Expresser, Agitator, Salve and Mirror: the Video Essay and Contemporary Cinephilia Jessica McGoff Supervised by: Dr. M.A.M.B. Baronian Second Reader: Prof. P.P.R.W. Pisters Word Count: 19,881 26 June 2017 Master’s Media Studies: Film Studies University of Amsterdam 1 Abstract The video essay has emerged as a new and popular form of critical analysis in the last half-decade. However, its emergence has provoked discourses surrounding the form’s exact position within the contemporary media landscape. This thesis seeks to mediate these discourses by examining the video essay in the context of contemporary cinephilia. The concept of contemporary cinephilia proves to be a productive framework, for the video essay functions within it as an articulation and reflection on the landscape. This thesis will firstly demonstrate that the video essay functions as an expression of contemporary cinephilia. It will further examine how this expression provokes new conceptions of the material in relation to cinema and cinephilia. In examining these new conceptions, this thesis will finally interrogate their implications, and how the video essay may trouble the paradigm of (im)materiality vital to cinephilia. Thus, this thesis finds the video essay to provide an excellent vantage point through which to reveal the tensions and ambivalences of the landscape of contemporary cinephilia. Keywords: video essay; videographic film studies; cinephilia; phenomenology; materiality. 2 Table of Contents Abstract 2 List of Figures 4 Introduction 5 Chapter One: The Video Essay as an Articulation of Contemporary Cinephilia 10 Traditional Cinephilia: An Ephemeral Notion 10 Cinephilia and the Digital: Beyond Transience 14 The Video Essay: A Contentious New Form 17 Cinephilia Take Two and the Video Essay: An Encounter 21 Chapter Two: The Video Essay and New Experiences of Materiality 26 Digital Materiality 26 Close Proximity 30 The Video Essay’s Affective Insights: From Creation to Reception 32 The Video Essay’s Affect and The Affective Turn 37 The Contemporary “New” 40 Chapter Three: The Video Essay as Disruptive Force 43 The Frustration of Cinephilia 43 Touch as Destruction 50 The Video Essay as Reflector 55 Conclusion 58 Works Cited 61 3 List of Figures Figure 1.2 Screenshots from Pass the Salt. Figure 1.2 The original image from An Anatomy of a Murder. Figure 2.1 Screenshot from Carnal Locomotive. Figure 2.2 Screenshot from Carnal Locomotive. Figure 3.1 Screenshot showing Eric Farr in Rock Hudson’s Home Movies. Figure 3.2 The aftermath of the Bigger than the Shining DCP disk (personal photograph). 4 Introduction The emergence, and rapid proliferation, within the last half-decade of a new format and practice of critical film analysis often dubbed “the video essay” has opened a Pandora’s box of discourses regarding cinema. The video essay, to use a most rudimentary definition, is an expression of critical thinking that utilises audiovisual means of sound and image. The form’s emergence and popularity has been both a cause of celebration and resistance. Generally disseminated in online spaces, the current trend of video essay practice has been presented as an affirmative re-engagement with critical film analysis, whilst at the same time been resisted and dismissed as a fad with little critical rigour. The form’s directness and accessibility also gives it broad appeal, and the practice’s adoption by film critics, academics and amateur fans alike has been met with both enthusiasm and accusations of indistinctness. Further, the video essay’s exact origins are somewhat indefinable, and many have expressed reservations in considering the form “new.” The video essay has also provoked discussions regarding copyright and commercial or educational usage of existing film material, further highlighting the ease of access one has to film objects within our contemporary media landscape. I do not wish to engage with each of these discussions discretely within this thesis, nor do I wish to make any generic or evaluative claims regarding the video essay. Rather, this thesis will mediate these various debates through the all-encompassing concept of cinephilia: the love of cinema that gives rise to and propagates these discourses. Cinephilia proves a productive concept in relation to the video essay, for it is one that mirrors the contradictions of the video essay expressed within the aforementioned debates. Cinephilia as a notion is not itself entirely resolved: Jenna Ng, for instance, argues that cinephilia is so deeply subjective and personal that “it cannot be fully contained in objective theory, and that is its glory” (75). However, Malte Hagener and Marijke de Valck, whilst not necessarily disagreeing with the personal aspects of cinephilia, assert that the concept can in fact be theorised, given that we recognise its subjective factors. Hagener and de Valck assert that any approach for studying contemporary cinephilia should 5 engage in its “double-movements,” namely, its constant move “between the biographical and theoretical, the singular