On today's episode, Katie Bird discusses her work and practice in an interview with Johannes Binotto. Much of their conversation centers on Katie's 2023 desktop documentary, "With a Camera in Hand, I Was Alive." Katie and Johannes discuss the potentials of videographic practice, filming oneself as a method of videographic criticism, and her work as an independent scholar and industry professional. Other works discussed include, "young (woman) filmmaker(s)" (2023), "Feeling and Thought as They Take Form: Early Steadicam Labor, Technology, and Style, 1974-1985" (2019), and Katie's research on editing and Gunsmoke.
This episode is the eighth in an ongoing collaboration between The Video Essay Podcast and "The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies," a three-year research project on video essays led by Kevin B. Lee, Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema at USI University of Lugano, with Johannes Binotto and Evelyn Kreutzer, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Music by Ketsa.
On today's episode, Jason Mittell joins to discuss his videographic book, The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad. The book is the first in a new series of open access, videographic books from Lever Press.
Jason joins to discuss the origins of the book and series, the philosophy behind a videographic book, and his longtime interest in alternative, open access forms of digital publishing.
Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Music by Ketsa.
Today's episode features the latest collaboration with the Swiss publication, Filmexplorer. For the second time, Filmexplorer has invited guest curators to select video essays to screen as part of their online Video Essay Gallery. In this conversation, Evelyn Kreutzer, Julian Ross, and Volker Pantenburg discuss three videos they curated under the theme, "How to Measure the World." For more, visit filmexplorer.ch. The conversation centers on three works:
Volker Pantenburg presents:
capricorn sunset [a constellation] (2023) by Johannes Binotto
Julian Ross presents:
Constant (2022) by Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner
Evelyn Kreutzer presents:
Xena’s Body: A Menstrual Auto-Investigation Using an iPhone (2024) by Occitane Lacurie
Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Music by Ketsa.
Today's episode features an interview with Lucy Fife Donaldson, Colleen Laird, Dayna McLeod and Alison Peirse on their ongoing series of collaborations and methodological practices, "Ways of Doing." They are interviewed by Kevin B. Lee.
This episode is the seventh in an ongoing collaboration between The Video Essay Podcast and "The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies," a three-year research project on video essays led by Kevin B. Lee, Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema at USI University of Lugano, with Johannes Binotto and Evelyn Kreutzer, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
For more on Ways of Doing, visit their website. Learn more about the Scholarship in Sound & Image Workshop here. Listen to the previous episode with Evelyn Kreutzer and Alan O'Leary, and read a response from Miklós Kiss.
Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Music by Ketsa.
Today's episode features the latest collaboration with the Swiss publication, Filmexplorer. For the second time, Filmexplorer has invited guest curators to select video essays to screen as part of their online Video Essay Gallery. In this conversation, Evelyn Kreutzer, Julian Ross, and Volker Pantenburg discuss three videos they curated under the theme, "Who Owns an Image?"
The conversation centers on the works:
A History of the World According to Getty Images, by Richard Misek – 19’ (Evelyn Kreutzer)
Maryam Jafri vs Mariam Jafri, by Maryam Jafri – 12’ (Julian Ross)
Excerpt from Bitomsky “Das Kino, der Wind und die Photographie” (1991, 55 min), by Hartmut Bitomsky/Volker Pantenburg – 10’ (Volker Pantenburg)
Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Music by Ketsa.
Today's episode features a conversation with Alice Lenay, an academic researcher and artist based in Paris. The discussion centers on Alice's recent work Twisties!, made with Théophile Gay-Mazas and recently published in NECSUS. Will and Alice also discuss her ongoing interest in Zoom aesthetics.
Learn more about the podcast's collaboration with the Cary Comes Home Festival, and our call for video essays on Cary Grant and the theme of "acrobatics," here.
Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Music by Ketsa.
There’s been a lot of debate about what the relationship should be between videographic criticism and writing. Some have wondered if video essays could function as stand-alone scholarship and break free from having to be framed by text-based explanations such as creator statements or peer reviews. But even if one acknowledges the role of writing in advancing videographic scholarship, another question emerges: which writing?
At this year's SCMS annual meeting in Boston, videographic scholars Evelyn Kreutzer and Alan O’Leary observed that several video essay presentations would cite texts from feminist film studies, genre film studies, global film studies, etc. But there wasn’t so much reference to existing writing about videographic scholarship. And it got them thinking, why aren’t videographic scholars giving more attention to writing about video essays? Haven’t there been examples of written scholarship that are worth referencing, in shaping our thinking about the form? Is it that they aren’t known well enough or established enough to be cited? And how can we start to get a better appreciation of the role of writing in video essay scholarship?
Evelyn and Alan recorded this conversation to get into these questions. Evelyn asked Alan to come up with two written essays that could be especially helpful in understanding videographic scholarship. Alan came up with about 6 or 7, which can be found in the show notes. From those they picked two to discuss in depth, leading to a rich and contentious conversation about what scholars want from video essays, and what role writing has in determining the answers to that question.
