video art essay

What is a Video Essay? The Art of the Video Analysis Essay

I n the era of the internet and Youtube, the video essay has become an increasingly popular means of expressing ideas and concepts. However, there is a bit of an enigma behind the construction of the video essay largely due to the vagueness of the term.

What defines a video analysis essay? What is a video essay supposed to be about? In this article, we’ll take a look at the foundation of these videos and the various ways writers and editors use them creatively. Let’s dive in.

Watch: Our Best Film Video Essays of the Year

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What is a video essay?

First, let’s define video essay.

There is narrative film, documentary film, short films, and then there is the video essay. What is its role within the realm of visual media? Let’s begin with the video essay definition. 

VIDEO ESSAY DEFINITION

A video essay is a video that analyzes a specific topic, theme, person or thesis. Because video essays are a rather new form, they can be difficult to define, but recognizable nonetheless. To put it simply, they are essays in video form that aim to persuade, educate, or critique. 

These essays have become increasingly popular within the era of Youtube and with many creatives writing video essays on topics such as politics, music, film, and pop culture. 

What is a video essay used for?

• To persuade an audience of a thesis
• To educate on a specific subject
• To analyze and/or critique 

What is a video essay based on?

Establish a thesis.

Video analysis essays lack distinguished boundaries since there are countless topics a video essayist can tackle. Most essays, however, begin with a thesis. 

How Christopher Nolan Elevates the Movie Montage  •  Video Analysis Essays

Good essays often have a point to make. This point, or thesis, should be at the heart of every video analysis essay and is what binds the video together. 

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interviews in video essay

Utilize interviews.

A key determinant for the structure of an essay is the source of the ideas. A common source for this are interviews from experts in the field. These interviews can be cut and rearranged to support a thesis. 

Roger Deakins on "Learning to Light"  •  Video Analysis Essays

Utilizing first hand interviews is a great way to utilize ethos into the rhetoric of a video. However, it can be limiting since you are given a limited amount to work with. Voice over scripts, however, can give you the room to say anything. 

How to create the best video essays on Youtube

Write voice over scripts.

Voice over (VO) scripts allow video essayists to write out exactly what they want to say. This is one of the most common ways to structure a video analysis essay since it gives more freedom to the writer. It is also a great technique to use when taking on large topics.

In this video, it would have been difficult to explain every type of camera lens by cutting sound bites from interviews of filmmakers. A voice over script, on the other hand, allowed us to communicate information directly when and where we wanted to.

Ultimate Guide to Camera Lenses  •  Video essay examples

Some of the most famous video essayists like Every Frame a Painting and Nerdwriter1 utilize voice over to capitalize on their strength in writing video analysis essays. However, if you’re more of an editor than a writer, the next type of essay will be more up your alley. 

Video analysis essay without a script

Edit a supercut.

Rather than leaning on interview sound bites or voice over, the supercut video depends more on editing. You might be thinking “What is a video essay without writing?” The beauty of the video essay is that the writing can be done throughout the editing. Supercuts create arguments or themes visually through specific sequences. 

Another one of the great video essay channels, Screen Junkies, put together a supercut of the last decade in cinema. The video could be called a portrait of the last decade in cinema.

2010 - 2019: A Decade In Film  •  Best videos on Youtube

This video is rather general as it visually establishes the theme of art during a general time period. Other essays can be much more specific. 

Critical essays

Video essays are a uniquely effective means of creating an argument. This is especially true in critical essays. This type of video critiques the facets of a specific topic. 

In this video, by one of the best video essay channels, Every Frame a Painting, the topic of the film score is analyzed and critiqued — specifically temp film score.

Every Frame a Painting Marvel Symphonic Universe  •  Essay examples

Of course, not all essays critique the work of artists. Persuasion of an opinion is only one way to use the video form. Another popular use is to educate. 

• The Different Types of Camera Lenses →
• Write and Create Professionally Formatted Screenplays →
• How to Create Unforgettable Film Moments with Music →

Video analysis essay

Visual analysis.

One of the biggest advantages that video analysis essays have over traditional, written essays is the use of visuals. The use of visuals has allowed video essayists to display the subject or work that they are analyzing. It has also allowed them to be more specific with what they are analyzing. Writing video essays entails structuring both words and visuals. 

Take this video on There Will Be Blood for example. In a traditional, written essay, the writer would have had to first explain what occurs in the film then make their analysis and repeat.

This can be extremely inefficient and redundant. By analyzing the scene through a video, the points and lessons are much more clear and efficient. 

There Will Be Blood  •   Subscribe on YouTube

Through these video analysis essays, the scene of a film becomes support for a claim rather than the topic of the essay. 

Dissect an artist

Essays that focus on analysis do not always focus on a work of art. Oftentimes, they focus on the artist themself. In this type of essay, a thesis is typically made about an artist’s style or approach. The work of that artist is then used to support this thesis.

Nerdwriter1, one of the best video essays on Youtube, creates this type to analyze filmmakers, actors, photographers or in this case, iconic painters. 

Caravaggio: Master Of Light  •  Best video essays on YouTube

In the world of film, the artist video analysis essay tends to cover auteur filmmakers. Auteur filmmakers tend to have distinct styles and repetitive techniques that many filmmakers learn from and use in their own work. 

Stanley Kubrick is perhaps the most notable example. In this video, we analyze Kubrick’s best films and the techniques he uses that make so many of us drawn to his films. 

Why We're Obsessed with Stanley Kubrick Movies  •  Video essay examples

Critical essays and analytical essays choose to focus on a piece of work or an artist. Essays that aim to educate, however, draw on various sources to teach technique and the purpose behind those techniques. 

What is a video essay written about?

Historical analysis.

Another popular type of essay is historical analysis. Video analysis essays are a great medium to analyze the history of a specific topic. They are an opportunity for essayists to share their research as well as their opinion on history. 

Our video on aspect ratio , for example, analyzes how aspect ratios began in cinema and how they continue to evolve. We also make and support the claim that the 2:1 aspect ratio is becoming increasingly popular among filmmakers. 

Why More Directors are Switching to 18:9  •  Video analysis essay

Analyzing the work of great artists inherently yields a lesson to be learned. Some essays teach more directly.

• Types of Camera Movements in Film Explained →
• What is Aspect Ratio? A Formula for Framing Success →
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Writing video essays about technique

Teach technique.

Educational essays designed to teach are typically more direct. They tend to be more valuable for those looking to create art rather than solely analyze it.

In this video, we explain every type of camera movement and the storytelling value of each. Educational essays must be based on research, evidence, and facts rather than opinion.

Ultimate Guide to Camera Movement  •  Best video essays on YouTube

As you can see, there are many reasons why the video essay has become an increasingly popular means of communicating information. Its ability to use both sound and picture makes it efficient and effective. It also draws on the language of filmmaking to express ideas through editing. But it also gives writers the creative freedom they love. 

Writing video essays is a new art form that many channels have set high standards for. What is a video essay supposed to be about? That’s up to you. 

Organize Post Production Workflow

The quality of an essay largely depends on the quality of the edit. If editing is not your strong suit, check out our next article. We dive into tips and techniques that will help you organize your Post-Production workflow to edit like a pro. 

Up Next: Post Production →

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Summary of Video Art

Video became an excitingly immediate medium for artists after its introduction in the early 1960s. The expensive technology, which had been available prior only within the corporate broadcasting arena, experienced an advent when Sony first created an economical consumer piece of equipment that allowed everyday people access to vast new possibilities in documentation. Understandably, this produced huge interest for the more experimental artists of the time, especially those involved with concurrent movements in Conceptual art , Performance and experimental film. It provided a cheap way of recording and representation through a dynamic new avenue, shattering an art world where forms such as painting, photography, and sculpture had been the long-held norm. This expanded the potential of individual creative voice and challenged artists to stretch toward new plateaus in their careers. It has also birthed an unmistakable population of artists who may never have entered the fine art field if stifled by the constraints of utilizing traditional mediums. With warp speed over the last half century, video has become accessible by the populous, spawning a continual evolution of its use; we live in an age where even your everyday smartphone has the ability to create high caliber works of art through the use of an ever increasing assortment of applications. We now consider Video art to be a valid means of artistic creation with its own set of conventions and history. Taking a variety of forms - from gallery installations and sculptures that incorporate television sets, projectors, or computer peripherals to recordings of performance art to works created specifically to be encountered via distribution on tape, DVD or digital file - video is now considered in rank equal to other mediums. It is considered a genre rather than a movement in the traditional sense and is not to be confused with theatrical cinema, or artists' (or experimental) film. Although the mediums may sometimes appear interchangeable, their different origins cause art historians to consider them distinct from each other. So popular a medium, many art schools now offer video as a specialized art major.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• With the introduction of the television set in the second half of the 20 th century, people gained a new all-consuming pastime. Many artists of the era used video to make works that highlighted what they saw as TV's encroaching and progressively insidious power by producing parodies of advertising and television programs. They pointed provocative fingers at the way society had become (passively) entranced with television or had succumbed to its seductive illusions. By co-opting the technologies of this medium, artists brought their own perspectives to the table, rounding out the brave new world of broadcasting ability to include creative, idiosyncratic, and individualized contributions.
• Some artists have used video to make us think more critically about, and oftentimes look to dissect, Hollywood film conventions. By eschewing the typical templates of formulaic narration, or by presenting intensely personal and taboo subjects on screen as works of art, or by jostling our ideas about how a film should look and feel, these artists use the canvas borrowed from the cinema to eradicate preconceived ideas of what is suitable, palatable, or focus-group-friendly.
• Looking beyond video's recording capabilities, many artists use it as a medium for its intrinsic properties with work that mimics more traditional forms of art like painting, sculpture, collage , or abstraction. This might emerge as a series of blurred, spliced scenes composed as a visual image. It may take the shape of a recording of performance meant as a reflection on movement or the perception of space. It may consist of actual video equipment and its output as objects in a work. Finally, it may be a work that could not exist without the video component such as art pieces that utilize video signals, distortion and dissonance, or other audiovisual manipulations.
• Because Video art was radically new for its time, some artists who were trying to push limits in contemporary society felt video an ideal format for their own work. This can be seen in the Feminist art movement in which many women, who hoped to distance and distinguish themselves from their male artist forebears, chose the medium for its newness, its sense of progression, and its opportunities that had not been widely tapped or established yet. We saw this politically, too, as many artists with a cause began using video as a means to spread their message. It appeared socially as well, as many people working to expose or spread important, underexposed information, felt the medium was conducive to both grass roots affordability and yet very broad distribution capabilities.

Key Artists

Artworks and Artists of Video Art

Sun In Your Head - Television Décollage

Artist: Wolf Vostell

For Sun In Your Head - Television Décollage , German artist Wolf Vostell distorted and played with various single frames that he'd sourced from film and television of the time (such as a smiling woman; words such as "Silence Please! Genius At Work!" or an embracing couple, for example). The resulting piece is a fast-paced, flickering mish-mash of televisual images that veer from flashing, abstracted shapes to recognizable forms. The work was shown as part of Vostell's nine-part 'happening' - 9 Decollagen - which took place in Wuppertal, Germany in 1963. As no video playback technology was available at the time, Vostell recorded the images from a television set using a film camera, allowing him to edit the piece and play it back on a projector. With its highly experimental technique and subversive form, Sun In Your Head was one of the first works to examine the possibilities of television as a medium in its own right. It employs his innovative use of the decollage technique, first associated with the French Nouveau Realisme movement who used the term to describe their ripping, erasing, and reworking of Parisian posters to create new information. Vostell used it to refer to the re-mixing and layering of image and sound he employed to create a new artistic language in his Video art. A pioneer of the European branches of the Fluxus and Happening movements, Vostell is considered one of the most influential early Video artists - he was also the first to use a television as an object in an artwork in 1958.

16mm film transferred to video - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Artist: Andy Warhol

In Sleep , Andy Warhol filmed his close friend and occasional lover John Giorno sleeping for five hours and twenty minutes. The piece's length means few people have watched it from beginning to end (two of the nine people who attended its premiere at The Gramercy Theater in New York left during its opening hour), and it is considered one of the first and most important works of durational art. Sleep looks at themes of intimacy, repetition, and duration, and is one of the first examples of what Warhol called his 'anti-films', in which he used hugely long, single takes to record his everyday experience and that of his friends. Although Sleep is a film rather than a video, Warhol's use of the camera, in which he just switched it on and walked away, make it stylistically much closer to art then film since he is clearly looking to bash Hollywood's conventions of narrative and the strategic manipulation of real time through editing. The artist's use of such epic duration has been exceptionally influential, inspiring many contemporary film and video artists working today. Sam Taylor-Wood's hour-long film of David Beckham sleeping in 2004 directly referenced Warhol's piece. Christian Marclay's 24 hour-long epic Clock and Douglas Gordon's slowed version of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece, 24 Hour Psycho , were also made in the same tradition.

Black and white film - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Artist: Nam June Paik

Fluxus artist Nam June Pak was one of the first artists to break the barriers between art and technology. TV Cello is a seminal example, specifically created for use in performance by the avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman. The work consisted of three television sets piled on top of each other, all showing different moving images - a film of Moorman performing live, a collaged video of other cellists and an intercepted broadcast feed. Ingeniously, the whole sculpture was also a fully operational cello, designed to be played with a bow to create a series of raw, electronic notes that reverberated through the space. By appropriating the domestic television set as an art object in this way, Paik became one of the first artists to establish video as a serious artistic medium. By taking the television out of its normal setting and using it in such subversive performances, he wanted to question its increasingly dominant role in shaping public opinion.

Video tubes, TV Chassis, Electronics, Wiring - Walker Art Center, Minnesota

Art Make-Up

Artist: Bruce Nauman

Art Make-Up consists of a series of four films set in Nauman's studio in which the artist slowly and ritualistically applies individual layers of color - white in the first, then pink, green and finally black - to his naked torso. The title refers simultaneously to the substance the artist is using, to the idea that he is "making himself up" for the viewer, and to the question "What is an artist made of?". Nauman was exploring the boundaries between disguise, masquerade, and reality by presenting these four versions of himself, none of which can be said to be the 'real' Bruce Nauman. Each ten-minute section was originally intended to show on four separate screens on the walls of one square room, with the viewer never witnessing the artist without a colored mask. Bruce Nauman was one of the first video artists to work with the single take, fixed-camera technique that's demonstrated in Art Make-Up - a method in which the scene is shot from one perspective in one sitting. This created a sense of authenticity to the work, which, in its refusal of editing or fluctuating shots, allowed for a denial of the normal cinematic fluff-and-preen convention, an important distinction to many of these artists. These artists looked to the new medium to document and extend ideas around live performance - an approach that would influence generations of artists, including the so-called 'father of Chinese Video art' Zhang Peili and contemporary US conceptual artist Martine Syms. Along with his groundbreaking use of video to push the possibilities of art making to new limits, the work is also a prime example of Nauman's use of his own body as a tool for artistic exploration.

16mm film - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Facing A Family

Artist: Valie Export

In Facing A Family , Austrian feminist performance artist Valie Export filmed a family watching the camera as if it was a television set in their living room. Labeled a 'TV action' by the artist, the footage lasts for almost five minutes, during which time the viewer becomes more aware of the piece's mirror-like quality and the passing of time - it is as if the viewer and the family are gazing at each other. The work was originally broadcast on Austrian television in 1971, ironically viewed by a large portion of the country's TV-consuming families. Export wanted viewers to reflect on the passive role they took on while being entertained, and to think about how we construe the contents of our television screen (fantasy versus reality). It was considered especially pioneering at the time, produced just as TV was becoming ever more dominant in lives of the public and concerns were being voiced about its increasing power.

Black and White Film - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Vertical Roll

Artist: Joan Jonas

Named after a type of television malfunction, Vertical Roll is a disrupted recording of Joan Jonas rehearsing for a performance in her studio as her masked alter ego, Organic Honey. As the image on the screen constantly rolls to a steady rhythm (which Jonas/Honey taps out, first with a spoon then a length of wood), we see various parts of the performer's body - her masked face; her wheeling legs; her rotating, corset-clad torso; and a shadow of her hand holding the spoon. All are shot from a dizzying variety of angles, abstracting many of the body parts so they appear strange and unfamiliar. Jonas also plays with and moves around the video's frame throughout the piece, highlighting the difference between her live activity and its videoed portrayal. Vertical Roll is a prime example of Jonas's seminal video works of the 1970s that theatrically explored ideas of female identity. She often used her alter ego to investigate notions of masquerade and femininity, producing an elusive and disjointed self-portrait using what was, in the 1970s, a new and cutting-edge medium. She is considered a key figure in the history of both Performance and Video art, and has been enormously influential on many contemporary artists who use their bodies in performance to explore what it is to be female today, including Video artists Sarah Lasley and Amber Hawk Swanson.

Black and White Film - Video Data Bank

Teaching A Plant The Alphabet

Artist: John Baldessari

Conceptual art pioneer John Baldessari made Teaching A Plant The Alphabet in direct response to Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys's innovative 1965 performance How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare . Described by Baldessari as "a perverse exercise in futility", the Portapak video consists of the artist's hand showing educational flashcards of the alphabet to a clearly unresponsive potted plant, repeating each letter slowly and deliberately, as if tutoring a small child. Like much of his work, the piece is full of irony and subtle humor, using everyday objects and a seemingly mundane task to explore broader philosophical concerns. In this case, those concerns are structuralist theories of the 1970s that presented language as a series of signs. Baldessari was also influenced by books published by members of the hippie movement, which encouraged people to communicate with their plants. Teaching A Plant The Alphabet is one of the best-known examples of Baldessari's artistic exploration of ideas around language, dealt with using his characteristic sense of humor and offering a fresh, original perspective on what he called the 'pedantic' and uncompromisingly serious conceptual art of the day. The use of video allowed him to further his already quite established conceptual agenda by utilizing a brave new form to expand his ideas from a static space to a live one.

Black and White Film - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Semiotics of the Kitchen

Artist: Martha Rosler

In Semiotics of the Kitchen the artist walks into a kitchen, dons an apron, and proceeds to vocally identify kitchen objects in alphabetical order: a for apron, b for bowl, c for chopper, d for dish, etc. As she goes down the roster, she quickly demonstrates each object's use. For the last few letters u through z she simply makes the shape of the letter with broad sweeping gestures of her arms while holding a utensil in each hand. There is a violent force in the manner in which Rosler presents many of the objects, such as slamming down the meat tenderizer or jabbing violently with the ice pick, which contradicts society's image of the happy homemaker in a decidedly passive-aggressive fashion. This work is an important example of how early Feminist artists co-opted the video medium to establish themselves as important new voices disembodied from the male art canon and its many years of more traditional artwork.

Video - Collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York

The Reflecting Pool

Artist: Bill Viola

The first in a series of tapes with the same name, The Reflecting Pool shows a man (Viola) approaching an artificial pool in the middle of a dense forest. As we hear trees rustling, water flowing and an airplane flying overhead, the man leaps into the air as if to jump into the pool, then remains frozen in mid-air, his image gradually fading into the foliage behind him. Eventually, he emerges from the pool as if reborn - Viola has said that he was portraying "the emergence of the individual into the natural world, a kind of baptism." He also used a simple masking effect to split the frame so that the human action above the water wasn't always reflected in it, turning the pool into a metaphor for the mystic and separating its strange world from the real one in the other half of the screen, while ensuring they remained united by the televisual frame. This work marks the beginning of Viola's innovative use of special effects to explore notions of transcendence and spirituality. He wanted to use a medium that had previously been regarded as embodying the literal to explore invisible phenomena and examine the gap between the seen and the unseen. In subject as well as technique, Viola is seen as one of the most important artists working in video from the 1970s to the present day. His works have proved hugely influential on other, younger artists working in epic and immersive film and video such as Cremaster Cycle creator Matthew Barney, and Swiss video installation artist Pipilotti Rist.

Color video - The Art Institute of Chicago

Why Do Things Get In A Muddle (Come On Petunia)

Artist: Gary Hill

In Why Do Things Get In A Muddle , Gary Hill constructs his own, twisted version of the classic literary nonsense story Alice In Wonderland . Hill had become fascinated with the concept of entropy - a term that refers to gradual descent into disorder - and wanted to explore it using video and sound. Most of the piece was performed and recorded backwards, including the exchange between the two characters (a childish woman called Cathy and her father), before being reversed again in the editing process. Their resulting confusing conversation about confusion itself was inspired by theoretician Gregory Bateson's definition of a 'metalogue', as quoted in the work's opening sequence: "When a conversation between people mirrors the problems themselves." At thirty minutes long, this was the first video piece for which Hill wrote a full screenplay. Why Do Things Get In A Muddle was considered groundbreaking in its open, experimental approach to movement, sound and words, as well as the artist's inventive use of editing techniques to make a conceptual point. Contemporary artists who stretch the medium in similarly innovative ways include British artist Ed Atkins, who uses moving image, bodies and text in his subversive video installations. The work of US multimedia artist Adam Pendleton engages with language and meaning in ways that also owe a clear debt to Hill.

Color film - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Beginnings of Video Art

Although artists have been creating moving images in some form since the early-20 th century, the first works to be widely labeled as 'Video art' are from the 1960s. The first nationalities to pick up on the Portapak as an artistic tool - and therefore those who made the earliest pieces of Video art - were, unsurprisingly, from those countries where it first became commercially available (the US and the UK were the early practitioners).

Nam June Paik - 'The Father Of Video Art'

In the same way that the 'father of conceptual art' Marcel Duchamp had declared an ordinary urinal to be a work of art when he created his first and most infamous readymade in 1917, the "father of Video Art" Nam June Paik first established video as a credible artistic medium in 1965, when he claimed his footage of the Pope's visit to New York to be a serious artwork. When Korean-American Fluxus artist Nam June Paik, glimpsed the pontiff by chance while sitting in traffic, he recorded it on his Portapak, and presented the grainy, barely edited result later that evening at a screening at the Cafe A Go Go in Greenwich Village (though some art historians have disputed Paik's claim that it was indeed the Portapak that he used, asserting that Sony did not release it until 1968.) What is not disputed is that this work, along with Paik's 1963 Fluxus exhibition at Galerie Parnass in Paris - where he showed his first reworked television sculptures - were some of the first pieces of art made using the newly accessible medium of video.

After his seminal 1965 screening, Paik wrote a short manifesto encouraging artists and activists to use video as a tool for empowerment to fight back against the establishment, especially what he called 'one-way' broadcast television companies - a utopian mission he would continue to pursue throughout his long career. He also predicted that 'as collage replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas' He would go on to pioneer the use of broadcast, video installation, live events, and artists' screenings, all of which are modes practiced by artists today.

Broader Adoption of Video

It was in the 1970s that many of the key figures in Video art started to make their most important works. Many of these early practitioners were, like Paik, eager to explore the impermanent and transient qualities of the medium. It was adopted notably early by American artists such as John Baldessari , Joan Jonas , and Bruce Nauman to further their conceptual agendas. In the UK, David Hall campaigned vigorously for video to be accepted as a valid art form and wrote widely about it as a medium, as well as producing important works of his own.

An interest in video as a tool for activism arose in the 1970s as well. It allowed for documentation, which to some activists offered an opportunity to prove the injustices they sought to change; or, it allowed for a presentation of their message in a boldly, undeniable way. A powerful example of this was Videofreex's Davidson's Jail Tape (1971). After getting arrested at the 1971 May Day events in Washington D.C., a Videofreex member films rarely seen raw footage of his ride on the bus to jail, his detainment in the cell, and an up close and personal look at the inmates.

Technology Dictating Art

As technologies such as color television, special effects, thermal imaging, consumer electronics, surveillance cameras and video projection were introduced and developed, their impact was seen in the work of video artists. The toolkit available in the 1980s became immeasurably larger than the prior decade and allowed artists to produce more spectacular works. Laurie Anderson often played with voice distortion, most memorably when she created The Clone, a digitally altered male version of herself. Bill Viola became known for his use of extreme slow motion. Gary Hill would go on to experiment widely with electronic sound and language, creating his own "electronic linguistics."

Additionally, some of the most prominent experimental filmmakers became intrigued with video and later developed highly regarded Video art practices that sat alongside and were informed by their cinema-based work. Chris Marker, for example, made a number of well-known pieces of Video art in the 1990s, including Zapping Zones (1992), featuring a mixture of his previous film and television works in an immersive gallery installation, and an interactive 'multimedia memoire' on CD-ROM called Immemory in 1998.

Video Art: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Video allowed artists from various movements to expand their existing toolkit and get their diverse ideas across in an unprecedentedly immediate way. Video's portability and ease of use allowed practitioners to record their actions or performances in a way previously unimaginable. These artists all used video to produce extraordinarily direct and personal artworks that hadn't been possible with any other medium. Thus, the innovation of the technology equaled an evolution in artistic possibility.

The Power of Television

The growing popularity of broadcast television had a strong influence on early Video art practitioners in particular. Artists such as Wolf Vostell and Martha Rosler sought to highlight what they saw as TV's progressively insidious power by producing parodies of advertising and television programs. Some feminists used video to showcase society's sexism via popular culture. Dara Birnbaum , for instance, often deconstructed popular television programs, like Wonder Woman, with key female characters, which she then compiled as moving visual images that questioned stereotype and objectification. Still others, like Nam June Paik and Brian Hoey, challenged viewers to think about their own passive role in television's domination by using live video feeds in their installations to reflect audience images back at themselves. Paik was also inspired by the question of how television and its relationship to modern technology vis-a-vis contemporary man might affect the profound and the spiritual vis-a-vis ancient man. His work Buddha Watching TV (1974-1997) became a twenty-three year meditation on this question; a stone head of a Buddha contemplating a television set reflective of Paik's sentiment. Many of these works represented a desire by artists to morph the television experience into a redefined impetus of focusing on the unique, the personal, the political and the non-commercial.

Defying Film Conventions

When Video art was in its birthing stages, film had already been widely established as a credible means of entertainment, a medium for telling stories, and a widespread, mainstream choice in encountering the multitude of human experience, once removed from self. But artists working with video were quick to give themselves permission to ignore Hollywood's conventions, even ignore rules of narration, and to experiment with presenting moving pictures and sound according to their own terms. This meant work that defied expected notions of plot or character establishment, but instead put forth pictures (sometimes with sound) that denoted an artist's emotion, statement, or snapshot). In some cases, Video offered no real explanation, but was intended merely for the viewer to experience a feeling, reflect on a theme, or get a glimpse into the artist's mind, as chaotic or calm that might be. With no tight weave from beginning to end, these works were impact-established and went against everything film was supposed to mean. In some way, this defiance can be said about almost all Video artists from the 1960s through now - in particular, Andy Warhol slashed cinema's ideas of presenting long stories in condensed spaces by producing videos such as Andy Warhol's Sleep , (1971) which is nothing more than an hours long glimpse at a sleeping man. And, in Joan Jonas' Vertical Roll (1972), we find a gradual unfolding of the self portrait of the artist through random images of her body interspersed with other objects and elements - a distinctly non-narrative collage, radical in its non-linearity or logical make-up.

Video as Medium

Video is an electronic signal that can be manipulated, distorted, amplified, and transformed. For many video artists, an interest in video for these inherent qualities was akin to an abstract painter's interest in oils, brushes, shapes, and structure. Some artists produced works that played with the medium itself and as technologies have improved, the opportunities in using video for its material qualities have also vastly evolved. A prominent example in this category is artist Peer Bode , who has been enacting this type of mechanical collaboration since the '70s. In his Flute with Shift , (1979) we see an image on screen of a man playing the flute, which shifts in brightness according to the controlled analog synthesizer parameter of the live flute sounds. Video Free America Founder Skip Sweeney was known for installations that played with video feedback, abstract image processing, and synthesis. Bill Viola has always regularly tweaked video to achieve multi-layered effects in ways that visually collude with his investigations into spirituality, humanity, the body's place within the context of space, experience and time, and other probes into our existence.

Installation Art

The early works of Paik and Vostell that presented televisions as sculptural elements laid the foundation for later 'video installation' works. Contemporary Video art shown in a gallery can be classified as either 'single-channel' (one screen) or 'installation' works (those that are designed specifically to be projected into an exhibition space, potentially with more than one image and including additional components such as props or sculpture.) Artists such as Gary Hill, Bill Viola, and Joan Jonas are considered pioneers of video installation as an art form, taking full advantage of the architectural features in a gallery, for example, to fully involve their work within the space. Again, the development of display technologies has had a huge impact on the kind of work being produced. US artist Peter Campus , for example, projected viewers' own images onto their shadows in his 1974 work Shadow Projection , while multimedia artist Tony Oursler started making his immersive environments featuring projections of faces onto sculptures in the early 1980s.

Video Recordings of Events and Performances

Video also became an invaluable tool for artists such as Paik, the Viennese Actionists , Robert Smithson , and Marina Abramovic to make a permanent record of their live art events. This type of Video art is more about preserving a piece for perpetuity than a work in its own right, though some pieces (such as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970)) are often installed and shown in galleries as artworks rather than mere documentation. Four of Abramovic's performances at the Galerie Mike Steiner in Berlin from 1975-76 can be found online. Each of the events made history and are written about widely, yet their impact surely may have been diffused had they not continued to exist in video form for future generations to witness as an important historical part of the performance genre. Similarly, with Vito Acconci's Sounding Board (1970) performance in which he lay naked on a pair of speakers to virtually feel the music pulsate through his body while a collaborator massaged him in accordance with the beats. What makes these pieces of Video art so important is that they reach not only audiences in the years in which they were spawned, but they continue to be seen by future generations on such mass-accessible means as YouTube and social media, remaining important remnants of the overall art canon.

Later Developments - After Video Art

Nam June Paik's early prediction on the dominance of video has become, at least partially, true. Although Video art has by no means replaced the more traditional mediums in the contemporary art world, it has become an exhaustive field which certainly complements them.

Contemporary Video art practices continue to expand in both form and content, allowing artists to experiment with new ideas and new technologies. The growth of high definition digital video over the last decade, for example, has enabled artists to produce work of expanded clarity. The humorous mock-documentaries of American performance artist Alex Bag, complex animations of British Ed Atkins and French artist Laure Provoust's detailed projections are all made to an extremely high production value far removed from the grainy, scratchy videos made in the 1960s. This technology is now available through a wide proliferation of intuitive and DIY software programs easily adaptable across computers, tablets, cameras, smartphones and the Internet. This has opened the context of how and where art can be shown as well.

Today's video artists build upon inspiration from early Video art pioneers yet bring an enhanced knowledge of the constantly transforming technology to the table. Some examples are more true to video's origin much like the large, highly atmospheric projections of French artist Phillippe Parreno, or the ever more elaborate, architecturally-scaled video installations of Swiss Pipilotti Rist - both of whom use modern projectors and special effects to push the medium in ever more visually impressive and conceptually complex directions. One can find hints of Warhol's love of real time footage with doses of the video collagist in Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010), which ran for 24 hours and featured a mash up of images of clocks from iconic movie scenes. Additionally, Andrew Thomas Huang gained worldwide attention in 2007 with his video Doll Face ; a critique on the influence television has on our self-image. Ryan Trecartin is noted for bringing a gay male angle to Video art by interjecting oftentimes garishly presented stereotypes into otherwise normative images and video clips.

Some video artists tote signs of the post-millennial age with cutting edge video works. Revolutionary post-Internet artist, Cory Arcangel's most famous piece Super Mario Clouds (2002) featured hacked, pixelated images of the popular video game sailing across blue skies on a website, which can still be seen on YouTube. Although the original launch of the piece took place in a gallery on various screens of different heights and sizes to create a fully immersive experience, the online video is now all that remains. Incredibly smart British artist Hannah Black usually sources online imagery by typing in search terms to find pieces that will eventually inform her themed collage videos. In her piece My Bodies (2014), she Googled "CEO" and "executive" to compile images of white men upon which she overlaid audio tracks of black recording artists such as Rihanna. As more video artists look to the Internet as a platform, and the current methodology continues to morph toward the use of webcams, virtual reality, and interactive animation, the field that has consistently burgeoned like a self-feeding mushroom, will no doubt continue to expound upon itself at a rapid pace.

