Volume 3, Issue 5: Notes from UMass
And don't forget about Cary Grant!
Last month, I had way too much fun at the “Theory & Practice of the Video Essay” conference at UMass Amherst. You can read my presentation, which centered on three years of The Video Essay Podcast, here.
Over on Patreon a few months ago, I shared a post that contained thoughts I jotted down while watching the found footage classic, Los Angeles Plays Itself. I spent much of the conference taking notes and decided to try something similar here. Below are some notes, without their context, that I hope capture some of the tremendous things that were being said and screened at the conference!!
scrapbook of my failures
reimaging films (typo?)
aliveness
presence of shoes
applying voiceover to previous work
feeling + pleasure of videographic essay
deal w/ pleasure without repeating it
repetition
manipulation of time
theory as tool
logical space made to seem illogical
labels
sabotage my own concept
ahead of the curve w/ Kate Bush
got so addicted to split screen
videographic translation
counting rack focus
from analog to digital
music as superpower
poor video essay image | iMovie
critical variations on existing media
I love working in Final Cut Pro. So Simple.
And finally, a diagram:
Some other highlights included a screening that featured selections from “Once Upon a Screen Vol. 2,” a collection of works co-curated by Evelyn Kreutzer and Ariel Avissar. Watch the trailer below.
The keynotes on day one featured Jason Mittell, who talked about his new venture with Lever Press, Videographic Books, and Johannes Binotto, who delivered a live performance. The performance ended with the creation of the video below. Watch it and read the full context in the description!
The conference ended with keynotes from Catherine Grant and Chloé Galibert-Laîné, who then engaged in a conversation after finishing their respective talks. What an absolute treat it was to see two pioneering artists talk about their work. It was the perfect end to a ridiculously fun and generative weekend. A special thanks to Barbara Zecchi and Daniel Pope, the conference directors, and everyone else at UMass for making it all happen!!
Don’t Forget About Cary Grant
A friendly reminder that The Video Essay Podcast is once again partnering with the Cary Comes Home Festival and Charlotte Crofts in soliciting video essays about Cary Grant to be screened at the festival. You can read more about our call below. If you need a more flexible deadline, please be in touch [willdigravio [at] gmail.com]! Nearly finished works-in-progress and other experiments are welcome. To give you a sense of the kinds of work we are open to, here is a short video I made for the program:
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. 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.
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.
Rolling Deadline until: Friday 14 October 2022
Celebrate Good Times, Come On
To celebrate three years of The Video Essay Podcast, we released three episodes of the show looking back on the dozens of conversations we have had over the years. You can listen to them all below.
News & Notes
Have something you’d like to share? Please send news and notes for future newsletters to willdigravio{at}gmail.com.
October
The latest issue of [in]Transition was published on October 11! Issue 9.2 features videographic work on the following topics: “U.S. lifestyle television and the racist histories beneath some of its surfaces; a sensuous exploration of the films of French-Senegalese writer-director Alain Gomis; the persistent figure of the cinematic woman artist; a career trajectory investigation of U.K. actor Alan Bates, centering on one of his movie roles in particular; the nostalgia and disenchantment of mainstream contemporary science fiction films; the SundanceTV series Rectify and its rich storytelling techniques and themes; and a survey of live-action filmic representations of the comic book villain, the Joker.” Watch and read more here.
Via Will Webb: Be on the lookout for a new project from the Essay Library. A group of creators have completed a round-robin collaboration based around horror. The collection debuts on Friday, October 14th at 8pm GMT. Learn more here.
Tecmerin. Journal of Audiovisual Essays has launched its CFP for issue 10: “In issue 10 we propose a special section dedicated to video essays related to the theme "Women in contemporary cinema and TV" that revolve around the participation of women in the field of film and television creation. Works with a historical perspective or focusing on the representation of women in the media will also be welcomed. Section curated by Ana Mejón, Elena Ortega Oroz and Asier Gil Vázquez (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid).” The deadline is October 15, 2022. Learn more here.
Part four of Filmexplorer’s Video Essay Gallery is now live, centered on the theme of “Technopresence.” Watch a series of videos curated by— and a conversation with — Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Kevin B. Lee and Johannes Binotto. More here. The gallery ends on October 30, 2022.
Friend of the show Philip Brubaker’s essay film, How to Explain Your Mental Illness to Stanley Kubrick is streaming online via the Mental Filmness festival from now until November 6. More here.
November
Symposium: Videoessays and Academic Filmmaking: Practices, Pedagogies and Potentials (via Alan O’Leary)
“This online symposium is part of a series of events at Aarhus over three days (8-10 November) devoted to videoessays and filmmaking as a means of research, scholarship, communication and publication. Featuring internationally renowned practitioners and academic filmmakers and teachers from a range of career stages, these events will showcase videoessay and filmmaking activity and ask: What are the political, epistemological, and aesthetic advantages of filmmaking in the academic context, and what are its potentials? What place is there for experimental approaches to filmmaking in academic practice? What are the institutional opportunities for and impediments to the adoption and development of filmmaking in the academy? How can academics themselves learn and teach videoessay-making and filmmaking practice?”
December
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.”
Be on the lookout for Tecmerin. Journal of Audiovisual Essays, which will be published in December!
Evergreen
Via Katie Bird, who is currently at work on a video essay project, Re-Editing Gunsmoke:
“Re-Editing Gunsmoke is a video essay project and digital archive on the history of the American Cinema Editor’s educational film Film Editing: Interpretations and Values (1958). The project has been developed by Dr. Katie Bird.
As part of a scholarly video essay on the history of the American Cinema Editor’s Gunsmoke assignment, I am looking for filmmakers, former and current film students, or anyone who worked with the ACE Gunsmoke dailies footage in a classroom setting who are interested in contributing to a video essay and digital archive.
I am looking for participants willing to share a recording of their edited Gunsmoke student projects AND/OR a Voice Memo Memory of working on the project. These projects and recorded memories may be used and credited in a Fair Use/Non-Profit/Scholarly Video Essay on the creative practices and history of the ACE project. Additionally, with permission, the voice memos will be made available as a digital archive connected with the video essay, so that other filmmakers, students, and educators may continue to learn from the decades of students who’ve completed this project.” Learn more here.
Listen to this podcast conversation with Jason Mittell and Christian Keathley about videographic criticism on Amplified.
Watch several video essays made by Kevin B. Lee’s students at the Università della Svizzera italiana, here.
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