The Personal Camerais an exploration of an elusive but more and more compelling field: essayistic cinema. The essay film, together with its cognate forms& -the diary, the travelogue, the notebook and the self-portrait& -is cinema in the first person. It is a cinema of thought, of investigation and self-reflection, in which the filmmaker, instead of withdrawing behind the camera, comes out into the open, to say 'I', to take responsibility, and to address and engage with the spectator within a shared space of embodied subjectivity. Authorial, experimental and radical, essayistic cinema belongs within the lineage of avant-garde and political filmmaking and responds above all to the need we feel today for more contingent, autobiographical, private forms of expression. This study provides a unique insight into an intricate but fascinating field, by engaging with the work of directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alexander Sokurov, Michelangelo Antonioni, Derek Jarman, Federico Fellini, Wim Wenders, Jonas Mekas and Agnés Varda.

Laura Rascaroli is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. She is co-author with Ewa Mazierska of From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema (2003), The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: Dreams and Diaries (2004) and Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (2006).