In the wake of the explosion in the production of essay films over the last 25 years and its subsequent theorization in scholarly literature, this volume seeks to historicize these intertwined developments within the 'long duree' of the 20th century and into the 21st. By raising the issue of 'beyond the essay film', this collection seeks not only to acknowledge the influential predecessors of this - in the view of many critics, the most interesting type of contemporary filmmaking - but also to speculate about its possible transformation as we move forward into the uncharted waters of the 21st - digital - century. Beyond the Essay Film focusses on three specific axes that underpin and shape the articulation of the essay film as a specific cultural form - subjectivity, textuality, and technology - to explore how changes along and across these dimensions affect historical shifts within the essay-film practice and its relation to other types of cinema and neighbouring art forms.

A civilian chaplain records whispered confessions and low urgings, writing in a notebook during his summer tenure at Sydney's Central Street Police Station. His 'Summer Exercises' are habitual five times a day. His terseness can generate feelings so sharp that sometimes a great notion gets pared clean with a meager swatch of syllables. In constructing this notebook of a sharp observer, author Ross Gibson builds a world Sydney, Australia in 1946 sordid and bruised after decades of depredations. --- This work of fiction was inspired by 175 carefully selected black and white photographs from the collection at Sydney's Justice & Police Museum, taken during the years immediately after World War II. These photographs (many included in the book), were generated by the New South Wales Police in the course of their investigations between 1945 and 1960. They form a visual reference for this richly imagined and experimental storytelling to take place. Anchored in the realities of the 1940s, along with Sydney police investigative procedure, The Summer Exercises is an artistic re-invention of history as it happened.