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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
by Will Brooker and Rebecca Hughes Brooker This film documents a project that began when a musical hero and cultural icon of mine died. Lou Reed passed away in October 2013, which made me realise I should celebrate one of my other heroes, David Bowie, while he was still alive. My way of paying tribute […]
by Ian Garwood The line between academic and non-scholarly videographic film criticism The production of The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism (2016) coincided with the release of two books focused on videographic film studies: The Videographic Essay – Criticism in Sound and Image, edited by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell;[1] […]
by Domietta Torlasco I have always been interested in doing what Godard once described as ‘research in the form of a spectacle’. Even in my writing, I begin by collecting images and quotes, treating the latter as passages (walkways), visible points of entry into a world (of ideas) that for me always maintains a sensorial, […]
by Catherine Grant By tentatively circumscribing one spectrum or continuum of the field for the purposes of this section – with digital, found footage collage at one end and the film/media essay at the other – we hope to orient the thoughts and works of our contributors and readers toward those audiovisual possibilities that actively […]
by Hugo Emmerzael Last year the International Film Festival Rotterdam hosted the second edition of the renewed Critics’ Choice program, in which film critics were invited to introduce a film of the program with a video essay. Films reflecting on film, in front of a live audience that could ask questions to the video essayist […]
by Paula Albuquerque A Crackup at the Race Riots (2015) is a film made by the Belgian artist trio Leo Gabin and inspired by Harmony Korine’s homonymous novel. With most material coming from Florida, the film consists of a collage of imagery found on YouTube. This mostly consists of home videos or fragments from vlogs […]
by Dana Linssen For its 2016 edition the Critics’ Choice program at the International Film Festival Rotterdam once again presented a wide array of video-essays on the big screen. The selection of films and video-essayists was inspired by the question ‘Whose Cinema’ and gave way for discussions about intellectual property rights, image appropriation, and how […]
by Juan Daniel F. Molero ‘It’s amazing that Steven Spielberg needed $20 million to make Raiders of the Lost Ark, and my dad only had his allowance’, says the son of one of three Mississippi teenagers who created a shot-for-shot remake of Spielberg’s film in the late 1980s. It all started as a fan project […]
The new special issue of [in]Transition features five videos that emerged from the June 2015 workshop Scholarship in Sound & Image, hosted at Middlebury College. The workshop brought 14 film and media scholars from the United States and Europe to work with a team of experts to collectively explore how to produce and conceptualise videographic criticism. […]
by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin It is sometimes observed that the burgeoning form of the audiovisual essay (of the analytic kind that has been featured in recent issues of NECSUS) is good for close, detailed work on individual films, television episodes, or digital art works, but less suitable for the type of broader […]
by Pasquale Iannone I have often been frustrated that outside of Italy, and for English-language audiences in particular, the great Italian actress Monica Vitti is known almost exclusively for her collaboration with Michelangelo Antonioni in films such as L’Avventura (1960), La notte (1961), L’eclisse (1962), and Red Desert (1964). These films are undoubtedly groundbreaking, and […]
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
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam
Maria A. Velez-Serna
University of Stirling
Andrea Virginás
Babeș-Bolyai University
We would like to thank the following institutions for their support:
NECS–European Network for Cinema and Media Studies is a non-profit organization bringing together scholars, archivists, programmers and practitioners.
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. Volumes are also indexed in the DOAJ. Please consider the environmental costs of printing versus reading online.