This episode is the sixth in an ongoing collaboration between The Video Essay Podcast and "The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies," a three-year research project on video essays led by Kevin B. Lee, Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema at USI University of Lugano, with Johannes Binotto and Evelyn Kreutzer, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Written Essays Discussed
Two articles by Susan Harewood:
Two articles by Miklós Kiss:
Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Music by Ketsa.
Today's episode features a conversation recorded live in May at The King's Festival of Artificial Intelligence in London. The event featured as the launch of Cinema and Machine Vision: Artificial Intelligence, Aesthetics and Spectatorship, a new book from Edinburgh University Press by Daniel Chávez Heras, who is a lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London.
Before a live audience, Daniel and Will chat about the themes and topics covered in the book, the intersections of AI and Film Studies, and answer audience questions. To learn more about Daniel and his work, click here.
Daniel has also agreed to give away two copies of the book to listeners! Learn more here.
Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Music by Ketsa.
From movies to television, YouTube to TikTok, it’s a big world of audiovisual media out there. How many videographic works have tried to take them all in? A new installation work has tried to do just that. The Extended Play is a collaboration between artists Anina Müller and Jennifer Merlyn Scherler, which was exhibited at the Austellungsraum Klingental in Basel. The piece consists of four videos, or tracks, that function like a musical EP. Collectively they explore how moving images influence the ways humans inhabit their bodies, an extended play if you will.
Track 1: The Portal borrows from stereotyped cinematic, dreamy imagery to explore the moment of exiting the cinema in a daze, where on- and off-screen worlds bleed into each other.
In Track 2: The Main Character, two characters enter a medieval fantasy world cosplay inspired by Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, music videos and TikTok.
Track 3: crying selfies <3 reflects on the selfies people, especially young femmes, take when they cry – as a refusal to participate in the capitalist, neo-liberal “girlboss” mindset.
Track 4: No Pose No Rose is a YouTube style talk show on bodybuilding, exploring its exaggerated presentations of gender and an image-based understanding of the self.
As part of the exhibition, the artists invited Kevin B. Lee and Johannes Binotto, co-leaders of the SNSF project “The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies” to share their reflections on the themes of their work in a joint conversation. They talk about their own relationship to different modes of media experience, from movies to social media, and the effects of these experiences on their own sense of embodiment.
The Extended Play was supported by the Fachausschuss Film und Medienkunst BS/BL.
Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Music by Ketsa.
Today's episode is the first in a series of conversations on videos created as part of the project, Doing Women’s (Global) (Horror) Film History (DWGHFH), a year-long video essay mentoring and training program that culminated in a videographic special issue of MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture. Led by Alison Peirse, DWGHFH features the work of thirty contributors on "women horror filmmakers in non-anglophone countries, with a particular focus on filmmakers from the Global Majority."
This episode features a conversation with Krista Calvo, the creator of "Dos Hermanas: Uncanny Femininity, Grief & Childhood in Carillo's Animations," and Colleen Laird, creator of "Kūki." Support the podcast on Patreon. Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Subscribe on YouTube.
Will DiGravio hosted, edited and produced this episode. Emily Su Bin Ko is the show's associate producer. Music by Ketsa and _HEAVYLEG.
Today's episode is the fourth in an ongoing collaboration between The Video Essay Podcast and "The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies," a three-year research project on video essays led by Kevin B. Lee, Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema at USI University of Lugano, with Johannes Binotto and Evelyn Kreutzer, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
In this episode, Kevin talks with project members Libertad Gills, Marine de Dardel, and Silvia Cipelletti about the experience of making video essays on the work of Alice Diop, the featured filmmaker at this year's L'immagine e la parola, the spring edition of the Locarno Film Festival. The event for the group to produce original video essays on Diop's films. In this conversation, the group discusses how they approached the films for their video essays, knowing that they would be screened with Alice Diop in the audience. You can learn more about the project on their Instagram page.
Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Music by Ketsa.
Today's episode features a conversation with filmmaker Christopher Jason Bell, who joins the show to discuss Miss Me Yet, his ten-part found footage series on the presidency of George W. Bush and rehabilitation of Bush's image in recent years. The series is available to stream for free via Means TV.
Also, check out an essay on Miss Me Yet written by Will in the latest issue of Millennium Film Journal.
Support the podcast on Patreon. Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Subscribe on YouTube.
Will DiGravio hosted, edited and produced this episode. Emily Su Bin Ko is the show's associate producer. Music by Ketsa: "Live It," "Anvil," and "Refraining."
Today's episode is the third in an ongoing collaboration between The Video Essay Podcast and "The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies," a three-year research project on video essays led by Kevin B. Lee, Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema at USI University of Lugano, with Johannes Binotto and Evelyn Kreutzer, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation In this episode, Evelyn talks with Libertad Gills, a project affiliate and post-doctoral researcher for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at the Locarno Film Festival, about works they encountered at this year's Berlinale that might be considered "videographic."
Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter.Will DiGravio hosted and produced this episode. Editing by Elsa Despoix, Evelyn Kreutzer, and Will DiGravio. Emily Su Bin Ko is the show's associate producer. Music by Ketsa.
Today's episode features a conversation with Alison Peirse, a horror film scholar and professor at the University of Leeds. Alison led the project Doing Women’s (Global) (Horror) Film History (DWGHFH), a year-long video essay mentoring and training program that culminated in a videographic special issue of MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture. DWGHFH features the work of thirty contributors working on "women horror filmmakers in non-anglophone countries, with a particular focus on filmmakers from the Global Majority." Alison and Will discuss the origins of the project, the contributors and mentors who worked on DWGHFH, how the video essays exist into existing scholarship on women horror filmmakers, and much more.
Support the podcast on Patreon. Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Subscribe on YouTube.
Will DiGravio hosted, edited and produced this episode. Emily Su Bin Ko is the show's associate producer. Music by Ketsa: "Live It," "Anvil," and "Refraining."
Today's episode is the second in an ongoing collaboration between The Video Essay Podcast and "The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies," a three-year research project on video essays led by Kevin B. Lee, Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema at USI University of Lugano, with Johannes Binotto and Evelyn Kreutzer, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation
In this conversation, Kevin talks with Evelyn about her picks for the 2023 survey of the year's best video essays by Sight & Sound magazine. Evelyn's selections serve as an entry point for the two to discuss the broader themes of their research project.
Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter.
Will DiGravio hosted and produced this episode. Editing by Kevin B. Lee and Will DiGravio. Emily Su Bin Ko is the show's associate producer. Music by Ketsa.
On today's episode, Will talks with filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho about his new film, Pictures of Ghosts. Set in the director's home city of Recife, in the Pernambuco state of Brazil, the film is a self-described "multidimensional journey through time, sound, architecture and filmmaking." Kleber talks about the film's origins, the art of voiceover narration, treating his own films as archival images, and the unique ways that cinema is able to tell stories of ghosts. Learn more about the film and when it might be screening near you, here.
Support the podcast on Patreon. Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Subscribe on YouTube.
Will DiGravio hosted, edited and produced this episode. Emily Su Bin Ko is the show's associate producer. Music by Ketsa: "Live It," "Anvil," and "Refraining."
Today's episode centers on Sight & Sound magazine's new list, "The Best Video Essays of 2023." In a conversation moderated by Kevin B. Lee, the curators of this year's list, Irina Trocan, Queline Meadows, and Will Webb, discuss the results of the poll, their curatorial strategies, and offer general thoughts on the video essay landscape in 2023.
This episode is the first in an ongoing collaboration between The Video Essay Podcast and Kevin B. Lee, who, in his role as the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema at USI University of Lugano, is leading a three-year research project on video essays with Johannes Binotto and Evelyn Kreutzer, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Read Kevin's columns for Sight & Sound here.
Support the podcast on Patreon. Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter.
Will DiGravio hosted and produced this episode. Editing by Kevin B. Lee and Will DiGravio. Emily Su Bin Ko is the show's associate producer. Music by Ketsa: "Live It," "Anvil," and "Refraining."
On today's episode, Will is joined by Catherine Fowler, a film scholar based at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Catherine curated the most recent special issue of the journal, [in]Transition, which features feminist videographic diptychs by six scholars: Nicole Morse, Maryam Tafakory, Melissa Dollman, Paola Voci, Maud Ceuterick, and Catherine herself. Watch and read more about the special issue here.
Support the podcast on Patreon. Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter. Subscribe on YouTube.
Will DiGravio hosted and produced this episode. Emily Su Bin Ko is the show's associate producer. Music by Ketsa: "Live It," "Anvil," and "Refraining."
On today's episode, Evelyn Kreutzer, a Berlin-based scholar, curator, and video essayist, joins to discuss her videographic origin story, collaborative projects (including Once Upon a Screen and Moving Poems), videographic vulnerability, the new Videography section of the journal zfm, and more.
We also discuss Evelyn's video essay, "Footsteps," and a moving poem by Desirée de Jesús that pairs A Raisin in the Sun (1961) with Langston Hughes's 1951 poem "Harlem."
Support the podcast on Patreon. Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter.
Will DiGravio hosted and produced this episode. Emily Su Bin Ko is the show's associate producer. Music by Ketsa: "Live It," "Anvil," and "Refraining."
Today's episode features a conversation with Alan O'Leary, a scholar and artist based at Aarhus University. On today's episode, we discuss Alan's origin story, the videographic "society," academic labor and mode, organizing videographic events, and more. We also discuss Alan's video, "Nebular Epistemics: A Glossary (Scholarship Like a Spider or Spit)," and Kathleen Loock's "Reproductive Futurism and the Politics of the Sequel."
Support the podcast on Patreon. Follow the show on Twitter. Learn more at the pod's website. Get the free newsletter.
Will DiGravio hosted and produced this episode. Emily Su Bin Ko is the show's associate producer, and also co-hosted and edited this episode. Music by Ketsa: "Live It," "Anvil," and "Refraining."
