The Video Essay Frontier: Finding the Generic
Conventions of the Video Essay
Transformers: The Premake (Kevin B. Lee, 2014)
Master Thesis Film Studies ’16-‘17 Student: Rik Weel Student number: 10383123 Supervisor: B. Joret Second reader: F. Paalman
Abstract
The thesis analyzes the video essay as a genre. It researches its history and preceding genres, analyzes its generic conventions using Rick Altman’s semantic / syntactic analysis method and describes the practice of making video essays. Furthermore it delves into the possibility of making video essays as an academic practice. This thesis suggests that the video essay is form of remix. Another conclusion is that the video essay is not as the name suggests an essay, but instead it is a cinematic work.
This thesis makes the analogy that the video essay genre finds itself on a frontier, breaking into new ground. In conclusion, the thesis argues that the pioneers of the video essay genre are leading critics and the academics into new territory, namely by showing that they do not have to use words to set out their observations and argumentation, but can use a ‘remix language’ to make these in.
However in doing so the pioneers of the video essay have succeeded in creating a new genre, one that is not academic yet.
Keywords
TABLE OF CONTENT
CHAPTER I – Introduction 3
CHAPTER II - Defining the corpus – what is a video essay? 5
CHAPTER III – The Birth of a Genre – What are the Origins of the Video Essay? 8
- 3.1 The Essay Film 8
- 3.2 Critical and Academic Writing 10
- 3.3 The Documentary 12
- 3.4 Functions of the video essay 15
CHAPTER IV – Generic Conventions 19
- 4.1 Semantic Building Blocks 22
o A. The Voice 22 o B. Imagery 24 o C. Remix 25 o D. Creating Meaning 26 - 4.2 Syntactic Structures 27 o A. Film on Film 20
- 4.3 Generic conventions of the video essay 31
CHAPTER V – Making the Video Essay – Practice and practicalities 33 - 5.1 The Craft of Constructing Video Essays 33 - 5.2 Educational Purposes and Economic Interests 35
- 5.3 Online distribution 37
CHAPTER VI – Conclusion 39
CHAPTER I – Introduction
A new form of discussing cinema has been catching the public’s attention over the last few years. A form of discussing film that does not only rely on written or spoken words, but speaks in the same language as film itself: the cinematic language. Finally a form has arrived which can truly do cinema justice by referencing all its cinematic components. Sound, imagery and montage do not need to be described anymore because now they can be shown. This form has been coined as the video essay, a name that tries to capture both its audiovisual components and its essayistic style or structure. But as the form’s popularity is rising, one has to stop and ask a simple question: What exactly is a video essay?
This question seems easy, but is more complicated than thought at first glance. As of right now, a clear and common description of the video essay seems to be non-existent. The term ‘video essay’ is not completely clear. Going from a – admittedly simple – observation, ‘video essay’ does not have a Wikipedia entry, where other more established genres do (the entry on the Western genre even lists a total of twenty-two different subgenres). But on the other hand, the video essay does show a presence on the internet. A search on the term video essay on the video sharing platform Vimeo yields more than ten thousand results. That same search on YouTube: three point one million results. A Google search gives more than eleven million pages to consider. These online searches may not be the greatest example to show the importance of the video essay, but what they do show is that the video essay is a commonplace form on these platforms. The video essay is becoming more prevalent, and film critics and academics have taken notice as they start to use the form in their own works (McWhirter, p. 369). Creators from disciplines other than filmmaking try to appropriate the form to their own stories and research. But as the form’s popularity is growing and is gaining more notoriety, one must stop and wonder where the form is actually going.
It is my hypothesis that the video essay is not just a visualization of a written essay, be it academic or critical, but a cinematic genre that puts it focus more on the audiovisual nature instead of the textual one. But to develop this hypothesis, and try to answer the aforementioned question of ‘what is the video essay’ one encounters a problem. Since there is no clear definition of the video essay, there seems to be a ‘wild west’ in terms of content. Common conventions and approaches are being changed in a whim and are rapidly adapting to modern technological changes. Keeping with the theme of the wild west, video essays are now located on the frontier between known practices like criticism, academia and filmmaking and the unknown land of the video essay genre. There is a certain lawlessness in terms of generic qualities, conventions and content, as video essay creators seem to be making up the rules about their genre as they go.
As the video essay genre is growing and gaining more popularity it is time to do a thorough research into what the video essay genre encompasses. This thesis is not to written to divide the well-made video essays from the bad quality ones. Rather, this thesis is trying to find the patterns of a genre in the clutter of content, to find order in the chaos. As the video essay is being implemented as didactic tool in academia, as promotional content by companies and as critical nodes of
communication, it is important to now when we are looking at a video essay and when we are simply looking at something else, for instance a commercial or an instructional video. What are the ground rules for this relatively new form and what distinguishes the video essay from its counterparts?
CHAPTER II – Looking for a definition – what is a video essay?
What is a video essay? Is it a documentary or a short film? Is it critical or academic? Scholars, video-essayists and critics seem to grapple with the definition. Different ideas about what a video essay should accomplish and what the criteria are for quality are being published frequently, but a clear consensus on what the video essay encompasses seems to be absent. As Paula Bernstein puts it: “Perhaps video essays are like pornography in that, as the saying goes, you know it when you see it” (2016). When looking for literature, the definition seems to be elusive, with no clear explanation on what it actually is, but the name for it – video essay – seems to be adopted by multiple international platforms and authors. Andrew McWhirther puts it in plain words in the title of his research note ‘Film Criticism, film scholarship and the video essay’ (2015). McWhirther defines the genre as “a short analytical film about films or film culture, and over the course of the last decade it has become a term that serves as a general metonym for video criticism about the cinematic arts and, to a lesser extent, television” (2015, p. 369). Catherine Grant (editor of [In]Transition, a peer-reviewed
academic periodical specifically given over to videographic film and moving image studies) does not even give a description of the video essay in the editors introduction of [In]Transition. She simply states that “these forms (…) include, inter alia, the ‘video essay’, ‘audiovisual essay’, and ‘visual essay’ formats” (Grant, 2014).
