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The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy

Videographic Epigraph

For this ‘videographic epigraph’ assignment, we asked participants first to select a favorite quotation from some critical text that could serve as an epigraph—possibly related to the media object they were working on, but not necessarily. The quotation could not be more than ten sentences long. Next, the participants were to select a continuous scene or sequence from their film object and alter it in some way—through slow motion, image manipulation, or some other visual or temporal effect. The source soundtrack was to be replaced or significantly altered via effects. The selected critical quotation was then to appear as text on screen in some dynamic interaction with the images in the scene.

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This video was submitted as an exercise in Middlebury College's Workshop in Videographic Criticism, sponsored by the NEH. The challenge was to combine a film clip, a quotation, and at least one track of sound from another source. The film is Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), the quotation is from V.F. Perkins's essay "Where Is the World? The Horizon of Events in Movie Fiction," and the music is "Vector Melody," by Podington Bear, on an attribution-non commercial license at http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear/Rhythm_and_Strings/VectorMelody. The music track has been shortened. Thanks to the participants of the workshop, and to the organizers Jason Mittell and Christian Keathley.