Chaos Cinema Part 1 [by Matthias Stork]
1 2016-04-29T02:50:36-07:00 Miklos Kiss bab68bf9457e82557cb440971c8c3307eac46327 8115 1 The video essay Chaos Cinema explores the style of 21st century action films. Part 1 contrasts traditional action films with more modern iterations and takes a close look at the role sound plays in shaping the film experience. plain 2016-04-29T02:50:36-07:00 Critical Commons 2011 Video Chaos Cinema Part 1 Matthias Stork 2016-04-29T09:37:19Z Miklos Kiss bab68bf9457e82557cb440971c8c3307eac46327This page is referenced by:
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The web and the video essay
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Shortly after amendments were made to the fair use discussion concerning audiovisual materials, the online video essay started coming into fruition. Around this time, technological means for broadband Internet connection, video production, editing, distribution, and
annotation had become exceedingly attainable. Still, it was relatively early, in 2007, when film critic Kevin B. Lee started ‘Shooting Down Pictures’ – a website dedicated to his efforts watching “every film of the list of 1000 greatest films of all time, as compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?”. To keep track of his project, Lee wrote blog posts and started sharing video excerpts on his YouTube channel from the films he watched. On April 24th, he uploaded a video with the title While the City Sleeps, accompanied by a description that read “Video essay on While The City Sleeps (1956, Fritz Lang).paratextual Shooting Down Pictures: shooting.alsolikelife.com”. The 5’51” video features a compilation of assorted footage from Lang’s film noir, during which Lee provides general comments via voice-over.From
This early video essay already demonstrates the format that most of the upcoming videos would adopt in the following years: the opening of the video only presents an enticing shot, after which we see the film’s title-card, followed by a voice-over. The film’s synopsis , and then the applied focal point is introduced, which serves as the subject of the video. The voice-over delivers commentary that only roughly corresponds to what can be seen on screen at that specific time. Strategies that are customary in today’s practice, such as snappy (contrapuntal) editing of commentary and images, are wholly absent here; both voice-over and footageis recounted general comments and approximate impressions, without a real thesis, method, or conclusion. Coherence between commentary and visuals is loose, and the pacing is relatively slowdemonstrate [39] While spartan in its execution, Lee’s video is highly informative and provides a personally argued access to the film within six minutes, which was then a novelty. More trailblazing attempts from Lee would follow until about a year later when the term ‘video essay’ first appears in the title of the video Shooting Down Pictures #933: Evil Dead 2 Video Essay (though this labeling would not be followed up consistently for some time). [40. ]
Later video uploads would range from scenes and excerpts to analyses that mirror traditional DVD audio commentary, like a casual discussion between Keith Uhlich and Lee that is clearly recorded while the scene played out as featured in the Shooting Down Pictures #937: Posto – Sequence Analyses video.Il
By making a guest appearance on Lee’s YouTube channel in 2008, film critic Matt Zoller Seitz debuts with a two-part essay on Raoul Walsh’s 1941 classic They Died with Their Boots On: They Died with Their Boots On w/ Matt Zoller Seitz.
Shortly after Seitz would produce a video series for Moving Image Source, initially together with Lee (on the season 1 credit sequence of David Simon’s The Wire: Extra Credit, Part 1, and the by now classic The Substance of Style series on Wes Anderson’s cinema), and later on his own [41] Lately Seitz himself became more productive; his videos have begun to take shape of close readings and efforts to trace formal and aesthetic tendencies..
Safe to say, these initiatives mark the inception of the video essay, as we currently know it. Yet, aside from videos from Seitz in 2009 and 2010, Lee would be alone for some time. Only around and after Matthias Stork’s three-part theorization of Cinema in 2011 would we begin to see more videos, by more authors, in more diverse forms.Chaos
In addition, Lee’s efforts would show more sophistication in later years, and upgrade earlier modes of formal breakdowns that can now do what, for instance, Bellour intended to achieve in both ‘The Obvious and the Code’, as well as in ‘The Unattainable Text’ in 1973 and 1975, respectively (see, for example, Lee’s 2008 close spatial analysis of Paul Thomas Anderson’s shot techniques: The Career of Paul Thomas Anderson in Five Shots - also [Figure 9]).
