This book explores the impact of digital technology on the essay film in the early 21st century, arguing that the cinematic essay has been associated with technological evolution throughout its history.

Chapter 1.- Introduction.-Chapter 2.- Essay Cinema and Technological Innovation.-Chapter 3.- Interactivity and Dialogical Exchange in Chris Marker’s Immemory and Ouvroir.-Chapter 4.-Jean-Luc Godard, Intertextuality, and Digital Remix Culture.-Chapter 5.-Capturing the Domestic Space in an Era of Ubiquitous Digital Media: Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie.-Chapter 6.-Simulation, Gameplay, and the Non-Indexical Image in Harun Farocki’s Serious Games I-IV and Parallel I-IV.-Chapter 7.-Conclusion: Essaying the Future.-Index.

This book explores the impact of digital technology on the essay film in the early 21st century, arguing that the cinematic essay has been associated with technological evolution throughout its history. The author considers the output of four towering figures in essay filmmaking: Harun Farocki, Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman and Jean-Luc Godard, and explores the ways in which these directors utilise aesthetic strategies, editing techniques, and modes of spectatorial address that are rooted in the capabilities of digital technologies. Slaymaker conceptualises the cinematic essay as a self-reflexive mode of nonfiction cinema—one that foregrounds the filmmaking apparatus and the act of its own making, and which thereby launches an inquiry into the ontological nature of the cinematic image, the tools which construct it, and the wider artistic landscape in which it is embedded.

James Slaymaker is a filmmaker, researcher and Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. He has written numerous journal articles, book chapters and conferences papers on digital technology, European cinema, the essay film, and experimental film. He is also a prolific writer of popular film criticism.

“James Slaymaker writes the kind of criticism that's needed now, keen on trends as well as theoretical concerns. His focus on essay cinema is as perceptive as his previous studies, in treating an emerging field in the digital era. Using eclectic sources, Slaymaker offers probing analysis on a range of essay cinema, from Godard, Ackerman, to emerging voices, to map its recent history and curious future.” (Matthew Sorrento, Rutgers University-Camden; editor, “Film International Online”)

“Engagingly written, erudite, thoroughly researched and full of incisive analyses, this book marks an important contribution to debates about the essay film and a valuable resource to scholars of European art cinema.” (Douglas Morrey, Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick, author of Jean-Luc Godard and The Legacy of the New Wave in French Cinema)

“Ever since its invention, the cinema has been used, not just to tell stories, but also to think and to reflect. Meditative essays, whether written or filmed, are neither fictional nor factual, but move fluidly between inner experience, on the one hand, and the affordances the world offers to that experience, on the other. In this book, James Slaymaker considers the tradition of essayistic cinema, and in particular how this cinema has been reshaped in recent decades by the inventions of digital technology. He considers four great filmmakers -- Harun Farocki, Chantal Akerman, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chris Marker -- and traces how their work establishes them both as artists and as philosophers.” (Professor Steven Shaviro, author of “Post-Cinematic Affect and Connected: Or What It Means To Live In The Network Society”)

“Slaymaker adroitly explores how digital media alters the aesthetic and formal possibilities of cinema, offering an invaluable resource for understanding contemporary film practices and navigating the uncertainties of a non-indexical future. A must-read for those interested in the epistemological potential of digital cinema.” (Scott Barley, director of “Sleep Has Her House” and Associate Lecturer in Film at Falmouth University)