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Video Essays and Scholarly Remix: Film Scholarship’s Emergent Forms - Audiovisual Film Studies, Pt 2

Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 20 Maret 2012


Catherine Grant will discuss the above companion piece to her video essay Touching the Film Object? at a workshop on "Video Essays: Film Scholarship’s Emergent Form" at the 2012 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, 5pm on March 22, 2012 in Boston.
     Her fellow workshop participants will include Christian Keathley (Middlebury College), Girish Shambu (Canisius College), Benjamin Sampson (UCLA), Richard Misek (University of Kent), Craig Cieslikowski (University of Florida) and Matthias Stork (UCLA).  
In her book Death 24x a Second, Laura Mulvey considered how the intersection of cinema with various digital technologies has changed film studies in recent decades.  Most obviously, DVDs allow film scholars unprecedented access to high-quality copies of our objects of study, and the internet has supplemented this with a wealth of online critical and archival material.  As a result, these various digital tools have significantly enhanced film scholars’ research and teaching.  But this intersection of cinema and digital technologies has brought not just accessibility, but the potential for dramatic transformation in the study of film.  Mulvey wrote, “New ways of consuming old movies on electronic and digital technologies,” she wrote, “should bring about a ‘reinvention’ of textual analysis and a new wave of cinephilia."
One place where this ‘reinvention’ of analysis and revived cinephilia can be seen is in the emergence recently of a new scholarly form -- the video essay.  Practitioners of this form are exploring the ways in which digital technologies afford a new way of conducting and presenting film research -- for the full range of digital technologies enables film scholars to write using the very materials that constitute their object of study: moving images and sounds.  Examples of this video essay work can be readily viewed online, especially at the Moving Image Source website, and at the vimeo site Audiovisualcy .  But most of the work in this new form is being produced by scholars outside academia (with some key exceptions), in part because the strictures of written academic discourse pose a challenge for this nascent form of multi-media scholarship.
This workshop -- which will include presentations by film scholars who are also video essay producers -- will consider the challenges faced in legitimizing the video essay as a valid form of academic scholarship.  The participants will address such issues as: How does the use of images and sounds in the presentation of scholarship demand a rethinking of the rhetorical strategies employed by the film scholar?  How does aesthetics play a role in an academic discourse that aims to produce knowledge and emotional response?  How would teaching courses on video essays help legitimize the form, and how might such instruction be undertaken?  How might emerging scholars situate themselves as leaders of this emerging academic mode? [SCMS workshop proposal drafted by Christian Keathley, author of the must-read essay 'La caméra-stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia', in Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism. London: Routledge, 2011]
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[H]apticity -- a grasp of what can be sensed of an object in close contact with it -- seems to me now to be very helpful in conceiving what can take place in the process of creating videographic film studies. It can also help us more fully to understand videographic studies as objects to be experienced themselves.

In the old days, the only people who really got to touch films were those who worked on them, particularly film editors. As Annette Michelson (1990) and others have argued, the democratization of the 'heady delights' of editing (Michelson, 1990: 22) was brought about by the introduction of video technology in the 1970s and 80s. Now, with the relatively wide availability of digital technology, we can even more easily share 'the euphoria one feels at the editing table [...] a sharpening cognitive focus and [...] a ludic sovereignty, grounded in that deep gratification of a fantasy of infantile omnipotence " [Michelson, 1990: 23].

But, are there other ways in which 'touching film' is just a fantasy? In videographic film studies, do videographers actually touch or handle the real matter of the film? Or are we only ever able to touch upon the film experience? Our film experiences? Do video essays only make objects of, or objectify, our film experiences, our insuperable memories of them, our own cinematic projections?

These questions may not flag up significantly new limitations. Film critical video essays do seem to work, it seems to me, in the same 'intersubjective' zone as that of written film criticism. As Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton argue of this zone, 'we are immersed in the film as the critic sees it, hence brought to share a deeply involved perspective' (2011: 9).

Yet, in videographical criticism, is there not a different intersubjective relation, a more transitional one, to the physicality or materiality of the objective elements of films that the video essays reproduce? Like written essays, video essays may well '"stir our recall"' (Klevan and Clayton, 2011: 9) of a film moment or sequence, but they usually do this by confronting us with a replay of the actual sequence, too. How might this difference count?

If nothing else, this confrontation with, or, to put it more gently, this inevitable re-immersion in the film experience, ought to make videographic critics pursue humility in their analytical observations with an even greater focus, make them especially 'willing to alter [their analyses] according to what [they come into] contact with [...] give up ideas when they stop touching the other’s surface' (Marks, 2004: 80).

