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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. 

Related Posts

• Stanley Kubrick Directing Style Explained →
• A Filmmaker’s Guide to Nolan’s Directing Style →
• How to Write a Voice Over Montage in a Script →

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 →
• Visualize your scenes with intuitive online shotlist software →

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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How to make a video essay: A guide for beginners

What type of content do you primarily create?

Video essays are an incredibly popular genre on YouTube, and many new creators are eager to have their views heard on topics in culture and politics. But making a video essay involves a lot more than just sitting in front of a camera and pressing record. This guide is intended for beginners who don’t quite know where to start. 

What is a video essay?

A video essay’s primary defining feature is that it sets out to make an argument. It is, to put it simply, like an essay you wrote in school. Video essays often cover politics, popular media, or science.

But unlike the essays you wrote in school, video essays need extensive visual accompaniment, whether that’s footage (or B-roll ), still images, or animation.

Here’s how you can get started:

Step 1: Craft a thesis

Good video essays will have a central thesis explored throughout the piece. If you can’t summarize your thesis in a sentence (sometimes two), you’ve still got work to do. The best theses immediately leave the viewer wanting to know more. Test it on friends: If you state your thesis to friends and get reactions of curiosity or excitement you’re on to something.

Consider one of my favorite video essays, whose thesis is right in the title: "Why Snowpiercer is a sequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory."

‎ Sometimes, a thesis is a little more subtle, but nonetheless important. In Yhara Zayd’s video on horror movies, she argues that horror has always been a genre for social criticism.

‎ The rest of your video isn’t just proving that thesis, though that’s important. You'll want to explore the twists and turns of the idea. What questions does your thesis raise? What are the big doubts about your thesis, and how do you address them? How can we zoom out from your thesis and ask even bigger questions? 

Step 2: Determine your audience  

Your audience will dictate what level of complexity and detail you should cover in your video. If you’re an engineering channel, maybe you want to appeal to working engineers who understand the jargon of the profession. But if you’d like a broader audience, you’ll need to take the time to define terms and give background information. The best video essays usually appeal to both—their topics are unique enough to be interesting to people with prior knowledge of the topic, while accessible enough to be understood to a casual viewer.

Step 3: Organize your research early

Your video essay should have lots of supporting evidence. Aside from the usual list of articles and books, video essays can also use visual evidence.

If you’re commenting on media, that means hyper-specific shots and lines of dialogue. If you’re commenting on history, that means old news clips. Filmed interviews are a great resource regardless of the topic.

Whenever I'm trying to cover a show, I’ll watch the show (sometimes twice), take extensive notes, pause to write out lines of dialogue, and mark where specific moments supported various themes, motifs, or ideas. 

I've always regretted telling myself I’d remember a specific line or shot because I'd find myself spending an hour to hunt it down later in the process.

Whether you’re commenting on news footage, video games, or film and TV, I cannot stress enough how much extensive notetaking will improve your video essay later in the process.

The same advice goes for any books or news articles you might cite: annotate extensively and cite them in your piece.

Step 4: Familiarize yourself with "fair use"

Many video essays source footage from the news, TV, and film without licensing them. I'm not here to give advice on the legality of that, but I do think any video essayist should familiarize themselves with fair use .

Fair use is a set of criteria that a creator can use to defend their use of copyrighted work. It's not a license to freely use copyrighted work if you think you fit those standards; it’s a series of tests a judge should weigh in court. 

Usually, it doesn’t come to that. Most copyright issues go through YouTube’s copyright claim system , which you should also read up on. A film studio may claim your content, or block it altogether, for using their copyrighted material. YouTube allows you to appeal these claims , but if both parties won’t give up, the question can only be settled by a judge (in the US, at least).

Step 5: Start your script

Be sure to use a two-column script, rather than just writing out everything as if it were a traditional essay.

In one column, you’re writing what you’re saying, or what the footage is saying. In the other, write what you plan to show. Your notes here should be specific enough to help you later in the editing process. You may want to add a third column for notes, or sources to cite later.

Writing a video essay follows some different rules than what your English teacher might have expected. Most video essays use a conversational style, and include words, phrases, and grammar that would never fly with the written word. Sometimes that includes filler words, like starting a sentence with “so” or putting an “um” for effect. Just don’t overdo it.

Other writing rules still apply. Be concise, use active verbs, and otherwise just make sure you sound like a human.

Step 6: Film (or record)

You don’t need a $10,000 filming setup to make good video essays. Plenty of  people start with just a microphone, completely avoiding the camera altogether in what's known as a faceless YouTube video .

The two most important things to recommend: get good sound, and be natural. People can tolerate a lot of visual sins, but usually won’t put up with bad audio quality. Similarly, you don’t need to have the charisma of a talk show host, but people have no tolerance for on-screen performances that seem forced or fake.

That is all to say, get a decent microphone and be yourself. If you’re on-screen, buy a cheap teleprompter setup for your phone or camera.

Step 7: Start editing

There are many options for video editing software out there (and Descript is a great one), even for people with limited video editing experience. This article isn’t long enough to be an editing guide , but a few quick tips for a true novice:

• Don’t linger on any one visual for too long. Instead, mix up the visual interest of your video.
• Emphasize important concepts with text on screen.
• Take the time to learn a little about color grading .
• Clean up any noticeable background noise .

Step 8: Figure out your title and thumbnail

This may be the last step of this article, but it should often begin while you’re brainstorming. Your title and thumbnail should generate intrigue without giving it all away. Video essays often lean on titles with “How” and “Why.” Lessons from the Screenplay is a good example:

But video essays can also make provocative statements that make the viewer curious about how you’ll back it up. Consider Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell’s “ Smoking is Awesome ,” which I promise is not pro-tobacco.

Step 9: Publish

Finally, it's time to put your video out into the world and see how it fares. Your first video essay won't be perfect. It's important to put your work in public, take in feedback, and move on to your next project. Like all things, skill comes with time.

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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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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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• Last Updated: Aug 14, 2024 5:00 PM
• URL: https://johncabot.libguides.com/communications

How to do a Video Essay: What is a Video Essay?

Introducing the Video Essay: Assignment of Now!

• What is a Video Essay?

The term Video Essay is hard to define as it is still evolving from a long cinematic history. From the screen studies perspective, it is a video that analyses specific topics or themes relating to film and television and is relevant as it comments on film in its own language. On a basic level it could be defined as the video equivalent of the written essay.

This guide refers to the video essay from the context of the academic audiovisual essay as a multimodal form that combines written, audio and visual modes to communicate an idea. As a structure, the video essay is thesis-driven, and uses images with text so that the audience can read and interpret the idea or argument in a multimodal way.

In educational settings, the term video essay is used broadly for teacher/student-learner generated video and as a vehicle to transmediate between written-text to digital forms.  Through the video essay form, students are able to achieve learning outcomes in a new way as a multimodal experience while engaging with the subject, task or assessment through expression and creation of self-knowledge.

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• The Video Essay Process
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• 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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Media Production and Film Studies

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• The Video Essay

So you want to make a video essay...

The video essay: how-to, featured video essays.

• Copyright & Fair Use
• Getting Help

Additional Resources

Academic Journals

• in[Transition] : The first open access, peer-reviewed journal on videographic criticism
• AUDIOVISUALCY: Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies : An online forum for video essays or works of audovisual screen studies that have an analytical, critical, reflexive or scholarly purpose; fully attribute all sources used; are made according to Fair Use principles; are non-commercial in nature.

Video Essay Channels

• Every Frame a Painting  
• Indietrix Film Reviews
• 100 Years of Cinema  
• Channel Criswell  
• Lindsay Ellis

Library Guides

• Tufts University Library: Multimedia Production
• Edith Cowan University Library: The Video Essay
• Pace University Library: Film Criticism

What is a video essay ?

Christian Keathley, a Professor of Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College & co-founder of in[Transition], defines video essays as

“short critical essays on a given film or filmmaker, typically read in voice-over by the author and supplemented with carefully chosen and organized film clips”

Video essays have found incresased popularity in recent years on digital content sharing platforms like YouTube & Vimeo. Despite their scholarly-focused and argument-driven nature, video essays have since been associated with (and mistaken for) other popular forms of commentary (e.g. movie commentaries, reaction videos, online fan-edits, etc.) shared on the same platforms. The two do have similarities in their accessibility and utilize the same set of creative tools and texhniques. However, the video essay in its academic form does follow certain conventions (a written critical component from the author, scholarly research, and peer review), as opposed to popular commentaries. 

Video essays as a medium are an important audivisual form of scholarship, particularly in terms of expression, creation, and accessibility. Traditional essays may not always lend themselves to the fullest expression of film and how we interpret/analyze visual images. As students of film and media studies, it is important to both understand the medium from a critical point of view, as well as from a creative point of view. 

• Planning & Preparation
• Gathering Materials & Filming
• Editing & Sharing
• Understanding File Formats

So you've been assigned a video essay for class, or you want to make one on your own...

Where do you start? Like any other form of traditional essay, you will begin by Developing A Topic , whether it's a persuasive argument, a narrative story, or a research question. If you’re telling a story, think about good elements of narrative. If you’re making an argument in your video essay, think about the elements of making an effective argument. If you're drafting a research question, make sure to be specific and answer the following: who?, what?, where?, when?, why?, and how?

For more information about developing a topic or researcj question, please check out the following resources: 

• Pace Library Guide: The Research Process, Step-By-Step
• Pace Library Guide: Getting Started with Research

Once you have a well-developed topic and/or research question, then you can Create an Outline and Write a Script for your video essay. Utilizing your background research, evidence from whichever piece(s) of media you are analyzing/discussing, and your own arguments/interpretations of that media, you can build an outline and write a basic script to refer to when filmming and/or recording your video essay. This script will especially be important if you plan to record a voiceover. 

For more information about how to write a script/create an outline, please check out the following resources: 

• Excelsior Online Writing Lab: Video Essays
• How To Make A Video Essay: Writing   by  Indietrix Film Reviews

Now, you've got your script and you're ready to start gathering materials (scenes, images, audio, etc.) to edit into your video essay.  The best place to capture images is always  from a high-resolution DVD, Blue-ray, or video file. 

There are a couple of different places you can acquire these files. Of course, you can always invest in your own copies of the physical media. This is the best (and most ethical ) way to get high quality images, video, and footage.

Should you wish to do a screen capture, you can use platforms like Camtasia or Clip Converter to record images or footage directly from your screen. These aren't always the most ethical means to record footage, so if you choose to do so, be sure to consult Fair Use Guidelines before doing so. For this process, you will also likely need a DVD Drive, whether external or internal. Having one that can read DVDs and Blu-rays is a plus! Resoruces for how to do these technical processes are included below. 

Before you actually aquire any footage or media for your video essay, it's important to weigh the ethical considerations (i.e. Fair Use & Copyright Law) no matter what the media is or your intention to use it. 

Resources: 

• How To Make A Video Essay: Footage and Voiceover   from  Indietrix Film Reviews  
• How To Make Video Essays:  This video is especially helpful in terms of the technology of filming and recording voiceovers for video essays, less so the other aspects of video essay production. 
• Camtasia: Screen Capture & Recording Tutorials

As for finding stock photos or images to use that are in the Public Domain , check out this well-curated list of public domain image libraries, websites, and archives at the Tufts University Library Multimedia Production Resource Guide . 

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. 

For more information on editing video essays, please check out the following resources: 

• How to Make a Video Essay: Editing by  Indietrix Film Reviews
• Vimeo: Editing Basics

When creating, saving, uploading, and sharing video essays, it's important to have a basic understanding of digitail file formats, for videos, audio, and images. 

Linked below are some resources (websites, videos, & infographics) to help you learn how to navigate each file format and learn their best uses. It's likely you'll become aware of and proficient at most of this as you move through your Film & Screen Studies coursework, so think of these resources as a brief introduction to the topic and/or as little reminders for you to refer to in the future. 

Books: 

• Portable Moving Images: A Media History of Storage  Formats  by Ricardo Cedeño Montaña
• Images on the Move: Materiality - Networks -  Formats   Editor: Olga Moskatova

Blog Posts: 

• Understanding Video File Formats, Codecs and Containers by Andy Owen at TechSmith
• Video Formats – Meaning, types and everything you should know   by  Akeem Okunola at InEvent
• Image file formats: When to Use Each File Type   by Samual Lundquist at 99Designs

Other Resources: 

• Introduction to Digital Format Preservation, The Library of Congress

Image Credit: WonderShare, "Top 9 Video Formats You May Want to Know In 2023." 

The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism from Ian Garwood on Vimeo .

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Home Resources Free Guides Video Essays Guide

Video Essays Guide

Introductory guide to video essays., drawing on the inspiring work of pioneering educators and researchers engaging with this creative method, this guide aims to offer a research-led introduction for students, teachers and researchers approaching the video essay for the first time..

Introduction to Video Essays

Studying and researching film through film

A research-led introduction for students, teachers and researchers approaching the video essay for the first time.

Finding Coherence Across Journals

Guidelines and criteria for making, curating and publishing video essays

A look at the existing guidelines for the production and evaluation of video essays.

How To Make Video Essay Guides

Preproduction, Production, Postproduction

Considerations for planning, making and editing a video essay.

Copyright Considerations

How copyright law regulates the creative reuse of existing materials

Understanding the basic principles of copyright law when producing or using creative works.

Dissemination

A selected list of journals and websites where you can publish video essays.

Video essays as creative assessment method at SOAS, University of London

Reducing the uncertainty around creative assessment methods.

About this guide

Authors's biographies, list of references and contact details

Launch Event

An online event organised by Learning on Screen in collaboration with SOAS, University of London.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, chaz's journal, great movies, 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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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?

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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.

5 filmmakers that have mastered the art of the Video Essay

Jeremy Kaye

The Creative Landscape of YouTube

What is a video essay, and who’s making them on YouTube?

Videos Essays are a creative format of investigative analysis that are popular with film critics, art analysts, educators, and storytellers of all types.

The ‘Video Essay’ structure resembles written essays: thesis, introduction, body sections, and conclusion. Video Essays take a structured, in-depth, analytical, and sometimes persuasive approach, as opposed to the quick ‘explainer’ video style of ‘xyz subject explained in .59 seconds ’ that is also popular on YouTube.

Narrated and mixed with images, sound, and video clips, the Video Essay format is gaining popularity with all types of filmmakers. Let’s take a look at several of the best:

Tony Zhou — Every Frame a Painting

“Dedicated to the analysis of film form. Pictures and sound all the way, baby”

Tony Zhou is a filmmaker and freelance editor, but in his spare time he crafts excellent video essays that examine films and how they are constructed. He even has a video on what makes a great video essay here .

In his video essays, he explains the art behind writing, editing, directing, and camera work, and has attracted a sizable audience of filmmakers, moviegoers, and students. Learn more about Tony in an interview he did on reddit here .

Evan Puschak — The Nerdwriter

“A video series that aims to cultivate worldview: a particular philosophy of life, and a commitment to the well-rounded, intellectual individual.”

Evan Puschak studied film production at Boston University, and has been making videos as The Nerdwriter since 2011. After writing/hosting Seeker Daily on Discovery’s Digital network, he left to pursue The Nerdwriter full time.

The Nerdwriter covers a wide variety of topics: philosophical, political, moral, psychological, financial, artistic, and scientific. Evan also does a series called Understanding Art: analyses of artworks, films, paintings, and poems.

Adam Westbook — Delve

“Video essays that tell stories about our past and our future, using the fabric of film form to convey fascinating, surprising ideas.”

Adam Westbook is a British filmmaker who has been making videos on the web since 2009. His videos have been featured on Brainpickings , The Verge , Kottke , Aeon and Fast Company , and he was named an honoree nominee in the 2015 Webby Awards.

His current project, delve.tv , covers a wide area of subjects. From the causes of World War 1 to Leonardo Da Vinci’s creative journey, he takes stories from our past and shows their relevance and importance to the present and future.

Stuart Brown — Ahoy

“A retrospective and insightful look at gaming content and its place in history”

Stuart Brown has a background in professional web development, a degree in interactive media, and has been making videos since 2009. His video essays are presented with a distinct visual style, and go beyond typical gaming content to showcase a historical perspective that draws interest from gamers and non-gamers alike.

He creates video essays related to video games in different ways. They include topics such as the Cold War’s influence on video games, and how changes in technology improved game graphics over time.

Jack Nugent — Now You See It

“ Exploring film themes and tropes. It’s like a college film analysis class minus the lecture halls, essay assignments, and student loan debts.”

Jack is a student at University of Virginia, and makes video essays during his spare time. His videos cover thematic techniques in film, looking at how those techniques, symbols, and themes create patterns.

Sometimes you want to sit back and watch something that takes time to really explain and teach you something. Video essays are the perfect format.

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How to Create a Video Essay for Your College Application

Some colleges may accept a video essay in lieu of the traditional written essay as part of the college application process.

A video essay serves as a personal introduction on a college application. As a modern trend in the application process , some colleges and universities allow prospective students to submit a video essay, either in the place of the traditional written essay or, sometimes, as a separate element of the application packet.

With a video essay, you can naturally highlight your personality while providing the decision-makers with a glimpse into your world. You have the power to present yourself in your best light— literally —in a more personal medium than the regular written word.

What was once limited to art and design schools is now part of the normal process for schools like theUniversity of Chicago and Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. This modern twist on essays allows students to express themselves in a way that was once reserved for social media.

To impress the college admissions representatives of your chosen school, take the proper measures when planning. When preparing your video, give plenty of forethought to make your best first impression.

Learn more: How to Write a Personal Statement

How to make a video essay

Verify how long the video can run; this should be listed in each of your institutions’ requirements. For example, the University of Chicago allows videos of up to two minutes. Stay within the university’s range to be considered. The challenge is to focus on your presentation and choose your words wisely.

1. Choose a topic.

Next, decide on the topic of the video. Some schools may invite you to discuss a particular topic, and others will want the video essay to serve as a personal introduction in place of an interview.

If the video serves as an interview, include the answers to the following questions: 

Why do you wish to attend this specific school?

What will you bring to the college campus?

What will you do when you arrive?

Overall, you can use the video to show why you’ll be a natural fit at the school.

Read more: What Should I Major In? 5 Things to Evaluate

2. Create an outline and script.

Show off your production skills, but don’t overextend yourself. University representatives will focus on various aspects of your video in addition to its production. Plan your talking points, create a script, and practice by recording yourself multiple times before finally hitting the send button.

A video script is different from a written essay . Make a logically organized list of the topics you want to cover in a way that allows you to speak naturally and comfortably at the camera. Use the outline to guide you as you record in lieu of memorizing a script.

Record yourself with your phone’s camera, and practice the presentation repeatedly until you feel comfortable. Time yourself to stay within the time limit predefined by the college or university you're applying to. Once you feel satisfied with your script, you’ll be ready for the next step.

3. Use imagery and audio files.

Think about the scene you are depicting in the video. Verify your background. If you’re in your bedroom, for example, make sure it’s tidy and clean. Display things that visibly render your interests, such as a trophy from a swim meet or a stack of your favorite nonfiction books.

You can also film your video in a nearby park or landmark to represent your interests and make good use of the natural lighting. Use the setting to reveal a part of your personality and gain the interest of your college admissions representative. 

Along with video of you talking, you may wish to include additional images, video, and audio files that go along with your message. Collect all your content first before initiating the editing process.

4. Upload files into editing software.

Demonstrate your presentation skills by doing more than one take of your video and editing them to create a polished final cut. For this, you can use any of the trusted free editing software, including iMovie and Lightworks, which are typically user-friendly. You can drag and drop any file you upload and add sound and visual effects as you edit your content.

For tutorials on new software, look for relevant courses on Coursera like Mastering Final Cut Pro , where you’ll learn skills to make your video look professional.

Keep your post-production simple since you will principally be ranked on the content of your video rather than the graphics and transitions, that is unless you’re applying to become a videography student.

5. Share or submit your work.

Follow the submission guidelines described in the university’s application process to ensure you meet all requirements. You may only need to submit a link to your video upload from a commonly used video-sharing website.

If such is the case, upload your completed video essay for free on popular video-sharing platforms like Vimeo or YouTube. Once you’ve uploaded your video to your preferred site, you will have the option to copy a shareable link. Before you send the link, test it on your computer or phone to make sure it leads to your video.

Use the Common App to submit your essay.

Many high school juniors and seniors are familiar with the Common App , which is used by hundreds of colleges and universities to streamline the process of application. For the 2021-2022 school year, there were seven different essay prompts that you could choose from for the traditional written essay.

For some institutions, you may have the option to submit your essay through the Common App. You may also be able to submit a video essay in place of a written essay or as its complement. You’ll need to research and follow the directions of the institution you’re applying to.