Useful Resources on Video Art

• Video Art: A Guided Tour (2005) Our Pick By Catherine Elwes / An index of Video Art artists and the history of that artmaking practice
• A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function (2006) By Chris Meigh-Andrews / Comprehensive history on Video Art practices
• Nam June Paik: Global Visionary (2013) Our Pick Image-based collection of prominent Paik works
• Bill Viola (2015) Our Pick Compilation of notable Bill Viola works accompanied by explanations of the works
• Paik's Virtual Archive: Time, Change, and Materiality in Media Art (2017) By Hanna B. Holling / An analytical view of Paik's influence on Video Art and its functionality
• Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words: Writings and Interviews (2005) Collection of interviews and essays by the artist -- detailing his transformative art making practices
• National Gallery of Art: Nam June Paik Our Pick Museum page for the artist
• Bruce Nauman Art21 Feature Page Our Pick Featured artist page includes videos and background on the artist
• Joan Jonas Art21 Feature Page Featured artist page includes videos and background on the artist
• Back to the Future: 50 Years of Video Art at the Broad Art Museum, MSU Our Pick By Barbara Pollack / Art News / February, 12, 2016
• Has Video Art Become Obsolete? By Jonathan Jones / The Guardian / January 23, 2013
• Nam June Paik: The Father of Contemporary Video Art By C.A Xuan Mai Ardia / Culture Trip
• Nam June Paik - Becoming Robot / Asia Society Museum NY Our Pick Video of the 2014 exhibition
• Charlotte Moorman performs with Paik's 'TV Cello' Video of performance / installation
• Nam June Paik - Venus Exhibition view of installation/ sculpture with brief curatorial discussion
• Art21 - Bruce Nauman: "Poke in the Eye / Ear / Nose" Our Pick Bruce Nauman discussing one of his video works
• Art21 - Joan Jonas New York Performances Video compilation of her New York Performances
• Bill Viola - Ascension Our Pick

Similar Art

Cut Piece (1964)

How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965)

Un Chien Andalou (1929)

Related artists, related movements & topics.

Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

The Video Essay As Art: 11 Ways to Make a Video Essay

Part one in a series of commissioned pieces on video essay form, originally published at Fandor Keyframe.

This feature piece, the first in an ongoing series, was originally published by Fandor Keyframe in May 2016. You can read the other pieces in this series here .

When you think of the video essay, you might imagine someone expressing their love of a movie over a selection of clips, a compilation of a famous director’s signature shots, or a voice that says: “Hi, my name is Tony.” But these are just a few of a remarkable variety of approaches to making videos exploring film and media, a diversity of forms that is continually evolving and expanding. Here’s an attempt to account for some of the more recognizable modes of video essay, with key examples for each.

Supercut . A collection of images or sounds arranged under a category (i.e. Jacob T. Swinney’s wonderful The Dutch Angle ) or used to break down a film to a set of elements (i.e. Zackery Ramos-Taylor’s recent Hearing Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Joel Bocko’s The Colors of Daisies ). The supercut is usually very short and lacks text so as to maximize its impact on a visual level. This brevity of form emphasizes a central concept more than a narrative argument. If a supercut has an argument to make, it is typically in the order in which items are sequenced.

Personal Review . This broad category of video essay hinges on a strongly personalized account of a film. Scout Tafoya’s recurring series The Unloved is a prominent example of this, wherein he makes the claim that each film he focuses on is underappreciated and then asserts their qualities through visual analysis. The best of these, in my opinion, is his video on Michael Mann’s Public Enemies :

Vlog . While similar to the personal review, the vlog differs strongly in mode of presentation. There is a greater focus on direct address of the viewers, and on delivering opinion rather than analysis. They’re often played up for comedic entertainment value and feature a lot of voiceover or footage of the editor themselves. Chez Lindsay’s video on Joel Schumacher’s The Phantom of the Opera is a sprawling, informative, funny journey through theater and cinema history that in many respects encompasses elements of the video essay but first and foremost is grounded in a personal perspective. Outside of film, the work Jon Bois does at SB Nation in his series Pretty Good would also fall under this category (his latest, on character types in 24 , is very much worth the watch). The popular YouTube series CinemaSins would also fall under this category, which relies moreso on personal nit-picking than film analysis.

Scene Breakdown . A visually-driven close reading of a scene (or many scenes in one film) that leans heavily on explaining film form and technique. Tony Zhou is especially skilled at this, and his scene breakdowns often come nestled in a video about many scenes, like his look at ensemble staging in Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder or the approach to staging a fight scene in his video Jackie Chan—How to Do Action Comedy :

Shot Analysis . A cousin of the supercut and scene breakdown, though more analytical in nature than the former, the shot analysis dissects a shot or a repeated type of shot. Josh Forrest’s engaging video on the insert shot in David Fincher’s Zodiac is not shot analysis in and of itself; it’s more of a supercut. David Chen’s Edgar Wright and the Art of Close-Ups , on the other hand, is definitely a shot analysis, turning its compilation structure into a video essay by virtue of its director’s commentary track (which we might call the DVD-era ancestor of the video essay):

Structural Analysis . To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, these videos look at a film’s story shape, seeking to uncover hidden meaning or a subtextual emphasis by viewing the film as a collection of scenes rather than necessarily a plot or narrative. Kevin B. Lee’s Between the Lines: THE DAY HE ARRIVES is one of the best videos in this field, comparing repeated scenes in Hong Sang-soo’s film to reveal the film’s playful interpretation of time passing. One of my video essays for Fandor last year, Containing the Madness: George A. Romero’s THE CRAZIES , was an attempt to engage with this mode of video essay:

Side-by-side Analysis . Not a supercut, not yet a shot analysis. The side-by-side is a fascinating form of the video essay pushed by essayists like Cristina Álvarez Lopez, Catherine Grant ( All That Pastiche Allows ) and, in recent months, Davide Rapp, which finds meaning through visual comparison of two or more film clips in real-time. In What is Neorealism? , kogonada brilliantly employs the side-by-side comparison to reflect on the ideological and creative differences between Vittorio de Sica and David O. Selznick in the cutting of the same picture.

Side-by-sides with voiceover narration are relatively rare. Álvarez, Grant and Rapp tend to let viewers interpret the footage on their own. Rapp’s series of videos under the Seeing Double and Seeing Triple moniker place sequences from films and their various remakes side-by-side and implicitly address not only specific but generational aesthetic and narrative priorities. A particularly illuminating video in this collection is his look at Michael Haneke’s two versions of Funny Games :

Recut . The line between video essay and video art is blurred when we look at the imaginative re-purposing of texts. Filmscalpel’s 12 Silent Men is a good example of this, which was shared as a video essay despite being very similar in form to Vicki Bennett’s work of video art, 4:33: The Movie . Davide Rapp’s enchanting SECRET GATEWAYS (below), where he maps the space of a house in a Buster Keaton short and then moves his virtual camera between each of these rooms, is a more visually-focused re-purposing. I’d count my video essay, The Secret Video Essays of Jenni Olson , as also being a part of this form. It’s worth noting that an imaginative recut does not need to be visual, it can also be conceptual, as in Jeremy Ratzlaff’s Paul Thomas Anderson: A Chronological Timeline . This recut concept also extends to re-purposed marketing materials or film trailers, as seen in The Maze of Susan Lowell by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, which suggests an alternate cut of The Big Combo with Susan as the protagonist. The very popular YouTube series Honest Trailers would also fall into the category of the recut, as they mimic and parody film trailer form, though their comedic narration-as-criticism does blur the line even more.

Subject Essay . These videos typically tell a story to explore a filmmaker’s (or actor’s, cinematographer’s, etc.) body of work, an era of filmmaking or a recurring motif in a lot of films, incorporating elements of scene, shot and thematic analysis. For the most part, the better videos in this field seek to educate or inform the viewer about a relatively unknown body of work or period of time. In this vein they teeter on the edge of conventional documentary cinema, like Kevin B. Lee’s Bruce Lee, Before and After the Dragon , and are reminiscent of some of the essay films of Mark Rappaport (whose body of work in and of itself defies easy genre labels). An unconventional example of this, and one of the best video essays of 2015, is Tony Zhou’s Vancouver Never Plays Itself . Another unconventional example, and one which straddles the modes of supercut and shot analysis, is Rishi Kaneria’s brilliant Why Props Matter .

Academic Supplement . When Kevin B. Lee made his refractive video essay What Makes a Video Essay Great? back in 2014, he used an excerpt from Thomas van den Berg’s Reliable Unreliability vs Unreliable Reliability or, Perceptual Subversions of the Continuity Editing System , a chiefly academic piece of video criticism that runs for over half an hour, features lecture-like narration and is grounded in academic and theoretical concepts of cinema. While this video does stand on its own as analysis, when I say supplement I mean that it is supplemental to the academic form. Some of the video works from David Bordwell, which he has termed video lectures, are examples of this form, in spite of what they have in common with shot analysis and filmic survey (in particular, his Constructive Editing in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket ). Catherine Grant, another academic working in the realm of video essays, has managed to often subvert this expectation that academics making video essays will make supplementary works, turning in some wonderfully imaginative and non-academic videos like her brilliant UN/CONTAINED .

Desktop Video . A recent mode of video arguably born from the metatextual work of Harun Farocki ( Interface in particular), this seeks to present an argument about film within the confines of a computer screen. It’s worth noting that while the visual experience is tethered to a screen, like the recent horror flick Unfriended, it’s often not actually a real-time one-take desktop journey. The defining film in this field (arguably moving beyond the video essay label to become an experimental documentary in its own right) is Kevin B. Lee’s Transformers: The Premake :

As you can see from the various definitions above, the problem with all of these videos standing under the umbrella category of the video essay is that they’re all trying to do different things and aiming for different audiences. Because of this, when any two practitioners talk about what they like in video essays, they may be talking about very different things, not just in terms of content but in what they think the purposes of these videos are. Earlier this month Filmmaker Magazine posted a series of responses to the question What is a Video Essay? and answers ranged from a tool to stimulate better film viewing to a new form of essay filmmaking; and from a means of expressing cinephile obsession to a means of critiquing that same obsession.

On the other hand, what’s certain is that these videos, in their multitude of forms, have become very popular online over the last few years. There are many communities forming in the world of video essays, not just within publishing sites like the one you’re visiting now, but also in the “schools” of approaches taken by like-minded video makers. The mostly straightforward film-analysis approach is a favorite among very popular YouTubers. The academic-minded teaching aide is championed by the online journal [in]Transition. The personal love letter to cinema arises in supercuts and most single-film videos. The miniature essay film floats in and out of categorization, making it one of the most interesting forms of video essay.

Here at Keyframe I’ll be writing about various approaches to the video essay, looking at a wide variety of videos and video essayists and speaking to curators and editors to try to understand just how we got to where we are now. I’ll explore questions such as: why do some supercuts work better than others; when and when not to use voiceover and much more. Join us, won’t you?

The Rise of the Video Essay as Art: ContraPoints

The YouTube of today is a vastly different platform from the YouTube of yesteryear. Once characterized by cheesy, poorly-filmed comedy skits and the dominating presence of Vevo, it was a mecca of low-brow humor and cat videos. YouTube’s audience, however, has matured, and so has its content. 

The video essay is taking over YouTube as a primary form of content on the platform. YouTubers with niche knowledge and impeccable production value are becoming major stars. These YouTubers are smart — they have high level knowledge about topics from critical theory to historical dress — and they perform for the camera in a manner that is entertaining, educational and far-reaching. Many viewers are flocking to YouTube, not just to laugh, but to learn — and the best creators offer both. 

The video essays I will discuss in this column are nothing short of works of art. They often combine musical score, high fashion and makeup alongside performance and narrative, with sturdy cultural critique and analysis that is both complex and easily digestible. And, perhaps most importantly, they are a hoot to watch.

You can’t talk about YouTube video essays without mentioning ContraPoints, also known as Natalie Wynn. She is one of the pioneers of this digital movement toward video essays, and her videos, perhaps best described as “films,” present some of the highest art, critical analysis, skilled performance and humor that the platform has to offer. Wynn delivers all of this surrounded by elaborate sets and beautiful score, while wearing full drag, tipping a 40 oz. to the head and engaging her own hilariously on-the-nose characters through dialogue, a la Plato. If anyone can be described as the intellectual figure of this generation, it’s ContraPoints.

Wynn might be described by some as a “classically trained academic.” She studied piano at Berklee College of Music and received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Georgetown. She then attended Northwestern to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy. 

But this is where Wynn’s career diverged from the traditional academic. She dropped out of the Ph.D. program at Northwestern, saying to Vice News , “The idea of being an academic for the rest of my life became boring to the point of existential despair.”

Wynn plays an important role in the contemporary intellectual community — she is no modern liberal. ContraPoints, rather, is a radical leftist . But while many modern left-liberal movements have condemned discourse with “the other side,” ContraPoints has embraced it. She doesn’t shy away from engaging with the arguments of incels , the alt-right , TERFs and public “intellectuals” such as Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson (whose visage she hilariously flirts with in a bathtub). 

This is where Wynn’s academic training combined with her high emotional intelligence make her a powerful public presence. She’s been credited with converting many young alt-right leaning men away from dangerous racist, sexist, transphobic rhetoric. If you’ve ever argued with an alt-righter or “Trumpist,” you might be wondering, how the f*** does she do it? 

Wynn herself says , “It’s not just about calling someone out and using logic, because there are emotional and psychological reasons that people hold their political convictions. From a psychological standpoint, you have to empathetically enter a person’s world; not just why do they think what they think, but why do they feel what they feel? Repeat that back to them and you can really gain traction.”

Indeed, her critiques are always based on charitable interpretations of the arguments that she addresses, and her combination of philosophical argumentation and sociology has proved to be powerfully effective. For many, it’s difficult to explain to someone why white supremacy is wrong, they just know that it is. But ContraPoints can do it. Her video on the alt right breaks down both the factual incorrectness and negative ethical value of common, normalized white supremacist arguments. She takes the alt-right’s very own arguments and talking points and breaks them down in a clear, charitable and thorough way that makes her critique nearly impossible to dispute. She puts words to concepts that, for many, have been impossible to describe. And she does so in a way that reaches people on every side of every aisle.

Contra’s content isn’t just devoted to changing the opinions of alt-righters. She also makes video essays that critique and analyze cultural phenomena (such as “ cringe ,” “ beauty ,” “ cancelling ” and “ degeneracy ”) with the double-edged sword of philosophical breakdown and extreme drag looks. These videos are fun, but so solid in their argumentation that I was able to use “The Darkness” as a source for my philosophy capstone paper; they have true academic utility. Within these films, she discusses each topic as it pertains to gender, sexuality, behavior, personal beliefs and more. She works out meaningful and thorough descriptions for these topics that provide exquisite foundations for her analysis. She, critically, has perfected the fine art of meaningfully differentiating between expedient political rhetoric such as “trans people are born in the wrong bodies” (phrasing which is not philosophically nuanced, nor true to every trans person’s experience, but is critical to the acquisition of rights for trans people) and more complex metaphysical discussion about gender, sex and orientation which many modern academics shy away from. 

What puts ContraPoints a step above the rest is her bold, critical and unapologetic nature. She’s not nice . She doesn’t cater to anyone or anything, left or right. She’s not afraid to say, “I am an evangelical transsexual. I don’t want toleration, damn it. I want converts,” and she certainly doesn’t care whether you think she means it or not. She pursues what’s true, what’s expedient and what’s hilarious. And she does it all while dressed as a sexy catgirl. 

Natalie Wynn’s work is of the highest art, but don’t just believe me, check it out for yourself . Did I mention she’s funny?

Contact Rachel D’Agui at rdagui ‘at’ stanford.edu.

Rachel D'Agui is a member of the editorial board and a contributing writer in the Arts & Life section. Contact her at rdagui 'at' stanforddaily.com.

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What Is a Video Essay? Definition & Examples Of Video Essays

A video essay consists of a series of videos that collectively, present an in-depth analysis or interpretation of a given subject or topic.

In this way, a video essay can be thought of as a condensed version of a lengthy written article.

VIDEO ESSAY

What is a video essay.

A video essay is an audio-visual presentation of your thoughts on a topic or text that usually lasts between 5 and 10 minutes long.

It can take the form of any type of media such as film, animation, or even PowerPoint presentations.

The most important thing to remember when creating a video essay is to include voiceover narration throughout the whole project so that viewers feel they are listening in on your thoughts and ideas rather than watching passively.

Video essays are typically created by content creators’ critics to make arguments about cinema, television, art history, and culture more broadly.

Ever wondered how ideas unfold in the dynamic world of video?

That’s where video essays come in.

They’re a compelling blend of documentary and personal reflection, packed into a visually engaging package.

We’ll dive deep into the art of the video essay, a form that’s taken the internet by storm.

In this article, we’ll explore how video essays have revolutionized storytelling and education.

They’re not just a person talking to a camera; they’re a meticulously crafted narrative, often weaving together film footage, voiceover, text, and music to argue and inform.

Stick with us as we unpack the nuances that make video essays a unique and powerful medium for expression and learning.

Components Of A Video Essay

As storytellers and educators, we recognize the intricate elements that comprise a video essay.

Each component is vital for communicating the essay’s message and maintaining the audience’s engagement.

Narrative Structure serves as the backbone of a video essay.

Our crafting of this structure relies on a cinematic approach where the beginning, middle, and end serve to introduce, argue, and explore our ideas.

Film Footage then breathes life into our words.

We handpick scenes from various sources, be it iconic or obscure, to visually accentuate our narrative.

The Voiceover we provide acts as a guide for our viewers.

It delivers our analysis and commentary, ensuring our perspective is heard.

Paired with this is the Text and Graphics segment, offering another layer of interpretation.

We animate bullet points, overlay subtitles, and incorporate infographics to highlight key points.

Our sound design, specifically the Music and Sound Effects , creates the video essay’s atmosphere.

It underscores the emotions we wish to evoke and punctuates the points we make.

This auditory component is as crucial as the visual, as it can completely change the viewer’s experience.

We also pay close attention to the Editing and Pacing .

This ensures our video essays are not only informative but also engaging.

The rhythm of the cuts and transitions keeps viewers invested from start to finish.

In essence, a strong video essay is a tapestry woven with:

• Narrative Structure – the story’s framework,
• Film Footage – visual evidence supporting our claims,
• Voiceover – our distinctive voice that narrates the essay,
• Text and Graphics – the clarity of our arguments through visual aids,
• Music and Sound Effects – the emotive undercurrent of our piece,
• Editing and Pacing – the flow that maintains engagement.

Each element works Along with the others, making our video essays not just informative, but also a cinematic experience.

Through these components, we offer a comprehensive yet compelling way of storytelling that captivates and educates our audience.

The Power Of Visual Storytelling

Visual storytelling harnesses the innate human attraction to imagery and narrative.

At its core, a video essay is a compelling form of visual storytelling that combines the rich tradition of oral narrative with the dynamic appeal of cinema.

The impact of visual storytelling in video essays can be profound.

When crafted effectively, they engage viewers on multiple sensory levels – not just audibly but visually, leading to a more immersive and memorable experience.

Imagery in visual storytelling isn’t merely decorative.

It’s a crucial carrier of thematic content, enhancing the narrative and supporting the overarching message.

By incorporating film footage and stills, video essays create a tapestry of visuals that resonate with viewers.

• Film Footage – Brings concepts to life with cinematic flair,
• Stills and Graphics – Emphasize key points and add depth to the narrative.

Through the deliberate choice of images and juxtaposition, video essays are able to articulate complex ideas.

They elicit emotions and evoke reactions that pure text or speech cannot match.

From documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth to educational content on platforms like TED-Ed, video essays have proven their capacity to inform and inspire.

Sound design in video essays goes beyond mere accompaniment; it’s an integral component of storytelling.

Music and sound effects set the tone, heighten tension, and can even alter the audience’s perception of the visuals.

It’s this synergy that elevates the story, giving it texture and nuance.

• Music – Sets the emotional tone,
• Sound Effects – Enhances the realism of the visuals.

Crafting a narrative in this medium isn’t just about what’s on screen.

It requires an understanding of how each element – from script to sound – works in concert.

This unity forms an intricate dance of auditory and visual elements that can transform a simple message into a powerful narrative experience.

The Influence Of Video Essays In Education

Video essays have become a dynamic tool in academic settings, transcending traditional teaching methods.

By blending entertainment with education, they engage students in ways that lectures and textbooks alone cannot.

How To Create A Powerful Video Essay

Creating a compelling video essay isn’t just about stitching clips together.

It requires a blend of critical thinking, storytelling, and technical skill.

Choose a Central Thesis that resonates with your intended audience.

Like any persuasive essay, your video should have a clear argument or point of view that you aim to get across.

Research Thoroughly to support your thesis with factual data and thought-provoking insights.

Whether you’re dissecting themes in The Great Gatsby or examining the cinematography of Citizen Kane , your analysis must be thorough and well-founded.

Plan Your Narrative Structure before jumping into the editing process.

Decide the flow of your argument and how each segment supports your central message.

Typically, you’d include:

• An intriguing introduction – set the stage for what’s coming,
• A body that elaborates your thesis – present your evidence and arguments,
• Clearly separated sections – these act as paragraphs would in written essays.

Visuals Are Key in a video essay.

We opt for high-quality footage that not only illustrates but also enhances our narrative.

Think of visuals as examples that will bring your argument to life.

Audio selection Should Never Be an Afterthought.

Pair your visuals with a soundtrack that complements the mood you’re aiming to create.

Voice-overs should be clear and paced in a way that’s easy for the audience to follow.

Editing Is Where It All Comes Together.

Here, timing and rhythm are crucial to maintain viewer engagement.

We ensure our cuts are clean and purposeful, and transition effects are used judiciously.

Interactive Elements like on-screen text or graphics can add a layer of depth to your video essay.

Use such elements to highlight important points or data without disrupting the flow of your narrative.

Feedback Is Invaluable before finalizing your video essay.

We often share our drafts with a trusted group to gain insights that we might have missed.

It’s a part of refining our work to make sure it’s as impactful as it can be.

Remember, creating a video essay is about more than compiling clips and sound – it’s a form of expression that combines film criticism with visual storytelling.

It’s about crafting an experience that informs and intrigues, compelling the viewer to see a subject through a new lens.

With the right approach, we’re not just delivering information; we’re creating an immersive narrative experience.

What Is A Video Essay – Wrap Up

We’ve explored the intricate craft of video essays, shedding light on their ability to captivate and inform.

By weaving together compelling visuals and sound with a strong narrative, we can create immersive experiences that resonate with our audience.

Let’s harness these tools and share our stories, knowing that with the right approach, our video essays can truly make an impact.

Remember, it’s our unique perspective and creative vision that will set our work apart in the ever-evolving landscape of digital storytelling.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is visual storytelling in video essays.

Visual storytelling in video essays is the craft of using visual elements to narrate a story or present an argument, engaging viewers on a sensory level beyond just text or speech.

Why Is Visual Storytelling Important In Video Essays?

Visual storytelling is important because it captures attention and immerses the audience, making the content more memorable and impactful through the integration of visuals, sound, and narrative.

What Are The Key Elements Of A Powerful Video Essay?

The key elements include a central thesis, thorough research, a well-planned narrative structure, high-quality visuals, fitting audio, effective editing, interactive components, and a compelling immersive narrative experience.

How Do I Choose A Central Thesis For My Video Essay?

Choose a central thesis that is focused, debatable, and thought-provoking to anchor your video essay and give it a clear direction.

What Should I Focus On During The Research Phase?

Focus on gathering varied and credible information that supports your thesis and enriches the narrative with compelling facts and insights.

What Role Does Audio Play In Video Essays?

Audio enhances the visual experience by adding depth to the narrative, providing emotional cues, and aiding in information retention.

How Can Interactive Elements Improve My Video Essay?

Interactive elements can enhance engagement by allowing viewers to participate actively, often leading to a deeper understanding and connection with the content.

Why Is Feedback Important In Creating A Video Essay?

Feedback is crucial as it provides insights into how your video essay is perceived, allowing you to make adjustments to improve clarity, impact, and viewer experience.

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Related posts, should i go to film school, what are closing credits in film the final bow in the cinematic experience, movie genres list: the definitive guide, what is iris out in film focusing the end of a cinematic passage, denis villeneuve directing style: how to use his style in your films, what is graphic violence in film the impact of on-screen brutality [with examples].

A video essay is a type of video that is used to present a single, cohesive argument or idea. They can be used to communicate a complex idea in a way that is easy to understand. They can also be used to show how a

It is indeed.

Absolutely, Greg.

Great post! I found the definition of video essays to be particularly insightful.

As someone who is new to the world of video essays, it’s helpful to understand the different forms and purposes of this medium. The examples you provided were also enlightening, particularly the one on the First Amendment.

I’m looking forward to exploring more video essays in the future!

I found this post to be incredibly informative and helpful in understanding the concept of video essays.

As a budding filmmaker, I’m intrigued by the idea of blending traditional essay structure with visual storytelling. The examples provided in the post were particularly insightful, showcasing the versatility of video essays in capturing complex ideas and emotions. I can’t wait to explore this medium further and see where it takes me!

I found this post really fascinating, especially the section on the different types of video essays. I never knew there were so many variations!

As a student, I’m definitely going to start experimenting with video essays as a way to express myself and communicate my ideas. Thanks for sharing!

Interesting read! I’m curious to explore more video essays and see how they can be used to convey complex ideas in an engaging way.

Appreciate the comment

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Visual Rhetoric

Video essay resource guide.

PAR 102 (M-Th, 9 AM- 5 PM) Fine Arts Library Media Lab (same hours as FAL) PCL Media Lab (same hours as PCL)

About video essays

What are they.

“The video essay is often described as a form of new media, but the basic principles are as old as rhetoric: the author makes an assertion, then presents evidence to back up his claim. Of course it was always possible for film critics to do this in print, and they’ve been doing it for over 100 years, following more or less the same template that one would use while writing about any art form: state your thesis or opinion, then back it with examples. In college, I was assured that in its heart, all written criticism was essentially the same – that in terms of rhetorical construction, book reviews, music reviews, dance reviews and film reviews were cut from the same cloth, but tailored to suit the specific properties of the medium being described, with greater emphasis given to form or content depending on the author’s goals and the reader’s presumed interest.”

Matt Zoller Seitz on the video essay .

what makes a good video essay? 

Tony Zhou on how to structure a video essay

Kevin B. Lee on what makes a video essay “ great “

why should we use them? what are their limits?

Kevin B. Lee’s  experimental/artistic pitch for video essays

Kevin B. Lee’s mainstream pitch for video essay

“Of all the many developments in the short history of film criticism and scholarship, the video essay has the greatest potential to challenge the now historically located text-based dominance of the appraisal and interpretation of film and its contextual cultures…”

Andrew McWhirter argues that t he video essay has significant academic potential in the Fall 2015 issue of  Screen

“Importantly, the [new] media stylo does not replace traditional scholarship. This is a new practice beyond traditional scholarship. So how does critical media differ from traditional scholarship and what advantages does it offer? First, as you will see with the works in this issue, critical media demonstrates a shift in rhetorical mode. The traditional essay is argumentative-thesis, evidence, conclusion. Traditional scholarship aspires to exhaustion, to be the definitive, end-all-be-all, last word on a particular subject. The media stylo, by contrast, suggests possibilities-it is not the end of scholarly inquiry; it is the beginning. It explores and experiments and is designed just as much to inspire as to convince…”

Eric Fadden’s “ A Manifesto for Critical Media “

Adam Westbrook’s “ The Web-Video Problem: Why It’s Time to Rethinking Visual Storytelling from the Bottom Up “

Video essayists and venues

Matt Zoller Seitz (various venues) A writer and director by trade, Zoller Seitz is nonetheless probably best known as a prominent American cultural critic.  He’s made over 1000 hours of video essays and is generally recognized as a founder of the video essay movement in high-brow periodicals.  A recognized expert on Wes Anderson, Zoller Seitz is also notable because he often mixes other cinematic media (especially television) into his analysis, as in the above example, which doubles as an experiment in the absence of voiceover.

Various contributors, Press Play Co-founded by Matt Zoller Seitz and Ken Cancelosi,  Press Play  (published by Indiewire)   is one of the oldest high-brow venues for video essays about television, cinema, and other aspects of popular culture.

Various contributors, Keyframe   (A Fandor online publication) Fandor’s video essay department publishes work from many editors (what many video essayists call themselves) on and in a range of topics and styles.  Check it out to get an idea of all that things a video essay can do!

Various contributors, Moving Image Source A high-brow publication for video essays.

Tony Zhou, Every Frame a Painting The master of video essays on filmic form, Tony’s arguments are clean, simple, and well-evidenced.  Look to Tony as an example of aggressive and precise editing and arrangement.  He’s also an excellent sound editor–pay attention to his choices and try out some of his sound-mixing techniques in your essay.

Adam Johnston, Your Movie Sucks (YMS) Although an excellent example of epideictic film rhetoric, this channel is a great example of what  not  to do in this assignment (write a movie review, gush about how good/bad you think a movie is, focus on motifs or narrative content instead of  film form  as the center of your argument).  What you  can  learn from Adam is a lot about style.  Adam’s delivery, pacing, and editing all work together to promote a mildly-disinterested-and-therefore-credible ethos through a near-monotone, which I’ll affectionately dub the “Daria” narratorial ethos.

Adam Westbrook, delve.tv Adam Westbrook is part of an emerging group of professional video essayists and delve.tv is his version of a visual podcast.  Using the video essay form, Adam has developed a professional public intellectual ethos for himself through skillful overlay of explanation/interpretation and concept.  Check out Westbrook’s work as a really good example of presenting and representing visual concepts crucial to an argument.  He’s a master at making an argument in the form of storytelling, and he uses the video essay as a vehicle for that enterprise.

:: kogonada (various venues) If you found yourself wondering what the auteur video essay might look like, :: kogonada is it.  I like to call this “expressionist” video essay style.  Kogonada is the ultimate minimalist when it comes to voiceover/text over–its message impossibly and almost excessively efficient.  Half of the videos in his library are simple, expertly-executed supercuts , highlighting how heavily video essays rely on the “supercut” technique to make an argument.  Crafting an essay in this style really limits your audience and may not be a very good fit for the constraints of assignment (very “cutting edge,” as we talked about it in class), but you will probably draw inspiration from ::kogonada’s distinct, recognizable style, as well as an idea of what a video essay can do at the outer limits of its form.

Lewis Bond,  Channel Criswell Narrating in brogue-y Northern English, Bond takes his time, releasing a very carefully-edited, high-production video essay once every couple of months.  He’s a decent editor, but I feel his essays tend to run long, and I feel rushed by his narration at times.  Bond also makes a useful distinction between video essays and analysis/reviews on his channel–and while most of his analysis/reviews focus on film content (what you don’t want to imitate), his video essays stay pretty focused on film technique (what you do).  Hearing the same author consciously engage in two different modes of analysis might help you better understand the distinction between the two, as well.

Jack Nugent,  Now You See It Nugent’s brisk, formal analysis is both insightful and accessible–a good example of what it takes to secure a significant following in the highly-competitive Youtube marketplace.  [That’s my way of slyly calling him commercial.] Nugent is especially good at pairing his narration with his images.  Concentrate and reflect upon his simple pairings as you watch–how does Nugent help you process both sets of information at the pacing he sets?