From then on, thanks to a multiplicity of authors, the shapes and sizes of video essays would evolve, although the hard-core of video essayists would remain relatively stable, as we will point out in Chapter II.
Within the context of institutionalized education, English and Film Studies professor Eric Faden was relatively early to catch on this forming tendency when he wrote ‘A Manifesto For Critical Media.’ As early as in 2008, in a rather determined proclamation, he declared to give up on film analysis altogether, and to invest his hopes and efforts intowritten work:mediatized
In Faden’sI’m so convinced by this new form’s
that I, Eric Faden, hereby renounce my earthly, traditional, literary-bound scholarly practices. I vow to abstain from that mostadvantages restricted of intellectual practices – thesacred but essay – no matter the temptation. From here forward I put my faith in media over text, screen over paper. Thus, this is the last essay I’ll ever write. (Faden 2008)literary academic can see the inception of awriting we school dominating current video essay production, namely the one that challenges traditional scholarly work. Similar to Catherine Grant, who advocates the video essay as ‘thought new’ scholarly form (Grant 2014), Faden writes that “[tontologically ] scholarship aspires to exhaustion (…). The mediaraditional , by contrast, suggests possibilities” – which echoes the problems with hypertexts, as well as the (ambiguous) statements made instylo of personal documentary and essay film. Remarkably, passion and enthusiastic creativity may provide an indirect indication of why audiovisual work in Film Studies is relatively underdeveloped, at least from an academic, explanatory and argumentatively sound point of view: at the advent of newfavour possibilities, excitement over the novelty of medium specificity and about unusualmedial momentarily trumps respect for more traditional academic merits (this is one of the core concerns addressed in Chapter III). Rephrasing Tom Gunning’s seminal take on early filmaffordances in a ‘Cinema of Attractions’ (Gunning 2000 [1986]), it seems that we live in the age that could be described as an era of the ‘audiovisual essay of attractions’. Gunning writes about early practitioners’ “fascination with the potential of a [new visual] medium” (229). This lureproduction resulting with recent academic tendencies, as it seems that experimenting with fresh aesthetic and technical approaches is just ‘too attractive’ and may suppress established scholarly values. This way, one can find similar problems as when enthusiasm about hypertext’s associative and technical potential outweighed time-tested rhetoric of conventional research for those dabbling with this novelty. The inherent allure and practicalrhymes of theperformativity form too easily become a substitute for critical argument, as much as they may enable those arguments to be articulated ever more potently. Of course, one should not aspire to conservatism, and yes, potent audiovisual essaying allows and also requires some creativity (which may not be for everyone). However, at least in the scholarly context, one must keep an eye out for securing a certain amount of validity, in terms of academic soundness and subjection to evaluation criteria, as well as means to prevent overzealous naiveté.audiovisual gave voice to similar reservations:Lavik
Indeed, the emerging trend’s disregard or disinterest in the historical context (or ‘evolution’) of Film Studies is somewhat concerning. As Andrew notes, “a discipline needs to see current work in relation to the momentum of prior study, just as it needs to look forward to the advancements that graduate students will make when they take up the reins” (Andrew 2009, 884). Again,I find that [audiovisual film criticism] adopts too readily the conceptual abstractionism of the artistic avant-garde, and does not strive hard enough to preserve the particular competencies of film scholars as scholars: the ability to just engage with complex thought, but to pull it into focus, and to articulate and communicate those ideas clearly. (
2012)Lavik look forward is there, without question, but the relation to prior work and established criteria is often underdeveloped and uncritical. In terms of building on and incorporating a theoretical foundation, the tradition of Film Studies is regarded as either problematic or simply irrelevant – which, we argue, it both should not be, at least not by default. One of the ways we can remedy this development is by paying attention to the way video essays are employed in the classroom. The case we hope to have made after Chapter III is that current progressive-minded educators might want to look back on the theoretical tradition a bit more, and that traditionally minded faculties might want to open up their ideas to new means of – audiovisual – scholarship. The first group may benefit from feeding more established modes of research into their new and creative audiovisual explorations, while, alternatively, those who still consider the written word superior may have to reconsider the primacy of their practices. Fortunately, classroom experience with video essays is starting to prompt articles, or video essays for that matter, where educators attempt to define the best ways of teaching audiovisual research practices. Still, finding writings or practical guidelines for how to produce videos is scarce or at least theoretically thin (see the very useful but quite basic How-to Video Essays guide by Greer Fyfe and Miriam Ross) and measurements for evaluation are rather underdeveloped (the for exceptions, see Kelli Marshall’s attempt to create a sample Grade Sheet, and our brief plea for finding well-defined criteria to the new form in order to make it a verifiable scholarly medium – see Kiss 2014). Similar feats can be found in online journals calling for videos, whereas of evaluation are also currently pending (more to come on this in Chapters II and III).criteria
