🚨 THE VIDEO JAM IS BACK! 🚨 📅 January 16–18, 2026 To celebrate five years of The Essay Library, we'll be coming together once again to create video essays in 48 hours. Learn more + join: theessaylibrary.com#jam

Call for Applications! Ways of Undoing invites videographic makers, scholars, and artists to apply to one of three intensive, week-long residential workshops (St Andrews 2026 | Vancouver 2027 | Tokyo 2028). Funded accommodation & board provided. Deadline: Feb 1, 2026 waysofdoing.com/ways-of-undo...

“We can now steal all your creative work. And share it with other thieves”. WeTransfer’s new terms of service are as brazen as they are despicable. I just deleted my professional account.

I Know What You’ll Do This Summer.

Implement a 100% tariff and ruin a movie. Seventeen

How does Kevin Costner's 1991 Robin Hood remember Disney's 1973 version of the outlaw? How does that one, in turn, remember Errol Flynn's 1938 incarnation? Why is Ridley Scott's 2010 take on the character forgettable? @jemsaunders1.bsky.social jogs her memory in this nostalgia-inducing video essay.

Application deadline is March 28 - please share with your students and colleagues who might be interested!

Friends Down Under: my video essay / short film MALE GAZING is playing at the ninth edition of the CAPRICORN FILM FESTIVAL in Yeppoon, Australia. This Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th January it is part of CAPS EXPERIMENTAL, a short form video art selection. More here: www.capricornfilmfestival.org

GETTY ABORTIONS explores Getty's stock image databases and finds that the photos used to illustrate abortion are very stereotypical. Franzis Kabisch uses her personal story to challenge the anonymity of those images. #favoritevideoessaysof2024 More here: www.filmscalpel.com/getty-aborti...

MAKEOVER MOVIE by Sue Ding compiles a long list of objections to the trope of the makeover montage and substantiates them with an impressive array of film excerpts. She also enlisted six childhood friends to give a running commentary on her video essay - a great idea. #favoritevideoessaysof2024

HEIMATFILM fashions excerpts from 50 different films into a hilarious supercut. Marion Kellmann deftly combines recurring situations and motifs, and boils the German genre down to its narrative, thematic and iconographic essence. #favoritevideoessaysof2024 More here: www.filmscalpel.com/heimatfilm/

MEANWHILE IN LOS SANTOS (DISSOCIATION NATION) is a mod for Grand Theft Auto V that shifts the focus to NPCs (non-player characters, the extras of the gaming world). Their interior monologues are a critique of GTA’s design. #favoritevideoessaysof2024 More here: www.filmscalpel.com/meanwhile-in...

LIGHT HANDS is an excellent example of how to revitalise archival footage in a video essay. Historian Lily Ford delves into the Imperial War Museum’s collection of footage of women building airplanes during WWI. She engages with it in a creative and speculative manner. #favoritevideoessaysof2024

THE RED GOD strings together footage of foxes recorded by a wildlife camera. Christine Rogers connects her videographic research to her Māori ancestry and her personal history, to decolonisation and the camera as imperial tool, to speciesism and the human/nonhuman divide. #favoritevideoessaysof2024

DE SONT OF MJOEZIK is a live performance by Maria Zandvliet that translates videographic strategies to the stage. It turns the video essay into a fully embodied form of research. The result is an exhilarating study of fandom. #favoritevideoessaysof2024 More here: www.filmscalpel.com/de-sont-of-m...

Here's a great way to start 2025. The Museum of the Moving Image in New York is devoting a screening series to the video essay. From January 3 to 5, they will present four different programs. My video essay THE APARTMENT is part of the second program (scheduled for Jan 4), called REMIXING NEW YORK.

On this day in 1986, Andrei Tarkovsky left us. He had spent only 54 years with us, but he sculpted that time into seven immortal feature films. Celebrate his legacy with this selection of ten video essays: filmscalpel.com/andrei-tarko...