Kevin B. Lee, the chief video essayist at Fandor, starts his video essay, titled ‘What Makes a Video Essay Great?’ (2017) with the following statement: “Most movie-buffs know what a video essay is by now”. In that video essay, he tries to articulate what it is precisely that makes some video essays compelling and interesting, and others not. Although the video essay is still a relatively young genre, Lee evidently assumes that his public has a good understanding of what a video essay is, and furthermore knows it well enough to recognize the progress of the genre documented in his video essay. In the same spirit, Conor Bateman of FourThreeFilm published an article titled ‘Publish and Perish: Video Essays in the Age of Social Media’ (2017). In that article he describes the influence of social media, most notably Facebook, on the stylistics of the video essay. Like Lee’s video essay, Bateman’s article presumes a broad knowledge of the public concerning the video essay, and also offers opinions about what a video essay should do and what it should look like. Now, what a video essay is exactly, is not really discussed. It appears that academics, critics and video essayists alike just assume that their audience is familiar with video essays and came to the same conclusions about what the genre is as them. It is evident that the aforementioned authors expect a certain literacy in the field of audiovisual essays from their respective audiences. But it is exactly this expectation that, until now, has led to the absence of a clear and common definition of the video essay. Here, this thesis will take a step back, to try to describe the video essay before such assumptions are made.
Going from my own observations, the common definition of the video essay could encompass the following: an audiovisual essayistic exploration of one or more aspects of cinema or cinema culture. Video essays are relatively short in length - usually no more than fifteen minutes, although there are exceptions -. They are produced digitally and rely heavily, sometimes exclusively, on available or found footage. Self-filmed shots are few and far between. The essays are mostly
composed with clips from the films that they are referencing. Most of them also feature text, either in written form in the way of titles or through a voice-over, but there are exceptions, most notable in stylistic forms such as the so-called mash-up or supercut. Finally they are published and viewed in an online digital environment, on platforms like Facebook, Vimeo and YouTube.
These are the stylistic audiovisual components and distribution practices of the video essay, but what makes it truly unique is their essayistic nature. Like a textual essay, the video essay conveys the author’s ideas or observations, which makes the video essay subjective and personal. Its goal is not primarily to inform, but also to carry out a personal idea or thought. With their authorial products, these makers try to participate in a discussion by arguing their own personal and critical point of view. Indeed, one should emphasize the individualized practice of making video essays: Video essays are commonly posted under personal names, sometimes aliases, but usually not under company names. It is very important that it is immediately clear who the individual is behind the video essay, because the argumentation and ideas are so inherently personal.
This is, in short, what the feel of video essays encompasses. This combination of re-used footage, quick editing, their argumentation structure and highly personal observations are the
groundwork, or frame, of every video essay out there. It is this feeling that authors and video essayist refer to when they note that “you probably know what a video essay is by now”. One who has seen a number of video essays would probably ‘get’ what the just described feel of a video essay is, but this remains too vague for academic purposes. And in this is where the problem of researching video essays lies. It is difficult to define a specific corpus or group of video essays to study because there is no clearly defined body of work in this genre. What further complicates this is that – as explained in the introduction – the video essay genre currently finds itself in a frontier-like place, where new ground is being discovered on a regular basis. In other words; the genre is in flux. In localizing a group of work to study, it is important to also have the ability to show this change and evolution of the genre. That is why fixing the video essay in time and place is not only nearly impossible, but also counterproductive when one wants to describe and analyze the video essay, as this thesis aims to do. An extra complication that stems from the continuously changing form of the video essay is that it also makes it harder to localize a representative group of video essays.
The reason for the existence of this thesis – the lack of a clear definition of the video essay – also makes the object of study of this thesis hard to pinpoint. But on the other hand, as the remarks made earlier in this chapter by Lee, McWhirter and Grant show is that there is a certain consensus on what a video essay is, although that consensus has not been made very explicit. To find a body of
work to be studied, in this thesis I have to select these video essays based on that unspoken consensus, or to go from a certain instinct for what is and what is not a video essay. However, it is rather logical that a clear common definition of this new genre still does not exist. A genre is a framework of cinematic conventions that covers a body of work, and only recently do we see a body of work that is substantial enough to be categorized. It is however somewhat paradoxical to select a group of works to determine their common qualities that will only reveal themselves after they have been analyzed. This paradox has been coined the “empiricist dilemma” by Andrew Tudor (p.139). Apart from describing this problem, Tudor also proposes a solution. He states that to analyze a genre one can rely on a “common cultural consensus”, which ensures that it is alright for a researcher to analyze works that are grouped together due to a universal understanding. In other words; if almost anybody would agree that certain works can be grouped together, than that understanding is the justification for a researcher to do the same. According to Tudor, this method is justified because "Genre is what we collectively believe it to be" (p. 139).
In that sense a statement like “you probably know what a video essay is by now” is not necessarily untrue. This thesis will also base its objects of study on the already existing common cultural consensus, so that in the end we will have a clearly articulated definition for a group of works that is now only grouped together by a consensus.
CHAPTER III – The Birth of a genre – What are the origins of
the video essay?
Having established that a recognizable body of video essays exists, one can wonder how this body came into this world. A new genre never appears out of thin air. Generic conventions are based on preceding genres, external influences and adapted to new technologies, ideas and developments. In this chapter, the many genres that precede and influence the video essay will be explored to show how they have shaped the video essays. Where does the essayistic nature come from, how are its stylistic features formed? More importantly it also reveals how the video essay differs from those genres. Every genre works within a set of conventions, but if those conventions are to be found too limited to achieve a certain goal new genres can be formed. In the case of the video essay, that unique goal is to ‘write’ an essay using an audiovisual language. In showing the genealogy of the preceding genres of the video essay, the purposes of different genres – and ultimately the purpose of the video essay – will be revealed.
The answer to the question of why the video essay appropriates aesthetic qualities and subject matter of different genres has much to do with the actual intention of the video essays. It is a question of purpose; what is the goal of the video essay. In other words: what are the tools that the video essay loans from other genres to achieve its goals.
3.1 - The Essay Film
The most obvious point of departure,if only because of its name, is the so called “essay film”. But, and here the problem starts, the essay film is an infamously elusive genre. Erland Lavik argues that the essay film “assumes an intermediate position between avant-gardist and documentary practices” (Lavik, p. 4). It is less experimental and more coherent than avant-garde cinema, but not as authorial or didactic as the documentary. Basically, the essay film is an attempt to rework the literary essay into a cinematic, audiovisual form. Phillip Lopate in his text ‘In Search of the Centaur: The Essay Film’ (1992) offers five distinctive generic qualities:
“1) An essay-film must have words, in the form of a text either spoken, subtitled or intertiteld. (…) 2) The text must represent a single voice. It may be either that of the director or screenwriter, or, if collaborative, then stitched together in such a way as to sound like a single perspective. (…) 3) The text must represent the speaker’s attempt to work out some reasoned line of discourse on a problem. (…) 4) The text must impart more than information; it must have a strong, personal point of view. (…) 5) Finally, the text’s language should be eloquent, well-written and as interesting as possible.” (Lopate, p.19).
