For the past several years, I have taught a course at Middlebury College on producing video essays – something Catherine Grant and I, at the 2012 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, identified as the discipline’s emergent scholarly form.  The essential question faced in the production of the scholarly video is not technological, but conceptual.  This question, which I have elaborated elsewhere, is how to develop a rhetoric that ‘matches’ a mode of presentation consisting of moving images and sounds – a mode that is therefore as much poetic as it is explanatory. 

As I have written, most video essays ‘are still very much language based.  Or more correctly, we could say that [they] reside comfortably within the explanatory mode, and it is language in that mode (spoken and written) that guides it.  Images and sounds – even when carefully and creatively manipulated in support of an argument – are subordinated to explanatory language’ (Keathley, 2011: 180-181).  By contrast, there are video essays that ‘resist a commitment to the explanatory mode, allowing it to surface only intermittently, and they employ language sparingly, and even then as only one, unprivileged component’ (181).  Often in such more poetical works, ‘we are asked first to experience the arrangement of images and sounds before we understand them’ (182).  In this way, these videos effectively borrow the power of those very qualities that comprise their objects of study.  Instead of explaining some critical insight about a film, these videos, at their most effective and inventive, perform it.

Because the term ‘essay’ is synonymous with the explanatory, and thus carries with it certain assumptions and expectations, I have decided that it is perhaps best to abandon the use of ‘essay’ in the description of these works.  Indeed, part of the task of this course, in imagining what forms the scholarly video can take, is to break free of a simple analogy (it’s like an essay, only it uses images and sounds) and, through experimentation, help the scholarly video find or invent its own forms.

I have taken up teaching this class for several reasons.  First, designing a syllabus – selecting readings and devising assignments – has forced me to articulate very concretely certain ideas I have about the scholarly video, as well as given me a formal context that challenges me to develop new ideas.  The need to lay a theoretical foundation for why and how film scholars should undertake this media project is a challenge, but an essential one.  As scholars, we have to offer such justification for our research, so that we can demonstrate to our colleagues why such work is worthy.  But, of course, with vanguard work such as this, the need for such a scholarly rationale is more acute.  While we are currently seeing a groundswell of support for developments in the ‘digital humanities’, the assumption is that this scholarship will reside comfortably within the sanctioned explanatory mode.  Work that deviates from this mode requires especial justification. 

Second, I teach this course because I can.  I have support from my department in developing new courses; moreover, several of us in Middlebury’s Film and Media Culture Department (especially my colleagues Jason Mittell and Louisa Stein) are interested in exploring the ways in which scholarship is being transformed in the digital age.  This means not just online journals, but scholarship composed and presented in a multi-media form.  We all look for ways to incorporate media production assignments of various kinds into our classes.  Finally, we have exceptional media production facilities at Middlebury, along with a full time staff member to support courses involving any kind of media production.  Importantly, we all firmly believe that consideration of this development in the humanities is not something restricted to professional academics.  Students are well poised to contribute to this project in valuable ways.  Since so many students today have basic video and computer skills, they are not intimidated by the technology and can focus on the conceptual challenges.  Further, students are familiar with a variety of multi-media works that might be described as non-scholarly or quasi-scholarly – mash-ups, remixes, etc. – and many of the formal strategies used in these works are easily adaptable to forms where a ‘knowledge effect’ is more urgent.

Let me explain how the course is organized.  We begin with a set of readings to offer conceptual grounding.  First, we read selections from Walter Ong’s Orality & Literacy, which provides a solid general foundation for the specific task we will undertake.  Ong’s argument is that the single most important technological development in human history has been the development of alphabetic writing.  This shift from oral to alphabetic culture resulted in nothing less than a transformation in the definition of what we call ‘thinking’, and importantly, a development of new forms in which such thinking would be cast.   Ong maintains that we are currently living through the second such monumental shift, from the alphabetic to the electronic (or digital) culture.  This reading places the course’s agenda squarely within the broad concerns of ‘grammatology’ – that is, the history and theory of Writing, or (to put it another way) the impact of technology on the production and representation of (what we call) ‘knowledge’.

Next, we turn to something more recent and more disciplinarily specific: Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second, which forcefully articulates the positive effects DVD technology has had on film study.  With features like freeze-frame, scan, slow motion, as well as random access of scenes and infinite replayability, DVDs ‘have opened up new ways of seeing old movies’ (8).  Mulvey explains that, in traditional film analysis, ‘the flow of a scene is halted and extracted from the wider flow of narrative development; the scene is broken down into shots and selected frames and further subjected to delay, to repetition and return.  In the course of this process, hitherto unexpected meanings can be found hidden in the sequences, as it were, deferred to a point of time in the future when the critic’s desire may unearth them’.  But the spread of digital technologies has made this kind of fragmentation of film much easier to put into practice – and ‘In this context, textual analysis ceases to be a restricted academic practice and returns, perhaps to its origins as a work of cinephilia, of love of the cinema’ (144). 

The emotional motivation for analysis that Mulvey describes here is essential, especially for students, who are not typically asked to engage so intimately with their objects of study, but rather to keep them at a ‘critical distance’.  Further, while she does not dwell on it, Mulvey acknowledges the potential for representing our ‘analysis’ in a way that is appropriate both to the fetishistic desire that has motivated it, and to the digital technology that enabled it and into which it will be cast.  ‘There is a temptation’ she writes, ‘to detach a privileged sequence from its narrative armature.  This is a gesture that dismisses narrative and context and brings the cinephile’s love of Hollywood movies into touch with the counter-cinema of the avant-garde’ (145).  Indeed, the scholarly videos we seek to produce in these classes sometimes resemble the art-about-cinema from conceptual artists like Douglas Gordon, Mark Lewis, and Cindy Bernard.

Next, at a time when digital technologies seem linked exclusively with special effects and illusion, I want to remind students of film’s other power: its intimate relationship with reality, its ability to reveal the real world and to stand as a record of it.  Mulvey also makes this point quite clearly: DVD technology re-facilitates our access to this essential filmic property.  So we read some essential André Bazin – the “Ontology” essay, of course, and as commentary, Dudley Andrew’s recent What Cinema Is! , particularly for its emphasis on the role of negative and imaginary values in Bazin’s theory of cinema.  In a wonderful passage contrasting Bazin’s and Sartre’s respective interests in film, Andrew explains, ‘Neither Bazin nor Sartre cares about the photograph as object; the analogon is what interests them both, but the analogon points in two different directions and these men diverge in how they discuss it.  Sartre lifts it instantly toward the imagination, where it triggers associations in a manner distinct from other types of image-consciousness.  Bazin goes in the other direction, toward the photo’s source, characterizing how the photo’s analogon leads us back to the world from which it was ripped.  For Sartre, the photograph quickly fades into absence to the extent that it succeeds in getting us to attend to the analogon, which in turn is consumed by the freewheeling imagination where memory, emotion, and other images come into play.  Bazin, less interested in the freedom of the imagination, focuses on the power of the photograph to amplify our perception, ‘teaching us’ what our eyes alone would not have noticed’ (13).

To give way to the imaginary or to focus on the concrete?  Extending either approach too far (far enough?) leads inevitably to the other – appropriate when considering the cinema, which gives us precisely this paradox: fictions made out of reality.  This entanglement is the focus of much of our next reading, Robert B Ray’s The ABCs of Classic Hollywood.  Ray’s book consists of dozens of alphabetized short entries on four films: Grand Hotel, The Maltese Falcon, The Philadelphia Story, Meet Me in St Louis.  Each entry isolates some detail (analogon) of the film in question (a prop, a star, a camera movement) – ‘the isolated objects and moments potentially obscured by a film’s momentum’ (xix) – and considers how it contributes to the film’s construction of its meanings and effects.  At first, the book seems to follow the Bazinian approach, following the concrete detail back to the world; but at other times it follows imaginative associations of memory and emotion.  Indeed, many of these entries emphasize the way that the close analysis afforded by DVD technology pulls into relief the cinema’s extraordinary mixture fiction and reality. 

For example, Ray often considers the reality that serves as a backdrop for the film’s fiction – The Maltese Falcon is set in San Francisco, a real American city with real street names, a real history – and imagines more intersections between the real world and the world of the film’s fiction than we are given.  An entry on Meet Me in St Louis (‘Fair’), for example, considers in detail some of the sordid goings-on around the fringes of the historical 1904 World’s Fair.  Did the film’s Smith family know about this dark underbelly of the fair’s celebration of progress?  Another entry (‘Violinist’) wonders whether T. S. Eliot is on board the streetcar during the famous ‘Trolley Song’ number.  After all, Eliot was from St Louis, and was exactly the same age as Esther, the character played by Judy Garland.  The ABCs is inconceivable without the benefits of DVD technology, for it depends on its special digital features to undertake detailed investigations.  Ray does an even more convincing job than Mulvey of actually demonstrating how DVD technology has changed film study, changing also the rhetorical form of in which scholarship is offered.  My course’s first readings lay out the theoretical foundation for the task at hand, while Ray’s book most effectively shows the potential for an alternative rhetorical approach. 

In addition to these readings, we consider other alternatives in the form of recent video essay work – by Tag Gallagher on several Criterion DVDs, plus examples by Catherine Grant, Eric Faden, Matt Zoller Seitz, Kevin Lee, Jim Emerson, and others.  The goal we set is to produce work that engages with the poetic potential of the technology, but that also has an effect of knowledge.  So then we turn to making…

But while the students’ conceptual grounding is now solid, they still need a focused and concrete set of instructions for making their own work.  I take two steps here.  First, I select a single film for the entire class to work on – one time it was The Bad and the Beautiful, another time it was In a Lonely Place (both films about Hollywood filmmaking).  Thus, the class might be described as quasi-collaborative.  Everyone working on a single film allows a measure of collaboration, while still giving individual students control over their own projects.  We follow a workshop model: students present ideas, then show work in progress, and because everyone else in the class knows the film well, they can offer more useful feedback than if they weren’t so familiar with the film a student was working on.  For some students, seeing an example of a successful project underway is the key stimulant to getting them to understand the assignment and get started on their own imaginative work.

