De-coding or Re-Encoding?

Kevin B. Lee takes his celebrated video essay Transformers: The PreMake (USA 2014) (https://vimeo.com/94101046 (December 13, 2015)) as the point of departure for the consideration of how the ecology of moving image culture functions today. While this magisterial work shows the intricately intertwined levels of film production, from big budget blockbusters to smartphone footage, Lee disassembles the work and reflects on the process of discovery that was as much artistic as it was scholarly. In fact, both the written and the filmic essay are not identifiable exclusively as either works of art or of scholarship.