Examples of scholarly multimedia: mediating the passing time
Example 1: Thinking Through Acting: Performative Indices and Philosophical Assertions by Hewko and Taylor (2016)
I would categorise this video as the “traditional” type of video essay, which turns a well-written essay into a film. This video essay addresses the importance of acting in film studies. They argue we should take the performance of actors and actresses seriously as they are creative agencies of the content (e.g. self-referentiality) through an examination of Marilyn Monroe.
There is a male narrator who guides the viewers almost the whole way to explain their points (not sure if this is relevant, but he speaks in a relatively low pitch, which is generally considered as more authoritative (Van Leeuwen, 1999: 109)). The structure of this video is mainly led by the text, and in particular, the “rhetorical mode/style” as Faden’s (2008) described. The scripts are related to arguments and the moving images are mainly for showing evidence, which I think is a conventional way to produce video essays.
Example 2: Remix: A Litany For Survival
It has a different style compared with the first one. This video discusses the representation of black women entertainers, and also the circulating discourses. It suggests these discourses are sites of struggles, which the black women entertainers might be able to resist them.
There is a female narrator, but she just speaks for the first 20 seconds for an introduction of the video. I get the arguments mostly from the “relay” (Barthes, 1977: 38) between different scenes of Black women entertainers’ performances and linguistic messages, which the latter helps to “anchor” the performances with meanings (i.e. the author’s arguments). I really like her use of the song “Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood” by Nina Simone as the background music for the texts and some scenes that feature black women entertainers (0:20-1:20), which transforms the original meaning (most likely a love song) to the issues of representation and stereotypes. This video style is less linear and more creative in my opinion.
Mediating the Passing Time
Drawing on Mulvey’s “Passing time: Reflections on the old and the new”, which she discusses the relationships between cinema and the representation of time, and argues that there’s not necessarily a “great divide” between the old and the new, instead, they can be linked together as an “aesthetic of delay” (p. 79).
I find the second video illustrates her argument quite well, which the pause and to delay help audiences to find out the hidden details (ibid., p. 76) and hence able to reflect differently (and probably critically). As this video is mostly based on the “relay” between different scenes of performances and texts, I often go back and read the text again, then watch the scenes again, so as to make a better linkage between them. (In addition, because of the theme of this video, it also embodies how cinema as a “cultural site for liberation struggle” as Mulvey (2011: 73) suggested.)
Then, I find Mulvey’s argument is even more interesting when analysing the first video. As it is a video that with a linear argument structure, the pause and replay makes this argument more interactive in my opinion (e.g. I pause at 06:34 for the performative index, then go back to around 01:16 to watch it again, and at that moment I have more knowledge about Marilyn Monroe, so this time I understand her performances with a different mind, and my mind cannot un-do this watching experience).
(On their websites, both "Thinking Through Acting" and "A Litany For Survival" are still surrounded by paragraphs, so I suppose text is still important for explaining the contexts of their work. Especially the second one, which some details of her argument may not be as clear as the first one.)