What is an Audio Essay?

In his pioneering work, Dick Higgins uses the term ‘intermedia’ to categorise artistic work that “falls between media” and establishes cross-media configurations. [42] The essay film is inherently intermedial in its formation: its lineage returns us to the literary essay and a number of its signature attributes such as the “dialogic tension” between visual and verbal domains and a penchant for various kinds of transgression. [43] As Theodor W. Adorno outlines in his canonical piece “The Essay as Form”, the essay is a literary form that has been condemned precisely for its hybridity. [44] The essay film, as Corrigan puts it, “inhabits other forms and practices” by staging relationships between fiction and documentary, narrative and non-narrative modalities”, relationships that can also be described as intermedial in their orientation. [45] http://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-43-dossier-materialising-absence-in-film-and-media/beyond-the-archive-the-work-of-remembrance-in-john-akomfrahs-the-nine-muses/