Research Statement

The Window and I (2015) is a short film, exploring three sets of windows: in the UK, Norway, and Spain. Each site is explored with a series of shots, moving from the exterior landscape, into the building and framing the windows in question, showing a human body, and eventually venturing into the body using medical imaging technologies. These shots show different climates and lighting conditions: green vegetation, a snow-covered landscape, or a warm Mediterranean view. Further, each section ends with showing different parts of the body: hands, lungs and an eye. The soundscape captures the sounds of the rooms and spaces shot, while the body that is explored is accompanied by fragments of piano music – Claude Debussy’s Danseuses de Delphes – performed by the filmmaker herself.

Research Questions

According to film scholar Laura Rascaroli, the essay film genre holds the potential to explore framing, mobility and self-reflection, offering new critical insights in a variety of fields (Rascaroli 2017). From the field of architecture, Penelope Haralambidou suggests that the architectural essay film, a subgenre of the essay film, is helpful to think about the historical and social aspects of architecture and spatial thinking (Haralambidou 2015) In the context of a growing field of film scholars reflecting on the role of architecture and space, and architects and architectural theorists addressing how cinema could be understood as a form of architectural thinking (Vesely 2006; Cairns 2013; Koeck 2013; Borden, 2013; Bruno 2002; Martin 2014, Lamster 2000;) this reflection asks how exactly the film engages with the notion of framing, mobility and self-reflection as a method described as the fenestral essay film. The Window and I (2015) is a filmic exploration of three sets of windows, an essayistic self-portrait that explores framing, mobility and self-reflection. The submission offers a concluding remark by asking how the fenestral essay film can offer a critical approach to the way our bodies relate to different climatic and spatial contexts, opening up for questions of gender and disability. The film sits next to this statement and can be watched both before and after reading, or the two could stand alone independently. 

Context / Significance

Interdisciplinary in nature, the context of this work springs from the field of architecture and cinema. Here, I move between different theoretical strands, to outline the role of the key terms framing, mobility and self-relfection in both scholarship discussing the essay film and the architectural window. From these theoretical frameworks, I arrive at the definition of the notion of the fenestral essay film as a methodological innovation. The text does not aim to explain the film The Window and I (2015) explicitely, but works as a complimentary piece: offering a definition of the fenestral essay film that is highly theoretical. Let us begin with the essay film.

The essay film 

‘Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial.’ (Dillon 2017, 12)

The essay film as a genre was initially coined by Hans Richter in 1940. Adopted from the literary essay genre, which starting with the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), the essay uses a personal perspective as a point of departure, the text moves through wide ranging references to eventually open up a dialogue with the reader. (Richter 1940) Within recent scholarship of film studies, scholars such as Timothy Corrigan, Laura Rascaroli and Nora M. Alter have outlined the genre’s history, key traits and film-makers.(Altern 2018; Altern and Corrigan 2017; Corrigan 2011;  Rascaroli 2017; Rascaroli 2009; Rascaroli 2008). Within this scholarship, I have identified the key terms of mobility, framing, and self-reflection. 

Mobility

The Essay Film: from Montaigne, after Marker (2011) by Corrigan provides an in-depth introduction to the genre of the essay film suggesting the film essay’s potential for bringing together the personal and the general. Movement stands as a central trait of the essay film, particularly films that are structured around a journey. In his account of the different forms essay films has tended to take, Corrigan dedicates a chapter to cinematic travel and essayistic excursions: 

If essay films continually overlap and merge their different registers and modes, variations like the travel essay highlight and emphasizes their own particular experiential encounters. Whereas portrait essays turn images and sounds of self inside out and diary essays time that self according to different chronologies and daily rhythms, the travel essay discovers another self in the process of thinking through new or old environment and thinking of the self as a different environment. (Corrigan 2011, 105). 

Corrigan suggests that essay films about travel, taking place in different locations and the journeys between these locations is a way to address the thinking self also as a mobile process. 

Framing 

Paul Arthur give emphasis to the importance of language when defining the essay film. Arthur writes: 

The conjunction of language and image, fundamental to film grammar, is a key ingredient of the essay film. In some sense all great essays are about complex relationships between word and pictures, the mechanisms by which speech can annotate, undermine, or otherwise change the signification of what we see – and vice versa.(Arthur 2017, 165). 

