Critique of Audiovisual Criticism: 

Is “What Words Have to Do With Images” No Longer An Issue?

 My first title had to be relegated to a subtitle because the issue is disappearing. It’s really too late to ask at this point because words with moving images defines an established approach to practice-and-theory merged pieces. More than a decade ago, a critical book on the essay film (Corrigan 2011), followed by an article on the “videographic” as a “tendency” (Arsenjuk 2016), won Society for Cinema and Media Studies awards. The journal [in]Transition was founded in 2014 (Keathley and Mittell 2019, 5). The journal then won the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award in 2015 (Becker 2017, 128). Today, there is every indication that the number of moving image works claiming “video essay” status is exploding. Festivals have opened up a competitive category. One would assume, then, that the “What is it?” question regarding video essayism would have been answered. Now think back ten years when, in addressing this, Kevin B. Lee asked if the “What is cinema?” question hung over the “What is the video essay?” enigma (2015). But that was then, and the “What is cinema?” moment is over. Updating his position six years later, Lee finds “essayistic audiovisual practices” as part of the transformation of cinema now situated within another dominant, one so recently and readily available--“everyday mediatic discourse” (2021, 33 - 35). So why would the “What is a video essay” question linger? (Deguzman, 2024). Well, because something has happened that keeps the “What is it?” enigma alive. Why is that? Because, after a decade, this work is morphing. As a consequence of looking at recent work, late in the process of writing this overview, I relegated my original title to a subtitle. I changed my mind. 

Still, there is the issue as to what to call it. What contains the eclecticism and stylistic range of this proliferating artwork-as-critique? In the critical literature one finds references to the video essay, videographic criticism, more recently audiovisual criticism, and, increasingly, audiovisual research. It may be safe to say that a decade after videographic criticism was methodically established, the field has been challenged with trying to slot so many variations into a rule-bound tradition, however new. So at the end I ask, how much can we accommodate as research that takes “audio-visual form.”[1] To that end, I propose the video demo as one more solution to the problem of how to present visual analysis research. Finally, there is the larger category of remix which has the advantage of calling attention to what Lev Manovich calls the complete “computerization” of our culture which continues to transform critical modes (2025, 161). 

Looking Back: A Decade of Videographic Criticism

Let’s start with the established tradition associated with the Middlebury School, which I refer to here as videographic criticism. Relevant to this tradition I first wondered: Has anyone noticed that the critical literature on videographic criticism replays thorny theoretical issues from earlier decades?  This shouldn’t be surprising. Cinema, after all, is “teeming with semiotic problems,” as Edgar Morin once said ([1956] 2005). And I count at least four of these old problems that video essayism asks us to address from a new vantage—cine-semiotics, autocritique, close textual analysis, and viewing as “reading,” that is, as both analysis as well as reading within viewing if one considers words on the screen. First, while we might have thought that “cine-semiotics” would disappear, some of the same issues from that cinema-as-language moment returned, most notoriously that word and/or image conundrum announced in my subtitle. Second, we hear echoes of the 1970s “autocritique” from an earlier Screen moment with the difference that sometimes the critiques of (not by means of) video criticism (itself) seem tied in knots over the question as to whether the original film (itself) can be made to interrogate itself; or, what is the difference between the analysis performed by the critic-in-the-text as opposed to the traditional critic outside-the-text. 

Third, videographic criticism has put moving image analysis back under the microscope, although the term “close textual analysis” appeared to disappear along with the word “text,” a word that then returned to renewed significance as synonymous with words-on-screen and accompanying explanatory statements. Further, with or without the term “text,” videographic essayistic readings are definitely “close,” even a “closer close” study, and certainly one finds tour de force analyses. Fourth, the use of “words as words” comes back from the first decades of cinema. Recall that silent film intertitles were thought to have “interrupted” the scene with words requiring reading. Michel Chion argues that words in intertitles were never completely “incorporated” into the film but stuck out as “text to be read” (2009, 11). Videographic criticism wants the opposite—fully incorporated words on the screen now “meant to be read.” 

The related problem is exactly this: Is engagement with videographic critical work an experience of viewing and simultaneously reading, reading plus viewing, or viewing directed by words-on-the-screen if not voice-over commentary? And even this statement leaves out the “affective” dimension. Perhaps we are learning a new kind of critical engagement. And it is not as though the enjoyment of the moving picture experience is spoiled by the critique of it, as some worried in the 1970s about treating the entertainment film analogously with language. Few may recall that early skeptics railed against breaking down shot sequences into signifying systems on the grounds that semiotics ruined motion picture viewing. 

