|   Audiovisual Essays

You are here: / Audiovisual Essays

A Machine for Viewing

/in , /by

by Richard Misek In 1970, experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka designed a cinema auditorium for Anthology Film Archives in New York, in which ‘shell-like’ seats and reams of black velvet caused all but the screen to disappear into darkness.[1] He referred to his Invisible Cinema as ‘a machine for viewing’.[2] Though the movie theatre is now […]

Read more

The Mighty Maestro on Screen

/in , /by

by Evelyn Kreutzer In this audiovisual study, I look at music-performative gestures of ‘fetishisation’. Against the backdrop of the mid-century celebrity conductor figure, as well as larger historical discourses around mediated music consumption, I focus on two conductors in two films, which draw on the same musical composition: Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and Hugo Niebling’s Pastorale […]

Read more

Gesture in ‘A Woman Under the Influence’, a charting of relations

/in , /by

by Tracy Cox-Stanton voiceover transcript 1 writing parts and wholes In the essay film, like the video essay, words are not just ideas. They’re also sounds and images.  When an essay film examines its object, words often fade away completely, supplanted by the complex signifying landscape of mise en scène. The video essay, like the […]

Read more

Hands, Up

/in , /by

by A Zinsel Author A Zinsel is a recent graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, MA program in cinema studies, specialising in audiovisual techniques. Her research focuses on the status of the cinematic image in the digital environment, aided by the use of non-linear editing software and collaborative scholarly practice.

Read more

Gesture and videographic writing: Manifesting the ‘in between’

/in , /by

by Tracy Cox-Stanton Reflecting on her audiovisual study of a dance sequence in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Laura Mulvey notes that ‘digitally derived “delayed cinema” [has] a special, privileged relationship to cinematic gesture’.[1] Building upon her arguments in Death Twenty-four Times a Second,[2] Mulvey discusses how digital editing tools enable the film scholar to fragment a […]

Read more

How Black Lives Matter in ‘The Wire’: A video essay

/1 Comment/in , /by

by Jason Mittell As Black Lives Matter activists pushed the issue of police violence against African-American citizens onto the broad public agenda in the summer of 2014, my mind turned to The Wire. I had watched the landmark HBO series five times, written a fair amount about it, and taught courses about the series, which […]

Read more

‘Breaking Bad’ and surrealism

/in , /by

by Angelo Restivo To begin with, I would want to stress that in this video – which juxtaposes images from the television series Breaking Bad with scenes from the archive of surrealist filmmaking – I am decidedly not claiming that these resonances and rhymes were intentional citations by the production team of the television series. […]

Read more

New ways of seeing (and hearing): The audiovisual essay and television

/in , /by

by Catherine Grant and Jaap Kooijman In recent years, videographic criticism in the form of remix-based audiovisual essays has gained momentum in Media and Screen Studies, with courses and workshops at universities, presentations at international conferences, and publication opportunities in academic journals such as [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, The Cine-Files, […]

Read more

The Female Narcotrafficker’s Tongue | La Lengua de la Narcotraficante

/in , /by

by Juan Llamas-Rodriguez This video is the first in a series of video essays on the female narcotrafficker, a character whose popularity has surged in the past two decades across film, television, and other audiovisual media. My series takes the popular figure as an agent to instigate ruminations on social themes recurring across its various […]

Read more

Bodies at the border: Transnational co-produced TV drama and its gender politics in the pilots of ‘Bron/Broen’ and adaptations, ‘The Bridge’ and ‘The Tunnel’

/in , /by

Janet McCabe on Flow/Cut, Body/Matters, Law/Fear – a triptych of audiovisual essays made with Catherine Grant 1. FLOW/CUT … the forces that perpetrate injustice belong not to ‘the space of places’, but to ‘the spaces of flows’. Not locatable within the jurisdiction of any actual or conceivable territorial state, they cannot be made answerable to […]

Read more

Partners

We would like to thank the following institutions for their support:

Publisher

Amsterdam University Press (AUP)

Access

Online
The online version of NECSUS is published in Open Access and all issue contents are free and accessible to the public.

Download
The online repository media/rep/ provides PDF downloads to aid referencing. Please consider the environmental costs of printing versus reading online.

Editorial Board

Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot

Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade

Malte Hagener
Philipps-University Marburg

Skadi Loist
Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf

Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam

Francesco Pitassio
University of Udine

Belén Vidal
King’s College London

Recent News