Second, because we are all working on one film, and because we want to collect the video essays as a product of the class collaboration, we turn to a conventional form: the ‘Bonus DVD’.  The collected scholarly videos we produce stand as our own alternative Bonus DVD.  Further, having the standard Bonus DVD as a model – with its various generic forms – is also helpful, as students often find it easiest to take an existing genre formula and rework it.  Here are two examples, both of which effectively rework a common Bonus DVD feature.

Here is Hannah Epstein’s profile of director Nicholas Ray, constructed entirely out of clips from his films, in which the characters seem to be talking about their director [http://vimeo.com/41302561].  This piece was stimulated the student’s interest in what she had read about Ray, and following the conventional critical approach of illuminating the ways in which the work reflects the artist, she sought some alternative form of showing what the director’s films said about him. 

Another common bonus feature is the motion picture trailer.  The trailer that Nora Fiore created requires some contextualization.  In a Lonely Place is the story of Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart), a Hollywood screenwriter with a reputation for being ‘difficult’.  As the film begins, he meets his agent at some Hollywood watering hole, and the agent reports that he has secured a job for Dix: adapting a novel, the sudser Althea Bruce.  Dix leaves the book with the bar’s hat-check girl, Mildred Atkinson, who proceeds to become absorbed in it.  When he departs, Dix asks her to come to his apartment and tell him the story of the book (in order to spare him the ordeal of having to actually read it).  In a striking scene, the young woman recounts the story to him with great dramatic emphasis.  Fiore decided to construct a trailer for this unmade film, Althea Bruce.  She scoured dozens of 1940s movie trailers on Youtube, settling ultimately on Joan Crawford as the star to play the title character, and she let Mildred’s words guide the preview [http://vimeo.com/41302706].

Working on The Bad and the Beautiful, Simran Bhalla re-read one of the film’s most famous scenes:  actress Gloria Lorrison’s (Lana Turner) hysterical breakdown, driving her car in a rainstorm at night, after she has discovered that producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) has betrayed her with another woman.  Bhalla lays over the scene an audio recording of New York poet Frank O’Hara reading his ‘Poem’ (commonly known as ‘Lana Turner Has Collapsed’) in order to highlight, as she has put it, ‘our simultaneous love and derision for Hollywood and celebrity’. [http://vimeo.com/41302248]

I am grateful to all the students who have participated in these classes.  They have been, for me, a most valuable and stimulating group of collaborators.

Bibliography:

Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

André Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: caboose, 2009).

Christian Keathley, ‘La Caméra-stylo: Notes on video criticism and cinephilia’, in The Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan (New York: Routledge, 2011).

Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).

Robert B Ray, The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Copyright:

Frames # 1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital?, 2012-07-02, this article © Christian Keathley

The Post Card – Adaptation from Heraclitus Pictures on Vimeo.

The above video is research in progress for the fourth long format film in the series ‘Ontological Narratives’ which will take as its starting point Jacques Derrida’s book  La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà / The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1) (in part, a mock epistolary novel).

In this research film, the question of adaptation, representation and deconstruction is explored. Rather than seeking a way to ‘represent’ the narrative that exists within the novel my proposal is to not ‘create’ a representation at all but to adopt others’ representations of the narrative(s) that exist(s) within The Post Card with its themes of love, infidelity, writing.

The project is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and is a collaboration with Professor Martin McQuillan

‘Ontological Narratives I – IV’ is a series of films about ways of being through philosophical ideas. This research project is actively concerned with enriching and complicating practice-based inquiry by adapting a philosophical text into a film in order to perform and re-inscribe the philosophical problems presented by that text. I am currently working on the fourth film in the series, inspired by the ‘Envois’ section of Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card.

Derrida’s work has been of interest in both film studies (2) and the visual arts. (3) Two documentaries have been produced that feature Derrida, Derrida, dir. Kofman and Dick, 2003 and Derrida d’ailleurs, dir. Fathy, 1999. (4) There is also Ken McMullen’s beautiful Ghost Dance (1983) in which Derrida appears as a kind of character. In contrast, ‘Ontological Narratives IV’ takes ideas of Derrida as its point of departure for a consideration of film making and epistemology and, like my previous films on Plato (A mind’s eye, dir. Callaghan 2009) and Heidegger (Thrownness, dir. Callaghan, 2004), may not explicitly feature their philosophical origin.

The ‘Envois’ section of The Post Card is written as a series of love letters from the narrator to an unnamed lover. The letters recount the story of their love affair alongside reflections upon the history of the post and on psycho-analysis. It contains references to real people within the academic world in which it is set and to places; Oxford, Paris and Yale. The opportunity for a realistic presentation of a film narrative is presented through the narrative that exists in the ‘Envois’.  However one of our questions in producing a creative film work, is grappling with the relation between representation, adaptation and deconstruction. (5)

To answer this we have been producing digital video sketches that include interviews, video essays and animation.  In creating “Adaptation” a short mash up of films set to Monteverdi, I was exploring the possibility of not creating an original representation at all. That is, not to write and produce a narrative film with actors, locations, and mise en scene as I usually do, but to adopt representations provided by existing films that deal with aspects of Derrida’s text, broadly love and infidelity. The films had to be made and set in France or the US during the period of the lovers’ correspondence from 1977 to 1979. Working with six to seven French films produced during that period, the clips are cut together to create narrative episodes such as the writing and receiving of letters, clandestine meetings or trips away. The mash up engenders deconstructive practices through creating unexpected relations between the clips and the films, and in turn creates new readings of the material and by extension the book.

This clip is one of four I have produced and distributed online. These are essential to the research journey, functioning as both documentation and a communication tool when enlisting support and interest. The online environment facilitates rapid feedback and reaction, and, with Web 2.0 technologies, allows for wide dissemination well beyond academia.

We currently have a script with characters and plot, and are undertaking the unenviable task of casting and pre-production. The story we are creating is not strictly that of The Post Card, but functions as a counter signature to the text.  It will be set in academia with the main character, a Professor of Literature researching The Post Card as his life begins to reflect the events of the book. “Adaptation” will, with careful placement, feature in the final film ironically, as a mash up by a student. We believe that Derrida’s The Post Card is both a deconstruction of representation, and a love story about representation. This aporia is the very space of our research.

Joanna Callaghan

A filmic counter signature to Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK.

Produced by Heraclitus Pictures

Also see The Post Card – Deconstructive Film

Frames # 1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital? 2012-07-02, this article © Joanna Callaghan

I’ve always been an early adopter when it comes to the online world. I had my own web page sometime in the mid to late 1990s and I opened a Twitter account in 2007. Back then hardly anybody else had one so I gave up after just one tweet (“not doing much. fooling around with my computer, listening to leonard cohen”). But since 2009 I’m back, tweeting about film. I of course began blogging too but uncustomarily late, not until 2005, but I’ve kept on blogging ever since. Occasionally I’ve had three or four differently themed blogs simultaneously but for now my focus is on film. Now I’m also a founding editor of Frames Cinema Journal, with its inaugural issue devoted to digital film and moving image studies. This feels like a logical progression. Below, I’d like to use my experiences in order to discuss the virtues of blogging, tweeting and online publishing. I’d also like to highlight some threats concerning the well-being of the Internet.

In October 2009, Ian Sample wrote a review in the Guardian of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book What the Dog Saw. Towards the end of the, positive, review Sample wrote:

There is nothing new in this new book, but that is clear from the start. What is less clear is that all the pieces are available free of charge from Gladwell’s own website. If you like, you can go there and read the original New Yorker articles, complete with beautiful layouts and cartoons. You can even print them out and staple them together using an industrial stapler from the stationery cupboard at work. A trial run suggests that this could occupy an idle lunchtime.

Gladwell’s publisher no doubt paid a lot of money to repackage his free stories and sell them on for a tidy profit. It is a scenario that has the makings of a Gladwellian dilemma. Why buy the book if the content is free? And what does that say about me? Is the feeling of being mugged by the publisher trumped by the virtue of convenience. (1)

Why read it in book form, Sample asked, when it is already available freely online. Why indeed?

There has long been a debate as to whether the Internet is good enough for the publication of serious scholarly research. Should we not devote ourselves to non-virtual books and journals instead, and encourage our students to stay offline and only hang out in real libraries? I’ve always had problems with that approach, and with the dichotomy between words printed on paper and digital words. In the old days of the public Internet, say the early 1990s, this might have been an understandable, even defensible, stand. Nowadays it could be argued that the Internet is just as valid as the library and that by not using it scholars and students are in fact missing out on important readings.

For one thing, as Sample pointed out, the very same items that are available on paper might be available online. Besides Gladwell, many writers and scholars have their own websites, where most, or all, of their writing is freely available, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum. But there is also the case of scholars who write exclusively for the web, and whose material will only be available online, for example, those giants of cinema studies, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. They blog extensively and film scholars who don’t read their blog miss out on an extraordinary wealth of knowledge, analysis and reflexion. But also, as in the model that Sample mentions above, Bordwell and Thompson have experimented with allowing their readers to access material online, for free, that is also being published and sold, expensively, in the traditional book format. (2)

The Bordwell and Thompson example leads us to the second invaluable example of the importance to film studies of open access, online publishing, namely blogging. Film blogs can serve three important purposes:

1 – As with Bordwell/Thompson’s blog, they provide important historical and theoretical information and context, much as any offline essay, book or article.

2 – They provide a channel, an outlet, for the many critics and writers, underemployed or let go from their regular jobs in print media, where downsizing is the name of the game.

3 – They allow readers to come up close and personal with the critics and scholars in a way that was previously not all that easy or even possible.

Essential in this respect is Dave Kehr’s blog. Kehr is a leading critic/historian and his blog has some 10 000 regular visitors. What Kehr does it not so much write on the blog himself, but rather he provides a free forum for film folk. Among those that keep up a daily conversation at his blog are some of the world’s most distinguished writers, critics, filmmakers, scholars and film historians, as well as distributors. Kehr calls his blog “reports from the lost continent of cinephilia”, and it is partly a waterhole for film enthusiasts, but, with the high standard of the discussions and the collective knowledge, you might get more up-to-date insights into the current trends in film studies than anywhere else.