Take note of these best practices of video production to make sure your video is both memorable and favorable.

Videography tips for success 

Apply your top-notch creativity in this nontraditional medium to produce your video essay. Discuss ideas for your video with a guidance counselor, parent, or trusted teacher. Ask them for feedback to make sure the message resonates properly.

Reach for success in these other ways:

Have good lighting and sound: Avoid distracting the viewer with shadows, cluttered backgrounds, or loud background noises. Sit near a window to use natural sunlight and prevent a washed-out appearance.

Dress for success: Wear a presentable outfit like you would for an in-person interview. Aim for business or business casual attire, tidy hair, and positive body language. This will improve your confidence as well as send the message that you’re serious about this application.

Answer questions directly: If the school asks specific questions on their application process or has prompts that need to be included in your video essay, make sure to directly provide the answers to each of them. Avoid getting carried away during the creative process.Write the questions and timestamp of the video where they’re answered.

Be yourself : Perhaps one of the most important video tips is to be authentic and relaxed. Review your script and practice repeatedly so you can naturally express yourself without reading it. Give yourself plenty of time to complete the project, and remember to meet the submission deadline.

Express yourself: Interviewing Skills to Benefit Your Career

Practice your presentation skills and increase your confidence before working on your video essay with the following courses from top universities, available on Coursera: 

Effective Communication: Writing, Design, and Presentation Specialization

Storytelling and influencing: Communicate with impact

Speaking Skills for University Success

Speak English Professionally: In Person, Online & On the Phone

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This content has been made available for informational purposes only. Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals.

The best video essays of 2023

Our annual poll spotlights 181 unique video essays, nominated by 48 international voters, showcasing the breadth and depth of current videographic practice.

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Now in its seventh annual edition, the Sight and Sound poll for the best video essays of the year surveys the online sphere, film festivals and audiovisual research in almost equal measure. Its primary purposes are to mark notable works and keep track of the various schools of thought concerning what video essays can or should be, and how they can communicate to a range of audiences.

The poll was conducted with the assistance of 48 voters from 17 countries, including academics, critics, online creators and festival curators. Together, their 260 nominations include 181 distinct titles. Given the scope and abundance of recent video essays, even an extensive poll can only provide a cross-section of the topics, forms and rhetoric of their contemporary practice – a limitation many voters noted in their submissions. Of the nominated works, 47% were created by male video essayists, 39% by female, with several from non-binary creators and mixed teams. Around two-thirds feature voiceover, with the majority presented in English, although 14 languages feature in the overall poll.

The nominations saw a relatively equal split between essays created for YouTube and those created for academic research, with 50 YouTube and 47 academic videos (or entire series). Publicly available videos’ viewership varies broadly, from 9.5 million views (for MyHouse.wad ) to the low double digits; participants were keen to highlight new and underseen works as well as celebrating the achievements of established creators. Festival films or installation pieces also proved popular, with 53 arthouse shorts, features and documentaries nominated. Also present, although in a smaller proportion, were self-published Vimeo works or collaborative projects unaffiliated with a specific institution. However, within the yearly S&S poll for video essays, there seems to be a slight decline both in independently produced and published Vimeo content, and in video output by cinephile magazines, while the academic sector is slowly but constantly expanding.

The average runtime was 27 minutes, with most around the 15 minute mark – although a few marathon nominations like Will DiGravio’s Against Polish and Adam Curtis’ TraumaZone (three and seven hours respectively) stick out. Three videos were one minute long or shorter.

Leading the nominations, Maryam Tafakory and Johannes Binotto tie for 10 nominations, with Tafakory’s split-screen work chaste/unchaste and Binotto’s Practices of Viewing series coming out on top. A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek received nine nominations, the most for a single work. Returning essayists of note include Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Barbara Zecchi and Ariel Avissar, while new entrants with multiple nominations include Occitane Lacurie (three noms for Xena’s Body: A Menstrual Auto-Investigation Using an iPhone) and James DeLisio (four nominations for Cinema in Pain: Decoding “Mad God” ).

It is worth noting that some videos appear in consecutive polls: among them, Misek’s History of the World According to Getty Images and Galibert-Laîné’s GeoMarkr are now available online, while in the 2022 poll they were occasionally mentioned, but less widely seen. It is often the case that videos travel in festivals or are viewed in conferences and among peers before being made public. While the current poll has several dozen videos to which we cannot presently direct our readers, we hope that in the near future many will be similarly available with unrestricted access.

Videographic collaborations make up a number of nominations in this years’ list. Once upon a Screen: Vol. 2 , edited by Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer, returns with two nominations for its second instalment. Moving Poems , also curated by Kreutzer, received five nominations, chiefly for Desiree de Jesus’ a raisin in the sun. And the 169 Seconds series, commissioned by Danish journal 16:9 to celebrate its 20th anniversary, received three nominations, including returning essayists Catherine Grant and Jason Mittell. Independent videographic community The Essay Library also features with one nomination for Lara Callaghan’s contribution to the When Essay Met Library collaboration.

A number of essays were published through new academic journals, including Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft with five videos nominated; other new entrants include Teknokultura and Feminist Media Histories. [in]Transition, Tecmerin and NECSUS are by now certified in making the works they publish visible among videographic researchers.

Independent streaming service Nebula has continued to grow its base of creators, many of whom are video essayists. Out of 50 unique YouTube videos, seven were also published on Nebula. Three of these were directly cross-posted, another three were Nebula First (published earlier than YouTube), and one nomination – We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot by Big Joel – was a Nebula Plus video, meaning it includes extra content beyond what is available on YouTube. Lily Alexandre’s Nebula-first essay Everything Is Sludge: Art in the Post-Human Era received three nods, bringing the total number of Nebula nominations up to nine.

Billed as a creator-first streaming service , Nebula aims to give its creators the freedom that they cannot find on YouTube. Many video essayists have joined Nebula after finding their work coming up against YouTube’s advertiser-friendly guidelines, restricting the discussion of mature topics. In February 2023, Maggie Mae Fish launched her series Unrated exploring sexuality in film, and Broey Deschanel followed suit in November with the Taboo on Screen series. There’s an oft-noted divide between ‘Vimeo-style’ essays – with their more academic leaning and longer clip length – and YouTube essays – with their quick cuts and careful stepping around automatic copyright claims . This gap may be quickly closing, although whether a Nebula style will arise remains to be seen.

Although content creators can make money through AdSense and sponsorships on YouTube, many turn to community donations and subscriptions to fund their work. Forty-one of the nominated YouTube works included a link to Patreon, Ko-fi or PayPal in the video description. One nominated video, Brad Troemel’s The Literalists , is available exclusively on Patreon, with only a trailer uploaded to YouTube.

Vimeo essayists have also encountered in greater force the problems that have plagued YouTube essayists for years. Formerly a safe haven for video essays containing copyrighted materials, Vimeo has enacted a slew of copyright claims, viewing restrictions and takedowns on well-known video essays in recent months. This brings to mind Fandor’s 2016/2017 removal of multiple video essays from their channels in response to the threat of copyright claims, ringing alarm bells about the mixed potential of the Internet as an archive for videographic work. The long-running TV Dictionary project is just one example with multiple claims, despite its clear origin in academic research practice.

Nostalgia and memory, pop culture and cinephilia – sometimes mixed together – loom large in this year’s list, due in part to some popular academic series including Indy Vinyl for the Masses (curated by Ian Garwood) and the Screen Stars Dictionary (curated by Tecmerin and Ariel Avissar). Gender as spectacle makes its appearance in several videos, from the mainstream end of the spectrum (max teeth’s The Man/Car Gender Binary in John Carpenter’s Christine ) to critical discussions of star personae, cinema’s archetypal female protagonists as well as filmmaking/media practices (Morgane Frund’s short films, among other titles), to direct references to Laura Mulvey and Judith Butler at the other end.

As with all other areas of discourse this year, AI featured in multiple videos, usually more as a thematic concern than as a videographic tool (although text-to-speech and some generative techniques feature in the list). Futurism more generally, whether dystopian or utopian, was a common theme in the YouTube nominations.

Interrogation of the video essay form itself continues to stimulate discussion within the field, including the drawing to a close of Johannes Binotto’s popular Practices of Viewing series. While this self-reflexivity was first noted in the 2021 poll , it was seen more on YouTube in 2023, with videos ranging from assessing the state of the video essay landscape to dispensing advice about how to be a successful video essayist . Harris Michael Brewis, better known as hbomberguy, released a nearly four-hour exposé of plagiarism on YouTube with a particular focus on video essays. The video passed two million views within 24 hours of its publication.

While there are certainly great videos that remained unmentioned even with such dedicated teamwork on behalf of all voters, the present survey should be a solid starting point (and, in a few years’ time, a reminder) of the state of video essays in 2023. Thank you to everyone who participated.

Full list of voters

Ariel avissar, johannes binotto, philip józef brubaker, nelson carvajal, ben chinapen, isabel custodio, will digravio, flavia dima, chloé galibert-laîné, jacob geller, tomas genevičius, libertad gills, catherine grant, maria hofmann, oswald iten, delphine jeanneret, miklós kiss, jaap kooijman, evelyn kreutzer, occitane lacurie, colleen laird, kevin b. lee, adrian martin, daniel mcilwraith, dayna mcleod, queline meadows, carlos natálio, clare o’g ara, alan o’l eary, michael o’n eill burns, julian ross, josé sarmiento hinojosa, jemma saunders, dan schindel, shannon strucci, scout tafoya, max tohline, irina trocan, ilinca vânău, ricardo vieira lisboa, adam woodward, barbara zecchi, all the votes.

Film theorist, curator, and video essayist , Queen Mary University of London and Národní filmový archiv

A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek

A timely meditation on how even public domain images ‘we all know’ can become unattainable when they find themselves in the thrall of commercial archives and data banks. A powerful call for paying attention to copyrights after Vimeo started taking video essays down.

Machines in Flames by Andrew Culp and Thomas Dekeyser

Part desktop documentary, part evocative experimental film, this philosophical video essay succeeds in enacting the ‘detective logic of the digital’ like few other works I have seen. By jumping between the indistinct traces of CLODO , a terrorist group that bombed computer companies in 1980s France, it denies the pretension that the desktop interface is there ‘for us’ to make content readily available and uncovers the fundamental lack and self-destructivity of contemporary visual regimes.

Twisties! by Alice Lenay

A fascinating extension of the videographic impulse into a live performance. Lenay uses Zoom software to embody the experience of participating in the 1996 Summer Olympics and shakes our notions of audiovisual archives as well as the politics of individual and collective bodies.

Notes from Eremocene by Viera Čákanyová

Who would have thought that an essay film on blockchain and artificial intelligence could be so intimate and touching? Čákanyová achieves it through a catalogue of experimental techniques that turn photochemical as well as digital images into emblems of an indistinct future in which we yet have to find our place.

Teletext Revival by Karin Spišáková and David Scharf

A whimsically inventive video essay that resurrects the early 2000s’ teletext interface not just for its nostalgic appeal but chiefly for its unique temporality and inclusiveness.

Back to the Ruins by Jáchym Šidlák

A rare piece of videographic criticism that reworks a short Czechoslovak non-fiction film from the 1940s. Images of post-war reconstruction are poetically deconstructed to give voice to overlooked details and actors that shaped the spectacle in the first place.

Divine Horror by Kryštof Kočtář and Matouš Vaďura

A truly visceral experience that makes us sense how close experimental film, horror, and videographic criticism can be.

• Back to list of voters

Video maker and media scholar at Tel Aviv University

Arbitrary Motion: Accidentally/On Purpose by Farzaneh Yazdandoost

Yazdandoost’s video, exploring the use of the arbitrary motion of fur in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs and other stop-motion films, is an absolute treat, start to finish. It was made under the mentorship of Catherine Grant, as part of a wonderful videographic symposium held in Hanover late last year, where I first got to see it — and was published earlier this year in the ZfM blog Videography, which followed that symposium. Don’t miss it — and also check out her shorter, lovely video, Wes Anderson’s Trains .

The Accented Sound of Camp by Barbara Zecchi

In another video first presented at the Hanover conference and published this year on the ZfM blog, Zecchi offers a 4-part exploration of the use of Italian accents in Hollywood films. Starting from House of Gucci, it examines various screen representations of Italians and Italian Americans and the political and ideological dimensions of the accented voice (following Zecchi’s previous work on the subject). It is insightful, entertaining and highly inventive, experimenting with a diverse range of videographic techniques and forms of voiceover.

Men Shouting: A History in 7 Episodes by Alan O’L eary

One of the explicit inspirations for Zecchi’s video above, O’L eary’s is a tour de force of parametric criticism, or what he calls a form of “cyborg scholarship”. It is a fascinating and highly generative piece, and remains playful throughout; O’L early must have had a lot of fun while making it, like a child playing with Lego. It would be difficult to explain here just what the video does with its subject material (three narrative films made about the 2008 financial crash); luckily, O’L eary has already done that himself, in the accompanying creator’s statement, which you should definitely read prior to watching the video if you want any chance of figuring out what the hell is going on!

Moving Poems: A Raisin in the Sun (1961) by Desirée de Jesús

Evelyn Kreutzer’s Moving Poems collection, which pairs poems with moving images, has generated some remarkable works over the past couple of years. This video by de Jesús is one of the standout pieces. It places the 1961 adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun in dialogue with Langston Hughes’s “Harlem”, from which its title was derived. It is an intelligent and complex piece, employing multiple, dense layerings of image, sound and text, and will benefit from repeat viewings. Check it out, as well as the other pieces in the collection – and consider contributing your own.

Unsteady (for Elisabeth Bronfen) by Johannes Binotto

I will not say much about Binotto’s touching tribute to his former teacher and close friend, Elisabeth Bronfen, who retired from Zurich university this summer. You should simply watch it (all the way to the very end) and smile.

Watching the Rehearsal by Jason Mittell

Why leave scholarship to chance? You’d better watch Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal before watching this one; and while you’re at it, watch some of Professor Mittell’s previous pieces, where he established some of the ideas and approaches he’s developed here in elaborate and unexpected ways; specifically, this and this .

Mast-del مست دل by Maryam Tafakory

This last one is unfortunately not available for viewing online, and has been making the festival round this past year – go and watch it if you get the chance. Is this a video essay? I don’t know. Here is how Tafakory describes it: “A love song that would never pass through the censors, Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.” Anyone who’s seen her previous work (and if you haven’t, you’re missing out), would recognise these themes and ideas that she has dealt with before. Here, she approaches them from a radically different aesthetic, masterfully blending clips from existing films, original footage, a scripted narrative and original score, to mesmerising and moving effect.

Media studies scholar, bricoleur, project leader videoessayresearch.org

No representative overview, no proper summaries. But a collection of echoes, reverberations of works I have seen this year and which keep playing in my head.

Moving Poems: Eine Erinnerung [A Memory] by Evelyn Kreutzer

“Sometimes I still picture myself.” Part of Evelyn’s fantastic Moving Poems initiative, yet a whole universe of its own. It pierces me. Everything in it. The artefacts of the video signal that devour the image, the high pitched hiss of the TV , the calm and sober voice that speaks of memories which sound innocuous but frighten you, and then the look on this face I recognise and which I have never seen like that.

With a Camera in Hand, I Was Alive + Introduction by Katie Bird

“I keep thinking about gestures”.

Katie Bird’s haunting video essay and its bittersweet introduction makes us keep thinking, keep wondering, about the weight and value of labour, of film labour, scholarly labour, of what it means to hold, a camera, a child, a body, yourself, and how we can continue by letting go.

Film Thought 5. Kuchar at Kmart by Will DiGravio

“In such places, he finds the people, the ones like my family, and friends, and neighbours from home…”

A videographic haiku, from one loving observer to the other, beautiful, personal, careful, vulnerable. It makes me fall in love with the filmmaker it portrays, with the people the filmmaker met, and with the person who made this video.

“How did you get it? I ask — They don’t know.”

An analysis of, as well as an act of resistance against visual capitalism going rampant. We need to fight a system that is already well ahead in co-opting, privatising, watermarking, and sealing the archives, depriving more and more people of their past, their collective memories. This video essay is an emergency call and a road map.

Thelma & Louise: Rape Culture, Mudflaps, and Vaginal Horizons by Dayna McLeod

“Ain’t it beautiful?” Playful. Painful. So precise. I cannot choose among the works of Dayna but I feel particularly connected to this one because I cannot separate it from all the conversations we had around it. Here is a beautiful artist and thinker driving at high speed to where video essays usually do not dare to go. Please take me with you, I will sit on the backseat.

Super Volume – A Tactile Art by Cormac Donnelly

“Intention re-situates to the hands and fingers.” Abstract and visceral at the same time it is this experimental video essay that made me suddenly and fully understand and feel what “working with sound” could mean, how it feels to grasp what cannot be touched. When you see it, everything vibrates.

mini_essay_5 (Body Parts) by Occitane Lacurie

“Balayez vers le haut pour afficher plus.”

Occitane’s mini-essays (what an understatement!) show iPhone navigation as a method of thoughts taking shape. Scrolling, clicking, touching, feeling through images and associations, a flow of intertexts at the tip of your invisible finger. You better be careful with what you open next. In this one I feel seen by all these bodies, dismembered, scattered, commodified. Looking through the mirror stage and back again. And what about this little screen in my hand? Part of my body or not?

Video essayist/experimental filmmaker

The 169 Seconds Series

I couldn’t pick only one video essay from this stellar series, so I nominate the entire body of work from 2023. I love the length requirement, which results in some creative interpretations of the source material.

It’s a Zabriskie Zabriskie Zabriskie Zabriskie Point by Daniel Kremer

A personal, feature-length essay film about Death Valley and its importance to the history of cinema as well as its longstanding resonance with the filmmaker. Kremer has admirably unearthed many underground and lesser known works that were filmed in this desert and included them here, to my delight. Kremer’s playful juxtapositions between the two main films is humorous and well-edited.

Memories of “It” by Kathleen Loock

Loock entwines her own experience growing up in a reunified Germany with the 1990 TV movie version of Stephen King’s It. A surprising association, but one that is fully realised and supported with her examples. Loock’s observations enrich the popular horror story as well as educate the audience about complications resulting from the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

The Thinking Machine #64: Inkblot by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Two cosmically intertwined tragedies from different films are synchronised beautifully in this succinct video mashup.

Webby Award-nominated video essayist, writer and television producer

Fire Film Supercut by Daniel Pope

The supercut, often an overlooked subgenre of the video essay, is much harder to pull off than it seems. When done right, you almost don’t even notice the splice. This supercut is, pun intended, fire.

New Beverly Cinema — October 2023 by Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith has cut a lot of the New Beverly’s monthly previews and to me, they’re pure video essays, on a pure pop-level. This one for October, a la Halloween, is especially captivating.

An electric and gripping use of animation and multi-screen to really get its thesis across. McLeod understands the exciting heights of the video essay form and has all the cylinders firing here.

YouTube creator /video editor and essayist

Why Tom Cruise’s Run Matters by Scene It

Scene it is a fairly new channel I came across, I found his content very refreshing as a new voice in the more standard “film essay” area.

string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard by acollierastro

This video came out of nowhere and blew everyone’s mind who saw it. An intriguing title, with a clearly stressed out person and also The Binding of Isaac in the thumbnail? What’s going on? Within 1 minute the purpose becomes clear; this woman who has very strong opinions and credentials will break down exactly what happened with the String Theory phenomenon while simultaneously stumbling through a playthrough of the vintage roguelike indie darling Binding of Isaac. A premise so absurd and hilarious (dare I say groundbreaking?) that you instantly want to watch and listen. It’s very informative and HIGHLY entertaining for the joke of the idea alone. I’m glad this took off because it was worth it. This is probably my most firm nomination out of the group.

Attack the Block: A Subversive Masterpiece by Kay and Skittles

Coming from very very early 2023; this one about John Boyega’s first leading role stood out for me; a beautiful look at an indie darling from one of my favourite creators breaking down the politics of crime in poor communities.

YouTuber ( Be Kind Rewind ) and film critic

Art Without the Artist (and Other Horrors from the Machine) by Dan Simpson, Eyebrow Cinema on YouTube

AI became a hotly contested subject in 2023, with studios eager to capitalise on its apparent ease and speed, and artists fighting to establish guardrails for its growth and use. Dan Simpson argues for the integrity of the artist over the dispassionate, surface-level results AI often prompts. It’s a rallying cry for those of us who advocate and appreciate the work of creative human beings.

We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot by Big Joel

Big Joel’s essays always stand out for their fluency in art history. Here, he weaves several works together, connecting material as disparate as Jenny Holzer and Godzilla in a stunning exploration of what words mean, contradictions, and subjectivity.

