Expresser, Agitator, Salve and Mirror: the Video Essay and Contemporary Cinephilia

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Expresser, Agitator, Salve and Mirror: the Video Essay and

Contemporary Cinephilia

Master’s Media Studies: Film Studies University of Amsterdam

Supervised by: Dr. M.A.M.B. Baronian Second Reader: Prof. P.P.R.W. Pisters Word Count: 19,881 26 June 2017 Jessica McGoff

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Abstract

The video essay has emerged as a new and popular form of critical analysis in the last half-‐decade. However, its emergence has provoked discourses surrounding the form’s exact position within the contemporary media landscape. This thesis seeks to mediate these discourses by examining the video essay in the context of contemporary cinephilia. The concept of contemporary cinephilia proves to be a productive framework, for the video essay functions within it as an articulation and reflection on the landscape. This thesis will firstly demonstrate that the video essay functions as an expression of contemporary cinephilia. It will further examine how this expression provokes new conceptions of the material in relation to cinema and cinephilia. In examining these new conceptions, this thesis will finally interrogate their implications, and how the video essay may trouble the paradigm of (im)materiality vital to cinephilia. Thus, this thesis finds the video essay to provide an excellent vantage point through which to reveal the tensions and ambivalences of the landscape of contemporary cinephilia.

Keywords: video essay; videographic film studies; cinephilia; phenomenology; materiality.

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List of Figures

Figure 1.2 Screenshots from Pass the Salt.

Figure 1.2 The original image from An Anatomy of a Murder. Figure 2.1 Screenshot from Carnal Locomotive.

Figure 2.2 Screenshot from Carnal Locomotive.

Figure 3.1 Screenshot showing Eric Farr in Rock Hudson’s Home Movies.

Figure 3.2 The aftermath of the Bigger than the Shining DCP disk (personal photograph).

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Introduction

The emergence, and rapid proliferation, within the last half-‐decade of a new format and practice of critical film analysis often dubbed “the video essay” has opened a Pandora’s box of discourses regarding cinema. The video essay, to use a most rudimentary definition, is an expression of critical thinking that utilises audiovisual means of sound and image. The form’s emergence and popularity has been both a cause of celebration and resistance. Generally disseminated in online spaces, the current trend of video essay practice has been presented as an affirmative re-‐engagement with critical film analysis, whilst at the same time been resisted and dismissed as a fad with little critical rigour. The form’s directness and accessibility also gives it broad appeal, and the practice’s adoption by film critics, academics and amateur fans alike has been met with both enthusiasm and accusations of indistinctness. Further, the video essay’s exact origins are somewhat indefinable, and many have expressed reservations in considering the form “new.” The video essay has also provoked discussions regarding copyright and commercial or educational usage of existing film material, further highlighting the ease of access one has to film objects within our contemporary media landscape. I do not wish to engage with each of these discussions discretely within this thesis, nor do I wish to make any generic or evaluative claims regarding the video essay. Rather, this thesis will mediate these various debates through the all-‐encompassing concept of cinephilia: the love of cinema that gives rise to and propagates these discourses.

Cinephilia proves a productive concept in relation to the video essay, for it is one that mirrors the contradictions of the video essay expressed within the aforementioned debates. Cinephilia as a notion is not itself entirely resolved: Jenna Ng, for instance, argues that cinephilia is so deeply subjective and personal that “it cannot be fully contained in objective theory, and that is its glory” (75). However, Malte Hagener and Marijke de Valck, whilst not necessarily disagreeing with the personal aspects of cinephilia, assert that the concept can in fact be theorised, given that we recognise its subjective factors. Hagener and de Valck assert that any approach for studying contemporary cinephilia should

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engage in its “double-‐movements,” namely, its constant move “between the biographical and theoretical, the singular and the general, the fragment and whole, the complete and the incomplete, the individual and the collective” (Cinephilia in Transition 27). The video essay and cinephilia become interrelated in this way, both articulating double-‐movements. The video essay, when considered an expression of cinephilia, brings to light the contradictions and tensions within the concept. Thus, this thesis aims to elucidate these tensions, as well as explicate the way in which the video essay embodies cinephilia’s ambivalences.