So Kehr’s blog is different from Bordwell/Thompson’s, because theirs is ‘closed’, not open for comments or interaction. It is only the masters’ voice that gets heard. So, in their two different ways, these two blogs show two different ways of using the form. One, Bordwell and Thompson’s, in writing very long and complex texts, with no interaction. The other, Kehr’s, in primarily providing a place for debates among his readers/commentators. In a way Bordwell/Thompson’s blog use old media principles in a new media setting, and is therefore also an example of how distinctions between new and old media are often narrow-minded and simplistic.

A third version of film studies blogging is my own. My entries are not as lengthy and academic as Bordwell’s or Thompson’s, and there’s no on-going discussion between readers as at Kehr’s, just the occasional contribution from a commenter. I blog for three reasons. Because I love to write, because I want to contribute to evolving research into film history and because it is a good way of networking and acquiring scholarly visibility. I have readers all over the world, and the number of daily visitors is constantly growing. I always feel excited when I see that somebody faraway in the world has read something of mine or when I receive the occasional message from someone asking for advice, or thanking me for having written about something that they had been wondering about. It makes writing on the blog worthwhile. It also gives me a way of telling the world about my research, so if there is somebody in, say, Pakistan who is interested in the same things as I am, we can meet this way, and share ideas and insights.

But the blog is one of three parts of my online presence. As I mentioned I also use Twitter and Facebook, all using the same name (Fredrik on Film) and the same profile photo (a still from Antonioni’s L’elisse (1962), to emphasise that they are related. On these platforms there’s considerably more interaction with my readers, and I use both places to link to my own blog post but also to other blogs, reviews or essays, or YouTube-clips. This is also a place where I can directly engage with other tweeters, be they students, critics, academics or just about anybody who’s enthusiastic about films. I get more intellectual stimulus through this channel than from my blog, which is more a case of me putting my ideas out there (and hopefully providing intellectual stimulus for somebody else).

I have more followers on Twitter than on Facebook and that’s what I use the most. The benefits of Twitter are that it is more direct, easier to use and more immediately accessible to the wider world. But they all work well together. For example, not only do I link to my latest blog posts on Twitter, a box on my blog has my latest tweets as well, so they both generate traffic for each other.

So far so exciting.  But I, and others, see some dangers ahead, for the kinds of blogging I describe above, as well as for open access in general, and even the Internet. The threats could be divided in to three categories: app-ification, costs and censorship.

With smartphones before and tablet computers now leading the way, the uses of application software, apps, for any kind of activity you might want to indulge in on the internet is increasing. These apps will change the web as we now know it, shrink it, and perhaps make it a gated community. Web browsers such as IE, Firefox or Safari give us almost unlimited access to the Internet but apps do not. They will just take you to one specific location on the Internet. Instead of freely moving around, you will just go to the one place that you want, be it a newspaper or a online store, or a game. But those who haven’t got an app for their web presence, such as a little store or a film blogger, might very well lose out, in that less people will find them. With people no longer freely browsing, or even googling, as much, it is likely there will be less spontaneity and freedom in our online lives.

Another problem is the costs involved with having an on-line presence. It should be said that open access and open software, what might be called copyleft, as opposed to copyright, is never free, or at least not without costs. As the old saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In 2009 Chris Anderson came out with a book called Free, which was immediately criticised. The argument was that if he was ahead of the game with his previous book The Long Tail (from 2006), with Free he was half a step behind, that things were already becoming less free. One potential problem is that using open software might actually lead to greater costs for a company than if they had bought for example Microsoft’s products. This is partly because the company must still have people to create and maintain the software, and this might be more costly than relying on the structure and support provided by Microsoft. For a film blogger there are also costs involved of course, of both time and money, especially if you want your blog to look good. But for individuals, unless you’re a famous fashion blogger, it is hard to live on just blogging. In that sense blogging is still an amateur thing, for volunteers. How long they (we) will keep it up remains to be seen.

And then there is the third threat, censorship. These come in different shapes and forms. Obviously from governments and states, with China leading the way with their great firewall. Under the recent events in the Middle East, words such as Egypt, Tunisia and Jasmine have disappeared from the web in China in different ways, and are not searchable. This of course affects a film blogger who wants to write about Tunisian cinema. Writing about films about Tibet or the Dalai Lama, to take another example, is also difficult to do under China’s censorship rules. But many other governments censor the web, or try to control it. There’s also censorship on company levels with for example Apple’s pre-approved apps, where only decent ones are allowed. At the moment it feels like censorship and restrictions are growing, all over the world.

So whether the internet will remain free and open in the future is very much an open question. But we should enjoy it while it lasts.

(The theme of this issue is digital film studies but I thought I link to something I recently wrote, about what we lost as we switch from analog to digital: http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/2012/05/passing-of-polyester.html)

Endnotes:

(1) I copied and pasted this from the online version of the article http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/17/what-the-dog-saw-gladwell-review?INTCMP=SRCH which I originally read in the paper version. Last accessed 2012-06-07

(2) Don’t forget to read Kristin Thompson’s essay in this issue on her own on- and offline publishing experiences.

Copyright:

Frames #1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital? 2012-7-02, this article © Fredrik Gustafsson

“A principle says, ‘This works . . . and has through all remembered time.’” (Robert McKee) (1)

“It’s very hard for people brought up in one era with one set of principles to come into a new era where the old principles don’t work.” (Anonymous Academic) (2)

Despite the ‘digital revolution’, the contemporary screenplay is still conspicuously analog in design and use, “a document that exists as a carry-over from a pre-digital era.” (3) Given access to a time machine, a Hollywood screenwriter working half a century ago would encounter little difficulty adjusting to the conventions of professional screenwriting in 2012. Sure, he would need to learn how to use his PC’s spellchecker and how to enable his word processor’s autosave functions, but this should end his brief orientation. Today’s master scene format — the standard formatting convention for Hollywood screenplays — was already described in detail by Lewis Herman in 1952: “No camera angles have been indicated. Only a scene description, character action, and the accompanying dialogue have been attended to.” (4) Screenwriting instructors have little incentive to change the way they teach because, in spite of the advent, indeed the proliferation of screenwriting software programs in the last fifteen years, the screenplay itself has hardly changed in sixty years. “This works . . . and has through all remembered time.” (5)

As the industry goes, so goes institutional instruction. The problem with this whole line of reasoning is that it rests on the prime assumption that professional screenwriting is a vocation a student may reasonably hope to enter after graduating from university or college with a degree in that field, an assumption that is absurd on its face. Screenwriting is a vocation like playing professional football is a vocation. Most university programs in screenwriting teach students how to write a spec script to be sold on the open market in Hollywood. Box Office Mojo tracked just 120 new feature films released by the six major Hollywood studios in 2011, (6) but the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) boasts more than 12,000 members and registers more than 65,000 new screenplays every year. (7) Only 4,244 of the Guild’s members reported any income from screenwriting in 2010. (8) These odds make taking a university screenwriting course a little like studying to win the lottery. “This is why the craft of teaching the craft of the screenplay is for many more lucrative than the craft of the screenplay,” writes Howard Rodman. (9) Given these harsh realities, it may be time for screenwriting instructors to rethink our pedagogical principles. In my essay, I will engage in a little speculation about whether it may indeed be time for ‘Screenwriting 2.0’ and the digital screenplay.

As filmmaker, essayist and academic Kathryn Millard writes, “The rise of new technologies and networks means that writing now happens primarily in digital environments: on screens, personal computers, netbooks and myriad mobile devices. We compose digital texts for websites, blogs, wikis and interactive media, opening up alternative practices to those established around print.” (10) Teaching Screenwriting 2.0, for me, would mean integrating this technological fluency into the craft and study of the screenplay. Not only would this enrich the learning environment of our classrooms and offer students valuable skills for a variety of career paths, it might revolutionize the practices of screenwriting, just as Web 2.0 revolutionized our experience of the Web.

The term Web 2.0 was first coined by Web designer Darcy DiNucci in 1999. DiNucci envisioned a Web “understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.” (11) Her predictions have since come true, but her term for this present-future — Web 2.0 — only gained traction in public discourse when Tim O’Reilly launched his first Web 2.0 Conference in 2004. (12) O’Reilly more than anyone has been responsible for defining the core principles of Web 2.0. Together, he and John Musser have defined eight core principles, but here I will look only at the five most easily applied to screenwriting: harnessing collective intelligence, perpetual beta, rich user experiences, software above the level of a single device, and leveraging the Long Tail. (13)

As O’Reilly and John Battelle report, “Many people now understand this idea [harnessing collective intelligence] in the sense of ‘crowdsourcing,’ namely that a large group of people can create a collective work whose value far exceeds that provided by any of the individual participants.” (14

) When students and teachers think of crowdsourcing, Wikipedia is probably the first example that comes to mind, but “[t]he Web as a whole is a marvel of crowdsourcing, as are marketplaces such as those on eBay and craigslist, mixed media collections such as YouTube and Flickr, and the vast personal lifestream collections on Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.” (15)

The process of making a motion picture is inherently collaborative in nature, but the conventional screenplay has sometimes been viewed as an impediment to collaboration, resulting in a close identification of collaborative film authorship with unscripted improvisation. For example, according to Maria Viera, “All of [John] Cassavetes’ films following Shadows have well-thought-out, fully-formed, carefully detailed scripts with all lines of dialogue in place. Yet this end title card (‘the film you have just seen was an improvisation’) clings to the rest of Cassavetes’ works.” (16) For Cassavetes, this claim to improvisation was closely linked to collaboration: “I’m always aware that somebody else on the set may have some good ideas. For instance, I sincerely think that Ben Gazzara [star of Husbands] knows a lot of things about acting and film making that I don’t know, and I want them if he’s got them.” (17)Collaboration of this sort conflicts with the “shoot as written” (18) notion of the script as blueprint, a view that suggests “a fixed, single moment of control over the filmmaking process — leading to the implication that filmmaking is a mere process of assembly.” (19) This implication stands in direct opposition to the principle of harnessing collective intelligence. Screenwriting 2.0, on the other hand, might actually enhance the opportunity for collaboration and improvisation in filmmaking, since it would invite collaborators into the writing process long before shooting begins and allows participation to continue well into production.

