Video Essays: Critical Approaches

Video Essays: Critical Approaches to Cinema

This post is for film students in Critical Approaches to Cinema who want to create a video essay in lieu of a traditional written essay.

What Is a Video Essay?

Also called “media stylos,” the video essay, according to Eric Faden,

  • is designed initially to move across a series of potential platforms from classroom to conference presentation to web streaming
  • does not abandon the tools and techniques of oral or alphabetic culture; it simply can use them in new ways
  • moves scholarship beyond just creating knowledge and takes on an aesthetic, poetic function
  • should evoke the same pleasure, mystery, allure, and seduction as the very movies that initiated our scholarly inquiry
  • should consider formal issues in addition to content (i.e., the creator must consider ideas of image, voice, pacing, text, sound, music, montage, rhythm, etc. In effect, s/he has to deal with the very same problems that his/her subjects deal with)

Rules for the Video Essay Project

For the purpose of our class video essay project, students should abide by the “rules” above in addition to the seven listed below. Specifically, all student video essays should:

  1. contain a clearly defined thesis
  2. include some form of narration (e.g., voiceovers, intertitles, subtitles) and ultimately a transcript of that narration
  3. integrate clips and still images from the film under discussion to support the thesis
  4. close with a conclusion that not only restates the thesis but makes the reader think further about the subject matter
  5. include a bibliography with at least THREE secondary sources to support or refute the thesis
  6. refrain from providing a lengthy summary of the film; the author should assume her/his audience has seen it
  7. boast a catchy title that reiterates the thesis

DVD Ripping Software

Windows

Mac OS

Finally, here’s Lifehacker‘s “Five Best DVD Ripping Tools.”

Sample Video Essays

While the following are fine examples of video essays, please note that many of them do not include ALL of the features required for your class project. Please keep that in mind as you review the videos.

Notes Toward a Project on Citizen Kane

A vignette using text, digital masking, and music to introduce the psychoanalytic dilemmas of Orson Welles’s famous character. Watch here.

Layers of Paradox in Welles’s F is for Fake

This visual essay explores how Orson Welles uses the text of F for Fake to comment on his long and troubled career in filmmaking.

Do the Right Thing

In this video essay, Matt Zoller Seitz looks at the conflicts (personal and social, verbal and physical) driving Spike Lee’s film-of-ideas, released twenty years ago this week. (Read the transcript here.)

Outlaw Vision: Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker

On the occasion of the release of The Hurt Locker, this is a look at Kathryn Bigelow’s close identification with, and ironic distance from, her IED-defusin’, surfin’, bank-robbin’ adrenaline junkies. (Transcript here.)

In a Lonely Place

“In the video below, I discuss Nicholas Ray’s 1950 film noir In a Lonely Place, the harshest, most agonized romance I’ve ever seen issued from Hollywood. It’s also a perceptive and bitter — yet still idealistic — inside-Hollywood drama, a warped police procedural, and a study in post-war trauma.” — Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Study of a Single Film: A.I. Artificial Intelligence:

A visual analysis of the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg. Link to PART 2.

The Vanishing and Zodiac

Video essay contrasting The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1988) and Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007).