Viennale's The Way of the Termite: The Essay in Film 1909-2004

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The Essay in Cinema was organized by The Austrian Film Museum and originally presented at the Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival) in October 2007.

quote:

The extensive programme was curated by the French filmmaker and theorist Jean-Pierre Gorin who lives and teaches in San Diego and whose own work - partly created in collaboration with Jean-Luc Godard - includes important contributions to the "essayistic strategy” in cinema. Gorin has selected 60 works from 20 nations - among them a number of classics of film history as well as numerous (re-)discoveries.

Beyond the characteristic and often-quoted elements - such as the presence of the author’s voice and the first person singular perspective chosen by many of these films - the essay film according to Gorin "is a rumination in Nietzsche's sense of the word, the meandering of an intelligence that tries to multiply the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or has been elected by).