Students might at first resist such an approach, concerned they could “disappear” into collectively written scripts, making it “impossible to determine or remember or care about who contributed what passages.” (20) But harnessing collective intelligence need not result in anonymous authorship. Wikipedia may prove a useful example here: “Text on Wikipedia is a collaborative work, and the efforts of individual contributors to a page are recorded in that page’s history, which is publicly viewable.” (21) Authorship is collective but not always or entirely anonymous. Wikipedia entries also have administrators who oversee the quality of each edit and have the ability to block abusive users and spammers. Classroom screenwriting and student film production could work similarly. Students might be assigned to write their scripts in a wiki platform. Faculty and classmates could then make editorial contributions to each student’s script wiki, with the original author acting as a kind of administrator, accepting or declining collaborative input into the master entry. In such an arrangement, user agreements would establish copyright: before contributing to a student or classmate’s script wiki, faculty and peers will release their claim to credit or compensation for any material they add to the final product.

The second of O’Reilly and Musser’s core principles I would like to discuss, perpetual beta, refers to the end of software release cycles. (22) Traditional desktop-based applications are released in distinct versions. When new versions are released, users are required to upgrade, often at an additional cost. Sometimes works created using one software version will be incompatible with another. Web-based applications, however, perpetually evolve, and those who use them always have access to the latest version and features. “Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices […] The open source dictum, ‘release early and release often’ in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, ‘the perpetual beta,’ in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.” (23)

During the principle photography of a motion picture, script revisions are common. “The changeability of the text is also reflected in its physical appearance. Screenplays are loosely bound and can be easily dismantled to insert revision pages.” (24) The process of keeping the entire cast and crew literally on the same page can become quite a challenge when revisions are released, giving rise to strict conventions for the tracking of these revisions. When a screenplay is locked for production, new revisions are printed on color-coded sheets of paper that indicate the date of revision, and the specific revisions themselves are demarcated in the margins by an asterisk. Each member of the crew can compare his or her script to another copy on set, and visually determine whether or not it is an up-to-date draft. The principle of perpetual beta in digital screenwriting would remove the need for such ‘version-control’ concerns. With a cloud-based script wiki, revisions would always immediately be available to everyone on the crew, as would the history of those revisions (just as it is in Wikipedia). For screenwriting instructors, this would also be an invaluable tool, making it possible for us to review not only our students’ final drafts, but their entire revision process. We could see which peer suggestions a student has decided to use and which were rejected. Students would not have to worry about whether or not their professor is grading the latest draft of their work, since updates will be automatic.

Another of O’Reilly and Musser’s core principles, ‘rich user experiences’ refer to the dynamic and interactive qualities of a Web site’s interface. (25) Peter Morville identifies seven facets of user experience-centered design, arguing that a Web site’s interface should be useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible, and valuable. (26) Where Web 1.0 was static, Web 2.0 is always in motion, and many sites act as Web-based applications that offer users a wide range of functionalities. Content and presentation change to offer personalized experiences for each new user. Audio, video, and animation elements are common. Users can respond to what they see and make changes, customizing and filtering as they see fit. Unlike its conventional paper counterpart, a truly digital screenplay could easily incorporate all of Morville’s facets of user experience. To help our students achieve this, we could teach them to embed audio and visual elements in their script wikis, to add hyperlinks to connect readers to notes and research, to integrate GPS data and location maps, and to use tagging “folksonomies” (27) and other meta data to increase the searchability of their projects, offering users a more flexible and rewarding experience. Now the script wiki becomes something more than a mere screenplay; it becomes a kind of living pre-visualization of the film to come, one which also has all sorts of added advantages for marketing work to film producers.

Cloud-based software applications also make it possible for users on different kinds of devices to interact with the same content. (28) This is what is meant by Musser and O’Reilly’s core principle of ‘software above the level of single device’. If we were to translate this principle to the teaching of Screenwriting 2.0, we would unleash one of its most powerful opportunities: writing above the level of a single narrative medium. “A new generation of screenwriters who have grown up in a networked world saturated with YouTube, TiVo, instant messaging, MP3s and cell phones as well as graphic novels are abandoning the idea of writing only for the movies,” Millard writes. “Instead they are embracing a more elastic, cross-platform approach.” (29) In cross-platform writing, often referred to as transmedia storytelling, “elements of a story are dispersed systematically across multiple media platforms, each making their own unique contribution to the whole. Each medium does what it does best — comics might provide back-story, games might allow you to explore the world, and the television series offers unfolding episodes.” (30) Teaching Screenwriting 2.0 might mean rejecting limited three-act design in favor of comprehensive storyworld creation. In this case, the script wiki would finally become “a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.” (31)

The transmedia potential of Screenwriting 2.0 also makes leveraging the Long Tail more manageable for students. First articulated in a Wired column by Chris Anderson and later expanded upon in his influential book, the Long Tail refers to a graphical representation of the market principles that drive the success of Web-based businesses like Amazon and Netflix. (32) “What’s really amazing about the Long Tail,” writes Anderson,

 is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are. (33)

As discussed earlier, Hollywood released only 120 feature films in 2011. Meanwhile, Web 2.0 content aggregators like Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes have opened new distribution channels to content creators who can learn to leverage the Long Tail in their marketing. (34) Today far more motion pictures are made outside of the Hollywood system than within it, and the Web offers additional platforms for transmedia stories. If our students are far more likely to have their works produced independently, why do screenwriting instructors, especially in the U.S., continue to focus the majority of our teaching on the strict conventions of Hollywood screenwriting? By learning to leverage the Long Tail, screenwriting students will begin to market their works directly to independent filmmakers, release them across multiple platforms, or even use the Web for crowdfunding purposes and self-finance a feature film production of their own. We can help them do this.

“Films originate from written words,” writes Jean-Pierre Geuens. “Words here, now; images there, later. The question that has plagued the motion pictures almost from the beginning is how best to proceed from one medium to the next.” (35) Screenwriting 2.0 would attempt to integrate conception and execution through an interactive digital text, but would it work? Writer/director Chip Proser (36) has already begun applying Screenwriting 2.0 principles to his own writing, working in a form he calls the Online Graphic Screenplay (OGS). (37) Describing the OGS, Proser writes:

It is visual, like a storyboard or graphic novel only more detailed. […] It can include music, dialogue, animation, hyperlinks. It can be written online among a group anywhere in the world.  It is a stage in production that can be used to empower writers, and bring their vision to the audience without the interference of gatekeepers, producers, directors or Harvey Weinstein. It takes advantage of the internet. It also can be propagated to all potential buyers at the same instant, in order to create a bidding situation. It may also diminish the need for agents, God forbid…

Proser created his first OGS while trying to tackle the problem of visualizing his science-fiction adventure script, ‘Treasure of the Oort Cloud’. When the conventional screenplay form proved woefully inadequate to express his vision, he turned to another hybrid of image and text for inspiration: “Both studios and independent producers are currently buying up graphic novels and comics. They can see what they are getting, and the visual works may have attained a measurable level of interest with the audience.” Proser is not the first screenwriter to make this observation about graphic novels and comics. As Millard notes, “Screenwriter Jim Taylor (Election [1999] and Sideways [2004]) argues that screenplays could draw more on comics and the graphic novel in their formatting and layout. ‘I’m hoping to figure out a new way to make screenplays more expressive,’ he says (Kretchmer 2006).” (38)

The conventional screenplay is written for an insider audience, but the OGS can be enjoyed by anyone. “Nobody reads conventional screenplays,” Proser notes. “… at least not the mass audience necessary for a movie’s success.” (39) The OGS, however, leverages the Long Tail. “If a screenplay doesn’t sell or isn’t produced, you can still put it online and reach an audience.” Proser believes the OGS is also inherently well-suited to transmedia storytelling and storyworld creation: “the audience can be invited to contribute or alternative story arcs can be created… There is a choice to follow characters into their backstory… like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern… or concepts into hyperlinked educational footnotes. It can be used to create a game. It’s not just for features, it can be long form television or strictly online productions. We are no longer limited to the feature film form, based on how long your butt can interact with a chair or how long granny can hold her water.” While Proser admits that some feature film directors may find the OGS off-putting due to its overt visualization, he believes the form represents a net gain for the production process:

With OGS, you could use the screenplay as a template for the whole production. For example, characters can be dressed, lit, animated… They can be synced to recorded dialogue. Sets and costumes can be designed and developed, even lit in computer which lowers cost, and speeds the process. All departments can do a dry run before spending serious money… They can poll the potential audience for acceptance as they do it. At some point building practical sets or going on location may no longer be necessary. (40)

Proser believes students can easily work in a form similar to the OGS. While some conceptual artists were used to create backgrounds for Treasure of the Oort Cloud, Proser created most of his OGS himself using consumer-level software tools like Keynote, Photoshop, Aperture, and iBooks Author. “You can actually see what you’ve written. You can eliminate scene descriptions and unnecessary dialogue. And you can do each element of filmmaking. You can start to transition from purely the written word to the more or less elegantly visual.”    

In my view, teaching Screenwriting 2.0 in the classroom would produce both smarter, richer screenplays and more technologically fluent students equipped for teamwork in the digital workforce. Entrepreneur Zach Simms (creator of CodeAcademy) predicts, “In 20 years, programming will be just another blue-collar job or related to almost every major employment field.” (41) Unless university screenwriting instructors want their students left in the economic dust, it is time we move beyond teaching the screenplay as a closed blueprint for a Hollywood motion picture and start teaching it as flexible source code, adaptable to any number of media expressions. “Scripting,” writes Maras, “can be easily extended into the domain of computer programming, motion-capture, algorithmic decision-making, interactivity, dynamic media, and avatars, visualised across a range of screens (from mobile phones to iPods to Second Life),” (42) and these screens produce hundreds of thousands of jobs. (43)

Adapting digital principles to the teaching of screenwriting would not be without its challenges, of course. Many screenwriting instructors would need to learn these new concepts for the first time before we could teach them to our students. We would also be likely to meet with resistance, both from students and more traditionally-minded colleagues, but Screenwriting 2.0 needn’t replace all traditional screenwriting instruction. Proser argues that this digital approach “should compliment usual screenplay writing.” (44) Finally, the infrastructure isn’t yet in place to do everything proposed here without significant effort. For instance, while Final Draft, the industry standard screenwriting software program, allows writers to embed hyperlinks and export their scripts as html files, many other programs lack these features. As things currently stand, teachers would have to invent workarounds for their students in order to integrate screenwriting and the Web. Ultimately, however, I predict that the digital screenplay of the future won’t be written in software, it will be software, with the screenwriter in the role of programmer.