A further, built-in, random element in non-linear digital video editing -- the fact that this process frequently confronts the editor with graphic matter from the film (e.g. thumbnails) that s/he may not specifically have chosen to dwell on -- may also encourage a particularly humble, usefully (at times) non-instrumental form of looking that Swalwell (2002) detects in Marks' notion of hapticity.
As Marks writes, 'Whether criticism is haptic, in touch with its object, is a matter of the point at which the words lift off' (2004: 80). Haptic criticism must be what happens, then, when the words don't lift off the surface of the film object, if they (or any of the other film-analytical elements conveyed through montage or other non-linear editing techniques and tools) remain on the surface of the film object, as they often do in videographic film studies. In addition to this, video essays on films may often be an especially 'superficial' form of criticism, frequently using slow motion or zoom-in effects to allow those experiencing them to close in on the grain or detail of the film image.
With so many words, or other filmanalytical strategies, simultaneously available to be sensed on the surface of the image and, in terms of sound strategies (such as voiceovers or other added elements), seeming to emanate from it, videographical film studies may be curiously haptic objects, then. It is useful to remember that the art historical concept of haptic visuality emerged from the scholarly and artistic traditions of formalism, which made procedures such as defamiliarization central to their practice. Defamiliarization -- the uncanny distancing effect of an altered perspective on (such as a hyper-proximity to) an otherwise familiar object -- may be one of the greatest benefits of the particular hapticity of videographical film criticism. [Catherine Grant, 'Touching the Film Object', Filmanalytical, August 29, 2011: citing Laura U. Marks, 'Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes', Framework" the Finnish Art Review, No. 2, 2004 (large pdf - scroll down to p. 79); Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton, 'Introduction', in Clayton and Klevan (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism. London: Routledge, 2011; and Michelson,  Annette, 'The Kinetic Icon in the work of Mourning: Prolegomena for the Analysis of a Textual System,' October 52 (Spring 1990)]
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One of the elements that Film Studies For Free appreciates most about online audiovisual film studies (film studies in digital video forms) are the phenomenological possibilities they offer viewers for the experiencing of moving image and sound juxtapositions in real time. We can synchronously feel, as well as know about, the comparisons they make. In other words, unlike written texts, they don't have to remove themselves from film-specific forms of meaning production to have their knowledge effects on us. [Catherine Grant, 'Garden of forking paths? Hitchcock's BLACKMAILs - a real-time comparison', Film Studies For Free, March 12, 2012]
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What interests me most in academic study is the exploration of what Gérard Genette called "transtextuality", that is to say, "everything that brings the text into relation (manifest or hidden) with other texts" (Genette, Palimpsestes, 1992: 81). Sometimes this interest alights on matters of cultural influence and film authorship (see here, for example), but often it focuses itself on the issue of the recognition of cinematic interconnectedness.

Now, in an age of digital and multimedia scholarship, how better to explore filmic connections of different kinds than to use the format of the video mashup? [This video essay on Peeping Tom and Code Unknown] is, then, the first in a series of "scholarly mashups" [...] examining the obvious and obscure connections between particular films in ways that are both striking and, hopefully, more precisely illuminating with regard to their form as films, than comparisons performed purely in non-audiovisual formats might be. [Catherine Grant, 'True likeness: Peeping Tom and Code inconnu/Code Unknown', Filmanalytical, June 26, 2010]

Here is the second entry in a mini-series of posts here at Film Studies For Free on the practical possibilities for, and the critical debates about, audiovisual film studies research and 'publication'.

Today the focus is on two of film scholarship's emergent forms, much loved by FSFF: video essays on, or scholarly remixes about, film. The above quotations draw attention to the range of issues these forms  raise for film studies: from the changes they involve in the processes of film studies research to the questions they pose about its publication forms and knowledge effects, as well as the possible roles for creativity and affect in our discipline.

The occasion for this latest meditation is an upcoming workshop discussion at the annual conference of the U.S. Society for Cinema and Media Studies. But  there are also a whole raft of online developments in, and other important, recent, publications on, this genre that FSFF wanted to flag up. Those are listed below.

Beneath all the links you will find embedded versions of some of the online video essays by FSFF's very talented, fellow workshop panellists and respondents in Boston. (You can find all of FSFF's audiovisual essays here).

If you are able to come to the workshop, hurray! Do please say hello to us all at the end! If you can't come but would like us to discuss any questions you have about video essays, do post those in the comments below. Thanks.

FSFF will take a little blogging break during and after the SCMS conference, but will tirelessly tweet during the conference, reporting on panels attended and other events. So do please follow @filmstudiesff if you'd like those updates.

Otherwise, see you back here sometime in early April.

Christian Keathley, Pass the Salt


 

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Knowing that/knowing how? On audiovisual film studies, part 1: practice-led film research

