Att tala i ord och bild: : Den audiovisuella essäns historiska utveckling

The audio visual essay, or ”film/video essay” as it might be better known, has in recent years started to enjoy a level of popularity previously unseen in its long and obscure history; encouraging a proper reexamination of the genre through the years, to see how it has developed and changed throughout its lifetime to finally arrive at where it is today. With a lineage stretching back across the centuries, through to the 16th -century writings of Michel de Montaigne, the essay format, either as it manifests in the traditions of literature or the audio visual mode, is a curious form of expression, preferring an indirect route towards knowledge, marked by quandary, reflection, the trying and retrying ideas in a process built around the act of searching. Because of its unusual and shifting nature, on both a formal and discursive level, coupled with a propensity for analysis and dialectical reasoning, it has been a staple of transgressive aesthetic practices, landing it with several of leading experimental filmmakers and movements of the pre- and postwar eras. Interestingly, however, in the new cultural landscape, shaped by the advent of the digital revolution, it has also been involved in a politically transgressive arena of democratized home productions, sparking discussion about the imperative conditions and potential future possibilities of media creation as a whole. To make sense of these historical proceedings, and the forces which impel them, a cohesive definition of the genre is in order, which can then be used as the basis of a functional historical model. As such, the following questions are prompted: What characteristics define the audio visual essay, in what ways has it manifested throughout its history and, by extension, how does one go about formulating a conception of its history? To accommodate these queries both an essayistic mode of analysis, concerning a work’s discursive and formalistic properties, and a chronological lineage of the audio visual essay, is proposed, and applied to different historical examples, to map out paths of development and progression as well as the genres response to the varying cultural, social, political and technological forces during its lifetime