In arguing that the conjunction of language and image is fundamental to all great essays, Arthur, as well as Lopate above, makes an argument that the essay film cannot function without words. As a reaction to statements such as these, Rascaroli’s most recent book How the Essay Film Thinks (2017) aims at moving away from the ‘vococentrism’ apparent in the scholarship on the genre. She argues that ‘disjunction is to be found at the core of the essay film’s diverse signifying practices, among which the verbal is only one of several levels of intelligence.’ (Rascaroli 2017, 7). To explore how the essay film ‘thinks’, she looks elsewhere and provides a thorough account of how filmmakers making essay films use genre, temporality, narration, montage, sound, and framing, and these keywords form the chapters of her book.  Finally, she concludes that the essay film first and foremost thinks through a process of reframing personal experience, existing footage, events, objects and place. (Racaroli 2017, 189) She writes:  

In writings on film, the frame is usually understood as an element at once of the image, of the apparatus of the cinema, and of film language that participates in, supports, and structures meaning-making in multiple ways, some of which have to do with spheres including technology, perception, psychology, aesthetics, narrative, ideology, and culture. The word “frame” itself is ambiguous and multilayered. (Rascaroli 2017, 169)

With this, Rascaroli suggests that the frame is a concept that encompasses several meanings, ranging from physical properties of the technology to the way that frame relates to ideology and to those who frame information, views and ideas. (Rascaroli 2017, 169)

Self-reflection

In a similar manner to the written essay, also the essay film relies upon a personal point of view, to present a trail or attempt. Philip Lopate argues: ‘That is not to say that it is always first-person or autobiographical, but it tracks a person’s thought as he or she tries to work out some mental knot, however various its strands. An essay is a search to find out what one thinks about something.’(Lopate 2017, 110) As such, the essay film uses a subjective point of view to make an attempt to work out a mental knot, according to Lopate. 

As Timothy Corrigan points out, ‘the essayistic acts out a performative presentation of self as a kind of self-negation in which narrative or experimental structures are subsumed within the process of thinking through a public experience.’ (Corrigan 2011, 6) The self in essay films, is a way to explore subjective experience in a public sphere. Corrigan’s emphasis on the self in the essay film is shared by Rascaroli, who dedicates her book The Personal Camera: subjective cinema and the essay film (2009) to the the personal aspects of the genre. Her book focuses on self-reflection and what occurs when the camera is turned towards the personal. She argues that ‘authorship in the essay film is interstitial, and is played in the liminal spaces between the empirical author and his or her textual figures.’ (Rascaroli 2009, 190) As such Rascaroli sees the subjective and personal in essay film as a way to approach what occurs between the author and the figures surrounding her, highlighting fissures and gaps.  

Rascaroli defines the essay as ‘the expression of a personal, critical reflection on a problem or set of problems,’(Rascaroli 2009b, 183) where the self can be present through a voice-over, or made visible in the film-maker’s structural choices. The self in the essay film is important in forming a relationship with an audience. She writes: 

The “I” in the essay film always clearly and strongly implicates a “you” – and, for me, this is a key aspect of the deep structures of the form. It is important to understand that this “you” is not a generic audience, but an embodied spectator. The essay film constructs such a spectatorial position by adopting a certain rhetorical structure: rather than answering all the questions that it raises, and delivering a complete, “closed” argument, the essay’s rhetoric is such that it opens up problems, and interrogates the spectator; instead of guiding her through emotional and intellectual responses, the essay urges her to engage individually with the film, and reflect on the same subject matter the author is musing about. This structure accounts for the “openness” of the essay film. (Rascaroli 2009b, 185).  

As such, the personal, and self-reflective I in the essay film, is vital in forming a dialogue with the viewer, opening up rather than closing down an argument. She argues how ‘It is important to state one more time that heresy and openness are among the essay film’s key markers,’ before stressing that crystallising the essay film into a genre, would take away from the open-ness. The essay film should remain elusive, she argues: ‘In being informal, sceptical, diverse, disjunctive, paradoxical, contradictory, heretical, open, free and formless, the essay truly is the post-modern “matrix” of all generic possibilities!’ (Rascaroli 2009b,190)  

