this weeks reading was a hefty one and i have to be honest, i didn’t get through all of it. a lot of skimming was done. but it was just so long. i was finding it impossible to focus and figured off i was better off reading parts and taking them in than reading the whole thing but absorbing nothing. not that it wasn’t interesting. because the concept of film essays is a new and interesting one. it was just a very long, very wordy article that had a lot of foreign examples that meant nothing to me because i don’t watch those kind’s of films.
Laura Rascaroli tells us all about the concept of the “film essay”. a concept which i am assuming is related in some degree to Korsakow. otherwise, why would we be reading it. it’s about making and seeing films in a new and different way. not just pure narrative anymore, film essays are more biographical. the director and scriptwriter merge together. most importantly, it’s the voice of the filmmaker which comes across through the essay. like korsakow, it’s not so much about what is being said but about how ideas are being represented or delivered and what the audience can gain from that. a literary essay is a means for someone to try and communicate their ideas and opinions to an audience and thus a film essay is the same. it sits between fiction and non fiction cinema, blurring the boundaries between the two as it can be either, both or neither. from the article, “an essay is neither fiction nor fact, but a personal investigation involving both the passion and intellect of the author”, the film essay is an exploration of ideas, led by the filmmaker.
this is what korsakow is. it’s what we’ve been discussing. that’s it’s not about the content but rather how the content is delivered and how it can be interpreted. and this is how we have to look at our k-films. right now i’m still unsure about putting the whole thing together. but i just have to think about how i want to express myself and the clips that i have taken. importantly, it’s the relationships between the clips, not the clips themselves.
if the literary essay is a device for saying almost everything about almost everything, then the film essay can do exactly the same, only even more because it can show it too. this is where the benefit of cinema comes in. it is visual and audial (is that a word?) the viewers can see, watch, read and listen to the essay and the different elements combine to produce a far more cohesive and enriched work.
like korsakow, the essay shows the process of thinking, how the filmmaker goes about getting to the point they are trying to communicate. it is a reflective form, practically auto-biographical. the k-films show the inner workings of the filmmaker’s mind as they put the film itself together.
i only have two question coming out of this reading.
1. if our k-film is a film essay, why do we need a written essay to accompany it?
2. the article mentioned someone named Georg Lukács. are we sure this isn’t George Lucas trying to get his hands on another type of cinema?