This thesis intervenes between two concurrent discourses: the declared death of cinephilia and the burgeoning emergence of the video essay. Debates surrounding the end of cinephilia are inextricably bound up in proclamations and prophetisations of the death of cinema itself. These declarations of cinema’s death tend to occur as results of shifts within the technology involved in cinema, or the introduction of new technologies capable of filming, screening or storing the moving image. Paul Willemen observed necrophilic overtones in his consideration of cinephilia, in how it relates to “something that is dead, but alive in memory” (227). Willemen sees cinephilia as a fragile concept, under threat of extinction as analogue technology gives way to digital, and projected images give way to electronic ones. Most famously, Susan Sontag penned an obituary to cinema in her 1996 ‘The Decay of Cinema.’ Sontag’s despair was directed not so much at the quality of the films themselves, but rather a critical shift in the way in which they were now being consumed. Sontag mourned the time wherein “the full-‐time cinephile [was] always hoping to find a seat as close as possible to the big screen — ideally front-‐row center” (61). With this remark, Sontag betrays a fixation with technological changes that instigated the altering or loss of cinema-‐ going habits. Home viewing media threatened cinema attendance, endangering the prevalence of the exhibition-‐based experience of cinema. Declarations of cinema’s death are defined by a refusal to acknowledge or conceptualise any form of malleability of the medium. In these accounts, cinema and cinephilia are not open to re-‐interpretation or re-‐imagination: once they cease to be defined by recognisable parameters, they cease to be — they die.

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Arguably the largest shifts in technologies have been centred around the increasing importance of the Internet and online spaces. At first glance, the physical space of the exhibition venue becomes lost to the non-‐physical, digital space of streaming, file sharing and online discussion. It is within this online environment that the video essay rapidly proliferates. Often also referred to as the “audiovisual essay” or “videographic research,” the video essay is not a precise genre. As this etymological contention already divulges, the form’s rise in popularity has occurred simultaneously to debates regarding the video essay’s exact definition and value. Practitioners Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin perhaps provide the most complete summary of the video essay as a “name for the burgeoning field of inquiry, research, and experimentation within academia and also beyond it; the expression of critical, analytical, and theoretical work using the resources of audiovisuality — images and sounds in montage” (Introduction to the Audiovisual Essay). From this, one can infer a broad characterisation that considers the video essay an expression of pedagogy regarding film using the means of film itself, that is, audiovisual processes. I will elaborate on the video essay’s evasiveness of definition and indiscernible lineage in a later chapter, but what it crucial to note here is that the form heavily relies on the digital means of file storage, editing and the online culture of propagation and circulation. In this light, the video essay emerges within a time of “dead” cinephilia, only to exhibit a sustained focus and concern for cinema, the very concern that begat the conceptualisation of cinephilia at the outset.

It would be tempting, then, to position the video essay as a “re-‐birth” of cinephilia. Indeed, the video essay does restore many facets of traditional cinephiliac practices, namely a renewed interest in critical interrogation of film texts and the provocation of debate (through a means that even poses a potential way of bridging the gap between academia and film criticism). However, this narrative risks simplification of both the video essay as a form and the contemporary landscape of cinema it thrives in. Further, the trajectory that proposes cinephilia’s death and re-‐birth can be radically disputed. Malte Hagener and Marijke de Valck argue for cinephilia as an ultimately pliable concept, demonstrating how it has “transformed itself” in step with the transformations

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of digital technologies (Down with Cinephilia 12). This thesis will subscribe to cinephilia as a malleable notion, therefore positioning the video essay not so much as a strict re-‐birth but a re-‐channelling of cinephilia within a changed landscape. I am cautious to avoid a technologically deterministic narrative, for although the video essay depends on digital technology and online distribution, I will see these technologies as enablers, rather than the sole causations for the form. This thesis will see the video essay as an expression, not a totality, of contemporary cinephilia. In this way, the video essay will be used as a framework to examine and explicate the tensions present within contemporary cinephilia, be they either unique to the digital age or simply illuminated by it. The video essay, as I will argue, embodies both relief and aggravation of these tensions. The video essay is an ambivalent form that articulates a concept, cinephilia, full of, and to an extent defined by, ambivalence.

