News of the End of the World: The Essay Film as Mentality

Abstract

The contemporary essay film is situated within the deep transformations of cinema that led to post-cinema, just as it arises from the revolution experienced by the classic documentary, now transformed into the post-documentary, whose main axes are subjectivity and thought. Following the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, the essay film can be considered as a sign of a new image of thought derived from cinema but more complex. The essay mode in general, as a way of thinking, adapts to the complexities of the contemporary world through its fluid, rhizomatic and multidimensional condition. Likewise, based on the hypothesis that the essay form corresponds to a certain mentality anthropologically understood, it results in the existence of a post-subject that is especially evident with the essay film and that confronts the crisis of transcendental subjectivity that has characterized the twentieth-century thought.