Méliès made a short film about the 1902 coronation of King Edward VII, which mixes actual footage with shots of a recreation of the event.
[10] Orson Welles made an essay film in his own pioneering style, released in 1974, called F for Fake, which dealt specifically with art forger Elmyr de Hory and with the themes of deception, "fakery", and authenticity in general.
[13] The University of Wisconsin Cinematheque website echoes some of Gray's comments; it calls a film essay an "intimate and allusive" genre that "catches filmmakers in a pensive mood, ruminating on the margins between fiction and documentary" in a manner that is "refreshingly inventive, playful, and idiosyncratic".
[14] While the medium (or as film scholar Eric Faden called it "media stylos") has its roots in academia,[15][16] it has grown dramatically in popularity with the advent of online video-sharing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo.
[21] In 2017, Sight & Sound, the magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI), started an annual polls of the best video essays of the year.
The 2021 poll reported that 38% of the essayists whose work received a nomination are female (which implies an increase of the 5% from the previous year), and that predominantly the video essays are in English (95%).