Architecture and space

In her focus on the non-verbal aspects of the essay film and its importance in shaping a form of film that thinks, Rascaroli does not explicitly discuss architecture as one such feature. But without explicitly writing for an architectural audience, or coming from architecture or architectural history, Rascaroli pays attention to spatiality in essay films and often speaks in spatial terms. Her analysis of the essay film includes a focus on ‘spatialisation of temporality and thus to time seen’ (Rascaroli 2017, 93), as she considers ‘a space of intelligence that accounts of the opening of essayistic meaning’ within these films. (Rascaroli 2017, 16) She sees the genre as ‘a spatial strategy of in-betweenness, exploited by the essay film to create nonverbal forms of signification.’ (Rascaroli 2017, 93) The essay film creates a ‘gap between viewer and viewed’ (Rascaroli 2017, 41), or  engaging an ‘inside/outside dynamic’. (Rascaroli 2017, 38) The frame – a highly spatial concept – is pivotal in her argument, as she argues that essay films query ‘the partiality of its point of view and [hint] at all that was left out of frame’(Rascaroli 2017,169) and highlight how cinema through framing ‘hold something back from the viewer… limit the vision, thus producing a mystery.’ (Rascaroli 2017, 43) These mentions of spatial aspects of the essay film, from various sections of her book, suggests that spatial aspects of the essay film are of importance to Rascaroli.  Yet, an in-depth focus on the way in which architecture features in these films lies outside of the scope of Rascaroli’s book. In my approach to the essay film – specifically the fenestral essay film – I build upon Rascaroli’s attention to framing and self-reflection in the genre of the essay film, but do so from the field of architectural history, and an interest in the literal and figurative window, paying attention to the way in which architecture frames, and what it means to frame architecture through an essay film. 

Whereas Rascaroli writes from the discipline of screen studies, Penelope Haralambidou comes from the field of architecture, and explores the way space works in film, or could even be ‘made’ with film. In her article “The Architectural Essay Film”,  Haralambidou defines a subgenre of the essay film that has potential to inform architectural design, considering design itself as ‘an architecture of making.’ (Haralambidou 2015, 247) She outlines how architectural representation traditionally has tended to look at space outside of time, but how the film, as a temporal medium, has the potential of bringing time into architecture, affecting the way we approach and design it. This approach to designing through the making of essay films, Haralambiou sees as having great potential for design. She mentions how the genre traits of the essay film can allow for a different sense of the subjective in design, a new way of approaching history, and let empathy into design thinking as a way of identifying with the building. (Haralambidou 2015, 247) Whereas Haralambidou’s aim is to inform design thinking, my attention is more closely related to the architectural historical potential of the architectural essay film. Adopting Haralambidou’s emphasis on how space works in essay films, I ask how the essay film can be a form of critical spatial practice for exploring the window in architecture. 

The architectural window 

The architectural window played a role in the early history of the camera. According to Karen Hellmann, the window was, in fact, the precondition for the photographic process, shaping this inherent link. She draws attention to the way that early advances in photography, reliant upon light, took place by the window. The very first photograph by Nicéphone Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras (1826 or 1827), was that of a window of his studio. She argues that these spatial conditions of the photographer’s studio, affect the way we think about the camera more symbolically, as she notes of the window specifically:   

it is the “opening”, of the “viewfinder” through which images are seen and recorded in the camera, like the “opening” in a wall of its ancestor, the camera obscura. As such, a photograph of a window is a representation of how a camera sees, a “view of a view”. (Hellmann 2013, 7)

Alongside a reliance upon light, it is the notion of the frame that links the architectural window to the camera. In this way, the existing language already used to describe the architectural window influenced the way in which the camera was described from the outset. 

This link continues into our contemporary screen culture. In her book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006) Anne Friedberg defines the window as an opening, separation, surface and frame: ‘a membrane where surface meets depth, where transparency meets its barriers.’(Friedberg 2006, 12). In an essay accompanying the exhibition Window | Interface at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (2007), Lutz Koepnick addresses the many meanings of the window and how such meanings might co-exist. According to him the window: 

provide[s] a surface or skin at which different symbolic or material worlds dynamically intermingle. They draw the viewer into what turns out to be an unpredictable and utterly unstable series of interactive exchanges and reciprocal transactions… (Koepnick 2007, 18-19). 