The Literalists by Brad Troemel

I’ve yet to find a better interpreter of online culture than artist Brad Troemel, whose work satirises some of the internet’s most exasperating modes of expression. In fact, he so effectively mocks these aesthetics that his work often goes viral, with choruses of the terminally online taking it, well, literally (a recent post about the unionisation of the Taylor Swift fandom comes to mind). In addition to these posts, he creates video essays outlining his observations of online behaviour. In The Literalists, he takes a look at “millennial cultural liberalism” and the inclination to scrub content clean of any possible offence, connecting the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s to the modern, flawed reasoning that it is morally bad to watch films with immoral characters. His essays are available exclusively on his Patreon, but it’s well worth at least a month’s subscription to binge them. You won’t regret it.

The Four horse_ebooks of the Apocalypse by Grace Lee/What’s So Great About That?

Everything happens so much. It’s an iconic tweet, an evergreen feeling, and the subject of Grace Lee’s exploration of the apocalyptic unease of modern life. She charts the decline of the relatively literal disaster film with the rise of a looming, paralysing belief in our pre-determined doom. It’s a fascinating topic, made even more compelling given that Lee is the best editor of video essays on YouTube.  

Host of The Video Essay Podcast; assistant editor, Cineaste; PhD candidate, University of Amsterdam

Each year, it gets more difficult to be a viewer of video essays; it is a beautiful and frustrating thing. More people are making them. They are longer. They screen at festivals, and in varied corners of the internet. Below are a few of the video essays that have resonated with me this year. Rather than try and explain why I picked them, I will instead attempt to describe something in each work. Here’s hoping it might inspire you to give them all a watch.

Joséphine Baker Watches Herself by Terri Francis

[3:43] On the left, Joséphine Baker performs in the famous skirt made out of bananas. On the right, a clip from a 1968 CBC interview with Baker. Below, a translation on screen: “No, it’s about work. You have to work hard.” A video essay that grows richer with each rewatch.

Apostles of Cinema (Tenzi za sinema) by Cece Mlay, Darragh Amelia, Gertrude Malizana, Jesse Gerard Mpango

“I like quality films. And I like difficult films,” says DJ Black. But if it is bad, “I can’t dub it.” [04:51] An incisive documentary about film culture in Tanzania.

watch me sleep: self-surveillance and middle-aging queer performance anxiety by Dayna McLeod

There’s a moment in the second minute I felt throughout my whole body. A revelation.

Void by Kevin Ferguson

The persistence of Robert Duvall’s bald head, especially at [00:13] and [04:46].

Why the Internet Loves Buster Keaton by Don McHoull

I imagine Don’s masterful montages of the internet’s response to Keaton’s artistry, and also that of Fayard and Harold Nicholas, playing on the wall of a gallery.

moving poems: a raisin in the sun (1961) by Desirée de Jesús

Water ripples. Sidney Poitier, playing with his lighter, gestures for a drink. His finger points to the text on screen, “in the sun?” Off-screen dialogue plays. [00:26] A harmonious blend of sound, image, and text.

Miss Me Yet by Chris Bell

Each episode begins with George W. Bush raising his middle finger to the camera, a gesture that becomes more grotesque and poignant the more one watches.

Film critic, programmer ( BIEFF )

A fleeting list — quite heterogeneous, and I must admit I’m not sure whether all of them are “ontologically” video essays, as definitions seem to become increasingly porous — of films that I discovered together with my colleagues at BIEFF during our work for this year’s editions.

Home Invasion by Graeme Arnfied

Simply stunning. Perhaps the best zero-budget film in many years — which affords itself the very rare “luxury” of playfully engaging with the legacy of Harun Farocki. You’ll never look at a doorbell with the same eyes after this film, not ever again.

Dear Gerald by Jasper Rigole

Rarely does the perspective of film archivists — with its particular way of looking at film, and its entire universe of both material and ethical dilemmas — actually transpire in film. Jasper Rigole’s short (aside from spotlighting his delightful IICADOM archives, a true goldmine for home movie enthusiasts) does exactly that, while also bringing into question the spectatorship of archival footage.

GeoMarkr by Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Guillaume Grandjean

Galibert-Laîné, brilliant as usual.

Bliss.jpg by Emily Rose Apter and Elijah Stevens

Some of the world’s most famous (digital — in all senses of the term) landscapes, reexamined, almost à la Richard Prince, or rather, a y2k take on the method of James Benning — brought back into materiality through 16mm film.

The Film You Are About to See by Maxime Martinot

Despite all the hand-wringing in recent years, content warnings are by no means something new to cinema — and the double helix-like structure (going both backwards and forwards throughout the history) of Martinot’s incisive and irreverent short reveals this to the fullest, together with excavating the various mores and taboos that cinema was transgressing at various times in modern history.

Gods of the Supermarket by Alberto Gonzalez Morales

I’m a sucker for any and all films that use ‘Wicked Game’ on their soundtrack. Especially so if they’re found-footage essays on queerness and bodybuilding culture.

Dancing at My Parents’ Wedding by Andreea Chiper

Finally, a pick from the local scene, still very much emergent — a tender exploration of personal videographic artifacts, as seen through the eyes of the child that knows how life is going to work out for those captured on a seemingly innocuous wedding tape.

Filmmaker and senior researcher at the Lucerne School of Art and Design

Having once again decided to nominate for this poll only makers whose work I discovered this year, I realise that the five videos that I want to highlight are works I watched in the presence of their authors. Not only did their films inspire me, but I was moved by all five Q&A sessions, for very different reasons. This may testify to a growing need for personal connection through videographic practices, in the midst of a media landscape that grows more cluttered and anonymous by the day. I also want to salute the engagement of makers who are committed to accompanying their creations in person and helping them reach an audience, even when economic or political circumstances are not favourable. My list is non hierarchical.

Artistes en zone troublés by Stéphane Gérard and Lionel Soukaz

Lionel Soukaz’s video diary Journal annales is not only a milestone in the history of French experimental cinema, it is also an essential piece of LGBTQIA + heritage. There is something extremely moving about the care and tenderness with which Stéphane Gérard approaches this audiovisual document, as he edits a new short portrait of Soukaz’s late lover Hervé Couergou from the thousands of hours of footage Soukaz shot, making this testimony to the history of the «années sida» and the evolution of the gay movement accessible to a new generation of spectators, artists and activists.

Ours / Bear by Morgane Frund

A personal exploration of the complex power dynamics between a male filmer and female filmed subjects, when the camera is suddenly turned towards he whose gaze had hitherto remained unchallenged. Frund’s video essay is uncomfortable in the best sense of the word, and leaves its viewers with more questions than answers, providing a starting point for an essential conversation about gender, class and generational differences, and the ethics of documentary.

Personne n’était sympa / Nobody Was Cool by Hélèna Villovitch and David TV

The film is a moving and hilarious evocation of a walk through the streets of Paris on 1 May 1986, based on the filmmakers’ memories and a wide range of audiovisual archives. Images and sounds are saturated, superimposed, iridescent; facts and fantasies merge in a hallucinatory stream of real and fabricated memories, to which a final twist gives a whole new meaning.

Dreams About Putin by Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez

Based on a selection of actual dreams that the filmmakers collected online, this essay explores how the figure of Vladimir Putin has crept into the psyches of Russian citizens since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Disturbing, violent, absurd, the dreams are narrated in voice over and accompanied by a visual score created with the 3D graphics program Unreal Engine, interspersed with bizarre and equally absurd archival footage of Putin. A nightmarish response to a nightmarish war, waged both on the frontline and on social media.

Non-alignés: Scènes des archives Labudović / Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels by Mila Turajlic

A portrait of Tito’s official cameraman Stevan Labudović, this feature-length essay film exhumes previously unseen archival footage from the 1961 Belgrade conference to explore the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement. As educational as it is politically sharp, the film accounts for the difficulties faced by Turajlic in working with unprocessed, barely identified archives, and offers Labudović an opportunity to share his personal and often humorous take on this turning point in the history of world politics.

YouTube-based video essayist writing about the intersection of games, culture, art, and politics

Everything Is Sludge: Art in the Post-Human Era by Lily Alexandre

Alexandre’s dissection of how algorithms are morphing our artistic tastes is insightful and biting. Although viewers may expect a video about AI , more time is spent on how humans are more than willing to start producing AI -esque content by hand in order to serve the tastes of their perceived audience. The real star of this video is the production, however. Alexandre speaks as a kaleidoscopic projection of Subway Surfer, minecraft montages, and other “sludge” is projected onto their face. As interesting as the essay’s script is, the viewer’s eye will inevitably slip to the endless stream of meaningless attention-grabbing clips – just as Alexandre intended, I imagine.

History of Handedness in Video Games by Face Full of Eyes

Equal parts essay and visual compendium, Face Full of Eyes’ video contains a dizzying amount of clips from hundreds of video games, all answering the same seemingly inconsequential question: how do the game’s characters handle guns with their dominant and non-dominant hands? The answer for any particular game isn’t important. The point of the video is instead that no decision is meaningless when creating art. In a created world like a video game, everything is a chance for storytelling— even the choice to depict how a left-handed person might have to reload a right-handed gun.

Four-Byte Burger by Ahoy

The experience of watching Ahoy attempt a perfect replication of a digital illustration from 1985 somehow captures the energy of a 21st-century sculptor attempting to re-carve Michelangelo’s David. While he starts with modern Photoshop tools, the latter half of the video is a deep dive into save file formats and 40-year old display technology; a crucial realisation in the video comes from a monitor’s changing colour tone when turned to portrait orientation. The fact that all this is in service of a delightfully whimsical picture of a burger? Even better.

Film critic, kritikosatlasas.com

This video essay gives additional meaning to the idea that cinema is a warehouse of memory.

The Thinking Machine #73: Revealing Leone by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Video essay exploring Sergio Leone’s technique of “revealing”. But revealing what was hidden in the scene is also the most interesting feature of the video essay. This video “opens the doors” with a wonderful rhythm and music.

Practices of Viewing: Description by Johannes Binotto

A video essay that doesn’t use any film footage, but which is still very interesting to watch and listen to. A video essay about a description technique that can make you see things better than any images.

Some Thoughts Occasioned by Four Desktops by Ariel Avissar

A video essay made as a response and as a dialogue with the other four video essays, each of which uses desktop documentary form in different and unique ways.

Sensuous and Affective by Oswald Iten

Using various techniques, it explores how cinema affects us through audiovisual experiences and how video essays can reveal this.

Rain: A Phenomenal Catalogue by Stephen Broomer (Art &  Trash)

Many important avant-garde films were made in 1929, Joris Ivens’ Rain being one of them. This video essay shows what an amazing and groundbreaking film it is.

Memories of It by Kathleen Loock

Relationship between collective and personal memory, It (1990), VHS , the fall of the Berlin Wall – all of these somehow connect to my personal experience, interest and history, which, as this video shows, is not entirely unique.

Audiovisual essayist and professor of film at the University of Reading

Although it may not have been where I first encountered them, all of my nominations appear in two consecutive issues of [in]Transition. This is a reflection of the quality of work being published by the journal, rather than a lack of imagination on my part.

‘Isn’t That Going to Be Awfully Dull and Drab?’ George Hoyningen-Huene’s Use of Neutrals by Lucy Fife Donaldson

A follow up to the video essay on George Hoyningen-Huene’s work published in Movie last year, this piece again draws on archival research to sharpen our perception of production design choices, this time in relation to the potential of a muted colour palette.

This video was mentioned a couple of times in last year’s poll but has since been published. A brilliant interweaving of gaming, Chris Marker and reflection on the politics of Google Street View.

Mad Men’s ‘Babylon’: Mapping Out a Musical Metaphor by Ariane Hudelet

A compelling tracing of multi-stranded connections in an end-of episode musical montage: expertly and elegantly done.

Eye-Camera-Ninagawa by Colleen Laird

Graphically striking, temporally inventive, technically dazzling, formally compelling, surprising throughout.

I downloaded this film from its dedicated website, before the option to stream became available, and watched it without reading anything about it, thereby experiencing the full impact of its dramatic payoff.

Filmmaker, videoessayist, researcher and critic

It is exciting to finally be able to engage with Joséphine Baker’s media presence through film historian Terri Francis’ research and video essay. I had been waiting to see this video essay for some time so I was very happy to see it published in the journal Feminist Media Histories this year.

“Why this accent?” Barbara Zecchi takes a closer look -or listens more carefully- to the accents employed in House of Gucci (Ridley Scott, 2021) in order to explore (and undo) Hollywood representations of Italians. This video essay builds off her previous work on the subject of the accented video essay, with a once again playful and creative, as well as thought-provoking result.

Roberto Cobo: Screen Stars Dictionary by Catherine Grant

This video essay is part of the Screen Stars Dictionary, published by Tecmerin and edited by Ariel Avissar and Vicente Rodríguez. Although there are so many great ones to choose from, I am highlighting this one because in it Catherine Grant gives us the special opportunity to remember and rediscover the “rare” and wonderful late Mexican actor Roberto Cobo (1930-2002).

chaste/unchaste by Maryam Tafakory

A beautifully crafted and compelling video essay from filmmaker Maryam Tafakory which cuts together images from 32 films, spanning three decades, in order to dissect the binary of chaste/unchaste women in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema.

Practices of Viewing: Ending by Johannes Binotto

The final video essay in Binotto’s series titled Practices of Viewing. These videos are made with so much care and love for the artistry of filmmaking that we will surely come back to them with time, as these gestures of film viewing begin to transform and, in some cases, even disappear.

Nitrate: To the Ghosts of the 75 Lost Philippine Silent Films (1912-1933) by Khavn De La Cruz

Nitrate: To the Ghosts of the 75 Lost Philippine Silent Films (1912-1933) and National Anarchist: Lino Brocka’ are two masterful works made by filmmaker Khavn De La Cruz about Filipino film history through the recycling of archival materials. Both are fascinating films, made in a video-essayistic spirit, that will hopefully circulate widely after their premiere this year at IFFR .

A fresh take on the beloved film Thelma & Louise by video essayist and artist Dayna McLeod in which the final suicidal leap is transformed into a deep dive of the vagina (using an endoscopic camera)! Soon to be published in the special issue, ‘Right to Rage: Subjectivity and Activism’ edited by Barbara Zecchi and Diana Fernández Romero, in Teknokultura: Journal of Digital Culture and Social Movements (forthcoming). Final note: I promise to see everything that Dayna McLeod makes (which also goes for everyone else on this list).

Freelance film scholar and video essayist

In my opinion, it was an excellent year for video essays and so it was especially hard to make a selection for this poll. I used three parameters in the composition of my list: I had to choose works by different essayists from those for whom I voted in 2022; and my selection could only feature personal favourites in the field of videographic criticism, that is, a specific film, television and screen studies subset of the “video essay”. The videos also needed to be already published and freely available online, which ruled out a lot of great works for which I will undoubtedly be voting next year. I’m betting that 2024 will be an even more excellent year for video essays!

Shah Rukh Khan. Screen Stars Dictionary by Ritika Kaushik

This was the video essay I most enjoyed watching in 2023! It was part of a joint venture inaugurated this year in which I was delighted to participate - The Screen Stars Dictionary , launched by the Spanish audiovisual essay journal TECMERIN in conjunction with video-essay entrepreneur extraordinaire Ariel Avissar, whose own contribution to the dictionary (on Tom Cruise ) I also really loved.

Creative Geography, Creative Connections: Candyman by John Gibbs

An ambitious and highly significant work, published in Movie , that is the perfect match of videographic critical form and content. I am simply in awe of John Gibbs’ audiovisual research and composition here. A great and powerful model for future work on the performativity and facticity of film and television locations.

The Responsive Eye, or, The Morning Show May Destroy You by Catherine Fowler

Fowler’s magnificently inventive video essay on the two television series The Morning Show and I May Destroy You compared the relational technique that each takes to sexual abuse using a ‘feminist videographic diptych’ method. Her video formed part of a brilliant special issue on that method that she proposed, produced and guest edited for [in]Transition, the peer-reviewed journal I co-edit, which was full to the brim with similarly urgent and powerful feminist works using multiscreen and other juxtapositional procedures.

This was the most original work of those I loved this year, and one I was fortunate to follow the making of while it was in progress. Academic film and TV studies video essays have taken a very performative and embodied turn in recent years, but Mittell characteristically pushes this even further into the realm of extremely ambitious, very entertaining and deeply insightful pastiche. I can’t wait to see where his videographic approaches to televisual reflexivity will take him, and us, next.

A superbly made, genuinely risk-taking work that asks and answers ongoing urgent questions about the circulation of public domain images and films. We were delighted to publish Misek’s work at [in]Transition, where it headed a huge and very strong issue featuring numerous other works I would have loved to select for my best-of-the-year videos had it been a Top Twenty list, rather than a Top Seven one.

Filling (Feeling) the Archival Void: The Case of Helena Cortesina’s Flor de España by Barbara Zecchi

Zecchi gets my vote for Video Essayist of the Year for her prolific, always brilliant videographic work. This particular video, published in issue 9(4) of the journal Feminist Media Histories, is extraordinary. As the editor of that journal Jennifer Bean wrote of it in her marvellous introductory essay for the issue of FMH , “[Zecchi’s] voice as well as her embodied, emotive presence on the screen are intrinsic features of a project that deploys videographic tools to sustain what she calls a ‘practice-based counterarchive’ capable of reversing the ongoing ‘dispossession’ of women’s contributions to media history.” Terri Francis’s remarkable 2019 video essay Joséphine Baker Watches Herself is also published in the issue’s exploration of the potential of videographic criticism for feminist media historiographies, alongside powerful new work by Celia Sainz.

With a Camera in Hand, I Was Alive by Katie Bird

Katie Bird’s virtuosic exploration of the affordances of desktop filmmaking to access the sensations of using a physical camera (and its highly original and moving audiovisual maker’s statement) made a magisterial contribution to Kevin B. Lee and Ariel Avissar’s audiovisual essay dossier on the desktop documentary, for the Spring 2023 issue of NECSUS : European Journal of Media Studies. The other entries in the dossier were of excellent quality across the board, and I would particularly point to Ritika Kaushik and Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco’s great video essays for the ways in which, like Bird’s, their work points to how screen capture techniques can be harnessed to investigate very important and highly diverse screen studies research questions. 

Film scholar and video essayist ; University of Minnesota

Kiss me softly | crackly | sharply by Lucy Fife Donaldson

The combination of visuals and sound in this intriguing video forces the viewer into attention, listening and watching carefully while examining one’s own expectations and intimate reactions to individual moments.

Nebular Epistemics by Alan O’L eary

Incredibly dense on a theoretical level, performatively innovative, and yet still accessible and hilarious — what an accomplishment to combine these elements into a coherent whole and convincing argument.

Being Dolls (or Not): Spinning Mothers and Daughters in Elena Ferrante’s Adaptations by Barbara Zecchi

A dazzling watching experience that masterfully interweaves critical argument with audiovisual spectacle; a prime example of Zecchi’s superior sense of rhythm that permeates all her work.

Home Is Bleak. Is Home Bleak? by Delal Yatci

With Yatci’s piece too, rhythm is what captures my fascination. An examination of the home in Turkish films by female filmmakers takes shape by meandering between different film scenes, tied together by beautifully selected sound.

The Body • S05E16 • TPN ’s Buffy Guide by Passion of the Nerd

While I’m a fan of Passion of the Nerd’s entire series on Buffy, the episode on “The Body” weaves together such powerful narratives and meditations on grief and, at the same time, on the effect and personal meaning of media objects and their embeddedness not only in a cultural context but in our own private archives of (media) memories.

Once upon a Screen Vol. 2, Part 2

The second part of Once upon a Screen Vol 2 (edited by Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer) seems to have a much more sombre atmosphere in comparison to Part 1 and features another inspiring array of videos based on other creators’ written screen memories. To me, Avissar’s The 39 Shots, Oswald Iten’s Recreated Memories, and Johannes Binotto’s Down a Dark Spiral stand out in this collection of amazing works.

Film scholar , video essayist , animator, PhD researcher

Arbitrary Motion: Accidentally / On Purpose by Farzaneh Yazdandoost

Inventive videographic research about stop motion animation is still rare, but Farzaneh Yazdandoost finds striking images and sounds to draw our attention towards the arbitrary motion of animated fur.

A pamphlet, an act of deliverance, and a moving found (and partly licensed) footage film.

Critics’ Choice 9 : (putting) on Aftersun by Inge Coolsaet

When we see the same film, we each see a different film, especially when that film invites us to inhabit it ourselves. Inge Coolsaet’s refreshingly minimalist take on this idea did the same for me.