Endnotes:

Copyright:

Frames # 1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital?, 2012-07-02, this article © Andrew Kenneth Gay

In the growing – and welcome – discourse on the audiovisual essay as a form of film criticism or study, a bogeyman has swiftly been created: old-fashioned writing (particularly in its certified, academic form), just words, written language, without the full cinesensuality of images, sounds, movement, spectacle, atmosphere, texture … Who would want to go back to such a grey world of discourse, after being opened up to the possibilities of audiovisual editing on even the most humble laptop computer? Screenshots, mash-ups, collages, sampling …

Now critics and scholars (myself among them) long to write in an expanded sense of écriture, the kind of poststructuralist ecstasy we used to only read about: using the materials of the medium to express ourselves anew, we will be reborn as creatives, maybe even as artists; one day we will all be Chris Marker or Agnès Varda, Harun Farocki or Tacita Dean. Just as John Travolta utters, at the end of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), ‘it’s a good scream’, I can say, in all sincerity: it’s a good dream. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad fantasy or a delusion; indeed, it is, at present, an uncommonly enabling dream. But we also have to know, to feel out, the borders, the limits, the conditioning factors of any dream that moves us so deeply and so far.

Let’s back up like the proverbial Tonka truck, and grab for some historical perspective on the matter of the audiovisual essay.

One of the film critics I most admire is Raymond Durgnat. One of the many reasons I like him is because he’s always talking, in a very natural and everyday way, about tricky, complex things that go on in the human brain, and indeed in the entire human being: synaesthesia, left brain/right brain relations, mind/body or eye/hand conjunctions and disjunctions, even analogical versus digital thinking. In a candid, long-lost interview that I helped publish, Durgnat explained that he in fact had MBD (Minimal Brain Dysfunction):

In intellectual work I really think in two stages. Right brain dominance, which makes all sorts of approximate comparisons — that’s the analogic half […] First I’m intuitive, muddled, fertile, and all my opinions are easily reversible. Then I reason. (1)

Like many people who grapple with various kinds or shades of mental dysfunction – I faced a comparable situation when the onset of killer migraines scrambled my thought processes (the Emergency Ward initially mistook my first such migraine, at age 28, for a massive brain haemorrhage) and I literally had to re-learn how to remember things through associative leaps – Durgnat was eerily, hyper-consciously aware of the complexity of the seemingly simplest mental operations. And, of course, this influenced – I would almost say determined – his approach to both audiovisual art and the manner of writing about it.

But look at the texts, the books – the great mountain of critical-analytical material that Durgnat left behind when he died just short of his 70^th birthday. It is mostly printed words on a page. Very occasionally (and most generously in his final BFI book, A Long Hard Look at Psycho), there would be especially selected frame enlargements from films to refer to and riff off. But no video essays, no CD-ROMs, no Internet databases, no TV specials or episodes of Histoire(s) du cinéma under his guidance. There was no Chris Petit or Jean-Pierre Gorin around making an essayistic portrait about him while he was still alive, as there was for Manny Farber (indeed, there seems, at least going by YouTube, to be precious little film or video footage at all of him speaking). It’s only words, and words are all he had to take your heart away.

But what words they were! Evocative, jazzy, multi-levelled and multi-layered; thoughts, concepts, models and associations spinning everywhere. ‘A jungle gym for thoughts to swing on’, as he once said about (of all things) The Witches of Eastwick (1987). (2) Words that contained and triggered many things: images, sounds, smells, haptic experiences, feelings, diagrams, lists, sub-headings within sub-headings. Synaesthetic writing; a brainstorm. Doesn’t all great writing on film – whatever mode or tone it adopts, baroque or serene – conjure more than what is implied by restricting its semiotic channel to simply material, linguistic signifiers on a page?

Durgnat was prophetic and visionary; as early as the 1960s, he was already using multimedia as a driving concept, long before it became a popular buzzword. And he was alive to breakthroughs and movements outside of film aesthetics (too) strictly delimited: cybernetics, for instance. In this, Durgnat had a contemporaneous cousin in Brazil: Jairo Ferreira, whose wild, delirious writing from 1965 to 2003 (for many years in a newspaper for the Japanese community!) frequently contained declarations like this one from 1986 about the future of cinema as he envisioned it:

Amphicinema. New old Greece, techno-pop, electronica. Slow substitution of film by hi-def tri-dimensional tape. Cinema without a screen. Sign cinema, satellite cinema. Informatics is synthesis … (3)

At other moments Ferreira would conjure the medium of film as he imagined it to be: an electric book – knowingly or unknowingly echoing Sergei Eisenstein’s no less prescient dream of a spherical book, another of the many, vivid presentiments in the critical literature of our multimedia, digital present day. (4)

I am a mere dabbler in the media theory/history/archaeology of Friedrich Kittler (and the multitude of researchers he has influenced), but I am drawn by his conviction that ‘general digitisation’ or what we know today as ‘interface’ – the mediatic interplay of images, sounds and texts – began not with modern computers, but the Greek alphabet. According to him: ‘In early Greece the phonetic alphabet already amalgamated language, music and mathematics’. (5) As another Kittlerian commentator, Niels Werber, remarks: ‘With one single system of notation (or ‘discourse system’) the Greeks, blessed by the muses, could therefore capture epics and tragedies, numbers and operators, melodies and pitch’. (6) To Kittler, sound and image, voice and text were thus once, in antiquity, closely interrelated (without being reduced or fused into a single thing) and are so again in the digital age. This is a radically different model from that of Vilém Flusser, who sharply distinguishes, in the succession of history, an ancient culture of writing from a modern culture based on what he terms techno-images (including cinema, TV and computers).

My simple point is that words – when used imaginatively and inventively – do not have to be just words. Language and writing are – can be – already multimedial or intermedial (to use the more recent buzzword) in their nature, use and action. It is from here that, in my view, we need to begin conceptualising the rise and the possibilities of the audiovisual essay as a form of film critique and analysis. It is never going to be a matter of swapping a supposedly dead, inert or encrusted culture of literary explication de texte for some all-new, pure, creative image-sound idiom. Nor is it going to be a matter of producing an expressive fusion of media channels: if the ‘70s taught us anything worth remembering (and they did – quite a lot, in fact), it is surely that all audiovisuals are heterogeneous, or as Frieda Grafe suggested: ‘Only the calculated mingling of formative elements originating in various media, each with its own relative autonomy, generates the tension that gives [a work] life’. (7) Our task should not be the Utopian one of delivering a new, single, fused audiovisual language but, rather, seizing the possibilities inherent in exploring expression across forms and media.

So my question, or my intuition, for future, media-archaeological research comes down to this: what are the origins, in writings from the past, of a multimedia, multi-channel approach to critique? And not only writing: also speaking, teaching, radio and TV programs. Recall, for example, the debt that Robin Wood in 1975 expressed to V.F. Perkins’ televisual analysis of Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), broadcast in the UK in the late ‘60s (8) – alongside the better known and better preserved case of the French Cinéastes de notre temps series.

Let’s take one, fleeting example from within publishing itself – publishing understood not as pure, unsullied vessel for the written word, but precisely as layout, design, a graphic medium. We need to take a glance back, occasionally, at the Petite Planète travel books that Chris Marker was writing and designing in the 1950s (an inspired concatenation of words and photographs) or the comic strips so beloved of Alain Resnais (narrative propelled through the highly self-conscious technique of multiple figures, frames and balloons on a page)  – the Right Bank culture of the Nouvelle Vague that so inspired Durgnat with its early, post-war consciousness of the multimedia revolution – to get the full measure of where we all started.

When I was a teenager, I was entranced by this passing remark by Jonathan Rosenbaum about Cahiers du cinéma in the ‘60s: in translating a roundtable, collective text devoted to montage, he regretted that ‘it hasn’t been possible to reproduce or approximate this jazzy sort of mise en page’ of the original. (9) It was a lesson I remembered well: when my students read Serge Daney in translation from mid ‘70s Cahiers, I always rub their noses in the often peculiar, innovative, and utterly heterogeneous design layout of main text, images, captions, footnotes and breakout boxes or sections: all of which generate associations inexorably erased in a straight/conventional English translation. And I would refind this same, delightful term – mise en page – two decades later, in the course of Raymond Bellour’s expanded reformulation of the concept of mise en scène in cinema: Godard once again offered the lead, with his graphic design of printed/typed words, stills and superimposed clips exploding in the Histoire(s), but present to varying degrees in all his work. What matters across all the mise operations that Bellour detects in cinema – mise en scène, mise en page, mise en phrase, mise en image, and so on (10) – are the diverse strategies of ‘spacing’ and spatialisation, separation and associative combination, that play between all these levels, sparking thought and emotion. The same goes for the audiovisual essay.

I am in agreement with Cristina Álvarez López (in her article for this issue of Frames) when she remarks: ‘Before it was physically possible to create video-essays, we imagined them and traced them out in our writing’. For me, this prompts two reflections: first, that writing will never be – and in a majority of cases, should never be – entirely severed from the audiovisual essay genre; and second, that the video-essay form remains, in the final instance, a gesture of critique, and not a work of art … no matter how giddily near to art it may travel.

The audiovisual essay is a mode of critical discourse, and in my view it should never give up that stance. It should not renounce the rationality of critique, but rather seek to install it, multiply it, at every level. Nor should it forego what Bellour, at a film/media festival in Zagreb, once called the ‘necessary labour of description’ required for every serious, genuine act of critique: not everything is going to ‘inhere’ in the film itself; every analysis or interpretation needs the careful setting-up of its context, its ‘frame’, in order to communicate itself. The seductive lure of the audiovisual essay, such as it sweeps over us at present, is precisely the heady illusion it offers, for a moment or two, that all frames and contexts have dissolved – that fragments of cinema, sparked into life by our montage of them, will magically ‘say it all’.

