Duration: 1 Nov 2018 → …
Conference | Not Another Brick in the Wall |
---|---|
Country/Territory | Australia |
City | Melbourne |
Period | 1/11/18 → … |
T1 - Video Essay
AU - Wallace, Roy
PY - 2018/9/12
Y1 - 2018/9/12
N2 - This is a twenty-minute video essay presentation to explore how we might employ the audio video essay to represent our scholarship within education, in particular the media studies discipline. Furthermore, to examine how this emerging academic approach may be used as a new form of research output and its potential to develop more focused, engaged, teaching and learning strategies for undergraduate students at the University of Northampton and elsewhere.I will reflect upon my current research and recent production of a sixty-minute video essay as part of my PhD research project and the subsequent re-orientation of my teaching delivery to include ‘video lectures’ as part of my teaching delivery to undergraduate students. A key issue in producing the finished research project was focused on my lack of experience in producing video essay works. I overcame this problem by researching current approaches then developing a series of ‘video essay’ projects for presentation at academic conferences, which I have now delivered to a range of audiences at various events. This has led to the development of ‘guidelines’ for the production of the academic video essay for undergraduate and post graduate students.The research into academic video essay was influenced by the work of Tony Zhou Every Frame a Painting, [in]Transition Online Journal, Kevin. B. Lee the Otolith Group and Audiovisualcy on Vimeo. Kodwo Eschun has influenced my perception regarding the video essayist approach when he suggests; the essayistic is dissatisfaction, discontent with the duties of an image and the obligations of sound. It is dissatisfaction with what we expect documentary to do especially. Key References:Kevin. B. Lee, Vimeo (197, The Essay Film: Some thoughts of Discontent).Shrum, W/Dugue, R/Brown, T. Digital Video as Research Practice: Methodology for the Millennium, Journal of Research Practice 1(1), 2005. Article M4 Utterson, Alan. Technology and Culture: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2005. PrintWayne, Mike. Theorising Video Practice. London: Lawrence & Wishart. 1997. Print
AB - This is a twenty-minute video essay presentation to explore how we might employ the audio video essay to represent our scholarship within education, in particular the media studies discipline. Furthermore, to examine how this emerging academic approach may be used as a new form of research output and its potential to develop more focused, engaged, teaching and learning strategies for undergraduate students at the University of Northampton and elsewhere.I will reflect upon my current research and recent production of a sixty-minute video essay as part of my PhD research project and the subsequent re-orientation of my teaching delivery to include ‘video lectures’ as part of my teaching delivery to undergraduate students. A key issue in producing the finished research project was focused on my lack of experience in producing video essay works. I overcame this problem by researching current approaches then developing a series of ‘video essay’ projects for presentation at academic conferences, which I have now delivered to a range of audiences at various events. This has led to the development of ‘guidelines’ for the production of the academic video essay for undergraduate and post graduate students.The research into academic video essay was influenced by the work of Tony Zhou Every Frame a Painting, [in]Transition Online Journal, Kevin. B. Lee the Otolith Group and Audiovisualcy on Vimeo. Kodwo Eschun has influenced my perception regarding the video essayist approach when he suggests; the essayistic is dissatisfaction, discontent with the duties of an image and the obligations of sound. It is dissatisfaction with what we expect documentary to do especially. Key References:Kevin. B. Lee, Vimeo (197, The Essay Film: Some thoughts of Discontent).Shrum, W/Dugue, R/Brown, T. Digital Video as Research Practice: Methodology for the Millennium, Journal of Research Practice 1(1), 2005. Article M4 Utterson, Alan. Technology and Culture: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2005. PrintWayne, Mike. Theorising Video Practice. London: Lawrence & Wishart. 1997. Print
KW - Video Essay
KW - Australia
KW - Multimodal
KW - education
KW - Pedagogic research
KW - pedagogic innovation
KW - pedagogical practice
M3 - Non-Textual Output
T2 - Not Another Brick in the Wall
Y2 - 1 November 2018
Previously at the ICA - Films
30 Mar 2017
Our present social and political environment begs a moment of urgent reckoning for the audiovisual essay, whether it is practiced by artists, scholars, or everyday video-makers: how can or should it address the current crises facing the world? Kevin B. Lee's work has pondered this question in the past through video essays on filmic forms of social protest and dissent, including with Nicole Brenez on The Hour of the Furnaces (2012), in The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent (2013) and Real Film Radicals (2013).
These earlier videos explored films and media artefacts made by other creators. But at what point do audiovisual studies of works of activism become activist works in their own right? Especially when one important dimension of the video essay is to uphold a critical distance from its subject? How do criticism and activism co-exist, and possibly inform and nurture the other? In this event, Lee explores these questions through screening and discussing his and other recent works that engage with a social and political consciousness.
