Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable?
- 2 To Attain the Text. But Which Text?
- 3 Compounding the Lyric Essay Film : Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-Narrative
- 4 ‘Every love story is a ghost story’ : The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015)
- 5 Lines of Interpretation in Fields of Perception and Remembrance : The Multiscreen Array as Essay
- 6 Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016) : Intellectual Vagabond and Vagabond Matter
- 7 Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film : The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button
- 8 Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant-Garde to the Audiovisual Essay
- 9 ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator
- 10 The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking
- 11 The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously
- Index
3 - Compounding the Lyric Essay Film : Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-Narrative
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable?
- 2 To Attain the Text. But Which Text?
- 3 Compounding the Lyric Essay Film : Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-Narrative
- 4 ‘Every love story is a ghost story’ : The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015)
- 5 Lines of Interpretation in Fields of Perception and Remembrance : The Multiscreen Array as Essay
- 6 Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016) : Intellectual Vagabond and Vagabond Matter
- 7 Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film : The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button
- 8 Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant-Garde to the Audiovisual Essay
- 9 ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator
- 10 The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking
- 11 The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Both artists and critics refer more and more to a diverse range of contemporary films as lyric or poetic essays. Lyricism is indeed acquiring increasing relevance as one of the key modes adopted by an artistic practice that is spreading fast throughout the globe. Yet, the lyric essay is still substantially undertheorized. This chapter aims to refine the theoretical and analytical tools that are at our disposal to think about the lyric essay film, and to expand our understanding of how lyricism is used by film-makers to create audiovisual spaces for thought. In doing so, it draws on a specific case study, the cinema of contemporary Italian film-maker Pietro Marcello, whose experimental essayistic work is elegiac and political all at once.
Keywords: Lyric essay film, poetic essay film, elegy, Pietro Marcello, The Mouth of the Wolf, Lost and Beautiful
Artists and critics increasingly refer to a diverse range of contemporary films as lyric or poetic essays – from Trinh T. Minh-ha's Forgetting Vietnam (2016) to Patricio Guzmán's The Pearl Button (2015), from Alexander Sokurov's Francofonia (2015) to Laurie Anderson's Heart of a Dog (2015), to cite some of the most recent and better-known examples. Lyricism is indeed acquiring increasing relevance as one of the key modes adopted by an artistic practice that is spreading fast throughout the globe. Yet, the lyric essay is still substantially undertheorized. This may be explained by the impression that distinctive features of the lyrical, such as affect and sublimity, are at odds with the essay's characteristic rationalism. While acknowledging that the essay film's voiceover can include the lyrical mode, for instance, Timothy Corrigan describes the lyrical as being almost at odds with the essayistic:
With a perplexing and enriching lack of formal rigor, essays and essay films do not usually offer the kinds of pleasure associated with traditional aesthetic forms like narrative or lyrical poetry; they instead lean toward intellectual reflections that often insist on more conceptual or pragmatic responses, well outside the borders of conventional pleasure principles.
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- Information
- Beyond the Essay FilmSubjectivity, Textuality and Technology, pp. 75 - 94Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020