Collectively Composed by Victor Bowman-Rivera, Linh Ngoc Bui, Andrenae Jones, Annie Martin, Quillan Qian, Anniyah Rawlins, and Kailyn Shepherd With thanks to Professor Amelie Hastie for organizing our contributions to this Preface
Let us assume, to begin with, that films themselves engage in the art of description. Just as poets describe the world, so do film makers – with all the technological possibilities available to them.
— Lesley Stern
We hope you will read the following essays, produced for our fall 2021 Amherst College course “The Film Essay,” and see only a sliver of the full breadth of what can be achieved when writing about film. Of course, film criticism isn’t just the rushed scribbles that only barely answer the all-too-prompted question of “Well, how did you like it?” Film criticism, or well-written film criticism, is concise, patient, and curious. But that doesn’t have to mean that film criticism must be constricted in its form, in how it is communicated from one mind to another. We write “criticism” not just to break apart but to accompany, to add harmonies melodically, and to continue traveling with the films we’ve seen. We do it for the love of the feelings we felt in the work of art, for the love of words and the spaces they can transport us into, the emotions they can at times capture and transmit.
When you read these essays, you will see the patience, the curiosity, the sharp wit, the eye that both focuses and meanders across a frame. You will see how the echoes of the words of past writers give voice to the new words we contribute here; Trinh Minh-ha, Theodor Adorno, Lesley Stern, Roland Barthes, Siegfried Kracauer, Kristi McKim all find a home here in our writings as honored guests whose ideas and experimental forms are inextricably intertwined with our conception of film writing. The films we watched, in their range of content, style, and tone, also challenged us to think about the limits of cinema in relation to the essay. What makes a film essayistic, and what cinematic qualities can we draw upon for our writing? In our writings, we trust you will also see something radically expressionistic—an experiment for the sake of grasping closer toward the truth. The truth of what? The truth of film as a medium with the power to offer the viewer an experience.
These essays therefore represent our experiments with film criticism. Throughout our semester together, our seminar comprised writing challenges and discussions meant to help us push the bounds of traditional academic writing and to think both critically and visually. While we read many critical essays about film, we also engaged with creative nonfiction and even a short novel, as well as videographic essays, each of which helped to direct our experimentation with the essay form. Over the duration of the semester, we grew increasingly comfortable and increasingly bold with the form and content of our essays. For a lot of us, this meant finding a place for poetic imagery in our essays, and for others, this meant bringing in our own personal experiences of the films. Our aim was to make increasingly playful “attempts” in order to draw upon the core practice of essay writing, which itself stems from the French word “essayer,” or “to try.”
Throughout the semester, our writing practice—or attempts or experiments—always began with thinking about images. When we encountered a new film, our professor asked us to describe it in a word. Doing so is an act of capturing: it allows us to capture the temporality of emotion, critical thinking, and even shock that lingers on the image and cinematic experience. This training starts with an opening point, and we spread it into a line, a passage, or even a net made by language and image. Words and images are similar, maybe almost the same. Sounds developed in our ancestors to communicate “scenes” to each other, as attempts to describe that built on one another’s use. Through relationships to their surroundings, to one another, to themselves, words and sounds were created to share. Words were active then—alive—and they continue breathing today. It is through words, spoken and written, that films are created, and it is through words that we can communicate our understanding of them. We change as writers through use of these “primal noises” and maybe even change them somehow, too, even if just a little.
Oftentimes, our experimentation was further guided by collaboration: in our workshops, our professor often encouraged us to draw inspiration from each other’s writings and to see the revision process as fundamentally creative. We not only focused on our own writing but also were encouraged to write as a community. We workshopped our peers’ pieces during each session; we were brave and radical in giving suggestions, and we learned from one another through the art of workshopping and critique. It was helpful to hear suggestions for radically different revisions from our peers and to learn how to properly give others critique in a way that was thoughtful and offered attempts at improvement. We also never hesitated to “steal.” Stealing in our experience together has meant absorbing one thing that strikes us most from others’ work. Sometimes there will be a spark, of which the writer themself wasn’t even aware and thus emerged only through our “stealing.” Reading, sharing, and exchanging helped us become a group of writers who have the creativity, encouragement, and space to grow.
