The self-portrait and the film and video essay

Abstract

This essay seeks to illuminate the intertwined forms of the essay and the self-portrait and does so in light of recent currents in contemporary art, film, and literary and media theory. Today we can speak not only of the essay film but also of the video essay and, more generally, of the essayistic in postmodern digital creativity. As a media artist, I have always been attracted to the essay form because of its pliable, intertextual capacity to act, as Serge Daney would have it, as a ‘go‑between’, linking cinema, video, new media, literature and critical theory.