The Essayistic Mode

The essayistic mode, like a stone thrown into water, starts with a point of insertion then spreads out concentrically, with splashes here and there starting new points of departure and exploration. Fox describes the essayistic mode similarly to how one might hear the form described in the writing tradition. It is the testing or proving of an idea. It begins with a curiosity and is developed across vast interconnections with varying degrees of solidity and personal relation.

The film, Something To Do With The Wall, exemplifies the testing of ideas. The film is concerned with a loose association of generally anything that is concerned with the once Check Point Charlie in Berlin. The film is not concerned with driving a point or argument, but rather simply investigates any sort of anecdotal element of the place. Many of the essayistic moments in the film come from the filmmakers making associations between the wall and themselves, family/parenting, and especially their own son. They explore ideas of 'place' in the anthropological sense, as something humanizing.

Perhaps more strongly an essayistic piece, is Chris Marker's Remembrance Of Things To Come. Marker explores a history of France through the associations between surrealist art, the first and second world wars, and the photography of Denise Bellon. Though these things are indeed connected in history, their connections become more profound through the filmmaker's loose associations. He makes assertions such as surrealist art having prophetic qualities, evident in Bellon's photography, foretelling the imminent second world war.

Marker's film employ a seemingly more flexible mode of exploring and montaging ideas as did McElwee and Levine. As a result, the Marker film's at times are fleeting and abstract, the associations and diversions being minuscule and irrelevant, or grandios and profound.