Sight and Sound has published its annual poll of the year's most notable video essays. @queline.bsky.social , @willwebbful.bsky.social, and @cydniiwilde.bsky.social tallied a total of 183 videos. Better start now if you plan to watch them all before the year ends. Or skip Christmas dinner.

On this day in 1930, Jean-Luc Godard was born. He was both film icon and iconoclast, movie rebel and royalty. Defining this chameleonic French provocateur is hard, but these ten video essays give it a go, focusing on different aspects of his output: www.filmscalpel.com/godard

On November 29, 1954, Joel Coen was born. His brother Ethan would join him three years later. Celebrate their combined creative output with this selection of video essays. 🧵 (Big fan? There are even more on www.filmscalpel.com/coen-brothers/)

On November 28, 1961, Alfonso Cuarón was born. He has directed just eight feature films but often does double duty on his movies. He's won Academy awards as director, producer, editor and cinematographer. Here's a selection of half o dozen video essays to celebrate his birthday. 🧵📽️ #filmsky

If you want to contribute to the newest volume of the Screen Stars Dictionary, then here's your chance. Previous entries in this series of video essays can be found on the website of the Journal of Audiovisual Essays TECMERIN (see tinyurl.com/2f74a8ej).

On November 23, 1887, William Henry Pratt was born in London. He emigrated to Canada, then the US, where he pursued acting. In 1931 he rose to fame under his stage name Boris Karloff when he played Frankenstein's Creature. Celebrate his birthday with these Frankenstein-themed video essays. 🧵

Researcher and visual artist Roc Albalat traces the genealogy of modern AI visuals back to two 19th-century photography pioneers, Marey and Galton. His excellent video essay LATENCIES OF THE STATISTICAL IMAGE invites viewers to reflect on the ambitions and aspirations that underpin AI developments.

Dust and lint, scratches and splice marks: what if you started focusing on those imperfections of celluloid film instead of the actual image? Such UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS fascinate @sennahojottonib.bsky.social, and his hypnotic video essay does an excellent job conveying that fascination.

If you ever need to explain the concept of the uncanny, then this elegant video essay by @filmstudiesff.bsky.social and Lynda Nead is all you need. THE HAUNTED MIRROR illustrates Freud's definition of "Das Unheimliche" with shots from the 1945 anthology horror film Dead of Night.

The angry cadence of THE RHYTHMS OF RAGE is both catchy and cathartic. @barbarazecchi.bsky.social mixes dozens of film and tv clips of enraged women into a video essay that pulses powerfully.

The video essay isn't that young anymore... DUST is a Western supercut created in 2008 by Patrick Elliott. Patiently piecing together shots sourced from VHS tapes, he made a montage of Native Americans gathering for a "last ride." The cowboys and settlers are conspicuously and deliberately absent.

Filmmaking is as pragmatic as it is creative. The song that plays over the closing credits of The Cry of the Owl is a case in point. CHOOSING DEATH ROW SONGS, a video essay by John Gibbs, explains how rights issues complicated the audio post-production of the film, but enriched the end result.

TWISTIES! is a wondrous and inspirational example of embodied research. Using chroma keying and overlay effects, Alice Lenay inserts herself into footage of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games to explore how athletes' bodies are televised and how viewers develop empathy for this mediated image.

Since the 1950s, film and tv have presented a variety of quixotic computer interfaces. @sfanders.bsky.social's abundantly illustrated video essay ENVISIONING THE INTERFACE connects these portrayals to shifts in the relationship between humans and computers, and to real-world digital advancements.

There are a couple of powerful side-by-side compositions in this video essay, pitting Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket against films by Santiago Alvarez (79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh) and Hai Ninh (The Little Girl of Hanoi). Construing them as examples of the Kuleshov effect is a bit of a reach though.

SCREEN JOURNEYS THROUGH BIRMINGHAM: THE CITY, THE CAR AND THE CANAL is a great video essay on "carchitecture" and automobility. @jemsaunders1.bsky.social amassed an impressive array of examples that show how media representations chronicled, championed and critiqued the city's love affair with cars.

