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Journal of Visual Culture: Translating The Essay Into Film and Installation Nora M. Alter
Journal of Visual Culture: Translating The Essay Into Film and Installation Nora M. Alter
Nora M. Alter
Abstract
This article investigates whether or not it is possible to translate the
philosophical essay into a two- and later three-dimensional audio-
visual form known as the ‘essay film’. This genre is increasingly gaining
recognition as a distinct branch of international cinema. This text
traces the essay film’s origins back to early silent cinema and the
abstract, experimental films of artists and then follows its development
and the forking of paths into non-fiction ‘art cinema’ and non-fiction
film, concluding with recent experiments that blur the distinction
between art and film and which seek to transform the essay into a
sculptural installation.
Keywords
Theodor Adorno Walter Benjamin essay film installation Georg
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literary essay, between genres that are more stable and firmly established – in
the case of the written essay between literature and philosophy and in the
case of the essay film between narrative fiction and documentary – audio-
visual essays problematize binary categories of representation. Although
‘essay films’ have been sporadically produced for at least 80 years, this genre
was only properly theorized in the final decade of the 20th century. Since
then, the production of audio-visual essays has increased at such a rate that
they have come to be commonly acknowledged as a third cinematic genre.
The reasons for the proliferation of the essay film are multiple, and include
the broad accessibility of video cameras and digital editing systems. This
technology has enabled individuals with little or no training in filmmaking to
become practitioners of the craft. The more general shift away from literacy
toward visual culture in the late 20th century has also spurred on production
within this medium. Indeed, the essay film at the turn of the millennium has
increasingly come to perform the critical function of the written film theory
essay. In what follows I shall examine the genealogy of the audio-visual essay,
as well as discuss the vicissitudes of this genre from a one-dimensional
written linguistic text to be read, to a two-dimensional audio-visual film or
video work to be screened publicly or viewed on a VCR, DVD or CD-ROM,
and finally to a three-dimensional installation designed as a space through
which the spectator actively navigates his or her way. My aim is not only to
explore the particular stages of the essay film, but also to investigate the
translation or mutation of this genre from medium to medium.
‘To essay’ means ‘to assay’, ‘to weigh’, as well as ‘to attempt’, suggesting an
open-ended, evaluative search. But this objective search is haunted and con-
strained by the presence of individual subjectivity. This makes sense if we
consider that the verb is also linked via the Latin ex-agere to agens, the word
and problem of human agency. Current use of the word essay as a distinct
genre can be traced to the 16th-century social critic and philosopher Michel
de Montaigne, whose Essais (1580) were to exert a deep influence on the
philosophs of the Enlightenment, and on a number of critics in this legacy,
from the Marquis de Sade, Giacomo Leopardi and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to
Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes.
By ‘essay’, Montaigne meant the testing of ideas, himself (slyly qualified as
‘the most frivolous of topics’) and society. It was a wide-ranging form of
cognitive perambulation that reflected upon fundamental questions of life
and human frailty, tensions and overlaps between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, and
their consequences for social order and disorder. Since Montaigne, the essay
has retained some of its distinguishing features. Its weapons are humor,
irony, satire, paradox; its atmosphere is contradiction and the collision of
opposites. Although the essay as a form transgresses national contexts, my
investigation of the formulations and practices of this genre will be limited to
the writings of Lukács, Adorno and Benjamin.
46 journal of visual culture 6(1)
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an
image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and
never seen again . . . For every image of the past that is not recognized
by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear
irretrievably. (p. 255)
Similarly, the manner in which the opening shot of Eisenberg’s film features
an image of the golden angel Victoria that sits on top of the Siegessaüle in
Berlin with debris blowing across the screen inevitably summons the specter
of Benjamin’s Thesis IX:
Alter Translating the Essay Into Film and Installation 47
essays are so dense that they seem to be made with video technology in
mind, which allows for unlimited rewindings and pauses. The form of
experience that is thereby produced is not unlike the traditional reading of a
difficult text in which it is not uncommon for the reader to pause and reread
particularly complex passages. Finally, according to Adorno, the essay is ‘the
critical form par excellence; as immanent critique of intellectual construc-
tions, as a confrontation of what they are with their concept, it is critique of
ideology’ (p. 20).
Benjamin was the essayist par excellence for Adorno, and although the
latter’s theorization of the essay has had a significant reception, formally it is
to Benjamin that many audio-visual essayists turn. Yet, it would be an error
to underestimate the importance of Lukács’s conception of the essay for late
20th-century practitioners of its audio-visual form. For it was Lukács who
theorized the translation of the written essay into a new aesthetic medium,
and it was he who also reformulated Schlegel’s famous dictum that the
‘theory of the novel should be a novel’ into the idea that the theory of the
essay should be an essay or the theory of film a film.
