The essay film is in the spotlight. The last 25 years or so saw an explosion in audiovisual productions from across the globe that belong to this lineage. Ushered in by the watershed moment of Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema (1998), other prominent examples of this recent development include Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I (2000), Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), Victor Erice's La Mort Rouge (2006), Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light (2010), John Akomfrah's The Stuart Hall Project (2013), John Hughes’ The Archives Project (2013), and Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie (2015). But we can also think of Hito Steyerl's How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational (2014), Boris Groys’ Thinking in Loop (2008), Richard Misek's Rohmer in Paris (2013), and the critical audiovisual essay work of Kevin B. Lee, Catherine Grant, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, Kogonada, Christian Keathley, and Jason Mittel. Another index of the current reinvigoration of interest in the essay film is demonstrated by the elevation of ‘essayistic’ documentaries in polls like the Greatest Documentaries of All Time. For example, in 2014, Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) was rated first in Sight & Sound's poll, with Chris Marker's San Soleil [Sunless] (1983) in second place. As Brian Winston points out, this rating indicates much about the current status of the essayistic tradition: ‘Subjectivity is no longer forbidden to the documentarist. The Vertovian tradition opens the door to it and subjective “essayists” have, the poll insists, walked through in triumph. Varda, Marker, Guzmàn, for example, not only appear in the top 10 but they start to dominate.’

This increased visibility of the essay film has been followed by the reciprocal intensification of film and media scholarship, including such signal contributions as Catherine Lupton's Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (2004), Michael Renov's The Subject of Documentary (2004), Thomas Elsaesser's Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines (2004), Timothy Corrigan's The Essay Film: From Montaigne to Marker (2011), Nora M. Alter's Chris Marker (2006), and Laura Rascaroli's The Personal Camera (2009) and How the Essay Film Thinks (2017).