This project will attempt to think through the form of the video essay in order to obtain a unique vantage point within the contemporary landscape of cinephilia. In doing so, I will utilise concepts from a multitude of movements within film studies and new media, such as new materialism and film phenomenology, alongside textual and contextual analysis of several video essay examples. The first chapter will undertake the foremost task of this thesis, that is, to establish the video essay as an expression of contemporary cinephilia. This chapter will provide a historical outline of cinephiliac traditions, arriving at a contemporary cinephilia that signals a transformed relationship between the cinephile and film object. The video essay will itself be introduced within this chapter, and I will validate the form as an expression of cinephilia through synthesising the disputes it has provoked. Finally, this chapter will stage an encounter between contemporary cinephilia and the video essay. This encounter brings to the surface the tensions concerning materiality at the heart of cinephilia — providing a line of enquiry for my subsequent chapters.

The second chapter concerns itself primarily with the new relationship between the film object and the cinephile. In doing so, it argues that the video essay, as a cinephiliac practice, provokes new conceptions of the material. The video essay calls for a re-‐consideration of digital space as immaterial space, and

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this chapter will demonstrate that the digital process of video essay creation is indeed a material one. This material process involves a close, and often direct proximity to the film’s body — transforming the metaphor of filmic embodiment into a more tangible notion. The video essay fulfils and realises the allegorical notion of touch and hapticity, closing the distance between the body of the spectator and the body of the film and opening up the possibility of cinephilia as a more embodied practice. In this light, the chapter will go on to examine how the creation of the video essay can open up embodied insight regarding film. The chapter will then turn to how these insights can be comprehended, examining the video essay’s potential to give pedagogy a haptic dimension.

Whilst the second chapter of this thesis explicates a new bodily relationship between cinema and cinephile, the third chapter interrogates the implications of this new relationship. This chapter asserts that the video essay’s fulfilment of the metaphor of touch acts as relief to the frustrations of cinephilia. Here, the paradigm of materiality and immateriality at the heart of cinema is proved to be one that ends in frustration. Whilst the video essay will be shown to ease the frustrations of navigating the complex immateriality of cinema, this chapter will also ask: at what cost? This chapter will consider touch a destructive force: for as the metaphor of the haptic is made more tangible, the film object’s position becomes destabilised. Thus, the practice of the video essay will be considered a threat both to cinephiliac longing and to the film object itself. The inherent sense of destruction within video essay creation reveals a new power dynamic in contemporary cinephilia, forcing reflection upon the conflicts and anxieties of the landscape.

Ultimately, this thesis strives to situate the video essay within contemporary cinephilia as expresser, agitator, salve and mirror. It will follow a trajectory through these chapters that considers the video essay as an expression of contemporary cinephilia; examines the new conceptions of the material this expression calls for; and finally interrogates how these new conceptions trouble the paradigm of materiality inherent to cinephilia from its very outset. It will conclude with a reflection on contemporary cinephilia and the tensions the video essay forces the cinephile to reckon with.

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Chapter One:

The Video Essay as an Articulation of Contemporary Cinephilia

The history of cinephilia as a concept and practice has consistently had to reckon with one primary force: technology. It is not so much the specifics of cinema-‐ related technology that is at stake here, rather the qualities it imbues in cinephilia as a concept and the reactions it provokes that define cinephiliac practices. Susan Sontag’s famous 1996 obituary for cinema, ‘The Decay of Cinema,’ provides an excellent framework through which to examine the shifts within the properties and practices of cinephilia. Sontag asserts that love of the cinema has waned, stating that “the distinctive cinephiliac love of movies” is now hard to find (61). Most tellingly, Sontag conflates the act and practice of watching films in a cinema space to a passion for the medium. Sontag’s inability to reconcile the archetypal cinephiliac “rituals…of the darkened theatre” (Sontag 60) with the state of contemporary cinema leads her not a reconsideration of cinephilia, but a declaration of its death. Here, I will examine both the cinephiliac practices that Sontag mourns, and the ones that provoked her obituary. What emerges in doing so is not indeed a narrative of death (nor subsequent re-‐birth), but a transformative concept bound up in notions of materiality and immateriality.

