Volume 3, Issue 7: Lists & Lists & Lists
Plus, the final week of Scout Tafoya's XENOLITH ATLAS on Recycled Screenings
Hello!
I hope 2023 is off to a great start for you all. The video essay world kicked off the new year with the publication of the 5th (!) annual survey of the previous year’s best video essays, published in Sight & Sound. (You can read it here.) A special thanks to the poll’s editors: Cydnii Wilde Harris, Grace Lee, and Irina Trocan! Two other superb lists - one by Daniel Schindel for Polygon, and the other by Meg Shields for Film School Rejects (I should note that while I’m a contributor at FSR, the video essay stuff is all Meg!) - were also published. Check them all out!
As I have done since 2019, I submitted my picks to the Sight & Sound poll. I don’t have a set philosophy for making selections, but my process more or less comes down to this: a couple videos that I must include no matter how many other people select them, a couple videos that I think no one else will select, and a couple videos that in some way push the boundaries of what a video essay can be. Again, that is the ideal; sometimes it happens, sometimes it does not.
Below are my picks for this year’s poll and my reasons for selecting them.
These seven videos/projects/films, for me, epitomize the greatness of this form: they provide a new way of seeing and engaging with familiar images, sounds, and mediums. Each taught me how to be a better watcher, listener, and reader. They inspired me, and I look forward to returning to them time and time again in the years to come.
Shiplap by Eva Hageman
Beginning with clips from HGTV programming, Hageman analyses the history of ‘shiplap’ through the lens of Waco, Texas, unpacking its racist roots and revealing its hidden, violent history. Construction, reconstruction, deconstruction, all take on new meanings in this video, both as it relates to the process of videographic criticism and the content of the work itself. What sticks with me though is Hageman’s remarkable voiceover, guiding us through this “American nightmare.”
Speaking Nearby by Amaya Bañuelos Marco
Video essays offer a unique way to shape one’s own viewing choices. Not until watching this fantastic piece did I finally watch Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage (1982) and Margot Benacerraf’s Araya (1959). I not only found a way into these films because of this work, but my experience was enriched – and my understanding deepened – as a result of watching all three together.
Accidentally Sexist – How to Rewrite an Icky Scene by Afterthoughts
An analysis of a single, sexist scene becomes a wide-ranging video about sexist writing, sexism in professional athletics and e-sports, bad writing, talking about sexism online, the nature of analysis and persuasion, and so much more. Through a mix of virtuosic pacing and editing, coupled with a voiceover that guides us through each step of the way, this video by Afterthoughts is a new gold standard for me in how video essays can engage in close analysis to not only better understand a scene, but make its audience better viewers.
Makeover Movie by Sue Ding
A superb deconstruction of the makeover movie trope featuring the thoughts and conversation of the director’s friends as they watch a cut of the video. What sits with me is the ways in which this video blends together the experiences of individuals with the remixed films to understand the degree of universality that can often be found in the deeply personal.
Filling (Feeling) the Archival Void: The Case of Helena Cortesina’s Flor de España by Barbara Zecchi
A deeply moving, personal, political, and revelatory work that showcases the potentials of videographic criticism as it relates to the archive. Video essays can not only animate the archive, but attempt to fill, as this video essay does, voids in the archive. A work that charts the way forward for what video essays can do and be.
Las Marías de María / Maria’s Marias by Maria Hoffman
Multiscreen juxtaposition sits at the foundation of videographic criticism. In this video, Hofmann places The Sound of Music (Wise, 1965) beside “its almost unknown German original,” Die Trapp-Familie (Liebeneier, 1956) to challenge the cultural and critical histories of the film. With a mix of archival audio pulled from various sources, the video will leave anyone who watches it with a new and greater understanding of Wise’s film (and a desire to watch Liebeneier’s), showcasing the power of this form to alter our engagement with otherwise familiar images and sounds.
Footsteps by Evelyn Kreutzer
A personal anecdote comes to inform a reading of a key motif in Hitchcock’s films: sounds of feet. Though the films of Hitchcock are the corpus from which this video draws, it becomes about the sounds of feet in film in general, and thus how we interpret them in our own lives, through the screen or otherwise.
Some who read this newsletter may know I also work as a freelance critic/writer in New York (I’m always available for work ;) ) and try and see as much stuff, new and old, as I can (I’m always looking for recommendations too!). A big goal for me last year, and even more so this year, was trying to see as many documentaries as possible. I participated in the NonFics poll of the year’s best documentaries. Below are my picks. As always, we were encouraged to think of the term “documentary” however we liked.
