Beyond the Frame: The Essay Film as a Living Dialogue
At the 2025 Rotterdam International Film Festival, I found myself repeatedly drawn to the essay film—not just as a genre, but as a way of thinking, a rhythm of inquiry that unfolds beyond the traditional logic of storytelling. In the Tiger Competition, three films particularly stood out, each intertwining personal reflection with archival fragments, each resisting the finality of narrative closure and the comfort of resolution. These films didn’t simply tell stories; they circled around them, disrupting and dislocating them, allowing ideas and emotions to surface in the spaces between. In this way, they embodied what Deleuze refers to as a “thought of the outside”—cinema not as representation, but as a surface where fragments, voices, and images resonate and collide.
I began to think of the essay not just as something written, but, rather, as a cinematic gesture: a practice of gathering and scattering, of touching thought without ever trying to capture it. The works which I’ll touch upon below, were less about offering answers than about posing questions. They unfolded like problems without clear solutions, using montage not to explain, but to invent concepts. The images didn’t clarify; they hesitated, speculated, interrupted. In this sense, they offered something rare: an experience where ambiguity isn’t a void, but, rather, a space of potential—a cinema where thought is felt as much as it is shown.
In Fiume o morte!, Igor Bezinović unravels history not by recounting it, but by inhabiting its reverberations. The film spirals around the chaotic and mythic events of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume (now Rijeka), creating a porous dialogue between past and present, ideology and performance, archive and reenactment. Instead of reconstructing history, Bezinović opens it up, exposing its ruptures, its theatricalities, its contradictions. What emerges is a kind of cinematic interstice: a space between fact and fiction, where history becomes a living, unstable surface. This isn’t a documentary in any conventional sense, but an essay in Deleuze’s terms: a creation of concepts through montage, gesture, and discontinuity.
The film resists coherence, leaning into fragmentation, performance, and excess. Characters shift between historical figures and contemporary bodies, moving across timelines, enacting memory rather than explaining it. Fiume o morte! becomes a film of the outside: a cinema that thinks not by conclusion, but by fracture. The title’s militant slogan—“Fiume or death!”—is repeated and destabilized, transforming from a firm assertion into a question: What is Fiume, and who has the right to claim it? Bezinović doesn’t offer answers; instead, he opens a fissure in the historical record, allowing viewers to sense both the absurdity and allure of fascist spectacle, while confronting its persistent afterlife. This is the essay film as provocation, not pedagogy, where thinking emerges not through clarity, but through deliberate disturbance.
In L’arbre de l’authenticité, Sammy Baloji constructs a film like a palimpsest, layering colonial histories, symbolic landscapes, and post-independence ideologies onto the same cinematic surface. At its heart is the tree: once a symbol in Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, now both a relic and an image laden with political afterlife. But instead of fixing the tree within a single temporal or symbolic frame, Baloji allows it to drift, displaced and made strange. The essay film here isn’t a tool for documenting history, but for exploring its textures, ruptures, and unresolved ghosts. The camera moves slowly, almost ritualistically, across spaces that are both saturated with power and emptied of it. What we see isn’t explanation but contemplation: a form of cinematic archaeology, tracing the visual residue of ideology.
Through its mix of archival fragments, spoken reflections, and hypnotic stillness, the film enacts Deleuze’s “thought of the outside”—cinema that doesn’t represent power, but brushes against its surfaces, its ruins, its myths. Baloji doesn’t seek to recover authenticity—despite the title—but exposes the very machinery by which “authenticity” was fabricated, imposed, and monumentalized. The film’s temporality resists chronology, choosing instead to weave a visual essay in which the spaces between what was and what remains are more important than what is fixed. Like Bezinović’s work, Baloji’s film doesn’t deliver a clear lesson. Rather, it invites us to think spatially, visually, and affectively—where history is not a closed narrative, but an open wound, and the essay film becomes a space where new concepts, new readings, and new hauntings emerge.
Wind, Talk to Me unfolds like a whisper across a desolate landscape: quiet, unassuming, yet heavy with unspoken histories. Stefan Djordjević crafts a deeply personal film where absence becomes presence, where the wind itself takes on the role of both witness and narrator. Set in a Serbian village, the film listens to what remains: voices on tape, fragments of memory, traces of lives once lived. It’s an essay not built on exposition, but on drift, one that moves with the wind, across sound and silence, across images that seem both ordinary and haunted. The film doesn’t assert; it breathes. And in doing so, it creates an encounter between landscape and memory, between the seen and the felt.
Djordjević’s film embodies the essayistic as a cinema of hesitation: nothing is fully grasped, and yet everything trembles with meaning exactly the way we see daily routines of the family gathered there, from different generations, doing nothing important, yet essential. The dialogues, intimate yet elusive, doesn’t guide us but accompanies us, like wind passing through leaves. The fractures here are emotional, temporal, sonic. The film creates concepts not by naming them, but by holding them gently: loss, belonging. Wind, Talk to Me isn’t just about family affairs; it depicts lives lived in the present tense, composed through listening, through looking, and through letting silence speak.
Experiencing these films at IFFR 2025 wasn’t just an aesthetic encounter—it was an intellectual and emotional shift. Each film, in its own way, invited me to dwell in uncertainty, to think with images rather than about them. They didn’t offer clarity, but, rather, something far more valuable: the opportunity to feel thought as sensation, to listen to history as an echo, to experience cinema as a porous, thinking surface. In Fiume o morte!, L’arbre de l’authenticité, and Wind, Talk to Me, the essay film became a space of interruption, layering, and rupture, a cinema that, as Deleuze might say, thinks from the outside. Leaving the screenings, I carried with me not arguments or conclusions, but textures, tensions, and a renewed understanding of how film can engage with the world—not by fixing it, but by keeping it open.
By Hossein Eidizadeh
Edited by José Teodoro
Copyright FIPRESCI