Books

The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | 2018

Nora M. Alter reveals the essay film to be a hybrid genre that fuses the categories of feature, art, and documentary film. Like its literary predecessor, the essay film draws on a variety of forms and approaches; in the process, it fundamentally alters the shape of cinema. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction locates the genre’s origins in early silent cinema and follows its transformation with the advent of sound, its legitimation in the postwar period, and its multifaceted development at the turn of the millennium. In addition to exploring the broader history of the essay film, Alter addresses the innovative ways contemporary artists such as Martha Rosler, Isaac Julien, Harun Farocki, John Akomfrah, and Hito Steyerl have taken up the essay film in their work.

“For many years, Nora Alter has been our most brilliant advocate of the essay film as an open genre that floats between documentary, fiction, and the art film. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction is the first comprehensive survey of this difficult and experimental genre in both its historical context and variable aesthetic manifestations. The depth and complexity of Alter’s account of the essay film’s critical force and aesthetic innovations will not soon be surpassed.” — D. N. Rodowick, University of Chicago

“This magisterial study marks a milestone in scholarship on the most intellectually expansive and unpredictable film genre of the last half-century. Global in scope, Alter’s book displays the essay film's astonishing richness of forms and functions from its beginnings in the 1920s to contemporary art installations. Both a reliable history and a sharp-eyed investigation, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction is indispensable for anyone interested in the past and future of nonfiction cinema.” —Anton Kaes, University of California, Berkeley

“The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction is unfailingly lucid, balanced, and informed. Alter provides generous and illuminating analyses of specific films, filmmakers, and decisive shifts in the arts and media history. Her book is a definitive guide to the multiple modes of production and global contexts of a vital tradition that continues to enrich contemporary culture and nurture critical thought.” —Edward Dimendberg, University of California, Irvine

Essays on the Essay Film

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | 2017

The essay—with its emphasis on the provisional and explorative rather than on definitive statements—has evolved from its literary beginnings and is now found in all mediums, including film. Today, the essay film is, arguably, one of the most widely acclaimed and critically discussed forms of filmmaking around the world, with practitioners such as Chris Marker, Hito Steyerl, Errol Morris, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Rithy Panh. Characteristics of the essay film include the blending of fact and fiction, the mixing of art- and documentary-film styles, the foregrounding of subjective points of view, a concentration on public life, a tension between acoustic and visual discourses, and a dialogic encounter with audiences.

This anthology of fundamental statements on the essay film offers a range of crucial historical and philosophical perspectives. It provides early critical articulations of the essay film as it evolved through the 1950s and 1960s, key contemporary scholarly essays, and a selection of writings by essay filmmakers. It features texts on the foundations of the essay film by writers such as Hans Richter and André Bazin; contemporary positions by, among others, Phillip Lopate and Michael Renov; and original essays by filmmakers themselves, including Laura Mulvey and Isaac Julien.

“Creatively and capaciously, this rich volume gets at the essay film not only by including key critics and practitioners of the form but, importantly, by going beyond the genre itself to broader contributions to essay theorization from philosophy and belles lettres. An exciting, inventive volume with great delights at every turn.” — Dana Polan, New York University

“Alter and Corrigan's masterful new volume on the essay film is rigorous, comprehensive, and refreshingly surprising. Their invaluable collection probes theoretical reflections on the essay as a mode of expression and a way of thinking in light of the creative and political investments of filmmakers around the globe; it also chronicles the essay film's changing countenances, from its prehistory and early signs of life to novel permutations in the present. Featuring a very distinguished cast of players, this collection is a production of the highest order.” — Eric Rentschler, Harvard University

“Nora Alter and Tim Corrigan bring their seasoned literary experience to herd but never tame the unruly essay film. Its prestige soaring, this mode is tethered to a long history of experimental writing that will keep it from disappearing into the bog of blogs and YouTube mashups whose best examples it is already inspiring. The proof is in the Table of Contents: a brilliant litany of sensitive, reliable writers, who dare to take on the most daring forms of image-thought the cinema has produced.” — Dudley Andrew, Yale University

“Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in interest in the history, concept and diverse manifestations of the essay film. In this essential collection, Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan have brought together a superb selection of foundational texts with a range of key recent writings by leading scholars and essay filmmakers. The result is an enormously rich resource for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of this most vital of audiovisual forms.” — Michael Witt, University of Roehampton

Chris Marker

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS | 2006

Having spearheaded the bourgeoning Nouvelle Vague scene in the late 1950s and developed a distinctive style involving still images, Chris Marker (born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve) stands among the most influential filmmakers of the postwar era, yet remains enigmatic. His notorious reclusiveness has led to surprisingly few studies, and Nora M. Alter's Chris Marker presents the first English-language study of the unpredictable and reclusive director who remains politically and artistically influential. 

Marker's 1953 debut "filmic essay," The Statues Also Die (with Alain Resnais) exposed the European art market's complicity in the former Belgian Congo atrocities, and provided a bold model for other politically committed filmmakers. Thus began Marker's long struggle against global injustice, a trajectory that included his involvement with Night and Fog, La Jetée, Le Joli Mai, Far from Vietnam, Le fond du l'air est Rouge, and Prime Time in the Camps. Alter's careful study includes interviews with the director and investigates the core themes and motivations behind an often unpredictable and transnational career that defies easy classification.

“Nora Alter's short study of Marker's work does much to restore a sense of the complexity of his motivations and working methods . . . She is especially informative on the aesthetic and political involutions of post-war France. . . . For its filmography and the breadth of its coverage, her book is essential.” — Brian Dillon, Sight and Sound 

“A valuable addition to Marker scholarship.” — Film International

Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture

BERGHAHN BOOKS | 2004

The sounds of music and the German language have played a significant role in the developing symbolism of the German nation. In light of the historical division of Germany into many disparate political entities and regional groups, German artists and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries conceived of musical and linguistic dispositions as the nation's most palpable common ground. According to this view, the peculiar sounds of German music and of the German language provided a direct conduit to national identity, to the deepest recesses of the German soul. So strong is this legacy of sound is still prevalent in modern German culture that philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in a recent essay, did not even hesitate to describe post-wall Germany as an "acoustical body."

This volume gathers the work of scholars from the US, Germany, and the United Kingdom to explore the role of sound in modern and postmodern German cultural production. Working across established disciplines and methodological divides, the essays of Sound Matters investigate the ways in which texts, artists, and performers in all kinds of media have utilized sonic materials in order to enforce or complicate dominant notions of German cultural and national identity.

“This volume is a most welcome contribution to an area of inquiry the editors concede as been slow to flourish in German Cultures Studies…the polished and thought-provoking essays in this anthology will lead readers to begin hearing things differently in their own research and teaching.”  — German Studies Review

Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema 1967-2000

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS | 2002

Between 1967 and 2000, film production in Germany underwent a number of significant transformations, including the birth and death of New German Cinema as well as the emergence of a new transnational cinematic practice. In Projecting History, Nora M. Alter explores the relationship between German cinematic practice and the student protests in both East and West Germany against the backdrop of the U.S. war in Vietnam in the sixties, the outbreak of terrorism in West Germany in the seventies, West Germany's rise as a significant global power in the eighties, and German reunification in the nineties.

Although a central tendency of New German Cinema in the 1970s was to reduce the nation's history to the product of individuals, the films addressed in Projecting History focus not on individual protagonists, but on complex socioeconomic structures. The films, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Harun Farocki, Alexander Kluge, Ulrike Ottinger, Wim Wenders and others, address basic problems of German history, including its overall "peculiarity" within the European context, and, in particular, the specific ways in which the National Socialist legacy continues to haunt Germans.

Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS | 1996

The escalation of the war in Vietnam in the mid-1960s unleashed worldwide protest. Playwrights grappled with the complexities of post-imperialist politics and with the problems of creating effective political theatre in the television age. The ephemeral theatre these writers created, today little-known and rarely studied, provides an important window on a complex moment in culture and history.

“... a thoughtful and important treatment of the international tensions of the period as they were embodied in theatre practice. It is the only book of its kind on the subject, and a valuable source of production information.” — Theatre Journal

“... an excellent discussion of the aesthetics of theater.” — Choice