This is, in its way, a small-scale re-eruption of the fantasia of the ‘aesthetic regime’ that Jacques Rancière diagnoses so well for the 19^th and 20^th centuries at the beginning of his Film Fables: free of narrative, free even of the narrative of analytical explication, we dream of the immediate, abstract, poetic sense that will fly like an arrow into spectators’ minds when two incongruous scenes are united, or when a familiar image is slowed down or magnified beyond immediate, conventionalised recognition … (11)

So: words, text, should be right in there with the flow of images and sounds: inside, above, underneath, alongside, wherever (and the position can, of course, shift in the course of whatever mode of mise en page that is employed). When audiovisual collages leave text behind entirely, I find that they quickly run the risk of becoming merely cryptic, a wash of poesis that has not quite yet managed to fashion itself into the musculature of a real cine-poem (such is the case with the ‘Vertigo Variations’, whose ‘thesis’ I cannot really grasp at all, underneath the undoubtedly pleasant, but not yet fully artistic, riot of slow-motion, colour-smearing and sound grabs). (12)

By the same token, that ‘necessary labour of description’, once the ‘ekphrastic’ domain of words alone (even in the academic classroom or conference hall), (13) is inevitably changing its procedures or contours: in the era of prodigious screenshots, it is the economy of critical word to illustrative image, the balance and weighting of their respective functions, that is slowly altering (and not without resistance, especially among those university students eager to regurgitate the old, tried and tested academic forms of discourse). But, I insist, it is not – ever – the moment to proclaim some total eclipse of word-discourse in the King Kong-like shadow of the almighty cinema.

If, along the hard road to illumination, the audiovisual essay manages to find or create some new eloquence, some new sensation, or evoke some of that ‘mad poetry’ that George Alexander once found in intense theorising, (14) then that’s all for the good: I aspire to some degree of madness of this sort myself. There is another new field, closely related to the rise of the audiovisual essay and overlapping with it, that I have elsewhere called creative criticism: it refers to all those forms of playful or experimental writing that form a middle-ground between the ‘pure’ rationality often ground down by the restrictive protocols of the academy, and the more intuitive, less reflexive processes of art-making itself. (15) This middle-ground is large, in fact is growing as we speak; we have yet to bump against its limits or hit our heads on its ceiling. That’s exactly where we are in the development of the audiovisual essay, too: the free, expansive phase. So, let a hundred montage-flowers bloom – but keep just as many words in the picture as well, please.

Endnotes:

1. Raymond Durgnat, ‘Culture Always is a Fog’, Rouge, no. 8 (2006), http://www.rouge.com.au/8/interview.html

2. Raymond Durgnat, ‘Up Jumped the Devil or, The Jack in Pandora’s Box’, Monthly Film Bulletin, no. 644 (September 1987), p. 266.

3. Jairo Ferreira (trans. Filipe Furtado), ‘Cinema: Music of Light’, Rouge, no. 9 (2006), http://www.rouge.com.au/9/cinema_light.html

4. See Oksana Bulgakowa, ‘Eisenstein. The Glass House and the Spherical Book: From the Comedy of the Eye to a Drama of Enlightenment’, Rouge, no. 8 (2005), http://www.rouge.com.au/7/eisenstein.html

5. Quoted in Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, ‘Friedrich Kittler: Kultur als Datanverarbeitungsgestell’, in Moebius & Quadflieg (eds.), Kultur. Theorien der Gegenwart (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschafen), p. 576.

6. Niels Werber, ‘The Disappearance of Literature: Friedrich Kittler’s Path to Media Theory’, Thesis Eleven, no. 107 (November 2011), p. 49.

7. Frieda Grafe, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (London: BFI, 1996), p. 56.

8. Robin Wood, Personal Views: Explorations in Film (Wayne State University Press, 2006), p. 144.

9. Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Introduction’ to Rivette: Texts and Interviews (London: British Film Institute, 1977), reprinted at http://www.dvdbeaver.com/rivette/ok/JR-introduction.html

10. See Raymond Bellour, ‘Figures aux allures de plans’, in Jacques Aumont (ed.), La mise en scène (Bruxelles: De Boeck, 2000), pp. 109-126.

11. See Jacques Rancière (trans. Emiliano Battista), Film Fables (London: Berg, 2006).

12. B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo, ‘Vertigo Variations’, Parts 1-3, Moving Image Source (September to December 2011), beginning at: http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/vertigo-variations-pt-1-20110921

13. Consult the various discussions of critical writing as ekphrasis in Alex Clayton & Andrew Klevan (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism (London: Routledge, 2011).

14. Spoken at a public seminar on art criticism in Melbourne during the late 1980s.

15. See my ‘No Direction Home: Creative Criticism’, in Project: New Cinephilia (Edinburgh International Film Festival, June 2011), http://projectcinephilia.mubi.com/2011/05/31/no-direction-home-creative-criticism/

Copyright:

Frames #1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital? 2012-07-02 this article © Adrian Martin June 2012

Anyone familiar with my blog and/or Twitter feed knows I am constantly on the lookout for ways to enhance the university classroom experience. Specifically, I seek ideas and assignments that speak to the time and to my students’ skills and interests. For example, in the early 2000s, I offered my Shakespeare students any one of the following for their final project: write a traditional research paper (safe choice), analyze a Shakespeare film (slightly more daring), draw up lesson plans on one of Shakespeare’s plays (for education majors), stage a theatrical performance (for theatre buffs), or create a Shakespeare-related website (for the adventurous student/techie). Regarding the latter, one must remember that when this project was offered over a decade ago, websites were relatively new and mostly static. Moreover, software like Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage were the norm, not the easier-to-navigate (and free) WordPress and Weebly. As a result, those students—those few, those happy few—who opted for the Shakespeare-related website project were embarking on something unusual and challenging.

More recently, I’ve integrated into my college courses other forms of technology that mirror my students’ expertise and interests. Students in my Seinfeld and Film Noir classes, for example, responded weekly on our class blog to news articles, quotes, scenes, and videos related to the subject matter at hand. As well, in larger courses like Introduction to Film (120+ students), I’ve introduced Twitter. While students did not always appreciate this microblogging network (e.g., Ugh, another social network to keep up with?! Twitter has no place in the college classroom!), I was particularly pleased with the amount of learning that often took place, not to mention the way students noticeably honed their debating skills and learned to pare down their (often wordy) thoughts to the bare minimum of 140 characters or fewer.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I’ve also recently featured in the classroom another trendy form of new media: the video essay. Broadly, according to John Bresland the purpose of a video essay echoes that of a traditional one: “a means for writers to figure something out” (Video Essay Suite). But unlike the written essay, all that “figuring out,” of course, takes place onscreen. More specifically, Eric Faden writes that video essays or, as he puts it, media stylos

• are designed initially to move across a series of potential platforms from classroom to conference presentation to web streaming
• do not abandon the tools and techniques of oral or alphabetic culture; they simply can use them in new ways
• move scholarship beyond just creating knowledge and take on an aesthetic, poetic function
• should evoke the same pleasure, mystery, allure, and seduction as the very movies that initiated our scholarly inquiry
• should consider formal issues in addition to content (i.e., the creator must consider ideas of image, voice, pacing, text, sound, music, montage, rhythm, etc. In effect, s/he has to deal with the very same problems that his/her subjects deal with)

It is Faden’s bullet points that I ultimately used as a guide for my students’ video-essay projects.

Last year, my Cinema History course, an intensive (six hours per week) study of film from the late 1800s to the 1990s, required students to create a video-essay project and accompanying in-class viewing/presentation. The description and steps were straightforward:

Historical in nature and requiring some library research, this multi-step group and individual project takes the form of a video essay. Specifically, the group will organize, investigate, and present to the class a film(s), director, movement, technological innovation, etc. according to its place within a historical context and in light of historical developments. Additionally, each student will submit a short written account of the video essay and his/her contribution to it as well as a written evaluation of the group.

To maintain some structure and unity throughout the semester, I required that each video essay be based on and serve as a visual extension of a required reading from the syllabus. Thus, via a wiki, students would place themselves into groups of no more than three by selecting the reading that presumably most interested them (unsurprisingly, the essay “Sex and Sensation,” interpreted below in video-essay form, was the first to go). Moreover, the students were to keep in mind Faden’s “rules” as well as these, which I put in place on our course website. The video essay should

1) contain a clearly defined thesis

2) include some form of narration (e.g., voiceovers, intertitles, subtitles)

3) support the thesis with clips and/or still images from/of the films, directors, subjects, etc. under discussion

4) include a bibliographic title card citing at least THREE secondary sources to support your project (your course textbook may serve as one of those sources)

5) boast a catchy title that reiterates the thesis

6) last no longer than 5 minutes

When I created this project and subsequently introduced it to my group of unsuspecting students, most of whom were film majors, I wasn’t too worried about the specifics — whether they’d include appropriate narration, a Works Cited section, or high-quality film clips — rather, my primary concern was this: would I, someone who has dabbled in video editing/montage for family events and conference presentations but who has never made a formal video-essay, have to teach them how to do so?

As a result, I awaited, was available for, and encouraged questions, emails, tweets, and Facebook posts from students on the ins and outs of the project. But, aside from a couple of queries that I’d already addressed underneath the video-essay description—is there ripping software for Windows, and how much do I have to pay for MPEG Streamclip?—the questions never came. Instead, the students, in their groups of two or three, tackled the clip-gathering, title cards, voiceover narration, image insertion, and editing transitions themselves. Perhaps most Millennials around the world, if pressured, would be able to do the same?

In virtually any university classroom, student work oscillates from exceptional to shoddy and all the averageness that lies between. This scale certainly held true with my cinema history students’ video essays. While some of the projects appeared hasty—e.g., omitting a clear thesis, clocking in at a wimpy 02:30 minutes, excluding a title page/card—several, like the two embedded below, fulfilled my expectations.

