Volume 3, Issue 3: Cary Grant Again
Join us for "Cary Grant: A Class Act" & Much More!
One of the highlights of The Video Essay Podcast in 2020 was partnering with Dr. Charlotte Crofts and the Cary Comes Home Festival to curate and host, "The Journeys of Cary Grant: An Audiovisual Celebration."
We invited video essayists new and experienced to create videos about Cary Grant centered on the theme of “journeys.” The call yielded a fantastic collection of videos. You can watch them all, and a roundtable Q&A we recorded at the festival, below.
And so I am very pleased to share that Charlotte and I are once again collaborating for this year’s festival! Bellow is the full call for, “Cary Grant: A Class Act.”
Cary Grant: A Class Act – Call for Contributions
The Cary Comes Home Festival, in partnership with The Video Essay Podcast
The Fifth Cary Comes Home Festival takes its theme as “Class,” celebrating the working-class heritage of Archibald Leach. Born in Bristol, UK in 1904 as the son of a tailor’s presser, Archie went on to become Hollywood legend and style icon, Cary Grant. He returned to the city of his birth regularly and never forgot his roots. Both sides of his family experienced high levels of poverty: from his grandfather shipbuilder William Kingdon on his mother’s side dying in the Poor House and his uncle Charles Llewellyn becoming an inmate on the HMS Formidable, a floating training ship for “wayward” boys; to his father’s family of hat-makers helmed by matriarch Elizabeth Leach.
Taking class in its broadest sense, we invite video essays which explore social mobility and identity across a range of Cary Grant’s performances from Cockney Cary in films like Sylvia Scarlett and None But the Lonely Heart, to the Sophisticated Cary of To Catch a Thief and Charade. The aim is not to invite “poverty porn”, but videos which probe the tension between being both Archie and Cary and the tremendous psychic effort it must have taken for Cary Grant to navigate this trajectory to stardom where he came to represent suave sophistication of American high-society. This tension between Archie/Cary is one with which Grant battled throughout his life, in front of and behind the camera:
“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant” (Cary Grant).
We are open to all forms of audio-visual criticism, including video essays, fanvids, and any kind of video that reappropriates footage of Cary Grant.
Videos of any length will be accepted but the ideal length will be between 5-6 minutes.
All submitted work will be featured on the Cary Comes Home website and on The Video Essay Podcast website. Some of the best work will be featured on an episode of The Video Essay Podcast which will be recorded live at the virtual festival in November. Creators will be invited to join the conversation. Check out The Journeys of Cary Grant screening to see how it will work.
Please add “For Study Purposes Only” at the end of the video, include a list of the sources of clips used, any references cited and ideally, if you want to use a backing track, please only use copyright-free music for that purpose. If you use copyrighted music, we may not be able to feature your work at the festival.
You will need to upload to your own Vimeo page. Learn more about uploading in their Video Guidelines, Compression Guidelines, and Help Center. If you are new to making video essays you might want to check out the series of videographic exercises listeners were assigned as “homework” on The Video Essay Podcast, here.
Rolling Deadline until: Friday 14 October 2022
We’ll begin to post submissions to the website from September as they arrive.
Cary Comes Home is a biennial festival which aims to celebrate Cary Grant’s Bristol roots, develop new audiences for his work and recreate the golden age of cinema-going, directed by Dr Charlotte Crofts (Associate Professor of Filmmaking, UWE Bristol). The festival will take place online this year, 18-20 November 2022. Learn more at www.carycomeshome.co.uk
I’m counting down the days until September 22 & 23, when “Theory & Practice of The Video Essay,” an International Conference on Videographic Criticism, will be held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The full program is now available on the conference website and registration is now open!
The paper I proposed is titled, “Understanding (and Podcasting) the Labor and Practices of Video Essaying.” Here’s what I pitched:
Crafting a video essay often comes down to a series of choices: Voiceover or text on-screen? Multi-screen or superimposition? Vimeo or YouTube? While the final video shows the ultimate answers to these questions, the process of creating — the contemplation, the re-edits, the trial and error — often gets lost along the way.
When The Video Essay Podcast launched three years ago, in 2019, one of the goals was to bring the labor of video essaying into the public space. The podcast aims to understand the craft in part by painting a picture of the video essayist and the mix of artistic, scholarly and analytic practices that inform their work. This talk asks: What can be learned by aggregating more than thirty podcast interviews with creators into a portrait(s) of the video essayist(s)?
The paper will offer a survey of who makes this work and how they do it. It will also draw connections between practitioners and their processes of creating. The goal will be to show the ways in which various creative approaches and practitioners have come to influence one another. The paper will also reflect on the ways video essayists of varying backgrounds – filmmakers, critics, scholars, fans, students – have come together to form a vibrant online community of practice dedicated to the form.
If you have any thoughts on this subject, please let me know!
On a somewhat related note, I’m currently in the process of reflecting on three years of The Video Essay Podcast. The pilot episode was released three years ago this Wednesday. Gulp!
As part of the reflecting process, I have a small ask for anyone who has listened. Over the years, I’ve heard anecdotally here and there that the podcast has been cited somewhere, or assigned in a class, or referenced in another setting, etc. I’m trying to curate these instances, both for my own purposes and also to help me tell the story of the podcast in more formal settings and in applications down the line. It’s a bit awkward for me to ask, but I’d be very grateful if any of these instances could be sent to my personal email, willdigravio [@] gmail.com. Thank you so much!!
