Surviving the future: Video essays as exploratory film festival research
by Kevin B. Lee
During the 2024 Locarno Film Festival, the Future of Cinema research team at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) organised a three-day conference to reflect on cinema’s relevance to the question of survival. Titled ‘The Future of Survival’, the conference convened 50 scholars, students, filmmakers, and artists for presentations and discussions on how cinema envisions its own lasting relevance, particularly in response to environmental and societal crises that threaten both humanity and the planet. As technological transformations such as generative AI, global disruptions to social infrastructures, and the climate crisis continue to reshape the world, the institutions that support cinema face unprecedented challenges. Theatrical attendance has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels in many parts of the world (with the exception of heavily subsidised film economies such as France) and film festivals continue to contend with diminished cultural centrality. Amid these shifts, the conference posed a two-sided question: How will cinema survive the future, and how can the future be survived with cinema?
Central to this inquiry was a critical investigation of the film festival not merely as a showcase for films, but as a complex cultural phenomenon in its own right. By foregrounding the festival’s structure, rhythms, and socio-cultural dimensions, the conference engaged the surfaces of the festival for exploration. To conduct this inquiry, the USI cinema research group proposed videographic methods in line with the group’s specialisation in video essays as practice-based research. Video essays themselves have been proposed as a future pathway for academic film and media criticism by virtue of their use of audiovisual materials to develop new means for producing and conveying insights. Until now, videographic scholarship has mainly been applied to film, television, and other audiovisual media. What insights are possible when a film festival is explored as a site for videographic research?
This question raises the prospect of a site-based practice of videographic scholarship that is no longer bound to existing media. A decade ago Mark Cousins suggested that festivals be critiqued like movies along the lines of how exciting and innovative their forms could be. Rather than focusing on the films being screened, this approach treats the festival site itself as worthy of critical analysis, exploring its forms, contents, and surrounding contexts through videographic means. Additionally, the cinematic form of the video essay proposes new epistemological and methodological dimensions to the field of festival studies. As Florian Krautkrämer writes in his introduction to his co-authored video essay ‘Asses in Seats’,
Videographic studies of festivals have the advantage of focusing on the surface… [and] infrastructures can usually only be grasped by looking at the surface. With a camera on the festival grounds, these aspects come more into focus.
Through their vivid and intimate sensory engagement with the festival’s structures, rhythms of experience, and contradictions between its intentions and effects, video essays can produce new modes of knowledge about festivals.
To explore these possibilities, the conference facilitated an on-site workshop in which participants developed and produced videographic materials reflecting their critical engagement with the film festival. To prepare for these site-specific audiovisual experiments, participants were encouraged to review a selection of video essays that employed camera-based, on-site filming techniques, as well as notable examples from conference attendees such as Ritika Kaushik and Richard Misek. The workshop embraced an open-ended methodology with no restrictions on length or format imposed on the results. However, the festival’s inherently overabundant environment – overflowing with films, conversations, and stimuli – naturally shaped the audiovisual experiments, imposing its own constraints. Working within this dynamic and overwhelming space, participants were encouraged to adopt a personal-analytical approach to video essays, using their subjective impressions and associations to devise meaning within limited space and time.
The workshop unfolded in three phases that drew upon emergent practices of videographic research centered on embodiment and collaboration, as practiced in the 2023 Embodying the Video Essay workshop at Bowdoin College and the 2023 conference In the Works: Makings and Unmakings of the Video Essay at the Lucerne School of Art and Design. On the first day participants were encouraged to freely explore the festival site and capture audiovisual footage using their personal devices. The next day focused on collecting, sequencing, and editing audiovisual material. With support from video essayists and filmmakers, they produced short videographic outputs that reflected on their experiences of the festival. On the last day participants screened their works-in-progress and received feedback to refine their projects into full-fledged video essays. Six of the resulting video essays are presented in this issue, each bearing a distinct subjective audiovisual approach to reflect on the festival experience.
Notably, the video essays generated during the workshop barely reference the actual films screened at the festival. This absence reflects an intentional turn toward the festival’s sociocultural, affective, and infrastructural dimensions. The social and material dimensions of the film festival setting come to the foreground, with a greater sensitivity to the human and environmental factors that inform the festival experience. The essays foreground embodiment, translation, infrastructure, and even datafication – offering a constellation of impressions that challenge the hegemony of auteur-centric programming or film-centric discourse.
