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]
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 ( The Coronation of Edward VII (1902)) 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]
While the medium (or as film scholar Eric Faden called it "media stylos") has its roots in academia, [16] [19] it has grown dramatically in popularity with the advent of online video-sharing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. [20] [21] In 2021, the Netflix series Voir premiered featuring video essays focusing on films like 48 Hrs and Lady Vengeance . [22] [23]
Fellow video essayist Thomas Flight observes videos about popular media receiving more clicks as part of the video essay economy. [24]
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%). [25]
Frequently cited [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] examples of video essayists and series include Every Frame a Painting (a series on the grammar of film editing by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos) [32] [33] [34] and Lindsay Ellis (an American media critic, film critic, YouTuber, and author formerly known as The Nostalgia Chick) who was inspired by Zhou and Ramos's work. [35] Websites like StudioBinder, MUBI, and Fandor also have contributing writers providing their own video essays. One such contributor, Kevin B. Lee, helped assert video essays' status as a legitimate form of film criticism as Chief Video Essayist for Fandor from 2011-2016. [36] Other video essayists include pioneering African American documentary filmmaker Marlon Riggs, [37] Korean-American filmmaker Kogonada, British film scholar Catherine Grant, [38] American experimental filmmakers Thom Andersen and Mark Rappaport (the latter known as the "father of the modern video essay") [39] [40] [41] and French media researcher Chloé Galibert-Laîné. [42]
In 2020, curator Cydnii Wilde Harris, along with Will DiGravio and Kevin B. Lee, collaboratively curated The Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist, highlighting the medium's activist potential. [43] Because the video essay format is digestible yet often emotionally impactful and can be created without requiring expensive equipment, it has served as a crucial tool for filmmakers and community organizers who have been marginalized from mainstream film criticism and media production. [44]
Youtuber and critic Jacob Geller has received acclaim for his videos on art and social justice, and published a print collection of his video essay scripts in 2024. [45] [46]
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. [96] Professors have found that students benefit and become better writers after learning how to make video essays. [97] [98]
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. [99]
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. [100]
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. [42]
Dziga Vertov was a Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary movie-making and the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical film-making cooperative which was active from 1968 to 1972. He was a member of the Kinoks collective, with Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman.
Marlon Troy Riggs was a Black gay filmmaker, educator, poet, and activist. He produced, wrote, and directed several documentary films, including Ethnic Notions, Tongues Untied, Color Adjustment, and Black Is...Black Ain't. His films examine past and present representations of race and sexuality in the United States. The Marlon Riggs Collection is open to the public at Stanford University Libraries.
Nostalghia is a 1983 drama film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and starring Oleg Yankovsky, Domiziana Giordano and Erland Josephson. Tarkovsky co-wrote the screenplay with Tonino Guerra.
Mark Rappaport is an American independent/underground film director and film critic, who has been working since the 1960s.
Tongues Untied is a 1989 American video essay experimental documentary film directed by Marlon T. Riggs, and featuring Riggs, Essex Hemphill, Brian Freeman. and more. The film seeks, in its author's words to, "...shatter the nation's brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference."
Sans Soleil is a 1983 French documentary film directed by Chris Marker. It is a meditation on the nature of human memory, showing the inability to recall the context and nuances of memory, and how, as a result, the perception of personal and global histories is affected. The title Sans Soleil is from the song cycle Sunless by Modest Mussorgsky, a brief fragment of which features in the film. Sans Soleil is composed of stock footage, clips from Japanese movies and shows, excerpts from other films as well as documentary footage shot by Marker.
Jon Alpert is an American journalist and documentary filmmaker, known for his use of a cinéma vérité approach in his films.
Cinephilia is the term used to refer to a passionate interest in films, film theory, and film criticism. The term is a portmanteau of the words cinema and philia, one of the four ancient Greek words for love. A person with a passionate interest in cinema is called a cinephile, cinemaphile, filmophile, or, informally, a film buff. To a cinephile, a film is often not just a source of entertainment as they see films from a more critical point of view.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a 1975 film written and directed by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. It was filmed over five weeks on location in Brussels, and financed through a $120,000 grant awarded by the Belgian government. Distinguished by its restrained pace, long takes, and static camerawork, the film is a slice-of-life depiction of a widowed housewife over the course of three days.
Mubi is a global streaming platform, production company and film distributor. MUBI produces and theatrically distributes films by emerging and established filmmakers, which are exclusively available on its platform. The catalog consists of world cinema films, such as arthouse films, documentary films, independent films. Additionally, it publishes Notebook, a film criticism and news publication, and provides weekly cinema tickets to selected new-release films through MUBI GO.
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances. Working from a feminist perspective, Sachs weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
Mark Cousins is an English-born, Northern Irish director and writer. A prolific documentarian, among his best-known works is the 15-hour 2011 documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey.
Ignatiy Igorevich Vishnevetsky is a Russian-American film critic, essayist, and columnist. He has worked as a staff film critic for The A.V. Club and written for Mubi.com and the Chicago Reader.
Sleep Has Her House is a 2017 experimental film shot, written, produced, directed, and edited by Welsh filmmaker, Scott Barley. Like several of his previous short films, the film also was shot on a Camera phone, iPhone 6. It also features still photography and hand drawn images by the artist.
Kogonada is a South Korean-born American filmmaker.
Harry Brewis, better known as Hbomberguy, is a British YouTuber and Twitch streamer. Brewis produces video essays on a variety of topics such as film, television, and video games, often combining them with arguments from left-wing political and economic positions. He also creates videos aimed at debunking conspiracy theories and responding to right-wing and antifeminist arguments.
Every Frame a Painting is a series of 29 video essays about film form, film editing, and cinematography created by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou between 2014 and 2016. They were first published on YouTube but have also been released on Vimeo. The series was revived in a limited series in 2024, alongside a short film by Ramos and Zhou.
Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs is a 2022 documentary film written and directed by Canadian YouTuber and video essayist Dan Olson on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), cryptocurrencies, and Web3. The video was published to his YouTube channel Folding Ideas on January 21, 2022.
The "Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time" is a list published every ten years by Sight and Sound according to worldwide opinion polls they conduct. They published the critics' list, based on 1,639 participating critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics, and the directors' list, based on 480 directors and filmmakers. Sight and Sound, published by the British Film Institute, has conducted a poll of the greatest films every 10 years since 1952.
Stephen Broomer is a Canadian experimental filmmaker, film scholar and video essayist.
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