by Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco Television series are filled with images that populate our memory, whether striking in their uniqueness, symbolism or emotional intensity, or familiar in their constant repetition. Although, as Amy Holdsworth criticises, television has often been derided by its presumed ‘ephemerality’ and ‘forgettability’, it is nevertheless ‘part of both a material network of memory […]
by Johannes Binotto Desk, this word for a ‘table especially adapted for convenience in reading or writing’, as the dictionary explains, is derived from the medieval Latin ‘desca’ and ultimately from the Greek ‘diskos’, which means quoit, platter, or dish. Thus, a quick look into the etymology of the term infuses it with a mobility […]
by Ritika Kaushik This video essay is a critical and self-reflexive reaction to the digital afterlife of the government film I am 20 (1967), made by experimental filmmaker S.N.S. Sastry, who worked for India’s primary state institution of documentary filmmaking – Films Division of India (FD). The film was commissioned for the twentieth anniversary of […]
by Ariel Avissar This video is my response, in desktop documentary form, to the other four videos included in this audiovisual section (by Johannes Binotto, Katie Bird, Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco, and Ritika Kaushik). This seeks to serve as an alternative to the traditional, written form of response to videographic works, as is the case in most […]
Author Katie Bird is a former academic turned independent scholar and video essayist. Her research focuses on the role of manual labour and embodied thinking in the history and discourse of film technical craft practitioners and Hollywood unions. She has published on these topics in JCMS, The Velvet Light Trap, Spectator, [in]Transition, Film History, and BAFTSS Open Screens.
Desktop documentary has gained increasing prominence both within and beyond cinema and media scholarly practice. The recent ascendance of desktop filmmaking prompts an occasion to reflect on the current state of the practice. The five original desktop videos presented in this section offer such an occasion for reflection, particularly with regard to the distinguishing qualities and affordances of desktop documentary and desktop subjectivities for cinema and media scholarship.
The audiovisual essay has been conventionally associated with the subjective and the personal. On the other hand, this introduction makes a case for the adoption of an ‘impersonal’ voice or viewpoint as a tactical response to the overvaluation of the self that pervades our current media economy.
by Domietta Torlasco Glass, stones, water, steel: the body remembers the time of things in this short film about the Italian Alps and the almost obsessive walking habits of those who live there; along the way, unpredictable alliances are formed. Author Domietta Torlasco is a filmmaker and critical theorist. She is the author of three […]
by Sara Fgaier A woman narrates the script of Gli anni, a few pieces picked up on the shores of a timeless Sardinia. Neither the words nor the images claim to tell the whole of its story: the places of the past emerge as reverberations of a fragmentary and shifting memory, bathed in a new […]
by Maha Maamoun Postcards of Egypt’s prime historical and touristic monument, the Pyramids of Giza, are flipped through to a soundtrack composed from dialogues occurring by the pyramids and sampled from a variety of Egyptian films. Author Maha Maamoun is an Egyptian visual artist and curator based in Cairo. Her videos and photographs address the form […]
by Deborah Stratman Obscure signs portend a looming, indecipherable slump. An oracular decoding of the landscape. Author Deborah Stratman makes films and artworks that question power, control and belief, considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool, and time to be supernatural. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, […]
by Cauleen Smith Earth sings a melancholic tale of disappointment. Folk fail to listen until it’s too late. We End. Structured like a blues song with a live-improvised electro-organic soundtrack. Author Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is rooted within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and […]
by Catherine Grant …the image of musical sound itself becomes contagious…[1] Irresistible Instrumentalism, the video essay embedded above, explores the somewhat paradoxical depiction in early cinema of the visible playing by onscreen musicians of music that makes no sound in the world beyond the film’s diegesis – the portrayal of music, in other words, that […]
by Liz Greene In 2013, two films were released that speak to each other via a radio conversation, Alfonso Cuarón’s feature length space adventure Gravity, and Jonás Cuarón’s short film Aningaaq. Both father and son, Alfonso and Jonás Cuarón, wrote the screenplay for Gravity, and while in the process of the film’s production Jonás made […]
by Johannes Binotto The coupling of optics and acoustics in cinema is never a natural given, but always a construction dependent on technological intervention. As we all know, moving image and sound recording, although both already invented, failed for a long time to come together because they lacked synchronicity. Attempts to run a gramophone record […]
Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot
Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade
Judith Keilbach
Universiteit Utrecht
Skadi Loist
Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf
Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam
Belén Vidal
King’s College London
Andrea Virginás
Babeș-Bolyai University
We would like to thank the following institutions for their support:
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