Video essay

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A video essay is an essay presented in the format of a video recording or short film rather than a conventional piece of writing; the form often overlaps with other forms of video entertainment on online platforms such as YouTube. [1] [2] [3] [4] A video essay allows an author to directly quote from film, video games, music, or other digital media, which is impossible with traditional writing. [5] While many video essays are intended for entertainment, they can also have an academic or political purpose. [6] [7] This type of content is often described as educational entertainment. [8]

Contents

Predecessors

Häxan (1922), a horror essay film about the historical roots and superstitions surrounding witchcraft

A film essay (also essay film or cinematic essay) consists of the evolution of a theme or an idea rather than a plot per se, or the film literally being a cinematic accompaniment to a narrator reading an essay. [9] From another perspective, an essay film could be defined as a documentary film visual basis combined with a form of commentary that contains elements of self-portrait (rather than autobiography), where the signature (rather than the life story) of the filmmaker is apparent. The cinematic essay often blends documentary, fiction, and experimental film making using tones and editing styles. [10]

The genre is not well-defined but might include propaganda works of early Soviet filmmakers like Dziga Vertov, documentary filmmakers including Chris Marker, [11] Michael Moore ( Roger & Me , Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 ), Errol Morris ( The Thin Blue Line ), Morgan Spurlock ( Super Size Me ) and Agnès Varda. Jean-Luc Godard describes his later works as "film-essays". [12] Two filmmakers whose work was the antecedent to the cinematic essay include Georges Méliès and Bertolt Brecht. 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. Brecht was a playwright who experimented with film and incorporated film projections into some of his plays. [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.

David Winks Gray's article "The essay film in action" states that the "essay film became an identifiable form of filmmaking in the 1950s and '60s". He states that since that time, essay films have tended to be "on the margins" of the filmmaking the world. Essay films have a "peculiar searching, questioning tone ... between documentary and fiction" but without "fitting comfortably" into either genre. Gray notes that just like written essays, essay films "tend to marry the personal voice of a guiding narrator (often the director) with a wide swath of other voices". [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]

Popularity

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. [17] [18] In 2021, the Netflix series Voir premiered featuring video essays focusing on films like 48 Hrs and Lady Vengeance . [19] [20]

Fellow video essayist Thomas Flight observes videos about popular media receiving more clicks as part of the video essay economy. [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%). [22]

Academic application

Academics, especially in regard to film, find video essays great for critique and analysis. [5] Academics also believe that video essays are an excellent way for students to explore creativity whilst being scholarly. [23] Professors have found that students benefit and become better writers after learning how to make video essays. [24] [25]

In 2014, a new peer-reviewed academic journal, [in]Transition, was created to have a platform for scholarly videographic work and video essays. [in]Transition is a collaborative project between MediaCommons and the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Journalof Cinema & Media Studies . The goal of [in]Transition is to bolster videographic work as a legitimate and valid medium for scholarship. [26]

Since 2015 under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and under the auspices of Middlebury’s Digital Liberal Arts Summer Institute, Professors Jason Mittell, Christian Keathley and Catherine Grant have organized a two-week workshop with the aim to explore a range of approaches by using moving images as a critical language and to expand the expressive possibilities available to innovative humanist scholars. Every year the workshop is attended by 15 scholars working in film and media studies or a related field, whose objects of study involve audio-visual media, especially film, television, and other new digital media forms. [27]

In 2018, Tecmerin: Revista de Ensayos Audiovisuales began as another peer-reviewed academic publication exclusively dedicated to videographic criticism. The same year Will DiGravio launched the Video Essay Podcast, featuring interviews with prominent video essayists. [28]

See also

Related Research Articles

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A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Essay</span> Written work often reflecting the authors personal point of view

An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal and informal: formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Horror film</span> Film genre

Horror is a film genre that seeks to elicit fear or disgust in its audience for entertainment purposes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Film studies</span> Academic discipline focused on cinema

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Experimental film</span> Cinematic works that are experimental form or content

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Participatory cinema is a form of participatory media regarding film-making and documentaries, advocated by David MacDougall. In his 1975 essay "Beyond Observational Cinema", MacDougal argued that traditional forms of documentary production evoked passivity from the filmmaker toward the documentary's subjects, and theorized that in participatory cinema, filmmakers could take an active role in their documentaries by directly interacting with their subjects, which can in turn profoundly develop the filmmaker's knowledge thereof.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Television documentary</span> Genre of television program

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Robert Stam is an American film theorist working on film semiotics. He is a professor at New York University, where he teaches about the French New Wave filmmakers. Stam has published widely on French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and film theory. Together with Ella Shohat, he co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.

Jason Mittell is a professor of American studies and film and media culture at Middlebury College whose research interests include the history of television, media, culture, new media, and digital humanities. He is author of four books, Genre and Television (2004), Television and American Culture (2009), Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, and Narrative Theory and Adaptation. He also co-edited How To Watch Television and co-authored The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy. His digital-humanities activities focus primarily on videographic media criticism and, in 2015, he co-founded the first "Scholarship in Sound & Image" workshop, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Moreover, he is journal manager and co-editor of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Studies, published by the Open Library of Humanities and supported by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

<i>Histoire(s) du cinéma</i> 1998 film by Jean-Luc Godard

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Soviet parallel cinema is a genre of film and underground cinematic movement that occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1970s onwards. The term parallel cinema was first associated with the samizdat films made out of the official Soviet state system. Films from the parallel movement are considered to be avant-garde, non-conventionalist and cinematographically subversive.

