November 6 - December 3
“Everything that is truth contradicts itself.” – Michel de Montaigne
“Talking of the essay film, I would rather refer to the attitude of he who attempts (essaie) to debate a problem by using all the means that the cinema affords, all the registers and all the expedients.” – Edgar Morin, co-director of Chronique d’un été
“[Gorin’s] solo films, however, may well prove as important as the collaborations with Godard. What they lose in provocation and extremity they gain back in charm and in complexity of form and nuance: they stand among the most ingenious and potentially fertile contributions to the genre of ‘film essay.’ They are characterized by a resolute fidelity to the local, revealed with tenderness and humor, and are personal and engaging in ways unimaginable in the Vertov-period works.” – Erik Ulman, senses of cinema
TIFF Cinematheque is honoured to welcome Jean-Pierre Gorin, celebrated filmmaker and professor at University of California, San Diego, to guide us through this essential series on the “essay film,” one of the most exciting and elusive genres in contemporary cinema. In many ways a salient postscript to our successful nouvelle vague show this past summer, this series, which will run over two successive seasons, forms an inevitable, if shape-shifting portrait of cinematic auterism – which pre-dates Alexandre Astruc’s infamous coining of the term “caméra-stylo.” With examples by Chris Marker, Dziga Vertov, Luis Buñuel, Orson Welles, Chantal Akerman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Gorin himself, as well as his Dziga Vertov group collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard, various incarnations of the essay film will emerge, from the analytic and the ruminative to the incendiary.
It’s well known but perhaps worth repeating that Montaigne, the French Renaissance author and father of the essay held as his motto, “What do I know?,” a shrugging, seemingly flip rebuke to his own mammoth treatise on the human condition. His skepticism was initially derided, but in time, a doubting tendency was recognized as fundamental to the essay, the fussy agent required for inquiry. Montaigne used the emblem of a scale to visualize his approach – that of weighing knowledge (ideas, facts, theories) against personal experience (feelings, desire). With this image of