Episode 2. Online Affects - Filmexplorer’s Video Essay Gallery
This month, the podcast continued its collaboration with Filmexplorer, rebroadcasting the second conversation centered on the publication’s revolving “Video Essay Gallery.” The episode featured Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Kevin B. Lee and Johannes Binotto discussing their second curated exhibition, “Online Affects”.
Works discussed include:
Distant Feeling(s) #9 by Annie Abrahams and Daniel Pinheiro
One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean by Wang Yuyan
How to Perform Teaching During a Pandemic Spring Session, 2020: GENDER STUDIES, Rain & Cats Cut by Dayna McLeod
Episode topics include: "Are affects more than just the expression of pure subjectivity? What happens when we do not know how to watch? What do watching experimental films and watching video essays have in common? How should we understand the performance of watching?"
A special thanks to the Filmexplorer team, Giuseppe Di Salvatore and Ruth Baettig, for this continued collaboration!
And please be on the lookout for a full episode of The Video Essay Podcast very soon!!
What’s everyone watching?
From time to time over on the podcast’s Twitter account, I ask followers a simple question: What’s a video you’ve made and/or watched recently that you particularly enjoyed? Click on the thread below to see dozens of exciting recommendations!
News & Notes
Please send news and notes for future newsletters to willdigravio{at}gmail.com.
August
“To mark the BBC centenary, the Make Film History project is offering emerging filmmakers across the UK access to 150 films from BBC Archive for creative reuse in short film projects on themes including the environment, mental health, youth culture and cultural diversity. 50 filmmakers will create films in response to this BBC collection, uncovering the forgotten histories of underrepresented communities.”
Locations & Deadlines:
London: August 12th and 25th (deadline for applications: August 1st)
Leeds: August 17th and 24th (deadline: August 10th)
Glasgow: August 26th and September 9th (deadline: August 15th)
Belfast: September 2nd and 16th (deadline: August 20th)
September
“The Adelio Ferrero Award is the oldest and most renowned Italian award for young film critics, historically featuring two contests, for essays and reviews in Italian. The 38h edition features a section dedicated to video essays (audiovisual works that analyze works and issues related to the audiovisual field). This section is addressed to international participants, filmmakers and video essayists from everywhere.” The deadline to submit is September 15, 2022. Learn more here.
“Theory & Practice of The Video Essay,” an International Conference on Videographic Criticism, will be held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from September 22-23, 2022. Learn more here.
Looking Ahead
Via Ariel Avissar:
“I am excited to announce a call for submissions to a special TV Dictionary issue of [in]Transition, that will exclusively feature student work! This call is intended for students (undergraduate + graduate) of any age, and is open until the end of the year (December 31, 2022). For anyone unfamiliar with the TV Dictionary, it is a collaborative videographic collection I started last summer; each entry attempts to capture the essence of a television series using a single word, in a short video that combines the dictionary definitions of that word with a clip or several clips from the series. You can check out the collection, which currently includes 50 videos, here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/8660446.
Contributions to the collection (by any one!) are always welcome – and any student entries that will be submitted by the end of the year will also be considered for inclusion in a special issue of [in]Transition, the Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, intended for publication in 2023.
I invite any students who are interested in doing so to submit their own entries – and I invite my colleagues who employ videographic criticism with their students to use the TV Dictionary prompt in their classes and encourage their students to submit their own!
Email me your submissions at arielavissar24[at]gmail.com or tweet me at @ariel_avissar. All submissions will be in English or include English captions, and will be uploaded to Vimeo. Inclusion in the collection might be contingent on a review process; any videos submitted for inclusion in the special issue will be subject to a further peer review process.”
Evergreen
Mirror Lamp Press is “looking for writers, featured artists and video essayists for future issues.” For video essays: “If you’re interested in videographic criticism or your practice involves words and moving image, please contact us about making a video essay. Each issue will feature one video essay on the website. We can offer €800 fee + €200 materials budget (€1000 in total).” More here.
More Notes
Congratulations to Liz Greene and Jessica McGoff for winning the inaugural Screen AV Essay Film Award, as voted on by the delegates at this year’s Screen Studies conference! Watch the full collection of ten nominated videos, and a conversation with the curators, here.
Congratulations as well to the participants of the Cinema Rediscovered 2022 Film Critics Workshop, all of whom are aspiring and early career video essay makers and film critics! Learn more here.
Ariel Avissar has published a new website featuring all of his work. More here.
Shane Denson started a Twitter thread asking for recommendations of scholarly work on YouTube. Read here.
The latest issue of NECSUS features a fantastic collection of video essays curated by Liz Greene. The collection includes video essays by Catherine Grant, John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, Johannes Binotto, Ian Garwood, and Liz Greene. Read Liz’s introductory essay, “Sound and the audiovisual essay, part 2: The theory, history, and practice of film sound and music in videographic criticism.”
The 9th issue of Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays is now live! Check out the entire issue here.
Evelyn Kreutzer has put out a new call for videos to be included as part of an ongoing project called Moving Poems, “a showcase of video essays based on poetry.” More here.
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