As we know, the animosity towards semiotic theory died down, and film educators came to confirm the pedagogical value of semiotic analysis. Rather than ruining the experience, they found, analysis serves to enhance it, and the great success of videographic essayism is as a pedagogy! (Lee 2021, 34-35).  Apropos of the relation between analysis and enjoyment, such passion is represented in this issue by the two student projects undertaken as part of Behrang Garakani’s Columbia University class in Videographic Criticism taught in Fall 2024. The two students whose class work is featured here elected to break down films that were already among their favorites. Perhaps they analyzed them in order to understand their own fascination, the lure increased by video-critical methods that teach students to get inside moving picture films by effectively recutting them, as demonstrated by Samantha Gordon’s “Trapped on a Pedestal,” a study of claustrophobia produced by the too close frame in A Woman Under the Influence (JohnCassavettes, 1974). And students may, in the process, come to think theoretically as well as practically. For instance, Lily Cumming starts with an interest in Jean Epstein’s concept of photogénie, the film Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015), and how the film’s shooting on Super 16mm film inspires a comparison between the camera’s shutter and the character’s blink. 

But the word-image relation is way more difficult than I have thus far indicated. For here we encounter a special category of semiotic problem—the “incommensurability” of word and image dilemma. Matthew Solomon (2019) pulls the term from Raymond Bellour’s seminal “The Unattainable Text” ([1975] 2000), and we recall that the theorist’s complaint was originally inspired by the limitations of written criticism to quote from the motion picture. Let’s remember, of course, that Bellour was writing before the scanned clip could be embedded, quotation-like, in the text of an online publication. But Bellour also acknowledges something akin to Michel Foucault’s insight about the art critic—his lament that “…it is in vain that we say what we see” (1970, 9).  So back to videographic criticism: If words fail, what chance, then, has the moving image to “say” what is seen by means of another image? Or, can images alone (that is, without words) perform a critique of a work that is also constituted by moving images? Then, there is the old hierarchy of aesthetic value. Bellour’s approach addresses the “inequivalency,” “incomparability,” or better, the “inadequacy” of criticism as compared to the artistic “work itself,” especially if the object of criticism is an acclaimed work. However, “incommensurability” stems not only from their dissimilarity of form, given the distinctly separate conventions of art practice and written art critique. It’s that their signifiers are so unlike to begin with and that, to state it outright, linguistic signification pales in comparison with the audiovisual richness of cinematic imagery. Think of the sheer number of sign systems at play in cinematic signification—acoustic, iconic, and the many stylistic signifiers, from camera movement to angle, color scale to framing, and so on. 

Also, as one might suspect, given aesthetic hierarchies, much of what has been termed videographic criticism began by holding over academic veneration of the singular “work of art.” Foundational has been the videographic tribute to classic motion pictures, beginning with the model of Brief Encounter (David Lean, UK, 1945) and Catherine Grant’s video essay thereon, Dissolves of Passion (2014), which homages both the classic film and Richard Dyer’s critical analysis of it (1993). Grant’s own critical analysis of Dissolves of Passion describes its example of videographic criticism as “an act of affective distillation,” as well as “fascinated exploration” (2019, 75). So the affective is that dimension that written critical analysis can ever hope to emulate. Or can it? Here, I have re-read in print Grant’s all-words analysis of her own video essay with great interest, especially given this question as to the critical potential of affect. Boiling this issue down, Jaap Kooijman quotes Dyer’s [in]Transition review of his videographic study of Diana Ross’s performance in Mahogany (Berry Gordy, 1975) where Dyer concurs that “words can never be” the same experience as the film experience and editing does what words could never do. It therefore must be possible, Dyer thinks, “to critique affect by means of affect” (2017, 148). And “critique” is the operative term here because videographic essayism features the very same imagery associated with viewers “feeling” or having “felt,” an issue Corey Creekmur addresses from the vantage of affect theory. And yet, he puts to us a question as to whether video essays can “share, transfer, or “‘transmit’ the affect” of the work they analyze (2016). 

