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.
Desktop documentary has gained increasing prominence both within and beyond cinema and media scholarly practice. The recent ascendance of desktop filmmaking prompts an occasion to reflect on the current state of the practice. The five original desktop videos presented in this section offer such an occasion for reflection, particularly with regard to the distinguishing qualities and affordances of desktop documentary and desktop subjectivities for cinema and media scholarship.
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of desktop documentaries is their affordance of making and presenting a video at the same time: i.e., collapsing boundaries between revealing their thinking and tinkering research process (as unfolding, step-by-step, in front of our eyes) and the presentation of the outcomes of such ‘t(h)inkering’ (arriving at results and, thereby, justifying the presented research methods). They are ‘exploratory’ and ‘explanatorily argumentative’ in one. There is a particular effect that emerges from such transparent, credible, and effortless performativity – a relaxed and seemingly spontaneous presentation of an unfolding argument in an environment (software on desktop) and through methods (typing, dragging, opening files) that is familiar and rather natural to all viewers. In this paper, I aim to take a closer look at these fundamental qualities – ‘transparency’, ‘credibility’, ‘effortlessness’, and ‘performativity’ – respectively, and reveal their distinct as well as joint effects, ultimately resulting in what I will call, ‘artist(ic) emotions’.
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
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.