“Isn’t That Going to Be Awfully Dull and Drab?” George Hoyningen-Huene’s Use of Neutrals by Lucy Fife Donaldson

The wonderfully muted colour schemes of Technicolor movies have always fascinated me. Thanks to the well-researched video essays (the first one came out the year before) by Lucy Fife Donaldson I am now also aware of one of the creators and proponents behind those concepts.

Overflowing with ideas and hilarious moments, this personal multi-part investigation of Italian accents in American mainstream cinema feels a lot shorter than it actually is.

Twisties! A Live Performance by Alice Lenay

The notion of what videographic criticism can do has been constantly challenged for a few years now. Alice Lenay is pushing the boundary further with her fully embodied live video essay performance in which she inserts herself into television footage from the 1996 Olympics, obscuring bodies, revealing camera angles, and the setup’s inherent dissociation.

Lecturer at University of Art and Design HEAD – Genève, co-director Festival Cinéma Jeune Public, curator at Locarno Film Festival and Int. Short Film Festival Winterthur

La Maison by Sophie Ballmer

Sophie recounts the renovation of a house inherited by her partner Tarik in the Vallée de Joux. Attracted by the potential, they began by destroying everything. Then it was time to rebuild. To the weight of the rubble cans was added the weight of their families’ dreams and values. With affection and humour, Sophie deconstructs patriarchy, capitalism and inheritance in an attempt to make room for achievable utopias.

Marungka Tjalatjunu (Dipped in Black) by Derik Lynch, Matthew Thorne

The film follows Yankunytjatjara man Derik Lynch’s road trip back to Country for spiritual healing, as memories from his childhood return. A journey from the oppression of white city life in Adelaide, back home to his remote Anangu Community (Aputula) to perform on sacred Inma ground. Inma is a traditional form of storytelling using the visual, verbal, and physical. It is how Anangu Tjukurpa (story connected to country / dreaming / myth / lore) have been passed down for over 60,000+ years from generation to generation.

Æquo by Eloïse Le Gallo, Julia Borderie

The sound of an alphorn echoes in the mountains while glaciers are dripping. Far away, on an oceanographic boat, researchers probe the invisible seabed. Geological bodies of salt and ice emerge from the digital depths of a software. They melt and disintegrate in the hands of scientists. The filmmakers place encounters at the heart of their approach, anchoring their creative process in a poetic approach.

Pacific Club by Valentin Noujaïm

In 1979, the Pacific Club opened in the basement of La Défense, the business district of Paris. It was the first nightclub for Arabs from the suburbs – a parallel world of dance, sweat, young love, and one-night utopias. Azedine, 17 years old at the time, tells us the forgotten story of this club and of this generation who dreamed of integrating into France but who soon came face to face with racism, the AIDS epidemic, and heroin. The film gives visibility to the forgotten, the invisible and reflects on the power dynamics and dominance system within French society. 

Out of the Blue by Morgane Frund

In 2013, an auteur film causes a scandal due to its sex scenes. The filmmaker is 16 and one of the angry viewers. Ten years later, she is ready to settle the score with this film in the form of a video essay. Her film visits ways to tame the ‘male gaze’ and understand her position in a still man-made/thought world.

Tierra de leche by Milton Guillen and Fiona Guy Hall

On New England dairy farms, daily life orbits around the milking parlour. Here, machinery and cows come together as an exploitation mechanism of migrant workers from Central America, consuming their every waking hour and even infiltrating their dreams. The film denounces a terrible reality told in the most poetic and respectful way. 

Not sure what a video essay is, so my choices might be slightly off-topic.

Mickey Takes Acid by AI Generated Nonsense

It is great, very funny, and not sure a human could find all those weird connections.

TraumaZone by Adam Curtis

I heard many people complaining that Adam Curtis’s essay is simplistic, you cannot express the collapse of the USSR in such a short time etc. Maybe it is so, but it is exactly because of this method that he achieves a kind of poetic truth, if I may say so.

Der Elvis by Joe Moritsugu

It is older, but since I never have heard of it, I consider it new. I heard of this filmmaker because two of his films were freeleech on karagarga. This short essay is ahead of its time and has a punk energy not so easy to find anymore.

Video essayist and Subaru nomad. Co-moderator of the wonderful Essay Library .

The “Pay For It” Scam by Carlos Maza

I’ll start my list off strong by fudging the numbers – this video came out in the last months of 2022, and yet Carlos Maza’s work demands a spot in my recommendations. Maza is an online video veteran, previously creating for Vox. His independent work allows him to flex his style: a blend of professionalism that says “this is worth taking seriously and I’ve put in the work” and casualness that says “we’re still going to make a tough topic go down easy.” He tackles some of the most contentious topics affecting our political landscape – this video covers the manufacturing of the “debt crisis” in the minds of the American public. The heart of each video lies in the wrap-up: Carlos has a knack for leaving viewers off with a perfect mix of “this sucks,” and “but I believe in us” and finally, “fuck yeah.”

Cinema in Pain: Decoding “Mad God” by James DeLisio

“Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.”

This thought-provoking video is an approachable look at a notoriously repulsive film (which I do not say lightly, as a squeamish viewer myself!). It proposes one lens of interpretation: what if a film like Mad God is our best chance as an audience to experience an articulation of pain through art? If pain is incommunicable through words, what sights and sounds, what deviations from expectation, can bring us into that headspace? This examination of the non-straightforward means through which cinema may operate has bent my brain, and I must recommend that you experience it for yourself.

The Man/Car Gender Binary in John Carpenter’s Christine by max teeth

“Men are of course men and cars are cars but women are also cars.”

In the vein of Women Are Not Objects, but Objects Are Still Women, Max takes us through the special cinematic relationships between a man and his car, a man and his car who is also a woman, and a man and another man and a car which is somewhere nearby. The point: how have we learned to signify masculinity on screen? And how does John Carpenter’s Christine induce horror by perverting those signifiers? A cherry on top: this video is hilarious.

As a bonus, I’ll also recommend their video on Hereditary for its crisp, creative, and playful visual style.

The Essential Whiteness of One-Hit Wonders by The Nukes

“Hey Josh, you’re white. Who sang Tainted Love? I answered easily and without thought: ‘Soft Cell.’ But a few have offered me a truth that I, in my whiteness, did not know then, but do know now. Soft Cell’s Tainted Love is a cover.”

This is a tale as old as time, and yet even if you think you know this story, this video is a journey worth taking. Josh from The Nukes takes us on a personal musical tour through the many, many hidden (and not so hidden) ways that the music industry has historically catered to white sensibilities. Interesting, frustrating, and relentlessly funny – make sure to read the chapter markers for an extra dose of “this creator is having way too much fun.”

(Another bonus recommendation: Josh’s “ Is it Impossible to Dad ” is a heartfelt, prescient examination of the gap we attempt to bridge in parenthood – and in all relationships, really. Watch both, enjoy!)

I Watched 151 Celebrity House Tours and They’re Full of Lies by Kendra Gaylord

You might’ve noticed that I lean toward thoughtful, exploratory content that pulls you in with a premise, then surprises you with a run of jokes. Well, in that vein, Kendra’s channel has been a fantastic discovery for me this year. Kendra talks about architecture the way I talk about That One Funny Thing My Friend Did That One Time. Her style feels comfy and inclusionary, like you’re both laughing together.

It’s always fun letting someone take you on a journey through their random obsession, and watching all 151 Architectural Digest home tours probably enters “obsession” territory (and yet, one gets the sense that if not for the video, Kendra still would’ve done this anyway). The impression is less “I self-flagellate for content,” and more “let me give you my best takeaways from a task that you will likely never do yourself.” The difference between the two, I realised, is surprisingly important to me!             

The Importance of Spaces in The Last Black Man in San Francisco by KaiAfterKai

This video is a lovely exploration of the importance of personal connection to space, the ability to self-actualise through space, and connection to history through space, which all feel especially prescient to a generation of young adults who have been gatekept from home ownership.

It feels like listening to a guided meditation tape; Kai is, as always, soothing in their delivery, punctuated by perfect music choices and encapsulated within a flawless structure. This is the essay equivalent of sitting back in a field, relaxing, letting ideas wash over you.

Is the “Off-Grid” Lifestyle a Lie?? by Maggie Mae Fish

Also on the topic of spaces, Maggie explores a trend that may seem like a dream to young people growing increasingly unsure that they will ever be able to afford typical homeownership: off-gridding. Specifically, she calls attention to the way that people discover new lifestyles through the Internet, and whether the people selling that lifestyle are leaving out important details (and why they may be incentivised to do so!).

Following up on her 2022 video on the Netflix show Motel Makeover, this video continues Maggie’s deep dives into the ways in which the lens of “content” turns building and designing spaces into a sales pitch, while unearthing the hidden costs that these shows are not incentivised to reveal.

Associate professor in audiovisual arts and cognition at University of Groningen, NL / co-author of Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video

Trying to have a full grasp on a year’s videographic output is increasingly becoming an impossible effort. This inevitably leads to a highly personal selection (and possibly less overlap among the featured videos – perhaps Kevin B. Lee will figure that out for us), but it’s also great news as it is due to a rapidly expanding videographic scene and community.

From what I’ve seen, this was one of this year’s most eloquent videographic ruminations on the theory and then applied practice of audiovisual t(h)inkering, brilliantly marrying an appeal for the exploratory research method with its explanatory mode of clear presentation.

Mind Autopsy by Johanna Vaude

(One of the) best producer(s) of supercut mashups these days is Johanna Vaude. Fans can watch her treatment of variously similar criminal investigations in Fincher’s oeuvre until we get our 3rd season of Mindhunters.

Sound Before Picture by Cormac Donnelly

I always enjoy it when someone finds an unexplored cinematic niche (in this case the sounds, full with clues and anticipation, leading the movies in before they even begin) and makes the most out of it through engaging audio(!)visual presentation.

Embodied Visual Meaning [in] Motion by Maarten Coëgnarts

Imagine how challenging it would be to argue for the functioning of abstract dynamic patterns as fundamentals for representing a variety of cinematic drama – a challenge Coëgnarts himself is dealing with in his excellent writing. Beyond its inevitable scholarly qualities, this video’s virtue is how simple it makes such (textually) difficult concepts understandable (in videography).

Rain: A Phenomenal Catalogue by Stephen Broomer

Making me want to view the movie they’re studying is one of my (very personal) benchmarks for evaluating the quality of video essays. A 27-minute contemplatively thorough dissection of Joris Ivens’ 12-minute short film Regen [Rain] – that creates an ‘archetypal rainstorm’ out of an 8-month sampling of rainy images – is exactly such a videographic work.

An attentive response, in desktop video form, to the four desktop videos (by Johannes Binotto, Katie Bird, Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco, and Ritika Kaushik – wish I could include all these videos in this best-of selection) that were part of the audiovisual section of the Spring edition of the Necsus journal. It does the work viewers normally do when watching and assessing video essays.

Koker in Fragments by Ardeshir Shirkhani and Arshia Shirkhani

A student project for my videographic criticism class, this little ‘screwmeneutic cinemagraph’ pauses the main action and keeps running the peripheral happenings and sound around it. Such tender intervention is not only a lovely tribute to Kiarostami but in fact a brilliant way of illustrating his characteristic “gentle humanism … that reveals the cosmic majesty and mystery of ordinary life” (The Criterion Collection for Kiarostami’s The Koker Trilogy).

Associate professor Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam

Natalia Oreiro by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková

Part of the innovative Screen Stars Dictionary series published by Tecmerin, “Natalia Oreiro” by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková stands out in both topic and aesthetics. The essay breaks with the US -dominance in the study of (global) stardom by focusing on a Latin American star who becomes famous in Russia, Israel, and Central-European countries, thereby calling attention to a transnational movement that is not often addressed in star studies. The playful aesthetics of early 2000 digital culture highlights the importance of the internet in this transnational movement between “periphery” and “periphery.

Published in Feminist Media Histories, “Joséphine Baker Watches Herself” by Terri Francis shows the added value of videographic criticism to more conventional academic work. By connecting archival footage of early stage performances by Joséphine Baker to televised interviews with the iconic star in which she looks back and comments on her own star image, provides space for the Baker’s agency and voice within the narrative of her stardom in a way that could not be done so effectively (and affectively) in a written essay.

chaste/unchaste by Maryam Tafakory Published in [in]Transition, “chaste/unchaste” by Maryam Tafakory effectively challenges the binary that is spelled out in the title. Starting with a four-way split screen and a graphic that looks like a target finder from a rifle (or like a measuring rod), the audiovisual essay presents images of women from Iranian cinema, thereby highlighting how they are continuously scrutinised and policed, yet also how they challenge the omnipresent gaze. Using mirroring and repetition, combined by an uncanny soundtrack, the essay forces viewers (at least me) to question their preconceived notions and binary thinking. And what a surprise when the credits reveal that the footage comes from 32 films! As Maria Walsh concludes in her peer-review of the essay: “This is brave work.”

Postdoctoral researcher and video essayist , Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf

Just like in past years, I want to emphasise that I do not consider this a or my “best of” list but rather a list of video essays from different sub-genres and platforms that I found particularly interesting this year and with which I aim to hint at the breadth of video essay production.

An evocative and very layered meditation on poetry, drama, film and their (cross-)adaptations. A wonderful contribution to the Moving Poems project, which I’m running on Vimeo.

A dense, rich audiovisual analysis of the two Candyman films (1992 and 2021) that delves deeply into the films themselves but at least as much into questions of urban planning, architecture, and racial segregation in Chicago and beyond.

Extra Local: Extras as Actors in Breaking Away by Jacob Smith

A fascinating analysis of a commonly overlooked type of film labour and performance — extras — that starts and returns to a rich microanalysis and in the meantime provides a thorough historical and conceptual discussion of this form of acting. The video also includes one of the best “plot twists” I’ve seen in video essay work so far!

Why Do We Make Comedies about Existential Dread? by Afterthoughts

A highly entertaining and evocative video on contemporary absurdist, dark, “meme-y” comedy that asks questions like “Why are we so weird and sad right now?” and ponders on realisations like “When I’m alone with my thoughts, I’m alone with y’all’s thoughts.”

Another great piece from Binotto’s Practices of Viewing series – one that I referred to as an “anti video essay” when I first saw it.

Hello Dankness by Soda Jerk

An impressive assemblage of excerpts from all kinds of Hollywood films from the past ca. 40 years, sampled into a dark comedic take on the 2016 US elections and the Trump presidency.

How to Make Money from Video Essays: A Guide to Pitching by Will Webb

An unconventional pick since it’s not a video essay itself but a video about how to make (specifically pitch) video essays but one that I find useful to include here (perhaps as a bonus pick) because it provides insights into the ways in which video essayists produce and monetise their work outside the direct infrastructures of academic institutions.

Video essayist, critique and researcher in visual culture

Cycles of Labor: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives by Veronika Hanáková, Martin Tremčinský, Jiří Anger

Using interfaces familiar to anyone who grew up in the 2000s and 2010s, the authors reedit a film that recently won the votes of the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of all Times poll: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. I really loved how they manage to produce a feminist and environmental analysis of the film using these layouts, subverting our video-essayistic habits (using cinema as a hermeneutic tool) by calling on videogame grammar to study film.

O fumo do fogo (Smoke of the Fire) by Daryna Mamaisur

Daryna Mamaisur is a Ukrainian artist and a refugee in Portugal. In her essay, she films closeups of her Portuguese handbooks, finding echoes of dispatches her friend sends her from their country – the dots and shapes of the three-colour printing of the old-fashioned books resemble the low-quality videos. I was fascinated by the way Mamaisur films her hands hovering over her desktop covered by childlike images, and how as soon as the editing flips them, the war and its trauma appears.

البحث عن السوري الإرهابي In Search of the Syrian Fanatic by Abou Naddara

The Syrian filmmaker collective Abou Naddara conducted this year a multimedia investigation about an image and a corpse, both hidden underneath layers of French colonial propaganda. The images come from one of the first silent fiction films, The Assassination of General Kléber (Georges Hatot, 1897), depicting the murder of the Napoleonic officer in 1800 by a Syrian student in Egypt. Abou Naddara discovered the remains of the presumed perpetrator, Soleyman El-Halebi, are kept by a French Museum, in its colonial collection and decided to take action: he wrote both a written and a videographic letter to French authorities, asking them to return the body as well as renounce the racist cliché, first printed in visual culture by the 1897 film, of the fanatic Syrian.

Alain Krivine, le trotskisme permanent (Alain Krivine, the Permanent Trotskism) by Usul and Ostpolitik

This video is part of a series created by the French videaste Usul and Ostpolitik, the “Portraits” telling the stories of central figures of French political history in a critical perspective (the series is published for the online channel Blast, continued by Ostpolitik and another youtuber, Modiie; meanwhile, Usul started another series, “Rhinoceros” about the rightisation of media). Together, they also produced “Ouvrez les guillemets” (“Open the Quotes”) (for the online journal Mediapart) about political news. I wanted to cite one of their works for several reasons. One of them is that I find it very interesting how a video essay can engage with social and political criticism through mediatic images – the way Serge Daney, for instance, used to do it in a textual way in Libération. I also wanted to pay a specific homage to Usul, who for the last ten years, is, in my opinion, the most stimulating political video essayist of the French YouTube landscape and draws me to the art of montage and media criticism with his latest series “Mes chers contemporains” (“Dear Contemporaries”).

I Would Like to Rage by Chloé Galibert-Laîné

Finally and above all, I wanted to mention a piece by Chloé Galibert-Laîné, whose work in general is of crucial importance to me, and whose I Would Like to Rage, in particular, touched me enormously. As I had the chance to tell them, their work navigates brilliantly the tricky art of self-memeification to address gendered and intimate political issues, escaping every trap set by the internalised (patriarchal) injunctions of concealing the “I” and its revolts.

Assistant professor of Japanese cinema, The University of British Columbia

Thelma & Louise: Rape Culture, Mudflaps, & Vaginal Horizons by Dayna McLeod

With this righteous and riotous very close look at Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (1991), Dayna McLeod continues to be one of the boldest and bravest new practitioners of the video essay. Constructed in three acts, the piece highlights the interplay between actions and reactions, both in the film and beyond to the discourse surrounding it. The end result, and in particular the resulting ending, is a thought-provoking dive into videographic criticism and film scholarship.

Every time I watch a piece by Maryam Tafakory, I am overwhelmed by contradictory emotions. “chaste/unchaste,” Tafakory’s contribution to the ‘Feminist Videographic Diptych’ special issue of [in]Transition, is no exception. The use of uncanny repetition and graphic matches is both mesmerising and agitating, familiarising and defamiliarising, grounding and destabilising. And as always, I’m stunned by the quantity of films Tafakory uses to create the illusion of effortless coherent cohesion.

A Tactile Art by Cormac Donnelly

It’s worthwhile to access Cormac Donnelly’s “second iteration of the Super Volume project” on his Deformative Sound Lab website to read about the process of making a video that is very much about process and processing. While Donnelly considers the piece a representation of a tactile art, what haunts me about the video is the juxtaposition of the ephemerality in the piece—both of the transparent layering of the participants’ hands as well as the audio track itself—with the technology at the intersection of the two: the artefact of interaction. I find this work unsettling in the very best of ways.

Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives by Veronika Hanáková, Martin Tremčinský, and Jiří Anger

With each collaborative work, I find the dynamic duo of Veronica Hanáková and Jiří Anger increasingly enchanting. I can’t help it; I like their style. I was torn between this video and their entry in Ariel Avissar’s new Screen Stars Dictionary project which has some similar formal conceits, but the tongue-in-cheek nature of reframing Jeanne Dielmann’s daily routine as a “The Sim’s”-esque video game was the deciding factor. All too often, scholarly videographic criticism can feel heavy and bleak, particularly with trends in exploring thematised trauma. Here, along with Martin Tremčinský, Hanáková and Anger make a case for serious fun.

Crochet Is Sick by Alison Peirse

A companion piece to last year’s award-winning and frequent festival feature “Knit One, Stab Two,” here Alison Peirse shifts a feminist lens from the needle to the hook, and from the voice-over to the visualised voice, in this work on the role of crochet in horror. Peirse is developing a distinct videographic style and “Crochet” is a prime example of this aesthetic that takes the video essay (and what we think we know about horror) delightfully and impishly up a notch (or three). Note the original soundtrack created especially for the work.

Currently only available on the festival circuit, Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s most recent work is a deeply personal performance of catharsis years in the making. It is also, thankfully, very funny. The video is an inspiring whirlwind through multiple media objects and platforms, a flurry of failed and forced expressions of rage, that sticks its landing and compels us, once again, to rethink what we know about the potentials of the video essay. Details about forthcoming availability are likely to be found on their website in the future.

