Tag: video essay
Carlos Valladares’s Video Essay “Minnelli Red” at Pesaro Film Festival
Congratulations to Carlos Valladares, who not only graduated with honors from the Stanford Film & Media Studies program this past weekend, but whose video essay “Minnelli Red” was accepted at the Pesaro Film Festival taking place right now in Pesaro, Italy!
Valladares’s video essay, a revised version of his final project for the seminar I taught on “The Video Essay: Writing with Video about Film and Media” last fall, is one of five entries selected by curators Chiara Grizzaffi and Andrea Minuz in the festival’s “(Re)Edit Competition” and is now in the running for a juried award. Good luck, Carlos!
The complete catalog (PDF) for the 54th Pesaro Film Festival is available here:
Slowness and Slow Cinema
My student Spencer Slovic has just published an excellent video essay on “Slowness and Slow Cinema” at Film Matters, which will be of interest to people thinking about contemporary and world cinema, or simply interested in the medium of the video essay (and this is a very good one!).
Spencer’s video grew out of an assignment for my “Post-Cinema” seminar, which I taught in the winter quarter of 2017. An earlier version was featured in the exhibition I curated at Stanford, Post-Cinema: Videographic Explorations (you can still see all of the videos online).
In any case, the version featured in Film Matters is much improved, having gone through a rigorous peer-review process. Take a look!
Essays in Sight and Sound — Exhibition Opens Today
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
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.
WTF IS THAT? Allison de Fren at Digital Aesthetics Workshop
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).
Fembots: From Representation to Reality
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: The Video Essay (Stanford University, Fall 2017)
Syllabus for “The Video Essay: Writing with Video about Film and Media” (Stanford, Fall 2017).
The Meaning of “Animation” in Edison’s Frankenstein (1910)
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.
The Video Essay: Writing with Video About Film and Media
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.