But a different but related problem: Who or what is “authorizing” such affective critique? If awe-struck veneration historically kept the critic outside or at a distance from the “work of art,” what happens to that awe if the critic is now inside the work (itself)? How is critical engagement transformed, enabled, or complicated if new images, still and moving, are now integrated into the re-edited cinematic work of so-called “masters”? And what is the relation of the authorial critic to the auteur director, if, following Roland Barthes, the author can only return to the text “as a guest” (1986, 61)? Is the auteur director there “by invitation of” the film critic in the videographic work? 

Let’s return to Foucault the art critic. In this issue, Behrang Garakani’s video essay tribute to Spanish artist Francesco de Goya’s anti-war etchings and the painting, The Third of May 1808, brings to mind Foucault, as quoted above, on the relation between critical writing and the work of art. Fittingly, Foucault’s theorization is part of his exhaustive discussion of another important Spaniard. For it is Foucault’s engagement with Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas that exasperates the critical theorist in him: “It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.” Foucault then goes on to comment on the frustration of the art critic confronted with the painting about which he is discovering so much to say—and around which he developed an entire theory of representation. So what can the painting “say”? If words can’t say what we see, neither can painted or photographed imagery “show” the full discursive enunciation of what we would say. Foucault seems to address videographic criticismwhen he despairs: “And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendor is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax” (1970, 9). Significantly, let’s also note that this quotation is from the chapter of The Order of Things titled “Las Meninas” that contains an early theorization of “the gaze” in classical perspective, a merger between the visual vantage of the painter and the spectator of the painting (14-16). So let’s ask: Can videographic criticism lay out the kind of philosophical intervention that Foucault’s written engagement with Las Meninas achieved, setting up, as it did, a later theory of cinema spectatorship?  

 Figure. 1

Words will be words and in combination they make sentences, spoken aloud with affective intonation or graphically rendered in a range of typefaces. But let’s recall that the film-as-grammar analogy between language and moving images to which I earlier referred was finally abandoned, there being no equivalence between the word and the shot. (Think here of how a shot can contain an entire room, a landscape, and even a world, especially if a 360-degree shot). Moreover, the basic unit is now not the shot but the signal and/or the sample, and distribution is transmission via networked communication. And words? The issue is no longer a matter of unincorporated words on silent era intertitle cards. Words enlarged and graphically foregrounded as words are part of videographic criticism. And the spoken word as voice-over gains a new kind of authority in video essayism that it never had as character dialogue. The voice of the critic tells the audio viewer what the still and moving images mean. After all, in the conventions of critical discourse, written and spoken words are made to stand out, to control meaning. So in the videographic-critical mode, maybe spoken words are no longer destined to fall short, unable to say what is seen, because they are assigned a new function. If, no longer inequivalent, word and image are put in a conjunction more like that of Michel Chion’s sound-image relation. For if sound “ceaselessly influences what we see,” in the video essay, words, as graphic letters or voice over spoken commentary, “ceaselessly” interpret moving images (2016, 152).  But also vice versa and thus a paradox. As interpretation, words limit semiosis—words stop down meaning—yet words in combination with images also open up new conceptual possibilities. 

Thinking of Chion’s audio-viewer, we finally we come to sound, separable into the musicological (vocal and instrumental), as well as into sound effects. This is where we must concede the futility of trying to convey in words the musical strains we hear underscoring the dramatic scene or the mobile camera shot. But let’s take another tack: to ask whether the term audiovisual criticismmight insist that the critic try to say what is heard musically as well as to say what is seen at the same time that we are also seeing, may or may not correspond with what we are “feeling.” Which reminds us that to say what is “felt” is not the same as “feeling.” But to “say” what is heard—even to sing a melody especially when musical— sometimes functions as what “words alone cannot express.”  What, then, is the discursive function of the rhythmic aspect of the acoustic, as exemplified by the plucked guitar strings in Behrang Garakani’s study of Goya’s anti-war artwork? Are the videographic critic’s graphic edits timed to the rhythmic guitar an interpretative strategy or an expressive musicology in their own right? Or both? Consider early experimental sound shorts like the animated work of Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nameth. Their “Seeing Sound” approach sets out to prove that “Music in addition to pleasing the ear brings something to the eye.”[2] Does, then, the musicological sign lend itself to visualization more than the linguistic sign? 