Indian cinema’s rising popularity around the globe is chronicled with clarity and in great detail in this video essay by Suryansu Guha. The unsung heroes of that global expansion? The humble subtitle writers. Their specialized work is the focal point of this study of Indian media industries.

After cancer surgery, film critic @adrianpmartin.bsky.social discovers an unexpected kinship with Cary Grant. In this video essay, made with the help of Cristina Álvarez López, he discusses Howard Hawks’ I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE... and his own nether regions.

Happy 82nd birthday to Martin Scorsese. What better way to celebrate a career of well over half a century than with some video essays? Here's over a dozen of them, analyzing his favorite themes and stylistic traits: filmscalpel.com/martin-scors...

Frankenstein pops up in all corners of popular culture, not just in the many film adaptations of Mary Shelley's novel. In FRANKENSTEIN (RE)MEMBERED, Chris Gerrard borrows the modus operandi of Bill Morrison's Spark of Being. He assembles his own version using dozens of references to the Creature.

In horror films, green is THE COLOR OF FEAR. The use of greenish night vision cinematography in modern found footage horror hearkens back to the tinting of the silent era. Then too, green was used to evoke dread. @dullboy237.bsky.social and Michael Ashman examine that connection in this video essay.

DRILL TEAM adapts observations by Danijela Kulezic-Wilson on the similar musicality of Beau Travail (Denis) and The Fits (Holmer) into a rhythmic video essay. @filmstudiesff.bsky.social crafts an audiovisual duet of dancing and exercising characters, illustrating how bodies can become a soundtrack.

Gus Van Sant used parts of a specific Hildegard Westerkamp soundscape composition in two of his films. The video essay COMPOSING PERCEPTION takes the complete musical piece and "visually scores" it with sequences from various Van Sant films. An interesting videographic experiment by Randolph Jordan.

THE MUSICALITY OF TRAUMATIC MEMORIES analyses the intricate sound design of "We Need to Talk About Kevin" (Ramsay, 2011). Using Danijela Kulezic-Wilson’s ideas as his starting point, Oswald Iten crafts another characteristically meticulous (and beautifully visualized) soundtrack breakdown.

In WATCHING THE REHEARSAL, @jmittell.bsky.social tries to mind-read his way into Nathan Fielder's byzantine and bizarre tv series. Instead of offering clarity, his imaginative and mischievous reenactments add new layers of discomfort and doubt. vimeo.com/916819502

The video essay ONE TO ANOTHER looks at the many instances of rack focus in the HBO series Deadwood. Sean O’Sullivan interprets this common (because time-saving) television technique as a visualization of the show’s themes. vimeo.com/916820959

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE DRESSING ROOM uses excerpts from over a dozen early films to take us behind the scenes. Desirée Garcia's video essay ponders the fascination of early cinema for spaces behind the stage, behind folding screens, behind the curtain. vimeo.com/917254433

MUSIC VIDEO SPACE compiles many, many great examples of the many, many ways in which music videos create and reshape spaces. Mathias Bonde Korsgaard continues his videographic research on music videos in this delirious panoply. vimeo.com/917140929

THERE IS A STORM COMING offers a thematic analysis of Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter by seeing it in the light of harmful extractivism, the housing and the climate crises. Julia Leyda and @kathleenloock.bsky.social offer a detailed case study within their research on climate fiction. vimeo.com/917149067

On this day in 1978, Céline Sciamma was born. Her films are tender yet intense, they are both cerebral and visceral. They're the work of a director with a clear aesthetic and keen intuition. Celebrate her birthday with this VIDEO ESSAY DOSSIER on her work: www.filmscalpel.com/celine-sciamma/

Friends and film lovers in Boston, MA: my new video essay / short film MALE GAZING was selected for the RPM24 Festival. On September 27th it will be part of Matter & Message, a program of shorts that screens at the Goethe-Institut. More info here: revolutionsperminutefest.org/24program02....

On this day in 1940, Brian De Palma was born. Celebrate his birthday with half a dozen of video essays on his work: www.filmscalpel.com/category/bri...