Videographic Film Studies and Research by Practice

This article outlines the current state of videographic criticism with special reference to the Italian Studies context and goes on to report on the experience of co-teaching a graduate seminar (a one-semester course), ‘Italian Film and Television and Videographic Criticism’, at The Ohio State University. We argue that videographic criticism is an exciting opportunity for students and scholars of the Italian context, for at least three reasons. The first is because so much videographic activity has focused on anglophone material while what work there is on Italy has tended to focus on male auteurs, exportable filone cinema (spaghetti western, horror), and neorealism. This means that our disciplinary expertise on topics less familiar to mainstream and cult cinephilia has the chance to find novel expression in videographic form and to fill some glaring gaps. Secondly, videographic criticism can help to attract students: the chance to make (as well as to study) audiovisual essays is an appealing one for many and may allow students to find an audience for their work more readily than for the standard prose paper. Thirdly, the practice of videographic criticism can allow us to communicate and publicise our work more effectively beyond the academy, again potentially increasing enrolments but also helping to engage communities and constituencies without easy access to our prose scholarship.

Article available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10509208.2022.2033066?journalCode=gqrf20

Desktop documentary has firmly established itself as a reflexive form that directly addresses the screen-mediated nature of our lives. This genre on the border between film theory and practice treats the computer/mobile screen as both a camera lens and a canvas and seeks to depict and question how we explore the world through the screen. Crucially, unlike previous forms of cinematic theoretical practice, such as the 1970s counter-cinema, desktop documentary incorporates both reflexivity and narrativization. While it lays bare the inner workings of the apparatus, at the same time, it assimilates them into a relatively coherent and accessible narrative.

This paper aims to understand how this paradoxical marriage between reflexivity and narrativization works. In which ways can the desktop documentary genre be reconceived as a successor to the 1970s counter-cinema, and in which ways does it constitute a break from it? A term that will enable us to stage an encounter between the old and the new, narrativization and reflexivity, revealing and concealing, is suture. This concept and its recent revisions will present desktop documentary as a staged process of welding together elements surfacing and resurfacing on the screen that brings the author, the apparatus, and the spectator on the same plane.

Our (co-written with Thomas van den Berg) ‪media rich,‬ ‪‎open access‬ ‪‎Scalar‬ ‪e-book‬ on the ‪‎Audiovisual Essay‬ practice is available online: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/film-studies-in-motion

Audiovisual essaying should be more than an appropriation of traditional video artistry, or a mere audiovisually upgraded extension of our analytical practice. What we expect from it is a form of expression that is autonomous and self-sufficient, that would both maintain and refine traditional academic values, and ultimately could lead to a ‘true’ audiovisual turn in communicative discourse by as well as about films.

The leading question for this book is ‘How can the traits and rhetoric of a traditionally text-based scholarly work, characterized by academic lucidity and traceability of information and argumentation, be optimally incorporated and streamlined into an autonomous, audiovisual container?’

A talk delivered at the NECS 2022 Conference: Epistemic Media: Atlas, Archive, Network, hosted by National University of Theatre and Film "I.L. Caragiale" in Bucharest, June 22-26, 2022.

Click here for more information: https://necs.org/conference/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/NECS-2022_final-programme.pdf

Archival theory and practice still tend to hierarchize between audiovisual artifacts worth preserving and those that are not, and the increasing amount of images, screens, and interfaces in the digital sphere has only broadened the number of objects that risk disappearing without a trace.

One of these lost audiovisual objects is the star wipe, a type of film transition that connects two images or sequences through a wipe in the shape of a star. This editing technique and special effect in one, associated with 1980’s television as well as the early digital era, ostentatiously makes itself visible, with its blatant excess being manifested both in the image content and in the highlighted temporality of transition from one image to another.

Despite the excessive character of the star wipe, the editing gesture is no longer to be found in the current audiovisual field. It occasionally resurfaces as a parodical yet nostalgic effect in popular culture, e.g., in TV shows The Simpsons and Better Call Saul; however, it stopped being used in professional editing and almost disappeared from the mainstream. 