The exhibition included works by Olafur Eliasson and Cerith Wyn Evans, amongst others, and presents the window as multifaceted, both as a literal and perturbative concept. In the exhibition the artists approach the window differently. In Evans’s Think of this as a window (2005) these exact words written as a window-like neon-light sign, and are playing with the tradition from René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images: This is not a pipe (1928 – 1929) asking if the pipe, or window, is the word or the object the word refers to. Eliasson’s installation Seeing Yourself Sensing (2001) is a window-like frame, where stripes of mirror breaks it up, allowing the viewer looking through the window, also to observe her or himself. The works both frame a view, and offer self-reflection.

These artworks are clear examples of works that are both filmic and built. Yet another interesting overlap between the practice of essay filmmaking and the field of architecture, become evident if we introduce the third keyword: mobility. Koepnick finds the window as defined and used by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to be fruitful when describing the works of art in the exhibition. According to Koepnick, Rilke’s understanding of the window diverges from the way his contemporaries understood the window and anticipates the understanding of the window in works by artists such as Evans and Eliasson. A clear indication of the way Rilke’s understanding of the window was different for its time, can be seen when compared with the way the window was understood in Romanticism. In the art and literature of the era, the window was literally between inside and outside, figuratively between life and death, or between everyday life and the Romantic dream of something else, something better. Caspar David Friedrich’s (1774 – 1840) painting Woman at the Window (1822) represents this notion in the age of German Romanticism. A woman is standing in an interior and looks longingly out the window, out towards a different world. The longing towards something different, something else, stands as a significant trait of Romanticism here depicted through a window. (Koepnick 2007, 15) The window is a frame between inside and outside, the woman and her longing for another world. 

Rilke sees the window and its frame differently: for him it does not only separate two spaces, but also unites the two and creates a relationship between them. Tang draws attention to the way Rilke, particularly in his letters, describes the window as a frame to understand the relationship between spaces, between the inner and the outer world, and to develop an understanding of the position of the self in the world. 

Koepnick draws attention to Rilke’ s description of sleeping by an open window, as an example of this mobility. In the darkness, sounds enter into the room, and intermingle with sounds from the outside. Koepnick suggests that this experience is a highly tactile and kinaesthetic one, in spite of the body not moving at all. In Rilke’s writing, Kopenick argues how ‘body, window, and world here fuse into one unity, allowing for a new intensity of perception but also suspending any former sense of protection. The poet’s body itself is experienced as a medium.’ (Koepnick 2007, 48) As such, the window in Rilke’s writing not only suggests a figurative sense of mobility, but also a literal and tactile experience of movement, where one is ‘no longer able to distinguish between interior and exterior spaces, between body and world, between the visual, the acoustical, and the haptic.’ (Koepnick 2007, 48) From Rilke’s understanding of the window, I have identified the themes of mobility, framing and self-reflection. Here, these keywords stand as key elements in what I understand as the ‘fenestral’, building upon Rilke’s windows as discussed by Kopenick.

Methods 

In what ways do these theoretical strands inform the fenestral essay film as a method? To Freidberg, the architectural window is not just a physical construct, but also a widely-used metaphor, which has informed screen culture of today. (Friedberg 2006, 1) Friedberg awards attention to the framing features of both the figurative and the literal window, as she focuses on the slippages of meaning in-between. She writes:

Metaphors are proxies, allies. As a rhetorical trope, metaphor relies on the substitution of one thing for another, a transfer of properties from the plane of the literal to the plane of the figurative … we need to examine the slippage of meaning occasioned by the metaphor itself. (Friedberg 2006, 12)

Friedberg’s thesis, where she traces the history of the window from Alberti to Microsoft, relies upon an understanding of the window that is shifting: a metaphor resting between the literal and the figurative. (Friedberg 2006, 12) The fenestral essay film engages both literal and figurative window, by allowing for framing, mobility and self-reflection.  

Outcomes

And the consequence? With a focus on the notions of framing, mobility and self-reflection, I look at the conceptual, physical and metaphorical overlaps between the architectural window and the many windows of filmmaking; lens, viewfinder, editing or projection. In this way, I approach the way literal and figurative intersect in the architectural history that I study, explored through the practice of writing essays and making fenestral essay films. I am interested in the way the essay as a form uses personal experience, moving between a wide range of references and fields; these essays are an attempt to create an open-ended dialogue with a reader/viewers, rather than a concluding statement. The Window and I (2015) is an example – perhaps. Or perhaps not. The outcome of this research is twofold: a filmic exploration and the definition of the term fenestral essay film. 