Evan Puschak, The Nerdwriter Nerdwriter  is a great example the diversity of topics a video essay can be used to craft an argument about.  Every week, Puschak publishes an episode on science, art, and culture.  Look at all the different things Puschak considers visual rhetoric and think about how he’s using the video essay form to make honed, precisely-executed arguments about popular culture.

Dennis Hartwig and John P. Hess,  FilmmakerIQ Hartwig and Hess use video essays to explain filmmaking technique to aspiring filmmakers.  I’ve included the channel here as another example of what  not  to do in your argument, although perhaps some of the technical explanations that Hartwig and Hess have produced might help you as secondary sources.  Your target audience (someone familiar on basic film theory trying to better understand film form) is likely to find the highly technical, prescriptive arguments on FilmIQ boring or alienating. Don’t focus on technical production in your essay (how the film accomplishes a particular visual technique using a camera); rather, focus on how the audience interprets the end result in the film itself; in other words, focus on choices the audience can notice and interpret–how is the audience interpreting the product of production?  How often is the audience thinking about/noticing production in that process?

Kevin B. Lee (various venues) A good example of the older, high-brow generation of video essayists, Kevin’s collection of work hosted on his Vimeo channel offers slow, deliberate, lecture-inspired readings of film techniques and form.  Note the distinct stylistic difference between Kevin’s pacing and someone like Zhou or Lewis.  How does delivery affect reception?

Software Guides

How to access Lynda tutorials (these will change your life)

Handbrake and MakeMKV  (file converters)

Adobe Premiere  (video editing)

Camtasia  (screen capture)

File management

Use your free UTBox account to upload and manage your files.  Make sure you’ve got some sort of system for tracking and assembling everything into your video editing software.   UTBox has a 2 terabyte limit (much higher than Google Drive) and is an excellent file management resource for all sorts of academic work.

Adobe Premiere saves versions with links to your video files, so it’s imperative that you keep your video files folder in the same place on every machine you open it up on.  That’s why I keep all my video files in a big folder on box that I drop on the desktop of any machine I’m working on before I open my premiere files.  The Adobe Premiere project walkthrough  has more details on this.

Where to find video and how to capture it

About fair use . Make sure your composition complies with the Fair Use doctrine and familiarize yourself with the four criteria.

The best place to capture images is always from a high-resolution DVD or video file .  The first place you should go to get the film is the library– see instructions for searching here .

To import the video and audio from your DVD or video file into your video editing software (like Premiere), you will first need to use a software to convert it to an .mkv.  See instructions on how to do that here .

Camtasia tutorials .  Camtasia is a program that allows you to capture anything that’s going on on your screen .  This is a critical tool for this assignment as you decide what kind of interface you want to present to your reader in your video essay.  Camtasia also allows you to capture any high-quality video playing on your desktop without licensing restrictions.

You can also use Clip Converter to capture images and sound from pre-existing YouTube videos , and it may be a little faster and easier than Camtasia.   I suggest converting things into .mkv before putting them into your video editor, regardless of where you get the material from.

Film theory and criticism

• /r/truefilm’s reading and viewing guide

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7 Early Video Art

Video transforms art.

Very similar to how the introduction of photography and film challenged the definition of what is called art, the advent of video begged not the question of “Is this art?”, but rather “How will video transform art?” The technology of photography received its first artistic recognition for its application to existing art forms, a reason why many of the first photographs are still life images, such as Louis Daguerre’s (1787-1851)  Still Life with Plaster Casts (1837).

Elements of New Media Art in Video Art

As you explore the early history of video art in this chapter, notice when you recognize these elements of New Media Art.

• Expanding the definition of art
• Exploiting new technology for artistic purposes
• Democratizing access to art
• Merging new media with old media
• Time – unfolding over time
• Liveness – happening in real time, the artist is there
• Variable – always different, changing
• Interactive – viewers are involved and can change and manipulate the work

However, as video entered the visual arts, there were many other forms of visual expression, such as Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, Dada, found object sculpture, Fluxus, film, performance art, feminist art, Situationist International, and many other movements. Video, like an objective tool, was used to extend expression in diverse fields, which were by no means mutually exclusive. For this reason, it becomes difficult to follow the developments in early video simply chronologically or only by its application in various movements. A delineated analysis may seem chaotic, but there is no clean and simple manner of representing postwar cultures. The use of video art came naturally in artists in the postwar landscape with not only consumer level affordability and access, but its language was familiar to most households.

As Pop Art made it abundantly clear, mass culture came to define America in the 1960s and the television was one of the more the ideal forms of media to hijack. Many artists in diverse backgrounds and goals tasked themselves during this time with deconstructing images and imbuing them with new, subversive meaning and having video in their toolkit opened a whole new world of possibilities. Video was taken up as a rich source of content ripe for appropriation and it proved itself useful for image manipulation, documenting happenings and performances, and even instrumental in installations.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fluxus artists seemed particularly drawn to the medium. One of the first, significant works to emerge under the umbrella of the video art was TV Dé-collage , a series of events produced by the German artist Wolf Vostell (1932-1998) under the umbrella of installation art. The sculptural space in this case was the window of a Parisian department store, where he placed television sets on desks and furniture, displaying warped images. Since the late 1950s Vostell began experimenting with various forms of manipulation and, to some degree, disruption of visual messages in mass media from mass produced publications to billboards displayed for the masses. The leap then to integrate television sets into his works came naturally, which found powerful functional and symbolic expression in images, assemblages, installations, and sculpture.

Another direction that some video artists were taking their installations was to activate spectators into participating in the artwork. In Slipcover (1966) by artist Les Levine (born 1935) used a series of monitors to present spectators with recorded footage of themselves, which, for many, was an unsettling and exhilarating experience. The ability to shape spaces for and depend on the viewer to elicit a specific feeling was a powerful prospect and one that artist Bruce Nauman (born 1941) seized in his 1968 work Video Corridor .

This installation consisted of two parallel, floor-to-ceiling walls that created a narrow tunnel with two monitors at the end. As the viewer walked through the claustrophobic corridor that arrived at the screens only to find them streaming surveillance video of the viewer. The confines of the space paired with the displaced perspective aims to disorient and even instill fear into the viewer.

Expanding Video into the Arts

Initially, the television served Fluxus artists across the world throughout the 1960s like a prop in installations and mixed media sculpture to critique the new, vapid culture surrounding television. However, the use of video quickly expanded into other fields, like performance art , and gained recognition as a medium in its own right. Artists and critics alike were already questioning whether artworks need be limited to physical objects in the first place and video assumed an important role in this transition. An early adopter of video, US artist Bruce Nauman linked video media with performance art and sculpture. His work Wall/Floor Positions (1968) Nauman turns his own body into the sculptural work in poses throughout his studio. This work was a natural progression that arose from his explorations in integrating new media, as was clear in the photographs of his Fountain (1967) a year earlier.

Korean artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006) began to utilize the television set and other video devices for their inherent qualities for formal expression. Influenced by his time studying with American artist John Cage (1912-1992) in Germany, Paik took an approach akin to that of a mad scientist with a touch of Eastern zen philosophy. Like a curious inventor he deconstructed the appliances to experiment with the distortion of images with magnets and the sync pulses of the displays. Taking it further, the televisions were disassembled and collaged around rooms randomly, in shapes, in seemingly non-sequitur contexts. In the video performance Participation TV (1969) Paik invited spectators to take on an active role in manipulating the performance with microphones.

With this momentum Paik followed these performances by a collaborative performance series with musician Charlotte Moorman  (1933-1991) that utilized inventive applications of televisions, which attempt to both reconcile man/machine and also address contemporary social issues, such as mainstream feminism. In TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1968-69), for example two cameras are focused on Moorman’s face, which were reflected into two circular mirrors over her breasts. The simultaneous eroticization of technology and objectification of women is further explored in Concerto for TV, Cello, and Videotapes (1971). For this piece three monitors – playing pre-recorded performances by the Moorman – are stacked in the general shape of a cello, which is then played so-to-speak by Moorman, seated behind with a bow. It is difficult to single out one aspect for analysis in the work.

Clearly, there are departures from sculpture and performance art, as well as messages regarding gender and sexuality, harking back to a previous collaboration with Moorman, Opera Sextronique (1967), but the dislocation and layering of time was perhaps most important to Paik:. “It must be stressed, that my work is not painting, sculpture, ” noted Paik “but rather Time art: I love no particular genre.” Although that statement was given as early as 1962, it holds true through most of his career as Paik navigated through movements, playing often in the spaces between.

Paralleling the advancement of consumer level technologies, artists like Paik continued to push on the boundaries of artistic applications of video. In 1965 Sony introduced the Portapak, one of the first portable video cameras and within weeks artists were using them for video art. Recognizing the potential, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) became one of the first US artists to work almost exclusively with portable cameras. Several of his early tapes became content in his first double-projection film Outer and Inner Space (1965). Later in 1965, Paik and Warhol both became essentially the first spokesmen for video art with screenings. On September 29, Warhol screened his famous “underground tapes” in underground railroad space under the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. On October 4th, Paik presented Electric Video Recorder (1965) at Cafe au Go Go.

Video was able to transition from simply a means of documenting performance art to an essential medium to better connect with the audience and communicate. Vito Acconci (1940-2017) was using single-channel, black and white video for his performances throughout the 1970s. In Filler (1971) Acconci creates a very close physical space between himself and the camera on the floor inside of a cardboard box. This and many of his works to follow, like Theme Song (1973) are framed in very close quarters in order to engage with the viewer in a closer psychological connection and to enhance the feeling of voyeurism. In 1974 artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) released her collected series Body Tracks and her film Burial Pyramid, all works where her body becomes the focal point to elucidate feminist critique. In another vein of exploring intimacy with their own body, artist Chris Burden (1946-2015) sought to shock audiences at the expense of his own body. In the performance Shoot (1971) a bullet is shot into his arm; in Through the Night Softly (1973) he lies on his bare stomach with his hands and feet bound behind his back and drags himself through a street of broken glass. The intense, personal connection that video offered was picked up by many artists looking to communicate a visceral experience. You can find a more detailed discussion of Mendieta’s and Burden’s work in the Performance Art chapter.

In Third Tape (1976), artist Peter Campus (born 1937) presented the story of a man that transpires in three parts. First, a man’s face is presented with clear fishing line bound across his face, effectively cutting him into cross sections. Then in the second segment the viewer sees a hand place mirrored tiles across a black surface, as it slowly becomes clear from the reflections that a man’s face is looking down from above. Finally, in the last part, a man’s face looks up through a tank of water at the camera above. Slowly his face recedes into the waters.

Unfolding the Digital Landscape

The technology of the portable camera quickly evolved from the half-inch reel-to-reel in 1968 to the more compact three-quarter-inch, color video cassettes available in 1972. In these formative years some artists were actually involved in the research and development. At its heart, the video camera is a complicated machine, a device that converts moving images into electronic signals that are transmitted to a monitor, which decodes them and reassembles them into an image to display. There are many points in that process open for manipulation. In 1970, Nam June Paik  partnered with electrical engineer Shuya Abe (born 1932) to create a digital synthesizer capable of image manipulation instead of sound. Similar to revolutionary shifts in other fields of art, such as Modernist architecture or photography, the trailblazers of the art world move into areas dominated by technicians and engineers.

Elements of New Media Art

• Expands the definition of art
• Exploits new technology for artistic purposes

American painter, filmmaker, and teacher Ed Emshwiller (1925-1990) saw incredible potential in video synthesizers and computers for creating original artwork. In Scape-mates (1972) computer animation is used to render a dance of figurative and abstract visual elements in video. Indeed, the digital innovations of the 1970s ushered in a new era of image rendering. In 1973 Dan Sandin developed an image processor that is now known as the Sandin Image Processor, which accepted basic video input signals and manipulated them in a similar way that the Moog synthesizer did with audio. The device made real time modifications, making it ideal for live performances and “Electronic Visualization Events”. Another revolutionary advancement came from artist Keith Sonnier (1941-2020), who developed a forerunner to the modern computer image scanner, the Scanimate. With this he created aesthetic collages of images, like Color Wipe (1973).

In the 1980s video art took on a new dimension of real-time visualization in the form of stream-of-consciousness performance, which resonated best with Conceptual artists. Gary Hill (born 1951), for example, centered his work in linguistics, instead of music, in video art. In Electronic Linguistics (1977) the image is treated as a language that evolves. This is achieved through computer generated shapes on a screen that correlate to sound inputs. Even Nam June Paik continued to further video editing devices beyond the synthesizer that he developed with Shuya Abe. With more resources at hand Paik excelled at these creating stream-of-consciousness visual and conceptual techniques with vibrant image/music compositions such as Butterfly (1986). Works like these continued the modern and postmodern experiments in formal compositions of light and color in the digital field. Most artists working in the foundations of video art, were already members of an existing movement that did not shy away from technological change, who saw a new mode of expression and saw themselves as active participants in that change.

Consuming Video

In subsequent artworks Paik also seems to personally grapple with the classic Situationist paradox of balancing an attack on television — or at least video as a medium for passive spectatorship — with weaponizing it for critique. Beyond the typical passive consumption of the television, many artists recognized that video provides a uniquely creative forum for the artist and the spectator with its ability to receive and transmit. Television, much like a radio, is capable of reciprocal communication, receiving and transmitting information. Consumers have only been sold on the idea that information can flow in one direction. A number of works in the 1970s were centered around this mythology. For one example, look at artist Richard Serra’s (born 1939) video essay Television Delivers People (1973). The video presents a scrolling text that criticizes television programming as merely corporate sponsored entertainment, a message that is underscored by a soundtrack of muzak, a bland genre of music traditionally played in elevators and malls. Also consider the video performance Media Burn (1975) by Ant Farm, an San Francisco-based artist collective. Media Burn offered a particularly interesting counter to consumer culture by stacking televisions, setting them aflame, and then driving through the stack with a 1959 Cadillac at high speed.

Many early video artists like those from Ant Farm and the New York-based collective Paper Tiger Television recognized that a new consumer society that was growing out of television and offered critique using the same medium. Often these artist activists countered mainstream television programming with their own documentaries and news reports. One collective, Top Value Television, recorded their own coverage of the U.S. Democratic and Republican conventions in 1972. Artist activists sneaked onto the main floors with their Sony Portapaks and began interviewing everyone. The resulting report was an entertaining and scything glimpse into American politics and journalism. Paper Tiger Television continued to produce a guerrilla style media counter attack on the mainstream media by producing alternative news reports for cable television well into the 1980s.

Focus: Immediacy

As you continue learning about the early history of video art try to identify these elements of New Media Art in the work you’re exploring:

• Interactive – viewers are involved and can change and manipulate the work
• Collaborative – the artist is a facilitator and viewers make the art with them
• Time – unfolds over time
• Connectivity – made possible because of new global connections

The psychological space between the spectator became of increased interest to artists and the more it was explored, the more it proved to be an innate, powerful quality of video that artists leaned into even more, giving video more autonomy as its own art form. While exhibition space in institutions was initially given to television sets for its proximity to sculpture, the field of video art expanded quickly to fill and utilize physical space in ways that sculpture and painting could not, spilling into the realms of performance and installation art. In his live performance The Last Nine Minutes (1977) American artist Douglas Davis (1933-2014) took part in one of the first international satellite telecasts at the opening of documenta vi alongside Paik and artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986). In this telecast to over 25 countries Davis confronted viewers with the disparity in space/time between them. One of the most significant qualities that video embodied over film was its immediacy. Films have to be treated, processed, and edited.

To create a more immersive experience, artists like Dan Graham (born 1942) were led to create multifaceted systems for specific environments, sometimes using mirrors and often employing closed circuit video setups. Graham uses these elements to surround the viewer in Performance/Audience/Mirror (1975), where he stood facing the audience, but with a mirror to his back and proceeded to describe and infer meaning from the movements of those looking on. Then he turned around and renewed the dialogue but through the filter of the mirror.

Video and mirrors work together to manipulate the relationship to the viewer in Graham’s 1983 piece Performance and Stage Set Utilizing Two Way Mirror and Video Time Delay . In this work the audience is seated facing a group of musicians with a two-way mirror between them. The musicians began to play and then a six second delayed video feed of the act was projected onto the mirror, creating a phenomenological visual and auditory kaleidoscope. The experience for the audience was effectively watching themselves and listening to the performance in real time, but having the superimposition of delayed performance all through the mediator of the mirror.

Stop & Reflect: Active or Passive Participant

The 1960s and 70s witnessed a significant reconsideration of the relationships between viewer, artwork and artist. Moving forward in this text it is important to be able to understand these relationships and, moreover, this understanding will ultimately shape how you personally navigate art in museums, galleries, in the streets, and at home. Ask yourself the following:

• How would you define an active and a passive participant in viewing art?
• Do you think that viewing a painting is an active or passive experience? Why?

For further reading: The Emancipated Spectator (2009) by Jacques Rancière. [PDF via Brown University]

Focus: Subverting the Gaze

As also discussed earlier with Vito Acconci, performance artists during the 1970s were taking advantage of video to control the level of intimacy with the audience. It was precisely this intimacy that many feminist artists seized upon for critique and video suddenly became one of the staples of the feminist toolkit. The larger theme of visual consumption was narrowed notably by film critic Laura Mulvey to analyze and critique the historical and contemporary presence of the “male gaze” in her essay “ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema ” (1975). Briefly put, spectators are commonly put in a masculine subject position with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire, a relationship that is referred to as “the male gaze”. The essay proved to have far reaching influence on practicing artists regarding the representation of women, far beyond the scope of mainstream cinema.

Issues of gender roles and non-binary sexuality were commonplace in art of this time and the differences in approaching these themes were vast. The technique of manipulating images (such as décollage ) continued to be popular for critique of female images and the psychological intimacy between spectator and art continued with loaded sexuality. Many feminist performance artist, such as Ulrike Rosenbach (born 1943), Ana Mendieta, and Joan Jonas (born 1936), leaned early and heavily into video as a medium. One of Jonas’ most notable works Left Side, Right Side (1972) synthesized several of the aforementioned stratagems of other video artists. Her performance aimed to disorient the viewer and manipulate perspective using a camera and a mirror. Introducing a linguistic component, Jonas repeats the statements “This is my left side, this is my right side” throughout the performance. On one hand, the inversion of conventional perspective through optics reflected the artistic, mechanical interest of video. On the other hand, the use of the female body and the disruption of visual consumption clearly fit into the landscape of feminist art. The challenging mainstream portrayal of the female body preoccupied many female artists. Focusing on facial close ups, artist Hannah Wilke (1940-1993) practiced sexual gestures with her fingers and her tongue in Gestures (1973). Through the course of the act Wilke makes the gestures more and more grotesque until all eroticism has fled.

Video has been celebrated as an intensely personal medium. Explorations of the body and of the self were, as demonstrated here, not limited to women. Artist Bill Viola (born 1951) has made a career out of a life-long introspection of his spiritual and physical self. Viola started as a young artist experimenting with a young medium, a partnership suited to metaphysical self exploration. Beginning with Information (1973) Viola experimented with the introduction of an interrupting signal in his video recorder in order to produce a sequence of images that could be externally manipulated, a technique similar to that of Nam June Paik. In A Non-Dairy Creamer (1975) the viewer gazes at Viola, but through the reflection in a cup of coffee, which slowly disappears as he drinks it, a similar concept to Dan Graham’s Performance/Audience/Mirror mentioned earlier, but on a more personal level. Using the reflection and filtering of himself to represent and reconcile his self/non-self, became—in many ways—the leitmotif of his metaphysical journey in video and continues to inform even his contemporary work.

It was in his work I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986) that yielded a reflection of himself in the eye of an owl, an image so powerful to him that he made it his signature mark.

If the question of video began as “Is this art?”, it certainly established itself as not only art, but an independent media. Ultimately, video offered a new, alternative media to render meaning and new ideas in space and time that was unavailable in its predecessors, like film and performance art. Time, perhaps, was the most significant characteristic of video that drew artists to it, artists seeking to identify, communicate, or simply explore art in this dimension. The ephemeral quality of video, artists would find, would make it possible to unify and dissect, to focus and obscure, to represent, to be signifier and signified .

Watch & Consider: Electronic Superhighway

As society began to approach the turn of the twenty first century, Americans were looking ahead, thinking about what kind of future awaited them. Paik predicted a new paradigm for communication, something that he called a “broadband communication network” or “electronic super highway” connecting us all. By the 1990s, his concept of electric information exchanges seemed prophetic in light of the emerging “world wide web”. Watch this video from Smarthistory about the perservation of Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway.

After watching the video, consider the following questions:

• To what extent is this object purely a functional piece, communicating information, or does it have sculptural value?
• As the screens are replaced with newer technology, does the piece change in value, experience, or meaning?
• In what what does this work depend on the spectator?

Key Takeaways

At the end of this chapter you will begin to:

• Explain the historical divergences of video art from photography, collage, performance art, and sculpture.
• Identify video art as time-based, interactive and replicable.
• Discuss the employment of video art as discourse in socio-political critiques, such as Feminism.
• Analyze the techniques and characteristics unique to video art that innovatively utilize space and time.

Selected Bibliography

Hall, Douglas, and Sally jo Fifer. Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art . New York: Aperture/BAVC, 1992.

Hill, Christine. REWIND: A Guide to Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S., 1968-1980 . 2nd ed. Chicago, Illinois: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2008.

Popper, Frank. Art of the Electronic Age . London: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator . New York: Verso, 2011.

Rush, Michael. New Media in Art . London: Thames and Hudson, 2005.

Understanding New Media Art Copyright © 2022 by Elizabeth Bilyeu; Kelsey Ferreira; Luke Peterson; and Christine M. Weber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The best video essays of 2020

A year of physical separation and isolation was, not coincidentally, a year of unprecedented outreach and collaboration amongst the artists, critics and scholars at work in the burgeoning form of the video essay. Our poll of 42 of those essayists highlights 170 recommendations.

26 December 2020

By  Ariel Avissar , Cydnii Wilde Harris , Grace Lee

Introduction

As with any retrospective article, newsletter or GDPR -compliant email this year, we must begin with the unavoidable acknowledgement of: wow… what a year.

But while many essayists may have understandably been less prolific than in previous years, this year’s turmoil may have incited an even stronger drive towards the ways we can connect with each other virtually. Last year, the word ‘community’ was suggested as an overarching theme for the poll, and if a theme has emerged through this year’s results it would be an evolution of that same communal spirit into one of collaboration. It has repeatedly been collaborative projects that have helped inspire new ideas in a time when motivation wasn’t easy to find and allowed us to feel closer when we physically cannot be.

The Video Essay Podcast, created by Will DiGravio, has expanded its scope this year, co-curating The Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist (along with Cydnii Wilde Harris and Kevin B. Lee), launching the Notes on Videographic Criticism newsletter to further share news and promote interesting new work, and introducing experimental homework assignments to encourage creativity and new methods of working. Response from the video essay community has been overwhelming: the BLM Playlist (selections of which have already been screened in several online events, discussed and written about) has grown to include over 130 video essays and related audiovisual materials, and nearly 70 videographic exercises have been submitted thus far in response to the various homework assignment prompts.

Another collaborative video essay project, Once Upon a Screen , organised by Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer, was published in the latest issue of The Cine-Files, and consists of a series of fantastic essays responding to a singular theme: how formative, traumatic experiences of cinema go on to impact our lives. Meanwhile, Nando v Movies gathered over 180 essayists on YouTube to come together and create the One X-Cellent Scene playlist (a sequel to 2019’s One Marvellous Scene ), collectively exploring the X-Men franchise.

These efforts were matched by increased institutional engagement, with further venues for the production and circulation of video essays joining the fold, such as the Netflix UK commissions (with an emphasis on Black creators); the new online journal Zoom Out ; Monographs , a new series of commissioned essays on Asian cinema by the Asian Film Archive ( AFA ), which premiered at the Dharamshala International Film Festival; and Thinking Images , a new videographic program at the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival.

Trends and numbers

An overview of the poll, and some numbers and statistics: of the 42 contributors to the poll this year, 27 are male, 13 are female and two are non-binary. They submitted a total of 241 votes, for 170 unique entries which span online video essays, essay films, documentaries, installations and an HBO series; also a Kanye West music video! These works were made – or published – this past year, by both established essayists and newcomers to the field; they range from 24 seconds to 14 hours in length; some were viewed only once or twice prior to appearing on this poll, others had up to 10.4 million views, and everywhere in between.

Unsurprisingly, some prominent trends that emerged in the poll results this year included video essays related either directly or indirectly to the COVID -19 pandemic and its consequences (with 21 mentions); the presence of the BLM movement was also felt (with 22 mentions), as well as a more political slant to this year’s picks in general. The Once Upon a Screen collection was also featured prominently (with 25 mentions), and included the two top-mentioned videos in the poll.

The top-mentioned videos were: Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox by Kevin B. Lee (12 mentions); My Mulholland by Jessica McGoff (ten mentions); Forensickness by Chloé Galibert-Laîné (nine mentions); and Feeling and Thought as They Take Form: Early Steadicam, Labor, and Technology (1974-1985) by Katie Bird (eight mentions). Catherine Grant and Luís Azevedo each had five different videos mentioned on the poll.

The videos are overwhelmingly presented in English (91 per cent) and are predominantly from the US (41 per cent) and the UK (28 per cent), while France makes up 6 per cent of the remaining votes, followed by 18 other countries (mostly in Europe). The dominant focus in terms of medium remains film (71 per cent of videos), with television (five per cent) and gaming (circa two per cent) coming in at distant second and third.

Of the essayists whose work is featured on the poll, 33 per cent are female (up from 24 per cent last year!) and 57 per cent are male (down from 68 per cent last year), with the remaining ten per cent made by mixed-gender teams or non-binary essayists. We did not parse – neither contributors nor picks – by race (among other reasons, as this would have been somewhat challenging), but hope that everyone is thinking more critically about whose voices they’re choosing to listen to and endorse.

We hope this poll continues to contribute to the ongoing conversation among creators and lovers of video essays worldwide, and that next year will see even more opportunities and venues for collaborating on, making and sharing this form that we are all so enthusiastic about; and also, you know, fewer fires and plagues?

Here are the results…

Table of contributors

(click on a name to jump to their picks.)

Film theorist and curator, Charles University in Prague & Národní filmový archiv

Forensickness

Chloé Galibert-Laîné

The author’s ongoing investigation of online communities and desktop interfaces continues to yield fascinating results. This time, it takes the form of a detective story which makes sure that no revelation waits for us at the end, but also, more importantly, that our cultural and technological mechanisms of knowledge-seeking are fundamentally flawed. Instead, it guides us through an endless road of detours whose diversity can surprise even a know-it-all desktop cinema aficionado. Not only a poignant contribution to videographic film studies but also a work that gives the adjective ‘essayistic’ a truly contemporary meaning.

Feeling and Thought as They Take Form: Early Steadicam, Labor, and Technology (1974-1985)

While examining film technology and its impact on the image content, I often wonder how to make these material interventions visible and open to reflection at the same time. Katie Bird’s exploration of the Steadicam and Panaglide camera devices indicates that videographic scholarship can be employed to overcome this dilemma. By understanding the camera operating as, first and foremost, an affective, embodied experience, many supposed ‘imperfections’ and ‘instabilities’ can be revealed as things that make the films tick. Moreover, the essay shows that the application of digital tools in archival research may have a more playful, creative side.

Crossings. On Freak Orlando

Johannes Binotto

This essay resurrects a relatively overlooked cinematic trend – the German queer cinema of the 1970s–80s and the wider tendency of stylistic and bodily excess in avant-garde cinema. What is crucial is that the author uses the short scene from Ulrike Ottinger’s Freak Orlando in a way that renovates the contemporary videographic practice as well. By putting his own body on display and overlaying the action on screen with his performance, he enables us to take the haptic visuality of the shot literally, and not just through the usual analog/digital manipulations. More of this, please.

The Wind in the Trees from Early Cinema to Pixar

Jordan Schonig

I have stumbled upon Schonig’s work thanks to Shane Denson’s new book Discorrelated Images (highly recommended, by the way), and I was happy to find out that he also makes accomplished scholarly video essays. This piece focuses on the contingencies (“rippling waves, rising dust, and fluttering leaves”) in early films and CGI animation, highlighting how digital algorithms make the distinctions between accidental qualities and careful calculation blurrier than ever. Schonig effectively demonstrates the divergences and affinities between the pre-cinematic and post-cinematic modes of staging accidents while also opening ways for addressing this complicated dialectic in the videographic form itself.

There Must Be Some Kind of Way Out of Here

Rainer Kohlberger

This year has seen the completion of a brilliant experimental film essay The Philosophy of Horror: A Symphony of Film Theory (Péter Lichter and Bori Máté). Nevertheless, as I have already mentioned this project in the last year’s poll, I would like to give a shout to another experimental work. Kohlberger’s film brings the spectacular world of disaster movies into contact with the dance of coloured dots on the surface of the image. This unpredictable humming occludes the well-worn explosions and catastrophes in Hollywood cinema and exposes them as mere paltry things compared to the horrors of filmic matter.

Live at Appleville

It may not be a videographic essay per se, but… In this video, as far from a traditional music concert as possible, the American hyperpop duo is goofing around in a dark room with a laptop showing scenes from Ratatouille. This disturbing yet strangely funny exercise creatively exploits the limitations of Covid and opens yet another place where cinema can be relocated. Somehow it could even fit as an unlikely addition to the Once Upon a Screen videographic project – a childhood cinematic trauma turned into a liberating performance. And I am not even a fan of the band…

Thinking Audiovisually

Department of Film Studies, Charles University

This is clearly a biased choice, but I still feel obliged to mention three student video essays. A workshop with Kevin B. Lee saw the birth of many short videographic exercises, some of which were developed into full-length pieces. As the videographic practice in the Czech Republic is being invented practically from scratch, I was surprised how accomplished, original, and funny the videos turned out. Thus, Lucie Formánková’s essay on her fascination with Tom Cruise’s acting, Valerie Špuláková’s work on a failed Czech dubbing of Twin Peaks, and Otto Urban’s look on the synecdochic character of trailers deserve a shout.

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Ariel Avissar

Media scholar, video essayist and lecturer at the Steve Tisch School of Film and TV , Tel Aviv University

What begins as a personal account of the experience of watching Chris Kennedy’s Watching the Detectives evolves into so much more; part essay film, part desktop documentary, part conspiracy thriller with a twist ending, this epistemological audio-visual meditation expertly weaves together some of my favourite preoccupations – cultural depictions of counter-terrorism intelligence efforts, John Carpenter’s They Live!, conspiracy boards, Game of Thrones fandom and Chloé Galibert-Laîné – into one jumbled, coherent, meandering, beautiful whole. My favourite media object of the year.

A Very Long Exposure Time

This silent visual poem was produced for the Time Complex exhibition at the Yerevan Biennial 2020. While aesthetically the polar opposite of Forensickness, it similarly develops Chloé’s ongoing fascination with images – how we see them, what they reveal, what they leave out, what can we use them for. Simple, stimulating, sublime.

To The Lighthouse

Kevin B. Lee

How do you make a video essay about a film you have no access to? Lee has previously wrestled with the challenges of inaccessibility. Commissioned for the 2020 International Film Festival Rotterdam Critics Choice, this enthralling mashup of 36 different films starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, described by Lee as his ‘fanfic version ’of The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers, will make anyone who hasn’t seen the film feel as though they have. Arguably more enjoyable than the original, and with considerably less flatulence.

Extreme Is My Name

Johanna Vaude

Made for ARTE ’s online magazine “Blow Up”, this impressive montage is both a tribute to and a study of the works of one of my favourite directors, Kathryn Bigelow. Vaude takes Bigelow’s raw, adrenaline-fused energy then dials it up to eleven. Her video grabs hold of you from the get-go, and doesn’t let up until it’s – regrettably – over.