As mentioned in the Introduction, online platforms are adapting to video content more and more. Online scholarship is not new in the sense that there has already been a gradual shift where printed paper has been substituted for a screen. However, we would like to see a more optimized ‘graduation’ of that screen, as it were. Out of our everyday experience as digital consumers, we can agree with Eric sees written scholarship being presented on a screen as “the same dense content only now more difficult to read” (2008). Video on an online platform presented onFaden who is a new way of producing and displaying information, which subsequently calls for a new way of quality control and exhibition practice.screens
To date, the most professionalized and academically controlled effort to pull Film Studies in video form takes place on MediaCommon’s online cinema journal project [in Transition. The website was officially launched on March 20th, 2014, as “the first [online] peer-reviewed academic journal of] and moving image studies”, broadcasted live during a dedicated panel of that year’s SCMS conference in Seattle – the archived stream is broken up into two videos on the SCMS website: Part 1 (Becker, Morton) and Part 2 (Morton, Grant, Stork, Sampson).videographic film
The idea behind establishing such a journal was to offer a platform where the above-mentioned problems were to be overcome: to attain quality control through selection and introduction. For the first four done byissues this was curators, and recently byappointed (on a non-anonymous basis, selected from the members of the journal’s Editorial Board). The SCMS panel featured a group of people that decided to pull their recourses together and launch a single comprehensive website: Christine Becker, Drew Morton, Catherine Grant, Matthias Stork and Benjamin Sampson. Overall, during the panel it became apparent that the discussion surrounding audiovisual scholarship is one that needs to concern itself with production as well as evaluation and publishing. Especially Catherine Grant was up front about the uncertainty that is currently topical. As she relayed, “we don’t know what the relationship between length and substance is yet. We don’t know what the relationship between form and substance is yet” (see around 7:30assigned reviewers Part 2).into -
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Thesis video
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The parts of Matthias Stork’s Chaos Cinema cycle mark perhaps the first instances of thesis video.
While external sources are wholly absent in Part 1 and 2, this is largely due to the fact that these videos are built like a string of formalism installments. For every argument, Stork offers a film clip which he annotates through voice-over as the clip plays out: the center of the screen is (somewhatvideographic ) reserved for a boxed-in version of the film, with the title of each clip presented in the top-left corner at its onset. The first installment surfaced on August 15, 2011 and was something of an anomaly.cumbersomely still is today. To playfully introduce the concept of ‘chaos’, the video starts with a clip from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008). Stork then comes in with his voice-over, offering the premise of the video and his thesis, namely, that mainstream action cinema has become increasingly detached from classical continuity in bothArguably it as well as purpose. The 10’23” thesis video packs a lot of information in a relatively simple format: the screen is constantly filled with video clips; the audio track is taken up by the accompanying sound of the clip, with theexecution turned down every now and then to give way to Stork’s verbal commentary. While the first two videos were fairly similar, Part 3 expands on the technical and technological execution of the original subject (intensified continuity/chaos cinema), but also examines the impact of the first video by discussing the responses Part 1 elicited. As for technical improvements, Part 3 uses lecture-like slides and title cards to segment and demarcate the different topics. In addition, screen captures of various websites and clips of recorded computer game gameplay are implemented as means to underline Stork’s observations delivered through voice-over. As for segmentation, the chapters in the third video are headed by the most salient responses to Part I. Stork uses quotes from these responses and superimposes them on the screen mid-center, written in white color; bottom-center in red; or breaks them up halfway so that the text wraps around the visuals at the center of the screen. The end of Part 3 cites sources, but the selection is incomplete: the clips used in the video are absent here, though, these titles are shown in the running video at points when they are relevant. The sources of the quoted articles that were the foundation for the separate chapters are wholly absent [Figure 29]. Stork’s and Bordwell’s endeavors show that evenlevels the more scholarly and in-depth videos are not accustomed to conventional referencepraxis when ideas are communicated by means of video.