Lopate’s first characteristic, that an essay-film must contain text is debatable, and the last is a question of personal taste. However, the rest of the characteristics seem to be directly applicable to the video essay as well, which suggests the essayistic nature of both video essays and essay film. Further on in his text, Lopate makes another remark that goes to show the great similarities between the two genres. He argues that one of the natural subjects for personal essay-film is moviemaking itself (Lopate, p.21). Due to this, combined with the other five characteristics, it is almost as if the video essay is just a more modern example of the essay-film.
That assumption is easy to make, but in reality there are many differences between the video essay and essay-film. Lopate’s definition of an essay-film is extremely broad. Where the video essay is thematized around film and film culture, the essay-film could be about almost anything as long as it is told in an essayistic way. For instance, Lopate names Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955) and Chris Markers’ Letter From Siberia (1959), The Koumiko Mystery (1967) and Sans Soleil (1983) as great examples of the essay film - cases where Lopate experienced “a glimpse of the centaur” (Lopate, p.19). Comparing these films with the short description of the video essay I gave before, it is evident that they lack the “feel” of the video essay. I argue that this difference in feeling comes from how the two genres use the juxtaposition between text (or lack thereof) and image. In the films cited by Lopate the image serves a contextualizing purpose. Sometimes the image is an example of the text, most of the times it shows the broader context of what the text is about. In Night and Fog, near the ending, we hear the voice of Resnais saying: “the crematoria are no longer used / The Nazi’s cunning plan is but child’s play today / Nine million dead haunt this countryside”. As image, Resnais shows a torn down building and green field around an abandoned camp. Are these buildings the gas chambers where so many people found their deaths? Is this camp a concentration camp and where does it reside? The answers to these questions do not really matter, because the images are there to enhance the essayistic qualities of Night and Fog. In other words; the text is the subject, instead of the image.
Although Lopate’s list of the generic qualities of the essay film features filmic aspects, the bulk of his list and his reasoning in the rest of the text focusses on subjective terms like having an eloquently written text or that is should be a “display of rational thinking processes” (Lopate, p. 22). And in this he is certainly not alone. According to Laura Rascaroli in ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’ scholars tend to favour the textual aspects more than the filmic ones: “of all the features that are most frequently identified in the essay form, both literary and filmic, two stand out as specific, essential, and characterizing: reflectivity and subjectivity” (Laura Rascaroli, p.25). Although the goal of the essay film is to rework the literary essay into a cinematic form, the emphasis lies on the textual side of the essay film. What interests me, is that the goal of the video essay is roughly the same, namely to write an essay in an audiovisual language. However, it seems that scholars generally judge essay films on their literary qualities, instead of their filmic ones. With regards to the video essay, I will emphasize how interwoven text and image are to put forward the
observations and argumentations of the author or critic. As we will see later in this thesis, the reason for this is that the video essay is comprised of the material that it is referencing, while the essay film is a cinematic telling of a literary essay, where cinematic references are not necessarily needed.
(Night and Fog, 1956)
3.2 - Critical and Academic Writing
As seen above, what the video essay is able to do is justly reference its source material. The reason why this is possible now, is because scholars and critics are able to reference film and video thanks to new digital editing software and digital audiovisual material. According to some scholars the video essay is the embodiment of film criticism and academia moving into the digital age. For example, Christian Keathley has argued that: “the last decade has seen extraordinary developments in the multimedia presentation of cinema and moving image scholarship via the form that is commonly known as the ‘video essay’ ” (Keathley, 2016). Andrew McWhirter said that “It is largely academics and scholars who have advocated the potential of video essays in either their practice or research” (Mcwhirther, p.375) and according to Catherine Grant the “one place where this ‘reinvention’ of analysis and revived cinephilia can be seen is in the emergence recently of a new scholarly form -- the video essay” (Grant, 2012). Having these new possibilities leads to critics and academics
experimenting with new ways of writing essays, and mainly giving them the possibility to move beyond the written text and venture out into other media.
In 1975 Raymond Belour stated that “The text of the film is indeed an unattainable text” (1975, p.19). With this he did not meant the unattainability due to practical reasons. Back in 1975, when film was still projected on celluloid, the practice of pausing, stopping, freeze-framing and rewinding film was impractical, but not impossible. Belour also predicted that one day we would have the technology to make it possible to approach film the same way as we handle books or records, in the sense that we can go through the material at our own pace, going back and forth and pausing at our will. This prognosis obviously came true with the advent of video, DVD’s and digital files. What Belour did mean by calling film an unattainable text is that with written text, only the writable text of cinema could be referenced. Film plot, technical details and detailed descriptions can all be written, but it is impossible to quote the film itself on paper. Belour asks himself the following: “Although it would already be to go much further, we might change our point of view completely and ask if the filmic text should really be approached in writing at all” (Belour, p.27). In the modern day, as the fields of film criticism and academia move into the digital realm, for the first time we can try to answer this question. Now that we are able to rework cinematic material in such a way that it is not only quoted, but becomes the very material that the essay is written with there is no need to approach the filmic text in writing anymore. “For the first time, there is material equivalence between film and film criticism, as both exist – or can be made to exist – simply as media files” (Lavik, p. 2).
However, before the advent of digital media files writers already tried to surpass this lack of quotability by combining pictures with their texts. Today, frame grabs and film stills in journals, newspapers, magazines and the likes, are a during sight to see, but back in the 1970’s and before acquiring those was a costly and time-consuming process. Even then, questions of licensing and copyright remained. That is why publicity and on-set photos were used more commonly. These could be used for promotional and decorative purposes, but “they did not depict scenes as seen in the film and were therefore not specific enough to illustrate actual points of the analysis” (Van den Berg and Kiss, ch. 1.1). For example, David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson, using new technologies, started using frame enlargements to accompany their written analyses in Film Art: an Introduction (1997). But a still is not a film, if we combine the need to justly reference film from scribes and critics alike to enhance their writing, it seems only logical that critical and academic writing is moving partially into the digital and audiovisual field of video essays.
As seen before, McWhirter has stated that “it is largely academics and scholars who have advocated the potential of video essays in either their practice or research. These cinephile academics – including Grant, Keathley, Bordwell, Thompson, Nicole Brenez, Girish Shambu and Nicholas Rombes, as well as authors such as Masha Tupitsyn – are pioneers in the field of video essays in terms of either advocacy or praxis, or both” (McWhirter, p.375). Now the parallels between the video essay and the academic writing in a field like Film studies is obvious as far as subject matter is considered, just as it is evident that some academics do successfully use audiovisual material in their research. There are multiple variations in how the combination of video essay and academics take
shape. In Conor Batemans article “The Video Essay as Art: 11 Ways to Make an Video Essay” (2016) he names one of these forms the “academic supplement”, which is an audiovisual addition to an academic text. A telling example of this is Laura Mulvey’s 30 second edit of a shot from Gentlemen
prefer Blondes as found on [In]Transition, where the video serves as an example of what Mulvey
describes in her text.
