Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable?
- 2 To Attain the Text. But Which Text?
- 3 Compounding the Lyric Essay Film : Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-Narrative
- 4 ‘Every love story is a ghost story’ : The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015)
- 5 Lines of Interpretation in Fields of Perception and Remembrance : The Multiscreen Array as Essay
- 6 Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016) : Intellectual Vagabond and Vagabond Matter
- 7 Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film : The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button
- 8 Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant-Garde to the Audiovisual Essay
- 9 ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator
- 10 The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking
- 11 The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously
- Index
10 - The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable?
- 2 To Attain the Text. But Which Text?
- 3 Compounding the Lyric Essay Film : Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-Narrative
- 4 ‘Every love story is a ghost story’ : The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015)
- 5 Lines of Interpretation in Fields of Perception and Remembrance : The Multiscreen Array as Essay
- 6 Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016) : Intellectual Vagabond and Vagabond Matter
- 7 Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film : The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button
- 8 Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant-Garde to the Audiovisual Essay
- 9 ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator
- 10 The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking
- 11 The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter carefully considers the practice of the audio-video essayist, reflecting on the topics of subjectivity, textuality, and technology. Grant is a film scholar who, in the last ten years, has begun to produce, write about, and publish creative-critical digital-video essays on film and media studies subjects, essays that use footage from the films studied, as well as other moving image/sounds from existing media. Her chapter examines the critical and theoretical threads that surround the audiovisual essay as it belongs to the tradition of the essay film and as it belongs to the broader realm of creative practice. She also thinks through some of the spectatorial implications of her online practice as research.
Keywords: audiovisual essay, film and media studies, creative critical practice as research, material thinking
I
‘In the face of the seemingly limitless possibilities, practice cannot know or preconceive its outcome. Rather, the new emerges through process as a shudder of an idea […].’
In a sense, the cinephiliac moment may be understood as a kind of miseen- abyme wherein each spectator's obsessive relationship with cinema is embodied in its most concentrated form. […] But if we see cinephiliac moments as the flashes of another history, how to develop that history?’
‘[I]t is in the joining of hand, eye and mind that material thinking occurs, but it is necessarily in relation to the materials and processes of practice, rather than through the “talk”, that we can understand the nature of material thinking. Words may allow us to articulate and communicate the realizations that happen through material thinking, but as a mode of thought, material thinking involves a particular responsiveness to or conjunction with the intelligence of materials and processes in practice.
Long after the advent of the digital era, while the overwhelming majority of university-based film studies academics still choose to publish their critical, theoretical, and historical research in conventional written formats, a small but growing number of scholars working on the moving image have begun to explore the online publication possibilities of the digital video essay. This multimedia form has come to prominence in recent years in much Internet-based cinephile and film critical culture.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Beyond the Essay FilmSubjectivity, Textuality and Technology, pp. 199 - 214Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020