Impact

“It is by no means clear that literature is less embodied than architecture, or that architecture is less visionary than literature. Neither the materiality of writing nor the metaphysics of building can be quite so readily elided.” (Fuss 2004, 4) So writes literary critic Diana Fuss, acknowledging that historians have tended to treat architecture too literally, overlooking the metaphorical aspects of architecture. The fenestral essay offers a way to do so, by focusing on the notion of framing, mobility and self-reflection, bridging the literal and metaphorical. As more architects are making essay films, more theoretical discussions of how such films might work is urgent. Particularly films that do not rely on the written or spoken word. 

In my work, I seek the critical potential within these techniques: Framing, mobility and self-reflection. The film The Window and I (2015) does not illustrate theory, it practices theory (Rendell 2006; 2010). Coining the term fenestral essay film helps us cross between the metaphorical and the literal, across the interdisciplinary divide of architecture and cinema, proposing a method that can be adopted by others. In the film these key terms are being explored as we move through buildings, across national borders and in, and out of a body. The essay film opens up for a dialogue with its viewer, and by watching the film a series of questions can arise, and open up for important discussions. Beyond the title cards and credits, the film does not rely on words. The film frames views of bodies, and lands, offers mobility between spaces in buildings and bodies, and offers me a space to reflect on my own position in relation to the windows that surround me. Questions can arise: How do we understand, think about, visualise and possibly romanticise specific locations, climatic or cultural? Who travels where, and across what spaces? What does it mean to be a woman experiencing these sites, potentially a woman living with chronic illness and disability? 

References

Alter, Nora M. (2018) The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press.

Alter, N.M and T. Corrigan eds. (2017) Essays on the Essay Film. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Arthur P. (2003) «Essay Questions», In Essays on the Essay Film, eds. Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, 161 – 171 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017) 165. 

Dillon, B. (2017) Essayism. London: Fitzcarraldo Edition.

Borden, I. (2013) Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes. London: Reaktion Books. 

Bruno, G. (2002) Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso. 

Cairns, G. Eds. (2013. The Architecture of the Screen. Bristol: Intellect. 

Koeck, R. (2013) Cine | Scapes: Cinematic Spaces in Architecture and Cities. Abingdon: Routledge. 

Corrigan, T. (2011) The Essay Film : From Montaigne, after Marker. New York: Oxford University Press.

Friedberg, A. (2006) The Virtual Window: from Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge Mass: MIT press.

Fuss, D. (2004). The Sense of an Interior: Four writers and the rooms that shaped them (New York: Routledge, 2004) 

Haralambidou, P. (2015) ”The Architectural Essay Film” in Architectural Research Quarterly, 19:3, 234-48.

Hellmann, K. (2013) The Window in Photographs (Los Angeles, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum.

Koepnick, L. (2007) “The Aesthetic of the Interface” in Window | Interface, eds. Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick 15-49. St. Louis, Miss: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum/Washington University.

Lamster, M. (2000)  Film and Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Lopate, P. (1992) «In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film», In Essays on the Essay Film, eds. Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, 109 – 133. New York: Columbia University Press.

Martin, R. (2014). The Architecture of David Lynch. London: Bloomsbury. 

Rascaroli, L. (2017) How the Essay Film Thinks / Laura Rascaroli. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Rascaroli, L. (2009) The Personal Camera : Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. London: Wallflower. 

Rascaroli, L. (2008). “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments,” Framework; Detroit, Mich. 49, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 24–47.

Rendell, J. (2006). Art and Architecture: a place between. London: I.B. Tauris.

Rendell, J. (2010). Site-Writing: the architecture of art criticism. London: I.B. Tauris.

Richter, H. (1940) “Der Filmessay: eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilms” [“The Film Essay: A New Form of Documentary Film”]. In Schreiben Bilder Sprechen: Texte zum essayistischen Film. Eds. Christa Blümlinger and Constatin Wuldd, translation by Richard Langston. Wien: Sonderzahl, 1992.