(‘Volumetric Cinema’, 2015)
Another form is the “video lecture”, a form that is frequently used by David Bordwell1. They
consist of a spoken analysis enhanced with imagery, which can be moving or still. And then there is, of course, the video essay as described in this thesis, but there the subjects and line of reasoning fall within the academic paradigm. In these examples, the video essayist tries to implement the academic rules and standards, for example in regard to the referencing of sources. One could look for instance at ‘Volumetric Cinema’ (Kevin L. Ferguson, 2015). This video essay builds on the premise that “cinema is neither a window or a frame, but a volume. Ferguson uses software to create three-dimensional images of film scenes to “demonstrate the possibilities of looking at film sideways”. Ferguson states that this work in the digital humanities requires participation, and looking at screenshots will not suffice. By making a video essay Ferguson surpasses the limitations that a conventional publication in a scholarly journal would have had so he can show his volumetric works moving and interacting with the source material. It is no coincidence that because Ferguson’s work is rooted in digital
1 Examples are “How Motion Pictures Became the Movies 1908-1920” and “Constructive Editing in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket”, both from 2012
technologies, he needs digital technologies to showcase it. But why is this an academic video essay? Firstly let’s consider the source: Kevin L. Ferguson, the creator of the ‘Volumetric Cinema’ video, is a professor in the Department of English of Queens College in New York City, USA. Also this video essay is featured on [In]Transition, the peer-reviewed academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies. Going by the author and the source of publication, it is evident that this video essay exists in an academic environment.
In the video essay itself Ferguson cites and refers to critics like André Bazin and academics like Lev Manovich. By doing this, he positions his new method of research (the method of making volumetric images of film scenes) in a broader academic discourse. Although Ferguson cites his sources in his voice-over, the video itself does not adhere to the academic standards when it comes to referencing of literature. There is no list of his sources in the video itself or in the description. So although the video operates in an academic milieu and has a subject matter that shows overlap with academic fields of study, one can wonder whether it coheres to the current standards of academic practice.
As seen in this chapter, there are many scholars who are eager to claim that most of the experimentation with essayistic audiovisual material stems from the academic community. However, most developments of the video essay form stem from outside the realm of academia. Firstly, to use audiovisual material when making arguments about audiovisual material is not a groundbreaking idea, and has been made available thanks to technological advancements made outside of the realm of the humanity studies. The genre of the video essay itself has been developed and made popular
predominantly by individuals with little background in academia. The groundbreaking video essay series Everything is a Remix from Kirby Ferguson stems from 2010, and Ferguson’s background is that of a filmmaker. Kevin B. Lee, the influential video essayist who has been publishing video essays since 2008, started as a filmmaker. Lewis Bond of the Channel Criswell calls himself a filmmaker, Evan Puschak of Nerdwriter1 has a background as a producer and writer for the digital branches of MSNBC and the Discovery Channel (Forbes). The elusive Kogonada debuted his first feature film during the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Many of the most prolific, most popular essayists working today don’t have academic backgrounds, so for McWhirter to claim that “it is largely academics and scholars who have advocated the potential of video essays” is an overstatement at best.
3.3 - The Documentary
At first glance, the documentary shows great resemblance to the video essay. Both are audiovisual, investigative and informing works. However, the documentary film as a genre is incredibly broad. There are forms like portraits, histories, journalistic inquiries, fly-on-the-wall, participatory, poetic, found footage and mockumentary. These are just a few of the many stylistic forms a documentary can take. John Grierson, who coined the term documentary, defined it as a “creative treatment of
actuality” (Grierson, p. 13), underlining that the documentary was a creative endeavor but was also inherently not fiction. Going by this brief description of documentary, a video essay could be listed as one of those as well. The video essay is a creative re-arrangement of audiovisual material, used to substantiate a statement, observation or idea. And there are more commonalities; the explanatory voice, the audiovisual components. Certainly compared to certain styles of documentary, for instance the found footage documentaries that rely on archival footage instead of newly shot material, have a similar look as video essays.
A speaking example of the similarities between documentaries and video essays can be found in the following two films; Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) and Tony Zhou’s (Every Frame A Painting) Vancouver Never Plays Itself (2015). Anderson’s documentary is an exploration of the depiction of Los Angeles on film, and how much it differs from the ‘real’ city. It is about the liberties taken with the city and its architecture by Hollywood, and how the city and Hollywood have
become synonymous with each other to the outside world. The documentary is mainly made with archival footage of Los Angeles in films, shown together with a voice over from Encke King. The style of the film is personal, due to the narrator calling himself I and because of the personal observations that are being made, for instance: “People blame all sorts of things on the movies. For me it’s the betrayal of the native city. Maybe I’m wrong but I blame them for the custom of abbreviating the city’s name to L.A.” (Los Angeles Plays Itself). The style itself is meandering, searching, almost as an ongoing investigation into Los Angeles on the Silver Screen.
The premise of Zhou’s Vancouver Never Plays Itself is simple. It is about how the city of Vancouver – because of its beneficial tax rulings and is nondescript look – is being used as a setting for almost any big city except Vancouver. New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Fransisco, Santa Barbara, a non-descript Eastern European city, India and even North Korea. It features Zhou’s characteristic quick-talking voice over and lots and lots of audiovisual examples of Vancouver not being Vancouver. The score is comprised of high tempo pop and hip-hop music and the editing is flashy. The documentary and the video essay have similar premises and use similar stylistic features, which makes the differences between the two stand out even more. Los Angeles Plays Itself has a low tempo. Anderson is not afraid to let his examples play out without any voice-over narration,
sometimes going on for minutes. The voice-over is slow and contemplating, and has the feel of an old-time film noir narration. And Anderson takes his time. Los Angeles Plays Itself is 169 minutes long. Compare that to Vancouver Never Plays Itself, which clocks in a little over nine minutes long. The editing is quick, shots and examples are short and Zhou’s narration plays almost continuously. But both Los Angeles and Vancouver are personal explorations of how their respective hometowns are depicted on screen.
Why is Los Angeles Plays Itself a documentary, and Vancouver Never Plays Itself a video essay? Los Angeles Plays Itself is lengthy, and many documentaries are long too. The International
Documentary Festival Amsterdam’s (IDFA) most prestigious program section is the IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary where the condition on length is that a feature documentary has to be at least 70 minutes long. Video essays tend to be a lot shorter, usually around 15 minutes. Conclusion, so it seems: documentaries are long and video essays are short.
