by Ariane Hudelet From March 2020 to 2022, the global population endured months of lockdowns, social distancing, and sanitary measures, which restricted public gatherings and movement. One of the striking and intriguing effects was the specific sense of attachment, comfort, and knowledge that television series provided to their audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although all […]
by Mathias de Bondt This audiovisual essay examines a conspiratorial reading of the cult television series Utopia (Channel 4, 2013-2014). During the COVID-19 pandemic, I rewatched Utopia while conducting ethnographic research on conspiracy-oriented Reddit communities, where I observed intense engagement with this series. Users interpreted its plot – featuring a bioweapon engineered to sterilise […]
by Catherine Fowler At a time when, for many, lockdown meant isolation from others, the absence of actual intimacy made depictions of it onscreen achingly poignant and even painful. That is one way to explain the streaming surge that accompanied the ten-part BBC/Hulu series Normal People in April 2020, when it was reportedly downloaded 16.2 […]
by Barbara Zecchi ‘Atemporalities and Becomings in the Age of Covid’ juxtaposes two distinct visual experiences: clips from the Spanish television series Estoy Vivo, a tragicomedy I watched during the evenings of the COVID-19 lockdown as a way to relax and disconnect from the horror of the outside; and news on the pandemic, which I […]
by Nicolas Bailleul As a mostly stationary filmmaker, I was inclined to believe that documentaries filmed in offices and in bedrooms would erase the physical presence of the auteur. While viewing desktop documentaries I asked myself if the physical traces on screen of the stationary documentary filmmaker, such as the uncontrollable camera shaking that might […]
by Chloé Lavalette My research trip to New York at the beginning of 2017 closely followed the brutal and unexpected death of my 63-year-old father Christian Lavalette. He was a recently-retired man, a graphic designer, a painter, engraver and editor, and died in three days from a septicemia while he was himself on a trip […]
by Alice Lenay and Théophile Gay-Mazas In this visual and performative setup, my body is embedded in a video of the Olympic Games. We focus on a specific sequence from the 1996 Olympics, when the gymnast Kerri Strug injured her ankle but continued the competition to win the gold medal for her team. By being […]
xena’s body by Occitane Lacurie https://vimeo.com/879454111 How close is my phone to my body? How far does the entanglement of knowledges and power that dwells on my screen under my fingertips take the data I feed it? First, I thought my iPhone was the technologically-enhanced version of the little hand mirror one uses to […]
by morgane frund Link to the audiovisual essay I don’t really like to think about my body, let alone be creative with it. I hardly ever dance or perform ‘physically’. I tend to rely a lot more on words and voice to express myself. Because of that, I decided to approach the theme from a […]
by Nicolás Medina Marañón and Miklós Kiss Our video departs from an interest in the use of the split screen in Vince Gilligan and Peter Goud’s television series Better Call Saul. More specifically, we are interested in the use of the split screen as both a technique featured in the show as well as a […]
by Daniel O’Brien by Daniel O’Brien This twenty-six-minute video essay explores ideas of the time-loop on screen. It examines a range of films to argue that the concept of the time-loop can be found within the mechanics of the computer game, particularly in the aspect of failure and repetition (considered through ludologist Jesper Juul’s 2013 […]
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 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.
Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot
Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade
Ilona Hongisto
University of Helsinki
Judith Keilbach
Universiteit Utrecht
Skadi Loist
Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf
Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam
Maria A. Velez-Serna
University of Stirling
Andrea Virginás
Babeș-Bolyai University
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