Traditional Cinephilia: An Ephemeral Notion

If Susan Sontag’s ‘Decay of Cinema,’ is one that is inherently nostalgic, longing for a time now passed, then it is fitting that early conceptions of cinephilia were defined by a sense of temporality, specifically one of transience. Early, pre-‐ digital, cinephilia was bound up in transience, observable in the technologies of exhibition and in the nebulous definition of what cinephilia actually meant. For the majority of cinema’s lifespan, its associated technologies have been imbued with immateriality. Projection and storage of the traditional materials of film were already their degradation, for physical celluloid was vulnerable to decay and projection relied on the ephemeral elements of light and shadow. Further, the primary means of viewing cinema was that of cinema-‐going, the gathering within an exhibition space to view cinema texts. Historically, the word

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“cinephilia” has been most potently linked to a diverse range of ritualistic cinema-‐going habits throughout the middle part of the twentieth century, mainly in urban areas like Berlin, New York City and especially Paris (Balcerzak and Sperb 11). These groups of cinema-‐goers produced written accounts of “critical yet intensely personal responses to film as an art form, and more importantly, as an experience (emphasis mine)” (Balcerzak and Sperb 12). Cinephilia at this time relied on the event and context of literal attendance at theatres equipped to project the medium of film.

Early expressions of cinephilia’s dependence on the context of impassioned cinema-‐going elucidates a frequently cited site-‐specific point of origin, France in the 1960s (de Valck and Hagener, Down With Cinephilia 11). The film journal Cahiers du Cinéma introduced the practice of the politique des auteurs, a way in which to establish the primacy of the director as artist, and therefore cinema as art form. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener point to this moment as emblematic of cinephilia’s double nature: on the one hand connoting an intense pleasure resulting in a personal, strongly felt connection with cinema, and on the other operating as a cover for discourses with dogmatic agendas (Down With Cinephilia 11). They see the hierarchies and taste preferences established by the politique des auteurs as “highly idiosyncratic, elitist and often counter-‐intuitive” (Down With Cinephilia 11). Paul Willemen similarly positions cinephilia within a French context, crediting the 1920s debates surrounding photogénie as a predecessor to politique des auteurs, and “the first major attempt to theorise a relationship to the screen” (231). This Parisian archetype had a great influence on the conception of both cinema and cinephilia worldwide, most observable when Andrew Sarris’ influential ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory’ brought the concept of film authorship to the United States in 1962. Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb credit Sarris’ article to initiating “a tradition of American cinephilia,” (11) referencing critics and writers such as Pauline Kael and, of course, Susan Sontag. Whilst this writing was critical and analytic, the emphasis on the experience of cinema also signalled a more personal and subjective engagement.

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The personal, emotional aspect of this love of cinema, associated with felt emotion and experience, both inspired and troubled scholarly pursuits regarding cinema. The rise of journals such as Cahiers and the increasing interest and confidence within journalistic traditions of cinephilia propagated by writers such as Kael and Sontag “opened the doors for film studies in academic institutions where literary authorial scholarship ruled” (Balcerzak and Sperb 13). Movements within academia elucidate the complex navigation between the ungraspable subjectivity of cinephilia and the rational ventures of scholarly analysis. Dudley Andrew traces “three ages” of cinema studies, the first stage borne from the aforementioned criticism practice, wherein “aficionados engaged in zealous discussions in cineclubs” (342). The second stage sees an introduction of a more “disciplined spirit” (Andrew 343), wherein the field adopted continental theories such as semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism and post-‐structuralism. Andrew’s third stage is decidedly pluralist, dominated by approaches borne from cultural studies and a focus on exploring issues of reception (345). Through Andrew’s neat, although somewhat reductive, timeline of film studies within academia, cinephilia’s influence becomes clear. Film studies was developed due to the influence and fervour of cinephilia, but there was also a clear turn away from impassioned writing about the medium to a more critical and detached stance. Cinephilia, so based in experience and the immaterial realms of emotion and devotion, presented a conflict to the rigidity of academia. Immateriality, then, was present not just within the transience of cinephiliac practices, but also within the very concept itself.