Figure 2

Actually, no.  Let’s not forget the avant-garde films that experimented with making words and letters move, starting with Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (1926). Engaging with this tradition, in 2015, Richard Misek produced the “The Definition of Film” as what he terms a “video response” to Justin Remes’s 2015 article on that avant-garde word-film tradition. One thinks, for instance, of Secondary Currents (Peter Rose, 1982), that outrageous experiment with words-on-film in which the “foreign subtitle” takes over the frame and finally overruns the entire film as both spoken and written words evolve into gibberish. Misek’s “Creator’s Statement” explains his video montage of found footage filmed shots of pre-existing signs featuring words—Secret, Quote, Adult, Giant, Light, Truth—as exemplifying the problem of how technically this might be a video comprised of filmed footage that also demonstrates “films” now “made and seen on video.” He writes that although his title is “The Definition of Film,” there is really no point in defining film which today is a term for a well-made video. But the other direction his preface takes is, as he admits, that while his video is “quite wordy,” it is “nowhere near wordy enough” to engage with Remes’s overview on every point. So “wordiness” is required for critical engagement? For how in the world would the viewer know that Misek’s cryptic video has to do with the film-to-video relation without reading what he has written? The viewer cannot guess and will not know without reading what Misek, the critic outside and prefatory to the work, has written about how to think about these moving images. 

Figure 3

Still Looking Back: The Literary-Authorial Legacy of Essayism 

In the videographic essayistic format, still and moving images are everywhere combined with written and spoken words that cue readers to one interpretation or another. But there, in that format, linguistic signs as words in the form of headers, phrases, or quotations within a moving image frame are of course unlike words in type-set formation on the book page. So here is the difficult question. If in the critical humanities the goal is to produce a definitive analysis of a work, how often has this been achieved to the degree that this interpretation sticks to the motion picture film? In film history one thinks of Richard Dyer’s analysis of Gilda (1980, 91-99) or David Bordwell’s Citizen Kane—(2024, 99-110), masterful readings to end all readings, confirming the authorial status of the film critic—if that was ever in doubt. But what, after all, do we mean by film critic? Since the term has historically also referenced the film reviewer, “criticism” might appear to be a step down from historian or the theorist. It would seem that to call video analysis “criticism” is to demote the critical scholar. In contrast, “critique” calls up association with Frankfurt School critical theory, especially by quoting Walter Benjamin as Vinzenz Hediger (2025) does on the German Romantic notion of “criticism” (Kritik). It is, Benjamin writes, “a kind of experiment performed on the work of art which awakens the art work’s inherent potential for reflection, through which the work acquires a consciousness of itself.”[3] But let’s note that this particular ambiguous definition can apply to either the written critique or to videographic essayistic artistry. And so, the next question: What, then, do we call the critical analyst who has morphed into the art-maker?

Authorial assumptions are already built into the literary tradition of “essayism,” a long legacy that predates motion picture film. Luka Arsenjuk has remarked on how close the “in-depth, personal, and thought-provoking reflection” creates an “enunciator” who is proximate to the actual author. However, that author as “enunciator” is outside and as such effects the conversion of the “video essay” into a “form of personal cinema” (2016, 277-78). In this tradition, then, there are two authors, one of whom is the auteur filmmaker and the other the critic, so often speaking as authoritative voice (over). Further, in the terminology of the “essayistic,” whether video essay or audiovisual criticism, the literary definition includes expressing a “point of view” (Solomon 2019, 450). Thus it is that “personal” videographic criticism finds common cause with auteur theory’s directorial “world view.” Since so many video essays are homages to cinematic style, and given that every angle, edit, and shot is traditionally attributed to the film director, we have to ask whether video essayism lends itself to the analysis of “artist’s style or approach.” But, an issue arises: if the tradition of videographic criticism has privileged auteur style, as it appears to have in the first decade of its currency, it has kept alive the most traditional and even reactionary approach to moving image study.[4] And let’s not overlook how the Western film canon has been privileged (Grizzaffi 225, 43).  Why else would we find so often invoked as precedent the work of French authorial masters—Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema (1998) or the work of Chris Marker? 

