This project is a historical examination of the essay form as an intermedial phenomenon that traverses the fields of art, criticism, literature, and philosophy. While foremost concerned with the audio-visual essay and with four of its most virtuosic practitioners (Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, and Alexander Kluge), I demonstrate how their exercises in film, video, television, and screen-based installation art draw substantially on deeper rooted traditions of the essayistic that run through other manners of expression and disciplines of inquiry. I argue that the essay form has historically functioned as a crucial adaptive process that enables fresh forms of creative and critical activity to emerge between the categories of fiction and nonfiction, art and science. theory and practice.