The notion of transience that pre-‐digital cinephilia both relied and thrived on presented a separate ontological consideration for film scholars. In writing about film, most scholars were presented with the problem of analysing an object only available to them as presented in a cinema. This predicament was rarely seen as insurmountable (due in part to that there were little alternatives) but it undoubtedly informed pre-‐digital film scholarship. Close reading of influential writers and philosophers of film brings this issue to the fore. For example, in the preface to the French edition of Gilles Deleuze’s hugely significant Cinema 1: The Movement-Image in 1983, Deleuze gives his reasoning

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for the lack of illustrations within the text. He argues that the text alone aspires to act as illustration of “the great films, of which each of us retains to a greater or lesser extent a memory, emotion or perception” (xiv). Deleuze places greater emphasis on individual subjectivity, with the underlying assumption that viewing the film did indeed produce an affective response of some sort. This statement can be taken not only as a response to the practical consideration of film screening in the pre-‐digital era, but also an illustration of how the conditions of consumption informed scholarly thought. Stanley Cavell makes this more explicit: in his 1971 The World Viewed, Cavell writes, “my way of studying films has been mostly through remembering them, like dreams” (12). Cavell’s statement has ontological implications, revealing the extent that cinematic objects were to be viewed as dream-‐like, therefore transitory and somewhat illusory, and consquently analysed as such.

The ethereality of cinema during this era was also turned in to an object of study in itself as scholars took into consideration the way in which the cinematic object could, or could not, be possessed by the scholar. In 1975, Raymond Bellour published ‘The Unattainable Text,’ in which he asserted, “the text of the film is indeed an unattainable text” (19). He clarified that he does not denote the practical difficulties of obtaining the materials of the text, but the fact that the film as an object is inherently “unquotable” (20). Bellour is informed by the literal difficulties of transient film projection, stating that the contemporary scholar is “threatened continually with dispossession of the object” (19). Bellour then predicts the future of film studies in relation to changing technologies, which in some ways proves to be accurate conjecture. Bellour predicts that perhaps film will one day find a status analogous of a book, or a gramophone record of a concert (19): and indeed, film would find physical media such as VHS, DVD and eventually digital files. However, it is the technology that Bellour could not predict that directly agitates his argument regarding film’s unattainability. Bellour argues that film is unquotable due to the fact that what constitutes film in image, sound and movement, has fundamentally different relations to the written text (21). Therefore, the written text can never fully restore a film to what “only the projector can reproduce” (25).

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In asking if the film text should really be approached in writing at all, Bellour inadvertently poses the question in which digital technology and non-‐ linear editing begins to answer. I will return to this question later, which is fundamental in the emergence of the video essay as a form. Most crucial to note here, however, is that these academic examples cogently illuminate the connection between the transience of cinephiliac practices, that is, the literal attendance to site-‐specific exhibition spaces, and cinephilia as a concept. The ethereality of cinema’s pre-‐digital technologies imbues cinephilia with an inseparable sense of immateriality. In this light, Sontag’s declaration of the death of cinephilia becomes more understandable. Considering the close relationship between practice and concept, when practices changed, then arguably the concept itself becomes under threat.