The audio-visual essay is a multi-layered product – an image track, a sound
track, as well as a component in the form of intertitles, chapter headings, and
even writing directly on the celluloid – often accompanied by a voice-over.
The textual track or layer sometimes directly contradicts the image track,
creating within the total filmic text a jarring collision of opposites and
complex levels of meaning that the audience must co-produce. This model
of translation, which galvanizes the observer into the role of a full-fledged
participant in the construction of meaning, supplies the audio-visual essay
with metaphors of relationality and participation in a medium that in its mass
manifestations has been traditionally associated with passivity.
Essay films also translate various classical rhetorical devices into audio-visual
dimensions. For example, the rhetorical figure of ‘chiasmus’, the oscillatory
‘crossing’ of categories, has been adapted to the cinematographic medium in
several films. Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988–98) and Chris
Marker’s Letter from Siberia (1958) are cases in point. Both of these films
feature soundtracks that interrupt the visual track to loosen habitual
connections and produce surprising new meanings. Similarly, the painterly
and psychological technique of ‘anamorphosis’, whereby a ‘change of
perspective’ in the extended or narrow sense alters manifest meaning, has
been adapted as a methodological tool by film essayists. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s
Surname Viet: Given Name Nam (1989), for example, is cleverly presented
as a documentary only to reveal its complete artifice – and the artifice of the
genre of documentary altogether – by the end of the film. What these works
all have in common is that they challenge the manner in which history is
usually assembled and narrated and enable other stories to unfold.
The tenuousness of the relationship between representation and history is
also a concern of artists such as Hito Steyerl who use various techniques of
layering images and sounds to create a filmic version of what Benjamin
referred to as the ‘dialectical image’, or those such as Eisenberg who seek to
Alter Translating the Essay Into Film and Installation 49
The genealogy of the audio-visual essay begins in the 1920s when the genres
of feature and documentary were settling into their formal categories.
Essayistic tendencies are discernible in 1920s films such as Dziga Vertov’s
seminal Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a portrait of Moscow’s
dynamism, Joris Ivens’s Rain (1929), a poetic meditation on the relationship
between nature and modernity, and Walter Ruttman’s crucial Berlin,
Symphony of a Great City (1927), which signaled the great potential of this
new mode of filmmaking.
Although essayistic traces emerge with increasing frequency in films of the
1920s, the essay film as a genre was not formally articulated until 1940 when
avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter wrote the manifesto-like text, ‘Der
Filmessay: Eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilms’ (The Film Essay: A New
Form of Documentary Film) (1992[1940]). One of the key players in German
Dada, Richter worked closely with other figures in this international avant-
garde movement, including Richard Huelsenbeck, Kurt Schwitters, Viking
Eggeling, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp and Sophie Taeuber. By 1921, he
had made his first abstract film, Rhythmus 21, a black and white study of
Suprematist squares and rectangles that change in size and depth through a
series of rhythmic evolutions. Richter continued to make abstract films for
several years. The overriding structure of these productions was determined
more by the motion or movement of the filmed objects than by any physical
or referential materiality.
But by the late 1920s, Richter had shifted from purely abstract works to more
socio-critical representational shorts, such as Vormittagspuk (1927) and
Inflation (1928), that characteristically performed a mode of social critique.
Many of these films were censored, and Richter faced an increasingly hostile
environment, which culminated in his decision to emigrate to the United
States in 1941. The first film that he made in the US, Dreams That Money Can
Buy (1947), won the Special Award at the Venice Biennale of 1948 for ‘the
50 journal of visual culture 6(1)
German Cinema, a name that indicates that a clear connection was drawn to
French New Wave cinema of the previous decade. The filmmakers in
question, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Hans
Syberberg, Helke Sanders, Alexander Kluge, Wim Wenders, Hartmut
Bitomsky and Harun Farocki, typically interspersed their feature films with
smaller essayistic audio-visual projects. These strategies of hybridity
culminated in products that were neither feature films nor documentaries.
Indeed the Hamburg Declaration of 1979 (see Rentschler, 1988[1979]),
penned and signed by ‘we German filmmakers’, acknowledged the need for
a synthesis between the ‘feature film’ and the ‘documentary film’, as much as
the need for ‘films that reflect on the medium’ (p. 4). And here it is important
to stress that, at the time, what people understood as the documentary genre
in West Germany was either a form of American Direct Cinema or a form of
Cinema Verité, both of which maintained rigid guidelines meant to ensure
that reality was represented as truthfully as possible.