With the support of the Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading, and the Goethe-Institut, London.
Produced for Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of the greatest films ever made, this video adapts Nicole Brenez’ argument for the poll to give greater consideration to political films, as well as to the politics of filmmaking.
A recontextualization of “radical” cinema, this video critiques how the use of the term “radical” has been applied to certain contemporary films. It then pays tribute to films, many of which have been neglected or marginalized from film history, that attest to a legacy of radical resistance filmmaking.
Who is the enemy, exactly? Dozens of clips from Hollywood zombie films are interwoven into a single sequence depicting how societal paranoia is propagated by mainstream entertainment. An excerpt from State of Emergence , a work-in-progress feature by Anti-Banality Union, a New York based media activist collective
The 1960s Roger Corman B movie The Intruder is used as a blueprint for diagnosing the prevailing logic of 21st century Trumpism and the enduring racial dynamics of the United States.
The 2004 Swedish film Lilya 4-Ever depicted the problem of sex trafficking so powerfully that it was used by governments, NGOs and educators as an awareness raising tool. This video examines the aesthetic choices that make the film so powerful, as well as the problematic outcomes when it was used for social education purposes.
This desktop documentary follows a single image of an ISIS fighter through a trail of messages, videos and postings to uncover his existence in both social media and reality. An excerpt from an ongoing research project by Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee investigating videos produced and circulated by the Islamic State.
We are offering a special multibuy offer for Essay Film Festival 2017:
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29 mar 2017.
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人与过量的图像的对垒。
“Imagine a cinema that lets us see in two directions at once” 像镜面的窗户
真共脑了 做完才看到 李起万领先我十年
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Kevin B. Lee, in person, December 10th, “Aesthetics of Analysis” at Other Cinema!
In a world bedazzled by intractable images, do we need the essay film now more than ever?…Kevin B. Lee weighs up this distinctively self-aware, searching form of cinema through both video and text–Sight and Sound
The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent from Kevin B. Lee on Vimeo .
I cannot recall how the term ‘video essay’ came to be the adopted nomenclature for the ever-increasing output of online videos produced over the past few years by an ever-growing range of self-appointed practitioners (including myself). My own entrance into this field was an organic synthesis of my backgrounds as a film critic and a filmmaker, two modes that had competed with each other in my mind until I started to pursue the possibilities of critically exploring cinema through the medium itself. This practice is readily possible in an age when digital technology enables virtually anyone with a computer (not even a video camera, as images are overly abundant and accessible) to produce media with nearly as much ease as it is to consume it.
Does this type of production herald an exciting new era for media literacy, enacting Alexandre Astruc ’s prophecy of cinema becoming our new lingua franca ? Or is it just an insidious new form of media consumption? At least that’s how much of what lately is termed ‘video essay’ strikes me: an onslaught of supercuts, list-based montages and fan videos that do less to shed critical insight into their source material than offer a new way for the pop culture snake to eat its long tail.
Minding the as-yet-unfulfilled potential of critical online media, I take great interest in the BFI Southbank’s August S&S Deep Focus series on essay filmmaking as a much-needed occasion to reflect on the significance of this word ‘essay’ in relation to film and video. However, having watched and re-watched most of the films in the series, and engaged with several critical texts on the essay film, I’m no longer even certain if most of the videos I’ve produced over the years qualify as ‘essayistic’.
I pondered this when encountering essay film scholar Laura Rascaroli’s disqualification of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 as an essay film:
“Spectators are asked to follow the facts, to watch and listen, and progressively discover an objective truth, to which the author holds the key.”
Much writing on essay films espouse a resistance to the didactic, the pedagogical (which my work has been described, and not always in tones of approbation), or the polemical, while embracing the form’s ability, through the combination of images, sounds and words, to express the process of subjective thought. In the words of Hans Richter, who coined the term in 1940, the essay film:
“… allows the filmmaker to transgress the rules and parameters of the traditional documentary practice, granting the imagination with all its artistic potentiality free reign.”
However, these grandiose assertions confound as much as they clarify what constitutes an essay film. Rascaroli’s dismissal of Moore underestimates how his blunt-force polemics elicit (and even solicit) an active response from the audience, stimulating a critical engagement with the film and its political discourse, a strategy akin to the incendiary film essays of Santiago Álvarez (featured in the BFI series).
Richter’s definition doesn’t help much to differentiate the essay form from much of experimental cinema. And, as pointed out in the essays The Essay as Conformism by Hito Steyerl and Deviation as Norm by Volker Pantenburg, the common notion of the essay film as a form for free-flowing, subjective non-conformity, a concept borrowed from literary conceptions of the essay that are as old as Michel de Montaigne, has itself become a convention bordering on cliché.