In the first, “Sex and Sensation: How Hollywood Popped Its Cherry,“ the students (non-film majors taking the course as an elective, by the way) begin with a catchy title accompanied by some conventional “porn groove” as a way to engage their audience. Then, not regurgitating but applying ideas from their selected essay—Linda Williams’s “Sex and Sensation” (Oxford History of World Cinema)—the students introduce clips of The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Judd Apatow, 2005) to explain the pressure 1960s Hollywood faced from the growing youth audience to feature more onscreen sex and violence. After this, via voiceover narration and a combination of still and moving images, the students move deftly into Williams’s thesis and then offer a historical recap of this notable transition in the film industry as well as what it meant and what it means today. While there are a couple of volume problems, inferior-quality videos, and the clip of And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) runs a bit too long (in my opinion), overall, this video essay achieves virtually everything on both Faden’s and my lists above. It is humorous, appealing, organized, and informative.

The second student video essay embedded here considers the Italian Neorealist movement and is based on Morando Morandini’s essay “Italy From Fascism to Neo-Realism” (also from the Oxford History of World Cinema). Unlike the “fun” one above, this video essay, which examines filmmakers’ cinematic reactions to their poverty-stricken, war-torn country, necessarily exudes a more somber tone. Here, the two students begin mostly with still images of Italy under Fascist rule, using steady voiceover narration and nondiegetic music to infuse the solemn mood. Then, a simple title card with red, white, and green lettering (representing Italy’s flag) nicely marks the shift from the pre-war discussion of Mussolini to the post-war directors of Italian Neorealism. Next, although the despairing images from Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945) and Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1947) are before us, the speed and cadence of the voiceover picks up, now making the (same) underscoring seem slightly more romantic; thus, viewers are offered a somewhat more promising end to the story. Again, there are some poor quality clips here and I’m not sure the section on Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1949) is explained thoroughly; but overall, like the one above, this video essay certainly satisfied the assignment’s requirements.

To date, some of the finest examples of video essays may be seen on the online videographic forum Audiovisualcy, the Museum of the Moving Image’s site Moving Image Source, and Indiewire’s blog Press Play. Further, some scholars like Catherine Grant, Erlend Lavik, and John Walter create video essays themselves as well as devote entire posts to and oversee conference presentations on this new essay form. The same goes for online journals such as Transformative Works and Cultures (vol. 9 especially), which explore not only video essays, but also related endeavors like vidding, remixes, and mash-ups. Consequently, in our current tech-obsessed, file-and-image-sharing, digital humanities culture—in which even the University of Pennsylvania offers directions on making a mash-up video and Tufts University encourages video-essay applications—the video essay isn’t likely to vanish anytime soon. So why not allow and persuade our students to get involved with and help to enhance this inherently modern genre?

Copyright:

Frames #1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital? 2012-07-02, this article © Kelli Marshall

http://vimeo.com/40847557

Moving Pieces – Sergio Leone’s Duel from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.

The above video essay was borne out of a lifelong affection for Sergio Leone’s renowned Dollars trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars [1964], For A Few Dollars More [1965], and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly [1966]). It is also my personal attempt to define, in audiovisual terms, one of the crucial components of its iconography: the duel.

As a fledgling video essayist, the piece constitutes a departure for me. My previous work was, by design, fairly analytical.[1] The first two parts of “Chaos Cinema” were essentially conceptualized as the illustration of a thesis, employing a linear structure that addresses specific, interrelated points of an overarching argument. Part three, though a tad more laissez-faire in its structure, equally aims for coherence, by virtue of a point-by-point checklist formula. Consequently, the essays rely largely upon voice-over narration which served as a constant reference point, indeed the guiding principle, for the aesthetic form. In other words, the selected scenes were put in service of a written text.

With “Moving Pieces” I aspired to engage with another approach to the video essay. I thus deliberately opted against a voice over. The idea was to use only few textual inserts and primarily focus on the editing, to get in touch with the film object. Written and vocalized comments turned into purely audiovisual ones. This conceptual shift posed quite a challenge for me because it required a re-conceptualization of the video essay, not as a vehicle for a written argument, but an argument in itself.

The resulting poetic design of the video essay completely reconfigured the standard I had previously cultivated for myself. Instead of a linear structure, “Moving Pieces” is informed by an associative editing schema. Instead of explicit words and inter-titles, it uses match cuts and dissolves, music cues, and text fragments to construct – what I hope is – a more cinematic discourse. And it does not flaunt its core argument at the very beginning and subsequently provide examples to corroborate it, but gradually builds towards a distinctively personal vision of the duel aesthetic in Leone’s seminal Western films. This personal element accounts for the choice of the Ennio Morricone soundtrack from A Few Dollars More (1965), the quintessence of Leone’s vision of the (Spaghetti) Western, a – partially – deeply melancholic and tragic film that critically explores the personal ramifications of violence, much more than Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Morricone’s nostalgic, wistful tune sets the overriding atmosphere for the video essay.

My intra- and intertextual commentary on Leone’s films is complemented by a further link with Clint Eastwood’s iconic ‘Man with No Name’ character and Eastwood’s own meta-textual treatise on his career and the Western genre, Unforgiven (1992). The oft-quoted line, voiced by Eastwood’s William Munny — “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever going to have” — puts Leone’s approach to the duel in perspective. The Dollars films seem to not engage with Eastwood’s sermon, as popular discourse frames their use of violence as glorifying. While this cliché is true, to a certain extent at least, the related claim that violence itself is glorified, to me, is problematic. I propose that the violence of the duel is just one of many elements in Leone’s stylized action cinema. The structure of the duel, the manner in which it is ritualistically staged and executed, marks it as a deeply human action, one that goes beyond pure spectacle.

Eastwood’s quote opens the essay, and instigates my own search for more meaning. The essay concludes with a further quotation, one from Sir Christopher Frayling’s book Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone.[2] Frayling characterizes Leone’s duel as a ballet of death, ascribing it a poetic elegance and beauty that clash with the brutality of death. It is in between Unforgiven’s foundational critique and Frayling’s astute observation that I attempt to locate and crystallize my own assumptions about the duel, as a series of moving pieces, grandiose, exuberant, and invariably poignant.

Endnotes:

Translated from Spanish by Catherine Grant

The Double Life of Véronique (La Double vie de Véronique, Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1991) and Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006) are two very important films for me. So it was already likely that I would eventually give in to my temptation to explore their connections in depth.(1) At a certain point in my adolescence, Kieślowski’s film changed the coordinates of my relationship with cinema. Years later, the viewing of Inland Empire marked another turning point in my cinephilia, precisely because of the way Lynch took everything that had fascinated me about the earlier film to an extreme, with his story built on the figure of the double and the theme of second chances, his ramping up in intensity of film style, and his commitment to self-reflexivity as a tool for transformation and knowledge.

What I was not able to imagine, at least up until a few years ago, was that my project to explore these two films together could be presented in the form of a video essay. My experiment in this format is strongly linked to the birth of the website Transit. Cine y otros desvíos. When my colleagues and I founded this Barcelona-based online magazine in August 2009 we decided to take particular advantage of its digital format in order to create a special section dedicated to audiovisual criticism. In this section, we invite our collaborators to make video essays accompanied by written texts (though occasionally we have also published works that combine photography and texts). At that time there were already numerous blogs, as well as some magazines, that worked with variants of traditional criticism, offering different combinations of text and image, giving the latter a role that went beyond that of mere illustration. (2) But, at least to my knowledge, at a national level here in Spain there was no magazine pledging such a strong commitment to the critical video essay by devoting this kind of space to it. There were, of course, a few such websites internationally, but we only knew about those afterwards.

However, I think our points of reference for this section came more from the cinema itself than from the ambit of online film criticism: split screens in the films of Richard Fleischer or Brian De Palma, analytical zoom shots by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, the superimpositions and associative editing used by Godard, Eisenstein’s montage of attractions, the relationships between text, sound and image in Chris Marker’s films, work with repetition and accumulation by Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet … These are just some of the examples that came to my mind when I started to think about making video essays. Can one articulate thoughts about films with the very tools of the cinema itself, with its own language? This is the challenge that, for some years now, has faced audiovisual criticism. But cinema itself —  always way ahead —  has long been showing us that this is possible.

In my short experience in this field I have experimented with a very particular video essay format, one based on editing together elements from several films in order to create a singular discourse about them. This is only one way of exploring films audiovisually, among many others, but, personally, I consider it very rewarding and I don’t yet feel that it has yet revealed all of its possibilities to me as a method.

When it came specifically to this video essay, even before starting to edit the image tracks from both films, I already had going round in my head, in imprecise but still powerful ways, a series of spatio-temporal parallels between The Double Life of Véronique and Inland Empire, as well as some visual and musical textures that also indicated that the two films were linked. The first evidence of this is so obvious, and so slight, that it almost sounds like a joke: Poland. The two films unfold in geographical leaps and bounds, moving between two places which are very different and quite distant from one another on the map (France / Poland, California / Poland). The aura of Eastern Europe and of some of its dark mythologies surreptitiously colours both films. The materiality and colour of the transitional spaces (narrow streets, stairways, arches …) which appear in the Polish part of Inland Empire are also remarkably similar to those shown by Kieślowski in The Double Life of Véronique. In these scenes, music operates, almost subliminally, to connect both films. The score by Van den Budenmeyer —  the fictitious 18th-century Dutch-Baroque composer and occasional pseudonym of Zbigniew Preisner, who created the music for Kieślowski’s film —  is subtly, but intermittently echoed in the Inland Empire soundtrack composed by musicians including Polish avant-garde artists Bogusław Schaefer, Witold Lutosławski and Krzysztof Penderecki, and the Klezmer band Kroke.

But what prompted me to begin editing fragments of the films was a very particular visual motif which is treated in a strikingly similar manner in both films: the eye, filmed in close-up, directly from above, in shots used by both directors as a bridge leading us from one of their protagonists to her double (16 s.-37 s.). These were the first images that I edited together. They gave me the key to focus on what I was exploring through my linking of these two films: the representation of the double, or more specifically, the various strategies employed by each filmmaker to figure his female protagonist’s discovery of and contact with her other self. In this regard it is interesting that both Lynch and Kieślowski build their stories around journeys towards knowledge in mazes full of clues, concealed messages and hidden passages. It was while I was working with both films that I found an image that the two films share, near to their dénouements, which powerfully summarizes this idea: Laura Dern and Irène Jacob advancing along a corridor, watched by a camera moving tortuously between light and shadow, exploring space, leaving behind doors and abodes … until the two women reach their destination (5 min. 55 s. – 7 min. 6 s.).

