Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Introduction 1
4. Part I. Foundations
5. 1. On The Nature and Form of The Essay 21
6. 2. From The Man without Qualities (1930 - 1943) 41
7. 3. On The Essay and Its Prose (1948) 49
8. 4. The Essay as Form (1958) 60
9. 5. Preface to The Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley (1960) 83
10. Part II. The Essay Film through History
11. 6. The Film Essay: A New Type of Documentary Film 89
12. 7. The Future of Cinema (1948) 93
13. 8. Bazin on Marker (1958) 102
14. III. Contemporary Positions
15. 9. In Search of The Centaur: The Essay-Film (1992) 109
16. 10. The Political Im/Perceptible in The Essay Film: Farocki's Images of The World and The Inscription of War (1996) 134
17. 11. Essay Questions (2003) 161
18. 12. The Electronic Essay (1995) 172
19. 13. The Essay film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments (2009) 183
20. 14. Of The History of The Essay Film: Vertov to Varda (2011) 197
21. 15. The Cinema and The Essay as a Way of Thinking (2011) 227
22. 16. The Essay Film: From Film Festival Favorite to Flexible Commodity Form? (2015) 240
23. Part IV. Filmmakers on The Essayistic
24. 17. "Performing Borders: Transnational Video (2003) 259
25. 18. Proposal for a Tussle (2007) 269
26. 19. The Essay as Conformism? Some Notes on Global Image Economies (2011) 276
27. 20. On Writing The Film Essay (2016) 287
28. 21. Tramp Steamer (2016) 292
29. 22. The ABCs of The Film Essay (2015) 297
30. 23. Riddles as Essay Film (2016) 314
31. 24. Certain Obliquenesses (2016) 323
32. 25. Essay Documentary: The disembodied narrator and an unclaimed image that floats through space and time (2016) 333
33. 26. From Ten Thousand Waves to Lina Bo Bardi, via Kapital (2016) 335
34. Bibliography 345
35. Contributors 351
36. Permissions 361
37. Index 363