Charles John Musser is a film historian, documentary filmmaker, and a film editor. Since 1992, he has taught at Yale University, where he is currently a professor of Film and Media Studies as well as American Studies and Theater Studies. His research has primarily focused on early cinema, and topics such as Edwin S. Porter, Oscar Micheaux, race cinema of the silent era, Paul Robeson, film performance, as well as a variety of issues and individuals in documentary. His films include An American Potter (1976), Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982) and Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch (2014).

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary D. Rhodes</span>

Gary Don Rhodes is an American writer, filmmaker, and film historian. His work encompasses research on early 20th-century films and key figures, including the filmmakers and actors involved in the process. Rhodes is notably recognised for his contribution to classic horror films and his biographical works on Bela Lugosi. In addition to his academic pursuits, he has also created documentaries and mockumentaries. Rhodes holds a tenured faculty position in film studies at Queen's University Belfast.

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<i>Every Frame a Painting</i> Series of video essays about film

Every Frame a Painting is a series of video essays about film form, editing, and cinematography created by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou between 2014 and 2016, published on YouTube and Vimeo. The series is considered a pioneer of film criticism on YouTube, and has been praised by several filmmakers. The series was revived in a limited series in 2024, alongside a short film by Ramos and Zhou.

References

  1. ↑ "WATCH: Best Film Video Essays of 2020". StudioBinder. 27 December 2020. Retrieved 21 October 2023.
  2. ↑ McLaughlan, Paul. "LibGuides: How to do a Video Essay: Home". ecu.au.libguides.com. Retrieved 25 October 2023.
  3. ↑ "Video Essays". Excelsior OWL. Retrieved 25 October 2023.
  4. ↑ Bernstein, Paula (3 May 2016). "What is a Video Essay? Creators Grapple with a Definition". Filmmaker Magazine . Retrieved 5 July 2017.
  5. 1 2 Naremore, James; Hanstke, Tamar (18 June 2023). "A Short Interview with Dr. James Naremore". Cinephile: The University of British Columbia's Film Journal. 17 (1): 5–7. doi:10.14288/cinephile.v17i1.198233 (inactive 1 November 2024).{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
  6. ↑ Higgin, Tanner (23 January 2018). "Why and How to Use YouTube Video Essays in Your Classroom". Common Sense Education. Retrieved 25 March 2018.
  7. ↑ Roose, Kevin (8 June 2019). "The Making of a YouTube Radical". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 19 October 2023.
  8. ↑ Ibraheem, Azeezah (13 March 2023). "The Growing Popularity of Video Essays". Study Breaks. Near East University. Retrieved 26 October 2023.
  9. ↑ Laura Rascaroli (2008). "The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments". Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media. 49 (2): 24–47. doi:10.1353/frm.0.0019. ISSN   1559-7989. S2CID   170942901.
  10. 1 2 Cinematic Essay Film Genre Archived 2007-08-08 at the Wayback Machine . chicagomediaworks.com. Retrieved March 22, 2011.
  11. ↑ (registration required) Lim, Dennis (July 31, 2012). "Chris Marker, 91, Pioneer of the Essay Film" Archived 2012-08-03 at the Wayback Machine . The New York Times . Retrieved July 31, 2012.
  12. ↑ Discussion of film essays Archived 2007-08-08 at the Wayback Machine . Chicago Media Works.
  13. ↑ Gray, David Winks (30 January 2009). "The essay film in action". San Francisco Film Society. Archived from the original on 15 March 2009.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  14. ↑ Brown, Bill, ed. (Spring 2009). "Talking Pictures: The Art of the Essay Film". Cinematheque. UW–Madison. Archived from the original on 20 July 2011. Retrieved 22 March 2011.
  15. ↑ Is the Video Essay a New Avant-Garde? - The EDGE
  16. ↑ Film Critics in Disguise: Pioneers of the Video Essay Discuss Their Art Form|No Film School
  17. ↑ Bresland, John. "On the Origin of the Video Essay". Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University & New Virginia Review, Inc. ISSN   1540-3068 . Retrieved 5 July 2017.
  18. ↑ The Video Essay: The Future of Academic Film and Television Criticism? - Frames Cinema Journal
  19. ↑ Stream It or Skip It: 'Voir' On Netflix - Decider
  20. ↑ Netflix's Visual Essay Series Voir is Worth a Look|TV/Streaming|Roger Ebert
  21. ↑ 18 Great Essays from 2018 - Thomas Flight
  22. ↑ Avissar, Ariel; Harris, Cydnii Wilde; Lee, Grace (18 January 2022). "The best video essays of 2021". British Film Institute . Retrieved 18 June 2022.
  23. ↑ D’Cruz, Glenn (2021). "3 or 4 things I know about the audiovisual essay, or the pedagogical perils of constructive alignment". Media Practice and Education. 22 (1): 61–72. doi:10.1080/25741136.2021.1832768 – via Taylor & Francis Online.
  24. ↑ Evans, Christine (Spring 2022). "The Sharpening of Knives: Video Essays and Reflecting on Argumentation". The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. 61 (8). doi:10.3998/jcms.18261332.0061.803 (inactive 1 November 2024). hdl:2027/spo.18261332.0061.803. ISSN   0009-7101.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
  25. ↑ Nieminen, Juuso Henrik; Tuohilampi, Laura (2 October 2020). "'Finally studying for myself' – examining student agency in summative and formative self-assessment models". Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 45 (7): 1031–1045. doi:10.1080/02602938.2020.1720595. ISSN   0260-2938.
  26. ↑ "About [in]Transition | [in]Transition". mediacommons.org. Retrieved 23 October 2023.
  27. ↑ "Scholarship in Sound & Image". Scholarship in Sound & Image. Retrieved 25 October 2023.
  28. ↑ Avissar, Ariel; DiGravio, Will; Lee, Grace (14 January 2020). "The best video essays of 2019". British Film Institute . Retrieved 4 September 2020.
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