Audiovisual Thinking and the Essay Film : The Case of Francophone Europe

From a semio-pragmatic perspective and drawing on an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach, this book analyses how the audiovisual thinking process manifests itself in essay films. It explores how issues of subjectivity and identity, whether individual, social, political or cultural, prompt thought through the medium of cinema. The volume discusses the European Francophone essay film from its first appearance in cinematic modernity to the present. The study is developed in three stages. The first analyses the intermedial forms that are used: the letter, the (self-)portrait, the dialogue, the diptych, etc. The second examines the audiovisual materials that are mobilised. The third addresses the audiovisual procedures that are generated. In its analysis of works by Marker, Godard, Akerman, Varda and others, this book offers a new and detailed understanding of the production, evolution and achievements of the essay film in Francophone Europe.

From a semio-pragmatic perspective and drawing on an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach, this book analyses how the audiovisual thinking process manifests itself in essay films. It explores how issues of subjectivity and identity, whether individual, social, political or cultural, prompt thought through the medium of cinema.
The volume discusses the European Francophone essay film from its first appearance in cinematic modernity to the present. The study is developed in three stages. The first analyses the intermedial forms that are used: the letter, the (self-)portrait, the dialogue, the diptych, etc. The second examines the audiovisual materials that are mobilised. The third addresses the audiovisual procedures that are generated. In its analysis of works by Marker, Godard, Akerman, Varda and others, this book offers a new and detailed understanding of the production, evolution and achievements of the essay film in Francophone Europe. The challenging and ambitious purpose of the research consists in determining how subjectivity, the thinking process and self-reflexiveness materialise in the cinematic expression, how the different enunciative devices of the essay film allow to think through cinema, which are the audiovisual procedures that generate this intellectual expression in the European Francophone culture. Thus, the project originality lies, firstly, in the application of a rigorous semiotic-pragmatic analysis of the essay film and an innovative cultural studies perspective, francophony. In this sense, the research includes a unprecedented research on the Romand and the Belgian essay films never conducted before. Secondly, in its interdisciplinary nature, by mixing other disciplines beyond the Film Studies field: philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, gender studies and reception theory. Finally, the original research contribution includes the analysis of the functionality and evolution of the different enunciative devices in relation to the themes addressed by the essay films and the artistic movements they belong to. It will allow to determine how the essay film, as a free form recognized by the cinematic context from which it emerges, constitutes a social, political, cultural, gender equality and artistic developer that fosters both the spectator’s and the society’s critical thinking.