‘Playing’

It's a little known fact that Adrian Martin enjoys playing the keyboard and that, sometimes, I enjoy filming him. Normally, what I'll do is listen from another room because our house has great acoustics and, when he plays, the music spreads across the space beautifully. But, occasionally, I get inspired and flutter around with my phone—or, as some people like to say (especially of women): I dabble...

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...

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...

White of the Origins: ‘Liberté, la nuit’ (Philippe Garrel, 1984)

Blown by the wind, a white sheet enters the frame, like a candle swelling and shrinking. Its hypnotic and unpredictable movements obliterate (sometimes partially, other times entirely) the action in the background. It is a spectacle of heightened, Epsteinian poetry that demands to be read under the lens of Jacques Rancière's “thwarted fable”...