The film-essay is an important way to become aware of the power of images in our lives. Here’s a list of the best recent examples

The film-essay is an intriguing art-form. How do you use the power of the audio-visual to make a criticism of culture or politics - lifting words off the page (or PDF) into somewhere different and more powerful? Sight and Sound magazine has brought us a stunningly rich collection of the best of 2022’s film-essays. Even a slight dig into their list unearths a set of intricate, meditative movies.

Above is a classic of the genre: Evelyn Kreutzer’s Footsteps. From S&S: “A personal anecdote comes to inform a reading of a key motif in Hitchcock’s films: sounds of feet. Though the films of Hitchcock are the corpus from which this video draws, it becomes about the sounds of feet in film in general, and thus how we interpret them in our own lives, through the screen or otherwise.”

From IFFR: “After the revolution in 1979, Iran prohibited the depiction of men and women touching on the silver screen. Since then, directors have relied on every cinematic trick in the book to mirror the ecstatic release of tension through touch – but often it is the game of glances that is enough to set a scene ablaze. Nazarbazi collages these saturated cinematic moments into a poem about love and desire in Iranian film, that also echoes our own time of physical distancing.” An essay on this film is here - and there are four clips from the documentary here on Vimeo, not embeddable (and sorry, we can’t find a streaming service that carries it).

A real essay on film about the crisis in making special effects for superhero movies - the intense work-rate to achieve them causing emotional and physical grief to the sector’s imagineers: From S&S: “Saladino brings a level of graphical finesse and polish that remains unmatched by any of his peers. This video essay is a spectacular reminder that the antagonism between CGI people and practical effects people is a red herring. The real villain isn’t the false dichotomy of tangible vs digital. The real villain is capitalism.”