My own working definition of the essay film errs on the side of inclusion at the expense of qualitative judgment or inflated promises of uniqueness: for me, an essay film explicitly reflects on the materials it presents, to actualise the thinking process itself. This gives a firmer delineation against a more general conception of experimental or documentary film practices, while also entertaining other films that one might otherwise neglect as ‘essay films’. Looking at the top results of last year’s S&S Greatest Films of All Time poll, one finds no-brainer examples like Sans soleil and Histoire(s) du cinema , but one should certainly also include the likes of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera , Tarkovsky’s Mirror – and why not Malick’s The Thin Red Line ?
Tracy’s essay gives a compelling account of the evolution of what in hindsight came to be known as the essay-film form, which, according to his telling, seems to culminate with the Left Bank triumvirate (amply represented in the BFI series) of Marker, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda, with their interrogations of a world of images – and of the power of the moving image itself – characteristically set to literate voice overs of wilful indeterminacy.
To be sure, these works amount to a defining moment in the evolution of the form but not the defining moment; the three decades since Sans soleil have seen a veritable explosion of essayistic filmmaking that Tracy’s account neglects to acknowledge. Perhaps Marker’s recent passing moves us to attend to his sui generis contributions to cinema – but at the recent Flaherty Film Seminar on documentary film, the halo cast around Marker’s memory was so thick as to be suffocating. His legacy has become so firmly tied with the essay film that many presume a subjective voice over narration is essential to such works. But over the last 30 years, the centrality of the essay film voice over has been thoroughly complicated (cf. the Black Audio Film Collective’s masterfully polyphonal Handsworth Songs ), subverted (Ben Rivers’ faux-anthropological Slow Action ) or altogether abandoned (Jose Luis Guerin’s wordlessly analytical Train of Shadows ).
San Soleil, 1983.
To Tracy’s credit, he links the use of voice over to a purpose that he and I both consider essential to essay filmmaking – in his words, “to interrogate the image, to dispel the illusion of its sovereignty.” This discontentedness with the cinema, and all that it has promised us over the past century (total entertainment, total art, total Bazinian reality), is one of the profoundest subtexts to Tracy’s piece, a drop-kick through the looking glass of the screen into the world around it, a world it has done as much to distort or distract us from as it has revealed and connected back to us.
Where Tracy and I seem to differ is in the necessity of literary techniques such as the voice over in determining cinema’s capacity to interrogate itself; where he seems to hold that such interpolations are necessary to create the critical distance to cinema that enables the essayistic mode, I hold out that moving images on their own contain tremendous as-yet-untapped potential to shed critical light on themselves. To quote Marker enthusiast Kodwo Eshun of the Otolith Group:
“To me, the essayistic is not about a particular generic fascination for voiceover or montage, the essayistic is dissatisfaction, it’s discontent with the duties of an image and the obligations of a sound.”
Here it’s worth mentioning another figure who has done as much as Marker to define essay filmmaking practice over the last 30 years: Harun Farocki, who has spent a lifetime unpacking images as embodiments of social systems (from prison surveillance videos to business presentations to football broadcasts), and as systems of meanings in themselves. He once described his practice as “images commenting on images”, an analytic technique that, through its resourcefulness and simplicity, frequently yields eloquence.
He is represented in the BFI series by How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany , a perversely inspired selection, given how much more overtly essayistic some of Farocki’s other films are compared to this Wiseman-esque observational chronicle of behavioural training sessions (birthing lessons, police drills, a striptease rehearsal). But there is no question that over the accumulation of scenes, a socially critical discourse emerges, in a mode that’s highly relevant to critical (or uncritical) media today: the film plays like an extended supercut of real-life scripted events.
In his own way, Farocki’s work fulfills another wish for the essay film expressed by Tracy that I share, to see the image “as part of a matrix of meaning that extends beyond the screen.” This takes me back to this article’s starting point in the contemporary morass of online clip compilations and fan tributes that pass as essays, and what alternative mode of media could place us in a more critically aware position with regard to how media functions in our lives, where it comes from, what larger forces are behind its dissemination and our consumption of them.
In this way, the essay film might realise a greater purpose than existing as a trendy label, or as cinema’s submission to high-toned and half-defined literary concepts. Instead, the essay film may serve as a springboard to launch into a vital investigation of knowledge, art and culture in the 21st century, including the question of what role cinema itself might play in this critical project: articulating discontent with its own place in the world.
This essay first published online in BFI/Film Forever, “Sight and Sound” magazine.
Kevin B. Lee appears at Other Cinema on…
Still from Zbyněk Baladrán’s 40,000,000 , a short video essay.
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Fall 2016, issue #31: “meta-“.
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Video essay: The essay film - some thoughts of discontent. In a world bedazzled by intractable images, do we need the essay film now more than ever? As S&S explores its art in our latest Deep Focus primer and BFI Southbank season, Kevin B. Lee weighs up this distinctively self-aware, searching form of cinema through both video and text.
