In this audiovisual essay, Anna Karina and Marianne Faithfull talk to themselves and to each other across six different films. Bitterly, blatantly, brutally: they muse—using words written by men and songs composed by men—on what it means (for all of us: there ain't escape from the culture) to perform, inside and outside the fiction, as women invented by men...
Category: Notes on Audiovisual Essays
This category comprises a series of texts that reflect or expand on this type of videographic criticism (sometimes I discuss pieces made by me, sometimes by others) or explore issues revolving around this practice.
‘Smile’: Jean Epstein & Stephen Dwoskin
Why Jean Epstein and Stephen Dwoskin? Because of their mutual obsession with the close-up; with the drama of proximity, intensity, hesitation, imbalance; because "even more beautiful than a laugh is the face preparing for it"… How to do justice to Epstein's incessant leaping back and forth, to his moves from the general to the particular, to his effects of anticipation, suspension, staccato, acceleration, contraction, release? That's what editing (both on the audio and image level) was made for...
Souvenir: ‘Proximidades y resonancias’
During the latest edition of SACO 2022, Adrian Martin and I had our first museum exhibition ever: from 10th to 20th of March, 'Proximidades y resonancias', a videoinstallation of eight of our audiovisual essays, was playing in loop at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Oviedo. We spent four days there and saw it all happening with our own eyes! Since this is something rare and worthy of celebration, I'll scatter here a bit of memorabilia for the grandchildren I won't have…
Launching our ‘Multimedia Lectures On Film’ series
What we do in these videos are in-depth analyses of major films in film history ('major' meaning, simply, that we love them: bear with us and you might be surprised by some of our future choices, since the only canon we'll follow is that of our own desire). There are no windy, textbook generalities about genre, auteur or historical context; we go straight to the material details that (in our view) illuminate the films, how they work and how they feel...
‘The Burning House’
Last summer—when I was at my most depressed and in the midst of a long relocation process—I painted, over black cardboard, a blue, female figure standing at the threshold of a house already in flames. In my mind, there's no doubt that the house is in flames because I am in flames, and that I stand at the threshold of a future already ravaged, already lost...
Playing with ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’
This January I taught – for the second year – a week of audiovisual criticism at EQZE. My program makes enormous sense to me (and hopefully to my students), but it does not follow pre-established paths – my group is studying curatorship, so I hope they'll appreciate the extravagant lines of my work of curation, here. We watch a number of audiovisual essays made by critics (me included), but also some fragments from film essays and found footage films, plus a couple of clips that are (plain and simple) amazing examples of montage...
The Video Essay Podcast + An Annotated List
The latest episode of "The Video Essay Podcast", hosted by Will DiGravio, features a great conversation between him and Adrian Martin. Topics discussed include: audiovisual essays, film criticism, multimedia criticism, writing, love, collaboration, creativity, Raymond Bellour, radio, dreams, Jerzy Skolimowski, François Truffaut, artistic gesture, montage, Robert Mitchum, electric condensation, arte povera, Serge Daney, Jean-Pierre Léaud, heterogeneity, voice, John Flaus, performance, teaching, Marco Bellocchio, academia, audiences...
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.
Henriette Thrice: ‘Partie de campagne’ (Jean Renoir, 1936)
In the process of composing an audiovisual essay, one normally works with several audio and video tracks simultaneously. Deactivating some of these tracks in order to concentrate on a single one of them is a routine operation. The tracks that have been muted or blanked are still in your editing timeline, only you can't hear or watch what they contain. By doing this – severing a fragment of audio from its image and listening to it repeatedly – I started becoming aware of the particular qualities of Anatole's scream...
Laugh Motel 