Video is now online from the opening colloquium of Stanford’s Frankenstein@200 Initiative: “What is Monster? What is Human?” (October 17, 2017, Cubberley Auditorium, Stanford University).
My talk, “Frankenstein, Film, and the Mediation of Media Change,” is embedded above.
Below you will find talks by my colleagues Denise Gigante (English), Aleta Hayes (Theater and Performance Studies), Russ Altman (Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine), and Hank Greely (Law, Genetics).
Essays in Sight and Sound — an exhibition of video essays that I am co-curating with Spencer Slovic at Stanford — opens today. The wall text (above) outlines the aims and objectives of the show. Here is a list of the 13 works included:
Explorations of Narrative
On-Again, Off-Again Relationships: A Recurring Theme, 2017
Gita Krishna
Video, 5:33TALLADEGA NIGHTS: A Reinvention of the Tragic Hero, 2017
Robin Fierberg
Video, 5:56Crafting a Cinematic Universe, 2017
Antonio Avalos
Video, 8:37THE LAST OF US: What’s in a Moment?, 2017
Matt Bernstein
Video, 3:52Focus on Color
Minelli Red, 2017
Carlos Valladares
Video, 19:10Character Design in Pixar, 2017
Rogelio Salinas
Video, 5:55Sound, Form, Aesthetics
Sight and Sound Conspire: Monstrous Audio-Vision in James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN, 2015
Shane Denson
Video, 8:47The Arc Shot, 2017
Sabrina Medler
Video, 5:17LOCK UP: Tonal Dissonance and Homoeroticism, 2017
Francesca Watkins
Video, 10:33Culture, Context, Contour
You Eat with Your Eyes First: Comparing the Eastern and Western “Foodie” Movie Genres, 2017
Rose Adams
Video, 11:05Healing Waters, 2017
Zoe Mhungu
Video, 5:21Flexing Culture, 2017
Eleni Aneziris
Video, 4:46The Animal in the Lake: Ambient Sound in CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR, 2018
Spencer Slovic
Video, 4:30
Essays in Sight and Sound: An Exhibition of Video Essays brings together a number of works produced in the Fall 2017 course “The Video Essay: Writing with Video about Film and Media.”
The assembled videos deal with cinema, television, video games, and online media, which they approach from a variety of angles. Together, these works not only probe our changing media landscape but explore the critical affordances of the video essay as a means of writing with sight and sound.
The exhibition will be on view January 12 – 26, 2018 in the Gunn Foyer of the McMurtry Building, home of the Department of Art & Art History, on the Stanford University campus.
On Tuesday, November 14, 2017, media maker/scholar Allison de Fren will be discussing post-cinema and videographic criticism with the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, focusing on her video essay “WTF IS THAT? The Pre- and Post-Cinematic Tendencies of Paranormal Activity” and Steven Shaviro’s article “The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity and the Technologies of Vision.”
This event follows a screening of de Fren’s documentary and videographic work on fembots the night before (more details here).
On Monday, November 13, 2017 (5:30pm in Oshman Hall, McMurtry Building), media maker/scholar Allison de Fren (Occidental College) will be on hand for a screening of her 2010 documentary The Mechanical Bride and her 2015 video essay Fembot in a Red Dress. The screening, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a Q&A.
Sponsored by the Stanford Department of Art & Art History, the Documentary Film Program, and Stanford’s Frankenstein@200 Initiative.
Syllabus for “The Video Essay: Writing with Video about Film and Media” (Stanford, Fall 2017).
This video is an experimental “annotation essay” that develops a reading of Edison’s Frankenstein (1910) through on-screen text annotations. This is the complete film, unedited except for the annotations and new digital intertitles.
The video’s argument is adapted from Chapter 3 of my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface: “Monsters in Transit: Edison’s Frankenstein.”
This is my second Frankenstein-themed video essay. The first one, on sound in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), can be found in the online journal [in]Transition.
This fall, I am excited to teach a new course, “The Video Essay: Writing with Video About Film and Media,” as a part of Stanford’s Introductory Seminars program. Geared towards sophomores from any major, this small class will combine practical instruction in video editing, analysis and discussion of exemplary video essays, hands-on lab sessions, and group critique of student work.
The course draws essential inspiration from the NEH-funded “Scholarship in Sound & Image” workshop, organized by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell at Middlebury College, which I participated in back in 2015.
More info about the course can be found on Stanford’s Introductory Seminars website.
A selection of video essays from the exhibition Post-Cinema: Videographic Explorations, which ran May 1-12, 2017 at Stanford University, is now available for viewing online.
The video essays, by leading filmmaker-scholars Kevin B. Lee and Allison de Fren as well as students in my “Post-Cinema” seminar (winter 2017), deal with a variety of contemporary media forms and phenomena – including digital animation, Beyoncé’s Lemonade and the visual album, contemporary horror, slow cinema, post-cinematic television and transmedia franchises, among others.
You can find the video essays on my website, under “Videographic Scholarship” on the catch-all “STUFF®” page (where you’ll also find a variety of digital and creative projects). Or go straight to the exhibition page.
Post-Cinema: Videographic Explorations — an exhibition of video essays that I am curating at Stanford — opens today. The wall text (above) outlines the aims and objectives of the show. Here is a list of the 13 works included:
Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (Book Trailer), 2016
Shane Denson
Video, 4:12The Beyoncé Image: Synesthetic Abilities of the Visual Album, 2017
Cleo Chung
Video, 17:07Iñárritu’s Films in a Conversation on Realism, Hyperrealism, Time-Image, and Movement-Image, 2017
Raquel Orendain Shrestha
Video, 4:00WTF IS THAT? The Pre- and Post-Cinematic Tendencies of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, 2017
Allison de Fren and Brian Cantrell
Video, 10:12hijab.key, 2016
Shane Denson
Video, 2:46The Shared Universe Cinema, 2017
Will Ferrer
Video, 21:18Transformers: The Premake (a desktop documentary), 2014
Kevin B. Lee
Video, 25:03Slowness and Slow Cinema, 2017
Spencer Slovic
Video, 11:42FX’s LEGION and Post-Cinematic Television, 2017
Katie Adams
Video, 19:31Questioning the Human Machine in EX MACHINA, 2016
Allison de Fren
Video, 10:26New Forms of Racism in the Post-Cinematic Dispositif, 2017
Jace Alexander Casey
Video, 4:02A Closer Look at/into Depth Perception: Illusion, Impression, and Indexicality in Animation, 2017
Ouree Lee
Video, 20:14VHS Found Footage and the Material Horrors of Post-Cinema, 2015
Shane Denson
Video, 5:02