Looking Ahead: Technics and Remix 

The notion of personal expressivity may be so strong in this tradition that it prevails, no matter what is done to counter it. So it would seem that the individual human artist or singular intellectual wins out—but over what? Consider two directions that in its first decade the videographic criticism movement did not develop or approached too tentatively: 1) technics and 2) remix culture. First, technics: here we find exemplification of cinematic style but too little about the underpinning technics—motion picture film vs. video or video as video. My one example—Richard Misek’s “video response” takes up the challenge of finding film as “stylistically engulfed video,” in which case he concludes that “Film and video are inseparable” (2015). Then, let me single out Katie Bird’s historical study of early Steadicam imagery. What she terms “videographic exploration” includes an analysis over images from cinematographer Garret Brown’s 1974 demo reel featuring both 16mm and 35mm footage enabled with his stabilizer equipment (2020). This emphasis becomes especially important given the current shift to “technics” in film and media studies, which attempts to take the human-machine relation into account (Baer and van den Oever, 2024, 17). At this point, “technics” can be stretched to accommodate functions enabled by the computational hardware/software interface. So, to return to my beginning, following Manovich, the aspects of “computerization” that have enabled the very ingenuity of videographic essayism have yet to be submitted to substantial critique within the works of the very digital means through which they’ve been shaped, continuously stored, and that have enabled us to access them again and again. 

And so one wonders where to find the video-critical reflexive reference to the computer software required to produce digital video work, to consider the so-called “tools” that simulate the photochemical film image (a ghost of its material self) by means of digital scanning? When, however, will videographic essayism start to foreground how After Effects, Photoshop, iMovie, Adobe Premiere, and/or now DaVinci Resolve function to alter the moving image given the affordances of Manovich’s “softwarization” of film techniques (2013, 36). To give an example, one article, that promises to analyze the way that “digital technology” has had its impact on the “cinematic essay,” refers to recombining film footage by means of “digital editing systems.” But this author doesn’t use the term software (Slaymaker 2022, 200). Manovich, who has argued that “There is no such thing as ‘digital media.’ There is only software…” reminds us that online we access all content through a “layer of applications” (2013, 152-153). What, then, is the old ideological erasure of production by means of invisible editing compared with the invisibility of software program functions and our complicity in taking them for granted? 

Second, remix. It’s well established that videographic essayism arises out of internet culture and the ascendance of YouTube video. Further, the YouTube fan mash-up phenomenon configured from streamed video clips predates academic video essayism (Desjardins 2015, 248). Reminding us that music came even before video, editors of The Routledge Companion to Remix Studieslocate remix in late 1970s popular music culture (2025, 3). But Kevin Ferguson offers the most complete and convincing documentary history in the comprehensive “Everything is Remix” series (2012-2023). Consider, then, that from within Film and Media Studies, Corey Creekmur early on suggested that remix, not videographic criticism, could be the umbrella category, even extending to concepts crossing back and forth between media studies and literary studies—intertextuality, bricolage, and pastiche (2017, 176). However, if video essayism is to challenge the high art tendencies of authorial expressivity, we need to foreground not only “cut, copy, paste,” but the wider circulation on TikTok of videographic remix work less dedicated to auteur studies. Taking “remixability” seriously also means delivering a blow to the stubborn idea that the source of “creativity” is the individual genius. Here, remix culture is a preparation for both the opportunities and the difficulties of generative AI, sending us back to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition to update theories of cultural production (Gunkel 2025, 233, 242). And, following Lev Manovich’s principle of “deep remixability,” we’d need to foreground media modularity (2013, 268, 316; 2025, 156). For Manovich’s analysis is most important as he highlights the merger of unlike media formats within the same image (2013, 244). One thinks of Chloé Gailbert-Laine’s media composite Forensickness that returns to the 2013 Boston Marathan bombing by melding Reddit Internet comments on the search for the bomber with the 16mm silent footage from Chris Kennedy’s film Watching the Detectives. 

Alan Kay’s 1984 concept of the computer as the first “metamedium” enables us to think simulations of earlier pre-digital media (film, television, video) as merged into the single software environment where production, distribution, and exhibition functions converge (2013, 105-106). The wild popularity of online sources like Rotten Tomatoes or Movieclips.com is proof that fans are as engaged in re-viewing, excerpting, and re-combining as we may be, but with one difference. We must know more. For the all-everything metamedium, accessible on the everyday desktop, cite of both production and reception disappear into mere functionality, if, as academics, we don’t study it in an effort to foreground how use is complexly facilitated. So, how to make a critique about what is that we are doing while we are doing it? One model is Wanda Strauven’s study of touchscreen practices, which gives serious critical attention to “object-user encounters” (2021, 18). Another model is Johannes Binotto’s “Practices in Viewing I,” available on the website “Video Essay Research.” Somewhat less like either artistic or critical pieces, his viewing practice, “Fast Forward,” flashes words in bold print over moving images, less to interpret and more to instruct us to think about how we view as we are viewing: “WE COULD CONTROL…CONTROL OUR GAZE…BY TURNING AWAY…OR CLOSING OUR EYES…BUT WE COULD NEVER CHANGE…THE PACE OF FILM.” 