Diposting oleh good reading on Selasa, 06 Maret 2012


Research in progress by Joanna Callaghan for the fourth long format film in the series 'Ontological Narratives' which will take Jacques Derrida's epistolary novel The Post Card as starting point.
    In this research film, the possibility of a deconstructive film is discussed with world leading experts on Derrida using a range of clips as counterpoints.
    Ontological Narratives is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project led by Callaghan in collaboration with Martin McQuillan. [Also see 'The Post Card - Adaptation'; for more on this project see here and here]. See also Callaghan and McQuillan's important film on the current convulsive state of UK Higher Education, "I melt the glass with my forehead".
We can therefore turn this [film theory/film practice divide] debate into an explicitly philosophical issue, by not presupposing that knowing that and knowing how simply overlap; they are two different types of knowledge whose relationship needs to be thought through. It is the theorization of the link/overlap between the two types of knowledge that seems to be missing. [Warren Buckland, Film-Philosophy Discussion List, January 31, 2012]
[The debate about film theory and practice] has a history which, in the UK at least, goes back to the 1970s, when the art colleges taught experimental film making, and the then polytechnics and a few new universities began to include film-making in their undergraduate film courses. Film theory as such was still taking shape, and video was in its earliest stages.  In an atmosphere charged with radical intellectual fervour, the theoretical input led to much experimentation in colleges of creative practice—the watchword of the time was deconstruction. The paradigm for the infusion of theory into practice could be found in the work, for example, of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, who established themselves on screen and on page, together and separately, as leading denizens of both. Some of the people emerging from this habitus made the break and went on to successful careers in the mainstream, but independent film-making informed by theoretical critique remained in the margins. [Michael Chanan, 'Revisiting the Theory/Practice Debate', Putney Debater, February 15, 2012 (hyperlinks added)]
Audiovisual works, it may be argued – films, videos or some other form – are already discursively articulated, they not only incorporate language (as dialogue, voice-over, intertitle, and so on) but are quasi-linguistic in their very form. The analogy between language and cinema, for example, has been explored with particular rigour in structuralist film theory, not least in the work of Christian Metz. It might be argued that if audiovisual forms are inherently discursive, then an intellectual argument can equally well be presented in the form of a film or video as in a more conventional written form. [Victor Burgin, 'Thoughts on 'research' degrees in visual arts departments', Journal of Media Practice, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2006] (hyperlink added)]
The misgivings about the legitimacy of practice-based research degrees in the creative and performing arts arise mainly because people have trouble taking research seriously which is designed, articulated and documented with both discursive and artistic means. The difficulty lurks in the presumed impossibility of arriving at a more or less objective assessment of the quality of the research – as if a specialised art forum did not already exist alongside the academic one, and as if academic or scientific objectivity itself were an unproblematic notion. In a certain sense, a discussion is repeating itself here that has already taken place (and still continues) with respect to the emancipation of the social sciences: the prerogative of the old guard that thinks it holds the standard of quality against the rights of the newcomers who, by introducing their own field of research, actually alter the current understanding of what scholarship and objectivity are. [Henk Borgdorff, 'The debate on research in the arts', The Sensuous Knowledge Project, 2006]

And so begins a mini-series of posts here at Film Studies For Free on the practical possibilities for, and the critical debates about, audiovisual film studies research and 'publication'.

Below, in this first instalment, FSFF links to freely-accessible, online resources relating to the notion of film practice as a form of film/video theorising, in other words, as a reflexive and/or affective meditation on the ontological qualities of film or video (a 'felt framing', in Julian Klein's great phrase to describe artistic research). It's certainly a good excuse to showcase some of the burgeoning, open access work (and open access publications, or free publishers' samples) in the very healthy field of Moving Image Practice as Research (aka 'Research by Practice' or 'Practice-Led research).

Some studies of Practice-Led Research
Two Open Access journals for AV/media practice work:
Two free publishers journal samples:

Editorial:
Articles:
Features:
Reviews:
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Master Hands: A Video Mashup Round Table at Enculturation

Diposting oleh good reading on Jumat, 21 Oktober 2011



Part of the Prelinger Archives and openly accessible online as a Public Domain film at the Internet Archive: Master Hands (as embedded in full at YouTube above) is a classic "capitalist realist" drama showing the manufacture of Chevrolets from foundry to finished vehicles. Though ostensibly a tribute to the "master hands" of the assembly line workers, it seems more of a paean to the designers of this impressive mass production system. Filmed in Flint, Michigan, just months before the United Auto Workers won union recognition with their famous sitdown strikes. Released in 1936, the same year as two other films with which it shares similarities: Modern Times and Triumph of the Will, it was selected for the 1999 National Film Registry of "artistically, culturally, and socially significant" films [text mostly taken from the entry at the Internet Archive; hyperlinks added].

Today, Film Studies For Free is thrilled to flag up a truly "unique experiment in digital publishing": “Master Hands, A Video Mashup Round Table,” a project commissioned by the ever innovative online journal Enculturation and published as Issue 11 in the last few days.

Here's part of a short explanation of the project by the issue editors:
Master Hands is a 1936 film sponsored by the Chevrolet Motor Company that shows the inner workings of a Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan. It is available for download at the Internet Archive, and it offers rich material for mashups and remixes. [Richard Marback, Wayne State University] had been considering a project involving Master Hands for some time, and when he shared his mashup of the film with [James J. Brown, Jr., University of Wisconsin-Madison] in May it triggered a discussion between the two of us about how such a work might be published. Richard was not interested in writing an essay to accompany his video project – he wanted the video to stand on its own. Jim suggested that the best way to engage with such work was to create another mashup, and we began discussing a round table format in which other scholars would create their own mashups using the same source footage and respondents would discuss the mashups.
The videos (all under ten minutes in length) and the formal responses to them are linked to here. The individual mashup titles and their artists are set out below.
This is a great project in its own right, but what a wonderful model for future (and, of course, present!) forms of Film Studies, FSFF (rather typically for it) thinks...
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