Within the history of film, then, the essay film develops in opposition to the
strict genre of documentary. Whereas the latter claims to present
unambiguous truth and a relationship to history that is not arbitrary, the
essay film allows for contradictions and play. Thus when Kluge was faced in
the 1970s with the difficulty of addressing German history, he resorted to the
genre of the essay film, finding that the combination of fact and fiction, as
well as the inclusion of drawings and other innovative non-realistic elements
that this genre permitted, allowed him at once to work his way through this
aporia and self-reflexively draw attention to the artificial nature of the filmic
medium. Similar difficulties led Syberberg to adopt the genre of the essay
film when making his epic Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland (1977), which
relied heavily on dramatic forms of play, fantasy, puppetry and the like to
render the personage of Hitler.
From this perspective, the formal means of representation employed by
Kluge and Syberberg are as theoretical as anything advanced by the narrative
of their films. Inherent to the meaning of these films is that the medium itself
can never offer more than re-presentation, and that the veracity demanded
by the documentary genre is ultimately unattainable. The essay film, because
it plays with fact and fiction, untruths as much as truths, poses problems
without answers, and is deeply self-reflexive. As such, it is seen as the ideal
genre by filmmakers who want to advance historical knowledge but
recognize that this can only be done in a tenuous way.
What I am suggesting is that if in art the audio-visual essay emerges from an
attempt to fuse the genre of the documentary with avant-garde or
experimental film, in cinema the audio-visual essay develops from the
attempt to combine the documentary and the fictional or feature film genres.
These two strands of the essay film remained separate in the 1970s and 80s,
each with different practitioners, publics and venues. Whereas the essay films
of artists were presented in exhibition spaces such as museums and galleries,
those of filmmakers who stayed closer to the institution of cinema were
shown in repertory film houses or on television.
Alter Translating the Essay Into Film and Installation 53
The move from the written page to the audio-visual form presents a similar
freedom of movement. The filmmaker/artist can opt to transfer certain
elements and leave others behind. As a result, the new ‘essay’ may bear only
a fragmentary resemblance to the original, but that does not make it any less
faithful.
From this perspective, the nature of the essay encourages and promotes its
translation not only into different languages but also into other media and
forms. Benjamin (1969b[1923]) described Rudolf Pannwitz’s Die Krisis der
europaischen Kultur as one of the finest treatises on the freedom of
translation (p. 80). That the work Benjamin evokes centers on crisis is not
coincidental. Crisis, both in form and content, is intimately linked to the
production of the essay. The contemporary crisis to which the explosion of
audio-visual essays in the 1990s responds is both historical and formal. The
shift from analogue to digital ushered in a new visual regime of signification
in which claims to fact-telling truth disappeared altogether. Similarly, in
geopolitics, 1989 heralded the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of
Second World communism and a radical reconfiguration of the world order.
Taking the dual significance of 1989, it is not surprising that many of the
audio-visual essays produced around this period reflect upon topics such as
history, memory, technological reproduction and vision.
The continuing ‘afterlife’ of the essay in audio-visual media attests to its
inherent ‘translatability’. That the genre would today take the form of an
artistic audio-visual production fulfills Lukács’s original conceptualization of
it as a mode of critique enclosed in an aesthetic form. The contemporary
relevance and inherent adaptability of the essay is indicated by its translation
beyond audio-visual installations into digital media such as CD-ROMs and
DVDs.7 The experimental, playful and critical dimensions of these new
productions echo the vitality of their literary antecedent. And these new
productions, as with the highly theoretical and self-reflexive cinema that was
the product of the essay film, continue the critical function that the genre of
the essay was initially developed to perform.
Notes
1. According to Adorno (1993[1954–8]):
The essay allows for the consciousness of nonidentity, without expressing it
directly; it is radical in its non-radicalism, in refraining from any reduction to a
principle, in its accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary
character. (p. 9)
2. Richter (1992[1940]) proposes a new type of filmmaking, the ‘essay film’, which
combines documentary with experimental or artistic film as follows:
56 journal of visual culture 6(1)
References
Adorno,T.W. (1993[1954–8]) ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes To Literature, Vol. 1. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1988[1944]) The Dialectic of Enlightenment. New
York: Continuum.
Astruc, A. (1968[1948]) ‘The Birth of A New Avant-Garde: La Camero Stylo’, in Peter
Graham (ed.) The New Wave: Critical Landmarks. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Benjamin, W. (1969a[1939]) ‘Thesis on the Philosophy of History’, trans. Harry Zohn,
in Hannah Arendt (ed.) Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books.
Alter Translating the Essay Into Film and Installation 57