The Video Essay Podcast

Terris Francis is an associate professor at the University of Indiana — Bloomington and director of the Black Film Center/Archive. On today's show, we discuss Terri's new book, Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism. Terri and Will met in 2019 at the Scholarship in Sound & Image Workshop, where Terri worked with the films of Josephine Baker. We discuss how videographic criticism influenced the book and changed Terri's relationship with Baker and her research.

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For the first episode of On Your Screen, Will DiGravio chats with Michael Temple, the director of the Essay Film Festival and the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, about the 2021 Essay Film Festival. The festival will run online from 25 March to 3 April. Learn more here.

On today's show, Will sits down with John Gibbs, Head of the School of Arts & Communication Design and Professor of Film at the University of Reading, to discuss style-based criticism, his videographic work, and more. They discuss John's video essay, "‘Say, have you seen the Carioca?’," published as part of the AHRC/FAPESP-funded project, "Intermldia: Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema." John and Will also talk about Liz Greene's "The Elephant Man's Sound, Tracked" and "The Strange Streets of a Strange City: The Ambersons Montage" by Patrick Keating.

Douglas Pye also joins the show to discuss his new edited collection, V.F. Perkins on Movies: Collected Shorter Film Criticism, from Wayne State University Press. Doug and Will discuss the work of Perkins, how it relates to videographic criticism, and more.

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Last year, listeners of The Video Essay Podcast were assigned the five videographic exercises developed for the Scholarship in Sound & Image Workshop as "homework." Listeners made more than 60 videos as a response to the homework assignments. Episode 23 features audio reflections from eight listeners who created videographic exercises: Jemma Saunders, Cormac Donnelly, Roberto Carlos Ortiz, Charlotte Crofts, Alan O'Leary, Ben Creech, Max Tohline, and Ariel Avissar. Will also talks with Dr. Estrella Sendra, an academic based at the University of London and the University of Southampton, and Bartolomeo Meletti, the Education and Research Executive of Learning on Screen. Estrella and Bart are the team behind the "Introductory Guide to Video Essays," a brilliant new resource published by Learning on Screen.

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Today's show is (in part) dedicated to the 2020 Sight & Sound poll of the year's best video essays. Will is joined by the co-curators of the poll, Cydnii Wilde Harris, Grace Lee, and Ariel Avissar to discuss what it was like putting the poll together in the year of quarantine. The episode also features commentary from Oswald Iten, Kevin B. Lee, Shannon Strucci, Thomas Flight, and Scout Tafoya, who provide short audio reflections that expand upon their own selections in the year's poll. Finally, Will talks with Kevin B. Lee about an innovate new master's program he is starting at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany. Kevin talks about his plans for the program and the future of video essays.

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Today's episode begins with a special request from Will to the podcast's listeners. The episode features the audio from "The Journeys of Cary Grant: An Audiovisual Celebration," a partnership between the Cary Comes Home Festival and The Video Essay Podcast. In July 2020, we put out a call for video essays related to the theme of "journeys," not only in terms of geography, place, space and physical travels (both real life and on film), but also in terms of psychological journeys: voyages of identity, self-discovery and self-invention. On November 20, 2020, seven essayists joined Festival Director Charlotte Crofts and Will for a live conversation as part of the Cary Comes Home Festival to discuss the work they made for the celebration: Ian Magor, Anna Marin, Kendahl Cruver, Cormac Donnelly, Roberto Carlos Ortiz, Ian Garwood, and Philip Brubaker. The videos can be watched at www.thevideoessay.com/carygrant. 

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Will sits down with Nelson Carvajal, a two-time Webby award nominated video artist and television producer. Nelson is also the founder of the website Free Cinema Now. We discuss his video essay/mashup, "If Pride Rock Could Talk" and a supercut by Nicolas Longinotti, "Martin Scorsese: Hands."

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"Seen & Heard: Selections from the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist" was a live event recorded as part of the Open City Documentary Festival on September 12, 2020. The event was co-moderated by Cydnii Wilde Harris, Kevin B. Lee, and Will DiGravio, and featured interviews with Jazmin Jones, Professor Flowers, Nzingha Kendall, and Cydnii. Learn more at www.thevideoessay.com/blacklivesmatter.

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Cydnii Wilde Harris joins the show to discuss her video essay, "Cotton — The Fabric of Genocide." Cydnii and Will also discuss Ian Garwood's "SLAP THAT BASS Zoomed" and Jace Alexander Casey's "New Forms of Racism in the Post-Cinematic Dispositif." They also talk about what it's like to be a student of videographic criticism and how video essays have shaped their own scholarly pursuits.

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Will is joined by his former teachers and mentors, Jason Mittell and Christian Keathley, who are professors at Middlebury College, two of the co-founders of [in]Transition, co-conveners of the Scholarship in Sound & Image Workshop, and leading practitioners and teachers of the academic video essay. Our conversation centers on their collaborations, the history and practice of the workshop, aka "video camp," and features an in-depth discussion of the videographic exercises that listeners have been making in recent weeks. Listeners are assigned their final (for now) videographic assignment: abstract trailers.

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