Cinephilia and the Digital: Beyond Transience

I have inferred that the most potent force behind Susan Sontag’s assertion of cinephilia’s death was changing technologies. I now turn to examining what exactly these changing technologies were, and more crucially, interrogating if they did indeed threaten the entire concept of cinephilia, rather than just cinephiliac practices. Most pertinent to Sontag’s anxiety is the introduction of home viewing media as a competitor to cinema attendance. Whilst Jason Sperb and Scott Balckerzak remind us that earlier technologies, such as private 16mm projectors, “complicate any simplistic linear narrative about the evolution of ‘home’ or even ‘extra-‐theatrical’ viewing,” (7) the ubiquity of home viewing technologies of VHS and DVD is the primary concern here. Such material media allowed one to pause, to replay and repeat, a function that cinematic projection could not offer. Cinephilia, a practice up to this point so defined by transience, found itself at a crossroads. Physical home media was troubling, for it meant that the cinematic moment, the object of the cinephile’s love, was no longer so transitory. Theodoros Panayides argues, as part of a series of essays for Senses of Cinema regarding cinephilia in the age of the Internet and video, that the most important quality of home media such as VHS was the sense of control it gave the cinephile. Panayides refers not only to the control one has in the “unprecedented

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ability to isolate and manipulate images,” but also the global, non-‐metropolitan access to cinema and cinema culture that the circulation of home media has allowed (Permanent Ghosts Essay 2). Accounts such as Panayides’ are take a celebratory tone, in opposition to Sontag’s pessimism, already calling in to question the claimed degradation of cinephilia.

Another technological advancement that, like the circulation of home media, democratized cinephilia was the proliferation of the Internet. Sperb and Balckerzak point out that “few within academia have yet to fully acknowledge how blogging is fundamentally changing the nature of cinephilia” (23). Indeed, the existence of blogs provided a bridge between academia and criticism’s modes of discourse. Christian Keathley argues that non-‐academic blogs are frequently less jargon-‐ridden than academic publications, “while still maintaining a high degree of critical sophistication” (La Caméra-Stylo 178). Perhaps the commonality of cinephilia acts as a conduit for discourse, which conjointly with the Internet, opens up access to film knowledge and debate. Melis Behlil testifies to the power of these online networks, contending that film-‐ dedicated websites and blogs “provide a space for cinephiles to get together and exchange ideas, and fuel their need to discuss the films they have seen, which is part of the cinephiliac tradition” (113). Behlil implicitly lifts one aspect of traditional cinephilia, the need to discuss cinema with other cinephiles, away from its old preconditions concerning cinema-‐going. In doing so, we see the notion of cinephilia re-‐situated, proving that despite changing technology and spectatorial conditions, cinephilia itself has not changed, rather it has been re-‐ framed and re-‐channelled into new circumstances.

These accounts present a wholly different perspective from Sontag, portraying the notion of cinephilia has alive and well. However, what must be emphasised is that these technological shifts did not raise cinephilia from the dead. Rather, they prove that cinephilia did not die at all. What transpires in the transmutations that cinephilia has been forced to undergo in the wake of new technology is insight in to the term itself. As Christian Keathley puts it, “cinema’s first century has shown that there is no better formula for stirring up cinephiliac discourse than the introduction of new technologies into the film experience”

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(Digital Reproduction 1). As technology forced cinephiles to adapt, what comes into focus is the notion of cinephilia as a robust concept. So, if Sontag’s obituary was indeed “misplaced mourning” (Balcerzak and Sperb 16) — then the imperative of defining the exact contemporary state of cinephilia emerges. The most cogent account of which can be found in Thomas Elsaesser’s conceptualisation of “cinephilia take two.” Elsaesser’s model takes in to account the sense of temporality that sustains cinephilia whilst also introducing tensions within the contemporary transmutation of it — becoming a productive stage to set in order to introduce the video essay.

In ‘Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment,’ Thomas Elsaesser demonstrates that cinephilia did not perish after the classical period, rather it transformed. Elsaesser distinguishes between two primary kinds of cinephilia: classical cinephilia and cinephilia take two, both of which are “overlapping, co-‐ existing and competing with each other” (27). Elsaesser then demonstrates that cinephilia cannot be reduced to simply a love of cinema, “it is always already caught in several kinds of deferral: a detour in place and space, a shift in register and a delay in time” (30). The passage of Hollywood films to Europe after World War II and the site-‐specific cinema-‐going patterns of classic cinephiles are examples of detours of city, language and location (Elsaesser 31). The “triangulated time of strictly mediated desire” (31) that informs the cinephile’s love for the cinema provides an example in temporal deferral. This temporality defines the cinephile’s love, one tainted by doubt and ambivalence, and a disappointment that led to an “exorted confession of ‘I love no more’” (Elsaesser 32) in the form of the development of Screen Theory. Elsaesser summarises this feeling inherent to cinephilia, the ever-‐present possibility of disappointment, as “disenchantment,” which he argues as having a determining role within cinephilia itself (33).