Such a generalization is of course way too simplistic. Short documentaries are nowhere near an exception, they are even represented by their own Oscar category. And although video essays tend to come in 15 minute videos, notable longer exceptions can be found in plenty. Take for instance Lewis Bond’s Taxi Driver | ANALYSIS (2016) which comes in two parts and has a total running time of 74 minutes. Another example is YourMovieSucksDOTorg’s four-part video essay of Synecdoche,
New York (Kaufman, Charlie, 2008) which tallies up to a total of 86 minutes in running time. Is the
divide between documentary and video essay then found in its tone and tempo? Los Angeles Plays
Itself is slow, contemplating and is paced unhurried. Vancouver Never Plays Itself is hurried and
paced quickly, with lots of information cramped into its nine-minute running time. But just as the length of the material, tempo or pace is just a superficial difference between these two examples. And there are of course many fast-paced documentaries and slowly paced video essays.
So the difference between documentary and video essay does not lay in the superficial conventions such as length and tempo, but what makes them two separate genres then? Or is the video essay just a niche within the documentary genre? When comparing Los Angeles Plays Itself with
Vancouver Never Plays Itself it is evident that the difference lays beyond the surface of the look and
feel of the two pieces, the difference lays in the subject matter at hand. As mentioned before, Los
Angeles Plays Itself is told from a personal perspective, with the author making multiple mentions
about “his” city and his personal experiences of living in Los Angeles. And although this personal style of narration is akin to the narration and reasoning as seen in many video essays, it does show some big differences. Los Angeles Plays Itself is an investigation into Los Angeles on screen, and it investigates the many facets of it, but it is mainly into the city itself. It chronicles its history, its key players and its forgotten and overlooked voices. Although the style of narration feels very personal, its subject matter is not. Los Angeles Plays Itself is about the movies and Los Angeles. The documentary does not feature argumentation and reasoning in the style of an essay, and it also lacks a clear
statement or conclusion. Anderson shows its audience a deep investigation of Los Angeles and Hollywood from a personal perspective, but he does not deliver an essay. Therein lies the difference between the documentary and the video essay, because that is exactly what Tony Zhou does in
Vancouver Never Plays Itself. His video essay is not about Vancouver, but about cinema. In it he
delivers argumentation on a clear observation that he has; namely that the city of Vancouver is always used as a front for other locations in film. In the video he gives examples of when this happens, reasons for why this happens and the effect it has on the city of Vancouver.
This example shows that the video essay’s focus lays within cinema itself. Because of the unquotability of film in a written language, which Belour succinctly argued, the video essay needs to
adopt a cinematic language to ‘write’ its essays in, just like the essay film has tried to before. Academics and critics are starting to realize what filmmakers have always known: There is only one language available to do justice to cinema, and that is the cinematic language. But what is important here to note, is that the video essay is not simply a filmed version of a written essay. In the words of Tony Zhou: “Remember, video essays are not essays, they are films, so you want to structure and pace them like a filmmaker would” (‘F for Fake (1973) - How to Structure a Video Essay’, 2015). The video essay is not an audiovisual version of an essay or a short documentary on film, rather they are films in their own right, together forming their own genre.
3.4 Functions of the video essay
Looking at the video essay’s predecessors, one can dilute different aspects or characteristics that the video essay appropriated from each of them. Critical and academic writing have given the video essay a body of work and a tradition to base their essays and argumentation on. The essay film has shown that those essays do not have to be written in text but rather in a cinematic language. Lastly, the documentary has shown how factual content can also be a creative endeavor. But, to ask the question of purpose, can one dilute the goal or purpose of the video essay by looking at its forefathers?
It is evident that the essayistic nature of the video essay can be traced back to written essays and the essay film. But just as written essays have different purposes, the same is true for the video essay. To bring it back to a very simple question: is the video essay critical in nature, or academic? Cases can be made for both of those purposes, and at first glance the distinction seems to come from where the video essays are posted and by whom. After all, a video coming from an academic source that is posted on the website of an academic journal would then be academic, while a video that is shared by websites on film culture like Indiewire, Little White Lies or Fourthreefilm (all of whom have featured video essays in the past) would be critical. Although the source and context of the video essays do play a role in determining the purpose of the video essay, here in this chapter the actual stylistics that can be traced back to the video essays predecessors are more relevant to study.
In the case of academia those characteristics are for instance the practice of peer reviewing, a correct citing of sources and use of language in an academic style. Experiments with peer-reviewing are being made on platforms like [In]Transition and NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, but they are not entirely common practice. That also has to do with the case that both these platforms do not actually publish videos, rather they feature already published videos. At [In]Transition this happens because the platform wants to give video essayists opportunities to use their video essays to impress hiring, promotions and tenure committees (Peter Monaghan, 2017). However, it is in the academic style that we can find discrepancies between the written and the video essay. Ian Garwood argues in his video essay “The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism” (2016) that there are three big critiques on spoken voiceovers. Firstly there is the notion
that most voiceovers are just written essays spoken by a narrator, and therefore fail to take advantage of the audiovisual components of the video essay. A second problem is that most scholars have experience in writing compelling essays and giving engaging lectures, but recording interesting voice-overs is not part of the academic skill set. Therefore it is hard for some scholars to justly express themselves in video essays, and use tools like tone of voice or quick and slow pronunciation to properly engage with their audiences. Thirdly the use of voiceover exposes the author, which on the one hand makes the author more recognizable so it loses the more objective or impersonal nature of looking at written words. On the other hand it especially exposes female authors to misogynistic online harassment, which could explain why female voices are less represented than their male counterparts in video essays.
The narration of a video essay starts to become redundant when it resembles a written essay too much, which means that those video essays do not use the additional tools that the audiovisual form brings. But when scholars do use those additional components it has the danger of becoming too performative which in turn leads to a less objective style. It seems that the critical community, where the term objective does not necessarily apply, is in a smaller danger of these constraints. To get back to the video essay’s purpose; the genre is easier applicable to critical use then academic. Because the rules and conventions of critical works are less rigid than those in academic publishing, critics are offered more leeway when they translate their written works to video essays. With the absence of practices like peer-reviewing and standardized rules for sourcing, critics have the luxury of not needing to apply those practices to new media. Still, that does not mean that scholars don’t experiment with the genre. Audiovisual components do present big opportunities to scholars who want to refer to audiovisual works in their studies. Academics who are involved now in video essays could be seen as the pioneers who try to conquer the video essay frontier.