Xena’s Body: A Menstrual Auto-Investigation Using an iPhone by Occitane Lacurie

I had the pleasure of seeing this video as a work in progress piece at the ‘In the Works: Makings and Unmakings of the Video Essay’ conference held at the Lucerne School of Art and Design at the beginning of November of this year. Even in an unfinished form, it was still one of my favourite videos I encountered this year, as well as one of the most timely. A desktop video in cell phone portrait mode, and perhaps even edited on one, Lacurie’s remarkable production brings together the personal and the political through the act of “doom scrolling” that involves, among other things, an episode of “Xena: Warrior Princess,” the iPhone menstruation application, text messages, online message boards, demonic imaginations of cell phone home screens, website searches, and an online tarot reading. Forthcoming and not soon enough.

Video essayist , filmmaker , professor

More than ever, the video essays that left their imprint on me were ones which staked a position not only within film and media objects, but in the world at large.

Dreams Have No Titles by Zineb Sedira

When I first saw this at the 2022 Venice Biennale, I didn’t recognise it as videographic, using physically reconstructed movie scenes for what might be called “spatial remix”. Seeing it again this year at the Hamburger Bahnhof, I could appreciate how much care it takes in reconstructing sites of Algerian cinema: not only sets from films set in Algeria, but also spaces where Algerian cinema is screened, preserved and contemplated. The video essay as artistic theme park, in the best sense possible, film history playfully resurrected. (See also: Goddess of Speed , Frederic Moffet)

Pictures of Ghosts by Kleber Mendonça Filho

A deeply personal psychogeographic exploration of film as home, even in the face of a looming societal ruin. Even while keeping within the format of a feature film, it is as expansive as Sedira’s installation, bravely projecting itself into a post-cinematic, post-human finale. (See also: Mast-Del , Maryam Tafakory)

Introduction to “With a Camera in Hand I Was Alive” by Katie Bird

As excellent as — and somehow longer than — the video essay it introduces, it is also a radical new proposition for videographic scholarship. Creator statements are usually written, but instead we have an experimental selfie-video layered with reflections — academic, political, personal — on women’s labour in cinema. (See also: Jill, Uncredited , Anthony Ng)

A scholarly video essay that pursues its research object so thoroughly that it becomes its mirror reflection, art and life entwined in an inextricable dialogue. (See also: Laterally , Maria Hofmann)

An inspired series of interrogations of the Italian accent in Hollywood movies as a contested site of cultural identification. This video asks who cinema really speaks for, and in doing so speaks its own truth back into cinema. (See also: Dressed to Kill Cis Hetero Patriarchy , Nicole Morse)

Feeling Cynical About Barbie by Broey Deschanel

This vlog-style essay brilliantly links two phenomena from the summer — Barbie and the Hollywood strikes — to critique media capitalism’s insidious strategies for possessing and exploiting the cultural imaginary. (See also: A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek)

Games That Don’t Fake the Space by Jacob Geller

Among the video essays occupied with audiovisual form, I especially admire Geller’s vast research and deft navigation through the surprising spatial environments found in video games. (See also: Sensuous and Affective by Oswald Iten)

Film critic

In this list, I have tried to avoid simply listing my friends, and instead tried to cover a little of the diversity of audiovisual essay venues existing today.

Performance: Divine Horror by Kryštof Kočtář and Matouš Vad’ura

Puts the destruct in deconstruction.

The Mechanics of Fluids by Gala Hernández López

A deep dive into online incel culture.

@Concert: Liveness in the Time of Coronavirus by Landon Palmer

An inspired assemblage of awkward moments in a live-but-not-living world.

Searching for Incognita by Johanna Vaude

Another stunning work by this master of the form: the motif of ‘adventuring’ in film, deftly gathered and revealed.

Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now? by Thomas Flight

An extended, thoughtful reflection on ‘metamodernism’ in recent popular cinema.

The Address from Beyond the Grave by Roz Mortimer

Mortimer illuminatingly relates her own filmmaking work to that of other women, films in which ‘spectrality’ is hauntingly tied to historic, socio-political traumas.

Undercurrents: Meditations on Power by Margot Nash

Nash, among Australia’s greatest artists, would probably prefer this to be known as a film, but it has a special relation to the audiovisual essay: a montage from her previous works, it forms a powerful, urgent poem for our times.

Video essayist, filmmaker

Sleeping Sickness: The Downtrodden in Pedro Costa’s Cinema by Alexander Melyan

A beautifully crafted video. It got me lost in the images of Costa’s films all over again.

Great concept, better execution. A very satisfying watch and listen.

Takes me back to my days in foley classes. Brought a smile to my face watching and the odd grimace.

Queer performance-based media artist

What an incredible video essay! This enthralling and meticulously edited piece uses a binary of chaste vs. unchaste to collapse in on itself as a gendered structure of representation in Iranian cinema. Tafakory uses repetition and juxtaposition to emphasise this undoing and mirrors clips of women in grids of four where they are (now) engaged with each other onscreen. She overlays certain clips, which seep into and onto each other as a form of touching, as if to queer the materiality of these clips as well as the newly formed relationships she has created through her editing.

A masterful and hypnotic piece that is seemingly edited on a smartphone that simultaneously demonstrates the source materials and inspiration for the work, while showing the methods and thinking of its construction. Lacurie takes us on an expansive menstruation journey that is personal and political—navigating apps, memes, video clips, and a tarot card reading through the analysis of a fatal penetrative wound on Xena Warrior Princess’s body. A mesmerising video essay from, In the Works: Makings and Unmakings of the Video Essay, Lucerne School of Art and Design, Switzerland. See Lacurie’s other work: https://vimeo.com/lacurieo

A video essay with an ending you can dance to, I Would Like to Rage is smart, tender, and funny. Galibert-Laîné’s thorough and thoughtful practice is fully on display as they take us through various machinations of online and mediatised rage, its performativity, expression, and ownership, and how they experience or rather, attempt to experience rage authentically. A triumph of intelligent vulnerability expressed through an assemblage of self-reflection, video clips, memes, gifs, and Leslie Knope homages, this endearing delight of a video essay is surely coming to a film festival near you.

An impeccable experimental video essay that exaggerates and emphasises the uncanny through foley and feminist intervention. Fife Donaldson aptly mixes and amplifies the sharp edges of ASMR sound artist Julie Rose Bower’s work by replacing the soundtrack for the knife scene in Kiss Me Deadly. Switchblades pop and fist punches snap and crack onscreen through Fife Donaldson’s use of this unique collection of sound, and her use of visual repetition and slow motion. I am particularly drawn to how she lingers on sound during a slow motion shot of the would-be attacker’s descent to the ground as he slides down a wall after the attempted knife fight.

A gong repeatedly sounds as ‘The End’ title text from a variety of films are shown onscreen in several languages. We hear a tapping—a soft clicking that is perhaps his keyboard, our viewership guided by his hand. The way that Binotto has arranged these endings and silenced their corresponding soundtracks are filled with loss as they each mark an ending to a specific film as well as the end of his incredible Practices of Viewing series . Binotto cites Roland Barthes while seemingly articulating his own work ethic: “writing as absolute brings with it a particular existential movement: the drive to finish the work in order to start again”. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Using Evelyn Kreutzer’s Moving Poems prompt that asks makers to pair a poem with a media object, moving poems: a raisin in the sun (1961) is a poignant and poetic work that capitalises on affecting performances from the 1961 film adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun. De Jesús engages Langston Hughes’s short poem Harlem in onscreen text while expertly and artfully using opacity, repetition, movement, dialogue, and match cuts to sound in this stunning and layered poetic video essay.

Jeanne Dielman: On / Off by Dan Noall

A sublime supercut of every time the title character of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles turns on and off the lights. Noall jumpcuts us through each of the rooms of this film and the quiet bland domesticity of house and sex work with this simple task. Only fans of this iconic film will recognise the importance of Noall’s final shot where Jeanne turns off the light of the kitchen while firmly grasping her silver scissors and shutting the door behind her with a thud.

Video essayist (as kikikrazed ) and community manager for The Essay Library

Everything is a Remix (Complete Updated 2023 Edition) by Kirby Ferguson

Kirby Ferguson has revisited this project multiple times since it debuted in 2010, remixing his own work to create new iterations. The 2023 edition, described as “the definitive Everything is a Remix experience” by Ferguson, includes a new part about AI art, also released individually in 2023. Unfortunately, the video currently sits at under 100,000 views on YouTube due to unjust copyright claims that contradict fair use and the remix philosophy.

The PS1 Start-up Tells a Story by Dennis Gallagher

Gallagher’s 40-second essay (really only 30 seconds if you forget the credits) is a perfect example of a video essay with zero fluff. He narrates alongside the PlayStation startup sequence, guiding us through it with a sense of awe. The fantastic digital portal metaphor doesn’t overstay its welcome in this bite-sized treat.

Four-Byte Burger by Stuart Brown (Ahoy)

Brown documents his faithful recreation of his favourite piece of Amiga art, Jack Haeger’s Four-Byte Burger. In the process, he reveals how technological constraints can foster creativity. His passion and personal investment in the original artwork is clear throughout this journey.

The Chaos Behind The Wizard of Oz (and why it turned out ok anyway) by Isabel Custodio (Be Kind Rewind)

Custodio explores the production of The Wizard of Oz through each of its four directors, balancing substantial research with personal evaluations of their filmographies. In my own video essay work, Be Kind Rewind is one of my biggest inspirations. Every video amazes me with the sheer knowledge and passion for film on display. This essay is no different as it juggles the interconnected careers of actors, producers, and directors within the studio system at the time.

Some video essays that rely on literature to examine a film can become too text-heavy, but this essay never feels like that. DeLisio’s careful narration and textured sound design allows him to speak with the film instead of over it. This intelligent, well-edited video cements James DeLisio’s status as one of the most exciting emerging video essayists.

Film teacher and researcher at Escola das Artes in Católica University (O Porto); film programmer at IndieLisboa Film Festival; film critic at À pala de Walsh website.

Exotic Words Drifted by Sandro Aguilar

At the edge of the word lies silence, hesitation. On the other side of colour, there are bright colours, gray, black and white. This is a film that sits on the other side of the mirror and takes us through the tense and enigmatic reverse side of classic cinema. In Aguilar’s audiovisual essay, everything floats, expectantly, waiting to happen, inaugurating a new order, like a tense relationship between day and night, between the negative and the positive of a film stock.

Audiovisual essays are tools to unlock the imaginary and highlight possible paths and barriers. Misek’s work invites us to understand the struggles to show and hide images in contemporary digital agoras, where public versus private ownership is at stake in order to disseminate controlled versions of history.

Réseau des sens by Mirjam Leutwiler

For each contact, each touch there is a split “I”, a network of sensation. Mirjam Leutwiler’s short audiovisual essay is not only interpreting Michel Serre’s text “The Five Senses. A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies”, but also telling us how that network about touching and feeling is underway in the cinematic phenomenology.

Kinoapparatum Remade. A Videographic Montage Experiment. by Johannes Binotto, Maurice Dietziker, Linus Bolliger, Arseni Gavrilov, Kilian Frei, Andrina Moos, Cécile Brossard, Sven Friedli, Mirjam Leutwiler, Jana Schlegel, Melina Hofer, Anja Hubmann, Fynn Groeber, Nora Gruetter.

Kinoapparatum Remade is not only an homage to Vertov, Kaufman and Svilova’s seminal film Man with a Movie Camera. And also not only a reflection on Manovich’s ideas on the film regarding new media. It is all of this but it is also a collective collaborative effort in which we can see that recreation it also followed by actualisation, complementation and creative choices based on movement and form. And these particular choices of the “collective with the moving images” tells us that it is not only a question of past versus incoming future when we look at 1929’s masterpiece.

Against Polish or, Notes on Videographic Labor or, You Could Remix Blazing Saddles Today Will Digravio

Digravio’s original audiovisual essay may work against the idea of perfection and neatness as a possible disguised style. But it is also an exposition of the work involved in the audiovisual essay. In this sense, it enters a loop, a mise-en-abîme where a “meta worker” develops a similar “meta mirror” to better highlight the nature of what is involved when reworking the images and sounds of a film. 

Media and cultural studies graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

The Future Is a Dead Mall — Decentraland and the Metaverse by Dan Olson (Folding Ideas)

Another long-form triumph from the creator of Line Goes Up – The Problem with NTF s and In Search of a Flat Earth .

Searching for Humanity in Fortnite’s Battle Royale by Jonathan McIntosh (Pop Culture Detective)

A fusion between a “Let’s Play” and a conventional YouTube video essay, this moving autoethnography finds optimism and community in one of the most unlikely online gaming spaces.

Alexandre’s cleverly profound work on gender, sexuality, art, and digital culture never disappoints. Everything Is Sludge, which interrogates the rise of split-screen “sludge content” on TikTok, is yet another home run, and takes particular advantage of the traditional YouTube format. 

Associate professor of film and media in digital contexts at Aarhus University, Denmark; visiting researcher in the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, University of Leeds, UK ; author of Workshop of Potential Scholarship: Manifesto for a Parametric Videographic Criticism, NECSUS  2021.

There has been so much exciting work to learn from in 2023 that I found it near-impossible to make this selection, even limiting myself (as I have) to ‘scholarly’ video essays. Let me name some makers in addition to the many mentioned below that have impacted my understanding of the practice this year: Ariane Hudelet, Cormac Donnelly, Dayna McLeod, Irina Trocan, Jemma Saunders, John Gibbs, Kevin Ferguson, Liz Greene, Maria Hofmann, Maud Ceuterick, Oswald Iten, Richard Misek, Susan Harewood… My point with this list, which could have been indefinitely extended, is that investigating the possibilities of the video essay is a collective endeavour. Brian Eno has a notion of collective ‘scenius’ (as opposed to individual ‘genius’) which refers to “the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene”: it’s this boisterous collective intelligence that I think we’re witnessing with the explosion of the video essay. Can it last? I do worry that the period of expansion, exploration and experimentation will exhaust itself, and that a single preferred mode of audiovisual rhetoric will be asserted or be insisted upon by the journals. I’m relieved this hasn’t happened yet, not in 2023 at any rate. And so my selection (which could easily have been several further sets of seven videos) is intended to indicate some of the striking variety, as well as the quality, of the work being done. Memories of It by Kathleen Loock ‘Memories of It’ mixes film, trailer and documentary footage with personal reflection and interview in order to tease out Kathleen Loock’s traumatic memory of watching (and fast-forwarding) the 1990 adaptation of It on VHS as a child. She links this memory with the condition of the Wendekinder, children like her of the former GDR forced to cope with a new world after German reunification. Does Kathleen over-sociologise her act of retrospectatorship by invoking shared generational experience? Is the video an attempt to contain as well as explain the threat of traumatic eruption? I’ll just have to watch ‘it’ again… Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime by Drew Morton

Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland is my favourite novel and one joy of my 2023 was encountering Peter Coviello’s Vineland Reread, a book that mixes literary criticism, cultural theory and autobiography to evoke the presence of Vineland in Coviello’s life and teaching. Drew Morton’s account of re-viewing and teaching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at intervals since that film’s release is a similarly rich and joyful intellectual experience – Drew even shares some hard-earned lessons in love. (I recommend comparing the earlier version of the video linked in the creator statement, to see how an adept maker engages with challenging peer review.)

Desktop Documentary by Johannes Binotto

Johannes Binotto’s literally/ironically titled ‘Desktop Documentary’ is expressly a “call to clutter”. As such, it makes me terribly anxious. But this is a brilliantly conceived and engagingly performed piece of explicatory and programmatic rhetoric that draws on YouTube how-to videos even as it nods to the opening of Cléo de 5 à 7. I am happy to grant Binotto’s fiction that his desk has not been curated because I am persuaded by his account of the desktop as recalcitrant technology. And I am especially seduced by his call for productive accident and a-rational research methods that look back to surrealism.

True Enough by Chloé Galibert-Laîné

True Enough might seem a jeu d’esprit compared to Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s longer video essays. But even as it draws on the functional aesthetic of the karaoke video, this adaptation of a text by Will Webb, made for Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer’s Once upon A Screen project, is a work of great refinement. Galibert-Laîné creates a “fictional offscreen space” with beautifully composed filmed footage enlivened by dancing light from an unseen television. The cheerful font and sung accompaniment extend the possibilities of onscreen text and voiceover. As an added bonus (or intrinsic moment), it contains the best Simpsons allusion ever.

This has been a vintage year for multiscreen. Like the videos by Mittell and Arlander discussed below, Colleen Laird’s Eye-Camera-Ninagawa and Adam Cook’s A Cinema of Bodily Sense deploy multiscreen in powerful but contrasting ways. Maryam Tafakory uses it differently again in ‘chaste/unchaste’. The video is a supercut of female faces (plus one big cat and a gas hob) made from thirty-two Iranian films. It stages its imagining of queer desire as a progression from multiscreen to single screen to superimposition. ‘chaste/unchaste’ is a condensed masterclass in how argument can be made in formal terms without the aid of voiceover.

169 Seconds: Trimming Time in Breaking Bad by Jason Mittell

To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, the Danish film journal 16:9 has been publishing 169-second video essays in a series that features makers like Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, Jaap Kooijman, Catherine Grant, and Barbara Zecchi, with two impressive videos by my Aarhus colleague Mathias Bonde Korsgaard. My favourite is Jason Mittell’s cheeky afterthought to his videographic project on Breaking Bad (it traces Walter White’s story arc through his hairstyles). I like how the application of strict but ludic formal parameters, which Mittell derives from the journal name and video duration, generate a cryptic visual tapestry of the entire series.

Revisiting the Aspen Tree by Annette Arlander

Between 2002 and 2014, artist Annette Arlander recorded weekly visits to locations on Harakka Island near Helsinki in a series of videos. In Revisiting the Aspen Tree, she returns to one such site and embeds those videos in the video document of the more recent visit. Differently from Mittell’s Trimming Time, Arlander uses parameters to dictate a practice that is physical, repetitive and durational. But it reminds me of Will DiGravio’s Rio Bravo project, and like DiGravio’s four-hour Against Polish, it suggests the value of an ‘ambient’ scholarship, in which iterative academic labour is presented in something like real time.

Host and producer at Wisecrack

My selections focus on creators who are pushing the critical boundaries of the video essay format. In particular, these are creators who both utilise critical theory, social theory, and philosophy while also producing videos that are entertaining and accessible. They also make the types of videos that leave you feeling like more questions have been opened than answered. Which, especially on YouTube, is an increasingly rare thing.

Griftonomics: Why Scams Are Everywhere Now by Tom Nicholas

This video might be Nicholas’s magnum opus, and it feels more like a digital documentary than it does a traditional video essay with a runtime of almost two hours. But he earns every minute of the video by not only exploring the growing phenomenon of digital grifters, but by showing how the logic of grifters exists in an ongoing dialectical relationship with the larger economic structures in our world. In this way he arrives at the logical core of the modern digital grifter, and shows how this same logic is at the heart of much of modern culture. He balances this out by also exploring the psychological factors that have made grifter scams and content so popular. Nicholas also deserves credit for working a level of theatricality into this video (and all of his videos) that’s visually engaging without being distracting. In a world of sad ex-grad students making videos about capitalism ruining our world, Nicholas is the relatable and entertaining lad that takes you just as deep without any performative nihilism.

What Red Pill Philosophy Gets Wrong by Then &  Now

2023 was a banner year for content made by reactionary young men utilising various philosophical and political ideas to justify a sense of growing alienation. While it’s easy to dismiss this contingent of creators completely, the harder task is to engage with these trends, openly interrogating their ideological core. And this video does an exemplary job at this task, taking red pill philosophy to task, and in the process, exposing how it offers a shallow simulacrum of actual philosophical responses to complex social problems. The video acknowledges the alienating cultural conditions that produce the “manosphere” while exposing the illogical core at the heart of these ideas. In doing so, Then & Now has created a video that pushes the viewer to not simply dismiss the modern reactionary, but to understand the logic of this movement, and see how this manner of thinking is more common than we might realise. Ultimately, it’s a video that skillfully uses seemingly esoteric and academic ideas to re-frame the contemporary crisis of masculinity while showing us all why we should care.

the parasite class is killing us. by Alice Capelle In this video, Alice Capelle uses the logic of vampire capitalism to show how the modern digital economy increasingly depends on acts of parasitism. She shows how the type of parasitic class relationships exemplified in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is replicated in digital spaces, and in particular, among self-styled business gurus using YouTube videos as a way to repeat the logic of class exploitation in the guise of self-help and business advice. Like most of Capelle’s work, this video utilises her ability to synthesise a French brand of critical social theory with an English-language based digital cultural space. This video feels like a sort of ethnography of the contemporary digital parasite, one that both exposes the exploitative core of their content, while hopefully encouraging us to undermine this logic however we can.