In demonstrating the inherent role of displacement within cinephilia, Elsaesser in effect proves the transformable nature of it. This allows him to introduce cinephilia take two. Within this new cinephila, there are already divides between a cinephilia that has kept its faith with auteur cinema and the celluloid image, and a cinephilia that has found its love of cinema through

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embracing new technologies (35). The latter branch flourishes on the Internet, and fetishises the tactile sensations of new technological mediums. Elsaesser argues that three features stand out in this cinephilia, “re-‐mastering, re-‐ purposing, and re-‐framing” (36). These three features will inform my contention about the video essay’s position within cinephilia take two, and thus I will elaborate on the specifics of each later. What these features show however is that cinephilia take two implies a complex affair “involving an even more ambivalent state of mind and body” (39). Elsaesser suggests that whilst the new forms of enchantment “will probably also encounter new moments of dis-‐ enchantment,” (41) above all, cinephilia adapts to the circumstances of cinema. I will further explore possibilities of contemporary disenchantments, as well as the implications involved in the ability to re-‐master, re-‐purpose and re-‐frame. However, what Elseasser proves most crucial here is that cinephilia now is still alive, it is just living through different means. As Elsaesser most lucidly summarises, it has “reincarnated itself, by dis-‐embodying itself” (41). Thus, disembodied or otherwise, cinephilia persists. The concept of cinephilia take two sets the scene for the video essay, which I will now introduce before staging an encounter between the form and Elsaesser’s cinephilia take two.

The Video Essay: A Contentious New Form

The video essay is an emergent form, or mode, that has proliferated rapidly in digital spaces throughout the last half-‐decade. Often also referred to as “the audiovisual essay,” “videographic film studies” or interchangeably — the contention over its precise etymology already highlights its nebulous nature. For the purposes of this thesis, I will refer to the practice as that of producing a “video essay.” The emergent nature of the video essay means that it is itself still developing, establishing itself as a form as well as continually demonstrating new potentialities. Accordingly, defining the video essay is a complex task, for even its status as emergent can itself be called in to question. However, the key to delineating the form actually lies within its semantic awkwardness and resistance of definition — for these aspects are inherently related to its practice

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and heritage. My task here is to arrive upon a working definition of the video essay, whilst recognizing its innate deviations.

The video essay’s clearest lineage is that of the essay film. The essay film can be seen as both a sister and predecessor to the video essay, for it is both vital in configuring the video essay’s operations and distinct from the video essay itself. The essay film is characterized by its aesthetics and structure following the logic of an essay over narrative, “leaning towards intellectual reflections that often insist on more conceptual or pragmatic responses, well outside the borders of conventional pleasure principles” (Corrigan 5). To use a most-‐cited example, the “Left Bank” of the French New Wave movement that included filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda produced work with a “consistent interest in the interdisciplinary connections of film with literature” (Corrigan 209) confirming this work as essayistic rather than traditionally narrative. However, the essay film is by its nature difficult to classify, for transgression is characteristic of the literary essay form that it relies on and borrows from. Critical theorist Theodor Adorno notably argued for the indefinable nature of the essay, stating that “the essay’s innermost formal law is heresy” (23). Following this logic, Laura Rascaroli warns against overtheorisation of the essay film, for one risks countering the dissenting nature and openness inherent in the form. Rather, Rascaroli argues that the essay should be considered a mode in which cinema can work in, open to experimentation and appropriation (39). What emerges then, is not a need for strict delineation, but rather recognition of the way in which the essay film enabled the video essay. The essay film opened up the possibility of transferring the format of the literary essay to audiovisual means. Proving the power of sound and image, the essay film establishes and confirms that thought and argument can indeed be conveyed audiovisually.

