Video Essays: Global Cineama

This hands-on workshop immerses students in the craft practice of academic video essaying through your own videographic analyses of global films. Our labs will equip you with the basic skills required to begin your own video criticism. Video essays are an emergent field in film and media studies: “The full range of digital technologies now enables film and media scholars to write using the very materials that constitute their objects of study: moving images and sounds” (http://mediacommons.org/intransition/about). We will learn how to write videographically by using clips from movies as interpretive evidence for our analyses of the movies we watch.

How would we analyze the following phenomenon audio-visually using video-editing software? How a semi-historical Korean film on baseball history (YMCA Baseball Team, 2002) is like and unlike an Indian movie about cricket’s past (Lagaan, 2002). How films in Irish (Gaelic) and English re-tell the tragedy of the Irish famine differently (Arracht/Monster, 2019 vs. Black 47, 2018). How decolonial feminist director Lucrecia Martel uses discordant sound design to defamiliarize Argentinean society (The Holy Girl, 2004; Zama, 2017).

Class time will rotate among three activities: 1) Feature Film Screenings; 2) Seminar Discussions; and 3) Videographic Workshops. We will practice a variety of formal video editing and essaying exercises on the movies we watch: 1) a videographic pechakucha; 2) an unscripted voiceover; 3) a multiscreen composition; 4) a videographic epigraph; and 5) A video adaptation of a course article or reading. After we collectively experiment videographically, students will create your own essays individually or in groups.