The Age of Emptiness

Oswald iten.

Iten’s lovingly-edited video recuts the lush imagery of Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, focusing on shots devoid of human presence, and excluding human faces entirely. Fittingly accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s score from Scorsese’s own Taxi Driver, this tale of Edwardian-era New York aristocracy is recontextualised for our current day and age. The result plays like an annotated relic of the Age of the Coronavirus, such as might be uncovered by future historians seeking to make sense of this bizarre period in human history.

Catherine Grant

This moving epigraphic tribute to the late Irrfan Khan merges Khan’s performance in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool with excerpts from Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second to powerful, touching effect. Another example by Grant of what the videographic epigraph can achieve at its purest and most potent form.

House – Everything but the Kitchen Sink

Jesse Tribble

This ambitious six-part series on House MD , clocking in at four hours(!), is one of the most comprehensive analyses of a television series I’ve seen, certainly one devoted to a network medical procedural (in its early seasons, anyway). House remains one of my favourite (semi-guilty) pleasures, and while this episodic, narration-led effort by Tribble, highly impressive in its intimate familiarity with the show’s eight seasons, might not be ground-breaking in form or content, I found it extremely enjoyable and ridiculously watchable. Try the first part then see if you can resist the urge to keep on going; I certainly couldn’t.

Luís Azevedo

Filmmaker for hire. Maker of direct-to-video essays for Little White Lies , Mubi, Fandor, Amazon Prime &  Barbican

6ix9ine GOOBA except theres no music

Rob Lopez ( RØB )

Christopher Nolan | Doing It For Real

Julian Palmer (The Discarded Image)

Women Make Film

Mark Cousins ( watch trailer )

Cliff Booth Drives Home

Philip Brubaker

The Visual Architecture of Parasite

Thomas Flight

The Movies Behind Your Favourite GIF s

Leigh Singer (Little White Lies)

What Gordon Parks Saw

Evan Puschak (The Nerdwriter)

Filmmaker/writer

Expands the notion of what a video essay is and can be. Fascinating, even suspenseful. Blends performance in with videographic criticism in a way I had not seen before. Because of Binotto’s video, the way a critic can interact with a film is not what it was even a year ago.

From screening to (live) streaming

Davide Rapp & Andrea Dal Martello

An incredible marriage of past and present culture. Rapp & Martello have made a drop-dead hilarious critique of pandemic-era social media that is precisely funny because of how it recontextualises the movies that we grew up watching. It is an in-joke that richly rewards those who get it; how would these movies we loved in the past translate in today’s world?

Francisca Lila

A breathtaking, thorough taxonomy of flowers, plants and trees from the film canon. Lila’s brilliant, seamless editing makes the transition from Antichrist to Pather Panchali flow naturally, and part of the joy of this video essay is spotting and identifying the films she draws from.

In the Kitchen with Pedro Almodóvar

Luís Azevedo (Little White Lies)

Azevedo makes videos that are so sensuous and nimbly edited that he breathes new life into the clips on his timeline. Here his sensibility finds the perfect match: the kitchen. He finds captivating gestures from Almodóvar’s films and his speaking voice strikes just the right chord between his ideas and the visuals. Bravo.

Bad Vacations

The Criterion Channel

Criterion makes many great, concise supercuts to advertise the films on their streaming service. I wish they would credit the editors more generously, or at all, even. This is one that I have rewatched many times, because I love the arc; how a promising vacation can turn into a nightmare. This was a year full of miserable events that caused me great dismay, but somehow I delight in the pessimism of this teaser.

Change Needs to Come

Nelson carvajal.

Using simple, unadorned straight cuts set to an iconic song of the civil rights movement, Carvajal says what needed to be said. And oh, is it painful. A collection of cell phone imagery of black people murdered in contemporary life is juxtaposed with archival images dating back to slave times to show that in many ways, nothing has changed. We saw coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement throughout 2020, so I would be remiss not to include what I believe to be a very strong entry in this significant genre. I hate watching this video essay.

Video Artist and Founder of Free Cinema Now

Transcending Heidegger – The Cinema of Terrence Malick

Tom van der Linden (Like Stories of Old)

I was surprised by how moved I was by this video essay. Even with the voiceover element, van der Linden never hits the snooze button; his voice inquires, wonders and keeps insisting. By the end, I was floored by this work’s sincerity, the messaging, and its revelations about the human condition. Malick himself would be proud. It’s the best video essay of the year.

The Unloved – The Siege

Scout Tafoya (RogerEbert.com)

Part of the charm of Tafoya’s The Unloved series is that it gives us all a chance to beat our chests about our sentimental favorite films or guilty pleasure movies. When this entry on The Siege came out, it was a couple of months into the pandemic here in the States. I, like many people, was working from home, and felt really disconnected from the outside world. The way Tafloya injected socio-political urgency into his thesis for Zwick’s film, was like a bolt of electricity; it woke my senses, and reminded me of the very real world outside.

Wash Us In The Blood

Arthur Jafa

It was released as a music video but as soon as the appropriated images hit the screen and it was revealed to be created by video artist Arthur Jafa, it became, for me, a video essay. The striking juxtapositions Jafa creates between images and Kanye West’s music is thrilling. This is a vital work disguised as a music video. As I write this, it has 10,370,226 views on YouTube. That’s a really good turnout for a video essay if you ask me.

Andris Damburs

Cinefile, creator and moderator of 35 MM – A GROUP FOR CINEPHILES

Nothing at Stake

Everything is a remix: reality.

Kirby Ferguson

Aspect Ratio – The Changing Shape of Cinema

Leon Barnard

Physical Storytelling in Céline Sciamma’s Coming-Of-Age Trilogy

Why do you love cinema.

Ignacio Montalvo

Czechoslovak New Wave

Jonathan Keogh

Ian Danskin

Writer/editor/creator of YouTube channel Innuendo Studios .

Children of DOOM

Errant Signal

Errant Signal’s Children of DOOM is a dissection of the first-person shooter, wherein Chris Franklin takes what he considers to be the most important/interesting FPS from a given year and analyses it, planning to do one for every year of the genre’s existence. Chris has long been one of the most thoughtful voices in games criticism, and he’s always at his best discussing FPS . (His video on BioShock Infinite is what set me on the path to becoming a YouTuber.) In a year when watching political deep dives of the kind I typically make felt exhausting, this was my comfort food.

Coronavirus and America’s Death Cult

Carlos Maza

This is the year Carlos Maza – having previously been the main reason to subscribe to Vox’s YouTube – went solo and launched his own channel (he picked a heck of a year). He’s done excellent videos on the primaries and police brutality, but my fave is his video explaining the government’s response to the pandemic through the lens of neoliberalism and slowly devolving into a horror film. It does what all great political essays do: helps you understand a current event while also teaching you something fundamental that will help you understand much else about our world.

In Search of a Flat Earth

Dan Olson (Folding Ideas)

What at first appears to be a feature-length dissection of flat earth conspiracy theories telescopes out into the first comprehensive explanation of QA non I’ve seen, a distillation of the nature of conspiracy theories, a list of what other thinkers tend to overlook about conspiracists, and a sprinkling of love for the pursuit of knowledge. “Ultimately, it’s not about facts, it’s about power” is one of the most important takeaways of 2020.

Is Vine Cinema?

Kyle Kallgren (Brows Held High)

As he did two years ago with his video on bisexual lighting, Kyle Kallgren takes a seemingly innocuous subject – the life and death of Vine – and makes a video about EVERYTHING . About the essential units of filmmaking, about media that crosses social boundaries, about the speed of modern life and the formats best able to capture it, about race uprisings and cultural appropriation, about what happens when every so often The Youth are allowed to dictate culture. And all while montaging together his favorite Vines.

The $150,000 Banana

Sarah Urist Green (The Art Assignment)

Sarah Urist Green’s The Art Assignment didn’t end this year so much as go into low-power mode. The channel is still updated sporadically, but Sarah has refocused her attentions on other work. But, back in January – remember January? – she discussed Maurizio Cattelan’s then-trending art piece in which he duct taped a banana to a wall. Sarah employs her talent for taking strange, pretentious works on their own terms, digging into the banana’s surrounding contexts, the artist’s history, and the movement it’s part of, without ever claiming the work is ‘good’. This is her in her element.

we’re already ded || Zack Snyder, Part 2

Maggie Mae Fish

This year, the criminally under-appreciated Maggie Mae Fish started a series on the works of Zack Snyder, starting with a 15-minute look at how Snyder’s Superman contrasts with Supermen past, and then this 42-minute dive into how Snyder’s calcified, objectivist worldview manifests first in Dawn of the Dead and then across all his films.

Hamilton and the right mess it’s gotten me into

Grace Lee (What’s So Great About That?)

Grace’s dense and kaleidoscopic style proves a perfect match for the captivating yet self-contradictory musical that is Hamilton. The video goes back and forth over what makes Hamilton compulsively likable and also frustrating as heck, with every progressive idea undercut by something that seems to say the opposite, and every troublesome moment looking like it might be commentary on itself. Grace proves up to the task, providing not so much answers as a whole lot to think about.

Steven E. de Souza

It’s a Christmas movie. Bylines: @nytimes @LosAnglesTimes @FadeInMagazine @EmpireMagazine @SightSoundMagazine

How the Safdie Brothers Lie in Uncut Gems

Nehemiah Jordan (Behind the Curtain)

Never has a film essay had so disingenuous a title – but then N.T. Jordan’s essay is all about the art of misdirection. In truth, the brothers dissect as much as they dissemble, revealing more truths about the filmmaking process in 11 minutes than a semester of screenings. From the unanticipated dominoes that fall with casting changes (for instance, from a contemporary setting to a period one and back again), to unexpected sources of inspiration (spoiler alert: a colonoscopy) to the brutal marathon of 160 drafts over 10 years, the Safdies provide an unflinching portrait of the grind that is art.

The Most Important Filmmaker You Haven’t Heard Of

Jack Nugent (Now You See It)

Since silent days, women have been present in the editing suite, far too often unheralded (though not, of course, here). Starting with Margaret Booth in the 1930’s, then turning to Dede Allen and the late Sally Menke, Jack Nugent makes a strong case for these three artists as the midwives of modern film cutting. Both insightful and long overdue, Sight & Sound readers are urged to overlook the essay’s click-bait title… as they undoubtedly have.

Orson Wells a la Cinematheque Francaise

Pierre-André Boutang, Guy Seligmann

This month’s release of a major motion picture from an important filmmaker like David Fincher directly to a streaming platform sent a shock wave through Hollywood…. no, not the potential end of theatrical distribution as we know it, along with the shattering of the livelihood of exhibitioners and the shuttering of countless venues…I mean the impossible-to-shutter endless debate over Orson Welles: Boy wonder, or one-and-done-er? Found by Francois Thomas in the archives of the Cinematheque Francais only months ago, Welles gets another one hour 33 minutes with us… and we, with him.

Every Stormtrooper In Star Wars, Explained by Lucasfilm

Madlyn Burkert <@alohamaddy> and Doug Chiang

Call it classic or kitsch, revolutionary or rehash, but after 14 theatrical pictures and seven television series over 43 years for a total running time of let’s see, the original trilogy, six hours 20 minutes, then in chronological order Star Wars: Droids that’s 13 episodes x 23 minutes, plus 121 episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars… oh wait damn it, between the time I’m typing this and when it gets eyeballs, two more episodes of The Mandalorian will have been out, God knows what their running time will be, @jonfavs and @TaikaWaititi can’t even agree. Anyway, a long overdue taxonomy.

Steven Spielberg’s Use of Reflections

Shera Junushev

Like Bogart, this screenwriter is in a lonely place here with this one: I come to praise it, not critique it – but as observant as this essay is in recognising a signature Spielberg technique, in defining its effect as “allowing the audience to examine the details of a scene without losing connection to the character” it reduces psychology to geography. Rather, the subjective reflection shot’s true dynamic lies in flinging the filmgoer literally headlong into the protagonist’s shoes, bonding the viewer’s sense of self to the character with subliminal power.

The Irishman and the Death of the Gangster Film

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama declared The End of History. In 2020, Luis Azevedo is here to tell us that when we weren’t looking, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) declared the End of the Western, and in 2019, Martin Scorsese… hmm, how to best put this? Let’s just say that Luis thinks we got a real good genre here, it’d be a shame, a real shame if something happened to it…

Doctor Who and The Fourth Wall

Samuel Davis

From Justus D. Barnes’s gunshot in The Great Train Robbery in 1903 to Michael Caine’s seductive asides in Alfie (1966) to Joe Pesci bringing us full circle in Goodfellas (1990), breaking the fourth wall has been a key part of the motion pictures tool box. But those heralded films aren’t where we oh-so sophisticated Cineastes first encountered that jarring technique now, was it? And it wasn’t O Lucky Man, Amélie, or Fight Club, either. Come on, kiddies, fess up, you know the answer: here’s Samuel Davis to refresh your memory.

Monica Delgado

Peruvian film critic, director of Desistfilm.com

Presence: Call Me By Your Name

Fabian Broeker

I really liked this video: the search for a new topic in the treatment of a very hackneyed film.

On Contamination

Jessica McGoff

I felt interested about the political view of McGoff, because in this video she establishes correspondences between the filmmaker universe (animals and humans coexisting together) and social-environmental context.

Notorious Wavelengths

A Wave of the Hand. A way to the photo. An analysis of the use of the zoom in two opposite films, as a provocation. I never imagined watching this strange duel between Snow and Hitchcock.

Can any Johnny Guitar fan be indifferent to this?

Mariana Dianela Torres

There is a musical intention in this montage that attracts me a lot, that recovers a sensation of movement in the films of Chantal Akerman.

The Other Side of the Street

Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

I’m interested in the way in which Adrian and Cristina edit the images, research and voices, in an exact timing and leading us to subtle endings.

For some video essayists it’s a problem to work without complete films (for different restrictions). Kevin finished this challenge in a very playful and fresh way.

Will DiGravio

Host, The Video Essay Podcast ; Creator, Notes on Videographic Criticism ; Contributor, Film School Rejects

Follow the Cat

If there is one video essayist whose style and sensibility I most try to emulate in my own work, it is Johannes Binotto. His videos are rigorous and scholarly, yet deeply personal and emotional. In this video, like much of his work, Johannes turns his cinephilia into a shove which, like Lisa Fremont, he uses to dig deeper and deeper into the fabric of Rear Window. Follow the Cat gives us a new way of understanding familiar images, and thus gets at the heart of what videographic criticism is and what it can do and be.

Jazmin Jones

I think about Unlocked by video artist Jazmin Jones often. In an interview, Jones described the way she shifted the focus of the appropriated videos away from the white people at the centre: “It was a matter of zooming in… trying to reframe so that we’re really focusing on the pleasure and the experience of the black fems.” Jazmin may not have set out to make a ‘video essay’ when she created Unlocked, but the way she manipulates the footage is among the most powerful examples of the form I have seen.

cops ordering food

Manny Fidel

I can’t do justice to Manny’s video in 100 words. It’s hilarious and deeply insightful. I also love his follow-up tweet: “I made this in like four mins do NOT comment on its quality.” Manny’s video was made three weeks after the murder of George Floyd, at a time when a narrative emerged in the United States that police officers were somehow the real victims in society. The video makes a mockery of that absurd notion and, in the process, shows that a definition of ‘quality’ as it relates to videographic criticism is far more nuanced than one might think.

My First Film

Zia Anger ( watch trailer )

My First Film debuted in 2019 as a live film performance; an innovative desktop documentary that earned high praise in last year’s poll. Unable to perform in person this year, Anger began streaming live performances throughout the spring. The work continued to break ground and morphed into something new, a film that reflected Anger’s own pandemic experience. During the performance I saw, Anger texted her dad to say she loved him. Watching “My First Film” during such frightening times was a cathartic experience, one that made me briefly feel like I was back at the movies among friends and strangers.

Indy Vinyl: Records in American Independent Cinema: 1987 to 2018

Ian Garwood

Another ground-breaking work this year came in the form of Ian Garwood’s Indy Vinyl: Records in American Independent Cinema: 1987 to 2018, a project that features a range of video essays and written works. One aspect of video essay-making that often gets overlooked is the amount of time dedicated to making each and every video. Ian’s project, both in size and scope, but also given the fact that he released parts of this project as they were finished, beautifully captures the labor of love that is video-essay making, all while pushing the boundaries of what the form can be.

Tear away Turn back Breathe

Martina Probst and Chantal Hann

Over the past nine months, I have tried to relive my favourite pre-pandemic moviegoing experiences through video essays. This video by Martina Probst and Chantal Hann, two students at the Lucerne School of Art and Design, is among the finest analyses of Portrait of a Lady on Fire I have seen. But what I find so compelling about their essay is their willingness to at times forgo images entirely and embrace a blank canvas: the black screen. Video essayists often feel the need to fill every second with images. Perhaps we should allow our work to, like Marianne, breathe.

It’s Bad Luck to Compare Hands

Alex Slentz

Meshes of the Afternoon is one of those films that I rewatch all the time, just to try and understand how it works; how it was assembled. I feel the same way about Alex Slentz’s video, which blends together footage from Maya Deren’s film, Persona, and Un Chien Andalou. Similar to the video by Probst and Hann, I am inspired by the way Sletz allows us to see the canvas on which the video essay was created. The fluid movements of the images and their interactions with one another blend together in a beautiful collage and insightful analysis.

Video Essayist and Filmmaker

How Edgar Wright Uses Sound

Sound tends to be an underrepresented subject in the world of video essays. Julian’s essay mimics Edgar Wright’s editing and sound design to move effortlessly between his films, showcasing Wright’s unique approach to sound.

The Strange Reality of Roller Coaster Tycoon

Jacob Geller

Jacob Geller expertly ties together internet culture, video game design, and physics in this profound examination of the existential unease that can be found in a theme park simulation game from 1999.

Lies of Heroism – Redefining the Anti-War Film by Tom van der Linden (Like Stories of Old)

Weaving together examples from 49 films during the course of this nearly feature-length video essay, Tom thoughtfully and thoroughly examines depictions of war in cinema and whether it’s truly possible to make an anti-war film.

Dinner with Brad Pitt

Video essays can also just be a lot of fun. I’m not sure who had more fun, Luís Azevedo sitting down to edit this video, or Brad Pitt sitting down to dinner in all these scenes.

Researcher and filmmaker

The Viewing Booth

Ra’anan Alexandrowicz ( watch trailer )

An incredibly careful and thorough examination of the spectatorial mechanisms of two protagonists (a filmed spectator, and the filmmaker who is filming her) that exposes how much our beliefs and ideological convictions determine how we make sense of online images. Though rather pessimistic in its conclusion (no image can change a person’s political opinions – so long for a century-long history of activist media and political filmmaking), the film advocates convincingly for the political power of building respectful interpersonal relationships with our political opponents, and for the potential of images to serve as the basis for such conversations.

Il n’y aura plus de nuit

Eléonore Weber ( watch trailer )

This essay film looks at thermal imagery produced by helicopter pilots in a war context. We hear only one voice, but the words it speaks contain the gazes of many: from the pilots themselves, to the judges in military courts in charge of examining these images to determine retrospectively the legitimacy of the pilots’ decisions to kill, to the filmmaker who questions her mixed fascination for these images, to our own uncertainty about what these images expect from us – their probably unwanted, surplus witnesses.

On Contamination and My Mulholland

I equally love these two videos by Jessica McGoff. Re-watching On Contamination at the end of this year of sanitary crisis gives the video an uncanny, definitely prescient quality, but it is a great work independently from its unfortunate topicality. Like My Mulholland (which McGoff produced in the context of the video essay series Once Upon a Screen ), On Contamination explores an intimate form of narration in which the discussed film becomes not so much the limiting frame of the essay, but the substrate from which it grows in unexpected directions.

Elie Ga ( watch excerpt )

This essay – very much like my other picks – proposes a very personal, partly autobiographical, partly fictional narration, loosely based on a collection of images figuring objects found by ‘beachcombers’. Images come in waves onto the filmmaker’s table, who tentatively combines them into spatial arrangements and explorative superpositions, until the surf of the narration prompts their replacement with other images – some we discover, some we see again and again, constantly re-invested with new meanings.

I know very few video essayists who are willing to implicate themselves as much in their videos as Binotto does in this performative, wistfully celebratory and intensely personal short video piece. I admire the growing abstraction of Binotto’s work (such as in his video Trace , another strong candidate for this poll) for it opens up the possibility of unexpected, sensual engagements with the films with which it dialogues. These are video essays where images burgeon with news meanings and unlikely sensations, rather than being pinned down or constricted by the analysis.

Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed

This year I’ve seen a number of video essays reflecting on images of migrants on their way to Europe, and this film is by far the one I found the most inspiring. It recalls Philip Scheffner’s Havarie in its focus on a single, arguably illegible image, and its investment of the soundtrack as the lieu of meaning production. But the perspective is reversed: Havarie watched a ship sink from afar, Purple Sea plunges us in the water. The presentness of the image serves as the loam from which the story unfolds, made of the narrator’s uncertain memories and hopes.

Wild Heart 1981 / 2020

Zach Dorn ( watch excerpt )

From randomly filming contemporary online media flows to carefully re-animating on paper a decades-old improvised piece of footage (that was later uploaded to YouTube), this short essay deploys an impressively wide, and very personal narrative arc. The diversity of visual techniques that are employed in this virtuoso single-shot speaks to Dorn’s attempts to grasp his digital object and materialise it in the space of his home – a gesture that is fascinatingly articulated as one of self-care and compensation for the anxieties triggered by contemporary online media.

Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow

Desegregating the Two Shot: The Use of the Frame in The Defiant Ones (1958)

Henry Rownd

This finely detailed audiovisual commentary operates in the best tradition of close mise-en-scène analysis – a surprisingly marginal genre in the academic video essay world. Rownd demonstrates astutely how the image construction of the film tells a nuanced and complex story about race and space in the Civil Rights era, even as the surface narrative hammers home a more heavy-handed message.

Lisa Hanawalt: Being Human by Being Animal

This year I taught a dedicated video essay course for the first time in a while and Grace Lee was the go-to for examples of incredibly smart, quick-witted, well-researched and audiovisually engaging work. Lee’s awareness of the possibilities of animation shines through in this video, an awareness developed through both her critical and filmmaking practice.

Satis House

As is often the case with Catherine Grant’s work, Satis House is an exemplary act of collaboration. Firstly, it invites collaboration from the viewer by giving them more and more visual information to compare, without authorial commentary, as the video proceeds. Secondly, Grant’s accompanying writing refines and deepens the viewing experience, collaborating with it rather than simply describing it. Finally, the collaboration through writing is extended by the inclusion of a reflective piece by the cultural historian Lynda Nead, whose thinking about Great Expectations inspired the video in the first place.

My Mulholland

From my admittedly partial perspective, skewed towards video essays published in academic journals, a turn to the overtly personal seemed evident in a number of examples this year. Maybe it was fitting, then, that the year closed with the publication of the Once Upon a Screen collection in the Cine-Files, where video essayists reflected on formative film-viewing experiences. I’ve had a little more time to watch and think about Jessica McGoff’s contribution than the others, and it’s a wonderful reflection on the allure and perils of online media consumption, funnelled through a memorable first encounter with Mulholland Drive.

”Who Ever Heard…?”

Like Catherine Grant’s Satis House, Payne’s video uses an additive multi-screen compositional process that draws attention to repetitions in the source material – in this case a scene from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Payne’s approach is more overtly manipulative than Grant’s, repeating each shot from the scene to create a visual and aural montage that builds then recedes in intensity. The looping effect of the soundtrack, in particular, is mesmerising.

The Before Sunrise Waltz

This was the act of virtual film tourism I needed in the early months of lockdown. By orchestrating a Google Earth tour of the locations visited in Before Sunrise, Stone re-envisages the film from a panoramic perspective, thereby offering a completely different take on the original, which stays determinedly tied to Jesse and Celine’s ground-level progression through Vienna’s streets.

A Machine for Viewing

Richard Misek, Oscar Raby, Charlie Shackleton

Of course it’s a shame that the pandemic put a (temporary?) stop to the VR -video essay roadshow envisaged as part of Machine for Viewing, but the three videos published in NECSUS demonstrate that the project’s potential has already been realised. Whilst the demonstration of the technology is impressive, I related most to the videos’ use of VR to reflect on a traditional 2-D cinema-going experience. Who would have thought that the sight of a packed auditorium, witnessing the live VR presentation and commentary at the Sundance Festival, would now seem so poignant?

Hailey Gavin

Video essay creator

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Absurd Worlds

This is an excellent articulation of the questions Lanthimos asks and the visual and structural tools he employs. This is a must-watch for anyone who loved Nimic and conveys the power of shorts to reframe our understanding of auteurs’ work.

How Portraits Lie – What to be aware of in your portrait photography

Jamie Windsor

I love this clear exploration of a nuanced topic, supplemented by beautiful motion graphics and fluid editing.

This piece illustrates the sometimes inextricable nature of nostalgia and trauma. I also loved the way the essay draws points of connection between media of different formats from different times.

Audiovisual essayist and Professor of Film at the University of Reading.

Slap That Bass Zoomed

The elephant man’s sound, tracked., the original ending: the last acts of black horror heroes.

Cydnii Wilde Harris

Music and Point of View in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Patrick Keating

Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox

Video essayist; founding co-editor of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies ; Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and elected member of Academia Europea. Currently completing https:screenstudies.video

One of my all-time favourite videographic works by foundational artist and essayist Lee, or indeed by anyone. Part of a brilliant project recently published in issue 15 of the Cine-Files in the collection Once Upon a Screen , commissioned and curated by Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer.

Another astonishing work by one of the most innovative and significant of video essayists. Published online in December 2020, this video also deservedly garnered huge festival success, screening in competition at the Marseilles Festival of Documentary Film as well as at the Festival dei Popoli, the Kasseler Dokfest and the festival Caminhos do Cinema Português.

One of my all-time favourite pieces that we have published at [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Studies this last (or any) year. A wonderfully ambitious exploration of the first decade of stabiliser technologies and techniques. In surveying the industrial histories of two competing devices, the Steadicam and the obsolete Panaglide, Bird demonstrates, powerfully and movingly, how “now codified norms of craft labour practice around stabiliser’s aesthetic and generic forms emerged amongst a diverse range of media and eclectic techniques”.

Maryam Tafakory ( read synopsis )

I love Tafakory’s essay films and video essays, and this brilliant piece by her was one of the excellent new series of commissioned essays on Asian cinema, Monographs by the Asian Film Archive ( AFA ).

”Drawing upon histories and archives, both personal and regional, these works reveal new vistas of inquiry; ruminations that evince the essayists’ personal connections to [Asian] cinema, made more poignant by the fact that they were created during various states of isolation and solitude.”

The series had its world premiere at the Dharamshala International Film Festival held online from 29 October to 4 November 2020.

The latest work by hugely talented video essayist and film McGoff; her video was also part of the high quality collection Once Upon a Screen .

One of an outstanding collection of audiovisual essays devoted to explorations of gesture published in NECSUS : European Journal of Media Studies , curated by the wonderful video essayist and scholar Tracy Cox-Stanton, in December 2019. This video was also added to the essential Video Essay Podcast Black Lives Matter video essay playlist , curated by Cydnii Wilde Harris, Kevin B Lee and The Video Essay Podcast founder and host Will DiGravio.

Indy Vinyl, Interrupted

This video, published in 2020, is the tip of the amazing videographic iceberg that is Garwood’s work on his hugely original videographic/monographic project Indy Vinyl, as set out here and here .

Reader in Film and Sonic Arts, Liverpool John Moores University.

This audiovisual essay marries form and content in such an affecting manner that I was completely drawn into the essayist’s world. The universality of the space that Lee re-enacts/re-presents urged me to think back to the complexity of early childhood memories. The camera shot and movement choices coupled with the voice (which is sometimes masked) allows for an intimate story that perfectly reflects this particular moment and the trauma of early childhood.

If I could have made any other audiovisual essay, I wish it could have been this one! I love everything about it, from the voiceover, with its centrality of the cat, to the essayist’s own cat watching the screen. It is beautifully paced and offers an insightful point of entry to Hitchcock’s camera moves. It prompts a personal way into questioning cinematic spectatorship and image-making, and draws from an array of interesting representations of cats in cinema.

This audiovisual essay makes me think and feel differently about camera movement in cinema. It details a rich history drawing from technical manuals, instructional videos, film tests and experiments and other archival material to present an embodied argument that allows me to feel the moves of the Steadicam/Panaglide operator(s). The extent of the research is significant, but this is not merely a dissemination of research – the entire essay builds movement into its shape and form. It is truly inspiring work!

Forensickness is a longer audiovisual essay/experimental film that considers Chris Kennedy’s film, Watching the Detectives. Much like Galibert-Laîné’s earlier work, it deconstructs Kennedy’s film, goes to the online archive of material (this time on Reddit) to consider both the news footage circulating around the Boston Marathon bomb attack in 2013 and the Hollywood depiction of these events. This work is about how we see, how we consume images, and how we think about and through images.

McGoff’s My Mullholland is a poignant consideration of traumatic film viewing. The desktop format is most appropriate for examining the online consumption of film, and here the essayist’s own adventures on the internet and into the cinema of David Lynch are richly depicted through this approach. The audiovisual essay details some darker areas of the internet whilst also re-presenting the edgier moments of Lynch’s, Mulholland Drive. It is often fun and playful and the use of text is brilliantly deployed.

Garwood has had a prolific year creating audiovisual essays and has made a number that are inspired by the Zoom app as an aesthetic device, reflecting these recent months and how we have been collectively engaging online. He has created a showcase of this work which is available to audioview here . In a year where Black Lives Matter is at the forefront of political discussion, “Slap That Bass Zoomed” offers a timely de-centring of the white appropriator, instead offering an array of Black artists (named and unnamed) to take their rightful place onscreen.

Paris Bagdad: Fantasies of America(na) in German-American Cinema

Evelyn Kreutzer

Paris Bagdad: Fantasies of America(na) in German-American Cinema offers a personal route through Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) and Baghdad Café (Percy Adlon, 1987). This essayistic approach includes the use of superimposition, which is beautifully rendered and speaks to the sense of place and wanderlust that Kreutzer narrates her way through. This feels like a logical follow on from her earlier inspired work on German cinema, Berlin Moves (2017).

Chiara Grizzaffi

Postdoctoral Fellow at IULM University – co-editor of [in]Transition

MADELEINE / JUDY

The philosophy of horror: a symphony of film theory.

Péter Lichter, Bori Máté ( watch trailer )

Once Upon a Screen: Titanic

Victoria Wegner

Safe Bodies, Safe Environment: The Atmosphere of Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995)

Kelsey Draper

Film scholar and video essayist

That she was able to commute the cinematic trauma of Lynch’s work to the universal trauma of growing up during the Wild West years of the internet was a sublime insight. From the choice to take her audience on a journey through her desktop, to her recreations of jump scares and the IMD b message boards, this piece resonated with me on so many levels.

It’s one thing to understand that your colleague is brilliant. It is another experience entirely to watch an artist, independent of your relationship to them, so handedly exceed their own boundaries. Kevin’s piece on his childhood experiences with the film Platoon are an example of the very power of cinema to shape our relationship with the world, and the world’s relationship with us. Include that footage, and his deeply personal voiceover all combine to create an experience of childhood trauma so visceral, that I haven’t just gained new insight on the war epic itself.

This piece redefined what I believed to be the parameters of the video essay. By making manifest his own desire to enter a film, Joannes transcends the medium technically, and does so by seamlessly immeshing his own visuals, music, and handwriting into the groundbreaking work, Freak Orlando. He uses the style of his piece to supplement both that of the existing property and what the essayist has to say about it. Johannes didn’t just redefine how I’d like to create video essays. He redefined the limitations of how I can enter a film itself.

