86 THE ESSAY FILM Chapter 4 Cinéma-vérité and Kino-pravda: Rouch, Vertov and the Essay Form 1 Caroline Eades and Elizabeth A. Papazian A flm is an idea, fashing out or slowly elaborated, but one that cannot be es- caped, whose expression can only be cinematographic. – Jean Rouch, ‘Te Cinema of the Future?’ (Rouch and Morin 2003: 266) 2 Both Chronique d’un été (Paris 1960) ( Chronicle of a Summer (Paris 1960), 1961) by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, and Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1928) by Dziga Vertov sit uncomfortably within the defnition of documentary – to such an extent that sub-categories, such as ‘refexive docu- mentary’, ‘city symphony’, ‘ cinéma du réel ’, ‘ cinéma direct ’ and ‘ethnographic flm’ must be stretched to ft them or even invented to accommodate them. In this chapter, we consider the possibility that they belong to the category of ‘essay flm’. In her recent work on the topic, Laura Rascaroli suggests that ‘we should resist the urge to overtheorize essayistic cinema and crystallize it into a genre’ (2009: 2). Perhaps the essay flm should be understood not as a genre, but as an overfow, a counter-genre within an industry or system based on classifcation and genre, or even as a non-genre lying outside the system of classifcation. Because the term has been sometimes used, as Rascaroli points out, ‘indiscriminately, in order to classify flms that escape all other labeling’ (2009: 22), we will avoid defning the essay flm exclusively in terms of these two uncategorisable works, but will instead <i>The Essay Film : Dialogue, Politics, Utopia</i>, edited by Elizabeth Papazian, and Caroline Eades, Columbia University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/iub-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4723078. Created from iub-ebooks on 2019-10-14 11:38:20. Copyright © 2016. Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.