THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SUBJECT IN WRITING

The essay film constitutes a category of film practice in which the Brechtian influence is noticeable in terms of both theory and practice. As I explained in Chapter 4, much of the theorisation of Brechtian cinema on the part of the 1970s film theory went so far as to equate Brechtian films mainly with this audiovisual form. Symptomatic in this respect was Peter Wollen's renowned article on the counter-cinema of the Dziga Vertov group, in which he invoked Brecht's schematic description of the differences between epic and dramatic theatre by pitting Godard's/Gorin's counter-cinema against the dominant film narrative tradition. The counter-cinema for Wollen was a cinema of unpleasure that negated the predominant linear narrative style and its strategies of identification, effacement of technological mediation, diegetic closure and unitary diegesis. Wollen proposes that the chief aspect of counter-cinema is negativity, and while he does not really connect it with questions relevant to the essay film, there is an important passage in his article where he points to that direction. He states that Godard's/Gorin's experiments are not so much interested in offering a coherent representation of reality; rather, they see film as ‘a process of writing in images’ (1982: 83). Although Wollen's article was thought-provoking for its time, it remains wedded to a one-dimensional understanding of the film essay; in equating the essay film strictly with an aesthetics of negation and unpleasure he underestimated its primary objective, which is not just the abandonment of conventional dramaturgy, but the deployment of audiovisual experimentation with the view to rendering social realities visible.

In this chapter, I proceed to discuss the essay film's kinship with Brecht by identifying the roots of the ‘genre’ in the Soviet avant-garde. In doing so, I intend to place the Brechtian aspect of the ‘genre’ in its historical context. My aim is also to expand our understanding of the essay film beyond long-standing ideas of auteur criticism and I do this with reference to theoretical formulations of the essay as a form of writing that questions authorial power. In the second part of the chapter, I expand on this thesis with reference to Thomas Heise's Material (2009).