A Manifesto for Videographic Vulnerability

2021

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?

Academic Quarter, 2024

The article provides an introduction to the second of a pair of spe-cial issues devoted to academic filmmaking, which contains ten video essays and prose guiding texts. The article describes the vari-ety of filmmaking practice in the academy, and some of the venues where examples of the practice are published or exhibited. It ges-tures at the multiple origins of academic filmmaking with special reference to the tradition of the essay film, and finds a key reflexive moment in Eric S. Faden's (prose) “Manifesto for Critical Media” (2008), which articulated the challenge of using “image, voice, pac-ing, text, sound, music, montage, rhythm” to create scholarly audi-ovisual work. The introduction goes on to set out the aims for the special issues, and to describe the contents of the video essays and some of the features, concerns or approaches shared between and across those contents. The video essays derive from fields including videographic criticism, anthropology, experimental cinema, and participatory and activist filmmaking.

1996

The merits of the video photo essay as a broadcast production teaching tool and as a genre of television news are examined in this paper. Suggestions are offered for using the video essay in the classroom, such as assigning students projects which involve producing a news story using only "nat-sound" and soundbites or music, and utilizing the video essay to recap newscast stories. Also discussed is the effectiveness of the video essay in terms of viewer recall of story information, which is enhanced by the video essay. It is concluded that the video essay as a form of broadcast news deserves further attention in research, in the teaching of broadcast production, and in the broadcast industry. (Contains 14 references.) (AEF)

Media Practice and Education, 2020

This article explores how the video essay can be part of a radical pedagogy in the arts and humanities. Written as a dialogue between a screen studies educationalist and a researcher in contemporary education theory, the article examines the different ways that the video essay can be argued to reframe and resist dominant forms of pedagogy. Drawing on small-scale empirical research with a cohort of third year undergraduates at Deakin University, each of the authors read the data through a specific lens: Sean looks to the ideas and themes of radical pedagogy; and Jo draws upon contemporary assessment research. While the article starts from their different positions, it comes together to recognise their shared belief in learning and assessment that thinks and creates outside the box. KEYWORDS: Video essay, learning, criticality, creativity, radical pedagogy, assessment policy

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media

The essayistic device in film often brings together two temporalities of film creation: the present of the filmed image and the present of the editing process. Through the interaction of both moments, provoked by the critical revision of the raw material and its possibilities of montage, the essay film is constructed through the filmmaker’s exploration of the filmic apparatus, thus revealing film forms as a way of producing and disseminating knowledge. The essay film, therefore, subverts a common theoretical practice: thought is no longer assumed as a procedure for unveiling an image, but it is rather produced by film forms. We claim that the essay film, as a research methodology and a theoretical approximation to film informed by practice, must be unfolded through creative gestures, this is to say, images and sounds that present an audiovisual synthesis of the conscious and intuitive work that both precedes and is synchronic to the moments of filming and editing. This article addre...

NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, 2021

This article sets out the rationale for a videographic scholarship (the audiovisual study of screen media) that adopts constraint-based or 'parametric' procedures, and concludes with a short manifesto composed according to the simple constraint of division into ten equal segments of 50 words each. The article situates a parametric practice in relation to OuLiPo (a group founded in the early 1960s to explore constraint-based approaches to writing), to pataphysics (an absurdist branch of knowledge concerned with what eludes understanding by conventional means), to themes in the digital humanities, and to the posthuman. And it issues a call to forge an 'agonistic society' of videographic scholars who goad each other to greater achievement through the conspicuous and wasteful expenditure of resources of knowledge.

Adaptation 6, no. 1 (2013): 1-24.

Though it stubbornly resists classification, the essay in cinema still tends to be approached as a genre or quasi-genre constituted through recurring structural traits. This article develops an alternative view by stressing the adaptive principles of the form, specifically as they concern citation, self-portraiture, and an implicit running dialogue with a spectator who potentially shares in the intellectual labor of montage. I offer a pointed discussion of the Essais of Montaigne in order to draw attention to the activity of essaying over time, in and across multiple works. Then, while extending this conception to several of the cinema's most prolific essayists, I focus on how Jean-Luc Godard takes up a Montaignian sense of the practice in his late endeavors of self-portrayal, most notably in his film JLG/JLG: Autoportrait in December and in his video series Histoire(s) du cinéma. Ultimately I argue that what distinguishes the most capable essayists working with sounds and images is a " pedagogical " mission to pass on to the spectator not simply ideas and arguments but a particular way of seeing, a means of investigation to be incisively replayed and re-tested.

Dykinson, 2022

The objectives that we pursued in this contribution are presented in the following lines: ‒ Reflect on possibilities of the video essay as a didactic instrument in education. ‒ Explain some of the most important aspects of the Kogonada cinema style. ‒ Develop a content analysis of some visual and sound elements of some video essays directed by Kogonada.

JCMS Teaching Dossier, 2019

Within the Higher Education sector there is an increased focus upon authentic assessment where learning outcomes are conceived in terms of their “real world” relevance (Boud & Soler 2016). Authenticity can also be understood in terms of creative activity and criticality, where what is learned and assessed relates to the individual’s unique imagination and to their understanding of the power relations that operate in society. The video essay can be argued to foster authenticity in both these senses, uneasy bedfellows as they are. [1] In this paper we look to address both these definitions of authentic assessment, outlining the findings of a pilot research project with third year undergraduate students taking the Celebrity Industries: Star Images, Fan Cultures and Performance unit, at Deakin University, Melbourne, in 2018. The unit belongs to the generalist BA Arts degree, with students coming from a diverse range of academic backgrounds including, film and television studies, digital media studies, psychology, marketing, education, law, and sociology. 182 students took the unit, of which 55 were solely enrolled online, in our “Cloud” classroom. For their first assignment, the students were required to make a five minute video essay and accompanying 750 word exegesis: details can be found in Appendix One. The research developed in response to the authors’ desire to promote and investigate the notion of learning authenticity, and because the unit in question, with its focus on celebrity, lends itself to the creative and critical underpinnings of the video essay. The research sought to answer these entangled questions: first, how might use of the video essay as a mode or tool of learning improve students’ educational experience? Second, how do students view it in comparison with written forms of assessment? Third, is it seen to have “real world” relevance? Finally, how does the video essay work as an empowering assessment item within the communication and creative arts disciplines?