Penn Professor Timothy Corrigan’s ’The Essay Film’ Wins 2012 SCMS Kovács Book Award

Timothy Corrigan

The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker, by Timothy Corrigan , University of Pennsylvania English and cinema studies professor, has won the Society for Cinema and Media 2012 Kovács Book Award. The award will be presented at the SCMS 2012 Conference in Boston on March 23.

Published in July by Oxford University Press, the book offers a global perspective of the essay-film genre and includes discussions of popular nonfiction films like "Grizzly Man," "The Fog of War," "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "The Gleaners and I."

The selection committee hailed The Essay Film as "well-written, articulate and intellectually engaging," saying "the book moves fluidly back and forth between an in-depth discussion of the essay film and its subtypes and detailed and insightful close readings of specific films.... He astutely remarks that what these films do is ask the film viewer to become a thinker, which is also, in fact, what his book does. This is a defining study of a vital and creative genre, a study that future books on the subject will have to cite."

Corrigan’s work focuses on modern American and contemporary international cinema. He is the author of numerous books, including New German Film: The Displaced Image, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam and American Cinema of the 2000s. Corrigan has published essays in Film Quarterly, Discourse and Cinema Journal, among other collections, and is also an editor of the journal Adaptation, an editor of Critical Visions in Film Theory and an editorial-board member of Cinema Journal.