We also learned to experiment with various nontraditional forms of film criticism. Many of our writings didn’t directly reference cinema—works by Ross Gay, Nathalie Sarraute, or Maggie Nelson, for example—and yet we drew from the “cinematic” qualities of their writings to apply to ours. Whether we were analyzing scenes through elaborate descriptions of ephemeral movements on screen in the form of Sarraute’s Tropisms or connecting flowing ideas through a system as arbitrary as the alphabet (inspired by Peter Wollen’s “Alphabet of Cinema”),our class took pride in taking experimental approaches, to explore the possibilities of film criticism. This diverse engagement with nontraditional readings resulted in the breaking free from the need for overt argument of the academic apparatus: through analytic description and subtle criticism, we now invite our readers into imagining, engaging with and pondering over the scenes themselves. We don’t necessarily reject explicitness, rather we want to offer more possibilities when it comes to viewing and thinking about films. Our practices make room for speculation, humanity, and sincere compassion, with the opportunity for self-reflection for the writers and readers all the same.
Over the course of the semester we became proud of our accomplishments independently and collectively, and we look forward to bringing these new practices into our work in both critical and creative future courses. We learned how to free ourselves from the restrictions of the academic form, becoming aware of more possibilities in writing while seriously reflecting on our writing practices and our own voices as writers. We have become more confident writers who allow the voice of “I” to appear in our work, and we have learned how to apply metaphor, repetition, and questions into critical work. In fact, we have learned that academic writing and creative writing are not in contradiction with each other, and that we do not need to sacrifice the power of feeling when we pursue the depth of thought. We have found our articulative creativity expanding, weaving more vivid descriptions into our critical writing, regardless of guidelines or limitations that we might be given.
As we go forward as writers, we hope that we can bring what is the essence of writing—to depict what is burning within oneself, to depict how the world melts and molds under our eyes—into work that also is comprehensible and concise. By beginning our writing and thinking with a fragment or an image instead of struggling with planning a whole picture, we can think in more unrestricted ways. As writers, we can allow ourselves more room for imagining, growing, loving, sympathizing, and experimenting. We can create more states of being, which we wish to dwell in and operate from, and compassionately see in others who live beside us. Mostly we find that through essay writing, we can work through ideas and multiple attempts at “answers,” rather than to work toward one simple answer. We have come to see words as worlds.
Filmography
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt, 2020)
The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer, 2015)
Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)
No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, 2015)
Passing (Rebecca Hall, 2021)
The Rider (Chloe Zhao, 2018)
Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2013)
Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985)
Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma, 2007)
Bibliography
Baldwin, James. The Devil Finds Work: An Essay. Vintage Books, 1976.
Daney, Serge. Postcards from the Cinema. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Berg, 2007.
Epstein, Jean. “Magnification.” French Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Richard Abel, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 235-340.
Gay, Ross. The Book of Delights. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2019.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992.
Kracauer, Siegfried. “The Spectator.” Theory of Film. Princeton University Press, 1960.
McKim, Kristi. “Glory Fades and Shines: On Rushmore and Empathy.” Bennington Review, no. 3, July 2017, pp. 237-250.
McKim, Kristi. “Moving Away and Circling Back: On Knight of Cups.” New England Review, vol. 39, no 2, 2018, pp. 61-72. https://doi.org/10.1353/ner.2018.0042
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books, 2009.
Pollock, Griselda. “Writing from the Heart.” Writing Otherwise: Experiments in Cultural Criticism, edited by Jackie Stacey and Janet Wolff, Manchester University Press, 2013, pp. 19-33.
Sarraute, Nathalie. Tropisms. Translated by Maria Jolas. New Directions, 2015.
Stern, Lesley. Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing. Caboose, 2012.
Stern, Lesley. “Writing/Images.” The Cine-Files, http://www.thecine-files.com/current-issue-2/guest-scholars/lesley-stern/. Accessed 1 Jan. 2022.
Trinh, Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Indiana University Press, 1989.
Wollen, Peter. “An Alphabet of Cinema.” Paris Hollywood—Writings on Film. Verso, 2002.
Mentor Biography
Amelie Hastie established the Film and Media Studies Program at Amherst College, where she is Professor of English and FAMS. The author of Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection and Film History (Duke UP) and The Bigamist (a BFI “Film Classic”), her work focuses on film and television theory and historiography, feminism, and material cultures. She authored “The Vulnerable Spectator” column in Film Quarterly for six years and is currently completing a book on the 1970s television series Columbo for Duke University Press. Her essays have appeared in Cabinet, Camera Obscura, Celebrity Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Film History, Framework, journal of visual culture, Screen, and elsewhere.