Assistant professor, Leiden University, and film programmer

Ross’s recommendations were submitted without comment.

El juicio by Ulises de la Orden Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image by Adam Piron

Silence of Reason by Kumjana Novakova

Mast-del by Maryam Tafakory

Limitation by Elene Asatiani, Soso Dumbadze

An Asian Ghost Story by Bo Wang

Still Film by James N. Kienitz Wilkins

Film critic and curator of The Moving Image from Lima, Perú

This year has been particularly scarce in terms of what I’ve seen or experienced in cinema due to various reasons. But here is a small selection of works I deem worthy to be mentioned, all from the fantastic [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies.

A magnificent view on the dual nature of the portrayal of women in Iranian cinema.

Through the spirit of Chris Marker, this playful video essay runs the gamut of exploration via the Geo Guesser application and Marker’s cinema.

“Visual capitalism.”

Audio-Visual PhD student at University of Birmingham

Double Takes: A Series of Short Video Essays by Sarah Atkinson

Elegantly simple in their conception and execution; and cumulatively damning.

Insincere Inclusion? Ignorant Appropriation? A Symphony Orchestra Plays South Indian Film Music by Sureshkumar P. Sekar

I listened and I learned. A truly audio-visual piece.

Why Does Gotham Look like That? by Will Webb

An extensively researched and engaging exploration of this fictional city’s screen history.

A fascinating, haptic, personal inquiry that I couldn’t stop thinking about afterwards.

Indy Vinyl for the Masses: Lollipop by Ariel Avissar (curator) Matt Payne, Mingyue Yuan and Charlotte Scurlock

Pure fun and a wonderfully cohesive melding of song, theme (walking) and chosen keyword (kids). Hats off to Ian Garwood too for conceiving this project!

Freelance critic

I was flabbergasted last year when I somehow missed Mark Brown’s Platformer Toolkit , which I’m noting here because I think it absolutely represents a vital step forward for this art. I hope to see more work in interactive essays in the future.

Plenty of essays are about specific issues. This one manages to also embody its own ethos by acting as a conduit to get good-quality public domain imagery into the actual public.

A great rumination on acceptable expressions of anger, mediated through the desktop form in the same way that our emotions are mediated through technology.

The History of the Minnesota Vikings by Jon Bois et al

I think at this point Jon Bois just has a permanent spot in my ballot each year. He continues to innovate and refine his form. No one is making documentaries like this.

Pictures of Ghosts by Kleber Mendonça Filho et al

A beautiful meditation on memory as channeled through both personal and public archives, and the relationship between cinema spaces and their communities.

Brilliant in its simplicity, a Rorschach test that reveals the underlying absurdity of its own premise, and in turn the entire premise of censorious morality.

Nonbinary scholar-practitioner working at the intersections of artistic research and critical theories of embodiment and identity; reader in media and performance at University of Huddersfield; founding editor of Journal of Embodied Research.

I am a performance theorist and practitioner who has been working for several years to educate myself in the ways of videographic thought. My selection is eclectic and formally diverse, mostly coming from outside film and media studies.

Peribiophoty by Tom Murray, Karen Pearlman, Stephanie Russo, Hsu-Ming Teo, Rowan Tulloch, Rachel Yuen-Collingridge, Malcolm Choat

This item is from the journal I edit. I chose it from our 2023 video articles because of how it uses a formally simple concept to stage a deep dive into a range of scholarly projects. This is a co-authored video article sharing the research of five academics, who not only speak to the camera about their work but also interact physically with various objects on a sparse kind of set. It is elegantly produced and designed to examine “the personal and intellectual contexts (peri) surrounding academics and their biographies (bio) through audio-visual representation (photy).”

The World like a Jewel in the Hand by Ariella Azoulay

This film is technically from 2022 (I don’t know which month), but since this is my first Sight and Sound poll, I have decided to include it. As far as I can tell, it has primarily been screened in 2023. In the film, scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay explores the complex history of colonialism between Algeria and Israel, with an emphasis on the gradual erasure of the important figure of the Arab Jew. Azoulay manages to put this history in the broader context of European colonialism in Africa and to interrogate the ongoing practices of colonial museums, all through the simple action of touching and talking about a wide array of books, photographs, mezuzot, and other objects on her desk. When I first saw this film, I immediately felt that it brings an extraordinary depth and power to the concept of the “desktop documentary.”

Familiar Phantoms by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind

I have to confess that I have not seen this film, only the trailer. I recently got a chance to see In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016) and In Vitro (2019) by the same creators. One of the challenges in selecting the “best” video essays from a given year is that so much videographic thought still takes place within the economy of fine arts and is therefore not made available online because it would thereby lose its aura. Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian video artist and filmmaker whose work is powerfully situated and discussed in Gil Z. Hochberg’s book, Becoming Palestine. I am including Familiar Phantoms on my list of selections as the 2023 video work I most wish to see.

A Short Film About Stealing (in Norway) by Pouria Kazemi

I have been able to find very little about Pouria Kazemi online and nothing about this film, which I had the chance to watch when it was submitted to a video festival I co-curated. This short animated video essay is a perfectly composed, brilliantly understated autobiographical statement about the necessity of petty theft under late capitalism. Among the more delightful and poignant touches is that the author’s friends, to protect their anonymity, are given as pseudonyms the names of the Norwegian royal family.

Hold On, This Matilda Musical Snapping 💀💀 by @wonder_kidd

Hold On, This Matilda Musical Snapping was a TikTok / Instagram trend in which a scene of dynamic choreography from the movie version of the musical Matilda is overlaid by various alternative musical tracks. While putting forward a 25-second social media remix as one of the best video essays of the year is certainly pushing the limits of the form, all the key elements are there: a creative and incisive juxtaposition of a video track with a distinct audio track is contextualised by the critical commentary of a textual annotation. The version I have chosen to link uses @wonder_kidd’s remix of Beyonce’s ‘Cuff It’, a choice that (as many of the Instagram commenters noted) effectively brings out the black cultural roots of Ellen Kane’s choreography, in sharp relief against the massively predominant whiteness of the British schoolchildren who perform it. In just a few seconds, this remix gives us both a snapping new version of Matilda and a cultural critique of how black dance knowledges circulate in predominantly white cultural fields.

Video essayist at StrucciMovies , actual play host on Oddity Roadshow

Colleen Ballinger and Commentary Culture by Ro Ramdin

Ro Ramdin’s work is incredible. Always sharply written, insightful, very funny, beautifully shot, and deeply thoughtful under the meticulous aesthetic and entertaining editing style. She’s one of those essayists I am more than happy to watch even if I have zero interest in the subject matter. I chose this video of hers in particular because I found her reflection on her place in the commentary channel ecosystem navigating the “algorithmic nightmare” of YouTube (as she puts it) especially compelling.

Does Fresh Garlic Actually Taste Better than Garlic in a Jar? by Ethan Chlebowski

Ethan Chlebowski has made several videos posing the question of whether more expensive versions of the same ingredient are worth it and why, including on balsamic vinegar, olive oil, parmigiano reggiano, vanilla, and, here, garlic. Each video is a deep dive on the cultural history of how the food is used and why, the basics of the culinary science behind it, and Chlebowski doing several taste tests and then giving recommendations at varying price points. While some of his conclusions are down to personal preference, his videos are nevertheless fascinating and done without judgement or pretension. I’d consider them a must-watch for new home cooks or those looking for a great example of engaging educational content that doesn’t condescend.

Wayfinding Flight Rising Dailies & Accessibility by PSJ ulie

I started a Neopets account in elementary school, over twenty years ago. My interest in Neopets or other pet sim sites has long since waned but I’m still fascinated by the work of Pet Simmer Julie, who crafts in-depth videos on virtual pet games. Her depth of knowledge and passion for these games and communities is immediately evident with any of her videos. This video, for example, helped me understand my own problems navigating real-world attractions that had poor wayfinding, and I’ve thought back to it many times after watching.

Filmmaker , author, video essayist, critic

A perfect capper to Johannes’ indispensable series

It’s a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point by Daniel Kremer

Daniel finally makes his epic, a great odyssey about why we get lost in movies.

Against Polish or, Notes on Videographic Labor or, You Could Remix Blazing Saddles Today by Will DiGravio

With the insouciance of late Godard or Leos Carax’s New Order music video, Will disassembles our need to assemble.

Ozu Without Ozu by Green and Red

Deliciously busy exploration of auteurism.

Once upon a Screen: The 39 Shots by Ariel Avissar

A recontextualisation of what’s in plain sight.

Random Acts of Flyness Season 2 by Terence Nance

Terence and co’s vibrant and deeply necessary attack on commerce and media’s hideous parasitic relationship is an inspiration to all creators. One of the best to ever do it.

Independent scholar, video essayist

Practices of Viewing by Johannes Binotto

I remember where I was, shaking my head, beaming, and stifling a gasp, when I realised that Practices of Viewing is our generation’s Ways of Seeing or Histoire(s) du Cinema. A project of this scope, originality, insight and depth of audiovisual thinking may never happen again.

Jill, Uncredited by Anthony Ing

The log line says it’s a subtle, masterful tribute to the nearly-invisible labour of a background actress you’ve never heard of. But really, it’s a ground-up retraining of your whole visual cortex. Squint between the film grains, and you might even find a remake of Rose Hobart that outdoes Cornell.

Non-Euclidean Therapy for AI Trauma [Analog Archives] #SoME3 by neoknowstic

I’ve been meaning to include a mathematics video essay for years, and this one’s a revelation. A horror film starring an AI image generator lost in its own vector space, trying to remember enough matrix algebra to escape from the ‘dream’ of a grotesque face that it can’t stop making.

William Shakespeare’s Course of True Love by Lara Callaghan

Full disclosure: I was a participant in the group project that this essay belongs to, but I had nothing to do with this inspired entry. Unfortunately. I’m so jealous that I never realised that a video essay could parody other genres – in this case, the infomercial – to enclose its insights into an envelope of fleet-footed wit that belies their depth.

Elaine Scarry says pain can’t be expressed in words, but this essay claims that Phil Tippett’s film Mad God offers a counter-argument: maybe using a different system of signification CAN express pain. Magnificently, this essay doesn’t assume that scholars have more authority than artists, and opts instead to orchestrate a coequal conversation between two of them.

Indians from 1967: A Reaction by Ritika Kaushik

A time-capsule doc from 1967 resurfaces recut online and inspires a bevy of reaction videos. Why’d that happen? If we can’t explain why, maybe we can at least reproduce the effect, but with all the tools out in the open. And that’s what this essay does. After a forensics of the recut itself and a cataloguing of the reactions, a little zoom and slow motion unexpectedly imbue me with the same fascination with wonder and impermanence for contemporary online culture.

The AI Revolution Is Rotten to the Core by Jimmy McGee

This is ground zero of visual culture now, and most of us are either too tired to catch up or hoping it’ll just go away. If you don’t know where to turn, turn here. It’s rigorously researched, historically grounded, theoretically canny, sardonically wise, and as quotable as Casablanca. “We need to choose between building a world for money to live in or building a world for people to live in.”

Freelance film critic , film studies lecturer at UNATC  Bucharest

In retrospect, I seem to have compiled a mostly glum list, if not directly referring to contemporary events, at least haunted by them:

Scenes of Extraction by Sanaz Sohrabi

This installation work surveys the history of Iran over several decades, focusing on oil extraction by the foreign company soon to be known as British Petroleum, through a technique called reflection seismography. The challenge, of course, as postcolonial scholarship taught us, is to look beyond the audiovisual self-representation of the company – and the artist accomplishes this extraordinarily well. A voiceover accompanies a collage/montage documenting industrial processes, while the collage in itself operates on the images – which sometimes look like spectral cutouts – workers disconnected from the background, initially black, that slowly takes shape behind them), while at other times these images show their age (for instance, when 1930s maps are juxtaposed with recent CGI ).

Between Revolutions by Vlad Petri

Films about revolutions often – and quite paradoxically – treat the event like a solidly contained point on the historical axis, with a beginning and an end, missing exactly their transformative potential and their collective character. One way to avoid this is to resort to the not-entirely-manipulable archives from the depicted era (and not just in short clips to lend the veneer of truth to fictional reenactments), and Between Revolutions is a pretty convincing demonstration of this strategy. Maria and Zahra are fictional med students from Romania and Iran, trying to figure out life amid social turmoil – but the footage, poems and songs that illustrate their journey existed in the world long before the making of this film, and even when made with obvious artistic or educational intent (not to mention elaborate choreography!), these reworked materials contain some trace or emotional truth of their times.

This Is the End by Vincent Dieutre

By the most expansive definition a “videographic” work, Dieutre’s Los Angeles pandemic film has, I would argue, a family resemblance with Thom Andersen’s survey of polysemic Californian cityscapes. Love, longing and poetry readings (with actors’/directors’ cameos!) interrupt the grim silence of lockdown.

She Asked Me Where I Was From by Aulona Fetahaj

I reviewed this short film for Kortfilm.be.

Incident by Bill Morrison

Bill Morrison is known to be interested in film only when it is analogue and beautifully degraded, and in this respect the CCTV /bodycam-sourced Incident is a long distance from Buried News . The killing of Harith Augustus by the Chicago police was previously examined by Forensic Architecture to persuasively oppose the authorities’ version of the event, but Morrison and Jamie Kalven at the Invisible Institute set out to do something else. The 30-minute film, often showing in split-screen multiple angles and parallel events, only tracks a short span of time, although 1) it seems dispiritingly endless and 2) it already anticipates the community’s reaction to seeing yet another African American killed, while the policemen, in an onlooker’s phrasing, “get their story straight”. Augustus’s lifeless body is present in the frame for a long stretch of the runtime, contrary to the CPD ’s attempt to erase the “accident” from memory, while the eloquent rage of everyone in the community seems tragically rehearsed in similar prior events. The victim’s neighbours don’t get to express solidarity, but the colleagues of the policemen who fired the gun can, and do, help erase criminal guilt.

Makeover Movie by Sue Ding

You’d think this is the second-oldest topic in the feminist book (immediately after suffrage), but makeovers seem here to stay. Just look at what the too-radical teen in Barbie has to go through, or scroll down any social media app on a new account. Luckily, well-informed critiques, spanning many decades of US films, and listing all the problematic tropes implicit in the “makeover” are also competing for our attention. I can only hope that more young spectators see “The Makeover Movie”, where Sue Ding conjures a multiracial telephone slumber party with her girlfriends to understand how these films taught them “not only how to be a woman, but also how to be American”. Teen classics provide most material, but a handful of musicals plus Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale and Vertigo also fit the bill.

Screen Stars Dictionary. Natalia Oreiro by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková

I grew up with Natalia Oreiro in her many disguises on my TV screen only to realise that nobody referred to her in the many pop surveys of Film and Media Studies. Therefore, I owe Veronika and Jiří many thanks and a loud high-five for allowing me to mention her again as a media scholar in my 30s. Autobiography aside, this playful video is a throwback to 2000s TV series, music clips and shows, computer interfaces, and a persuasive argument about how the model-periphery theory of dissemination is a far from rigorous model.

Film programmer and researcher

Where Is Little Trixie? by Carlos Baixauli

A very moving work that packs a lot of wonder and attentive detail in under four minutes, building a bridge between the works of two women filmmakers more than a century apart.

Who Speaks? Possessing Lyotard by Oscar Mealia

It points the way to new possible intersections between philosophy, film research, and video essay formats.

Isn’t That Going to Be Awfully Dull and Drab?’ George Hoyningen-Huene’s Use of Neutrals by Lucy Fife Donaldson

Packs surprise and captivating visuals into a video essay able to pleasurably unpack original academic and archival research.

Film critic ( À pala de Walsh ) and film programmer (Cinemateca Portuguesa, IndieLisboaIFF)

The latest film by James N. Kienitz Wilkins is an intriguing and exhausting audio play voiced by the director, who plays the four main characters in a court inquiry about film memories, film still photographers, Kodak as a pharmaceutical enterprise, the negative aura of Tom Hanks, boom operators, and the elusiveness of Hollywood as a cultural agent. All of this is put together with a seemingly random selection of film stills. As usual, in Kienitz Wilkins’ work, discourse is moving and images are ecstatic.

Le film que vous allez voir by Maxime Martinot

Maxime Martinot’s 11-minute film is an immensely funny compilation of disclaimer cards presented at the beginning of films throughout history. Edited as a frantic accumulation of non-images, we expect the worst and suffer the anticipation of immoral, violent, or graphic images. Without the images themselves, we are left with an essay on morality and sensibility as they evolve through time and shape the way we see the world around us and ourselves.

Où en êtes-vous, Tsai Ming-Liang? by Tsai Ming-Liang

A 20-minute meditation by the greatest living filmmaker on back pain, the pleasure of sitting, the beauty of chairs and how to paint them.

Chambre 999 by Lubna Playoust

A conceptual remake of Wim Wenders’ Chambre 666, made 40 years later. Cinema has changed, and today’s issues concerning viewership, distribution, and production are radically different from those of 1982. An uneven collection of thoughts that includes a wonderful opening act by Wenders himself as a burlesque doomsday prophet.

Onde está o Pessoa? (Where is Pessoa?) by Leonor Areal

From a few minutes of film, shot in 1913, Leonor Areal loops, zooms, pans, and examines every detail (as in Ken Jacobs’ Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son), looking for the poet Fernando Pessoa, who was a cinephile, designed the logo of a movie company, wrote several film scripts, and was never caught on film. Or was he?

Even if Godard is dead, he lives in Maryam Tafakory. Mast-del is a collage of post-revolution Iranian cinema that produces mesmerising film compositions of gestures, textures, sounds, and words. A thin narrative line runs through public images and intimate feelings, delineating a complex web of recollections where memory and film history merge together.

Filmmaker , video essayist . Commissions include Sight and Sound / BFI , Little White Lies, Curzon and Arrow.

As ever, excited to see constant variety within the video essay world. My picks prioritise new creators and formal inventiveness.

MyHouse. WAD – Inside Doom’s Most Terrifying Mod by Power Pak

A masterpiece of recapping, Power Pak’s video is essentially a narrated journey through an ingenious mod. A good recap doesn’t just communicate plot, but also the point of the essay; this does both. Excellent pacing and vocal delivery communicates the tone of the map, and becomes a jumping off point for an analysis of horror in gaming / the oft-discussed topic of liminal spaces. And, a special shoutout to an almost unedited six-minute segment of black and silence in the middle. Commitment to the bit!

Interrogating one of the strangest releases of last year, this essay takes on the unenviable task of articulating how the film articulates the inarticulable (via Elaine Scarry). DeLisio’s commentary includes text elements that are ingeniously expressed in a similar visual language to the film’s (faded, grainy, blurry). As commenter Max Tohline puts it, “not under the knife of Scarry, but in coequal conversation with Scarry”.

Is It Impossible to Dad? by The Nukes

A trademark The Nukes / Josh Geist essay in its analysis of a throwaway family animation property through a serious academic viewpoint – not (just) for the comedy of applying highbrow to lowbrow, but to recognise that even (and maybe especially?) the forgotten parts of pop culture express truths about humanity. Josh reorders his text via its characters’ viewpoints to tell a story about father-son communication – and, perhaps, the impossibility of communication itself.

Alexandre investigates ‘sludge’ content – those splitscreens of a narrated reddit post and a Subway Surfers video, for instance – through a clever visual device. Talk about ‘embodied practice’: hard for me to imagine a more clear example than Alexandre projecting the edited video text onto their own body for the entirety of this video. An interruption a few minutes in from YouTube’s algorithm –a split-screen beer advert no less– just added to the gag on my viewing. And throughout the to-camera presentation, I found my eye drawn off to the Minecraft parkour constantly, in a clever proving of Alexandre’s argument. Behind the overstimulating presentation, Alexandre’s analysis offers an insightful categorisation of a media type inexplicable on the surface but ever-present in the developing digital landscape.

The breezy recap of the man/car binary in the opening moments of max teeth’s essay is authoritative, funny, and thought-provoking – everything a video essay can be, especially on YouTube. And the speed with which that’s just assumed and dropped as we speed into the main matter is a great example of how to explain succinctly. YouTube’s got too many 1hr+ essays – more like this, please.

Seinpeaks by @seinpeaks

There’s a fine line between a shitpost and a videographic work; ironically, the more academic end of video essays (with their lack of in-video explanation due to abstract support, and leaning towards supercuts and split-screens) are more like this than popular YouTube works. Seinpeaks illustrates the fine line beautifully. It’s a long-running project mashing up Twin Peaks and Seinfeld (with guest appearances from other stalwart shows like Always Sunny and Friends). These two shows aired simultaneously and their shared visual language provides a jumping-off point for a surprising collab that draws out the humour in Twin Peaks and the absurdism in Seinfeld.

