John Cassavetes: A Primer

In a Cassavetes film, everything is an event. The way someone enters a room, a scene, or a shot. The way that the drama rises or subsides. The framing of an image, the way it moves. The play of light and darkness, colour and hue, the grain of the film stock. The interplay of views from multiple, simultaneous cameras (one of them frequently worked by Cassavetes himself). The violence of the soundtrack, open to waves and intensities of every kind of voice, noise or musical note. And the amazing work on editing, to which Cassavetes and his collaborators could literally devote years...

A Response to Jessica McGoff’s “Text vs. Context: Understanding the Video Essay Landscape”

This text was written in March 2017 as a response to Jessica McGoff's "Text vs. Context: Understanding the Video Essay Landscape". It was offered to 4:3 magazine, which replied that it was not keen to “play host to a back and forth on video essays”. In the interests of open debate, we published it ourselves and now we host it here.