Roughly around the time of Stork’s videos, courses engaging with audiovisual essays became more popular at different institutions of higher learning across the globe. Thesis videos come close to traditional written essays – and to their audiovisual counterparts of autonomous research videos – and are mostly affiliated with institutionalized education. This affiliation is a logical one, as in these cases there are teachers present to assign subjects, creative angles or even theoretical and rhetorical approaches. Experimental classes are taking place internationally, led by like-minded scholars and result in comparable outcomes. Like the categorical indication implies, thesis videos are founded upon a thesis. Ideally, they are built around the rhetorical means to develop their arguments and discussions. In practice, this would entail a theoretical framework, close analysis, and a conclusion. While carrying out such rounded project, student-videos are oftentimes hampered by time restrictions, limiting the room for development. In her 2012 article, “Video Essay in the Cinema History Classroom”, Kelli Marshall shares her experience, according to which, despite the fact that students generally do not have any problem with the technological aspects of the work (ripping clips, editing, etc.), producing a video with consistent audiovisual quality as well as sound rhetoric, however, remains an overly challenging task. Additionally, the success of these videos all too often hinges upon preceding contextual knowledge. Similar problems arise in several pilot programs, and run parallel to the general concern expressed by, among others, the founders of [in] Transition: those who teach video essays have not been taught themselves (at this point); everyonein the current playing field is self-taught and self-made. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that some of the instructors have not yet garnered enough experience themselves in making and studying video essays to properly project any ‘ideal’ method or outcomeon their students. Our experience (distilled from our own audiovisual practice and from an informal survey with students andteachers we carried out at the University of Groningen) tells us that the general output of classroom videos varies, and proceedings are similar as those described by Marshall. Students encountered little to no troubles in the preparatory and production phases (including ripping clips), although the outcome revealed there were frequent problems with technology-related scholarly aspects such as disregarding or disrespecting original aspect ratios; editing clips with different visual qualities (e.g., resolution); or finding means to incorporate (written) sources. Additionally, the videos, more often than not, lacked consistency in terms of aesthetics, rhetoric and general handling and documenting of information (which was to be expected, as students’ capabilities in academic writing can vary). However, all shortcomings can often be attributed to the open-ended nature of both the assignments as well as their evaluation. If students are given no frame of reference, it is not surprising that theoretical conduct can come out highly inconsistent. Despite the fact that all students had passed classes in academic writing at that point in their education, most videos did not include a thesis. In addition,hermeneutic attempts were executed without consulting theory, and reference to intellectual property was often not properly documented, or not documented at all. Once more, although we acknowledge and embrace the value of free and playful hands-on experimentation in our teaching practice, somewhat ‘out of the box’ of the scholarly tradition, we also would like to remind ourselves that only those can step out of such box who are already ‘in’ it and therefore familiar with its discursive boundaries in the first place.
Our own 2013 effort, (un ) reliable (un ) reliability – or, Perceptual Subversions of the Continuity Editing System, was a relatively elaborate pilot attempt at producing an autonomous academic thesis video. While its runtime and allocation ofmaterials pairs up with that of the video lecture, its audiovisual rhetoric is a combination of annotated excerpts,videographic formalism and video lecture.