So can old divides be broached--high and low as well as theory and practice? Current criticism on videographic criticismcontinually raises that old issue as to the difference between theoretical discourse and creative practice, still so maddingly separate, or what Miklós Kiss refers to as “research-driven art” and “art-driven research” (2024). But is this concern coming from frustrated “creatives” or from exasperated theorists? What is achieved by arguing that theoretical and creative work, so long at odds, could be inching closer and closer together in video essayistic forms? Moving together, however, does not necessarily mean that a single new hybrid form will soon or has already emerged, as some celebrate. For others, this juncture may seem neither the one nor the other. Scott McDonald (2022) asks whether the video essay fits within the experimental film tradition, and yet he adds it at the end of his overview and ponders how much the “new avant-garde of the video essay” will change the way we teach cinema. Still, this question remains if the critical pieces that have appeared in [in]Transition are in so many ways unlike McDonald’s examples of the historical film avant-garde. 

Looking Back and Ahead: Experimental Film vs. Videographic Experimental Research 

Maybe it’s a toss-up as to which of our two defining divides (high vs. low and theory vs. practice) have been the most difficult to cross, especially as Miklós Kiss has wondered about the “academic” aspect of videographic criticism (2024). But in Film and Media Studies, fandom and the avant-garde are not mutually exclusive as they are in the elite discipline of art history where mass culture is disdained. To dispel this worry, we can easily make an art historical argument about the genealogy of videographic art that begins with Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, 1936).  But wait. The film is a whimsical re-cut of East of Borneo (1931) named after actress Rose Hobart, and a tipoff to its irreverence is the soundtrack—the lively Brazilian samba of Nestor Amaral’s orchestra. As Corey Creekmur reminds us, Rose Hobart has long been understood as both fan homage and critique of Hollywood (2017, 167). As might have been predicted, remix gives rise to remix: witness Derek Long’s academic study “Remixing Rose Hobart” (2017). But the genealogical lineage is quite strange given that after Rose Hobart there was a strange lull, a gap filled only by Europeans like Matthis Müller (Home Stories, Germany, 1990) and Martin Arnold (Alone: Love Wastes Andy Hardy, Austria, 1998) who radically recut Hollywood to seriously hilarious ends. What, however, other than the threat of Hollywood copyright injunction, froze creative re-cutting practices for decades?  

Figure. 4 

How to answer to this question as to why the hiatus? It’s too easy, however, to just say that remixing became technologically realizable with the move from film to video to the metamedial computational realm. Yes, we can agree that the “softwarization” that has taken us from copy-protected rip-proof DVDs to streaming facilitated academic as well as fanvid recutting. But how do we distinguish the one from the other going forward? To return to my initial reference to videographic variations as possible new forms of academic research: In this issue, Matthew Solomon’s “Turning Up the Red Queen,” featuring The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962) is, as he names it, research that in this case takes “audiovisual form.”[5] That this is film historical research is clear in his overview of cardplaying on screen, beginning with Partie des Cartes (Lumière Co., France, 1895) and The Living Playing Cards (Georges Méliès, France,1905). But here is also a visualized analysis testing Jean Epstein’s theorization of the close-up as “the soul of cinema,” from his 1921 “Magnification,” that inspires Solomon to make a comparison between the close-up shot and the card player’s tight attention. However, on first screening, it may not occur to the viewer how many layers are in play. For “Turning Up The Red Queen” works most provocatively as a means of exploring the analogy between card playing and watching as well as analyzing film.[6] But only if it is studied on this basis. Of course, research is not meant to be just “viewed,” it is designed to be studied—to be returned to again for review. 