The greater focus of Dan’s essay, distilled what I’ve found so troubling about conspiracy theories, from the Illuminati to QA non, and how more often than not, their unstated purpose is to oppose my very existence. By laying bare the historical context of these theories and their creators, Dan articulated the harm these theories stand to enact, and makes them far less easy to laugh off.

As far as works responding to or including elements of our current reality, Ian’s use of Zoom is perhaps one of the most hopeful. This may also be a standout for how it combines both the Zoom revolution with the Racial Equity revolution, and may be one of the most effective ways I’ve seen the Zoom framework employed. Add to that, the editing is impeccably timed, and I left the video with a healthy list of performers to whom I was newly introduced.

Coco’s Feel-Good Oppression

Eliquorice’s video essay on Coco was my gateway drug to the rest of his works. His analysis of the film’s depiction of immigration within the narrative is poignant, but his comparisons between the failings of the immigration system in Disney’s magical realm to the failings of the system in our reality make a compelling case for how political ideology is communicated in family films. The inclusion of his own experiences with the immigration system come at just the right moment, thereby narrativising his analysis, while giving a human face to an issue often overshadowed by the enormity of the system.

The Satirical Resurgence of Reefer Madness

Yhara’s recent video essay on Reefer Madness delves into the historical context that lead to the film, its reception upon release, and its place in the canon of midnight features. Her candour, humour, and personality transcend what could have been a simple history lesson into an engaging conversation about the mutability of everything from social attitudes about cannabis to the constantly shifting legacy of a specific film alongside those attitudes. It’s Yhara’s deft balance of humour and context that reveals to her audience the absurdity that is racial stereotyping and discrimination.

Film scholar, video essayist, animation artist

When was the last time I found myself enjoying a supercut for almost seven minutes? Conforme has a relentless urgency thanks in large part to the driving score by Vaude herself. For me, it captures that contradictory state of frantic stasis that was and is 2020.

Johannes Binotto keeps exploring the possibilities of the video essay in all kinds of directions sidestepping technological wizardry by relying on household items. In Trace he creates tactile sensations from a single film still on a tablet. Seeing it again now, I wonder if it was about that one question all along: what does physical contact feel like?

With her well paced self-reflective long form essays, Chloé Galibert-Laîné has more than once managed to entice me into agreeing then disagreeing with her narration before finally realising that I had been too immersed to “pay attention to that woman behind the curtain”, so to speak.

With his entry in the Once Upon a Screen collection, Kevin B. Lee confirms that he is an incredible storyteller. Explosive Paradox looks deceivingly simple, but works on so many levels. Most importantly, I found it a deeply moving experience.

Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist

Curated by Cydnii Wilde Harris. Kevin B. Lee and Will DiGravio

As our field becomes ever wider, curated lists have become crucial to make sure that notable video essays and voices do not go unnoticed. Among them, the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist is an essential contribution, has a clear-cut profile and is co-organised by three widely connected practitioners.

Nehemiah Jordan

Creator of Behind the Curtain , an online community of screenwriters

The Social Network – Ten Years Later

The Royal Ocean Film Society

The reason why I chose this was primarily its experimental form. Using the topic of Facebook and social media, Andrew Saladino (creator) builds the entire video essay off of the Facebook feed – scrolling from clip to graphic to clip. Something to watch for its inventiveness.

Brave was a Disappointment

This video does a great job of walking through the origins of making this film, breaking down how it’s structured, and finally, how it could’ve been rewritten to be stronger. A long video, but extremely entertaining and well-organised.

The Psycho Chord – Consonance vs Dissonance

Listening In

This channel takes a deep look into an unexplored section of filmmaking: the sound. Specifically, the music and how it’s an integral part of the storytelling. Also, the production quality of these videos are incredibly high.

How Martin Scorsese Integrates The Shadow: A Jungian Practice

Jillian Snead (Jilloms)

A deep but practical analysis of the Shadow, using examples from Martin Scorsese’s filmography to explore how it’s been utilised in different characters. What’s so great here is that she translates all of the analysis into practical application for ourselves. How does one begin integrating their own Shadow into their lives? This video gives you the steps.

Christian Keathley

Professor of Film & Media Culture, Middlebury College; Founding co-editor of [in]Transition

Santa y Teresa

Michelle Farrell

Tarkovsky’s Napes

Pavel Tavares

Miklós Kiss

Associate Prof. in Audiovisual Arts and Cognition at University of Groningen, NL /co-author of Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video

One of the best audiovisual research essays of the year, through its presented information (a rich exploration of the first decade of film stabiliser technologies and techniques) and quality of presentation (technical skill, soundtrack, use of split-screen, etc.).

All Is Not Lost

Amy Rachlin

The video that managed to squeeze all the suspense of living in isolation during a pandemic AND one of the most goose-bumpy scenes of my favourite TV series into less than four minutes. Bonus: it’s also funny.

Davide Rapp and Andrea Dal Martello

Famous film scenes appear in TikToks, Skype calls, distance learning and online conferences. Another COVID -19 cinephile fun.

If you want to watch only one video about GIF s, it should be this one. [insert Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson nodding meme.]

Repeating Terror: Contemplating Death in Amat Escalante’s Heli (2013)

Niamh Thornton

A calm but powerful side-by-side reflection on the ethics of the slow depiction of hyper-realist violence in Amat Escalante’s 2013 Heli, using repetition and variation of the ‘same’ scene. A brilliant demonstration of the potentiality of videographic criticism.

“Parasites move from animal to human. Are we the parasites or the hosts?” An eerily prophetic video ‘on contamination’ (a response to Janis Rafa’s KALA AZAR ), made for the Critics’ Choice panel of the 2020 International Film Festival Rotterdam – thus released just weeks before the COVID -19 virus turned into a pandemic.

Contagion – Willy and Rutty

Luca Gentile, Sasha Quinlan Narciso, Romy Weggeman, Sam Klement

A naughty little video made by my Videographic Criticism students at the University of Groningen, mixing Soderbergh’s Contagion with the TV speeches of the Dutch king and prime minister during the first wave of COVID -19. It’s in Dutch, but you’ll get the point without understanding the language.

Jaap Kooijman

Associate Professor Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

Explosive Paradox undoubtedly is one of the most personal and moving audiovisual essays that I have after watched, and at the same time presents a convincing criticism of the way Hollywood glorifies violence, not only in films themselves, but also in the way these films are celebrated by film critics and Academy Awards. The essay contrasts the mundaneness of the cinema-turned-liquor-store where Lee first saw the film, back in the 1980s, and the seriousness of the trauma he experienced when confronted with this racially motivated violence. A wonderful piece of videographic criticism and art.

Mastering Dialogue: American Crime

Andreas Halskov and Previously on Perry Mason

Henrik Højer

I select these two audiovisual essays together, because they are the first two of a new series by the Danish 16:9 film journal which is based on a very specific parameter, a constraint in length. The audiovisual essays are 169 seconds (thus 2:49 minutes) long and described by the journal as ‘condensed audiovisual breakdowns’. Both take a US American television series as case study. The constraint in length forces the authors to focus on one specific element and to come straight to the point. Viewers are reminded of the short length as the seconds literally tick away.

Although I find the arguments of both audiovisual essays on, respectively, American Crime and Perry Mason, compelling and convincing, I am most fascinated by their shared form and how a relatively arbitrary constraint in length succeeds in condensing academic arguments about US American television into very seductive bites of television studies knowledge.

Days of Linda

One does not have to be familiar with Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978) to make sense of Days of Linda, a tribute to the actress Linda Manz, whose first film role was playing Linda. The audiovisual essay highlights Manz’s ‘central authorial contributions’ by combining Manz’s voiceover with footage from the film presented in split screen, with shots of a non-speaking Linda on the left and other scenes (some including Linda) on the right. In this way, character Linda does not only get a voice through actress Linda, but her original marginalised and silenced role is emphasised as well.

Adjunct lecturer and video essayist, Northwestern University

This year I was so short on time that I missed out on seeing a lot of videographic work, so even more than in other years, my suggestions are highly subjective. I picked three videos whose originality and/or currentness caught my attention this year.

Katie Bird’s video essay on early stabilisation technologies is a marvellously executed demonstration of videographic scholarship’s ability to simultaneously communicate historical film scholarship and evoke aesthetic, phenomenological experiences. Reflecting upon an under-researched, complex topic in a very accessible (and fun!) way, it’s also a perfect video essay to show in film classes.

Who Ever Heard…?

Matthew Thomas Payne

Payne’s short and playful videographic engagement with a single scene from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance spoke to me because of its marvellous use of rhythm, repetition, and sonic layering. As a sound scholar, I often ponder on the possibilities and limitations of videographic methods to investigate and/or express one’s ideas via sound. Payne’s video certainly does both.

Before the End

Before the End is an interesting case in terms of its circulation and 2020-ness (rather than conceptual or formal novelty). It’s a very simple, short video that uses the basic principles of editing and the Kuleshov effect to join excerpts from separate zoom interviews with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (without the audio) to suggest a narrative sequel to the Before film series. Stone’s video went viral, eventually reaching way more viewers than the original interviews had. It speaks to various intersecting technological, narrative, and communicative desires of this particular moment.

Video essayist

What Do I Want?

This video makes great use of the looping format of social media video and, originating from TikTok, an exciting addition to the ever-monstrously-expanding field of video essay.

For All Mankind: Is The Moon Landing Cinema?

Kyle Kallgren

I mean, if your video essay doesn’t have lego recreations of your subject matter… what are you even doing here? Get out of my house!

Sorry to Bother You – You can’t just tame people

Curio (Eric Sophia and Natalie)

Curio has made so many amazingly ambitious essays this year, but I especially liked this more low key video on white supremacy and capitalism in Sorry To Bother You which people may have missed amidst the excellent creative flair of their higher profile videos.

I’m sure this will be on many lists this year, but Kevin continues to be the most inventive, versatile video essayist out there and… come on… I couldn’t NOT mention this video (as well as the Once Upon a Screen project in general).

We Are Here Because of Those That Are Not

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

I’m maybe stretching the definition of video essay more than I ever have but if there isn’t at least one pick on a list that makes you think “come on now, this is just taking the piss” then is it even a Sight & Sound video essay poll list? This interactive archive of black trans experiences may be neither strictly video nor essay, but it’s one of the most important, creative and emotional things I saw this year. It’s got audio, it’s got visuals and it’s going on the list!

Filmmaker, Director of the first Masters program for Video Essays and Desktop Documentaries (at Merz Akademie)

Purple Sea and Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea: 28 October 2015

Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, Forensic Architecture

These are separate works, but together they encompass the vast range of possibilities that video essays can have in using the same source material. Explanatory in the best sense, Forensic Architecture uses Alzakout’s footage as part of a potent account of a disastrous shipwreck. Alzakout takes her footage in the opposite direction, with a deep exploration into the thoughts and experiences the footage does not reveal. In doing so the film offers a strong rebuke to the instrumentalisation that dominates image discourse.

More about Purple Sea can be found here .

Originally a VR video essay performed live at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, this virtual exploration of the cinematic experience is all the more poignant in a year in which cinemas face an existential crisis and so much of daily life has migrated to a digital simulacrum of itself. Along with Zia Anger’s live online performances of My First Film, it points to exciting new directions for the video essay – interactive and in real time.

Various Creators with the Asian Film Archive (detailed info here )

I should acknowledge that I served as editorial consultant on this, but there is simply no precedent for this massive series of video essays on Asian cinema commissioned by the Asian Film Archive in Singapore, involving an impressive roster of filmmakers, moving image artists and scholars. They premiered last month at the Dharamshala International Film Festival and will circulate over the coming months. I am especially enamoured of Ghosts Like Us by Riar Rizaldi, Spirit Film by Raya Martin, and Irani Bag by Maryam Tafakory.

The most thoroughly and impressively researched academic video essay I’ve seen this year, bringing a heightened and expanded awareness of the physical labor that goes into a shot and how different approaches to technology and craft yield different effects of cinematic embodiment. A video essay that deepens one’s appreciation for the bodily experience of film viewing and filmmaking alike.

Also: Sonic Chronicle Post Sound by Cormac Donnelly.

An experiment in watching propaganda leads to a wholesale reassessment of the assumptions behind progressive documentary filmmaking. A brave self-critique of one’s longstanding practices and ideals in the face of an emerging set of sobering realities.

See also: Indy Vinyl, Interrupted by Ian Garwood.

Part of the Once Upon a Screen series of video essays on childhood film viewing-as-trauma, published on the Cine-Files Journal – this particular entry brings the topic out of the past tense with an exceptional liveness and presence. As my other selections would attest, questions of spectatorship and an expanded cultural and technological framework for understanding cinema are the foci for the video essays that I find most exciting right now. This desktop documentary engages all those themes brilliantly.

Real Talk: Is Breadtube Discussing Race ‘Right’?

Professor Flowers

Working on the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist was among the most significant experiences of the year for me, and through it I learned about several fantastic video essayists working in academia, YouTube and social media. I found especially noteworthy this careful consideration of the performativity of progressive racial politics on YouTube.

Eric Sophia McAllister

Video essayist working on YouTube covering media and cultural analysis, with a particular political focus on queer and leftist topics

I have to get this pick up front because it is the single greatest piece of video essay/documentary content on YouTube, not just this year. Olson has raised the bar absurdly high with this moving, insightful, well-researched, funny, well-shot and ideologically devastating look into the worlds of internet conspiracy theory. This isn’t just a YouTube video about conspiracy theorists, it is a phenomenology. What is always impressive about Dan Olson is how well he structures information for maximum impact, and the “mid point twist” of this video hits like an atom bomb.

A Prison of Our Own Loneliness

Sarah Zedig (let’s talk about stuff.)

This piece subverts the oft-derided talking head form of the YouTube video essay by having Sarah sit staring into the camera NOT talking while her pre-recorded voice-over delivers this essay about the pandemic, loneliness, nations, world politics and media, culminating in a silent scream and then breakdown into tears that is simply one of the most moving things I have ever seen on the platform. By the end of watching this you definitely will feel the catharsis of letting everything out with a ‘good old cry’, but most likely because you will actually cry.

Tyr & Grem (Pamphleteer)

It’s best to acknowledge up front that this video is aping off the style of a video that I made, simply because I want to say that I see how self-serving it might appear to select it but I had to anyway, because this video is simply so so SO good. Tyr & Grem had a double realisation earlier this year when Tyr came out as a trans woman and Grem realised they were, and always had been, a lesbian. This video takes the form of a “Martian Poem” inspired by Alan Moore’s Watchmen and will knock your socks off.

The Ideology of Apocalypse

Jack has been at the top of his game as a media analysis and political commentary essayist for a while – from his ‘Copaganda’ trilogy about police movies to his evolving series on cartoon animals as race metaphor and all the inherent problems therein – but this masterwork taking a broad survey across apocalyptic fiction to study its cultural and ideological trends is the tippy top of the tippy top. Not to mention that in the year of our Lord 2020 the cultural question of how we perceive and process the apocalypse seems uncomfortably relevant.

Twitter and Empathy

In the world of liberal and progressive politics, the notion of ‘empathy’ is often invoked as a virtue, but this essay is really special for questioning what we actually mean when we talk about empathy. Big Joel knocks it out of the park by dissecting the way we evoke this concept and the revelation that it’s actually several different, intersecting and nebulous concepts being crammed under the one umbrella.

Oblivion &  Women

Lilly (mothcub)

Did you know feminism makes games more fun, not less? Lilly knows this. While her channel doesn’t usually engage in media analysis or produce video essays, this was still one of my favourite media analysis essays this year. Lilly takes us on a journey through a quest in Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion and how it seemingly for no reason at all pulls the rug out from under itself and makes the quest less fun, when the obvious answer to any feminist gamer chad would be to go the other way entirely.

The Beginner’s Guide: This Is Not For You

Grace’s essays are always stunningly good. Shockingly good. Upsettingly good. Their essays are sharp, funny, insightful, well researched and paced so well that at the end of a ten-minute What’s So Great About That video I feel like I’ve just watched an hour, but in the best possible way. To paraphrase my esteemed colleague in political commentary, Mr. Rubin, Grace’s videos put my brain in recovery mode from all the high-level important ideas. This particular essay takes a hard look at the cultural, social, and personal implications of interpretation and when and how we should and shouldn’t do it.

Critical writer and video essayist

Days Passed: Lee Kang-Sheng Through the Eyes of Tsai Ming-Liang

Michelle Cho

Once Upon a Screen: On Psycho and The Witches

Daniel mcilwraith.

Video essayist and video editor

Blissfully Between Binaries with Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Carlos natálio.

Film Teacher and Researcher at Católica University (O Porto); Film Programmer at IndieLisboa Film Festival; Film Critic at À pala de Walsh website

One of the reasons why Kevin B. Lee’s work is ground-breaking in video essays because his imagination is always one step ahead. He is constantly reminding us that working with the body of cinema is working with your memories and affections, and circumventing material limitations. Here, childhood cinema is projected on a shadowy wall of a former movie theatre, Platoon is remembered between leaves and trees’ reflections. Violence of the past, violence of the present. An essay about memory and the permanence of racism. Video essays are tools to reedit the present.

Forensickness is a real detective story. Chloé understands the whodunnit potential of the desktop film form and the intellectual investigation of a visual construction. She takes us by the end through her own investigation processes, while making us realise that there are only combinations, versions of the truth. We’ve passed the moment where critical theory intellectuals would point out the ‘spectacle’ in images. At the moment, the faking and ‘unfaking’ of images is a two-way business, intellectuals go along with pastors and internet police works share regards with so-called police experts.

Some Visual Thoughts About Perceptions in Rebecca

Ricardo Vieira Lisboa

Lisboa is a very ironic and shrewd video essayist. Here he is fooling around with Hitchcock’s Rebecca, using cinema’s toolbox of directors and works – Kiarostami’s Copie Conforme, Lang’s Secret Behind the Door, Godard’s Adieu au Language, Cláudia Varejão’s No Escuro do Cinema Descalço os Sapatos. The essay dismantles Rebecca’s work from the themes of signature, drop/marriage, sea/see, idealisation, signature appropriation. In Lisboa’s works always expect the unexpectable: a laugh or an unhappy emoticon, next to a brilliant capacity for film analysis.

In Memoriam

Lucía Alonso Santos

2020 is a year of confinement, although we are able to film inside our homes, inside our heads, and travel virtually. In this honest video essay, Lucía Santos is ‘verifying’ what she knew of Thailand through Apichatpong’s films using Google Street Views. Memories of something not happening as she anticipates Memoria by the Thai director. In what way do the images we have access to replace the cinematic experiences we might have?

L’Assassinat Kennedy au cinéma

Editing together various films and also archive footage, this video essay signals the assassination of John F. Kennedy 57 years ago. More than just documenting and representing the tragic event, Luc Lagier aims at expanding our perception by combining several other films that confuse, momentarily, our perception and feelings towards the event. Suspense without graphic violence is also at play here.

I have always had a fascination with the idea that directors’ works and films can sensually meet and clash through video essays. Which beautiful monsters can be brought to life via these experiments? Ian Magor does this by joining an iconic shot from Notorious by Alfred Hitchcock to Michael Snow’s classic avant-garde Wavelength. The result is disquieting and this tells us how video essays, despite their analytical potentialities, might also look like Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment laboratory.

Shadows of Our Forgotten Montages

Dianela Torres

From watching films other films are born. Giving a form to our cinephile gaze, a body of montage made with what I see and what I make of that seeing. In this beautiful, oneiric video essay, on Sergei Parajanov’s film Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, Dianela states she aimed for “interpretation and dialectical appropriation of rhythmic and metric”, “emotions and the fluid time-space, music and colours”. Montage unto montage, organic appropriations, essay convey aesthetics and we are reminded of Marcus Aurelius’ words: “all things are implicated in one another.”

Daniela Persico

Programmer, Locarno Film Festival / founder, filmidee.it

A video about the investigation as a drive of contemporary man and a gesture of cinematic love.

The expressive elegance of making the art of editing perceived in Parajanov (and in particular in the film Shadows of our forgotten ancestors) as a process of bringing shadows back to life. Fantasmatic and inspiring.

Once Upon a Screen

A collection of gazes on the evocative theme of traumatic childhood encounters: different styles and perspectives that articulate a critical and cinephile discourse open to different interpretations.

Managing Editor at No Film School

Kevin lays bare something you don’t often see in film analysis: a personal account of how a film traumatises. He takes us to the theatre, now a BevMo!, where he first saw Platoon and tells the intensely intimate story of how the film affected him as a kid. It’s a direct emotional connection between the film analyst and the film he’s analysing: the site of traumatisation may have changed but the trauma itself remains.

This video is a shock to the system of film analysis.

How Movies Prepared Us For Coronavirus

Answer: Surprisingly, they pretty much didn’t.

We’re living in a disaster movie.

No, in My Room | A desktop documentary on the making of a video essay

Beyond the Frame

Video essays make me feel dumb. This one makes me feel like we’re all dumb. I love it so much.

David Lynch | Movies As Therapy

The Discarded Image

Clearly there’s a pattern to my selections this year, you guys. I’m very obviously a nervous and emotional wreck or something because I really gravitated to this video essay by The Discarded Image about how David Lynch uses filmmaking as his therapy.

Why The Red Shoes Looked So Stunning

If you want to know how colour can be used to tell a story, watch The Red Shoes. Boom. It’s an absolute masterclass and it’s beautiful and it almost convinced me that ballet was kinda cooler than basketball. This video essay is an excellent primer into the film’s aesthetic and narrative use of red.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Film critic

In alphabetical order:

L’Année Dernière à Dachau

Mark Rappaport ( read synopsis )

A look at the emotional and historical complexity of our aesthetic preferences.

Her Socialist Smile

John Gianvito ( watch trailer )

It offers some things we may not have known about Helen Keller, socialism, and ourselves.

A House is Not a Home: Wright or Wrong

Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa ( watch trailer )

It offers a lyrical and personal look at the relations between architecture and familial dysfunction by examining Frank Loyd Wright’s Rosenbaum house in Alabama. It isn’t my film, but I was interview subject, consultant, and camera assistant on it.

The Social Dilemma

Jeff Orlowski ( stream on Netflix or watch trailer )

It examines the corruption of communications via marketing, demonstrating how capitalism isn’t a victimless crime.

Sportin’ Life

Abel Ferrara ( watch trailer )

Ferra accurately calls it a documentary on the act of making documentaries.

Women According to Men

Saeed Nouri ( watch trailer )

An archival look at Iranian gender relations.

Charlie Shackleton

Filmmaker and sometime film critic

How To with John Wilson

John Wilson (stream on HBO Max or watch trailer )

I can’t think of anything that gives me greater pleasure than lo-fi on a hi-budget, and nobody’s fi is loer than John Wilson, whose sublime new HBO (!) show captured the beauty of the mundane with an ethereal grace made only more poignant by Wilson’s trademark fumbled voiceover. I didn’t expect the field of video essay to produce a more unexpected mainstream crossover this year than Theo Anthony getting an ESPN special (the excellent Subject to Review) but here it was.

Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another

Jessica Sarah Rinland ( watch trailer )

At one of the last social gatherings I attended before the pandemic, a friend told me that their favourite kind of film is one in which “nothing happens, many times”. That description stuck with me in Britain’s first national lockdown, as I rediscovered my taste for cinematic minimalism in newly streaming films like Ben Rivers’s Now, At Last! and – most memorably – this mesmerising study of archaeological restoration. As with all the best films where nothing happens, many times, Rinland’s work was a catalyst for a torrent of personal imaginative thought, and just when I was starting to feel incapable of it.

In a busy year for video essays on conspiratorial thinking (I also enjoyed Dan Olson’s In Search of a Flat Earth and Kirby Ferguson’s Constantly Wrong ), Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s characteristically probing and precise film was the only offering that seemed more concerned with asking questions than giving answers—surely a prerequisite of getting to grips with a cultural sphere increasingly dominated by conspiracy theories.

Leigh Singer

Film Journalist, programmer, video essayist

One of the saving graces of this awful year has been a greater involvement and engagement with student video work. The results across various courses and different countries has been a revelation – so much insight, originality and technical accomplishment. Though I advised on a couple of the videos below, the finished pieces are entirely the students’ own and I feel very fortunate to have watched the work take shape and then become so expertly realised. In the world of video essays, at least, the future looks bright.

Elizaveta Gushchynskaya

A brilliant, probing pop culture mash-up reflecting and refracting life under lockdown that doubles up as a superlative music video. It’s also the first video essay as part of a student course at the Polish-Japanese Institute of Technology, produced within five days, which makes the results even more extraordinary.

Ways of Looking: Playtime

Sergio Martínez Esqueda (password: Tati)

A dazzlingly original, present tense negotiation of Jacques Tati’s comic masterpiece that reveals so much about its multiple, often simultaneous visual delights and examines how different viewing experiences play a part in these discoveries. Another revelatory first time student video, made on the UK ’s National Film & TV School’s MA in Film Studies, Programming and Curation.

Mandy: The Film Concert

Too few video essays go into the audio textures of a film and its score. This one does a superbly effective, visually striking job at conveying complicated technical effects with great clarity. Yet another unbelievably accomplished student project, from the ever-impressive University of Warwick Film Studies department.

So simple, original, elegant, and strangely haunting.

Magnolia Zoomed

A terrific idea, beautifully executed, that resonates in a range of different ways in this most unsettling of years. Could be 2020’s video essay anthem.

Comedy and Tragedy in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite

A video essayist whose growing sophistication and playful touch when examining serious issues gets better every year. Parasite is the video essay gift that keeps on giving, but this is up there with the best feeding off of Bong’s hits.

Let’s Repo! Repo Man’s Plate O’ Shrimp Logic

Miklos Kiss & Shant Bayramian

An inventive, pretzel-logicked (is that a word?), suitably anarchic blast from start to finish, a hit-and-run job that makes you want to (re-)watch the film it hijacks immediately.

Shannon Strucci

video essayist StrucciMovies

Street Cat Rescue: Lionel

Flatbush Cats

Every video by Flatbush Cats is its own touching, elegantly written and edited and edifying little story about a cat. Together they make up a channel that is both a tremendous educational resource and a series of charming vignettes about individual animals and their personalities. You know from the outset that Lionel’s video has an unhappy ending and that it will break your heart, but it’s worth watching anyway, and it’s a fantastic example of what makes this channel so unique and so worth celebrating.

Scout Tafoya

Video essayist, critic and filmmaker

There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse

Nicolás Zukerfeld ( watch trailer )

The video essay casually makes it to the festival circuit. Hypnotic and funny.

last night i dreamt that somebody loved me , The Tale of Eurydice and a letter to adolescence

Haaniyah Angus

My new favourite filmmaker. She doesn’t make traditional video essays, so much as essays written in images. Heartbreakingly raw and emotionally open, even though she’s put barriers between her and her audience (footage from other movies), the connection between them is deeper for its distance. She reaches across mediums with a report on her melancholy, which becomes universal when painted with faces.

A Revolt Without Images (Una revuelta sin imágenes)

Pilar Monsell ( watch trailer )

What Makes a Movie Line Memorable?

Luís Azevedo & Mark Forsythe (Little White Lies)

Crystalline editing from Luis. Just soft as snow.

Milad Tangshir

Iranian filmmaker based in Italy

The Rising of the Moon

James Slaymaker

Surviving Memories

Alessandro Luchetti and Manuela Lazic

Irina Trocan

Lecturer in Film Studies, freelance film critic

Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea: 28 October 2015

While there are many moving films trying to sway the audience into empathy with the perils of migration, few provide such a watertight demonstration: using footage and data from various sources, this video essay/installation follows the play-by-play of an avoidable tragedy. A visually coherent, meticulous and fact-based plea to put human lives ahead of national interests and structure competent institutions accordingly.

The crackdown before Trump’s photo op

Washington Post/Dalton Bennett, Sarah Cahlan, Aaron C. Davis & Joyce Sohyun Lee

Should We Still be Watching Gone with the Wind? Part 1 + Part 2

Cold Crash Pictures

YouTube-standard in form but amazingly communicative in content, this take on the racism of Gone with the Wind is the best chance for anyone on the internet to be heard by the other side. Serge’s imagined viewer is initially respectful of Southern legacy, the monumentality of the 1939 film, skeptical towards accusations of racism and historical inaccuracy. Approaching the film through various videographic means, he builds a case by tackling counterarguments one by one.

Clean with Me (After Dark)

Gabrielle Stemmer ( watch trailer )

A nightmarish vision of what lies behind the shiny surfaces of Cleaning Motivation YouTube, this desktop documentary is borderline-voyeuristic (most likely in tune with how YouTube is meant to be used) and heart-on-its-sleeve empathetic toward the socially isolated women broadcasting themselves (along with the daughters they raise to take on their role). Social media is performative, which is a surprise to no one except the performers themselves.

Repeating Terror in Amat Escalante’s Heli (2013)

Violence is always a tricky subject for videographic exploration – and this take on how the threat of bodily harm exudes from the screen outwards is guaranteed to make you uncomfortable, which is precisely the point.

Like Watching Paint Dry – Éric Rohmer’s My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend

Putting a cinephile spin on a famed diss of Rohmerian cinematic style, this video uses digital wizardry for emphasising individual blocks of colour in an ostensibly plotless film to show where the story really is located: it is to be found in the slow completion of the colour scheme, inspired by a Nicolas de Staël painting that fleetingly appears on a wall as if to confirm an inside-joke of a climax. Like watching paint dry, indeed.

Manual for a Disassembly of Cinema (A Machine for Viewing, episode 3)

A theoretical excursion from cinematic projection to VR interactive gear via North Korean mass gymnastics with a “broken human pixel”, it makes you think of how seeing is altered when mediated by man rather than machine.

David Verdeure

Creator, collector and curator of video essays under the nom de video Filmscalpel

Swings Don’t Swing

Leonhard Müllner

The visual regimes of video games balance between realism and absurdity, between aesthetic refinement and ethic crudeness. There’s a wealth of great video essays and machinima about games. YouTuber eurothug4000 fascinatingly focused on virtual photography within games . But I chose this piece by Leonhard Müllner which virtually visits children’s playgrounds in shooter games. Those playgrounds are used as innocent-looking backdrops to the violent mayhem. Müllner’s video uses the games’ mechanics against themselves to lay bare their visual cynicism. He enacts the revenge of innocence on gamified violence, not in the least through the elegant spatial arrangement of his piece.

I Can’t Stop Watching Contagion

Lockdown life boosted the output of some video essayists and made others sour on the form, but it left nobody indifferent. Several pieces poked fun at our Zoomified existence or lamented our Skyped interactions. Rob Stone fabricated a touching video call between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. The fact that his Before the End went viral proves our need for comforting connections – even if they’re not our own.

Dan Olson watched Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion on repeat. The radical form of his confessional video essay visualises how a film can mark us and how it can serve as ‘emotional inoculation”.

Michigan Coronavirus Protestors Roots

The rhetorical strategies of the video essay can be applied to other subjects than film or television. In this US election year, I saw them being used for political purposes in a variety of ways. There were downright deceitful remixes (no, I won’t link one). There were revelatory side-by-side pieces . There were online experiments that made harrowing use of the absence of image and sound. But because politics (and 2020) can benefit from some levity, I chose a frivolous example for this poll. TikToker rebabeba used the desktop documentary format to get to the root of the problem .

Academic practitioners of the video essay served up some fascinating fare in 2020. It is especially great to see some practitioners confidently conduct formal experiments instead of sticking to tried and tested audiovisual strategies. Jill Walker Rettberg for instance enthusiastically embraced Snapchat technology in her video essay on the app’s biometrics .