In a world bedazzled by intractable images, do we need the essay film now more than ever? As S&S explores its art in our latest Deep Focus primer and BFI Sou...
Originally published in Sight & Sound, with full text introduction: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/deep-focus/video-essay-e...
197. The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent; 269. What Makes a Video Essay Great? 282. Learning Farocki: A Live Desktop Response; 226. Talking with Siri About Spike Jonze's HER (Oscar 2014) 161. Viewing Between the Lines: Hong Sang-soo's THE DAY HE ARRIVES
The Sight & Sound Deep Focus season Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film runs at BFI Southbank 1-28 August 2013, with a keynote lecture by Kodwo Eshun on 1 August, a talk by writer and academic Laura Rascaroli on 27 August and a closing panel debate on 28 August. To take this film-lovers' tiff to a more elevated plane, what it ...
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In "The essay film — some thoughts of discontent," Lee questions the definition of the essay film itself, both as it was was original conceived — free-flowing, meditative, inward-looking ...
The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent. For instance, I once evaluated Oscar-nominated lead performances based on how much time each actor or actress spent on screen to see if there was a correlation between screen time and impact of the performance on the viewer. What I inadvertently discovered was that Oscar-nominated lead actors have ...
1940 - Hans Richter's The Film Essay. The term "essay film" was originally coined by German artist Hans Richter, who wrote in his 1940 paper, The Film Essay: "The film essay enables the filmmaker to make the 'invisible' world of thoughts and ideas visible on the screen...The essay film produces complex thought - reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also ...
The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent; 269. What Makes a Video Essay Great? 282. Learning Farocki: A Live Desktop Response; 226. Talking with Siri About Spike Jonze's HER (Oscar 2014) 161. Viewing Between the Lines: Hong Sang-soo's THE DAY HE ARRIVES; 1; 2 ...
The first section catalogues books and chapters in edited books on the essay film, while the second lists some important journal articles, many of which may be found in online repositories such as JSTOR and Project Muse. ... Lee, Kevin B., 'Video Essay: The Essay Film — Some Thoughts of Discontent, in Sight and Sound, May 2017, <https: ...
the theorising done to date by essay film scholars such as Rascaroli, Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan, as well as in Andrew Tracy's feature article on the subject in the August 2013 issue of Sight & Sound. Tracy's essay gives a compelling account of the evolution of what in hindsight came to be known as the essay-film form, which,
In the introduction to The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitmen ts, author Rascaroli states that although the term essay film is "widely used, the category is under-theorized". Rascaroli tries to mend this in her text, while admitting the problematic nature of trying to define this format. You can read the complete text online.
Video essay: The essay film - some thoughts of discontent. By Kevin B. Lee. Video essay: The essay film - some thoughts of discontent. Videos. Video: Three closings and four highlights - the Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012.
Figure 52: The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent (Kevin B. Lee, 2013) ...226 8 Introduction: lessons in looking Lessons in looking is the short title of a 2014 digital audiovisual essay by Kevin B. Lee. The essay documents Lee's experience as a writing fellow at the School of
Video essays take advantage of the structure and language of film to advance their arguments. While the medium has its roots in academia, it has grown dramatically in popularity with ... •Video essay: The essay film -some thoughts of discontent Scholarly websites about video essays: •Audiovisualcy •[In]Transition: A media commons How-to:
30K subscribers in the videoessay community. A hub for video essays, super cuts, and other videos critically observing media texts.
The Kevin B. Lee video The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent was produced for Sight & Sound magazine and is an associative take on the genre. For Fandor, the prolific Lee made a video titled What Makes a Video Essay Great? which contains interesting observations about the directions in which the video essay format is developing.
It is dissatisfaction with what we expect documentary to do especially. Key References:Kevin. B. Lee, Vimeo (197, The Essay Film: Some thoughts of Discontent).Shrum, W/Dugue, R/Brown, T. Digital Video as Research Practice: Methodology for the Millennium, Journal of Research Practice 1(1), 2005. Article M4 Utterson, Alan.
Kevin B. Lee's work has pondered this question in the past through video essays on filmic forms of social protest and dissent, including with Nicole Brenez on The Hour of the Furnaces (2012), in The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent (2013) and Real Film Radicals (2013).
He presents excerpts from his videos "Shooting Down Pictures: Grey Gardens," Breaking Through the Screen: Video Essays by Mark Rappaport," "The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent," and "Transformers: The Premake." Special thank you to Chico Colvard and Tim Jackson for hosting and moderating the event.
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The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent from Kevin B. Lee on Vimeo. I cannot recall how the term 'video essay' came to be the adopted nomenclature for the ever-increasing output of online videos produced over the past few years by an ever-growing range of self-appointed practitioners (including myself). My own entrance into this field ...