Three Minutes: A Lengthening (Bianca Stigter)
Beba (Rebecca Huntt)
Lynch/Oz (Alexandre Philippe)
Nazarbazi (Maryam Tafakory)
All the Beauty & the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras)
The Afterlight (Charlie Shackleton)
Moonage Daydream (Brett Morgan)
Bitterbrush (Emelie Coleman Mahdavian)
All that Breathes (Shaunak Sen)
The Conspiracy (Maxim Pozdorovkin)
I also participated in the year-end “best of” lists for Crooked Marquee and Film School Rejects (forthcoming). My list differs on the day, and there are obviously many more films I need to see, but here are my picks:
Playground (Laura Wandel)
Three Minutes: A Lengthening (Bianca Stigter)
Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt)
After Yang (kogonada)
The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg)
Beba (Rebecca Huntt)
Everything Everywhere All at Once (the Daniels)
Nope (Jordan Peele)
Stars at Noon (Claire Denis)
Saint Omer (Alice Diop)
Scholarship in Sound & Image
The Middlebury Scholarship in Sound & Image workshop will return this summer! I’m beyond thrilled to be returning to the workshop for the first time as an instructor. The 2023 workshop will be from June 18 – July 1. Applications are now open and due February 10. You can learn more about the workshop, which this year will be directed and led by Jason Mittell, with an assist from guest mentor Catherine Grant, information about the curriculum, tuition fees, and beautiful summers in Vermont, here.
Recycled Screenings
The countdown begins! Scout Tafoya’s latest experimental feature, Xenolith Atlas, will be available to stream for free until the end of the month via Recycled Screenings, the streaming platform I started earlier this month. Learn more about Scout’s film — and consider making a donation that goes directly to the artist — here.
News & Notes
March
Ariel Avissar has extended the deadline to 15 March 2023 for student submissions to a special TV Dictionary edition of [in]Transition. Read more here.
CFP: “Academic Filmmaking in the New Humanities: Research Method, Communication Medium and Mode of Thought”
“Special issue of online open access journal Academic Quarter addressing the different forms, modes and approaches to academic filmmaking in the New Humanities and beyond, edited by Libertad Gills, Catherine Grant and Alan O’Leary. This issue (to be published early 2024) will interrogate a shared medium and our common or diverging processes and methods. It aims to bring together a wide range of practitioners and scholars of filmmaking research, academic film and videographic criticism to debate the particular affordances of filmmaking as means and medium of investigation and communication. Proposals are invited for articles or video essays, or combinations of prose and audiovisual work. Potential contributors are invited to contact the editors to discuss ideas before submitting a proposal (abstract deadline 15 March 2023).” Learn more here.
May
CFP: Tecmerin has issued a call for video essays for issue 11. The deadline is May 2, 2023. Learn more here.
June
"CO-VIDeos: a Collective Videographic Project on TV Series and the Pandemic"
“In the context of the financed project "TV Series in the Pandemic Era » (Université Paris Cite - IDEX 2022-2023), Ariane Hudelet will be curating a collection of short video essays dealing with our personal connection to TV series during the pandemic period. The parameters are:
- 3 minutes max
- Your video will feature footage from a series – a scene, a brief sequence, or a montage of scenes or still shots
- A voiceover, or text on screen, will explain why this particular series resonates with your experience of the pandemic (either because you watched it in lockdown or because it shed light on a particular aspect of the pandemic period, for instance). The video can be in any language, but an English version is required (via subtitles for instance)
Please contact ariane.hudelet@u-paris.fr if you wish to contribute. Video essays allow a more personal take on the material, balancing a poetic and an analytical approach. They will provide a different way to tackle the emotional connection that the serial form particularly encourages, especially in a very uncertain period. The main project deals more broadly with the effects of the Covid pandemic on the serial form, in terms of production, representation, and reception. It will lead to a special journal issue (to be determined) including a video essay section.” The tentative deadline is June 30, 2023, but could be extended beyond the initial publication.
Evergreen
Check out a new special issue of Open Screens, “dedicated to Teaching Women’s Filmmaking, with articles on classroom praxis and relevant innovations in film and media studies scholarship.” Guest-edited by Colleen Kennedy-Karpat and Feride Cicekoglu and featuring video essays. More here.
Issue 10 of MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism now includes more dossiers, articles, and videos. More here.
Alan O’Leary hosted Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer at Aarhus University for a screening and Q&A dedicated to the first iteration of “Once Upon a Screen.” Watch here.
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