The films also share the need to make their heroines confront their condition as characters, so that they can come to know their other selves. It is especially in this respect that intertextuality becomes a key element in the transmission of knowledge. In The Double Life of Véronique, there are two moments in which the truth is, literally, revealed through an intertext: the first occurs during the puppet show, the second in the film’s penultimate scene in which Alexandre reads Véronique his story about “two identical girls born the same day, same hour, in two different cities.” Inland Empire is much more complex because, in it, the three protagonists (actress, character and spectator) form multiple pairs of doubles. This film turns on numerous intertexts. It merges itself so voraciously with them that it takes on the form of a titanic matrix, generating reflections with each small movement, with every moment of contact.

The simultaneous montage of sequences from both films featuring a vision of the other self (1 min. 36 s.-2 min. 56 s.) helps us to become aware of striking similarities between the two films, but also offers evidence of the singularities of each director’s particular poetics of doubling. In Kieślowski’s film, this scene takes in a square in Krakow, during a political demonstration. In an imposing circular shot, the camera watches Véronique as she watches her double board a bus. Žižek argues eloquently that in Kieślowski’s film,

perhaps, we are not dealing with the ‘mystery’ of the communication between two Véroniques but with one and the same Véronique who travels back and forth in time. […] The camera’s circular movement, then, can be read as signalling the danger of the ‘end of the world’, like the standard scene from science-fiction films about alternative realities, in which the passage from one to another universe takes the shape of a terrifying primordial vortex threatening to swallow all consistent reality. The camera’s movement thus signals that we are on the verge of the vortex in which different realities mix, that this vortex is already exerting its influence: if we take one step further — that is to say, if the two Véroniques were actually to confront and recognize each other — reality would disintegrate, because such an encounter, of a person with her double, with herself in another time-space dimension, is precluded by the very fundamental structure of the universe. (3)

In Kieślowski’s film, circularity —  not just in this shot, but also in the form of objects such as the ring or the rubber sphere through which Weronika observes the inverted landscape —  is revealed as a symbol of these two parallel universes, which seem about to collide at the scene of encounter, but which finally don’t go on to do this.

In Inland Empire, however, Lynch goes a step further: here, we do find that disintegration of reality Žižek speaks about, into a world that takes over and ends up devouring the other self. Lynch is a director whose work turns on cutting (4) and the surface separating the film’s different worlds is constantly scratched, punctured. Formally, like Kieślowski, Lynch, draws on the curved aesthetic of convex vision. He uses inverted reflections to get us closer to the experience of the double —  there are several examples of this in the video essay. But when it comes to representing contact or the encounter with the other a key figure for him is the tunnel: the hole in the sheet, the darkness that engulfs the protagonists and then returns them to the light in another time, another space. Both films deal in depth with the subjectivity of their female characters, but while in Kieślowski’s film the journey to knowledge takes place in a borderland between emotion and intellect, in the case of Inland Empire it is an eminently physical crossing where all the convulsions and shocks that the story presents are engraved on the tortured bodies of its protagonists.

There is another fascinating aspect that links the two films: the presentation of the figure of the double as a benefactor, someone who makes way for the other, who is sacrificed and dies so that the other may live or be liberated. Thus, the protagonists have a second chance, their free replay, as Chris Marker might put it. (5) But every journey of knowledge is, in turn, a coming to awareness and an assumption of responsibilities. Nothing can exempt the characters from having to make decisions. Kieślowski explains it best: “Véronique’s constantly faced with the choice of whether or not to take the same road as the Polish Weronika, whether to give in to the artistic instinct and the tension intrinsic in art or to give in to love and all that it involves”. (6) If these films demonstrate anything it is that the free replay is not possible: paradoxically, nothing is truly free, or free of charge, in this new game. Marker already warned in his text: “The greatest joy […]: a second life, in exchange for the greatest tragedy: a second death”. (7) And, in Inland Empire, there is a phrase we hear repeatedly: “Acts have consequences”. (8) I will not deny that part of the fascination I feel for the video essay has much to do with this idea of a free replay. In the end, re-editing existing film material also gives a second life to the images but in building new bridges, approaches and relationships between them we also alter their destinies. These images will never be the same for us.

Often, when thinking about video essays, Kent Jones’s words at the conclusion of his essay ‘Can Movies Think?’ come to my mind: “We need to trust in our own intellects rather than in systems of thought, to stop thinking in terms of moral-aesthetic hierarchies, and to start letting Mizoguchi talk to Kurosawa, and letting Zodiac talk to His Girl Friday (1940). […] In short, I think we need to stop thinking so much about this thing called ‘cinema’, and start letting movies think for themselves”. (9) In fact, Jones’s text, rather than simply a celebration of the new forms of critique fostered by the advent of the Internet, is a reaction against the pursuit of essentialism, the imposition of hierarchies and the assimilation of absolutist moral dogmas that, in many cases, strangle any other critical discourse.

Let movies think for themselves … Is this the key notion, the great breakthrough that audiovisual criticism presents over written texts? I would be lying if I did not admit that, many times, I have felt that way, but at the same time I also realize that this is a completely unfair statement … I believe if, in audiovisual criticism, we do perceive more strongly that it is the films themselves that are doing the thinking, it is principally for two reasons. The first is the degree of evidence afforded to us by working with the film’s own images and sounds since, at the same time as we are creating a discourse about the audiovisual material, this very same material serves as its own proof. In other words, where written texts evoke, video essays invoke (and this is very useful for purposes of analysis, but not only for that). On the other hand, in video essays it is more difficult to discern or delimit where the films we are working with end and where ours begin, not only because we appropriate the images of these films, but also because in doing so we are using the very language and tools of cinema. This fusion, coupled with what Jones calls “a looser approach to aesthetics” (10) —  an approximation which comes from the images themselves and which, therefore, frees them from the weight that these “systems of thoughts” project onto them —  is what contributes to the impression that our discourse comes from, or inheres in, the images and sounds themselves.

The above particularities mark, without any doubt, important differences between written essays and video essays. But these distinctions operate in the field of emotions and perception, rather than placing a limit —  in a restrictive sense —  on the scope of either of these two forms of criticism. What is clear, however, is that in order to let “the movies think for themselves”, as Jones argues, first we have to get them thinking. It is the action required to get this thinking started that should concern the critic; this action should be performed on all fronts.

I began this essay by saying that cinema itself has begun to resolve the great challenge facing film criticism, but perhaps it is time to say also that if we have so enthusiastically embraced the arrival of the video essay is because we started to create these in our minds long ago. One thing that most of us from the field of writing share is that when it comes to making video essays we are self-taught, with all the shortcomings and the discoveries that this implies. We are not usually professional editors, we have some obvious technical limitations. So it will take us a while to become fully familiar with this practice and to find the same fluency in it that we have in writing. Also, our readers —  now also transformed into our spectators —  will also have to become accustomed to the workings of audiovisual criticism, to get used to deciphering and decoding the discursive logics created from sounds and images (and, despite what some think, these can be as powerful as writing).

But I believe that this is something really important and seldom discussed: the critical video essay is not only a product of a new technical panorama brought into being by the Internet and digital platforms, it is also, and above all, a product of our desire. Before it was physically possible to create video essays, we imagined them and traced them out in our writing. I can say that, personally at least, the majority of the texts that interest me contain traces of this desire, as if they were omens of it. And I believe that this is due to the fact that, deep down, no matter how many differences each of these approaches present, the good critic is always going to seek out one thing above all others: the need to make things appear, to conjure them, whether in the mind of the reader or in the eyes of the spectator.

Endnotes:

(1) The title of this text, and that of the accompanying video essay, was borrowed from Annette Insdorf’s Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski (New York: Hyperion Miramax Books, 2002). A different, shorter version of this essay appeared first in Spanish (as ‘Dobles vidas, segundas oportunidades’) in Transit. Cine y otros desvíos on August 12, 2011. Online at: http://cinentransit.com/inland-veronica/.

(2) For a comprehensive overview of the changes that criticism has undergone criticism with the advent of digital platforms I recommend the following discussion: Jose Manuel López, ‘Internet o las nuevas fronteras tecnológicas de la crítica’,Transit. Cine y otros desvíos, August 2011. Online at: http://cinentransit.com/critica-digital/#puntoocho.

(3) Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Double Life of Véronique: The Forced Choice of Freedom’, The Criterion Collection, February 1, 2011. Online at: http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1733-the-double-life-of-veronique-the-forced-choice-of-freedom

(4) For more on this idea see Paula Ruíz Arantzazu, ‘Las Venus abiertas de David Lynch’, Transit. Cine y otros desvíos, August 12, 2011. Online at: http://cinentransit.com/lynch-venus/

(5) Chris Marker, ‘A Free Replay (Notes on Vertigo)’, Positif, No. 400, (June 1994): 79-84. Online at: http://www.chrismarker.org/a-free-replay-notes-on-vertigo/.

(6) Danusia Stok (ed.), Kieślowski on Kieślowski (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).

(7) Marker, ‘A Free Replay (Notes on Vertigo)’.

(8) Many of these thoughts about responsibility were inspired by reading Slavoj Žižek, ‘La teología materialista de Krzysztof Kieślowski,’ in Lacrimae rerum: Ensayos sobre cine moderno y ciberespacio (Barcelona: Debate, 2006), as well as by an unpublished conference paper by José Antonio Palao Errando. Based on an analysis of Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) and several films by David Lynch, Palao defends the interesting hypothesis that under the narrative construction of these films lies an ‘ethical reaction to the interactivity and universal availability of the story’.

(9) Kent Jones, “Can Movies Think?” Rouge, 12, 2008. Online at: http://www.rouge.com.au/12/think.html. Originally published in Spanish translation, in Cahiers du cinema. España (October 2008).

(10) Ibid..

Copyright:

Frames #1 Film and Moving Image Studies Re-Born Digital? 2012-07-02 this article © Cristina Álvarez López, original article in Spanish, April 2012, and © Catherine Grant and Cristina Álvarez López, English translation, 2012)