Which leads us to a question: how and why preserve something that is often perceived as a disposable gimmick? How to archive something that does not have a material substance, that exists only as a connection of two or more images? We aim to offer means for understanding the star wipe as a challenge to the prevailing epistemological biases of the archival world against immaterial, ephemeral, hybrid, and supposedly low-brow cultural elements. Combining tools of contemporary archival theory with a more practical approach inspired by videographic criticism, we will outline ways to bring the star wipe back to life and attempt to preserve the unpreservable.

Threshold Infrastructures of Residual Spaces- I, II, III
15-16-17 April 2021

Part I: "Surplus of Destruction"
Pelin Tan, Özge Çelikaslan

Our workshop -in three parts- implicates complex cartographies of images of forced displacement and war circulating in the digital sphere. We are particularly interested in discussing the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of digital media infrastructures and threshold infrastructures of residual spaces and related diverse issues such as counter-surveillance, transversal labor conditions, access, curation, and disruption of violence and social inequalities through visual documentation specifically open-source archives.

As geographer Stephan Graham describes: “ …urban infrastructures as complex assemblages that bring all manner of human, non-human, and natural agents into a multitude of continuous liaisons across geographic space” (Graham, 2010). We call “Threshold Infrastructure” as multiple thresholds of spaces and mediums.

The first part of our workshop focuses on the specific region in Turkey that has been witnessing intense political, cultural conflicts, urban destruction, internal migration, and psychological outcomes for over four decades. Thus, it is possible to witness the neighborhoods where buildings and humans become waste and garbage in the affected region. We present our continuous visual research that focuses on the residual space, its dynamics and representations, and the circulation of the subject and object in the towns; Diyarbakır, Mardin, and Cizre. While tracing the sociological, economic, and cultural reflections of the invisible sign and unrecorded paths that lasted from urban transformation and migration footsteps on the recorded material, the workshop takes into its center the methodologies of forensics and ge-ontologies of visual documentation.

Part II: "Migrating Images"
Nagehan Uskan
“After several years spent on the global agenda with its normalized images of misery circulating both in mainstream and alternative channels, in September 2020 the infamous Moria camp was burned to the ground as a result of a riot. Perhaps this is an example of a residual space being “re-residualised” as a form of resistance by its inhabitants. Since the Moria camp burned down, migrants applying for protection and asking for asylum have been forced to live in the “provisory” camp also known as Moria 2.0, built on the toxic ground in an old military shooting area on Lesbos Island. At the same time, a new migrant camp is now planned to be constructed in an area adjacent to the only garbage dump of the island, in a way that makes the concept of “waste place” extremely concrete. What is the role of the self-representative images of migrants in all these oppressive dynamics? In which ways do these images resist mainstream representations that normalize pain with countless repetitions? What is the meaning of a “self-residualising” image of a migrant taking a souvenir photo among the ruins of the burned-down old Moria camp? How is it possible to produce resisting images and create circulation networks in a place where self-representative images are prohibited and criminalized by the authorities? This border region, whose militarization has been increased through increasing fluxes of capital, is not only hindering the freedom of movement and the legitimate claims to asylum, but it is also trying to criminalize the migrants’ practices of visual self-representation and to prohibit the free movement of images. On the one hand, there is the ongoing circulation of stereotyping mainstream images that contribute to the normalization of suffering, while on the other hand, the anonymous images used by migrants to document their own situation constitute an attempt to controvert this condition. We will discuss all these issues and questions based on the direct experiences of the Lesbos based video-activism migrant collectives."

Part III: "Border Infrastructures & Forensics"
Stefanos Levidis
Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, carrying out investigations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by conflict, police brutality, border regimes, and environmental violence. In this workshop, FA researcher Stefanos Levidis will discuss the tools and techniques the agency has developed and employed over the past years in order to counter-investigate cases of state violence at the external borders of the EU. Drawing on several complementing case studies, participants in the workshop will be introduced to complex methodologies of spatial and architectural analysis, open-source investigation, digital modeling, and immersive technologies, as well as documentary research, situated interviews, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. The diverse spectrum of actors and practices involved in these investigations provides critical insight into how novel modes of evidence and testimony amplification emerge, and how interdisciplinary and collaborative research provides a pathway to democratizing the processes of evidence production that have been traditionally monopolized by the state.