Stuff It - the video essay in the digital age (original) (raw)
Related papers
Framing the Video Essay as Argument (in Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier)
The Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier, 2013
When first incorporating video essays into my classes, I struggled to conceptualize what role the video essay would play in my teaching. How do I justify assigning a video essay to students and colleagues? How do I teach or coach video essays for my students? How can I teach the video essay in a way that is just as rigorous as a written essay? And how do these questions fit together? Are my answers consistent? Do they contradict each other?
Foregrounding the Digital Medium: Self-reference and Metareference in Video Essays
Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, 2021
This article focuses on video essays - understood as that specific subgenre of audiovisual productions that can be considered the main descendent of the essay film. Both are, in a sense, subjective explorations of certain subject matters via cinematic means - with the prime exception that video essays are mostly centred on analyses of filmic phenomena. Since another difference between these two types of productions is the very medium that they originate in, 'inhabit', and are propagated through-digital video and online video-sharing platforms, such as YouTube or Vimeo vs. photochemical film strip or electronic tape, and theatrical / home video releases -, I propose that one of the fundamental characteristics of video essays is a special type of foregrounding of the medium, and therefore one of its main effects on the viewers is that of eliciting a sort of medium-awareness. Starting from a semiotic definition of self-reference-as the ability of signs to point to themselves or to the sign-system that they are a part of - I propose an exploration of the ways in which certain video essays call attention to their status as digital artefacts, thus engaging with aspects of their medium and their relationship (1) with other images in general and (2) with the audience. This paper focuses on three case studies: Max Grau's «[…] craving for narrative» lässt sich einfach nicht gut übersetzen (2016); Kevin B. Lee's Transformers: The Premake (a desktop documentary) (2014); Gregory Guevara's This is a video essay (2018).
Video on Film: Video Essay, Videographic Criticism, and Digital Academic Publishing
2021
In the 2010s, an academic practice called “videographic criticism,” utilizing video essay creation and digital academic publishing, became a popular form of film criticism in the field of film studies. The emergence of such a videographic trend in academia and the existence of video essays in public video-sharing websites have made the task of justifying the scholarly values of video essays an urgent one. Through the analysis of the relationship between the video essay and the essay film, this study shows that the essayistic mode is crucial to distinguish videographic criticism from popular commentary. To understand the potentials of videographic criticism as an alternative academic writing method, this study also demystifies the advantages of writing with moving images and the changing role of a videographic critic as a video editor and a film critic. Finally, using the journal in[Transition] as a case study, my research investigates the functions of the peer review for videographi...
Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology
2020
The editors would like to acknowledge the help of all the people involved in this project and, first of all, the late Thomas Elsaesser. Without his support and guidance, this book would not have become a reality. Our sincere gratitude goes to the chapter's authors for their wonderful texts. We would like to thank Janice Loreck for her research assistance in preparing this volume and the editorial team at Amsterdam University Press-Maryse Elliot, Mike Sanders, Chantal Nicolaes, and Danielle Carter-for contributing their time and expertise to this book. Special thanks are due to Adrian Martin for translating into English, for the first time, Raymond Bellour's 'Trente-cinq ans après: le "texte" a nouveau introuvable?', written in 2009, and collected in Raymond Bellour's La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma-installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L, 2012), pp. 124-137. It is reprinted with permission of the author and publisher.
Video Composition As Multimodal Writing: Rethinking the Essay As Post-Literacy
KnE Social Sciences
This essay describes an academic experience that both authors shared during a research visit to Russia in November 2018. The goal of this experience was to introduce participants (students and professors) to the notion of multimodal writing as an alternative to how we create texts in class. The essay first contextualizes the idea of “post-literacy” as part of a worldwide move to rethink literacy, especially in this century. The essay then conceptualizes the notion of multimodality as a feature of these “post-literacies” and contextualizes this concept within the practical experience as both authors undertook in a masterclass at a Russian institution. For the masterclass, the authors asked everybody to make videos using only one smartphone and any other resources they had right beside them. After sharing what the activity was about and what attendants did, the authors provide a final moment of reflexivity for others who may want to consider implementing multimodal texts in their cla...
This article offers an ethnographic exploration of the world of interactive documentaries (i-docs), suggesting how such a scrutiny opens up a new scenario for visual culture – one where the study of the visual field needs to be backed up with an increasing awareness of digital culture, interactivity and the functioning of Web 2.0. Incorporating the languages that dominate communication on social networks and image sharing platforms, i-docs are a window onto the changing meaning of images in the context of contemporary digital technologies. In such products, a variety of different kinds of materials (such as videos, photos, sounds, texts, etc.) converge, forcing us to rethink the very meaning of image beyond the field of vision. Fostering new forms of interpretation and exploration of audio-visual materials, these projects also generate new connections between life online and life offline. Informed by the principles of participation, sharing and relationality that inform contemporary social networks, i-docs seem to invite us to engage with the physicality and socialness of everyday life, in other words, to get our hands dirty (again).