And so, to one more research project in this issue. As a companion to my written article in this issue, titled “‘The Instant in Which’: What Big Jet TV Livestreaming and TikTok Cat Videos Have in Common,” is the 6 minute experiment I call a video demo. Let me admit. I gave up on reworking this article on the temporality of streaming into a form of videographic criticism. It never advanced enough beyond powerpoint form. The 20-minute version, soon abandoned, could never have enabled viewers to “see what I said.” For critical theory may be easier “said” than “done as” a video essay. The “second’s time” in the “instant” the jet hits or doesn’t hit the airport runway in the live stream is “nothing” compared to the discourse of a philosophy characterized by paradoxical unanswerability and interminable elongation. But not to forget: conversely, written discourse cannot “show” the second “in which…”  It is futile to even try to describe the “instant in which…” as a temporal slice within the livestream. Why try if you can use the very video second itself? 

To summarize: The video demo is not an essay and it’s not personal, and the video clips are not described but are themselves downloads from British aviation enthusiast Jerry Dyer’s livestream, re-presented as a moving image demonstration of key points made in a written theoretical critique. A video demo is neither videographic criticism nor audiovisual art. It is part of a research study undertaken while practicing with so-called digital “tools.” I am not a video artist and have only designed, with the help of Eric Huang, a video demo titled “The Instant in Which”  Video Demo:

 

Figure 1. Las Meninas (Diego Velázquez, 1656) 

Figure 2.  frame enlargement. Escape (Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nameth, U.S., 1938) 

Figure 3. frame enlargement. Secondary Currents (Peter Rose, U.S., 1982)

Figure 4. frame enlargement. Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, U.S. 1936)

 

Thanks to Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, Matt Solomon, Pooja Rangan, Behran Garakani, and Eric Huang. 

 

Works Cited: 

The Audiovisual Essay website: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/ Accessed July 5, 2025. 

Luka Arsenjuk. 2016. “’To Speak, to Hold, To Live by the Image’: Notes in the Margins of The New Videographic Tendency.” In Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades,

The Essay Film: Dialogue/Politics/Utopia, 275–299, New York: Wallflower Press. 

Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer, ed. 2020. “Once upon a Screen”: Audiovisual Essays The Cine-Files 15. http://www.thecine-files.com/issue15-audiovisual-essays/ Accessed July 5, 2025. 

Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever. 2024. “Technics: An Introduction.” In Technics, ed. Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever, 13–24. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 

Roland Barthes. 1986. “From Work to Text.” In Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard, 56 –64. New York: Hill and Wang. 

Christine Becker. 2017. “Introduction: Transforming Scholarship through [in]Transiton.”

IN FOCUS: Videographic Criticism. Cinema Journal 56, no. 4 (Summer): 126–129. 

Raymond Bellour. 2000 [1975]. “The Unattainable Text.” In The Analysis of Film, 21–7. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

Johannes Binotto. n.d. Practices of Viewing I website. “Practices of Viewing: F.FWD.” https://transferences.org/videoessays/practices-of-viewing/f-fwd/ See also: videoessayresearch.org. Accessed December 1, 2025. 

Katie Bird. 2020. “Feeling and Thought as They Take Form: Early Steadicam, Labor, and Technology (1974–1985).” [in]Transition 7, no. 1. http://mediacommons.org/intransition/feeling-and-thought-they-take-form-early-steadicam-labor-and-technology-1974-1985)

Michel Chion. 2009. Film: A Sound Art. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. _____. 2016. Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise. Trans. James A. Steintrager. Durham: Duke University Press. 

 Timothy Corrigan. 2011. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker. New York, Oxford University Press. 

Corey Creekmur. 2016. “How Does Film Feel? Toward Affective Videographic Criticism.” The Cine-Files 10. https://www.thecine-files.com/how-does-film-feel2016/

Corey Creekmur et. al. 2017. “Roundtable: Remix and Videographic Criticism,” Cinema Journal 56, no. 4 (Summer): 159–182. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/15/article/666239

Kyle Deguzman. 2024. “What is a Video Essay? The Art of the Video Analysis Essay.” https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-a-video-essay-examples/

Gilles Deleuze. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Mary Desjardins. 2015. Recycled Stars: Female Film Stardom in the Age of Television and Video. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Richard Dyer. 1993. A Brief Encounter. London: British Film Institute. 

Michel Foucault. 1970. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books. 

