The Visual Essay: Cinema as a Medium of Thought

The Visual Essay: Cinema as a Medium of Thought focuses on film’s capacity to think in images. In recent years, the visual essay has become a specialized field of research within film studies, cutting across modes of nonfiction and experimental film. The

seminar will explore a range of classical to contemporary work by a variety filmmakers with the purpose of considering film itself as a medium that makes ideas seen. Beyond film’s thematic concern with abstract ideas, cinema partakes in what Daniel Frampton called “film-thinking.” We will discuss the taking shape of ideas in cinematic form.

Beginning with Dziga Vertov’s seminal Man with a Movie Camera, an example of “pure cinema,” we will go on to look at different types of film essays, from found footage films (including work by Gustav Deutsch, Martin Arnold, and Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi) to films by arthouse auteurs like Chantal Akerman, Werner Herzog, and Agnes Varda. We will also discuss lesser known but ground-breaking work by Artur Aristakisyan and Katrin Gebbe, in which essayistic moments prevail, and political visual essays by Sylvain Georges, Leslie Thornton, Phillippe Rouy, and Deboarh Stratman.  

To link the visual essay with the essayistic more broadly, the seminar will draw on writings by Simone Weil, Svetlana Alexievich, Walter Benjamin, and others. The combination of visual, literary, and philosophical materials will allow us to approach, not only the film essay as a distinct form, but cinema as a medium of intellectual inquiry.

A detailed syllabus will follow later on. For further details, please email Anat Pick at a.pick@qmul.ac.uk