There is however a purpose of the video essay that is not reflected in the goals of the academic and critical communities. The video essay also serves an artistic purpose. The essay film and to a lesser extent the documentary also show varying degrees of artistic quality, or at least a creative approach to storytelling and presenting argumentation. Video essays can be tightly structured informative works, but also less didactic videos where a feeling or unspoken observation is
communicated without words or text. These ‘artistic’ video essays tend to rely less on articulated argumentation but generate meaning from the juxtaposition and montage of images. How this is done will be explored more fully in the next chapter, but here it is important where these artistic tendencies come from. Phillip Lopate argues: “There is the somewhat intractable nature of the camera as a device for recording thoughts: its tendency to provide its own thoughts, in the form of extraneous filmed background information, etc. rather than always clearly expressing what is passing through the filmmaker's mind” (Lopate, p. 22). In other words, although video graphic material has its merits in regard to referencing its source, it is not the most natural way to express one’s thoughts.
To summarize; critics, scholars and artists each try to make use of the video essay form, and each use it to apply it to their own specific goals and functions. Interestingly enough, together they do have created one new genre: the video essay. But what are the characteristics of this new genre?
CHAPTER IV: Generic Conventions
So if the video essay is not a documentary, not an essay film, not necessarily academic, what is the definition of the video essay then? In this chapter, the generic conventions of the video essay will be explored. But this immediately presents a problem: How can one define a genre? And, maybe even more importantly, why would it be necessary to define a genre? Furthermore, what makes the definition for video essays even more difficult, is that the video essay is a young and constantly changing genre where its rules and conventions seem to be changing all the time. Moreover, if it seems to be so easy for audiences to recognize different genres, then why would we overcomplicate things and theorize. To quote Paula Bernstein again: “Perhaps video essays are like pornography in that, as the saying goes, you know it when you see it” (Bernstein, 2016). And if that statement is true, then why would there be need for a detailed description?
Firstly, it is evident that patterns in storytelling and aesthetics exist, and they persist
throughout decades (Staiger, 1997, p.1). Naming these patterns serves different purposes, for example promotional ones, or to make cataloguing easier. But it also provides audiences and academics with a vocabulary to discuss films. To sum up:
“grouping films can still be an important scholarly act because it may elucidate what producers and consumers of films do. That is, they see films against a hypothesized pattern based on viewing other films. The process of comparison - which requires pattern - is crucial to communication and may contribute to enjoyment of a text” (Staiger, 1997, p.1).
As discussed earlier in this thesis, a common cultural consensus exists on what a video essay is supposed to be. That means that the first step in locating a recognizable genre, namely the grouping of films, has already taken place. What is important now is to try to grasp and group its patterns and aesthetics to make a fruitful discussion possible. But how can those patterns and aesthetics effectively be dissected and located?
In ‘A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre’ (1984) Rick Altman advocates a new (that is, new in 1984) attitude in dealing with film genre. He sees three major contradictions that happen in in analyzing genre. Firstly there is the contradiction that genre can be inclusive and exclusive at the same time. Inclusiveness comes from the checklist of generic conventions that include certain works within a certain genre. But this inclusive body of work is disrupted by critics and academics who target certain films that are better, truer examples of a certain example. Altman gives the example of Elvis Presley movies, which are by definition musicals because of their diegetic music, but are typically not seen as ‘real’ musicals (Altman, p.7). This creates an exclusive list of films which are considered to be part of said genre. “Because there are two competing notions of generic corpus on
our critical scene, it is perfectly possible for a film to be simultaneously included in a particular generic corpus and excluded from that same corpus” (Altman, p.7).
The second contradiction is between genre history and genre theory. Ever since the ‘60’s semiotics have had a big influence on genre theory. One of the key notions of this structuralistic approach is the belief that it is impossible for a single individual to evoke change in a linguistic system (Altman, p.8). But this created so many restriction, that a wave of second semiotics tried to include multiple similar texts in their analyses to locate meaning. But in doing so, they ignored the power of the audience in the interpretative process. “Because they treated genre as the interpretative
community, they were unable to perceive the important role of genres in exercising influence on the interpretative community” (Altman, p.8). This meant an inherently a-historical approach to genre,
while as seen in chapter II of this thesis it is evident that genres have origins, fluctuate and develop before they settle in familiar patterns. As Altman convincingly states
“As long as Hollywood genres are conceived as Platonic categories, existing outside the flow of time, it will be impossible to reconcile genre theory, which has always accepted as given the timelessness of a characteristic structure, and genre history, which has concentrated on chronicling the development, deployment and disappearance of this same structure” (Altman, p.8).
This is especially true in regards to video essays. As said before, the video essay genre is young and quickly evolving. With this genre that changes so quickly, it seems contradictory to fix it in place by locating its generic conventions. Thirdly, there are the opposing ideas of genre as ritual and genre as ideology. The former is the idea that genre stems from the needs of its audience. The audience demands to see a certain type of film which film companies provides. The audience sees its expectations and desires reinforced. The audience identifies itself with the genre, and watching a genre film becomes a ritual to celebrate that identification. Video essays are also part of this
identification, as they tend to focus on the same set of auteurs for their analyses over and over again (Kiss and Van den Berg, 2016). On the other hand there is the idea that genres are the identifiable structures of Hollywood’s ideology, its discours if you will. “Whereas the ritual approach sees Hollywood responding to societal pressure and thus expressing audience desires, the ideological approach claims that Hollywood takes advantage of spectator energy and psychic investment in order to lure the audience into Hollywood’s own positions. The two are irreducibly opposed, yet these irreconcilable arguments continue to represent the most interesting and well defended of recent approaches to Hollywood genre film” (Altman, p.9).
Instead of neglecting these contradictions, or favouring one side of the discussion over the other, Altman develops a new approach to film genre that instead of diminishing these positions tries to “explain the circumstances underlying their existence” (Altman, p.10), an approach that tries to feed off of these existing contradictions. And so Altman comes to his semantic/syntactic approach. This approach first looks at the semantic building blocks of a film, which are for instance settings,
stock characters, music and shots. Together these are an objective checklist to categorize films in certain genres, which are inclusive and broadly applicable but in itself hold little explanatory power. After all, a film is more than just a set of formal stylistic components. The syntactic components of genre are best summarized as the underlying structure in which the semantic building blocks are placed. These syntactic components are harder to list as objective bits and are more subjective. Altman gives the example of the western, where the semantic components are the cowboys and Indians, the setting in the American West roughly between the years 1840 and 1900 (Altman, p. 10). Now the syntactic components of a western are for instance the encounter between civilization and nature on a frontier. In order to fully understand a genre, one must look at both the semantic components and the syntactic structure.
