The Essay Film

A film can be made of photographs that do not move: La Jetée, Chris Marker’s story of a man sent back through time, is built from still pictures, and only once, for a moment, does a woman open her eyes.

In his Sans Soleil a woman reads the letters of a travelling cameraman, who goes looking in San Francisco for the places Hitchcock filmed Vertigo. Alain Resnais filmed the empty camps in colour for Night and Fog in 1956, and to get it released he painted a wooden beam over a French gendarme’s cap in a photograph of a French internment camp. Agnès Varda took a small digital camera into the fields after the harvest, to film the people who glean what is left, and turned it on her own aging hand. Orson Welles opened F for Fake by promising that everything in its next hour would be true; near the end he told the audience that the hour had passed, and that for the last seventeen minutes he had been lying.