Next week, August 17-21, 2015, I will be participating in the “Found Footage Video Aesthetics” theme week at the mediaCommons site In Media Res. I’ll be up first, on Monday, Aug. 17, with a video essay on the topic of “VHS Found Footage and the Material Horrors of Post-Cinematic Images” — a project I started this summer at the NEH-funded Middlebury College Workshop on Videographic Criticism. Stay tuned!
Above, the video essay I made at the NEH Workshop on Videographic Criticism at Middlebury College, June 14-27, 2015. See also Jason Mittell’s blog post on the workshop, which details many of the exercises we did and includes several examples that Jason made. Stay tuned for more!
I have long been interested in “videographic criticism” — that is, scholarly (interpretive, argumentative, and sometimes more poetic) work done in the medium of sound and moving images. Such work is especially relevant for engagements with film and video, television, and video games — i.e. for the critical analysis of media that themselves operate with sound and moving images of various sorts. Until now, I have only dabbled in videographic criticism, but I regard it as an important means of gaining insight and materially grappling with moving-image media; the process of planning and executing a video essay can be literally eye-opening to students who are just coming to terms with concepts and practices of cinematographic framing and continuity editing, for example, but the experience is no less powerful for seasoned scholars who are used to engaging with moving images through the more conventional channel of written text.
Over the past few years, as a result, I have made a commitment to myself to work towards more fully integrating videographic modes and methods into my pedagogical and scholarly practice. I have encouraged students to produce video essays as seminar coursework (e.g. in my 21st-century film course) — and I have plans to expand my incorporation of such assignments in future courses. In the meantime, a great number of people have been busy developing the form, exploring best practices for conducting this type of work, and even setting up peer-reviewed journals for videographic criticism — if you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to check out the awesome journal [in]Transition. In other words, while this is still a relatively new field of scholarly publication (though it clearly draws on older forms of documentary and creative work), there is a growing community of people and a growing body of work and experimentation that can be drawn upon and learned from.
I am therefore very excited to be attending a workshop this summer, “Scholarship in Sound & Image” (June 14-27, 2015 at Middlebury College), where I look forward to meeting some of these people and learning from their experience. Co-directed by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell, and with guest presentations by the incomparable Catherine Grant and Eric Faden, the workshop promises to be a once in a lifetime learning event.
In other words: Expect to see more moving-image experiments on this blog!
For their final projects in my 21st-century film class, three of my students chose to make video essays, which they have now made available on a blog that they set up especially for this purpose. Over at 21stcenturycinema.wordpress.com, you will find Jesko Thiel’s exploration of transmedia storytelling, Christopher Schramm’s analysis of editing techniques in videogame-based “fragmovies,” and Andreas Merokis’s look at violence as narrative and/or spectacle in contemporary cinema. Take a look and leave them a comment!