Beyond the Essayistic: Defining the Varied Modal Origins of Videographic Criticism

During the past five years, the field of videographic criticism has grown exponentially. There have been several SCMS panels and workshops devoted to the subject, ongoing National Endowment for the Humanities summer workshops at Middlebury College, a trickle of books and e-books (The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image, Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video), and the launch of the first openly peer-reviewed journal devoted to the format—[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, now in its fourth year of publication.¹ Many of these enterprises were foundational in their foci. They sought to establish the validity of this mode of scholarship, to ponder how we might evaluate such works both professionally and in the classroom and—more pragmatically—how to produce them. However, the emphasis on the pragmatic has left a gap in how we might further explore the theory and history of videographic criticism.

To begin, let me begin to sketch out the problematic equation between videographic criticism and “video essays.” As I have written at [in]Transition, videographic criticism has been synonymous with such terms as “video essays” and “visual essays” over the past decade or so (we called them “DVD essays” in Janet Bergstrom’s seminar at UCLA in 2007). Yet this emphasis on the essayistic is not without issue.² As outlined in Timothy Corrigan’s foundational text on the mode, essay films such as Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1985) and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) embody a working through of subjective experience. Corrigan writes that the “essayistic indicates a kind of encounter between the self and the public domain, an encounter that measures the limits and possibilities of each as a conceptual activity. . . . [It] acts out a performative presentation of self as a kind of self-negation in which narrative or experimental structures are subsumed within the process of thinking through a public experience.”³ Essentially, the essay seeks to locate the universal in the personal. This may be true of some videographic criticism—Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998) comes to mind—but I would argue that the essayistic mode is but one submode of videographic criticism.

So, how might we define videographic criticism? Christian Keathley has defined video essays as “short critical essays on a given film or filmmaker, typically read in voice-over by the author and supplemented with carefully chosen and organized film clips.”⁴ Again, we see the link between the essayistic and videographic criticism. Now, I am not on a quest to bring my colleague and coeditor down a notch. On occasion, I still occasionally use the two terms interchangeably, and I would guess that the expansion in the field has pushed many videographic scholars and practitioners to reflect critically on terminology. That being said, further down the path that others have blazed far before me, I would push for an even broader definition of videographic criticism as rumination on moving images through the repurposing of moving image text(s)—with or without voice-over. This inclusive definition enables us to include the explanatory and essayistic texts of Mark Cousins and Godard while also including the poetic register that Keathley describes. Moreover, it allows for the inclusion of videographic works not based on film texts.

This broadening would allow for the considerations of mash-ups and videos like Nick Warr’s “Honolulu Mon Amour” (2016), a recent [in]Transition publication that utilizes split screen to juxtapose the television program Magnum P.I. (CBS, 1980–1988) to itself.⁵ The video does contain voice-over narration and text, but it is an audiovisual collage constructed from an audio interview with Marguerite Duras, audio from Alain Resnais’s adaptation of Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959), and text from a range of sources including Maurice Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation (1992) and Duras’s The Lover (1984). Thus, while it contains the formal devices we might associate with the explanatory mode, the end product is far more ambiguous with regard to its direction and...