The essay film’s distinct relation to the archive.
In the Intense Now
João Moreira Salles, 2017, Brazil
Genre: essay film
In many respects, formally, In the Intense Now follows in the template of other essay filmmakers, particularly Marker and Farocki. With voiceover narration director Salles both analyzes the film heritage of May ’68 in France, including a canon of leftist committed filmmaking, and ruminates on his own mother’s home movie footage of her trip to China (among other topics.)
The film is somewhere between a dialectic between the two (official history/personal history, Europe/China, capitalist/communist countries) and a free association (as programmatic as Salles can be in dealing with specific texts, he and his editor structure the film loosely).
But there’s another layer that draws me to the film: the way it maps out its relation to the archive in ways amenable to nontheatrical film studies. In the Intense Now, there are a range of types of footage: canonical documentary, newsreel, amateur documentary footage, and home movie.
The opening sequence in particular reflects on the differences between these types of footage and reads them against the grain. In short, the film asks us what it means to treat the amateur as “documentary” or the personal as political (or vice versa). It’s a similar move to Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology of the nonfiction image, in which the way we read nonfiction images is cued in no small part by our expectations (including the context of viewing).
The essay film is a form well poised to do this kind of reading, both through voiceover and manipulation of the image. But I’ve not yet seen a film thematize the amateur image in quite this way.