In the wake of the explosion in the production of essay films over the last twenty-five years and its subsequent theorization in scholarly literature, this volume seeks to historicize these intertwined developments within the 'long duree' of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Beyond the Essay Film seeks to not only acknowledge the influential predecessors of this - in the view of many critics - most interesting type of contemporary filmmaking - but also to speculate about its possible transformation as we move forward into the uncharted waters of the twenty-first - digital -century. Focusing on three specific axes that underpin and shape the articulation of the essay film as a specific cultural form - subjectivity, textuality and technology - this book explores how changes along and across these dimensions affect historical shifts within essay film practice and its relation to other types of cinema and neighbouring art forms.

Julia Vassilieva is Australian Research Council Research Fellow and lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne. Her research interests include narrative theory; cinema and the mind; cinema and philosophy and theory and practice of Sergei Eisenstein. She is an author of Narrative Psychology, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016 and co-editor of After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image, Routledge, 2013. Her publications also appeared in Camera Obscura, Film-Philosophy, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Screening the Past, Critical Arts, Kinovedcheskie Zapiski, Rouge, Lola, Senses of Cinema, History of Psychology and a number of edited collections.Deane Williams is Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. From 2007-2017 he was editor of the journal Studies in Documentary Film, and his books include Australian Post-War Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors (2008), Michael Winterbottom (with Brian McFarlane, 2009), the three-volume Australian Film Theory and Criticism (co-edited with Noel King and Constantine Verevis, 2013-2017) and The Cinema of Sean Penn: In and Out of Place (2016).

ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: A Tradition of DesiringJulia Vassilieva and Deane Williams35 Years On: Is the 'Text', Once Again, Unattainable?Raymond Bellour (translated by Adrian Martin)To Attain the Text. But Which Text?Cristina ‰lvarez López & Adrian MartinCompounding the Lyric Essay Film: Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-NarrativeLaura Rascaroli"Every Love Story is a Ghost story": The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson's Heart of Dog (2015).Deane Williams The Non-Linear Treatment of Disquisition - Multiscreen Installation as Essay.Ross GibsonDeborah Stratman's The Illinois Parables (2016): Intellectual Vagabond and Vagabond MatterKatrin Pesch Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film: The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl (2016)Belinda Smaill Montage Reloaded: from the Russian Avant-Garde to the Audio-Visual EssayJulia Vassilieva'All I Have to Offer is Myself": the Filmmaker as Narrator Richard MisekThe Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking.Catherine GrantOn Making Memory Posthumously: The Home Movie as Essay FilmThomas Elsaesser Index