Film Studies in Motion: From audiovisual essay to academic research video

Discussion

As this overview shows, the current field of videographic film culture is pretty much free-for-all. The visible bulk of (semi-)scholarly videos is made by a relatively small group of people, while online repositories and publishing platforms are lenient if not confusingly inconsistent regarding the material they allow within their collections. Additionally (or perhaps thanks to the field’s fuzziness), a lot of videos are hard to demarcate within practical parameters, although the common tendencies as well as general strengths and flaws are visible. Strengths of videos across all makers, platforms, and approaches lie in accessibility, appeal, spreadability and economy of informational distribution. Weaknesses generally lie in rhetoric and the obscure self-categorization of the videos by those that produce them: the term ‘essay’ is diluted through overuse, while videos with more refined essayistic rhetoric are not properly indicated – something which we are trying to do by building categories and definitions that will hopefully be met with positive inclination by our peers in the field.
 

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