inquiry, and even ideological struggle.

One key concept here is caméra-stylo ("camera-pen"), introduced by Alexandre Astruc, who called for a cinema that functions like writing—not merely in service of storytelling, but as a means of articulating thought. This paved the way for filmmakers who saw film not as a finished product but as a process of thinking, writing, and dialoguing with the world.

Chris Marker is often considered one of the pioneers of this form. André Bazin, in his analysis of Marker’s documentaries, noted that in this type of film, the image does not subordinate the voice or narration; rather, it is the voice—what Bazin calls a kind of verbal intelligence—that centers the work, with images deriving their meaning from it. This inversion of the typical image-sound relationship is a fundamental feature of the Essay Film and is also central to the works of Jean-Luc Godard.

Godard not only identified himself as an essayist but explicitly framed his work within the Essay Film tradition. He believed in a structural link between writing, television, and cinema, going so far as to equate filmmaking with essay writing. In Godard’s films, concepts such as citation and montage fundamentally serve the essayistic structure. He used montage as a form of critique—whether political critique through collage and détournement, or cinematic critique where sounds and images engage in direct dialogue.

The Essay Film also appears in the works of filmmakers such as Werner Herzog and Agnès Varda, as a blend of lived experience, theoretical reflection, and formal exploration. In films like The Beaches of Agnès, Varda blurs the boundaries between documentary, memoir, and philosophical rumination, while Herzog, through a kind of poetic existentialism, transforms documentary narrative into a meditation on the human condition.

Thus, the Essay Film is not merely a cinematic form but a continuation of the essay tradition—reborn in a new medium, with new possibilities, and for a new age(1).

Formal Features of the Essay Film and Its Relationship with the Audience

Since its emergence in the mid-20th century, theEssay Film has been characterized by formal traits that distinguish it from other cinematic genres. These features influence not only the narrative structure but also how viewers perceive and engage with the film’s world.

1. First-Person Narration:

One of the central elements of the Essay Film is the presence of a first-person narrator—not as an omniscient authority, but as a thinking, questioning, and at times uncertain subject. This narrator often reflects or discovers ideas alongside the viewer, explicitly situating themselves within the narrative. This first-person presence sets the Essay Film apart from classical, objective documentaries, rendering the experience more personal, subjective, and at times poetic.

2. Integration of Archive, Sound, Text, and Music:

TheEssay Film is often a layered composition that combines archival footage, voice-over narration, written text, music, and even digital animation. This integration does not aim at narrative coherence but rather generates a network of meanings—sometimes contradictory, overlapping, or intersecting. In the works of Marker, Godard, and Harun Farocki, image and sound engage in dialectical conversation, with neither dominating the other.

3. Fragmentary Structure and Rejection of Classical Form:

Essay Films typically abandon linear storytelling in favor of fragmentation, repetition, rupture, and digression. This fragmented structure creates a “form-in-progress” that stands in contrast to the closed, cause-and-effect logic of classical cinema. Rather than moving toward a resolution, the Essay Film tends toward openness and reflection, resembling philosophical writing or memoir rather than traditional drama.

These formal qualities make the Essay Film one of the most flexible and dynamic forms in contemporary cinema—a form capable of critically engaging with the world while also conveying a deeply personal and poetic experience.

4. Interactive Form with the Viewer:

One scholar describes Rossellini’s style in Journey to Italy as marked by a “capacity to see”—perhaps not the most subtle (like Renoir) or the most precise (like Hitchcock), but the most active, constantly moving between capture and pursuit. What this implies is a burden placed on the viewer, who is confronted with the film’s intentional incompleteness. The hybrid and sketch-like nature of the form becomes not an affectation but a strategy for engaging the modern chaotic world through a style attuned to its perceptual challenges.

In this sense, the boundary between film criticism and film itself begins to blur, as Godard put it:

"Cinema, according to Truffaut, is both spectacle—Méliès—and inquiry—Lumière. Analyzing myself, I see that I’ve always wanted to conduct an inquiry through spectacle."

One scholar explains that the words “spectacle” and “inquiry” define a space of convergence between imagination and reality, magic and science, theatricality and documentary vision. Godard does not use the word “narrative,” instead emphasizing the visual. Meanwhile, "inquiry" implies not merely documentary but experimentation—a process that Godard sees as enabled by the cinematic medium, through its capacity for montage, not merely as a tool of recording.

Cinematic essayist is not mere self-display; it arises from the belief that the tools chosen for exploration are essential to the investigation of ideas.

A cinema that fuses “spectacle” and “inquiry” imbues all performative elements with a research function and turns seeing into a conditional process. I use this definition to describe both Godard’s work and the Essay Film form, as the latter essentially stages a process of inquiry—one in which the viewer becomes more engaged than usual. While notions such as “personal” and “subjective” are relevant, what truly distinguishes the Essay Film from adjacent styles and genres is that what it offers the viewer is not a finished product, but an open-ended, ongoing exploration(2).

 

Comparative Analysis with Other Cinematic Forms
Differences from Traditional Documentary, Autobiographical Film, and the Audiovisual Essay

Although the Essay Film may appear to overlap with genres such as documentary, autobiographical cinema, or even the audiovisual essay, it fundamentally differs from them in terms of structure, purpose, and its relationship with the viewer.