Kirby Ferguson. 2012–2023. Everything is a Remix (4-part video series): Original series:  https://www.youtube.com/watchv=nJPERZDfyWc. Accessed December 1, 2025. 

Catherine Grant. 2014. Dissolves of Passion: A Film Within a Film https://www.caboosebooks.net/node/150. Accessed July 5, 2025. 

_____. 2019a. “Dissolves of Passion: Materially Thinking Through Editing in Videographic Compilation.” In ed. Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell. The Videographic Essay:

Criticism in Sound and Image. 65–83. 2^nd revised and expanded edition. Montreal: Caboose. 

Chiara Grizzaffi. 2024. “Audiovisual Film Histories for the Digital Age: From Found Footage Cinema to Online Videographic Criticism.” In ed. Malte Hagener and Yvonne Zimmermann. How Film Histories Were Made: Materials, Methods, Discourses, 389–415. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 

David J. Gunkel. 2025. “Generative AI and Remix: Difference and Repetition.” In The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, ed. Eduardo Navas and Owen Gallagher, 232–245, New York: Routledge, 2^nd ed.  

Vinzenz Hediger. 2025. “WHAT MAKES AN EXCERPT? The Video Essay as an Experiment

Performed on the Work of Art.” Forthcoming in “The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory in Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies” https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/. Accessed December 1, 2025. 

Miklós Kiss. 2024. “What’s the Deal with the ‘Academic’ in Videographic Criticism? zfm: Zeitschrift Für Medienwissenschaft No. 3.

https://zfmedienwissenschaft.de/en/online/whats-deal-academic-videographic-criticism Accessed December 1, 2025.    

Jaap Kooijman. 2015. “Success: Richard Dyer on Diana Ross [and Beyond].” [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies 2, no. 4: Accessed July 5, 2025._____. 2017. “To Critique Affect by Means of Affect.” Cinema Journal 56, no. 4 (Summer): 146 – 148. 

Kevin B. Lee. 2015. “The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent.” Otherzine No. 31 (Fall): http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/2940-2/ Accessed July 5, 2025. _____. 2021. “A Videographic Future Beyond Film.” NECSUS 10, no. 2 (Autumn 2021): 33 – 39. 

Lev Manovich. 2013. Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury. _____. 2025. “Remix Strategies in Social Media.” In The Routledge Companion to 

Remix Studies, ed. Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, 147–163, New York: Routledge, 2^nd ed. 

Scott McDonald. 2022. “Is the Video Essay a New Avant-Garde? The Edge: 16 November: https://www.theedgemedia.org/video-essay-new-avant-garde/ Accessed July 5, 2025. 

Richard Misek. 2015. “The Definition of Film.” Made for [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic 

Film and Moving Image Studies” Vol. 2 no. 2: https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/11377/ Accessed December 1, 2025. 

Justin Remes. 2015. “Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film. Cinema Journal 54, no. 3. (Spring 2015): 69–87. 

Edgar Morin. 2005 [1956]. Cinema, or The Imaginary Man. Trans. Lorraine Mortimer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Slaymaker, J. (2022). “Origins of the Twenty-First Century: The Impact of Digital Technology on the Construction of the Cinematic Essay.” Interactive Film & Media Journal, 2(3): 191–205. https://doi.org/10.32920/ifmj.v2i3.1528. Accessed July 5, 2025. 

Matthew Solomon. 2019. “Audiovisual Pedagogies: Introduction: The Inexhaustible Test.” Screen 60, No. 3 (Winter): 449–454. 

Wanda Strauven. 2021. Touchscreen Archaeology: Tracing Histories of Hands-On Media Practices. Lüneburg, Germany: Meson Press. 

https://meson.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/9783957961877_Strauven.pdf

 

Film/Videography:

Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold, Austria, 1998).

https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=tightropetb&ei=utf-8&p=Alone%3A+Life+Wastes+Andy+Hardy+%281998%29&type=Y269_F1_238525_092825#id=1&vid=1b70af0477ca4297058d7f6be056a077&action=click

Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, US, 1936) 

 https://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/rose-hobart-1936

Secondary Currents: a Film Noir (Peter Rose, 1982) 

https://vimeo.com/152638779

Forensickness (Chloé Gailbert-Laine, France)

 https://lehogalibertlaine.com/

Remixing Rose Hobart (Derek Long, 2017) 

https://vimeo.com/225587129

 

End Notes