and the general, the fragment and whole, the complete and the incomplete, the individual and the collective” (Cinephilia in Transition 27). The video essay and cinephilia become interrelated in this way, both articulating double-movements. The video essay, when considered an expression of cinephilia, brings to light the contradictions and tensions within the concept. Thus, this thesis aims to elucidate these tensions, as well as explicate the way in which the video essay embodies cinephilia’s ambivalences. This thesis intervenes between two concurrent discourses: the declared death of cinephilia and the burgeoning emergence of the video essay. Debates surrounding the end of cinephilia are inextricably bound up in proclamations and prophetisations of the death of cinema itself. These declarations of cinema’s death tend to occur as results of shifts within the technology involved in cinema, or the introduction of new technologies capable of filming, screening or storing the moving image. Paul Willemen observed necrophilic overtones in his consideration of cinephilia, in how it relates to “something that is dead, but alive in memory” (227). Willemen sees cinephilia as a fragile concept, under threat of extinction as analogue technology gives way to digital, and projected images give way to electronic ones. Most famously, Susan Sontag penned an obituary to cinema in her 1996 ‘The Decay of Cinema.’ Sontag’s despair was directed not so much at the quality of the films themselves, but rather a critical shift in the way in which they were now being consumed. Sontag mourned the time wherein “the full-time cinephile [was] always hoping to find a seat as close as possible to the big screen — ideally front-row center” (61). With this remark, Sontag betrays a fixation with technological changes that instigated the altering or loss of cinema- going habits. Home viewing media threatened cinema attendance, endangering the prevalence of the exhibition-based experience of cinema. Declarations of cinema’s death are defined by a refusal to acknowledge or conceptualise any form of malleability of the medium. In these accounts, cinema and cinephilia are not open to re-interpretation or re-imagination: once they cease to be defined by recognisable parameters, they cease to be — they die. 6 Arguably the largest shifts in technologies have been centred around the increasing importance of the Internet and online spaces. At first glance, the physical space of the exhibition venue becomes lost to the non-physical, digital space of streaming, file sharing and online discussion. It is within this online environment that the video essay rapidly proliferates. Often also referred to as the “audiovisual essay” or “videographic research,” the video essay is not a precise genre. As this etymological contention already divulges, the form’s rise in popularity has occurred simultaneously to debates regarding the video essay’s exact definition and value. Practitioners Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin perhaps provide the most complete summary of the video essay as a “name for the burgeoning field of inquiry, research, and experimentation within academia and also beyond it; the expression of critical, analytical, and theoretical work using the resources of audiovisuality — images and sounds in montage” (Introduction to the Audiovisual Essay). From this, one can infer a broad characterisation that considers the video essay an expression of pedagogy regarding film using the means of film itself, that is, audiovisual processes. I will elaborate on the video essay’s evasiveness of definition and indiscernible lineage in a later chapter, but what it crucial to note here is that the form heavily relies on the digital means of file storage, editing and the online culture of propagation and circulation. In this light, the video essay emerges within a time of “dead” cinephilia, only to exhibit a sustained focus and concern for cinema, the very concern that begat the conceptualisation of cinephilia at the outset. It would be tempting, then, to position the video essay as a “re-birth” of cinephilia. Indeed, the video essay does restore many facets of traditional cinephiliac practices, namely a renewed interest in critical interrogation of film texts and the provocation of debate (through a means that even poses a potential way of bridging the gap between academia and film criticism). However, this narrative risks simplification of both the video essay as a form and the contemporary landscape of cinema it thrives in. Further, the trajectory that proposes cinephilia’s death and re-birth can be radically disputed. Malte Hagener and Marijke de Valck argue for cinephilia as an ultimately pliable concept, demonstrating how it has “transformed itself” in step with the transformations 7 of digital technologies (Down with Cinephilia 12). This thesis will subscribe to cinephilia as a malleable notion, therefore positioning the video essay not so much as a strict re-birth but a re-channelling of cinephilia within a changed landscape.