Posts

Videographic scene analyses, part 1

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by Miklós Kiss As guest editor, my focus for the audiovisual essay section of the Spring and Autumn 2018 issues of NECSUS is original scene analyses as examples of autonomous and explanatorily argumentative videographic criticism. My aim was to inspire the creation of videographic works that provide straightforward close analyses of specific scenes of movies […]

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Fritz Lang (1974/1990)

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Director: Werner Dütsch First broadcast: 3 December 1990 Werner Dütsch, born in 1939, came to the WDR film department in 1970. Over more than three decades, he produced essayistic work by Helmut Färber, Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky, and the like. He also acted as a co-producer for films by Johan van der Keuken (Amsterdam, Global […]

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TELEKRITIK: Über zwei Filme von Peter Nestler

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Director: Rainer Gansera First broadcast: 28 October 1975 TELEKRITIK was a series of programs with at least ten installments between 1973 and 1975. Its commissioning editor, Angelika Wittlich, had just finished university when she began her work. She recalls: I had just come to the WDR. I had done German and Romance Studies and was […]

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TELEKRITIK: Über Song of Ceylon

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Director: Harun Farocki First broadcast: 7 October 1975 Depending on how you count, Harun Farocki’s 30-minute analysis of Basil Wright’s The Song of Ceylon was either the third or the fourth program the director realised for the Telekritik series at WDR. In 1973, his The Trouble with Images (1973) had provoked heated debates within the […]

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Towards an alternative history of the video essay: Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Cologne

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by Volker Pantenburg This dossier on audiovisual essays focuses on a trajectory in the history of the video essay that tends to be ignored in current discussions of the format. According to a well-known genealogical account, the video essay was born from the encounter of platforms like YouTube, social media, cinephilia 2.0, inexpensive DIY editing […]

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Problems with the gendered POV shot in ‘Lilya 4-Ever’

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by Kiera Sandusky I made an earlier version of this video for my final project in Form and Meaning, a core film/video class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago meant to give a theoretical understanding of film editing. Kevin B. Lee taught my section of the class and gave us the opportunity […]

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My crush was a superstar

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by Chloé Galibert-Laîné This video was produced as part of an ongoing collaborative project on terrorist media. The project aims to explore the contents and contexts for production of terrorist media and to question how these images migrate from social media to news broadcasts, from phones to computers, from the Middle East to other regions […]

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Snake oil in N—–town

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by Steven Boone I happened upon Roger Corman’s 1962 film The Intruder while casually surfing YouTube. Some twist of algorithmic fate led the site to suggest that movie for me. Less than five minutes into the film I understood why: William Shatner, America’s Captain, pop sci-fi royalty, utters the word ‘nigger’. YouTube knows that I […]

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Outbreak of violent protests prompts a state of emergency

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by​ ​THE ANTI-BANALITY UNION​, 1 March 2017 It echoed loudly in an escalating confrontation between extreme ends of the political spectrum.[1] The presence of thousands of camouflage-clad National Guard troops and armored vehicles was a sign that the city was not quite back to normal. While many protesters called for an end to the citywide […]

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Critique, protest, activism, and the video essay

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by Kevin B. Lee This selection of video essays is curated for an issue of the journal NECSUS with the special section theme #True. This begs the question of how this word applies to the video essay, particularly those featured in this selection meant to represent possibilities for the video essay to function as social […]

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Taking stock: Two decades of teaching the history, theory, and practice of audiovisual film criticism

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by Michael Witt Introduction Recent years have seen rapid growth in the use of the digital audiovisual essay in teaching and research, including in film and screen studies.[1] This phenomenon has been fuelled by a number of interrelated developments: easier access to copies of films; increased availability of domestic computers and digital editing software; the […]

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