In acknowledging the dissolve between the essay film and the video essay and the inherent slippage of such an open mode, I immediately signal that I do not wish to limit or deny this slippage. However, I do wish to define the video essay by qualification. The video essay becomes a distinct category based on two principles concerned with technology and pedagogy. Firstly, the video essay

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relies on digital and online technology. The ubiquity of non-‐linear digital editing, as well as the accessibility of the raw materials of film objects via digital files means that film objects are “available to acquire and manipulate…in a way that is historically unprecedented” (López and Martin, Introduction to the Audiovisual Essay 82). The video essay depends on this technology in its creation, and on digital online spaces of dissemination in its reception. The second point is concerned with pedagogy; I contend that the video essay explicitly seeks to educate, conveying theory or analysis regarding film. Hence the video essay’s perceptible tendency of taking up residence in film criticism and scholarship. The video essay makes progress in resolving the aforementioned dilemma of cinema studies proposed by Raymond Bellour. Bellour argued that the film object was essentially “unquotable” (20), and whilst digital technology such as DVD has allowed one to fragment the film in a presentational setting, the video essay has extended the reach of one’s ability to quote the film object. The form acts as a fruitful response to Bellour’s deliberation over if the filmic text should be approached in writing, as it provides a method of using the language of cinema (audiovisual montage) to discuss cinema itself. Thus, the base commonality of the video essay involves making use of exisiting film material through digital means for pedagogical purposes.

Despite my contention of the video essay’s inherent openness, there has been much debate regarding the generic classification and evaluative potential of the video essay.1_{I
am
not
concerned
here
with
classification
and
taxomony,} however a common discursive division within these debates gives us insight into the video essay’s interrelatedness with cinephilia. The most commonly referred to difference between modes of video essays is that proposed by Christian Keathley, who suggests a distinction between the explanatory and the poetic mode (La Caméra-Stylo 181). The former mode is dominated by language, whilst the latter subordinates language to an accompanying role whilst “exploiting multi-‐media presentation to its fullest (Keathley, La Caméra-Stylo 183). Although Keathley does refer to this observation as forming a “continuum” (La Caméra-

1_{For
examples
of
these
debates,
see
Bateman
(2017);
Garwood
(2016);
Kiss
and
van}

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Stylo 183), the difference in register between the didactic, illustrative method and the lyrical, explorative method is often imagined as a dichotomy. This conception is echoed by Alain Bergala, whose observations on video essays also reveal certain ontological implications. Bergala, in conversation with Alejandro Bachmann, argues that two categories of video essays should be distinguished — the classical model and a “more varied and creative approach” (Bachmann 126), these categories mimicking Keathley’s distinctions. Bergala states that the classical model, which he elaborates as “didactical essays on cinema,” is prone to dogmatism (Bachmann 126). The second model is guided by invention, creating new work departing from the sound and images of the existing film objects. Bergala goes slightly further than Keathley, contending that the second category is of more significance and value (Bachmann 127).

What Keathley and Bergala demonstrate is not that the video essay can indeed be divided neatly along these lines, but rather an ontological revelation that the relationship between pedagogy and cinema is not an easy one. Given that Bergala’s statements are in the context of a conversation surrounding teaching film, the video essay’s sense of pedagogy is at the forefront of his claims. To return to Keathley’s distinctions, he argues that the mere existence of video essays “demands an acknowledgement that images…do not always willingly subordinate themselves to the critical language that would seek to control them” (La Caméra-Stylo 190). Thus, the video essay articulates a friction between pedagogical mastery and the illusive pre-‐eminence of cinema. Crucially, this friction echoes the aforementioned double movements of cinephilia referred to by de Valck and Hagener, “between the biographical and theoretical, the singular and the general, the fragment and whole, the complete and the incomplete, the individual and the collective” (Cinephilia in Transition 27). In the same way, the video essay presents paradoxes — movements between didactic and rhetoric, analytical and instinctual, mastery and submission. Thus, the video essay comes easily to be understood as an expression of cinephilia, and a productive framework through which to investigate it.

Expresser, Agitator, Salve and Mirror: the Video Essay and Contemporary Cinephilia