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A Machine for Viewing

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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 […]

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From ‘video essay’ to ‘video monograph’?: Indy Vinyl as academic book

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Sarah Barrow argues that the video essay provides a ‘viable alternative to the academic book’.[1] This article explores that claim, considering how a video essay-based project can pursue a single topic in the manner of a monograph. The case study is Indy Vinyl, my collection of video essays and writing about vinyl records in American Independent Cinema. I argue that an approach informed by traditional scholarly values should be augmented by more exploratory thinking, when moving from written to practice-based forms of film criticism. 

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Podcast – ‘The Video Essay Podcast’

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Videographic criticism has gained momentum in the field of film and media studies over the past years. ‘The Video Essay Podcast’, hosted by audiovisual essayist, critic and journalist Will DiGravio, aims to document and archive this change through monthly interviews featuring leading scholars, critics and filmmakers. Previous episodes include interviews with Catherine Grant and Liz […]

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Autumn 2020_#Method, call for submissions

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‘There is a point at which methods devour themselves.’ – Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks) One can observe, in recent years, an obsession with methods – both in humanities research and teaching. Discussions include apprehensions about the imminent obsolescence of established media studies methodologies, a more liberal (in all senses?) search for synergies with […]

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The Mighty Maestro on Screen

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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 […]

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

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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 […]

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Hands, Up

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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.

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Gesture and videographic writing: Manifesting the ‘in between’

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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 […]

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‘Breaking Bad’ and surrealism

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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. […]

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

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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, […]

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

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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 […]

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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’

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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 […]

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University of Arts Belgrade

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University of Helsinki

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Universiteit Utrecht

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Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf

Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam

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