Accented Essay Films: The Politics and Poetics of the Essay Film in the Age of Migration

Abstract

Igor Krstić brings together the notion of ‘accented cinema theory’ (Hamid Naficy) with the category of the essay, in order to conceptualise a burgeoning body of film, video, and other moving image practices in what sociologists have termed ‘the age of migration.’ Through this confluence of a supposedly generic category (the essay film) with a theory that has been of great importance to film scholarship since its emergence, Krstić provides new perspectives on an emerging transnational body of films, all of which have been produced by diasporic, exilic or interstitial documentary and/or essay filmmakers in the recent past. In applying Naficy’s terminology, one can describe these examples as ‘accented essay films’, because they all deal with displacement, exile or migration in the essayistic format. His study includes readings of The Nine Muses(Akomfrah, 2009),Grandmother’s Flower(Jeong-Hyun Mun, 2007), Home (Hruza, 2008) and A Hungarian Passport(Kogut, 2001).