Locarno’s iconic Piazza Grande, one of the world’s largest outdoor screening venues, provides the backdrop for ‘Asses in Seats’, in which Florian Krautkrämer interviews his daughter Mira Herbel on the occasion of her first film festival visit. Herbel provides a nonchalant assessment of the festival’s efforts to manufacture visibility, attention, and prestige that leave her visibly unimpressed. Another series of disconnects are documented in Silvia Cipelletti and Evelyn Kreutzer’s account of their multiple comedic encounters with language barriers in and around the festival: failed attempts to interview locals, to interpret local social media memes trolling the festival, and to use AI tools to interpret and process their materials. In contrast, Chiara Grizzaffi’s ‘The Water Diaries: My Letter to Jane’ draws a network of poetic connections between her videographic image making during the festival and the cinematic imagery of director Jane Campion (attending the festival as an award recipient), with water as a ‘gestational milieu’ that sustains and nourishes these links.
Alternately, Elsa Despoix’s ‘Pressure’ provides a more sobering eco-materlialist account of the infrastructure in and around the festival and complicated relationship with environmental policies and practices. ‘Eyes On, Hands Off’ by Donatella Della Ratta and Alessandro Turchioe suggest another form of resource extraction, as Della Ratta describes how a decade of war and human rights crises in Syria were translated into festival films and other programming content. Extraction and impression combine in Marine de Dardel’s ‘The Colour Out of Space’, an account of cinema’s possible survival in an age of digitalisation and dematerialisation ushered in by technologies such as generative AI. This radically defamiliarising account, produced by feeding textual and audiovisual data of Locarno Film Festival into computational tools, makes for an uncanny counterpart to Herbel’s impressions: together they hint at how the festival may be seen from the perspective of the future.
Taken together, the video essays provide a small but suggestive sampling of what videographic forms, topics, and insights can be produced in a film festival. Collectively, the video essays demonstrate a resourceful attentiveness among the authors to their immediate surroundings, as entry points into self-directed trajectories of investigation and poetic discourse. The one-take approach in ‘Asses on Seats’ creates a moment of great concentration and suspense that reflects on the states of attention produced by the festival. ‘The Water Diaries’, ‘Pressure’, and ‘Eyes On, Hands Off’ each integrate footage filmed during the workshop with archival materials, and thus give indications of how the act of filming can generate investigational prompts that carry into the archive.
The videographic works also demonstrate different authorial functions for festival research: interlocutor, investigator, correspondent, activist, data scientist. Moreover, they reflect different bonds: between a parent and a child; a movie lover and a respected director; between humans across language, cultural and political borders; or between the human and the non-human, whether organic or machinic. The combination of subjective and intersubjective dynamics contained in these video essays create an alternative formulation of the cultural dynamics found in a film festival, in which masses gather for the celebration of highly individualised expressions of auteur cinema. If a film festival is not just a place to see movies, but, as Cousins argues, could be regarded as a movie in itself, these video essays offer visions for how such a movie can be experienced.
Author
Kevin B. Lee has produced nearly 400 video essays and is a pioneer of the desktop documentary format. He is the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano.
References
Cousins, M. ‘Festivalism’, Filmbulletin, no. 1, 2012: 6-9; https://www.e-periodica.ch/cntmng?pid=flm-001%3A2012%3A54%3A%3A569.
de Valck, M. and Damiens, A. Rethinking film festivals in the pandemic era and after. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
Harbord, J. ‘Contingency, Time, and Event: An Archaeological Approach to the Film Festival’ in Film festivals: History, theory, method, practice, edited by M. de Valck, B. Kredell, and S. Loist. New York: Routledge, 2016: 42-56.
Lavik, E. ‘The Video Essay: The Future of Academic Film and Television Criticism?’, Frames Cinema Journal, no. 1, July 2012: https://framescinemajournal.com/article/the-video-essay-the-future/.
Lee, T. ‘Being There, Taking Place: Ethnography at the Film Festival’ in Film festivals: History, theory, method, practice, edited by M. de Valck, B. Kredell, and S. Loist. New York: Routledge, 2016: 122-137.