1. Difference from Traditional Documentary:
Traditional documentaries are mostly based on the presentation of external realities, objective information, and narratives with clear references. In this type of documentary, images usually serve to support or explain the voice-over, which functions as a guide. But in the essay film—as André Bazin notes in his analysis of Chris Marker’s works—the spoken language takes precedence over the image, which plays only a tertiary role in the structure of meaning. The essay film is not created to inform, but to think; it invites the viewer to witness a process of thought rather than simply absorb a final conclusion(3).

2. Difference from Autobiographical Film:
While autobiographical films revolve around recounting lived personal experiences, the essay film—though it may use the first person—is not merely concerned with representing the “self.” The narrator of the essay film may speak of themselves, but this self is not the center of gravity; rather, it serves as a point of departure for broader questions. Unlike autobiographical films that aim for coherence and reconstruction of the personal past, theEssay Film is often discontinuous, nonlinear, and unstable—a form of writing from the self that is constantly collapsing and being redefined.

3. Difference from the Audiovisual Essay:
In recent decades, with the rise of platforms like YouTube, a form of “audiovisual essay” has emerged—often produced in academic or cultural contexts for analyzing films, styles, or specific subjects. While these works may use some of the same tools as the essay film—such as montage, voice-over, and citation—they are generally analytical, goal-driven, and didactic in content. By contrast, the Essay Film often appears aimless and meditative; it adopts an open-ended, question-oriented structure and avoids delivering a definitive conclusion.

As a result, if the traditional documentary seeks to represent reality, the autobiographical film aims to reconstruct memory, and the audiovisual essay focuses on thematic analysis, the essay film resembles a movement of thought: a winding path of reflection, doubt, montage, and dialogue between sound, image, and language.

Examples of Godard’s Works with an Essay Film Approach

“Two or Three Things I Know About Her”: Seeking to Understand Modern Life Through the Essay Form
 

This film is often considered the beginning of Godard’s overt and fully articulated essayistic address.
In it, Godard explores the social structures that govern modern life and seeks a way to comprehend this complexity through everyday events and interactions. The film progresses through a combination of observation, documentation, and staged scenes “drawn from life.”

He focuses on the character of Juliette—a woman who works part-time as a prostitute—within a “complex ensemble” of social relationships and events.
Godard uses voice-over commentary to reflect on what is being shown. At times, this narration becomes personal and contemplative, such as when he discusses the difficulty of representing events and of communication itself.
Certain scenes—like the gas station or the café with the cup of coffee—demonstrate Godard’s effort to capture and understand social reality. In the café scene, he speaks about the coffee cup, and the camera moves in for an extreme close-up of the coffee’s surface. In voice-over, Godard says, “Maybe an object is something that allows us to reconnect...” and then reflects on the difficulty of communication, the gap between subjective certainty and objective truth, and his own feeling of loneliness. The close-up of the swirling coffee is described as a symbol of “a constellation of spinning, converging, and dispersing elements.” This scene and its voice-over showcase Godard’s poetic thinking and his hope for the awakening of awareness and the formation of new kinds of connections.
He also challenges the possibility of connection in the modern world through visual techniques such as framing, varied perspectives, and reflections.

“Histoire(s) du cinéma”: A Visual Essay on History and Montage

This long video work by Godard has been described as a “visual critical study,” and Godard himself refers to it as an essay.
Histoire(s) du cinéma is a prime example of Godard’s use of quotation and montage as tools of critical thought. He employs quotes, sounds, images, and music to create connections, contrasts, and commentary on the history of cinema and the world.
Montage in this work is understood in multiple ways: as a collage of various elements, as a process based on the principle of “bringing together two more or less separate realities” (based on a poem by Pierre Reverdy), and also as “thinking with the hands.”
By juxtaposing dissonant images, Godard forges new connections and allows the viewer to discover those relationships and meanings for themselves. This form of montage is not a code to be deciphered, but an exploratory gesture—often tentative and provisional.
In Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard inserts his own presence through shots of himself at work—especially his hands. These gestures become symbols of the act of montage and of “thinking with the hands.” Godard’s self-involvement is part of a montage process through which he assumes responsibility for what is offered to the world.

“Scenario of the Film 'Passion' (Scénario du film 'Passion')”: Seeing as a Pre-Writing Act

This video essay is described by Godard as an exercise in seeing before writing the screenplay for his film Passion. He believes that one must first see, then write.
In this video, Godard speaks directly to the camera, using techniques like superimposition and his own physical presence to display the process of seeing and image composition. He positions himself in front of a screen on which images appear, gesturing toward them with his hand—resembling the mirror-play of self-portraiture in painting, in which the artist sees himself seeing and creating the image.
In his voice-over, he freely shifts between first- and second-person pronouns, reflecting a blurring of roles between author and viewer. He asks the viewer not to harden their heart against him, showing his desire to make the viewer a participant in the act of seeing—an act he seeks to foster(4).

References:
[1]Alter, Nora M. (2018). The essay film after fact and fiction. Columbia University Press, 1-31
Alter, N. M., & Corrigan, T. (Eds.). (2017). Essays on the essay film. Columbia University Press, 1-21

[2]   Warner, Jr., Charles Richard  (2011) Research in the Form of a Spectacle: Godard and the Cinematic Essay.  Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh(Unpublished), 7-14

[3] Alter, N. M., & Corrigan, T. (Eds.). (2017). Essays on the essay film. Columbia University Press, 20-31

[4] Warner, Jr., Charles Richard  (2011) Research in the Form of a Spectacle: Godard and the Cinematic Essay.  Doctoral Dissertation, University