Vesely, D. (2004). Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows

Review 1: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

In her text, the author examines the essay film as an open, reflective, and interdisciplinary form, using her film The Window and I (2015) to propose the concept of the ‘fenestral essay film’. Drawing on essayist-film theorists, such as Timothy Corrigan, Laura Rascaroli, and Nora Alter, the author identifies three defining traits of the essay film: mobility, framing, and self-reflection. Mobility is understood not only as physical travel but as a spatial thinking process. Framing is explored beyond language and voice-over, emphasising cinematic frames as tools for meaning-making. Self-reflection positions the essay film as a dialogic form in which the filmmaker’s subjective ‘I’ invites an embodied ‘you’, encouraging openness rather than closure.

Building on Rascaroli’s attention to framing and spatiality, the essay focuses on the architectural feature of the window as both a literal and metaphorical device. Through theorists such as Anne Friedberg, Lutz Koepnick, and Rainer Maria Rilke, the window is framed as a site of exchange between the inside and the outside, the body and the world.

The analysis in the essay does not directly describe the film, creating a fertile gap between the two. Staging a journey from the interior looking out through the window to the interior of the body through medical imaging techniques, the film’s cinematic framing transports the viewer to an intimate space where the filmmaker is in dialogue with the self. Informed by Jane Rendell’s writing, the author situates filmmaking as a critical spatial practice and argues that ‘fenestral essay films’ bridge architecture, cinema, the body, and theory.

Her definition resonates with the work of feminist essay filmmakers, such as Chantal Akerman and Laura Mulvey. In films such as Akerman’s News from Home (1976), shots of New York are often filmed through apartment windows, subway windows, or from behind glass, creating a persistent separation between inside and outside. This visual framing mirrors the emotional distance between Akerman and her mother’s letters, reinforcing the essay film’s open, reflective mode rather than illustrating a fixed argument. Akerman frequently explores mobility through stillness. Windows appear as thresholds where the camera lingers, observing passage, weather, or people beyond. In her essay films, such as Riddles of the Sphinx (1977, with Peter Wollen), Mulvey also uses the window as a recurring trope, employing windows, mirrors, screens, and apertures as structures of looking, though in a more conceptual and analytical way. These are not always literal windows but rather function as fenestral devices that foreground the act of seeing and the viewer's position. This directly aligns with her theoretical work on visual pleasure and the critique of naturalised cinematic vision.

Akerman’s and Mulvey’s films can be understood as ‘fenestral essay films’ in the author’s sense: works that think through windows, apertures, and thresholds as spatial and conceptual frames for reflection. Rather than closing down meaning, their fenestral structures sustain an open dialogue between interior and exterior, body and world, positioning the viewer within the essay film’s mobile, self-reflexive field of looking.

Review 2: Reject submission.

The research statement sets out a series of interesting reflections on different authors’ writings about the essay film. It is well-grounded in the relevant literature. However, I found it a little fragmented, and lacking a sense of the author’s own argument or voice, bringing the different sources together and articulating a sense of their own position in relation to these others. 

Developing from Laura Rascaroli’s critique of what she terms the ‘vococentrism’ of existing definitions of the essay film, the author proposes to follow Rascaroli in developing a form of essay film without text or voice but focused instead on other characteristics, including mobility, self-reflection and framing; and this appears to underpin the film-based element of this submission.

The resulting film work is meditative and I found that it successfully induces self-reflection in the viewer. The central motif of the window is allied to an examination of the interior of the body, via X-rays which punctuate the image-flow at key points. However, I was less confident that the film offers us a ‘point of view’ on its material, in the way we might usually expect from the more voco-centric essay film. I wondered whether removing text and voice from the essay film possibly makes the essay film too indistinguishable from other forms of personal, expressive and diaristic film-making. Perhaps, contra Rascaroli, the textual element in essay films is something that is worth holding onto, as distinctive of the genre.

The chief innovation the author proposes in their submission is the use of architectural spaces, building on the work of Jane Rendell, Penelope Haralimbidou and Anne Friedberg, to provide a way of exploring the significance of ‘framing’ and the importance of a ‘point of view’ to the essay film, in a new, wordless form. The aim is to develop a new form of essay film which the author calls the ‘fenestral essay film’. In the research statement, I found the discussion of Rendell’s work least successful, since it appears to be the least digested material. In the practical submission, visually and materially speaking, I wasn’t convinced that it succeeds in offering a new way of working with windows, to support the proposed new definition.

Overall, I found this submission (text and film combined) interesting, but a little fragmentary and not offering major or substantial new insights. I think it is publishable but would not strongly recommend publication.

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response