Extended Essay

Extended Essay – Notable Quotes

| garygowran

One of the interesting and challenging aspects of writing an academic essay is extracting pertinent and valuable quotes from the research. They should be insights into my chosen subject matter and themes which illuminate or contend with the view which I’m attempting to convey. I feel like I’ve found some very valuable and worthwhile quotes which would be beneficial to share here.

‘The essay is always concerned with something already formed, or at best, with something that has
been; it is part of its essence that it does not draw something new out of an empty vacuum, but only
gives a new order to such things as once lived. And because he only newly orders them, not forming
something new out of the formless, he is bound to them; he must always speak “the truth” about
them, find, that is the expression for their essence.’
(G. Lukacs, Soul and Form 1974)

I am intending to use this quote at the beginning of my essay. I feel it gives a good introduction to the importance of an essay film creator owning their subjectivity. The essay here is seen as a reflection or deepening of the subject matter it is preoccupied with.

“characteristics of the essay film include the blending of fact and fiction, the mixing of artand
documentary-film styles, the foregrounding of subjective points of view, a concentration on
public life, a tension between acoustic and visual discourses, and a dialogic encounter with
audiences.”
(Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, Essays on the Essay Film 2017)

“ability to carry on a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors.
It does not merely answer, correct, silence or extend a previous work, but informs
and is continually informed by the previous work”
(M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 1981)

“conceptual, psychopolitical, and representational dance with wolves, the drawn-out
imperative of the film is then to answer the silence that follows the death of the dogs, to
unmask an aesthetics of violence…to make the present of current events a far more
conceptually complex and vexed place for the subject experiencing that present as a past.”
(Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne after Marker 2011)

“science affects us by its contents, art by its forms; science offers us facts and
relationships between facts, but art offers us souls and destinies”
(G. Lukacs, Soul and Form 1974)

“one of the key elements of the essay film is the direct address of the receiver,
and voiceover is the most simple and successful way of actualizing such address”
(Laura Rascaroli, The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments 2008)

“The essayist allows the answers to emerge somewhere else, precisely in the position
occupied by the embodied spectator. The meaning of the film is constructed via this
dialogue, in which the spectator has an important part to play; meanings are presented by the
speaking subject as a subjective, personal meditation, rather than as objective truth. It is this
subjective move, this speaking in the first person that mobilizes the subjectivity of the
spectator.”
(Laura Rascaroli, The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments 2008)

“Humanism is, indeed, implicit in the essay structure—the assumption of a certain
unity of the human experience, which allows two subjects to meet and communicate on the
basis of this shared experience. The two subject positions, the “I” and the “you,” determine
and shape one another.”
(Laura Rascaroli, The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments 2008)

Extended Essay: Waltz with Bashir

| garygowran

Waltz with Bashir (2008)


Through my research into the essay film form I found examinations of the animated motion picture Waltz with Bashir and I decided to use it as an example to illustrate the essay topic.

Waltz with Bashir was made by the Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman. It recounts an investigation into his experiences during the First Lebanon War in 1982 through interviews with nine friends and is described by Corrigan as taking the form of an editorial essay.

As it attempts to explore the complexities of memory and the undertaking of a personal psychological journey through the protagonists experiences I feel it could be a valuable example to compare and contrast with my own film. It takes the examination of the experiences from a subjective viewpoint, trying as much as possible to stay conscious that they are telling the story from their own point of view and not trying to give a definitive account that would override the lived experiences of others. The story also exists in comic book form like my own film which I feel offers up opportunities to examine an ongoing dialogue of the issues the film raises. It resists an attempt to end the conversation, instead hopefully offering up new avenues to discuss the real life occurrences and themes explored.

Waltz with Bashir (2008)

Essay Film Research

| garygowran
From the initial research for my extended essay I decided to further investigate essay films as a potential topic. I read the following definition in the book Essays on the Essay Film by Nora M. Alter  and Timothy Corrigan (2017);
“characteristics of the essay film include the blending of fact and fiction, the mixing of art- and documentary-film styles, the foregrounding of subjective points of view, a concentration on public life, a tension between acoustic and visual discourses, and a dialogic encounter with audiences.”

The particular facets that struck a chord for me with my own film were the foregrounding of subjective points of view and a dialogic encounter with audiences. Though other elements also resonated including; the blending of fact and fiction and a tension between acoustic and visual discourses. I felt that approaching an investigation of my film through the lens of these aspects would help to advance the creative potential of the film.

So for further reading I researched other titles including; How the Essay Film Thinks by Laura Rascaroli; The Essay Film: From Montaigne after Marker by Timothy Corrigan; and journal articles; The Essay as Form by T.W. Adorno; and In Search of the Centaur: The Essay Film by Philip Loparte. Laura Rascaroli also had a number of relevant journal articles. 

Extended Essay Initial Research

| garygowran
As part of the Animation Research and Practice module I have to write an extended essay on a specific topic. This topic must bear relation to the main film project, it’s theme, subject matter or method employed. My initial ideas have included; investigating the use of dance to communicate emotions in film; examining the representation of female characters by male creators; the complexity of representing psychological challenge in a nuanced and respectful way; the hero’s journey told through non-traditional narratives.

Using the Wolverhampton College online library I began researching possible books and papers in relation to these areas. Some of the titles included; Understanding Animation by Paul Wells (2013), specifically chapter 5, issues in representation and Animating Film Theory, edited by Karen Beckman (2014). It was in this second title that I was introduced to the concept of the essay film form and for me it’s description aligned with my own main film project.