Katie Bird’s video essay starts off conventionally with a mini-documentary on the early history of Steadicam and Panaglide. But her piece then builds on this historical research with a series of imaginative (and even speculative) visual experiments that make the most of the videographic form.

John Cleese + Anthony Braxton

Olivier Godin

Video essays and performance studies are a natural match. This piece for the Canadian website Zoom Out is another fine piece of evidence. Olivier Godin matches up the work of two performers: one an actor and the other a musician. Scenes from the legendary British sitcom Fawlty Towers are rescored using Anthony Braxton’s free-jazz composition For Alto. The music emphasises Cleese’s erratic physical comedy and brings out the unpredictable dynamism of his dialogue delivery. This counterintuitive combination prompts the viewer to consider Cleese’s dialogue delivery as a musical improvisation – one with the unpredictable energy of Braxton’s jazz.

Michael Witt

Professor of Cinema at the University of Roehampton, London

Characteristically sharp, inventive audiovisual film criticism from the great Mark Rappaport.

Illuminating audiovisual study of the history, uses and effects of the Steadicam and Panaglide.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman

Moving personal exploration of the terms of the film’s title.

Golden Gate

William Brown

Insightful audiovisual investigation of the cinematic representation of the Golden Gate Bridge from a post-humanist perspective.

Thought-provoking poetic study of the relationship between successive image recording technologies and what they capture and omit.

Against the Day

Succinct reflection on the role of light in Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre (1998).

Further reading

The best film books of 2020, the 50 best films of 2020, the best blu-rays and dvds of 2020, sign up for sight and sound’s weekly film bulletin and more.

News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month.

Other things to explore

The best video essays of 2023.

By Queline Meadows

The best films of 2023 – all the votes

Martin scorsese on winning sight and sound’s best films of 2023 poll with killers of the flower moon.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, "the art of the video essay," a page by kevin lee, grandmaster of the form.

By Kevin Lee, Our Far-Flung Correspondent

In the age of YouTube and Vimeo, one of the most exciting developments in film culture are online video essays that explore different aspects of the movies. These videos take footage from films and reconfigure them using editing, text, graphics and voiceover to reveal startling observations and insights, visualizing them in ways that text criticism can't. These videos are typically produced independently by using consumer-level equipment, demonstrating that just about anyone with a computer can be both a filmmaker and a critic. The only limits are those of imagination and intelligence.

Below is a handpicked list of some of the most outstanding and representative works so far among this emerging genre of online videos. All of them feature regular contributors to Roger Ebert's website. Many of these videos and their creators will be featured in a panel presentation at this year's Ebertfest in April.

1. "The Sight and Sound Film Poll: A Tribute to Roger Ebert and His Favorite Films." Produced in anticipation of last year's Sight and Sound International Critics Poll of the greatest films of all time. The video focuses on four of Roger's favorite films of all time, the ones that have been part of his top ten lists for the last 30 years. His writing on those films, as found in an article written in his Video Home Companion from the 1980s, is used as a script and narrated by a chorus of 20 Ebert contributors. Read Roger's response to the video: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/05/a_symphony_of_voices.html

The Sight and Sound Film Poll: An International Tribute to Roger Ebert and His Favorite Films from Press Play Video Blog on Vimeo .

2. "The Spielberg Face." By Kevin B. Lee. An exploration of the human face as the visual signature throughout the career of Steven Spielberg .

3. "Falling: The Architecture of Gravity." By Jim Emerson. A video essay comparing how different movies and cinema techniques depict the act of falling. Accompanied by Jim's article on his Scanners blog: http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2009/01/the_architecture_of_gravity.html

4. " Wes Anderson : The Substance of Style, Part 5." By Matt Zoller Seitz. The prologue to The Royal Tenenbaums is annotated with text and inserts pointing out different stylistic influences of the sequence. The video is the finale of a five-part series of video essays that led to a book project on Wes Anderson, which will be released this year. Originally published on the Moving Image Source: http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-substance-of-style-pt-5-20090413

5. "Constructive Editing in Robert Bresson's Pickpocket." By David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. Two of cinema's leading scholars explore the art of editing. Part of a series of video essays produced with Criterion as educational supplements for Bordwell and Thompson's legendary textbook Film Art: an Introduction. Featured on their blog Observations on Film Art: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/10/28/news-a-video-essay-on-constructive-editing/

Constructive Editing in Robert Bresson's Pickpocket from David Bordwell on Vimeo .

6. "Low Budget Eye Candy." By Steven Boone. A fierce advocate for DIY indie filmmaking demonstrates how George Lucas was once a truly resourceful low budget filmmaker. Originally featured on the Scanners blog: http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2009/02/george_lucas_lowbudget_eyecand.html

LOW BUDGET EYE CANDY #1 from Steven Boone on Vimeo .

7. "Super: A Brief History of Superhero Films." By Michael Mirasol. Featured on Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents: http://blogs.suntimes.com/foreignc/2012/05/a-brief-history-of-the-superhero.html

SUPER: A Brief History of Superhero Films from Michael Mirasol on Vimeo .

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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TriQuarterly

Search form, an introduction to video essays.

The works in our winter suite are interested in process. These three new videos demonstrate how, like other literary genres, the “video essay” gets redefined by every new iteration. Like early examples of video art, each piece repurposes a technology to highlight the accidental art-experiences available within a utilitarian process.

In our first video, “Ars Poetica,” Kelly Slivka compresses the inherent audio/video qualities of digital composition—the sound of keys tapping, the flash of copy-paste, all the sensory layers of writing-aloud. While this project might serve as a document of what writing was like in the early digital age, it also demonstrates the various lives and “meanings” a poem briefly inhabits on its way to a final version. “Ars Poetica” has us thinking about poems as being always already in flux. As the audience watches Slivka compose, we begin to root for the writer to get each word right, to come toward a point of rest, a final utterance, even—and because—it won’t be their last.

Our second video, “The Center” by Annelyse Gelman has us eyeing the eerie potential for non-human entities to replicate or replace human jobs, relationships, and even literature. Like examples of video art that pushed the limits of early green screen technology, “The Center” repurposes face swap and text-to-voice in a savvy, uncanny pairing of poetry and digital media that brings out the specific resonances of the text. Gelman’s project nods to animal experiments involving cages with electrified flooring, centers and peripheries that implicate and confront the viewer: “Are you thinking about your own heartbeat?” 

Using a style that sets high-quality footage to the pace of slow breathing, Allain Daigle’s “New Arctic” thinks about the future of our planet without using images of landscape. In this project, Daigle shows us a house being built from the inside: industrial lighting, radio waves, breaths that rise in parcels. He asks us to consider the changes “our skin doesn’t notice” that mean our children will “dream about icebergs,” because “the new Arctic,” of course, is an oxymoron.

The videos in this suite trick us into seeing three familiar technologies in unfamiliar ways. Each piece showcases the variety of formats, structures, and new media that today’s literary videos might take on.

Issue 155  Winter / Spring 2019

Next: , share triquarterly, about the author, sarah minor.

Sarah Minor is the author of  Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit  (Noemi Press 2021),  Bright Archive  (Rescue Press 2020), winner of the 2020 Big Other Nonfiction Book Award and  The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated  from Essay Press. She is the recipient of the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, an Individual Research Grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, and the Kenyon Writers' Workshop. Her essays have been collected in places like  Best American Experimental Writing ,  Advanced Creative Nonfiction , and  A Harp in the Stars.  Minor holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and a PhD from Ohio University. She currently teaches as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program.

The Latest Word

Frames Cinema Journal

Peer-reviewed | open access | annual.

The Video Essay: The Future of Academic Film and Television Criticism?

By erlend lavik.

That the Internet has transformed film and television criticism ( 1 ) is readily apparent, though the ways in which it has done so are exceedingly hard to pin down. The most obvious change is simply quantitative: digital technology has made the maxim “everyone’s a critic” more nearly true than ever before. It is far harder to gauge the internet’s impact on the quality of film and television criticism, mainly because developments are so diverse and contradictory. Online criticism ranges from brilliant to banal, and it is as easy to argue that film criticism has never been better as it is to argue that it has never been worse. It merely depends on where we cast our nets and on what evaluative criteria we bring into play. What we can say for sure is that digital technology has a great potential to reinvigorate film and television criticism. The aim of this article is to tentatively explore what this potential consists of and how it can be realized. Of course, it is impossible to deal with such a vast topic at a general level. Film criticism is a sweeping concept, ranging from amateur blogs to newspaper reviews to dense scholarly studies that shade into film theory and film history. I will concentrate on the latter pole of the continuum, partly to make the discussion somewhat manageable, and partly because it is in the area of more academically oriented criticism that I think fulfillment of this potential is both most realistic and enticing. ( 2 )

One of the obvious fortes of digital criticism is its flexibility. For example, unlike their print counterparts, most online critics need not worry about word counts or deadlines. They are also free to write about any film they want, not just theatrical releases, or to put to the test generic conventions and explore alternative writing styles, unconstrained by editorial policy. Interactivity is another frequently cited resource. Hypertext links can point readers in the direction of relevant background information, while comment sections make online criticism more like the first move in an ongoing conversation rather than a verdict from on high. Most importantly – and promisingly – online critics may incorporate in their work moving images and sound. The burgeoning genre of the video essay commonly employs edited footage from the films under analysis in order to enrich and expand the function of criticism: to shed light on individual films, groups of films, or the cinema as an art form.

The inability to quote their object of study has been a long-standing drawback for film critics. The predicament has been most famously, and perhaps enigmatically, expressed in Raymond Bellour’s classical essay, “The Unattainable Text”. For Bellour, the literary text occupies a privileged position due to “the undivided conformity of the object of study and the means of study, in the absolute material coincidence between language and language” (1975: 20). Unlike literary critics, film critics have not been able to replicate portions of works, but have had to cope as best they can, mimicking, evoking, describing, “playing on an absent object”, as Bellour puts it ( ibid .: 26). In this digital day and age, though, this is no longer the case. For the first time, there is material equivalence between film and film criticism, as both exist – or can be made to exist – simply as media files.

That final statement requires a couple of qualifications, however. First, film critics have naturally not been incapable of reproducing any cinematic attribute. Film is a multimodal medium, and its repertoire includes print critics’ symbolic means of expression: the written word. Hence those portions of a film that consist of text are, to be sure, quotable. The problem is that text rarely, if ever, functions autonomously in the cinema. Certainly, when filmmakers started using intertitles in the silent era, critics could accurately quote movie dialogue – but not, crucially, its preceding and/or subsequent visual enactment (presumably the very reason such works assumed cinematic rather than solely literary form in the first place). With the introduction of sound, dialogue and performance were synchronized, throwing into relief the inadequacy of partial quotation (or more accurately, in this case, transcription). Print critics may still duplicate the literal meaning of the words spoken onscreen, but not the act of speaking itself, i.e. the what but not the how (except, of course, as always, through ekphrasis). ( 3 )

Second, since the 1970s film scholars have occasionally made use of frame enlargements when performing close readings. While useful for some purposes – scrutinizing image composition or lighting schemes, for example – still frames can merely hint at some of the key characteristics of film as a temporal art form: camera movement, blocking, editing, and so on. As Kristin Thompson – who, with David Bordwell, pioneered the use of still images in scholarly studies – points out, frame enlargements were quite rarely used because “It took special equipment to photograph such frames: expensive camera attachments, color-balanced light sources, and the expertise to use both” (2006: n.p.). Thus, until DVDs made frame grabbing easy, most scholars persisted with studio-generated publicity photos as illustrations, which of course were useless for close analysis, seeing as they “did not reflect what really appeared in the film, since they were still photos taken on the set, often with different poses, lighting, and camera position” ( ibid .).

Third, not all films are available in digital format. Numerous cinematic works cannot be quoted even in video essays, if only for the simple reason that they are unavailable either online or on DVD. Fourth, if we think of a film’s theatrical distribution as an “original”, some aural and visual information may be lost or altered as celluloid prints are converted to digital files on a computer. There is no surround sound, for example; film grain is often removed; and the image will typically be cropped along the perimeter. ( 4 ) Still, for most purposes these are minor problems (and it is worth bearing in mind that literary critics are not able to quote all aspects of a book either: to appraise the quality of its paper, its layout, or font style, they too must resort to description).

The obvious advancement that digital film criticism offers is the ability to quote in order to illustrate and exemplify, to hold up for the reader fragments of the work as a shared frame of reference for the critic’s observations and evaluations. The upshot of this facility is hard to specify at this stage. The video essay is still in its infancy, and has not coalesced into established patterns or forms yet. The label refers to sometimes widely divergent works. Matt Zoller Seitz’s wonderful five-part analysis of the film authorship of Wes Anderson, “The Substance of Style”, is a fairly conventional auteur study, tracing key influences on the director’s style and themes. ( 5 ) However, rather than putting forward his argument as text, it is presented in the form of a voiceover accompanied by carefully edited footage from Anderson’ work, sometimes juxtaposed by the work of the major artists that have inspired it. This allows Zoller Seitz to make his case with far greater economy, precision, and persuasion than a written piece with some frame grabs could hope to accomplish.

By contrast, Jim Emerson’s video essay, “Close-Up”, presents a very different approach to the format. ( 6 ) A collage of excerpts from classical films with no expository narration, it offers not so much a straightforward line of reasoning as an evocative meditation on the medium of film. With some modifications (if, no doubt, somewhat to its detriment) Zoller Seitz’s essay could probably be adapted into a scholarly article; Emerson’s, meanwhile, would not look out of place in an art gallery. These examples, though far from exhaustive, point up the scope of the video essay. As we will see, the format overlaps in myriad ways with a number of more established generic structures. The aim of the following discussion is partly descriptive – i.e. it attempts, in broad strokes, to provide an overview of the main genres with which the video essay intersects – and partly normative, i.e. it seeks to tentatively indicate some fruitful avenues for how the video essay may enhance film criticism.

One obvious point of reference is the so-called essay film, itself a notoriously elusive creature. Phillip Lopate calls it a centaur, “a cinematic genre that barely exists” (1992: 19). What he searches for, but struggles to find, is the cinematic equivalent of the literary essay: an eloquent, personal attempt to work out some fairly well-defined problem or mental knot through coherent arguments that flaunts, traces, or preserves the act of thinking.

While I share Lopate’s desire to see this fabled genre brought to fruition far more often, it is both too broad and too narrow for my purposes here. It is too inclusive because there are no thematic constraints. An essay film may deal with any topic under the sun; film criticism must be concerned with film. On the other hand, it is too restrictive, for Lopate seeks to describe a certain style, or tone of voice: elegant, probing, subjective, reflective, reflexive, and so on. The essay film assumes an intermediate position between avant-gardist and documentary practices. On the one hand, it is more accessible and less radically experimental than the avant-garde. For Lopate, the essay presents a reasoned discourse on a reasonably identifiable topic. Thus he finds it hard to think of a filmmaker such as Jean-Luc Godard as an essayist, as he is “too much the modernist […] to be caught dead straightforwardly expressing his views” ( ibid .: 20). While the essay form “allows for fragmentation and disjunction […] it keeps weaving itself whole again, resisting alienation, if only through the power of a synthesizing, personal voice with its old-fashioned humanist assumptions” ( ibid .: 21). Most controversially, perhaps, Lopate insists that an essay-film “must have words, in the form of a text either spoken, subtitled or intertitled” ( ibid .: 19).

On the other hand, the essayist’s rhetoric is invested with less authority than the documentarian’s; it is less assertive, impartial, proclamatory, or didactic: “The text must present more than information”, writes Lopate, “it must have a strong, personal point of view. The standard documentary voiceover which tells us, say, about the annual herring yield is fundamentally journalistic, not essayistic” ( ibid .: 19). The documentary’s typically omniscient mode of address is communal and collective. The essay, by contrast, invites us to adopt a more singular spectatorial position. It speaks to us as embodied individuals rather than as an undifferentiated mass. As Laura Rascaroli observes, the essay film’s argument is less “closed”, and its “rhetoric is such that it opens up problems, and interrogates the spectator; instead of guiding her through emotional and intellectual response, the essay urges her to engage individually with the film” (2008: 35).

While the essay form can be very rewarding, it would obviously be unwise to consign digital film criticism to such a Procrustean bed. We can all agree that the video essay – or, if we want to avoid the restricting connotations of the latter term: audiovisual film criticism – would benefit both from more documentary and from more avant-garde practices. Indeed, it seems to me that, among academics, it is the avant-gardist brand of audiovisual criticism that is most prevalent. For example, the recently launched, and tellingly titled, online journal Audiovisual Thinking ( 7 ) largely consists of experimental videos. Vectors is another online journal in a similar vein, promoting itself as “a fusion of old and new media in order to foster ways of knowing and seeing that expand the rigid text-based paradigms of traditional scholarship”. ( 8 ) While this work is highly varied and very hard to categorize, at least parts of it might be said to share some affinities with certain pre-existing, though somewhat marginal and interrelated, practices. Thus, some pieces appear to have a theoretical agenda, calling to mind the tradition of scholar-filmmakers like Noël Burch, Laura Mulvey, and Peter Wollen. Other pieces seem inspired by self-reflexive, avant-garde art engaging in political activism, recalling for example the efforts of situationist filmmakers like Guy Debord. Accordingly, Eric Faden, a prominent advocate and practitioner of multimedia-based scholarship, writes that “media stylos” or “critical media” (as he calls his video essays) consist of “using moving images to engage and critique themselves; moving images illustrating theory; or even moving images revealing the labor of their own construction” (2008: n.p.).

These efforts are interesting and rewarding, for there is no clear-cut line that neatly separates academic from artistic ventures in all cases, or at all times. Of course, most products and practices we encounter can be assigned exclusively and conclusively to one realm: It is either art or scholarship, and distinctions can be made comfortably enough, based on generic conventions, for example, or institutional affiliation. But it is also self-evident that there will be overlaps and limit cases. Most elementarily, artworks can be informed by academic theories or concepts (from philosophy, say, or narratology, or psychoanalysis), while an awareness and understanding of the craft that has gone into a work of art may sharpen scholars’ analytical and theoretical prowess.

Seeking out grey areas, exploring intersections and reciprocities, can be fruitful, and it swiftly demonstrates how random the boundaries between the arts and the academy can be. In some cases, artists and scholars appear, by and large, to engage in the same basic enterprise, except that they fall back on different modes of discourse. But this is hardly a revelation. After all, debates about the distinctions and interdependencies between literature and philosophy can be traced back at least to Plato. ( 9 ) It is, or ought to be, incontrovertible that the borderline between adjacent fields is not determined once and for all by the intrinsic features of the respective phenomena themselves. Nevertheless, the fact that the dividing line could easily have been drawn differently does not mean that it might as well be drawn anywhere. The ways in which we compartmentalize artistic and scholarly activities and creations are obviously not wholly natural, but neither are they completely arbitrary. Over time, the two domains have developed mostly distinct, if occasionally converging, rules and habits. These conventions continue to evolve, of course, but there is considerable continuity, and the pragmatic partitions remain because they have been found to serve certain purposes quite well.

Consequently, while I would certainly not discourage audiovisual scholarship that approaches experimental and “performative” modes of inquiry and communication, this is not where I think the greatest potential of audiovisual film criticism lies. I find that it adopts too readily the conceptual abstractionism of the artistic avant-garde, and does not strive hard enough to preserve the particular competencies of film scholars as scholars : the ability to not just engage with complex thought, but to pull it into focus, and to articulate and communicate those ideas clearly. ( 10 ) I share Lopate’s desire to see more intellectually ambitious work that endeavors not just to get us to think – though there is nothing wrong with that, of course – but “also tells us what its author thinks” (1992: 20).

Of course, I share the concern of many video essayists that the audiovisual material should not serve simply as ornamentation, but ought to contribute something that mere text on its own cannot. I agree with Faden that many electronic journals simply replicate traditional print journals, only on a computer screen, “same dense content now only more difficult to read” (2008, n.p.). But I think he overstates the differences between print-based and multimedia-based scholarship when he writes that:

Traditional scholarship aspires to exhaustion, to be the definitive, end-all-be-all, last word on a particular subject. The media stylo, by contrast, suggests possibilities – it is not the end of scholarly inquiry; it is the beginning. It explores and experiments and is designed just as much to inspire as to convince (…) In a key difference, the media stylo moves scholarship beyond just creating knowledge and takes on an aesthetic, poetic function (ibid).

I do not think this adds up to a relevant distinction between print-based and multimedia-based scholarship. Rather, Faden arbitrarily maps the different means of expression onto different epistemological ideals and procedures, which seem to roughly correspond to the old – and admittedly hazy – distinction between continental and analytical philosophy. Thus, on the one hand, Faden’s description of the media stylo would be just as applicable to the work of many influential thinkers that formulated their ideas in the form of print: In Critical Excess , Colin Davis points out that “What matters for Heidegger is the philosophical yield of his readings, not their critical pursuasiveness” (2010: 24), while Deleuze “wanted to create something new through his encounters with [texts and films]” (ibid: 56); Zizek, meanwhile, “wavers between patient, scholarly coherence-building and outrageous leaps of the interpreting imagination”, and “relies more on assertion than argument” (ibid: 128). Harold Bloom wrote that “all criticism is prose poetry” (1973: 95), while Derrida preferred to say that he wrote “towards” rather than “about” texts (1992: 62).

On the other hand, audiovisual scholarship may of course adopt a more conventional and pedagogical means of inquiry and presentation, and I think there is much to be gained from exploring more carefully the possibilities offered by more expository – “documentary”, if you will – modes of audiovisual film criticism. And to be sure, there are examples. Another online journal, Mediascape , ( 11 ) has published some video essays whose rhetoric is more straightforwardly explicatory than interrogative or associative. Other web sites target a more general audience of cineastes. Moving Image Source ( 12 ) contains many video essays, predominantly by Matt Zoller Seitz, with clear trains of thought and voiceover narration to guide the viewer. Critic and filmmaker Kevin B. Lee ( 13 ) is another frequent contributor. Zoller Seitz also curates Press Play – a blog springing from Indiewire , a daily news site for independent filmmakers – which consists mostly of video essays.

However, the contributors to such web sites are rarely academics; they tend instead to be freelance writers, critics, or filmmakers. This observation is not offered as a form of critique, of course, but rather as an indication of the extent to which academics have been hesitant to explore audiovisual scholarship, except as an avant-garde practice. One recent and promising project is Audiovisualcy , ( 14 ) whose subtitle ( Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies ) and self-presentation (“An online forum for video essays about films and moving image texts, film and moving image studies, and film theory”) suggest a more scholarly profile. But while there are original contributions, it functions more like an archive, collecting video essays from around the Internet, Consequently, it largely resembles and replicates what is available on web sites like Press Play .

I want to emphasize that these are all valuable contributions to film culture, ( 15 ) so I hope I do not sound too critical or prescriptive when I say I believe the format can be put to even better use, at least from a scholarly perspective. First and foremost, I would like to see audiovisual film criticism offer more ideas, in greater detail and greater depth. Most of the efforts so far tend to be relatively short, usually somewhere around ten minutes. ( 16 ) It is a tall order indeed, of course, but it is possible to envisage audiovisual work as densely informational and intellectually ambitious as a traditional scholarly article. ( 17 ) Certainly, recourse to visual quotations often eliminates the need for exposition, ( 18 ) but I also tend to agree with Lopate that – contrary to the utopianism of Alexandre Astruc’s famous 1948 article “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo” – the camera “is not a pencil, and it is rather difficult to think with” (1992: 19). Audiovisual film critics should not accept too uncritically the old filmmaking maxim show, don’t tell . Now, I certainly do not want to foreclose too hastily any avenues yet to be pursued; we should experiment with the genre and not try to settle in advance the best way forward. Thus I will simply assert that in my, admittedly tentative, vision for the most fully-realized audiovisual film criticism of the future, it is still text – whether written or spoken – which does the heavy lifting in opening its author’s mind to us.

There is an understandable concern that, having added moving images to its toolbox, audiovisual criticism ought to contribute or express something that mere text cannot. To be sure, the visuals should not simply serve as illustration, if by that we mean mere ornamentation. However, I fail to see how they could be “merely” decorative as long as they are sensibly selected and utilized. Imagine famous exemplars of historical-theoretical film criticism like Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” or Tom Gunning’s “The Cinema of Attractions” as voiceovers, accompanied by illustrative film clips: Perhaps it would not literally add new insights – it might, of course, but they would be hard to spell out hypothetically – but it would, I think, help get some of the authors’ points across with greater immediacy and precision, or make the texts accessible to a wider audience. It probably would not be worth the effort to visually illustrate these texts, but surely there are good reasons to think it would have added something of value.

Others would benefit more; say, Raymond Bellour’s renowned examination of twelve shots from Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep , “The Obvious and the Code”. Formalist studies would obviously be a prime candidate: David Bordwell – who uses frame enlargements more extensively and skillfully than anyone to illustrate his observations – would profit immensely. Just imagine his analyses – of depth staging strategies, ( 19 ) of action sequences in Hong Kong films ( 20 ), or of intensified continuity in modern blockbusters ( 21 ) – with the added benefit of moving images, complete with side-by-side comparisons of films from different periods and traditions. Clearly, the benefits to film studies would be considerable.

All kinds of close analyses, whether hermeneutic or descriptive, would stand to gain: mise-en-scene criticism, for example, or statistical style analysis, or the interpretation of themes, symbols and intertextual references. Generally, it would make film criticism richer: not just more reliable and verifiable, but more enjoyable and accessible as well. Traditional print criticism of the academic variety undeniably tends to place huge demands on, or faith in, the reader’s visual memory. Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema (2006) is an intriguing case in that regard.  A 150-minute “documentary” in which philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek, embedded in the diegesis, pontificates on the meaning of individual films, and on the cinema in general, richly illustrated with clips, hints at how visual quotations may serve to exemplify and clarify ideas – even if the film reads more like a general introduction to Zizek’s thought than an in-depth, concentrated examination of a distinct issue. ( 22 )

Commentaries on DVDs by filmmakers, critics, and historians may also hint at some of the forms that digital film criticism can take, though this genre has a serious drawback: the voiceover is at the mercy of – or forever playing catch-up with – the film’s linear, temporal unfolding. As Adrian Martin observes, this means that the voiceover narration tends to “coincide only loosely with the moment-by-moment flow of the film”, making it “easy to more or less ignore the film and offer a standard lecture on its context, background information, director biography, etc.” (2010: n.p.). ( 23 ) In the digital film criticism that I have in mind, however, text and image are carefully coordinated or “co-written”. Thus, the video essayist can arrest the action, for example by freezing the frame, to develop a detailed argument about shot composition, or inserting footage from other movies as points of comparison.

Other familiar frames of reference for audiovisual film criticism are the academic lecture and the conference presentation, both of which typically combine the spoken word, moving and still images, and text in the form of bullet points or quotations. All of these elements could enter into the video essay as well, so one template for the genre is a lecture over which the presenter has full control. Delays, distractions, technical hiccups, digressions, nervousness, false starts, and lapses of memory can all be eliminated. Rather, the video essayist can fine-tune every detail of the presentation in order to present an argument with maximum precision and clarity.

So far I have concentrated on how visual quotations may enhance the kind of criticism and analysis that film scholars and students are used to reading. There can be no doubt that the ability to make use of moving images allows the critic to express ideas more accurately and vividly. The value of this should not be underestimated. Still, the greatest cause for excitement is perhaps the prospect that the visuals may push thought further. This is a tricky point to demonstrate, of course, though I will try to hint at what I have in mind by way of an example: In 2009 I wrote an article on intertextuality in the HBO television series The Wire (2002-2008), noting that that the drug raid on Hamsterdam in the season 3 finale invokes Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) by, amongst other things, using the same music (Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”). In short, I made the case that this parallel, when considered in the context of other references and analogies, establishes certain emotionally and ideologically charged associations that contribute to the The Wire’s sociopolitical concerns. Having since started to experiment with audiovisual criticism it strikes me, when I see these scenes again, that there are additional semblances at the level of form that also merit consideration. To be more precise – though it is difficult to be too precise without recourse to the audiovisuals – the two attacks are similarly filmed in terms of sequencing, camera placement, and sound and image editing, the cumulative effect of which, in both The Wire and Apocalypse Now , is to create an intriguing contrast between the narrational and the moral points of view.

Although I was vaguely aware of these issues when I wrote the initial article, it never really occurred to me to fully think them through and include them in the study. Because I was creating a text-based analysis, I did not find this hunch worth pursuing. I intuitively sensed that, without the ability to quote the two objects of study adequately, it would have been too difficult and laborious to get my points across to the reader. And even if it were possible, it might not have been worth it, as it would probably have made the text terribly exposition-heavy and dull. Had I instead been composing an audiovisual piece of criticism, I am quite confident that I would have pressed on and explored these ideas in greater detail and depth.

As research for a book project as well as for a video essay on The Wire , ( 24 ) I recently rewatched all five seasons of the series, and it struck me how potently the different means of expression shape thought. For example, with the audiovisual essay I am putting together in mind, other features of the show announce themselves as candidates for further reflection and analysis, such as acting, dialogue and delivery, and character complexity. Media scholar Anders Johansen has made a general observation that is pertinent here: “When I work with the same material in different media, I see it from slightly different angles. I do not search the archive in the same way when I am writing a book as when I am building a database […] The medium is a means of investigation” (2011: 73 [author’s translation]). In other words, different means of expression also constitute different instruments of contemplation. We use words, images, and sounds not merely to capture and pass on pre-existing and fully-formed ideas, but also as thinking devices. By confining film criticism exclusively to text and still images, we are simply not using every piece of intellectual equipment potentially available to us.

Admittedly, the proposals set forth in this article may be purely utopian. Criticism that is as rich in information, knowledge and ideas as an academic article, accompanied by carefully edited audiovisuals to illustrate and exemplify – all of it conceived as a single, cohesive intellectual enterprise – is obviously hugely challenging. For example, many scholars simply lack the practical know-how required to make video essays, though at least ripping DVDs and embedding clips in Keynote or Powerpoint presentations is becoming increasingly common. ( 25 )

Of course, those who are proficient may still not find it worth the effort. Firstly, it is very time-consuming to extract all the clips, and then to edit them, before synchronizing the visuals and the text/voiceover so that everything comes together as an integrated, unitary argument. Secondly, there are few, if any, publication outlets for such work that bring the institutional rewards that would make the quest worthwhile. Particularly younger scholars who have not yet secured permanent positions – precisely those, it seems reasonable to think, who are most likely to possess the required technological skills – are expected to publish frequently and in prestigious journals. Both of these expectations would be hard to meet for devoted video essayists. To put it bluntly, then, there are simply few incentives to undertake serious audiovisual work for academics today (though it is also conceivable, of course, that swimming against the stream might be a wise – if rather riskier – career move for newcomers).

Copyright is another obstacle to audiovisual film criticism. Currently, copyright norms and regulations are confusing and poorly understood. Even though European legal systems give protection for the use of copyrighted materials for critical and educational aims, media scholars have generally not exercised their right to quote strongly enough. Universities and university presses, who ought to spearhead the digital rights campaign, tend to adopt absurdly conservative safety-first policies. This is regrettable, as it may lead to “a recalibration of the law itself towards a less permissive setting” (Jaszi, 2007: n.p.). In the US, the situation is somewhat healthier. Organizations like the Center for Social Media and The Electronic Frontier Foundation have lobbied intensely and successfully to defend the American public’s digital rights. Their efforts have been crucial in securing new exemptions to the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), as when circumventing copy protections on DVDs for purposes of criticism was made legal for film and media educators and students in July 2010. ( 26 ) In Europe, though, it is still illegal to bypass DVD encryption, even when it is done in order to create works that are wholly innocent. Thus, while it is permissible to use film clips in audiovisual film criticism, it is unlawful to get around the encryption that would make it possible to create said clips in the first place. Moreover, in the US fair use guidelines ( 27 ) have been created for a number of practices, including for scholarly research in communication, ( 28 ) for online video, ( 29 ) and for teaching for film and media educators. ( 30 )

Clearly, there are considerable practical and legal obstacles on the path to the brave new world of audiovisual film criticism. Still, the potential rewards are such that it is tempting to paraphrase Lopate’s concluding remarks (1992: 22) on his centaur genre, half-text, half-film: I will go on patiently stroking the embers of the form as I envision it, convinced that the truly great audiovisual film criticism has yet to be made, and that this succulent opportunity awaits the daring critic of the future.