Editor-at-large and YouTube channel manager at Little White Lies magazine

How Jane Campion Subverts the Violence of the Male Gaze by Carly Mattox

This was an idea pitched to me around focusing on the image of the woman on the street in cinema, especially at night, and especially in films directed by women. It took a little bit of back and forth to nail the structure and pacing, but the tone and central thesis of the piece was rock solid from the outset. I was delighted with how it turned out, and am really excited to see what Carly comes up with next.

Oppenheimer Is the Perfect Christopher Nolan Protagonist by Lara Callaghan

There was a lot published around Nolan’s atom bomb opus, but I’m not sure anything I’ve seen has managed to tap into his preoccupations as a filmmaker as astutely as this.

Adam Driver Driving by Luís Azevedo

This video stemmed from a silly conversation Luís and I had, but I think the result – aside from being superbly edited – speaks to something more serious about how actors choose to present themselves in certain ways on screen.

Professor and director of the film studies programme, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Very hard to limit myself to these nominations only.

Practices of Viewing series by Johannes Binotto

By all means this is the major project in videographic criticism of the year – or I should say of the last three years, since FFW , the first one (I believe) was produced in 2020. A work of art that redefines the boundaries of what’s possible in the medium. Its richness, originality, and creativity combine to create an experience that truly blows the mind. This videographic project is a testament to the limitless potential of form, its academic rigour, and artistry. It’s a visual and intellectual rollercoaster that will leave you in awe from start to finish.

RAWR by Maud Ceuterick

Beginning as a creative spark in an Aarhus workshop, it expanded at Middlebury College to become a true gem. Drawing from Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work, Ceuterick passionately interprets and deforms scenes of female rage, challenging gender norms. This transformative journey echoes Audre Lorde’s call for a radical change through the expression of rage. It’s a brilliant fusion of scholarship and creativity.

This is Not What I Normally Do: An Insignificant Step in the Downfall of the Humanities by Ariel Avissar

This is THE video essay of the year. A bold departure from convention, this video defies expectations with its remarkable layers of provocation. Meticulously edited and expertly crafted, it pushes the boundaries of videographic criticism, skilfully weaving a captivating tapestry of thought-provoking insights in the field

One of the most captivating sound projects I’ve ever encountered. This video essay ventures into uncharted territory, pairing the audio from the beginning of films with the closing images, creating an extraordinary mosaic of sound and visuals. The result is an auditory and visual tapestry that defies conventional expectations. It’s a seamless blend of the familiar and the unexpected, challenging our perception of film narratives.

169 Seconds: Una mujer reflejada / A Reflected Woman by Catherine Grant

In this brief but profoundly impactful exploration, Catherine Grant manages to distil the essence of the film’s themes, performances, and significance with remarkable precision, a testament to the art of succinct and effective storytelling. It’s a research gem that demonstrates the power of brevity in conveying complex ideas. In just 169 seconds, this video essay is the best piece of research ever “written” on Sebastián Lelio’s film.

This provocative video essay skillfully employs desktop editing on an iPhone to present a feminist perspective on the enduring control of women’s bodies through the dissemination of misinformation about menstruation and the menstruation apps. It is an awe-inspiring blend of resourcefulness, scholarly research, activism, art, exceptional editing skills, and creativity. 

Sensuous and Affective: The Potential of Videography for Studying Audio-Visual Relations by Oswald Iten

A beautifully edited and profoundly insightful exploration of the dynamic interplay between sight and sound.

Emerging voices

The voters had the option to nominate essayists to the ‘Emerging voices’ section as a way to highlight new and exciting talent in the video essay space.

acollierastro (nominated by Ben Chinapen)

[Ben also nominated this creator’s video on string theory in the main poll, and resubmitted his explanation from there to clarify why he was nominating them for Emerging voices.]

This video came out of nowhere and blew everyone’s mind who saw it. An intriguing title, with a clearly stressed-out person and also The Binding of Isaac in the thumbnail? What’s going on? Within one minute the purpose becomes clear; this woman who has very strong opinions and credentials will break down exactly what happened with the String Theory phenomenon while simultaneously stumbling through a playthrough of the vintage roguelike indie darling Binding of Isaac. A premise so absurd and hilarious (dare I say groundbreaking?) that you instantly want to watch and listen. It’s very informative and HIGHLY entertaining for the joke of the idea alone. I’m glad this took off because it was worth it. This is probably my most firm nomination out of the group.

Morgane Frund (nominated by Delphine Jeanneret)

Morgane Frund was born in 1997 in Lausanne, Switzerland. She studied Film Studies, English and German at the University of Lausanne. From 2019 to 2022, she studied Video at Hochschule Luzern, Design and Kunst, graduating with a Bachelor degree. BEAR (2022), her graduation film, screened in numerous festivals and won several prizes. OUT OF THE BLUE (2023) premiered in competition at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur. She is active in the fields of documentary film, video essay and performance arts.

Eloïse Le Gallo and Julia Borderie (nominated by Delphine Jeanneret)

Born in 1989, Julia Borderie and Éloïse Le Gallo have been a duo since 2016. They graduated from Le Fresnoy in 2023. In an exploratory mode, they approach water as a substance that influences the territories it flows through and the bodies that live in it. Taking a poetic, documentary approach, they make the experience of otherness a condition of artistic creation. The camera eye acts as a catalyst for encounters, while questioning the human gestures that shape materials and territories.

At the heart of a mesh of viewpoints and disciplines (craft techniques, geology, chemistry, marine biology, etc.) and at the crossroads of sculpture and cinema, they are interested in the origin of the materials that form a landscape. Recently, their research has led them to question more specifically the complementarities between learned form and sensitive form, working with scientists on objects generated by their cutting edge technologies. [Bio from Le Fresnoy]

Rodrigo Campos (nominated by Evelyn Kreutzer)

Campos participated in a mentorship program I co-organised with Anna-Sophie Pilippi, Maike Reinerth, and Kathleen Loock, as part of the Videography conference in Hanover 2022. There he worked with Barbara Zecchi. The resulting video, published in the ZfM Videography blog this year, is a deeply poetic, affective, and analytically profound investigation of Brazilian colonial screen history.

Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History Collaboration (nominated by Colleen Laird)

A collaboration of 30 makers, the Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History project has been in the works since an original call for proposals in February 2022. Although just a few of the participants are experienced (full disclosure: myself included), the grant-funded project was designed by Alison Peirse to train and mentor new talent from around the globe through a series of online videographic workshops over the course of approximately six months. Thereafter, participants would produce their first video essay and would refine their edits through online peer feedback. As one of the collaborators, it has been my great privilege to see the works of so many new creators grow and evolve and I am excited for their collective debut. The collaboration will be published online in the first quarter of 2023 in the journal MAI : Feminism & Visual Culture .

Carlos Baixauli (nominated by Adrian Martin)

Sometimes, audiovisual essays can do a simple thing very well. Baixauli’s ingenious mix of the silent Falling Leaves (1912) by Alice Guy with Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021) hits that spot.

Green & Red (Kasra Karbasi and Mohammad Amin Komijani) (nominated by Adrian Martin)

These Iranian cinephiles pursue very original film analyses.

Martín Vilela (nominated by Adrian Martin)

Like Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return, Chandler from Friends is multiplied and interacts with himself, uncannily. In Argentina, Vilela’s country!

May Santiago (nominated by Dayna McLeod)

A queer Puerto Rican feminist filmmaker, May Santiago’s unique voice and perspective makes her a video essayist to watch out for. She will have new work in Alison Peirse’s Doing Women’s (Global) (Horror) Film History ( DWGHFH ) project which will be featured in a special issue of MAI Feminism & Visual Culture in 2024. I was lucky enough to see May’s practice first hand at Embodying the Video Essay, a videographic workshop in Maine this summer and was blown away by May’s spectacularly intricate and layered work. She crafts soundtracks to complement a unique and riveting visual language, combining archive and horror while using herself as narrator and performing subject in front of the camera. Do keep an eye out for May’s work at film festivals and online: https://www.maillim.com/

Svanik Surve ( SUAVE , SUAVE cinema , svanik SUAVE ) (nominated by Queline Meadows)

Svanik Surve has been making video essays steadily for a few years now, but expanded his output in 2023 when he created two new YouTube channels. This year, his work explored Indian culture, international art cinema, and philosophy. His creative, intelligent, and funny videos deserve a much larger audience.

framemygaze (nominated by Queline Meadows)

In my eyes, there is nobody more immersed in the YouTube media and culture video essay landscape than framemygaze, and I say that as someone who runs a Discord server for video essay creators! I’ve found her in the comment sections of countless videos writing detailed notes that reflect her care and close attention to everything she watches. Framemygaze has only released one video so far, but if her deep understanding of the video essay community is any indication, there will be many more great videos in the future.

Alice Cappelle (nominated by Michael O’N eill Burns)

Alice’s videos offer an intriguing perspective at the borders of Francophile and Anglophile culture. She’s a French creator making videos in English, often about topics and phenomena specific to English language digital spaces and culture. This perspective allows her to use the critical force of a French leftist theorist to tackle seemingly vapid and conceptually empty trends and practices. At other times, she’s able to translate the specificity of the French political moment to a broader audience in a way that’s far more accessible than standard news coverage.

Jackson Maher (nominated by Michael O’N eill Burns)

Jackson is an already accomplished editor who in recent years has put himself in front of the camera to create video essays that lure viewers in with analysis of popular media properties, but uses this as the occasion to expose deeper cultural ideologies buried within pop culture. His series of videos on Copaganda does a masterful job at showing us how the logic of policing has infected so much of our culture, down to popular children’s programme Paw Patrol. But maybe most impressively, Jackson does all this while being relatable and curious, never making the viewer feel judged but instead inviting us to dig deeper alongside him.

Lara Isobel Callaghan (nominated by Will Webb)

Lara is a new face on the video-essay scene, with a number of commissions across Little White Lies and the BFI . Although the commissioned work is excellent, I’m highlighting this video from the Essay Library collab, When Essay Met Library, due to its formal inventiveness and cheeky sense of humour. Using Hindi film Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan as a jumping off point, Lara examines Shakespeare’s influence on the rom-com genre through the lens of a 1980s infomercial. William Shakespeare’s Course of True Love: available now!

Jemma Saunders (nominated by Will Webb)

A doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham, Jemma’s particular focus on sense of place (and Birmingham especially) comes to the fore in this fascinating essay examining automotive representations of the city. Other works in this vein include Reaching Out Remotely , covering UK soap Doctors’ covid episode, made all the more poignant by its cancellation this year.

Carly Mattox (nominated by Adam Woodward)

I met Carly in late 2022 when I gave a talk to the second year students at NFTS . She reached out to me earlier this year and has since contributed a handful of videos to the LWL ies YouTube channel.

The new issue of Sight and Sound

David Lynch on music, innovation and his future as a filmmaker Plus, in a music special: Kneecap on their blistering biopic – Brian Eno in conversation with Walter Murch – Great 21st century scores, as chosen by Ishibaki Eiko, Colin Stetson, Fatima Al Qadiri and more

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10 of the Most Niche YouTube Video Essays You Absolutely Need to Watch

YouTube’s algorithm is designed to keep your eyeballs glued to video after video (after video, after video...). The dangers of this rabbit hole are well-documented . However, for every ideological radicalization enabled by YouTube, I like to think there’s at least one innocent, newfound pop culture obsession discovered at 3 a.m. via the greatest medium of our time: the Video Essay.

The genre of YouTube video essays is more interesting than it sounds. Sure, any piece of video content that advances a central thesis could be considered a “video essay.” But there are key components of video essays that elevate the genre into so much more than simply a YouTube version of a written article. Over the past few years, the term “YouTube video essay” has grown to evoke connotations of niche fascination and discovery. For creators, the field is highly competitive with strong personalities trying to get eyes on extremely in-depth analysis of a wide range of topics. The “niche” factor is especially important here. Ultimately, the hallmark of a good video essay is its ability to captivate you into watching hours of content about a subject matter you would have never expected to care about in the first place. Scary? Maybe. Fun? Definitely.

Whether you’re skeptical about the power of video essays, or you’re an existing fan looking for your next niche obsession, I’ve rounded up some of my personal favorite YouTube video essays for you to lean in and watch. This is not a comprehensive list by any means, and it largely reflects what the algorithm thinks (knows) I personally want to watch.

Other factors that influenced my selection process: The video essays needed to have a strong, surprising thesis—something other than a creator saying “ this thing good ” or “ this thing bad. ” These videos also stood out to me due to their sheer amount of thorough, hard-hitting evidence, as well as the dedication on the behalf of the YouTubers who chose to share with us hours upon hours of research into these topics.

And yes, I have watched all the hours of content featured here. I’m a professional.

Disney’s FastPass: A Complicated History

Let’s start strong with a documentary so premium, I can’t believe it’s free. Multiple articles and reviews have been dedicated to Defunctland’s video series about, well, waiting in line. I know what you’re thinking—the only thing that sounds more boring than waiting in line is watching a video about waiting in line. But Defunctland’s investigation into the history of Disneyland’s FastPass system has so much more to offer.

Class warfare. Human behavior. The perils of capitalism. One commenter under the video captures it well by writing “oddly informative and vaguely terrifying.” Since its launch in 2017, Kevin Perjurer’s entire Defunctland YouTube channel has become a leading voice in extremely thorough video essays. The FastPass analysis is one of the most rewarding of all of Defunctland’s in-depth amusement park coverage.

I won’t spoil it here, but the best part of the video is hands-down when Perjurer reveals an animated simulation of the theme park experience to test out how various line-reservation systems work. Again, no spoilers, but get ready for a wildly satisfying “gotcha” moment.

Personally, I’ve never had any interest one way or another about Disney-affiliated theme parks. I’ve never been, and I never planned on going. That’s the main reason I’m selling you on this video essay right off the bat. Defunctland is a perfect example of how the genre of video essays has such a high bar for investigative reporting, shocking analysis, and an ability to suck you in to a topic you never thought you’d care about.

Watch time : 1:42:59 (like a proper feature documentary)

THE Vampire Diaries Video

No list of video essays can get very far without including Jenny Nicholson , a true titan of the genre. Or, as one commenter puts it, “The power of Jenny Nicholson: getting me to watch an almost three hour long video about something I don’t care about.” I struggled to pick which of her videos to feature here, but at over seven million views, “THE Vampire Diaries Video” might just be Nicholson’s magnum opus. Once you break out the red string on a cork board, it’s safe to say that you’re in magnum opus territory.

I haven’t ever seen an episode of CW’s The Vampire Diaries , but since this video essay captivated me, I can safely say that I’m an expert on the show. Nicholson’s reputation as a knowledgeable, passionate, funny YouTuber is well-earned. She’s a proper geek, and watching her cultural analyses feel like I’m nerding out with one of my smartest friends. If you really don’t think The Vampire Diaries investigation is for you (and I argue that it’s for everyone), I recommend “ A needlessly thorough roast of Dear Evan Hansen ” instead.

Watch time : 2:33:19

In Search Of A Flat Earth

Did you think you could get through a YouTube video round-up without single mention of Flat Earthers? Wishful thinking.

“In Search of Flat Earth” is a beautiful, thoughtful video essay slash feature-length documentary. Don’t go into this video if you’re looking to bash and ridicule flat earth conspiracy theorists. Instead, Olson’s core argument takes a somewhat sympathetic gaze to the fact that Flat Earthers cannot be “reasoned” out of their beliefs with “science” or “evidence.” Plus, this video has a satisfying second-act plot twist. As Olson points out, “In Search of Flat Earth” could have an alternative clickbait title of “The Twist at 37 Minutes Will Make You Believe We Live In Hell.” Over the years,  Dan Olson of Folding Ideas has helped to popularize the entire video essay genre, and this one just might be his masterpiece.

Watch time : 1:16:16

The Rise and Fall of Teen Dystopias

Sarah Z is your go-to Gen Z cultural critic and explainer. The YouTuber brings her knack for loving-yet-shrewd analysis to dig into fandom culture, the YA book industry, and why the teen dystopia got beaten into the ground.

I’ve found that one of the most reliable video essay formulas is some version of “what went wrong with [incredibly popular cultural moment].” In the case of teen dystopias, it’s a fascinating take on how a generation of teen girls were drawn to bad ass, anti-establishment heroines, only to watch those types of characters get mass produced and diluted into mockery. But maybe I’m biased here; as the exact demographic targeted by the peak of The Hunger Games, Twilight, and Divergent, this cultural debrief speaks to my soul.

Watch time : 1:22:41

A Buffet of Black Food History

Food is an effective way to combine economic, cultural, and social histories–and Black American food history is an especially rich one. Food resonates with people, allowing us to connect with the past in a much more real way than if we were memorizing dates and locations from a textbook. Historian Elexius Jionde of Intelexual Media is a pro at taking what could be a standard history lesson and turning it into an interesting journey full of crazy characters and tidbits.

Most of the comments beneath the video are complaints that the video deserves to be so much longer. It’s jam-packed with surprising facts, fun asides, and, of course, tantalizing descriptions of the food at hand. Jionde even warns you right at the top: “Turn this video off right now if you’re hungry.”

Watch time : 22:39

The reign of the Slim-Thick Influencer

At this point, I’m assuming you know what a BBL is. Even if you aren’t familiar with the term (Brazilian butt lifts, FYI), then you’ve still probably observed the trend. Before big butts, it was thigh gaps. The pendulum swing of trending body types is nothing new. Curves are in, curves are out, thick thighs save lives, “skinny fat” is bad, and now, “slim thick” looms large. How do different body types fall in and out of fashion, and what effect does this have on the people living in those bodies?

Creator Khadija Mbowe identifies and analyzes a lot of the issues with how women’s bodies (especially Black women’s) are commodified, without ever blaming the bodies that are under fire. Mbowe handles the topic with grace and humor, even when discussing how deeply personal it is to them. If you’ve ever found yourself staring at a photo of an Instagram influencer, please do yourself a favor and watch this video essay.

Watch time : 54:18

Flight of the Navigator

Once again: I have been sucked into a video about a film that I have never seen and probably never will. Captain Disillusion, whose real name is Alan Melikdjanian, is another giant of the video essay genre, posting videos to a not-too-shabby audience of 2.29 million subscribers. Most of Captain Dissilision’s videos that I’d seen before this were of the creator debunking viral videos, exposing how certain visual effects were “obviously” faked. In this video, he turns his eye for debunking special effects not to viral videos, but to the 1986 Disney sci-fi adventure Flight of the Navigator.

This behind-the-scenes analysis of the Disney film is incredibly informative, tackling every instance when someone might ask, “ Hey, how did they manage to film that? ” It also touches upon the history of the special effects industry, something that deserves a little extra appreciation as CGI takes over every corner of movie-making.

Watch time : 41:28

The Failure of Victorious

YouTuber Quinton Reviews is dedicated to his craft, and I thank him for it. As you’ve certainly caught on to by now, you truly do not need to know anything about the show Victorious to enjoy an hours-long video essay that digs into it. What makes this video stand out is the sheer amount of content that this YouTuber both consumed and then created for us. Part of the video length—a whopping five hours—is due to the fact that every single episode of the Nickelodeon show is dissected. Another reason for the length is all the care that Quinton Reviews puts into providing context. And the context is what made me stick around: the failures of TV networks, the psychological dangers of working as child stars, and the questionable adult jokes that were broadcast to young audiences…if you’re at all interested in tainting your memory of hit Nickelodeon shows, this video is for you.

Watch time : 5:34:58 ( And that’s just part one. Strap in! )

Why Anime is for Black People

In this video Travis goes through the history of the “hip hop x anime” phenomenon, in which East Asian media permeates Black culture (and vice versa, as he hints at near the end). Although I am (1) not Black and (2) not an avid anime fan, I first clicked on this video because I’m a fan of comedian and writer Yedoye Travis. And yet—big shocker—I was immediately engrossed with the subject matter, despite having no context heading into it. Once you finish watching this video, be sure to check out Megan Thee Stallion’s interview about her connection to anime .

I haven’t run this part by my editor yet, but now would be a prime time to plug Lifehacker Editor-in-Chief Jordan Calhoun’s book, Piccolo Is Black: A Memoir of Race, Religion, and Pop Culture . Just saying.

