The Digital Videoessay: Getting Creative-Critical Audiovisually

Digital videoessay-making is an important strand in the present and future of academic communication, already used to disseminate research and results to general public and scholarly peers, and often used for teaching, particularly in online environments. This is increasingly true of STEM subjects, as it is of the social sciences, arts and humanities. While videoessay-making may currently be seen as a supplementary activity, it is likely to become a core academic skill in the way that writing is today: a key means of dissemination and publicity in a ‘post-literate’ digital world, essential in securing project funding, and invaluable in teaching.

But note: if digital videoessay-making is an ever more important means of academic communication, it is also a powerful medium of research, even a means of thinking. Videoessay-making has been recognized as a powerful tool within digital humanities. I am myself interested in videoessay-making as a form of scholarship in which the scholar shares epistemic agency — the activity of knowing — with technology and automated systems. And I am working on a monograph-equivalent set of films dealing with (and exemplifying) that theme for a series at Lever Press edited by Jason Mittell, whose own ‘videographic book’ on Breaking Bad will soon be published as the first in the series.

As the example of Mittell’s work suggests, the development of videoessay-making has been led from film and media studies. In that world, the practice is referred to as videographic criticism, meaning the audiovisual analysis of audiovisual media. Videographic criticism can take a range of forms, from the illustrated lecture to something closer to artist video, and the number of videoessays produced has multiplied exponentially over the past dozen or so years. Dana Renga and I have argued that videographic criticism is an exciting opportunity for students and scholars of the Italian context (see for example these videoessays by graduate students Erik Scaltriti and Michela Bertossa, and by colleagues Danielle Hipkins and Barbara Zecchi).

My own work has moved away from Italian cinema in recent years, though I adapted a chapter of my book on The Battle of Algiers (Mimesis International, 2019) as a short videoessay, and continue to use the Italian language in my videographic work. My key scholarly concern, now, is precisely with the possibilities of the digital videoessay. I think of videographic criticism as part of a broader move in the academy to adopt ‘creative-critical’ methods in which, instead of the traditional ideal of critical distance, the scholar prefers a kind of critical intimacy that gets up close and personal with its objects of study. In such work, form is not intended to be invisible or transparent — the case with conventional academic prose — but is intended instead to be ‘constitutive of its conceptual argument’. Because the videoessay is still a novel form of scholarly communication, no one is likely to ignore the form it takes, and those suspicious of videographic criticism are right to perceive in it something of a paradigm shift. (Influential practitioner Catherine Grant has described the digital videoessay as an ‘ontologically new’ scholarly form.) What makes current work in videographic criticism so exciting is that we see the aesthetic, political and epistemic stakes of form being worked out and tested in real time. We don’t yet know where the videoessay will go, or where it will take us.

Still from Occupying Time: ‘The Battle of Algiers’ (2018), videoessay by Alan O’Leary

Bio:

Alan O’Leary is Associate Professor of Film and Media in Digital Contexts at Aarhus University, and Visiting Researcher in the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, University of Leeds. He has published video essays in [in]Transition, 16:9 and ZFM, and his most recent book is a study of the 1966 postcolonial film classic The Battle of Algiers (Mimesis International, 2019). He is working on a ‘videographic book’ on the poetics of videographic criticism and his ‘Workshop of Potential Scholarship: Manifesto for a parametric videographic criticism’ was published in NECSUS in 2021.