How the Essay Film Became the Most Honest Art Form
Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, released in 1983, established the essay film's defining characteristic: a first-person voice thinking aloud over images that neither illustrate nor contradict the narration but exist in productive tension with it. Marker's film moves between Japan, Guinea-Bissau, and San Francisco without conventional documentary logic, following instead the associative patterns of a mind processing memory, travel, and the relationship between image and reality.
The essay film's honesty derives from its refusal of objectivity. Where conventional documentaries maintain the fiction of an authoritative, detached perspective, essay films announce their subjectivity — acknowledging that every film is made by someone with a particular position, and that pretending otherwise is the deeper dishonesty. Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I, Wim Wenders's Tokyo-Ga, and Harun Farocki's Workers Leaving the Factory all foreground the filmmaker's presence rather than concealing it.
The form has attracted literary intellectuals for precisely this reason. Susan Sontag's essay films, John Berger's Ways of Seeing television series, and Alexander Kluge's hybrid works all treat cinema as a medium for thought rather than narrative — a visual equivalent of the written essay, with all the digressive freedom that form implies.
The recent proliferation of essay films suggests the form has found its historical moment. In an era of deepfakes, manipulation, and institutional distrust, the essay film's transparent subjectivity — its willingness to say 'this is what I think, and here is how I arrived at it' — reads as more trustworthy than the false objectivity of conventional documentary. Films by Kogonada, Terence Nance, and Ja'Tovia Gary demonstrate the form's contemporary vitality.
The Criterion Channel's essay film collection (https://www.criterionchannel.com) provides the most comprehensive streaming access to the genre's major works, from Marker and Varda through to contemporary practitioners.
Watch one essay film per month as a complement to your reading. The form rewards the same attention you would bring to a long-form written essay — it asks you to follow an argument rather than a story, to sit with ambiguity rather than awaiting resolution. In an age that demands certainty, the essay film's willingness to think in public, to change its mind, and to arrive nowhere in particular is a form of intellectual courage.