Watch time : 18:34 (basically nothing in the world of video essays, especially compared to the five hours of Victorious content I binged earlier)

Efficiency in Comedy: The Office vs. Friends

I’m rounding out this list on a note of personal sentimentality. This is one of the first video essays that got me hooked on the format, mostly because I had followed creator Drew Gooden to YouTube after his stardom on Vine (RIP). This video is one of his most popular, combining comedy and math to pit two of the most popular sitcoms of all time in a joke-for-joke battle.

Gooden in particular stands out as someone who excels as both an earnest comic and a thoughtful critic of comedy. I appreciate his perspective as someone who knows what it’s like to work for a laugh and wants to get to the bottom of why something is or isn’t funny. This isn’t even one of Gooden’s best videos (I actually think his take on the parallels between Community and Arrested Development has a much stronger argument), but it’s a great example of the sort of perspective best situated to make video essays in the first place. Because what makes all these video essays so compelling is often the personality behind the argument. These aren’t investigative journalists or professional critics. They’re YouTubers. Really smart YouTubers, but still: These videos are born out of everyday people who simply have something to say.

I believe the modern YouTube video essay is uniquely situated to put cultural critique back into the hands of the average consumer—but only if that consumer is willing to put in the work to become a creator themselves.

Watch time : 17:36

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The best video essays of 2023

Get smarter with your entertainment

by Daniel Schindel

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Looking at the year’s notable video essays, many grapple with issues at the heart of contemporary media itself. There are dissections of video-playing tools, exposés of how corporations restrict access, contrasts between tropes and reality, and thorough investigations of trends in plagiarism and/or fabrication. As the essay landscape refines, it seems to peer inward as much as out.

On the making of this list: I’ve been trying to stay up to date on video essays for a while, and have been contributing to lists and/or voting in polls about the best videos made each year since 2018. Over this time, doing these kinds of roundups has gotten exponentially more difficult. As YouTube has grown to become a mega-business hosting powerful creators (part of the general trend of social media video sites becoming the new primary forum for cultural influence), I’ve seen essayists I once thought of as niche accrue follower counts in the millions. It’s been surreal. For this year’s list, I tried to shake things up by keeping the essayists who have appeared in previous editions to a minimum, along with the usual considerations about incorporating a diversity of creator backgrounds and video style. Once again, the videos are presented simply in order of publishing date.

[Also, I’m going to preface this with a mega mea culpa: It was absolute malpractice of me to not include Platformer Toolkit by Game Maker’s Toolkit in the best video essays of 2022 list . I don’t have a good excuse, either; I just straight up missed the essay at the time it came out, and then overlooked it during my catch-up phase at the end of the year. But an essay about game design that instructs you on its ideas by letting you actively engage with them through interactivity feels like a breakthrough in the form.]

Practices of Viewing by Johannes Binotto

Johannes Binotto is a Swiss researcher and lecturer who has been adding to his “Practices of Viewing” series for several years now, and every installment preceding 2023’s videos, “Ending” and “Description,” is well worth checking out. With each essay, Binotto examines a specific element of the media viewing interface, and how they affect an audience’s engagement with it. Some subjects, like fast-forwarding, pausing, or muting, may seem like obvious touchstones, while others, like sleep, are more out-there approaches to the conversation.

A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek

This technically debuted last year, making the rounds at film festivals, but it was made available online this past spring, so I’m including it here. A History of the World According to Getty Images is a great example of a work embedding its own ethos into its construction. Misek, another academic, is scrutinizing how for-profit companies (specifically Getty Images) mediate information that’s supposed to be available for all. In practice, a great deal of visual material that’s technically in the public domain can only be accessed in decent quality by paying an archive like Getty. Misek circumvents this by paying the fee to use select footage in this essay and then making this essay itself available for anyone to cite and clip from, putting that footage out into the world for real.

The Faces of Black Conservatism by F.D Signifier

I feel that video essays that consist mainly of the creator talking directly into a camera stretch the definition of the term – to me, the best cinematic and argumentative potential of the form lies in the power of editing. F.D Signifier’s contrast between fictional depictions of Black conservatives and the reality of how they appear across media exemplifies is what sets him apart in this genre: not just the depth of his thought (though it is considerable), but also the playful ways in which he presents the objects of his discussion. The running gag here in which he films himself holding hairstyling tools over the heads of various people on his screen had me laughing harder with each appearance.

Games That Don’t Fake the Space by Jacob Geller/Why We Can’t Stop Mapping Elden Ring by Ren or Raven

I don’t actually think this is the best essay Jacob Geller released this year (that would be either “Games that Aren’t Games” or “How Can We Bear to Throw Anything Away?” ), but it pairs so incredibly well with Renata Price’s essay (an impressive video debut building on her experience as a games critic) that it felt more appropriate to present them as a double feature. Both videos are sharp examinations of the ways that video games conjure physical space. Geller illuminates the shortcuts and tricks games often employ through examples of ones that, as the title suggests, don’t use such devices, while Price analyzes the impulses beneath what one could call the “cartographic instinct” in open-world games.

Why Do Brands Keep Doing These Crazy Influencer Trips?? by Mina Le

It’s been encouraging in recent years to see Le grow more confident in her mixing of media in her videos on fashion and film/television. You might remember the controversy around Shein granting influencers a limited hangout in a clothing factory this past summer. Le contextualizes this story by delving into the wider, supremely odd world of sponsored tours. If you watch this on your phone, the transitions between Le speaking to the camera and the clips of TikToks and other videos and photos flow together in a manner not unlike how one would scroll a social media feed, creating queasy resonance between message and medium.

Feeling Cynical About Barbie by Broey Deschanel / The Plastic Feminism of Barbie by Verilybitchie

I present these two videos not as a contrarian attack on Barbie (a film I enjoyed), but to highlight the important role of considered critical voices that dissent against prevailing opinions. Both Maia Wyman and Verity Ritchie unpack the issues with a heavily corporate product attempting to capitalize on feminist sentiment. Ritchie emphasizes the history of Barbie the brand and how the movie fits into it, while Wyman reads more into the specifics of the film’s plot. Together these videos do a good job of elaborating on legendary critic Amy Taubin’s Barbie reaction : “It’s about a fucking doll !’”

TikTok Gave Me Autism: The Politics of Self Diagnosis by Alexander Avila

There’s a lot of social media discourse over who can and can’t — and should or shouldn’t — claim the label of “autistic.” As someone who’s struggled with both the logistics and appropriateness of sussing out whether I’m on the spectrum, this video hit me hard. There are parts that feel like they veer so far into philosophical query that they threaten to obfuscate rather than elucidate the subject, but the essay as a whole is undeniably compelling. Avila’s own confessed stake in the question of self-diagnosis is itself affecting. This is the most searingly personal video on this list, uniting self-inquiry with rigorous research.

Chaste/Unchaste by Maryam Tafakory

This years shortest entry is a deceptively simple interrogation of the concept of “chastity” as defined by Iranian censorship standards. Takafory is a veteran of the academic essay scene, and I’m delighted by the opportunity to present her work to a wider audience. The video’s text is minimal, and its visuals are simply a montage of clips from Iranian films, but the implicit question of propriety grips the viewer with each cut.

Journey to Epcot Center: A Symphonic History by Defunctland

This is the most boundary-pushing essay on this year’s list. Completely lacking commentary, it instead emphasizes visuals and reenactment in telling the story of how Disney’s Epcot park went from concept to realization over the decades. Kevin Perjurer also provides a detailed set of notes that are meant to be read along with watching the video, further demanding one’s full attention. This is a direct acknowledgement of how we use the internet, the windowed experience of browsing and watching videos. I don’t think everything works; many of the reenactments, while impressively professional, feel somewhat redundant. But I’d prefer a creator take big swings that result in a few flaws rather than play it safe, and I hope both Perjurer and others continue in such an experimental vein.

Plagiarism and You(Tube) by Hbomberguy

Harry Brewis is popular enough that he doesn’t need any boost, but even in the very brief period since this video’s release as of the time of writing, Plagiarism and You(Tube) has made seismic impact on the YouTuber scene . Does it need to be almost four hours long? Maybe not. Yet the sheer volume of evidence it pulls together to support various accusations of plagiarism does seem vital. The main focus of the piece, James Somerton, went into lockdown over the fairly comprehensive evidence presented against him (and has since attempted to apologize ). I’m seeing conversations flourish around the endemic problem of plagiarism on the internet and what is to be done about it, and a surge of creators recognizing and calling out others who have taken their work without credit. There’s a deeper issue at play here, which is that the growth of YouTube entertainment has come with a truly daunting mountain of crap content that nonetheless attracts views (and thus dollars).

On the subject of low quality standards on YouTube, beyond plagiarism, Todd in the Shadows’ recent exhaustive effort to fact-check various false claims Somerton has made in his work is a useful supplement to this video.

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Frames Cinema Journal

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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.

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Sensitive to Art & its Discontents

Five Video Essays to Watch in August

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This month’s video essay recommendations have some genuinely excellent filmmaking in the mix, from a “desktop horror” short to a video that manages to make competitive Tetris riveting. Works about “kid cities” and post-punk music round out this edition. Plus: Is making and/or consuming art effective activism? The answer may surprise you!

“The History of Tetris World Records” by Summoning Salt

The best storytellers make the unlikeliest scenes compelling. Tetris is one of the most elegantly simple of video games, but a community has cohered around it that’s remarkably complex, strategizing even its most granular elements, like the optimal way to tap the control pad. This video might be Summoning Salt’s best yet, visualizing statistics and data in exciting ways. In one scene, a broken record is represented by a pan across a bar graph of high scores, emphasizing how significant it is and making the sense of triumph visceral.

“Art Won’t Save Us from Capitalism” by Lily Alexandre

The title says it all. Alexandre analyzes the efficacy that artistic creation does — and more often doesn’t — have in real-world activism and affecting change. But that cynical-sounding summary belies the hope that Alexandre is trying to convey. What’s more interesting than this first inquiry is the natural follow-up of what art is “good for,” because it reveals the essential flaw of that kind of thinking. She posits that art is worth pursuing and consuming for its own pleasure.

“Kid Cities” by Defunctland

Before I watched this video, I was unfamiliar with the brief boom in theme parks built around letting children simulate the adult world, but now I wish I’d been able to visit one when I was a kid. A child could perform activities imitating jobs ranging from surgery to pizza delivery, and get in-park currency that could be spent on further amusements. Besides the history the video delves into, it explores the way that kids went beyond the parameters of these amusement parks to unwittingly replicate grown-up life even more closely. In interviews and news clips, we see them bemoan the frustrations of tight budgets, invent police corruption, and even figure out how to be a good defense lawyer. 

“Sticky” by Maria Hofmann and MUBI

Every year, the streaming service MUBI partners with the FILMADRID International Film Festival to produce a series of video essays. “ Sticky ” is the best of this year’s crop so far, described by creator Maria Hoffmann as a “horror desktop documentary .” By toggling different browser windows, some of which contain news and videos about the Mediterranean migrant crisis , while others simply show work apps or social media sites, Hofmann evokes the way that atrocity can perversely become part of the mundane background of daily life — just one more element of the constant feed of internet-mediated society.

“Post-Punk, Mark Fisher & Popular Modernism” by CCK Philosophy

Jonas Čeika’s videos about politics and philosophy often explore concepts by figures like Martin Heidegger or Gilles Deleuze through familiar forms of pop culture. His style is austere — it’s simply his calm narration over clips and images, deftly condensing a great deal of information. Here he explains the late Mark Fisher’s ideas about Modernist art by tracing the evolution of post-punk music. Čeika’s videos inspire viewers to read and learn more about his subject — not just to watch them as a substitute for real study. 

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Dan Schindel is a freelance writer and copy editor living in Brooklyn, and a former associate editor at Hyperallergic. His portfolio and links are here. More by Dan Schindel

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New video shows whereabouts of would-be Trump assassin before rally shooting

by ALEXX ALTMAN-DEVILBISS | The National Desk

BUTLER, Pa. (TND) — A new video has been released showing would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks strolling around the rally grounds in Butler, Pennsylvania a few hours before opening fire on the former president.

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Keisha Caine Bishop, Lyles' mother, sent in a video message congratulating him on his gold medal in the men's 100m final and the bronze medal in the men's 200m final at the 2024 Olympics.

"I'm so proud of you, and I'm even more so proud of you for getting out of your comfort zone," Caine Bishop said. "And I'm proud of you for using your platform and being transparent about overcoming the adversities of ADD, dyslexia, anxiety and clinical depression."

"Thank you so much for sharing that with people, and let's continue to make great things happen, especially through your nonprofit, and getting the word out to the youth that it's okay not to be okay sometimes," she added. "Can't wait for LA 2028, let's go win some more medals!"

Lyles, 27, beamed as he watched the video from his mom play, and TODAY's Craig Melvin admitted he almost got a little teary watching the clip.

"And it sounds like she just announced your intentions to be in Los Angeles," Craig said.

"Oh, that was never a secret," Lyles responded with a grin.

When asked about the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane, Australia, Lyles replied: "For sure. I don't see a reason not to."

TODAY's Sheinelle Jones described Caine Bishop as one of her "favorite people ever," and recently spoke to the mother of three in June about her son's track and field career.

"That is insane," she replied when Sheinelle said Lyles is a six-time world champion.

And he got it from his parents — Caine Bishop was a 10-time NCAA all-American, and his dad, Kevin Lyles, medaled in the 1995 world championships.

Lyles had a whirlwind competition in Paris, winning the men's 100m final before being diagnosed with Covid-19 — and running in the men's 200m final anyway. He crossed the finish line third and later collapsed on the track.

The sprinter explained his reasoning on why he decided to compete with Covid-19 .

"In my head, as a competitor and a racer, if the opportunity's there, I'm gonna take it," he said. "LA's not promised. The next year is not promised -- God forbid, injury, something could happen."

After getting checked out by medical personnel, he was whisked away in a wheelchair — but came back for the medal ceremony in a mask.

"I was wearing a mask throughout the whole time until we actually got on to the track, even for the medal ceremony, we made sure that we informed not only the athletes, but the people who were giving the medals and even asking if this is okay," Lyles said.

"And they were like, 'Yeah, we'll allow it, we make special, you know, situations, to make sure that everybody is aware and stays safe,'" he continued.

Anna Kaplan is a news and trending reporter for TODAY.com.

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A 12-Minute Show, Played Only Once, Just Might Live Forever

Every summer, hundreds of college-age musicians spend countless hours — and their own money — pursuing a single goal: the drum corps world championship.

Carrying on a tradition that stretches back to the 1920s, the Bluecoats Drum and Bugle Corps from Canton, Ohio, is a top drum corps competitor. Credit...

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By Chris Almeida

Photographs and Video by Jon Cherry

• Aug. 21, 2024 Updated 7:16 a.m. ET

The 159 members of the Bluecoats Drum and Bugle Corps are on the field. Sixty-four of them are standing on a fire-engine-red platform that fills the space between the hash marks and the 40-yard lines. They are dressed in white jumpsuits adorned with red lines.

Members of the color guard are spread across the field from one 10-yard line to the other. They are all carrying white mock rifles, which they toss high into the air and then catch just as horns play their first notes, a major chord. The sound is picked up by microphones and runs through a digital effect. It hovers in the air for six seconds. The horn players hit the chord six more times as they move together, confined by the platform. Each time the chord comes back more quickly.

Then they are off the platform and moving. The trumpets snake toward the front sideline. The drums are finally playing. The opening song is taking shape — it’s “Foreplay” by Boston, a spinning organ number that is already musically ambitious when played by a stationary rock band. The notes from the organist’s left hand are coming through the tubas. This isn’t stiff. It has some drive. The group is really blowing now. It’s loud. Its members spread 60 yards wide. Then they play that same major chord again three times. There is a moment for the crowd to whoop.

This is modern drum corps. It is a competition for mostly college-age students, but the groups are not affiliated with any schools. When they are in season, the corps consume the lives of their members — perfecting a single performance, and then continuing to drill it until it is somewhere beyond perfection. Rehearsals last up to 12 hours a day, and intense tours dominate the performers’ lives in July before culminating in a world championship in Indianapolis.

Jon Cherry for The New York Times

Drum corps has existed in a world of its own for decades.

It has its own versions of dynasties, celebrities and stars that would be unrecognizable to the mainstream world.

And it is, decidedly, not for the faint of heart.

A drum corps show usually takes about 12 minutes and may last no longer than 13. Every show has a title, announced over a loudspeaker before each performance. Themes vary from abstract and serious to campy and smack-you-in-the-face literal.

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Stephen Colbert Transforms into Hot Dog Vendor Donny Franks at DNC

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert

• Colbert Mocks Trump’s Recycled Insults & Addresses JD Vance Sex Rumors
• Colbert Mocks Fox News Attacks on Kamala Harris in ‘Late Show’ Monologue

Stephen Colbert has reprised his alter ego, Donny Franks, for the Democratic National Convention, which officially kicks off today, Monday, August 19, at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois.

Franks is an enthusiastic hot dog vendor, who Colbert first played in a 2016 sketch on The Late Show . Donned in a shaggy brown wig, goatee, sunglasses, and a Chicago Bulls baseball cap, Franks took to the site of the DNC on Sunday, August 18, where he surprised the various political figures preparing for this week’s event.

In the photos from the event, Colbert’s character is seen handing out hot dogs, hot dog water, and t-shirts to the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Chair of the Democratic National Committee Jamie Harrison.

The t-shirts featured slogans supporting Vice President Kamala Harris in her bid to become the first-ever female president. One shirt included a picture of Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, with the slogan, “Do Dougs, Not Drugs.”

Stephen Colbert speaks with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Another shirt featured a photo of Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz , and the catchphrase, “Ballz to the Walz.”

Chair of the Democratic National Committee Jamie Harrison and Stephen Colbert; Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Colbert’s Donny Franks first appeared on The Late Show in September 2016 when he went undercover and sold hot dogs at a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field. In the clip, he’s seen handing out weiners to fans and Cubs players before getting let go by former Cubs manager Joe Maddon.

Stephen Colbert and Chair of the Democratic National Committee Jamie Harrison; Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

This week, Colbert will be taping The Late Show live at Chicago’s Auditorium Theater to cover the DNC. He will be joined on Monday’s show by former First Lady Hillary Clinton and Veep alum Julia Louis-Dreyfus .

How to Watch the 2024 DNC & What to Expect

Other guests set to appear on the late-night show this week include House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi , Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg , and Chance the Rapper .

Thursday’s guests have yet to be announced.

Colbert announced the upcoming Chicago shows back in April, saying in a statement, “I am very excited to broadcast from the beautiful Auditorium. I started my career in Chicago… let’s see if I can end it there.”

The late-night host covered the Republican National Convention from the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City.

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Taylor Swift and King Charles III Both Meet With Survivors of the Southport Stabbing

Twenty days after a stabbing attack killed three girls at a Taylor Swift –themed dance class, the pop star met with a few of the survivors before her Sunday night Eras Tour show at Wembley Stadium in London. Sami Foster, a Southport mother, posted photos of her two daughters with Swift to her TikTok account . Swift’s mother, Andrea Swift, was also photographed with the girls. Variety reports that other survivors have had the opportunity to meet with Swift.

In the days after the July 29 attack, Swift shared a statement on Instagram expressing her emotions about the event. “The horror of yesterday's attack in Southport is washing over me continuously, and I'm just completely in shock,” she wrote. “I am at a complete loss for how to ever convey my sympathies to these families.” According to The Sun , Swift privately reached out to the families of Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice Aguiar, and Bebe King, the three girls who lost their lives during the attack. Nine other surviving victims were treated by emergency services, and the last one was released from the hospital 10 days later.

On Tuesday, King Charles III traveled to Merseyside to meet with victims and first responders of the attack. He viewed a public memorial to Stancombe, Aguiar, and King at Atkinson Art Centre before speaking to survivors of the attack and their loved ones in a private meeting at Southport Town Hall. He also signed a condolence book for the affected families near the building’s entrance. Afterward, he traveled to Southport Community Fire Station, where he spoke with local faith leaders and emergency services members who were on the scene that day.

One of the victims, 63-year-old John Hayes told BBC News about speaking to the king during the meeting. “It was lovely to meet him. I found him quite engaging, quite easy to talk to," said Hayes, who sustained a wound to the leg while trying to fight off the attacker. “I think he only arrived in Balmoral yesterday, so for him to come all the way to Southport today to see people is very kind of him…and I’m sure everybody who met him got a lift from that.”

Following the July 29 attack, Prince William and Kate Middleton also sent a message of condolences to the victims. “We send our love, thoughts and prayers to all those involved in this horrid and heinous attack,” they continued. “Thank you also to the emergency responders who, despite being met with the most horrific scenes, demonstrated compassion and professionalism when your community needed you most.”

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Erin Vanderhoof

Staff writer, royal watch.

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