( 1 ) The rest of the article refers exclusively to film. This is merely to steer clear of awkward phrasings, however. It is simply implied that what I have to say about digital film criticism applies to digital television criticism as well.

( 2 ) I am not suggesting that this kind of film criticism must be performed by academics, or be founded on scholarly conventions. Indeed, part of the promise of digital film criticism is that it may challenge the often overly rigid distinctions between “professional” and “amateur” practices. What I have in mind, rather, is measured and reflective criticism more generally – i.e. responses that are intellectually ambitious, informed by a profound understanding of the medium’s expressive resources and history, and strive to offer up more than mere opinions and consumer guidance – of which academic film criticism at present is the prototypical example.

( 3 ) See Adrian Martin’s contribution to this issue of Frames in which he discusses ekphrasis .

( 4 ) For a detailed comparison of frames captured from DVD and frames photographed from celluloid, see Kawin, 2008.

( 5 ) See http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-substance-of-style-20091109 .

( 6 ) See http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2007/10/close_up_the_movie_essay.html .

( 7 )  See www.audiovisualthinking.org . The journal is not dedicated to film criticism, but describes itself as “ the world’s first journal of academic videos about audiovisuality, communication and media. The journal is a pioneering forum where academics and educators can articulate, conceptualize and disseminate their research about audiovisuality and audiovisual culture through the medium of video”.

( 8 )  http://vectorsjournal.org/journal/index.php?page=Introduction

( 9 ) For a useful overview of the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy, see chapter 1 in Davis (2010).

( 10 ) Research is not a popularity contest, of course, and public perception should not be allowed to dictate findings or methodologies. But given the severe crisis that the humanities find themselves in today, it seems wise to make a concerted effort to reach out and reconnect with the public at large. Video essays could well be a useful way for film and media scholars to reach audiences that do not seek out the kinds of highly specialized academic journals and books where most studies are published. It is doubtful, however, that uncompromisingly experimental efforts will realize this potential. That is more likely to alienate tax payers further, exacerbating the image problem that the humanities suffer from, as excessively cloistered and esoteric.

( 11 )  See http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/ .

( 12 )  See http://www.movingimagesource.us/ .

( 13 ) See http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/ .

( 14 ) Online at: https://vimeo.com/groups/audiovisualcy .

( 15 ) Fine individual efforts include Benjamin Sampson’s visual study of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence , available from   http://la.remap.ucla.edu/mias/ben/index.php/Main_Page ; Catherine Grant’s “Unsentimental Education: On Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes ”, available from http://filmanalytical.blogspot.com/2010/06/unsentimental-education-on-claude.html ; Steven Santos’s audiovisual essays on Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Fritz Lang’s M , available from http://vimeo.com/channels/127338 ; and Matthias Stork’s two-part essay on what he calls “chaos cinema”, available from http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video_essay_matthias_stork_calls_out_the_chaos_cinema .

( 16 ) There are some longer pieces in which different facets of a broad topic are published in installments. One example is Press Play’s “Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg”, which consists of six discrete chapters, some of which are even further divided into separate parts.

( 17 ) What I have in mind is something akin to Richard Misek’s Mapping Rohmer: A Research Journey Through Paris , an excerpt of which was presented at the Remix Cinema workshop in Oxford on March 24, 2011. It is shown in its entirety here  in this issue of Frames .

( 18 )  A nice example is Kirby Ferguson’s “Everything Is a Remix” series. For example, part two manages, in just under three minutes, to sum up the numerous sources of inspiration for George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) more clearly and persuasively than many an article could. See http://www.everythingisaremix.info/everything-is-a-remix-part-2/ .

( 19 )  See for example Bordwell (1997).

( 20 )  See Bordwell (2000).

( 21 ) See Bordwell (2002).

( 22 ) Of course, audiovisual criticism need not function as stand-alone creations, but may usefully supplement (or be supplemented by) print-based work.

( 23 )  There are ways around this problem, however. See Rosenbaum (2010). For more on the practical challenges of DVD commentaries, see Bennett and Brown (2008).

( 24 ) This video essay “Style in The Wire ”, together with a text which discusses its making both appear  here in this issue of Frames .

( 25 )  As is information about how to go about it. See Mittell (2010).

( 26 ) See two other significant discussions of ‘fair use’ and copyright in this issue of Frames by Steve Anderson and Jaimie Baron .

( 27 ) Such guidelines have no legal authority, but they have often proved highly useful, as they specify what practices and procedures agents in some creative community – aided by input from legal experts – consider fair. For example, the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use has made it far easier and less risky for documentarians to use copyright material in their films. See Aufdeheide and Jaszi (2007).

( 28 ) See http://www.centerforsocialmedia.orghttps://framescinemajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/WEB_ICA_CODE.pdf .

( 29 ) See http://www.centerforsocialmedia.orghttps://framescinemajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/online_best_practices_in_fair_use.pdf .

( 30 ) See http://digital.lib.pdx.edu/resources/SCMSBestPracticesforFairUseinTeaching-Final.pdf .

Bibliography:

Aufdeheide P and Jaszi P (2007): “Fair Use and Best Practices: Surprising Success”, in Intellectual Property Today , vol. 14, no. 10.

Bellour R (1974): “The Obvious and the Code”, in Screen , vol. 15, no. 4: 7-17

Bellour R (1975): “The Unattainable Text”, in Screen , vol. 16, no. 3: 19-27.

Bennett J and Brown T (2008): “The Place, Purpose, and Practice of the BFI’s DVD Collection and the Academic Film Commentary: An Interview with Caroline Millar and Ginette Vincendeau”, in Bennett J and Brown T (eds.), Film and Television After DVD . New York: Routledge, 116-128.

Bloom H (1973): The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry , London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Bordwell D (1997): On the History of Film Style , Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press.

Bordwell D (2000): Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment , Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press.

Bordwell D (2002): “Intensified Continuity Visual Style in Contemporary American Film”, in Film Quarterly , vol. 55, no. 3: 16-28.

Davis C (2010): Critical Excess. Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Zizek and Cavell , Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Derrida J (1992): “This Strange Institition Called Literature”. An Interview with Jacques Derrida, in Attridge D (ed.), Acts of Literature , London: Routledge.

Gunning T (1990): “The Cinema of Attractions. Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant- Garde”, in Elsaesser T (ed.), Early Cinema: Space – Frame – Narrative , London: BFI Publishing, 56-62.

Jaszi, Peter (2007): Copyright, Fair Use and Motion Pictures , available from http://www.centerforsocialmedia.orghttps://framescinemajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/documents/pages/fairuse_motionpictures.pdf .

Johansen, Anders (2011): “Skrivingen er et høreapparat for den som virkelig lytter” [“Writing Is a Hearing Aid for Those Who Truly Listen”], in Prosa , no. 1, vol. 11.

Kawin, Bruce (2008): ”Video Frame Enlargements”, in Film Quarterly , vol. 63, no. 3: 52-57.

Lopate, Phillip (1992): ”In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film”, in The Threepenny Review , no. 48: 19-22.

Martin, Adrian (2010): “A Voice Too Much”, in De Filmkrant , available from http://www.filmkrant.nl/av/org/filmkran/archief/fk322/engls322.html .

Mittell, Jason (2010): “How to Rip DVD Clips”, in The Chronicle of Higher Education , available from http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-rip-dvd-clips/26090 .

Mulvey, Laura (1975): “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, in Screen , vol. 16, no. 3: 6-18.

Rascaroli, Laura (2008): “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments”, in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media , vol. 49, no. 2: 24-47.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan (2010): “The Mosaic Approach”, in Moving Image Source , available from http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-mosaic-approach-20100818 .

Thompson, Kristin (2006): “Film educators no longer criminals”, available from http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=152 .

Copyright :

Frames #1 Film and Moving Images Studies Re-Born Digital? 2012-07-02, this article © Erlend Lavik . This article has been blind peer-reviewed.

Communications: Video Essay

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What is a video essay?

A video essay is a short video that illustrates a topic, expresses an opinion and develops a thesis statement based on research through editing video, sound and image.

(Source: Morrissey, K. (2015, September). Stop Teaching Software, Start Teaching Software Literacy. Flowjournal . https://www.flowjournal.org/2015/09/stop-teaching-software-start-teaching-software-literacy/?print=print )

It is made of three main elements:

• Image (filmed footage and found footage)
• Sound (music and audio)
• Words (spoken and written)

All of them are linked to your own voice and argument. It is a way to write with video.

• Guidelines for Video Essay Best Practices Official technical guidelines by Prof. Antonio Lopez.

Video essays about video essays

Why Video Essays are just plain AWESOME by This Guy Edits  on YouTube .

Elements of the Essay Film from Kevin B. Lee on Vimeo .

F for Fake (1973) – How to Structure a Video Essay from Tony Zhou on Vimeo .

Sample Video Essays

• If Educational Videos Were Filmed Like Music Videos by Tom Scott
• How to Use Color in Film A blog post with multiple video essays about the use of color palettes by multiple great directors.
• Seed, Image, Ground by Abelardo Gil-Fournier & Jussi Parikka.
• Every Covid-19 Commercial is Exactly the Same
• Top Video Essayists some videos on this page are set to private
• VideoEssay: A subreddit for analytic videos and supercuts
• ISIL videos imitate Hollywood and video games to win converts
• Best Video Essays of 2023
• Best Video Essays of 2022 by British Film Institute
• Best Video Essays of 2020 by British Film Institute.
• Best Video Essays of 2019 by British Film Institute.
• Best Video Essays of 2018 by British Film Institute.
• Best Video Essays of 2017 by British Film Institute.
• Video Essays (Historical) A YouTube playlist of historically important films that helped define the concept of video essays.
• What Is Neorealism by kogonada.
• Analyzing Isis' propaganda - Mujatweets by Azza el Masri and Catherine Otayek.
• Oh dear! by Adam Curtis.
• Fembot in a Red Dress by Alison De Fren.
• WHY IS CINEMA: Women Filmmakers? NOT SEXIST, BUT LET'S BE REAL??? by Cameron Carpenter.
• Women as Reward - Tropes vs Women in Video Games by feministfrequency.
• Il corpo delle donne (sub eng) by Lorella Zanardo.

Video essays beyond COM

Video essays can be a valuable form of academic production, and they can be brilliant and insightful in many other fields apart from Communications and media studies. Here are some examples that cover all the JCU departments:

• Lady of Shalott | Art Analysis A look at John William Waterhouse's Pre-Raphaelite painting "The Lady of Shalott".
• How to ace your MBA video essay The 60-second online video essay is a recent addition to the MBA application process for some business schools.
• The Last Jedi - Forcing Change An analysis of Finn's and Kylo's narrative arc in Episode VIII of the Star Wars franchise.
• How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio A simple but not simplistic and easy to follow 30 minute animated video that answers the question.
• Evolution of the Hero in British Literature This video essay discusses the literary heroes throughout the Anglo-Saxon Period, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance Era in British Literature.
• Fast Math Tricks - How to multiply 2 digit numbers up to 100 - the fast way! An easy video tutorial unveiling some math tricks.
• Here's why we need to rethink veganism A brief climate change video essay on the environmental impacts of veganism, and how we can reframe going vegan less as a lifestyle and more as an aspiration.
• Italy on the edge of crisis: Should Europe be worried? Channel 4 discussing the delicate political juncture in Italy (May 2018).
• International Relations: An Introduction An overview by the London School of Economics and Social Science.

A video is basically a series of still images- each one is called a frame- that play back at a specific  rate . The frame rate (often abbreviated FPS for "frames per second") differs depending on where you are in the world and what you're shooting on.

If you're shooting a movie on celluloid (actual film that needs to be developed) then you are probably shooting at 24fps.

If you are shooting video in Europe then you are probably shooting at 25fps...

...unless you are shooting sports. Then you're probably shooting at 50fps.

If you're shooting video in the US or Canada then you are probably shooting at 30(29.98)fps...

...unless you're shooting sports. Then you're probably shooting at 60(59.98)fps...

...or unless you're shooting "cinematic video" at a frame rate of 23.976fps.

***The weird numbers for shooting in the US and Canada stem from the fact that while Europe's 50Hz electrical system operates at 50Hz, the 60Hz electrical system of the US actually operates at 59.98 Hz.***

If you're shooting at a higher frame rate (like 120fps or 250fps) it is probably because you want to play it back at one of these frame rates in order to achieve a slow motion effect.

Video sizes are measured in pixels. Resolution   refers to Width x Height. Here are some common resolutions:

• FullHD (1080p): 1920 x 1080
• HD (720p): 1280 x 720
• 4K (2160p): 3840 x 2160
• 4K Cinema: 4096 x 2160
• Standard Defintion (NTSC- US/Canada): 720 x 480
• Standard Definition (PAL- Europe): 720 x 576
• VGA: 640 x 360

Types of video essays

1. Supercut

A supercut is a compilation of a large number of (short) film clips, focusing on a common characteristic these clips have. That commonality can be anything: a formal or stylistic aspect, a shared theme or subject matter... 

Supercuts are a staple of fandom, but they can also be used as a form of audiovisual critique: to reveal cinematic tropes, to trace thematic or stylistic constants in a filmmaker’s work and so on.

Examples: ROYGBIV: A Pixar Supercut  or Microsoft Sam's  Every Covid-19 Commercial is Exactly the Same  or Chloé Barreau's  NON UNA DI MENO - l'8 MARZO sta arrivando!

2. Voiceover based

In this form, analysis is done by combining clips and images with a narrator’s voice that guides the process. This could be done for a variety of video essays styles: scene breakdowns, shot analyses, structural analyses, vlogs, etc. What is common is the integral role of the creator’s voice in advancing the argument.

Example: Tony Zhou’s Jackie Chan—How to Do Action Comedy or David Chen’s Edgar Wright and the Art of Close-Ups .

3. Text/Image/Sound-Based

In this form, analysis is done by combining text, images and sounds without a narrator’s voice to guide the process. Again, this could be done for a variety of video essays styles, but relies much more on editing to advance the argument.

Example: Kevin B. Lee’s Elements of the Essay Film or Catherine Grant’s All That Pastiche Allows Redux .

4. Desktop Films

A desktop film uses the screen of a computer or gadget to serve as the camera and canvas for all of the content of an audiovisual narrative. It can include content from videos, apps, and programs that would be viewable on a screen. It is a screen-based experience that uses the desktop as its primary medium.

Example: Katja Jansen’s Desktop Films ; Kevin B. Lee’s Reading // Binging // Benning .

Descriptions adapted from  Filmscalpel

Resources: background and fundamentals

Best Practices

• Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education Also downloadable as a PDF file
• Streaming: film criticism you can watch by Guy Lodge
• What is a Video Essay? Creators Grapple with a Definition Paula Bernstein from Filmmaker journal .
• The Video Essay As Art: 11 Ways to Make a Video Essay by Norman Bateman.
• Video essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent by Kevin B. Lee.
• Deep Focus - The Essay Film by British Film Institute and Sight & Sound .

Scholarly Websites about Video Essays

• The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy
• Audiovisualcy Video Essays on Vimeo.
• [In]Transition Journal of Videographic Films and Moving Image Studies.
• Introductory guide to video essay From the British Universities and Colleges Film and Video Council.

Resources: software and how-to

• How-to video essays by Greer Fyfe and Miriam Ross.
• Media Production Guide by Tisch Library, Tufts University.
• Video Reactions with OBS (Open Broadcast Software) Part 01 Setting up your scenes
• Video Reactions with OBS (Open Broadcast Software) Part 02 Recording with OBS

Storyboarding

• Planning and Storyboarding from Royal Roads University Library.
• Video Essay Script Template

Screencasting

• Quicktime (cross-platform)
• Screencast-O-Matic
• OBS Studio (open source, cross-platform) Open Broadcaster Software
• Flashback Express (PC only)
• 5 Free Tools for Creating a Screencast from Mashable.

Downloading and ripping

• Pasty Software for downloading.
• Savefrom allows up to 720p downloads of full video, 1080p downloads of video only (no audio). Select “download video in browser” on the site.
• Y2mate allows up to 1080p video downloads.
• Jdownloader Software for downloading
• Handbrake Software for ripping and converting
• DMA Basics: OBS for Video Essays A tutorial on how to use OBS for Netflix.

Note: Try to to ensure that you download in 720p resolution or higher. Your minimum level of quality should be 480p. If searching on YouTube, you can filter the search results to only show HD or 4K results. Check also the  Find Video   tab of this guide.

Free editing software options

• DaVinci Resolve (cross-platform) A color grading and non-linear video editing (NLE) application for macOS, Windows, and Linux, incorporating tools from Fairlight (audio production) and Fusion (motion graphics and visual effects that throw shade on After Effects).
• iMovie (Mac only)
• Videopad (cross-plaftorm)
• OpenShot (open source, cross-platform)
• Shortcut (open source, cross-platform)
• HitFilm Express (cross-platform)
• Free Music Archive An interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads directed by the radio station WFMU.
• SoundCloud SoundCloud is one of the world’s largest music and audio platform and you can search for creative commons music.
• YouTube Audio Library A library of free music and sound effects by YouTube. Each track is accompanied by information on the use.
• Sound Image Free music (and more) for your Projects by Eric Matyas. Only requires crediting the author for legal use (see "attribution info" page).
• Audacity A free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software. Very useful to trim audio, convert a sample rate, apply a little compression, chop & screw, etc.
• REAPER A digital audio workstation and MIDI sequencer software. Technically a paid-for platform, its free-trial never ends.

Check also the  Find  Audio Resources  tab of this guide.

Creating credits, copyright and fair use

• Creating credits for video essays From Digital Design Studio at Tisch Library
• Fair Use Evaluator
• YouTube Fair Use Channel
• Society for Cinema and Media Studies Statement on Fair Use
• Blender A free and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and computer games.
• GIMP A free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks.
• Inkscape A free and open-source vector graphics editor used to create vector images, primarily in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.
• Krita A free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital painting and 2D animation. Good for sketching and conceptual art.

Stock footage

For stock footage, please check under the  Find video tab of this guide.

• Final Cut Pro X Tutorial by JCU Digital Media Lab.
• Final Cut Pro X Tutorial (PDF)
• Final Cut Pro X Full Tutorial by David A. Cox
• Audio Recording Tutorial by JCU Digital Media Lab.
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• Next: Find Images >>
• Last Updated: May 20, 2024 5:10 PM
• URL: https://johncabot.libguides.com/communications

How to do a Video Essay: The Video Essay Process

• Plan, Prepare & Create

Storyboarding

• Finding, Filming & Editing
• References & Credits
• The Video Essay Process

This section will give an introductory overview of the stages required to create a video essay.  Video essayers advice is to start simple and work through each stage of the video production process. Visit the Resources page of this guide for more.

Identify what is your argument? What is it that you want to communicate to the viewer? Write this down in a few sentences, refer and modify it as required.

Watch Video Essays

Watch a selection of video essays, read blogs and web pages from video essayers and decide what type of video essay you would like to create. Start simple.

A storyboard is a detailed outline (similar to an outline in a written essay) that helps you to organise and visualise the video essay as to what is on the screen, text, media, message and transitions between shots.

Storyboards assist in determining the length, message and meaning of the video essay and help save time with editing and post production processes.

• Free Storyboard Templates

Collect & Edit

Collect video material as downloads, ripping DVDs, screen grabs, mobile phone footage and create voice-overs. Use research skills to find information and statements to support your argument. Maintain a standard of quality and manage your videos by naming conventions and storage.

Use editing software and experiment with available functionality to enhance and support your argument. Add a voice-over, sound effects, music and other aspects of multimodality. Be sure to include references and credits to all sources used in creating the video essay.

Revisit elements of your video essay and modify as required.

Visit the Resources page of this guide for more.

• Where to find video and how to capture it
• Video Editing Basics - iMovie
• Software Guides

References & Credits

References to cite sources used in the Video Essay. Referencing is a formal, systematic way of acknowledging sources that you have used in your video essay. It is imperative that you reference all sources used (including videos, stills, music, sfx) and apply the correct formatting so that references cited can be easily traced. The referencing style used at ECU is the APA style, 6th ed. 2010. Refer to the ECU Referencing Library Guide for accurate citation in APA style.

Production credits Individuals: acknowledgement of individuals and their role in the production. Purpose: A statement for internal use, e.g. “This video was produced for [course name] at [institution’s name] in [semester, year]”

• Referencing Library Guide
• << Previous: What is a Video Essay?
• Next: Modes, MultiModality & Multiliteracies >>
• What is a Video Essay?
• Modes, MultiModality & Multiliteracies
• A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies
• Modes Of Multimodality
• Video Essay Journals
• Video Essay Channels
• Weblinks to Video Essay Resources
• Weblinks to Creative Commons Resources
• Titles in the Library
• Referencing & Copyright
• Marking Rubric
• Last Updated: Aug 28, 2023 2:57 PM
• URL: https://ecu.au.libguides.com/video-essay

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• Masterpieces of Streaming

The video essays that spawned an entire YouTube genre

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Polygon’s latest series, The Masterpieces of Streaming , looks at the new batch of classics that have emerged from an evolving era of entertainment.

Like every medium before it, “video essays” on YouTube had a long road of production before being taken seriously. Film was undervalued in favor of literature, TV was undervalued in favor of film, and YouTube was undervalued in favor of TV. In over 10 years of video essays, though, there are some that stand out as landmarks of the form, masterpieces to bring new audiences in.

In Polygon’s list of the best video essays of 2020 , we outlined a taxonomy of what a video essay is . But time should be given to explain what video essays have been and where they might be going.

Video essays can be broken into three eras: pre-BreadTube, the BreadTube era, and post-BreadTube. So, what the hell is BreadTube? BreadTube, sometimes also called “LeftTube,” can be defined as a core group of high production value, academically-minded YouTubers who rose to prominence at the same time.

A brief history of video essays on YouTube

On YouTube, video essays pre-BreadTube started in earnest just after something completely unrelated to YouTube: the adoption of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (or, colloquially, just the “Common Core”). The Common Core was highly political, a type of hotly-contested educational reform that hadn’t been rolled out in decades.

Meanwhile, YouTube was in one of its earliest golden eras in 2010. Four years prior, YouTube had been purchased by Google for $1.65 billion in stock, a number that is simultaneously bonkers high and bonkers low. Ad revenue for creators was flowing. Creators like PewDiePie and Shane Dawson were thriving (because time is a flat circle). With its 2012 Original Channel Initiative , Google invested $100 million, and later an additional $200 million, to both celebrity and independent creators for new, original content on YouTube in an early attempt to rival TV programming.

This was also incentivized by YouTube’s 2012 public change to their algorithm , favoring watch time over clicks.

But video essays still weren’t a major genre on YouTube until the educational turmoil and newfound funds collided, resulting in three major networks: Crash Course in 2011 and SourceFed and PBS Digital Studios in 2012.

The BreadTube Era

With Google’s AdSense making YouTube more and more profitable for some creators, production values rose, and longer videos rose in prominence in the algo. Key creators became household names, but there was a pattern: most were fairly left-leaning and white.

But in 2019, long-time YouTube creator Kat Blaque asked, “Why is ‘LeftTube’ so white?”

Blaque received massive backlash for her criticisms; however, many other nonwhite YouTubers took the opportunity to speak up. More examples include Cheyenne Lin’s “Why Is YouTube So White?” , Angie Speaks’ “Who Are Black Leftists Supposed to Be?” , and T1J’s “I’m Kinda Over This Whole ‘LeftTube’ Thing.”

Since the whiteness of video essays has been more clearly illuminated, terms like “BreadTube’’ and “LeftTube” are seldom used to describe the video essay space. Likewise, the importance of flashy production has been de-emphasized.

Post-BreadTube

Like most phenomena, BreadTube does not have a single moment one can point to as its end, but in 2020 and 2021, it became clear that the golden days of BreadTube were in the past.

And, notably, prominent BreadTube creators consistently found themselves in hot water on Twitter. If beauty YouTubers have mastered the art of the crying apology video, video essayists have begun the art of intellectualized, conceptualized, semi-apology video essays. Natalie Wynn’s “Canceling” and Lindsay Ellis’s “Mask Off” discuss the YouTubers’ experiences with backlash after some phenomenally yikes tweets. Similarly, Gita Jackson of Vice has reported on the racism of SocialismDoneLeft.

We’re now in post-BreadTube era. More Black creators, like Yhara Zayd and Khadija Mbowe, are valued as the important video essayists they are. Video essays and commentary channels are seeing more overlap, like the works of D’Angelo Wallace and Jarvis Johnson .

With a history of YouTube video essays out of the way, let’s discuss some of the best of the best, listed here in chronological order by release date, spanning all three eras of the genre. Only one video essay has been selected from each creator, and creators whose works have also been featured on our Best of 2020 list have different works selected here. If you like any of the following videos, we highly recommend checking out the creators’ backlogs; there are plenty of masterpieces in the mix.

PBS Idea Channel, “Can Dungeons & Dragons Make You A Confident & Successful Person?” (October 10, 2012)

Many of the conventions of modern video essays — a charismatic quick-talking host, eye-grabbing pop culture gifs accompanying narration, and sleek edits — began with PBS Idea Channel. Idea Channel, which ran from 2012 to 2017 and produced over 200 videos, laid many of the blueprints for video essays to come. In this episode, host Mike Rugnetta dissects the practical applications of tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons . The episode predates the tabletop renaissance, shepherded by Stranger Things and actual play podcasts , but gives the same level of love and appreciation the games would see in years to come.

Every Frame a Painting, “Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy” (May 26, 2014)

Like PBS Idea Channel, Every Frame a Painting was fundamental in setting the tone for video essays on YouTube. In this episode, the works of Edgar Wright (like Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World ) are put in contrast with the trend of dialogue-based comedy films like The Hangover and Bridesmaids . The essay analyzes the lack of visual jokes in the American comedian style of comedy and shows the value of Wright’s mastery of physical comedy. The video winds up not just pointing out what makes Wright’s films so great, but also explaining the jokes in meticulous detail without ever ruining them.

Innuendo Studios, “This Is Phil Fish” (June 16, 2014)

As documented in the 2012 documentary Indie Game: The Movie and all over Twitter, game designer Phil Fish is a contentious figure, to say the least. Known for public meltdowns and abusive behavior, Phil Fish is easy to armchair diagnose, but Ian Danskin of Innuendo Studios uses this video to make something clear: We do not know Phil Fish. Before widespread discussions of parasocial relationships with online personalities, Innuendo Studios was pointing out the perils of treating semi-celebrities as anything other than strangers.

What’s So Great About That?, “Night In The Woods: Do You Always Have A Choice?” (April 20, 2017)

Player choice in video games is often emphasized as an integral facet of gameplay — but what if not having a real choice is the point? In this video, Grace Lee of What’s So Great About That? discusses how removing choice can add to a game’s narrative through the lens of sad, strange indie game Night in the Woods . What can a game with a mentally ill protagonist in a run-down post-industrial town teach us about what choices really mean, and how is a game the perfect way to depict that meaning? This video essay aims to make you see this game in a new light.

Pop Culture Detective, “Born Sexy Yesterday” (April 27, 2017)

One of the many “all killer no filler” channels on this list, Pop Culture Detective is best known as a trope namer. One of those tropes, “Born Sexy Yesterday,” encourages the audience to notice a specific, granular, but strangely prominent character trait in science fiction and fantasy: a female character who, through the conceit of the world and plot, has very little functional knowledge of the world around her, but is also a smoking hot adult. It’s sort of the reverse of the prominent anime trope of a grown woman, sometimes thousands of years old, inhabiting the body of a child. When broken down, the trope is not just a nightmare, it’s something you can’t unsee — and you start to see it everywhere .

Maggie Mae Fish, “Looking For Meaning in Tim Burton’s Movies” (April 24, 2018)

Tim Burton is an iconic example of an outsider making art for other outsiders who question and push the status quo ... right? In Maggie Mae Fish’s first video essay on her channel, she breaks down how Burton co-opts the anticapitalist aesthetics of German expressionism (most obviously, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ) to give an outsider edge to films that consistently, aggressively enforce the status quo. If you’re a die-hard Burton fan, this one might sting, but Jack Skellington would be proud of you for seeking knowledge. Just kidding. He’d probably want you to take the aesthetic of the knowledge and put it on something completely unrelated, removing it of meaning.

hbomberguy, “CTRL+ALT+DEL | SLA:3” (April 26, 2018)

Are you looking for a video essay with a little more unhinged chaos energy? Prepare yourself for this video by Harry Brewis, aka hbomberguy, analyzing the webcomic CTRL+ALT+DEL, and ultimately, the infamous loss.jpg. But this essay’s also more than that; it’s a response to the criticisms of analyzing pop culture, saying that sometimes art isn’t that deep, or that works can exist outside of the perspective of the creator. This video is infamous for its climax, which we won’t spoil here, but go in knowing it’s, at the very least, adjacent to not safe for work.

Folding Ideas, “A Lukewarm Defence of Fifty Shades of Grey” (August 31, 2018)

Speaking of not-safe-for-work, let’s talk about kink! Dan Olson of Folding Ideas has been creating phenomenal video essays for years. Highlighting “In Search of Flat Earth” as one of the best video essays in 2020 (and, honestly, ever) gives an opportunity to discuss his other masterpieces here: his three-part series dissecting the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise. This introduction to the series discusses specifically the first film, and it does so in a way that is refreshingly kink-positive while still condemning the ways Fifty Shades has promoted extremely unsafe kink practices and dynamics. It also analyzes the first film with a shockingly fair lens, giving accolades where they’re due (that cinematography!) and ripping the film to shreds when necessary (what the hell are these characters?).

ToonrificTariq, “How To BLACK: An Analysis of Black Cartoon Characters (feat. ReviewYaLife)” (January 13, 2019)

While ToonrificTariq’s channel usually focuses on fantastic, engaging reviews of off-kilter nostalgic cartoons — think Braceface and As Told By Ginger — takes this video to explain the importance of writing Black characters in cartoons for kids, and not just one token Black friend per show. Through the lens of shows like Craig of the Creek and Proud Family , ToonrificTariq and guest co-host ReviewYaLife explain the way Black characters have been written into the boxes and how those tropes can be overcome by writers in the future. The collaboration between the two YouTubers also allows a mix of scripted, analytical content and some goofy, fun back-and-forth and riffing.

Jacob Geller, “Games, Schools, and Worlds Designed for Violence” (October 1, 2019)

Jacob Geller ( who has written for Polygon ) has this way of baking sincerity, vulnerability, and so much care into his video essays. This episode is rough, digging into what level design in war games can tell us about the architecture of American schools following the tragic Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. It’s a video essay about video games, about violence, about safety, and about childhood. It’s a video essay about what we prioritize and how, and what that priority can look like. It’s a video essay that will leave you with deep contemplation, but a hungry contemplation, a need to learn and observe more.

Accented Cinema, “Parasite: Mastering the Basics of Cinema” (November 7, 2019)

2019 Bong Joon-ho cinematic masterpiece Parasite is filled to the brim with things to analyze, but Yang Zhang of Accented Cinema takes his discussion back to the basics. Focusing on how the film uses camera positions, light, and lines, the essay shows the mastery of details many viewers might not have noticed on first watch. But once you do notice them, they’re extremely, almost comically overt, while still being incredibly effective. The way the video conveys these ideas is simple, straightforward, and accessible while still illuminating so much about the film and remaining engaging and fun to watch. Accented Cinema turns this video into a 101 film studies crash course, showing how mastery of the basics can make a film such a standout.

