• Essay Film and Narrative Techniques
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Essay Film and Narrative Techniques

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The collection explores various methods of screen-writing for essay film, through a diverse set of reflections and analyses of canonical and unconventional approaches of essay filmmaking and includ...
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  • 03 October 2025
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The collection explores various methods of screen-writing for essay film, through a diverse set of reflections and analyses of canonical and unconventional approaches of essay filmmaking. It includes contributions from filmmakers and practice-led researchers who reflect on their production process in the form of production diaries or self-critique and analyses from scholars who investigate the production contexts of essay film as well as interviews with filmmakers on how their practices are conceptualised and contextualised. Overall, it takes essay film as an expression of personal camera, collaborative/collective work and experimental work where the boundaries between different art forms blurs and merges.

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Price: £71.95
Publisher: Intellect Books
Imprint: Intellect Books
Publication Date: 03 October 2025
ISBN: 9781835951484
Format: eBook
BISACs:

ART / Film & Video, Film, television, radio and performing arts: companion works, ART / Individual Artists / Essays, ART / Mixed Media, Documentary films, Film: styles and genres
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Romana Turina is associate professor at Arts University Bournemouth. She is a writer, filmmaker and historian. While leading research in the ‘Essay Film’ for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS), Romana engages in the creative processes. Her work includes the essay films Lunch with Family (2016) and San Sabba (2016), shortlisted at the AHRC Research in Film Awards 2018 and awarded at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards 2018. In 2024, she completed the essay film Three Sisters in a Sketchbook (2024), selected at the LA Independent Women Film Awards 2024, and the Hollywood Independent Filmmaker Awards and Festivals 2024. Romana received her Ph.D. in theatre, film and television from the University of York, UK. She taught creative writing and screenwriting at the University of Indianapolis, the University of York and the University of Greenwich. 

Kiki Tianqi Yu is a writer, filmmaker, curator, and reader in cinematic art at Queen Mary University of London. She is the PI of AHRC funded project 'Daoism, Cinema and Wellbeing' (2025-28) and also working on Sinophone women’s cinema, creative documentary and experimental nonfiction. She is the author of ‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China (EUP, 2019), co-editor of China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the 21 Century (Bloomsbury 2014) and her publications appear in Screen, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Studies in Documentary Film, etc. Her films include Memory of Home (2009), China’s van Goghs (2016), and The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019). Her curatorial projects include the film season Dancing with Water: Women’s cinema from Contemporary China. 

List of Figures
Preface – Laura Rascaroli
Introduction: Essay Filmmaking as Creative Research – Kiki Tianqi Yu and Romana Turina

Part One: Journeys and Nature of Thinking
1. Chaos or Process? Some Remarks on the Work Process of an Essay Film – Jouko Aaltonen
2. The Collector/Sampler/Editor: A Feminist Perspective on the Screenwriting Process – Judith Rifeser
3. The Future of Thinking: Notes on Animation and the Essay Film – Richard Wright

Part Two: Dialogic Practices
4. Father-land: Narratives of Memory in a Place of Conflict – Kayla Parker
5. Heliographies of Change: Marianna Christofides’ Days In Between (2015) – Brenda Hollweg with Marianna Christofides
6. Personal Monument: Remembering an Awkward Love – Louis Hothothot

Part Three: Work-in-Progress: From Still to Moving Images
7. Three Sisters in a Sketchbook: Photography as Prosthesis in the Essay Film Form – Romana Turina
8. ‘into the frameless distance – city of (no) memory’: Itinerant Research for Photo/Filmic Practices – Patti Gaal-Holmes

Part Four: Nature of the Essay Film and Cinema as Knowledge Production
9. Black Essay-filmmaking and Essay-filmmaking as ‘Black’ – William Brown
10. Filmmakers as ‘Magicians’ and Cinema Can Be Dangerous – Kiki Tianqi Yu in Conversation with Lei Lei 

Notes on Contributors