Guerrilla Video: Adjudicating the Credible and the Cool
Writing Instructor, 2010
Because video on the web has spread almost virally, video crafted out of an amateur aesthetic has contributed to a disruption of professional communication economies as it prompts us to ask: Can we use digital video to make work-related communication cool? Professional writing pedagogies are beginning to respond to new student expectations about what and how video can/should represent them, but students' amateur aesthetics sometimes are at odds with professional approaches in ways that lead the students to be thought "amateurs." Thus, students need to know when and how to be credible or cool. This article advocates the rhetoric of guerrilla video, which promotes a rhetorically-based choice of professional or amateur video aesthetics. To make sound choices, we argue, video communicators need to understand professional techniques and conventions, know how to use garage video techniques to approximate that professional video grammar, and know how to adapt an amateur video aesthetic. These processes will assist them in building a sense of which choices are appropriate, and when-or, in adjudicating among the credible and the cool. A 2009 issue of Business Week related how CEO James Schiro of Zurich Financial Services [1] set out on a global trip to reassure his employees that their company is sound. Schiro was armed with a Flip camcorder and he uploaded his talks to YouTube. Schiro said he used video because "A leader has to be the catalyst of change, has to champion it passionately, and epitomize it personally." (Gallo, 2009) After labeling the activity as a move to "use cheap videos," Carmine Gallo relates Schiro's communication process in this way: after he visits a site, he uploads oneor two-minute updates onto YouTube about his reaction to the site meeting. Schiro contends that this works better than email because it gives a differentsense of leadership and because people would rather watch a video than read an email. Gallo concludes that Schiro believes YouTube video "is just as powerful, if not more so, because it telegraphs informality and immediacy. It 'humanizes' people and can provide a deeper level of emotional engagement than posting a piece of text." The article implies that "cool" is important (again), though the relate line about "cheap videos" hedges Gallo's bets. If an insurance/finance company CEO is embracing YouTube in ways that impact internal corporate communications as well as corporate branding to customers, then "amateur" digital video is upsetting normal communication economies. More interesting to us, it signals that Mr. Schiro may have found the "cool," thus making amateur aesthetic a more vital consideration when we build video communications intended for corporate uses. Education, too, has been alert to the potential/growing impact of digital video. In 2008, EDUCAUSE's Horizon Report named "grassroots video"[2] its key emerging technology for instructional technology, noting that "Virtually anyone can capture, edit, and share short video clips, using inexpensive equipment (such as a cell phone) and free or nearly free software," and "What used to be difficult and expensive, and often required special servers and content distribution networks, now has become something anyone can do easily for almost nothing." (New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE, 2008, para 1) What might these developments mean for professional communication and ultimately for professional writing pedagogy, we ask? Our answer-Guerrilla Video [3]-is interested in how video [and other communication technologies] is [or might be] incorporated into professional writing pedagogies. Interested, as well, in the paradox posed by promoting amateur aesthetics for professional writing courses, we consider how students can both conform to the "ugly" aesthetics celebrated by social media venues (so that their videos gain a wide and young audience) and demonstrate a more traditional (and usually credible) aesthetic of professionalism that is often thought to be antithetical to the ugly. Can they forge new laws of cool that use garage video tools to build appropriately professional identities for themselves? And further, how might this "new" writing technology/tool adjust genres and expectations for all professional communication and its instruction?[4] Thus, this discussion airs issues surrounding the integration of a video production assignment into professional writing pedagogy and offers our take on how "guerrilla video" can be founded on our rhetorical skills. At this point video is a wild and woolly medium. Rhetoric, we argue, can be used to tame the wild [video] west.
Video and Participatory Cultures: Writing, Rhetoric, Performance, and the Tube
In this special issue of Enculturation, we invited scholars to explore the ubiquity of video and participatory cultures. We started our own investigation into this theme in a panel presentation, “YouTube U.: Home Video Goes to College” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New Orleans in 2008. In our work, we considered the limitations of viewing YouTube merely as a broadcasting platform and argued that YouTube should be regarded within the context of an ever-changing and growing networked ecology. We decided our questions and conclusions might be best extended in an on-line journal setting like Enculturation, especially as possible contributors could link to and engage with examples of video directly. Our initial CFP drew inspiration from a series of propositions about video culture forwarded by Henry Jenkins, and as the project unfolded, we looked for ways for our authors to respond to emerging scholarship, such as John Burgess and Joshua Green’s YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, Michael Strangelove’s Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People, and Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau’s The YouTube Reader. We see our collection as speaking to these recent works while also forging new connections and drawing sometimes conflicting conclusions about video and participatory cultures. http://enculturation.gmu.edu/Video-and-Participatory-Cultures
Thinking of Video Essays as A Performative Research With A New Concept: Transimage
2021
As the daily use of videographic tools increases, searches and trends for new forms of expression emerge. It has even become possible to say that this situation can affect the ways of thinking. At this point, it has become necessary to define an academic status to the video-essay genre, which is shown as a new way of expression and experience, in the context of film studies. Although video-essays, which can be a part of the search for a performative method, remain at an ambiguous point, we can state that videographic approaches have become widespread in the field of film studies. From this point to forth, this study proposes to consider the concept of transimage in order to use video-essays in film studies. Discussing the concept of transimage can be a new path to think on the images of the film with other images.