Kat Blaque, “So... Let’s Talk About JK Rowling’s Tweet” (December 23, 2019)

In 2020, J. K. Rowling wrote her most infamous tweet about trans people, exemplifying a debate about trans rights and identities that is still becoming more and more intense today. Rowling’s tweet was not the first, or the most important, or even her first — but it was one of the tweets about the issue that gained the most attention. Kat Blaque’s video essay on the tweet isn’t really about the tweet itself. Instead, it’s a masterful course in transphobia, TERFs, and how people hide their prejudice against trans people in progressive language. In an especially memorable passage, Blaque breaks down the tweet, line by line, phrase by phrase, explaining how each of them convey a different aspect of transphobia.

Philosophy Tube, “Data” (January 31, 2020)

One of the most underrated essays in Philosophy Tube’s catalogue, “Data” explains the importance of data privacy. Data privacy is often easily written off; “I have nothing to hide,” and “It makes my ads better,” are both given as defenses against the importance of data privacy. In this essay, though, creator Abigail Thorn breaks traditional essay form to depict an almost Plato-like philosophical dialogue between two characters: a bar patron and the bar’s bouncer. It’s also somewhat of a choose-your-own-adventure game, a post- Bandersnatch improvement upon the Bandersnatch concept.

Intelexual Media, “A Short History of American Celebrity” (February 13, 2020)

Historian Elexus Jionde of Intelexual Media has one of the strongest and sharpest analytical voices when discussing celebrity, from gossip to idolization to the celebrity industrial complex to stan culture . Her history of American celebrity is filled to the brim with information, fact following fact at a pace that’s breakneck without ever leaving the audience behind. While the video initially seems like just a history, there’s a thesis baked into the content about what celebrity is, how it got to where it is today, and where it might be going—and what all of that means about the rest of us.

Princess Weekes, “Empire and Imperialism in Children’s Cartoons—a super light topic” (June 22, 2020)

This video by Princess Weekes (Melina Pendulum) starts with a bang — a quick, goofy song followed by a steep dive into imperialization and its effect on intergenerational trauma. And then, it connects those concepts to much-beloved cartoons for kids like Avatar: The Last Airbender , Steven Universe , and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power . Fans of shows like these may be burnt out on fandom discourse quickly saying, “thing bad!” because of how they view its stance on imperialization. Weekes, however, has always favored nuance and close reading. Her take on imperialization in cartoons offers a more complex method of analyzing these shows, and the cartoons that will certainly drum up the same conversations in the future.

Yhara Zayd, “Holes & The Prison-Industrial Complex” (July 7, 2020)

2003’s Holes absolutely rules, and Yhara Zayd’s video essay on the film shows why it isn’t just a fun classic with memorable characters. It’s also way, way more complex than most of us might remember. Like Dan Olson, Yhara Zayd appeared on our list of the best video essays of 2020, but frankly, any one of her videos could belong there or here. What makes this analysis of Holes stand out is the meticulous attention to detail Zayd has in her analysis, revealing the threads that connect the film’s commentary across its multiple interwoven plotlines. And, of course, there’s Zayd’s trademark quiet passion for the work she’s discussing, making this essay just as much of a close reading as it is a love letter to the film.

D’Angelo Wallace, “The Disappearance of Blaire White” (November 2, 2020)

D’Angelo Wallace is best known as a commentary YouTuber, someone who makes videos reacting to current events, pop culture, and, of course, other YouTubers. With his hour-long essay on YouTuber Blaire White, though, that commentary took a sharp turn into cultural analysis and introspection. For those unfamiliar with White’s work, she was once a prominent trans YouTuber known for her somewhat right-wing politics, including her discussion of other trans people. In Wallace’s video, her career is outlined — but so is the effect she had on her viewers. What is it about creators like White that makes them compelling? And what does it take for us to reevaluate what they’ve been saying?

Chromalore, “The Last Unicorn: Death and the Legacy of Fantasy” (December 3, 2020)

Chromalore is a baffling internet presence. With one video essay up, one single tweet, and a Twitter bio that simply reads, “just one (1) video essay, as a treat,” this channel feels like the analysis equivalent of seeing someone absolutely captivating at a party who you know you’ll never see again, and who you know you’ll never forget.

This video essay discusses themes of death, memory, identity, remorse, and humanity as seen through both the film and the novel The Last Unicorn . It weaves together art history and music, Christian iconography and anime-inspired character designs. It talks about why this film is so beloved and the effect it’s had on audiences today. It’s moving, deeply researched, brilliantly executed, and we will probably never see this creator again.

Khadija Mbowe, “Digital Blackface?” (December 23, 2020)

“Digital Blackface” is a term popularized by Lauren Michele Jackson’s 2017 Teen Vogue essay, “We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs.” The piece explains the prominence of white people using the images of Black people without context to convey a reaction, and Khadija Mbowe’s deep dive on the subject expands on how, and why, blackface tropes have evolved in the digital sphere. Mbowe’s essay involves a great deal of history and analysis, all of which is deeply uncomfortable. Consider this a content warning for depictions of racism throughout the video. But that discomfort is key to explaining why digital blackface is such a problem and how nonblack people, especially white people, can be more cognizant about how they depict their reactions online.

CJ the X, “No Face Is An Incel” (April 4, 2021)

Rounding out this list is a 2021 newcomer to video essays with an endlessly enjoyable gremlin energy that still winds up being some of the smartest, sharpest, and funniest discussions about pop culture. CJ the X, a human sableye , breaks down one of the most iconic and merch-ified Studio Ghibli characters, No Face, who is an incel. This is a video essay best experienced with no knowledge except its main thesis—that No Face is an incel—so you can sit back, be beguiled, be enraptured, and then be convinced.

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How to Write a Video Essay: A Step-by-Step Guide and Tips

• by Joseph Kenas
• January 5, 2024
• Writing Tips

The video essay has become an increasingly popular way of presenting ideas and concepts in the age of the internet and YouTube. In this guide, we present a step-by-step guide on how to write a video essay and tips on how to make it.

While it is easy to write a normal essay, the structure of the video essay is a bit of a mystery, owing to the newness of the term.

However, in this article, we are going to define what is a video essay, how to write a video essay, and also How to present a video essay well in class.

What is a Video Essay?

A video essay is a video that delves into a certain subject, concept, person, or thesis. Video essays are difficult to characterize because they are a relatively new form, yet they are recognized regardless. Simply, video essays are visual compilations that try to persuade, educate, or criticize.

These days, there are many creatives making video essays on topics like politics, music, movies, and pop culture.

With these, essays have become increasingly popular in the era of video media such as Youtube, Vimeo, and others.

Video essays, like photo and traditional essays, tell a story or make a point.

The distinction is that video essays provide information through visuals.

When creating a video essay, you can incorporate video, images, text, music, and/or narration to make it dynamic and successful.

When you consider it, many music videos are actually video essays. 

Since making videos for YouTube and other video sites has grown so popular, many professors are now assigning video essays instead of regular essays to their students. So the question is, how do you write a video essay script?

Steps on How to Write a Video Essay Script

Unscripted videos cost time, effort, and are unpleasant to watch. The first thing you should do before making a video writes a script, even if it’s only a few lines long. Don’t be intimidated by the prospect of writing a script. All you need is a starting point.

A video script is important for anyone who wants to film a video with more confidence and clarity. They all contain comparable forms of information, such as who is speaking, what is said, where, and other important details.

While there are no precise criteria that a video essay must follow, it appears that most renowned video essayists are adhering to some steps as the form gets more popular and acknowledged online. 

1. Write a Thesis

Because a video essayist can handle a wide range of themes, video analysis essays lack defined bounds. The majority of essays, on the other hand, begin with a thesis.

A thesis is a statement, claim, theme, or concept that the rest of the essay is built around. A thesis might be broad, including a variety of art forms. Other theses can be quite detailed.

A good essay will almost always have a point to express. Every video analysis essay should have a central idea, or thesis, that ties the film together.

2. Write a Summary

Starting with a brief allows you and your team to document the answers to the most pressing project concerns. It ensures that everyone participating in the video production is on the same page.

This will avoid problems of mixing ideas or getting stuck when you are almost completing the project.

3. Choose a Proper Environment and Appropriate Tools

When it comes to writing your script, use any tool you’re familiar with, such as pen and paper. Also, find a writing atmosphere that is relaxing for you, where you can concentrate and be creative.

Consider what you don’t have to express out loud when you’re writing. Visual elements will be used to communicate a large portion of your content.

4. Use a Template

When you don’t have to reinvent the process every time you sit down, you get speed and consistency.

It’s using your cumulative knowledge of what works and doing it over and over again. Don’t start with a blank page when I sit down to create a script- try to use an already made template. 

5. Be Conversational

You want scripts that use language that is specific and targeted. Always avoid buzzwords, cliches, and generalizations. You want your audience to comprehend you clearly without rolling their eyes.

6. Be Narrative

Make careful to use a strong story structure when you’re trying to explain anything clearly. Ensure your script has a beginning, middle, and end, no matter how short it is. This will provide a familiar path for the viewers of your video script.

7. Edit Your Script

Make each word work for a certain position on the page when you choose your words.

They must serve a purpose.

After you’ve completed your first draft, go over your script and review it.

Then begin editing, reordering, and trimming. Remove as much as possible.

Consider cutting it if it isn’t helping you achieve your goal.

 8. Read Your Script Loudly

Before recording or going on in your process, it’s recommended to read your script aloud at least once. Even if you won’t be the one reading it, this is a good method to ensure that your message is clear. It’s a good idea to be away from people so you may practice in peace.

Words that flow well on paper don’t always flow well when spoken aloud. You might need to make some adjustments based on how tough certain phrases are to pronounce- it’s a lot easier to change it now than when recording.

9. Get Feedback

Sometimes it is very difficult to point out your mistakes in any piece of writing. Therefore, if you want a perfect video essay script, it is advisable to seek feedback from people who are not involved in the project.

Keep in mind that many will try to tear your work apart and make you feel incompetent. However, it can also be an opportunity to make your video better.

The best way to gather feedback is to assemble a group of people and read your script to them. Watch their facial reaction and jot own comments as you read. Make sure not to defend your decisions. Only listen to comments and ask questions to clarify.

After gathering feedback, decide on what points to include in your video essay. Also, you can ask someone else to read it to you so that you can listen to its follow.

A video essay can be a good mode to present all types of essays, especially compare and contrast essays as you can visually contrast the two subjects of your content.

How to make a Good Video from your Essay Script

You can make a good video from your script if you ask yourself the following questions;

• What is the video’s purpose? What is the purpose of the video in the first place?
• Who is this video’s intended audience?
• What is the subject of our video? (The more precise you can be, the better.) 
• What are the most important points to remember from the video?- What should viewers take away from it?

If the context had multiple characters, present their dialogues well in the essay to bring originality. If there is a need to involve another person, feel free to incorporate them.

How to Present a Video Essay Well in Class

• Write down keywords or main ideas in a notecard; do not write details- writing main ideas will help you remember your points when presenting. This helps you scan through your notecard for information.
• Practice- in presentations it is easy to tell who has practiced and who hasn’t. For your video essay to grab your class and professor’s attention, practice is the key. Practice in front of your friends and family asking for feedback and try to improve.
• Smile at your audience- this is one of the most important points when presenting anything in front of an audience. A smiley face draws the attention of the audience making them smile in return thus giving you confidence.
• Walk to your seat with a smile- try not to be disappointed even if you are not applauded. Be confident that you have aced your video presentation.

Other video presentations tips include;

• Making eye contact
• Have a good posture
• Do not argue with the audience 
• Look at everyone around the room, not just one audience or one spot
• Rember to use your hand and facial expressions to make a point.

Joseph is a freelance journalist and a part-time writer with a particular interest in the gig economy. He writes about schooling, college life, and changing trends in education. When not writing, Joseph is hiking or playing chess.

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Yet another “video games as art” essay

My English class assigned me to write an argument on any reasonably controversial subject. I chose the question of video games as art. The organization is horrid, the attention grabber is hokey, and I’ve written about similar subjects before , but I figured some Dtoid readers still might be interested. Read it after the jump.

A monster stands in a barren field, over fifty feet tall and covered in stone armor. A young boy stands before him, armed with nothing but a sword and a hope that killing this beast will save the woman he loves. This is a moment from Shadow of the Colossus , a 2006 video game that attempts to marry enjoyable gameplay with deep, universal themes.

As an avid gamer myself, I am aware of the attempts of games such as Shadow of the Colossus to elevate the medium of gaming. Still, it is still the opinion of much of mainstream America that video games are nothing more than superficial, uncultured, escapist entertainment. While it is true that many video games do fall into these categories, it is absolutely essential for society to understand that many games are filled with significant artistic meaning, and that the medium itself has great potential for artistic expression.

Before examining video gaming as an art form, it is necessary to specify the definition of “art”. For the purpose of this argument, art will be defined as any creative work with a thematic meaning or purposeful message. This definition is actually one of the most constricting, in that it excludes particular works from every art form: a shallowly entertaining film, for example, is not “art” by this definition.

Because the media constantly targets specific, inartistic games such as Grand Theft Auto , it becomes necessary to examine especially artistic games as well as identify the aspects of the medium that can be conducive to artistic creation. That being said, it is commonly (and incorrectly) argued that all video games, by their very nature, cannot be art. Film critic Roger Ebert has stated that games are not art because, “video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.” This may appear to be a sound argument until one considers any works of art with deliberately ambiguous messages. If one were to, say, look at an abstract painting and attempt to derive meaning from it, then the audience is actively participating in the enjoyment of that piece of art. The audience is consciously deciding what to take from the painting, and, thereforem the artist has handed over authorial control.

The same would be true of any film with a “cliffhanger” ending: the audience is forced to choose their own conclusion. The absence of authorial control does not harm the artistic value of a piece, but rather enhances it: instead of being spoon-fed ideas and messages, the audience is forced to choose their own interpretation of the work. In video games, the choices are simply intrinsic to the piece itself, instead of just the consideration of the piece’s meaning. For this reason, the accusation that video games are an inherently inartistic medium is a fallacious one.

Another complaint often aimed at video games is that they are unimportant, irrelevant wastes of time. One need only look at the statistics to see that the opposite is the case: as of a 2004 study by The NPD Group, video games are a ten billion dollar a year international industry (that’s more money than the entire film industry makes annually), and, according to Forrester Research, nearly half of all North American homes own at least one video game console. Social critic Chuck Klosterman has defended the medium, saying “people in America who do not take video games seriously are the same people who question the relevance of hip-hop and assume newspapers will still exist in twenty-five years” (47). He also likens video games in 2006 to rock music in 1967, and the comparison is fitting: both mediums are unfairly demonized as corruptors of America’s youth, both mediums are and were extremely prevalent amongst a younger generation, and both mediums, in Klosterman ‘ s words, “ have meaning, and reflect the worldviews and sensibilities of their audience†(47). Video game designer Ernest Adams concurs, but calls the medium an “ easy target” because “ unlike the movies, games have no powerful friends and no beautiful film stars to argue for them” (1). To dismiss video games as irrelevant is to ignore mountains of statistical evidence to the contrary, and to deem them unimportant is to make the same mistake the eldest generation of the 1960 ‘ s did.

Most importantly, it is necessary to note that certain video games have proven that the medium is already capable of delivering artistically meaningful experiences, such as my personal favorite game, the aforementioned Shadow of the Colossus . The main draw of Shadow of the Colossus is how consistently and effectively it mixes story mechanics with game mechanics; everything you do in the game helps develop a relationship or convey an idea, and vice versa. Most games attempt to convey a story solely through pages of dialogue or numerous “ cutscenes” (noninteractive movie clips), but Shadow, not content to rely on conventional art forms to tell its story, relies solely on actual gameplay to do so. The story (which is to say, the raw narrative itself), like almost everything else in Shadow, is extremely minimalist.

There are only four main characters and only one of them is explicitly named:the protagonist ‘ s horse, Agro. The protagonist and Agro journey to the Forbidden Lands in order to resurrect a dead girl who evidently means a lot to the hero. In order to do this, the god of the Forbidden Lands commands the protagonist to destroy the 16 Colossi, enormous beasts made of metal and earth: if the player can somehow bring them all down, the god vows to revive the girl. In addition to the beautiful graphics and exciting gameplay that accompanies a game of such epic scope, Shadow seeks to convey legitimate thematic messages to the player. Benjamin Sherman, video game theorist, points out that the main character’ s constant reliance on his horse for transportation across a completely lonely game world helps emotionally connect the player to both characters. Though neither the protagonist nor his horse companion ever speak, the sheer amount of time they spend together, the intentional loneliness of the lands the two have to travel across, and the incredible usefulness of the horse in fighting the colossi, results in a strong emotional bond between the player and the horse. When Agro dies at the end of the game, the player feels a sense of legitimate loss, and does not feel like “ the hand of the game designer came down and decided” to kill the horse (Sherman).

Another theme the game develops is the morally ambiguous nature of the protagonist’s actions. At first, the player naturally assumes that the killing of the colossi is, all in all, a morally good thing: the colossi are huge, look terrifying, and have weapons, so the player naturally assumes that they are evil. However, after the player slays about four or five of the beasts, a strange thing happens—the player meets colossi that do not immediately attack him. It is a subtle game mechanic, but an incredibly important one: instead of trying to destroy the player, the giants will examine you, run from you, or ignore you altogether. The giants begin behaving more like confused animals than evil killing machines, and in order to complete his assigned goal, the player is forced to instigate battle, and literally murder a creature that had not attempted to cause him any harm. The player begins to realize that the music that plays as a colossus slowly dies is not triumphant at all, but almost funerial in tone.

The game forces the player to re-examine what he is doing: is it morally right to kill these colossi? Why is the player even doing it? Because the player was simply told to do so? Of course, the player continues playing, wanting to get to the ending and find out the overall reasons for his actions, but as the player meets certain colossi–like a smaller bull-like animal who is terrified of fire, and cowers back like a frightened child at the sight of it–the game subtly but efficiently coerces the player into asking himself serious questions on the nature of right and wrong. The themes of friendship, loss, and moral ambiguity can be found in countless works of noninteractive art, but Shadow of the Colossus successfully develops these themes through interactive gameplay alone.

It is, however, essential to understand that Shadow of the Colossus is not some sort of artistic fluke: I personally own many other games that present the player with equally artistic themes. In Splinter Cell: Double Agent (2006), the player takes on the role of an undercover spy who has infiltrated a terrorist organization. The player is then forced to reconsider the definition of loyalty as he befriends terrorists who have helped him progress through the levels, but is then asked by his government to kill them in order to maintain his cover.

In Ico (2001), an earlier game made by the Fumito Ueda (the developer of Shadow of the Colossus), the player leads the daughter of an evil witch through a lonely castle, hoping to find a way to escape. Through leading the princess along, helping her solve puzzles, and defending her from evil monsters, the player becomes emotionally connected to her and is personally invested in the climax of the game, whereupon the princess is possessed by her mother and the player is forced to consider what to do if the companion he has spent the entire game with has turned evil.

In Deus Ex (2000), the player works his way through political conspiracies and underground organizations, and, in the end, has to choose whether to help the terrorists, the government, or neither. What would be an otherwise simple choice is made morally ambiguous as the player discovers both ruthlessness and compassion in both groups, and must decide which of the organizations is the “right” one. It is necessary to understand that there are many available games that have important messages to convey through gameplay alone.

Despite what much of the mainstream media assumes, video games have always had the potential, if not the desire, to function as art. Since video gaming is, in many ways, a combination of several different art forms (illustration, filmmaking, and music come to mind), the medium has the ability to tackle any of the “heavier” subjects that most established art forms address on a regular basis. In the words of Ernest Adams, an ideal video game would be about “ history, science, technology, politics, music, art, religion, diplomacy, family, manners, love, death, duty, sorrow, revenge, depression, and joy” (3).

Granted, many video games choose not to aspire to such a lofty task. Popular mainstream games such as Halo, Doom, Grand Theft Auto , and Super Mario Brothers , while endlessly entertaining in their respective genres, have no messages to convey, no themes to develop, and their storylines are usually nothing more than scenarios for entertaining gameplay. Under the current definition being used, these games are not artistic. However, this situation is typical of every art medium: while certain noteworthy works will reach aesthetic and thematic greatness, others will, whether by choice or a lack of quality, remain nothing more than pointless entertainment. The film industry has slasher flicks and the music industry has “bubble-gum pop”, but these mediums are still universally agreed upon as legitimate art forms (Adams 2). With video games, the amount of pointlessly entertaining works is simply much larger than in most other mediums.

But despite these entries of lesser artistic value, the fact remains that video games have an inherent ability to function as art. Though many video games are indeed nothing more than flashy entertainment, many existing games develop meaningful themes through gameplay alone, and the medium has the potential to produce many more games of this type. It may be some time before video games are regarded as a relevant art form, but, inevitably, it will happen. As technology gets more and more advanced, and as the audience of gamers grows larger and larger, it will eventually become impossible to ignore the prevalence of video gaming in modern society.

But, for now, gamers can take on the role of a young boy attempting to slay a building-sized beast to resurrect the woman he loves: they can feel his triumph, his heartbreak, and they can take part in his moral dilemmas firsthand. In the end, if that is not art, what is?

Essay on Art

500 words essay on art.

Each morning we see the sunshine outside and relax while some draw it to feel relaxed. Thus, you see that art is everywhere and anywhere if we look closely. In other words, everything in life is artwork. The essay on art will help us go through the importance of art and its meaning for a better understanding.

What is Art?

For as long as humanity has existed, art has been part of our lives. For many years, people have been creating and enjoying art.  It expresses emotions or expression of life. It is one such creation that enables interpretation of any kind.

It is a skill that applies to music, painting, poetry, dance and more. Moreover, nature is no less than art. For instance, if nature creates something unique, it is also art. Artists use their artwork for passing along their feelings.

Thus, art and artists bring value to society and have been doing so throughout history. Art gives us an innovative way to view the world or society around us. Most important thing is that it lets us interpret it on our own individual experiences and associations.

Art is similar to live which has many definitions and examples. What is constant is that art is not perfect or does not revolve around perfection. It is something that continues growing and developing to express emotions, thoughts and human capacities.

Importance of Art

Art comes in many different forms which include audios, visuals and more. Audios comprise songs, music, poems and more whereas visuals include painting, photography, movies and more.

You will notice that we consume a lot of audio art in the form of music, songs and more. It is because they help us to relax our mind. Moreover, it also has the ability to change our mood and brighten it up.

After that, it also motivates us and strengthens our emotions. Poetries are audio arts that help the author express their feelings in writings. We also have music that requires musical instruments to create a piece of art.

Other than that, visual arts help artists communicate with the viewer. It also allows the viewer to interpret the art in their own way. Thus, it invokes a variety of emotions among us. Thus, you see how essential art is for humankind.

Without art, the world would be a dull place. Take the recent pandemic, for example, it was not the sports or news which kept us entertained but the artists. Their work of arts in the form of shows, songs, music and more added meaning to our boring lives.

Therefore, art adds happiness and colours to our lives and save us from the boring monotony of daily life.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Art

All in all, art is universal and can be found everywhere. It is not only for people who exercise work art but for those who consume it. If there were no art, we wouldn’t have been able to see the beauty in things. In other words, art helps us feel relaxed and forget about our problems.

FAQ of Essay on Art

Question 1: How can art help us?

Answer 1: Art can help us in a lot of ways. It can stimulate the release of dopamine in your bodies. This will in turn lower the feelings of depression and increase the feeling of confidence. Moreover, it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Question 2: What is the importance of art?

Answer 2: Art is essential as it covers all the developmental domains in child development. Moreover, it helps in physical development and enhancing gross and motor skills. For example, playing with dough can fine-tune your muscle control in your fingers.

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‘It’s not just giving out food parcels’: the volunteers helping families – photo essay

Photojournalist Sean Smith has spent the last 12 months documenting the Thurrock community that operates and uses some of the busiest Trussell Trust food banks in the country

There were just under 1,400 Trussell Trust food banks in the UK in 2023, as well as 1,172 independent food banks, all largely run by volunteers from the community they serve.

Dock Road, Tilbury

Kyran with baby Kali-Rose and mum Angel at South Ockendon food bank, in All Saints church

Last year in Thurrock, 95 tonnes of food parcels were given out by the Trussell Trust to feed 7,974 people, 3,599 of whom were children. The borough is diverse, with semi-rural areas as well as the urban, industrial areas around Tilbury docks.

Part of the docks seen from the ferry to Gravesend

Mum Josephine and twins Grace and Grant getting help from volunteer Mark Talbot to take the food home

At the Trussell Trust warehouse in Stanford-Le-Hope, where the 1381 peasants’ revolt started, there are two full-time staff. The manager, Peter Newall, worked at Ford for 37 years, starting as an apprentice tool maker and finishing as a purchasing programme manager working on the Ford Transit. Ceri Norton oversees the charity’s warehouse and logistics.

Everyone else in the warehouse and in the 10 food banks in Thurrock are volunteers, largely from church congregations.

The warehouse in Corringham where donated food is received and sorted into boxes. It is then distributed to the different Thurrock food banks working with the Trussell Trust. From left: Ceri Norton, logistic coordinator, Derek Staton, driver, Katie Bridge, who helps sort food, and Andy Layton, driver

Michelle Mabbett and Kim Adams

All food donated goes through the warehouse as well as the number of vouchers issued by different agencies. Food is weighed, packed into parcels then distributed by van among the 10 food banks.

From the 1 January to 31 March 2024, 2,116 people received food parcels, 942 of them children.

Derek Staton (left) and David Ford picking up food from a supermarket donated by customers when shopping

David stops to talk to woman asking for help with money for food, outside a shop that he was picking up donations from.

Left: Derek Staton loading the van with food picked up from supermarkets. Right: Derek and David on their rounds

Of the 10 food banks in Thurrock, St John the Baptist church at Tilbury Docks is one of the busiest. The church is very central to the community – many of those long gone from the area return to be married or buried at the church. A victim of 9/11 who had long lived in America was remembered by a service in the church and some of his ashes were buried in Tilbury.

Father Tim Codling welcomes the bride at the wedding of Dean and Leia Brooks at St John the Baptist church

Visiting pharmacist Mo Raje at St John the Baptist church food bank, as part of outreach work he does (until funding stopped), sees Steph Adison whose baby Ash has a rash and is lactose intolerant and needs special milk formula.

Jenny Codling, originally from nearby Gray’s, has been going to the church for 35 years. Husband, Father Tim Codling, came in 1997 from Shoebury, Essex . Before the Trussell Trust approached Father Tim about setting up a food bank in Tilbury, they had been helping people on an ad hoc basis. Jenny came to the church after collecting clothes, bedding and toys for Romanian orphans after the revolution in 1989.

Jenny Codling and her husband, Father Tim Codling

“I couldn’t believe how friendly Tilbury was,” Jenny says. “The people here were really welcoming. There’s a massive community spirit here. Once the food bank started, it opened a door to other things as well as people struggling with the cost of living crisis. They have helped refugees, victims of domestic violence in emergency accommodation including children, people needing basics things such as bedding and curtains … Once it opened it developed organically. The congregation are very generous – you only have to ask at a service for something needed and someone will find it. Nobody judges you down here.”

Chris Henderson, 76, has worked as a volunteer at St John the Baptist since 2014. She moved from Wiltshire to Tilbury in 1969 to teach in the local primary school, where she worked for 44 years.

Volunteer Chris Henderson

“Tilbury is a poor area,” she says. “It was much more supportive in the past but clubs where people met up have closed. No youth clubs any more. Working at the food bank I often meet ex-pupils who stay and chat. When the government cut down the civil service we had many people who suddenly became unable to pay bills and were very embarrassed to come to the food bank. When we first came here we could only afford a house because the local council offered us a 100% mortgage. My first wage in 1969 was £48 a month.”

Eddie Brannan at home

Eddie Brannan, 56, has been on disability living allowance since a car crashed into him years ago. He visited the St John the Baptist church food bank before Christmas after his boiler broke and he had to heat his poorly insulated flat with an old fan heater, using up the little money he had to spend on food.

Volunteer Janet Hurn

Janet Hurn, 76, was born, baptised and would have married in St John the Baptist church if the roof wasn’t being repaired at the time. Now she volunteers each week at the church’s food bank. Before Janet retired, she worked in social services. At the start of her career she worked in management for Thurrock local government in social welfare, dealing mainly with older people. Later, she took a second diploma, this time in social work, and had two years of training funded by the council when she choose to work with 11 to 16-year-olds. When she started in social services it was all run by the council with dedicated staff but after the Thatcher government’s Community Care Act was passed in 1990 the work was tendered out to private companies. Near the end of her career, she ran a specialist mental health team, mainly working with older people with dementia, psychosis and other problems in South Ockendon, Thurrock. By the time she left, it had been disbanded.

Volunteers Anthony Hurley and Geoffrey Moss

Antony Hurley, 85, worked for the Port of London authority throughout his career as a mechanic on harbour service launches, dredging boats and every other kind of vessel. In his spare time, he taught tai chi for 55 years. Antony and Geoffrey Moss, 51, make a team unloading new stock and packing it away.

Sunday service at St John the Baptist

Geoffrey, who has volunteered for 12 years at St John the Baptist, is also a cross-bearer during the Sunday service.

Volunteer Sallyann Colgate

Sallyann Colgate, 63, is “born and bred in Tilbury”. She worked in the docks and an office in London before giving up work to look after her mother. As well as volunteering at the food bank Sallyann is also a scout leader.

Volunteer Mark Talbot

Mark Talbot, 61, has been volunteering for 16 months, after 36 years working for the NHS in Thurrock in procurement and as a personal supervisor. He has two children – one a teacher and one an environmental health officer.

Volunteer Maureen Bennett

Maureen Bennett, 76, moved to Tilbury from Gray’s but even before that she came to St John the Baptist. “It’s rewarding to help people,” she says, “a lot of people helped me.” She has volunteered at the food bank since it opened. “I dread to think what would happen if the food bank wasn’t here. A lot of people would go hungry. I always think: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’”

Volunteer Phyllis Vinton

Phyllis Vinton, 77, is a church warden. Her family all worked on the railways and lived in the cottages built for railway workers in Tilbury. She worked in an export and import office and at the Landsdowne and Jack Lobley schools as a welfare assistant. At the food bank, she works with Chris and Maureen.

“There’s always been problems but now it’s far worse,” Phyllis says, listing the price of school uniforms, rents and mortgage costs among the difficulties people face. “I hate to think what it would be like if we weren’t here. We are one of the busiest food banks in Thurrock. We try to make people feel OK. It’s not just giving out food parcels. I want people going out feeling better than when they came in.”

Volunteer Brenda Walker

Brenda Walker, 90, has been volunteering at the food bank since it started. Her dad worked for the Port of London authority with munitions during the war and her husband was a docker. Brenda worked in a sweet shop in Tilbury and for a Hungarian export firm in London. She has two children and was married at the church, which she has been going to since she was 12.

Volunteer Pat Morris

Pat Morris, 79, was born, christened and married in Tilbury. Before she retired, she worked for Marks & Spencer in HR. Pat moved from Tilbury but has always lived in Thurrock. “I want to help people who can’t help themselves,” she says, “I feel desperately sorry for them.” Pat says she still sees people at the food bank that she saw 12 years ago when it first opened, while some she has seen only once, such as: “a young girl in debt with a loan shark, never saw her again” and “a girl whose husband was made redundant who had to pay bills or eat and so came to the food bank, never saw her again.”

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