In adapting Altman’s approach to genre to the video essay, there are a few notions to keep in mind. Firstly, Altman’s text is very explicitly written about Hollywood film genres. Genre is of course a phenomenon that is broader than just Hollywood, but one cannot neglect the influence of
Hollywood as a system or industry on the forming of genres. Especially since the open system of publishing video essays is organized so differently than the relatively closed Hollywood system. Now how a system of competing businesses like Hollywood works is incredibly complicated and hard to generalize, but one big difference regarding to video essays stands out. When dealing with video essays, there is almost always a very direct relationship between creator and audience, with the intermediate being the platform itself where the video essays are located. For example, Evan Puschak of the Nerdwriter1 channel always ends his videos with video of himself talking directly into the camera. In these endings he addresses his viewers, thanks them for viewing and makes some statements about his future plans or current developments. Patrick H. Willems of the Patrick (H)
Willems Channel does the same. Another example is found in “How To Do A Plot Twist” (Now You
See It, 2017), where the author opens with the statement: “I have been asked to do a video about plot twist since just about the beginning of this channel”. This direct contact between author and audience also manifests itself in other examples like the prominently shown contact information, the ability to do requests and the involvement of authors in the comment section under their own videos. But when dealing with the Hollywood system, the process from creator to audience is longer, with more people and more interests involved. This also means that the process of change in genre happens more quickly in the video essay. Because the line of production and distribution is shorter, there are less checks and balances in the system and because the financial risks of publishing video essays are nothing compared to that of a big Hollywood production, it is easier for a video essayist to experiment with the form.
4.1 – Semantic Building Blocks
As said before, the video essay is constantly in flux, changing its characteristics in rapid tempo. An example of this can be found in Kevin B. Lee’s video essay What Makes a Video Essay
Great? (2014), in which he compares his own older work to Tony Zhou’s videos. He notices that
Zhou’s narration is quicker and his editing is flashier, a style that Lee now incorporates in his own video essays. Recently Conor Bateman explored the effect that a so called “Facebook-first policy” has on the aesthetics of video essays in his text “Publish and Perish: Video Essays in the Age of Social Media” (2017). The video essays that are posted on Facebook tend to be shorter in length and can operate without sound to suit the platform’s needs. This is to show how quickly the genre is changing. So is it possible to document the video essay’s semantic building blocks, or are they too elusive yet? Although the genre is developing and modernizing itself, the genre itself has not changed too much since its earlier examples, as the next chapter will show.
4.1.a - The Voice
Simply put, the video essay is compromised out of two components; image and text. The biggest part of the latter comes in the form of voice-overs, an often recurring part of the video essay. As far as the essayistic quality of the video essay goes, it seems to be that the spoken argumentation is the most essay-like part of the video essay. It is the vehicle that the author uses to express his thoughts. A beautiful example of this are the videos of Lewis Bond for his Channel Criswell Youtube channel. Although he started his channel with doing spoken reviews of movies he had seen, he has changed his subjects to film analysis since April 2015. He delivers his analyses through a voice-over in a very convincing style. His analyses, just like a well-written essay, have clear argumentative structures. An example of this can be found at the beginning of his video essay on City of God (original title: Cidade
de Deus, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002) called “City of God - The Open World Movie”
(2015). It starts with the following voice-over narration: “You have two hours to tell a story spanning 15 years, introduce a ton of characters that spin your plot and set it all in a completely lawless
environment. So how do you create a world for your movie to work? You make City of God” (Bond, 2015). This statement taken together with the title of the video makes it immediately clear what Bond’s aim for this video essay is. The goal is to show how City of God succeeds in creating an open world movie, stringing together characters, time and setting. The rest of the video is a point by point explanation of how this works so well in this particular movie.
Without the voice-over, Bond’s video essays could not hold their own. They would just be a string of videos with some music under them, so for Bond the voice-over is essential. But there are many examples of video essays without any form of voice-over narration, so how do they successfully convey their observations and ideas? Firstly, there are the video essays that do not feature a voice-over, but present their argumentation in titles. For instance look at the example “The Dark Knight
Resists” (2017) from Daniel Clarkson Fischer. It is a video essay about how Cristopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy plays into societal anxieties like terrorism, the surveillance state, weapons of mass destruction and the threat of fascism and anarchy. As mentioned before, the video essay does not use a voice-over. The video essay instead is comprised of footage from the three Batman films and some behind the scenes footage. The argumentation itself comes not only from inter- and subtitles that present the authors ideas, but also from pictures of newspaper headlines, quotes from experts and footage from documentaries and news items about the threats and fears that a modern Western society faces. These ‘real’ quotes underline the idea that a Christopher Nolan superhero movie strikes a chord because they reference modern developments in society. With less text, the images become more and more important in Fischer’s video essay, compared to Bond’s. But images can be more powerful still, which is the case in video essays with no text at all.
The filmmaker who goes by the name acronym of Koganada is a master of the video essay without narration. Two similar video essays of his are “Hands of Bresson” (2014) and “Eyes of Hitchcock” (2015). These are about the use of hands in the films of Robert Bresson and on shots of eyes used by Alfred Hitchcock respectively. They are both relatively short in length, no more than a few minutes each. With the absence of text, one can wonder if these videos are truly essayistic. After all the videos contain no argumentation, no conclusion and no explicit observations or thoughts. But because they are not explicit, does not mean that they are not there. The underlying observation, which is the starting point of every video essay, is in this case that Bresson and Hitchcock put strong emphasis on hands or eyes in their work. In Kogonada’s own words: “I don’t really have a desire, when I make these things, to teach. I just want it to be a starting point of conversation.” (Lapin, 2016). The authors who create video essays without text can, if successful at doing so, articulate their observations without using words, being written or spoken. Going back to Kogonada’s own words, the textless video essay’s didactic functions take a step back, to let the viewer make their own assumptions.
So here there are three different forms of video essays; video essays with a voice-over, video essays with titles and video essays with no text at all. In these three forms the emphasis on text over image or vice versa shifts, in the video essays with voice-overs the text usually has the strongest emphasis and in the textless video essays the image is the most powerful. But now the question is the following; is a voice-over an essential semantic convention for a video essay? As we have seen, the answer is simply a no. Having text is not a prerequisite to successfully convey the author’s
observations or ideas. And with this discovery, we are starting to get closer to the essence of the video essay. A video essay and a written essay are not the same thing. A video essay, other than a written one, tries to use its audiovisual components like montage, images and sound to explain the authors reasoning. One must put titles and voice-over within a broader use of audiovisual components that an author of video essays can use.
