The World Essay Film and the Politics of Traceability

Genèse d’un repas(Moullet, 1979), Ananas(Gitai, 1984) and The Forgotten Space (Burch & Sekula, 2010) constitute three cinematic attempts at representing the global production and distribution networks of commodities. Giorgio Avezzù and Giuseppe Fidotta argue in this chapter that these films, due to their central concern with late capitalism and globalisation, can be labelled ‘World Essay Films’. They question, however, the multi-layered dynamics of global economy and cinema from the standpoint of Cultural Geography and Visual Studies. Although the World Essay Film’s central question pertains to the ways in which the interconnectedness of the world can be made visible, material, spatial, these films also play, as they argue, on the anxieties related to the invisibility of late-capitalist world, whose flows and networks seem to escape conventional representation. This inherent contradiction poses a challenge to realistic aesthetics and the documentary.