Some of the aesthetic choices include: a self-composed musicalsoundtrack which was automated in volume in relation to the appropriateness of the voice-over and theaudiotracks from video excerpts;clips were included from multiple films (instead of only the case study), as well as third party visuals, diagrams,screencaps and drop quotes from articles. All of these sources were referenced in the running video at the instances where they appeared as well as in a works cited list presented at the end of the video, in the style of a credit roll. To secure overview in an otherwise dense video, the screen was dividedin regions allocated for specific functions: the lower-left corner shows page-references; the bottom line of the screen presents more elaborate literature references; the center of the screen is reserved for showing video clips, drop quotes and slides/text-cards. In a video with a high degree of audiovisual and informational compression as this one, consistent placement of distinct types of information greatly facilitates the viewing experience. In addition, theoretically dense passages were deliveredmultimodally , forinstance both as on-screen written text as well as through voice-over. This makes the often difficult vocabulary used in the voice more comprehensible, or aids with the relatively brieftimespans which one has to read on-screen text. Additionally, whereas all videos discussed thus far employ a single mode of presentation, our video sought to provide a sort of multimodal ‘lexical variation’, meaning that creative decisions were madeto not have incorporate and facilitate severalpresentational modes (likesupercuts , or elements of a lecture). Furthermore, the audiovisual material from the main case study was re-cut in a manner fitting to illustrate the point being made per example (most excerpts were looped in sequences, where additional annotation was added with every recurrence of that loop). The video’s rhetoric was modeled after a written research paper, starting with an introduction, followed by acontextualized thesis, consideration of form and method, theoretical framework, case study, and conclusion [Figure 30]. A logical problem that followed from this approach is, however, that there is too much of an emphasis on verbal text: the voice-over delivers a lot of in-depth information in a vocabulary that is closer to writing than speech, in a limited amount of time. This way, the video can be hard to muster for some. Nevertheless, accessibility was intentionally sacrificed in order to scope out the polar opposite of popular, yet, in terms of explanatory power, shallow videos. Therefore, it should be clear that this video was a pilot attempt, a means of testing the waters of technological and informational possibilities. For a video to succeed as a ‘text’ that is accessible, intricate and lucid, we suggest to find middle ground in perhaps all of the videos discussed in this chapter and oscillate between light and dense constructions where needed.
A relative newcomer to the scene that immediately made big waves is Tony Zhou. The first of his videos surfaced on May 9th, 2014 (on the use of telephoto lenses in Joon-ho Bong’s Mother, and reliability trickery in Bart Layton’s thriller-doc The Imposter). His work can best be described as thesis videos. Aside from the fact the he is a professional editor, he had a format at the ready as well: the name Every Frame a Painting and, in general, the overarching idea for the scope and style of his string of videos thus far are present right out of the gate. Zhou’s videos generally center on the creative devices as used by a certain director (Akira Kurosawa – Composing Movement, Lynne Ramsay – The Poetry of Details, and David Fincher – And the Other Way is Wrong), or isolate an ideafrom a specific film (Snowpiercer – Left or Right, Silence of the Lambs – Who Wins the Scene?, Drive (2011) – The Quadrant System). Aside from bridging relatively in-depth film analysis with accessibility, Zhou also introduced several new aspects to the realm of video essaying. One ofZhou’s trademarks that immediately draws attention is, as Kevin B. Lee dubs it, ‘hypernarration ’ – Zhou’s voice-over delivers high quality information in a casual yet fast paced and well-punctuated manner. The rapid-fire styling of the way he conveys his information has an appealing quality to it, yet it does not suit every purpose or angle. In his What Makes a Video Essay Great?, Kevin B. Lee compares and contrasts this aspect of video essaying with van den Berg’s muted, more Kogonada-like voice work. Arguably, these two modes of voice-over represent the two polar opposites of the spectrum. Now, returning to the discussion of trademarks: the second salient aspect ofZhou’s industry is that he has set-up a Patreon account where fans, subscribers and the like can ‘pledge’ tofund him. He continues to make his videos available for free, free of ads, but offers special versions (annotated or additionally educational) to those that pay. While the main constructional component of these videos isvideographic formalism, it is the ideas, the way these are set-forth and the construction of the videos that unmistakably make them thesis-driven Tony Zhou works. All in all, Zhou’svideographic works are exemplary to properlyresearched and documented videos existing outside ofacademic context . Zhou is a good example of ‘finding middle ground’ and shows high potential for the progression of the form [see the thumbnail image and description of Zhou's F for Fake (1973) - How to Structure a Video Essay (2015) - Figure 31].