4.1.b - Imagery
If text is not the most important vehicle that lays out the argumentation in a video essay, then what language is used to ‘write’ a video essay? What is the system or structure that the video essay operates in? In which language are they written? One thing that is similar in every video essay, is that they are made up from the cinematographic material that they are referencing. As mentioned before, this is what sets the video essay apart from its written counterpart. So how does this work in practice?
The author uses moving images from the audiovisual material that it is referencing, and uses montage to edit it into a cohesive story. In that sense the image is both the argument and the example at the same time, in the sense that at once it is used to construct argumentation, but it is also the construction of said argumentation. That is important for the video essay, as the footage is not just the reference of the argumentation presented but the construct of the essay. As we have seen, text in the form of titles or voice-over are not a prerequisite in a video-essay. It is the image that carries the weight of the observations. An example where this is done wrong is in the video essay “La La Land: Using Color | VIDEO ESSAY” (2017) from Karsten Runquist. In this video Runquist analyzes the use of colour in the film La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016). His observation is that the use of primary colours signals both Hollywood and separation in the film, whereas the less vibrant colors stand for warmth and connection. While this analysis in itself is not as elaborated as it could have been, it is the use of imagery itself where this example falls flat. Runquist has decided to use stills, titles and two times an image of the three different primary colours. The problem is that most of his use of visual material is redundant and unnecessary taken together with his spoken voice-over. For instance, take a look at the piece starting at the 1:14 minute mark of the video. We hear the voice-over say the following: “I see DOP Linus Sandgrenn’s heavy use of these colours (red, blue and yellow) as a symbol for Hollywood. Of course everything looks pretty, luxurious and vibrant. We get that from the party scene from somebody in the crowd in the beginning. But the colours don’t provide us with much heart or connection, they just look good. The reds are being red, the blues are being blue and yellows, you guessed it, are being yellow” (Runquist, 2017). The argumentation itself is limited, but here we are concerned with the corresponding images the author decides to use. When he says “Hollywood”, we see an image of the Hollywood sign. When he says “Pretty, luxurious and vibrant” We see an intertitle with these words written down, and during his last sentence we see an image of four woman in different red, blue and yellow coloured dresses with extra titles saying “Red”, “Blue” and “Yellow”. In this video, the text and images do not work together to state an argument, rather the images are a visual enhancement of what the author is saying, audiovisual decoration with an
ornamental function. This video would work exactly the same without the image, because it adds nothing new to the argumentation. Although Runquist claims in capital letters in the title that this is a video essay, it is not. This video could be called a spoken essay, maybe an audio visually enhanced essay, but it could not be considered to be falling within the genre of the video essay. It is not a video
essay, because the visual component is not adding to the author’s observations that he tries to articulate.
But how does this translate into an identifiable semantic building block? Just “use of moving images” is too vague, since almost all audiovisual material uses moving images. It also does not cover the practice of video essays, because in video essays the material is the reworking of its resource object or objects. The videos cite their research objects by using them as their work material. It is also the reworking of existing material that gives shape to the video essay. Could that be the recognizable aspect of every video essay? That the video essay uses existing audiovisual material? In other words, what are the prerequisites for the audiovisual imagery used in a video essay?
The source of the images comes from the research object of the video itself, which means that the images are unoriginal in a literal sense. The images are shot or designed not by the author of the video essay, but by filmmakers, journalists, animators and cameramen who did this not on behalf of the video essay author, but for projects that did initially had nothing to do with the respective video essays. Because video essays rely on this reworking of existing material, the videos are in a way remixes. Could the remix be another semantic building block?
4.1.c – Remix
The verb remixing refers to the practice developed by New York city DJ’s in the 1970’s of
“separating individual audio tracks from different multi-track recordings and recombining them into a novel musical work” (Diakopoulos, Nicholas, et al, p.133). In the modern day, when media has become digitized, the manipulability of audiovisual material has become greater and easier. The term remix is now broader than just music, as it is now generalized to mean the manipulation and
combining of many different types of media. Now it is the activity “consisting of the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies. Remix, as discourse, is supported by the practice of cut/copy and paste” (Navas, 2010). As the wonderful video essay series
Everything is a Remix (Kirby Ferguson, released in four parts from 2010 to 2012) explains, derivative
works, copying of ideas and reusing old material is something that can be found in pretty much all creative works. But the practice of literally copying and pasting parts of existing works into your own, goes hand in hand with the immense reproducibility and trans medial nature of modern digital files. It is no coincidence that the growing popularity of making video essays has happened coincidentally with the digital revolution and the increasing accessibility of digital editing software, but does that mean that the video essay itself is a remix? Wikipedia’s definition of a remix is the following: “A remix is a piece of media which has been altered from its original state by adding, removing, and/or changing pieces of the item. A song, piece of artwork, book, video, or photograph can all be remixes. The only characteristic of a remix is that it appropriates and changes other materials to create
something new” (Wikipedia, 2017). If we go by that description, then the answer is a simple yes. After all, the video essay is also appropriated from existing audiovisual material, but because through the
essayistic qualities personal observations and argumentation is added, its product is something new. So how does the being a remix shape the video essay genre?
“For those of us over the age of 15, our conception of writing is writing with text (…). But if you think about the ways kids under 15 using digital technology think about writing, you know, writing with text is just one way to write, and not even the most interesting way to write. The more interesting ways are increasingly to use images and sound and video to express ideas” (Lessig cited in Koman, 2005). In this quote, Lawrence Lessig is speaking about remix as a new way of writing, made possible by modern advancements in technology. Interestingly enough, here and in other texts (as mentioned in earlier in this thesis) comparisons have been made between the video essay and critical and academic writing. Although the remark from Lessig is an interesting one there is the practical fact that writing is a lot easier and more accessible than using different software-programs to manipulate content to make remixes. In that sense it makes more sense to call remixing an advanced form of writing, writing-plus if you will, that uses multiple sensory languages besides text, for example sound and image. And this comes back to the argument made in this thesis that the video essay is a piece of work where different forms of communication are used to present an argument or observation.
(‘Everything is a Remix Part 2’, 2011)
4.1.d – creating meaning
To summarize: what are the semantic building blocks of the video essay? What are the results of the semantic analysis of the genre? Although many video essays feature text of some sort, it is not a prerequisite for the video essay genre. More importantly is the reworking of existing audiovisual material into a remix, with the addition of a personal observation or argumentation. The author is able to use different audiovisual techniques to ‘write’ an essay in a digital multimedia language into a coherent video essay. So referring back to Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach, this list of attributes
