FILM Béla Tarr’s Turin Horse

 

Destructive Complacency and the Call to Action of ‘The Turin Horse’

A short intro to a 17 video essay, “explains, the father and daughter’s repetitive purgatory is not a punishment. It’s a state of mind: a destructive complacency, best described by who else but Nietzsche himself.”

With it a reference list to other Bela Tarr video essays:

• Here’s Slate on why Hollywood gets Nietzsche wrong (“Nietzsche is about as misunderstood as the teenage boys who like him”)
• Why Béla Tarr transcends the void
• Here’s the trailer for the making-of documentary about The Turin Horse, Tarr Bela, I Used to Be a Filmmaker. The documentary is an essential watch for anyone looking for a more personal perspective to Tarr’s filmography
• Here’s Thomas Elsaesser, an international film historian and professor at the University of Amsterdam, introducing The Turin Horse
• Béla Tarr brought his 1994 film Sátántango to the 2019 Berlinale, and it raised a lot of “confusing” emotions for the director (“I cannot say I am happy…I cannot say I am sad…I became 25 years older”). Also: if you want to hear Tarr absolutely obliterate over-edited Hollywood films, this is the clip for you.
• Here’s Béla Tarr and film critic Howard Feinstein discussing the filmmaker’s understated humor, the evolution of his style, and the history of black and white photography in Hungry

 

FILM VIDEO ESSAY How Alfred Hitchcock Blocks A Scene

How Alfred Hitchcock Blocks A Scene


Another one of Evan Puschak’s highly polished video essays.


Aisha Harris in Slate has it down as :


If You’re a Hitchcock Nerd, This Insanely Deep Dive Into a Pivotal Vertigo Scene Is For You


Check out his video on Ansel Adams photography.

FILM VIDEO ESSAY Kogonada ~ the exemplar

kogonada ~ The Image Master


Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene, 19 March 2015


Kogonanda


His work – all wonderful ~ My favourite The Hands of Bresson {A previous COTA post}


Video essay techniques are all so different. Commentary. Just visuals. A single aspects of a directors style. Plus thrown in for good measure watching some of them there’s that, Heck I’m not really much of a cinephile -need to get in some DVDs.


The thing that makes Koganada outstanding is his technical skill. Everything he does demonstrates his understanding of film: using the raw material of other film-makers to say something about these films, while at the same time creating something new.

I’ve said before many try the video essay [leave out the categories now well established..] in whatever form they chose, but few succeed. They’re often academics, cinephiles or film writers who know what they want and could say it perfectly well in a text, but rarely achieve what it is obvious they are trying to do in visual terms: in the terms of film itself; in the language of film. [though of course that is not obligatory for a video essay].

The slide-show is not what video essays are about in their highly evolved form. Though many that are just slide shows are excellent. The notion that Godard was really a writer who ended up making films always comes to mind at this point! How many video essays are layered in his way….

[See how easy it is to drop a Godard into every post – P.S New book out now on Histoire[s] Canadian lectures]

Some video essayists do learn to select and edit effectively. Others sling sequences together – often just too many of them – which do little to demonstrate the thesis. Some simply can’t make up their minds if text/ audio commentary has to form a part of the essay or if it can be done with visuals alone. Music & sound effects a given – soundtrack or video-maker’s supplements.

The video essay really has become a branch of film studies! As I’ve probably said before being a film student studying film by making video essays as well as doing all the course work must be a really exciting thing to be involved in.


Waddoiknow. Watch this. Kevin B. Lee explains:


What Makes a Video Essay Great?


The comments are quite useful too.


Other


Motion Studies: essential video essays

FILM VIDEO ESSAY Two Expositions and a Manifesto

How Long is A Piece of String?
–On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and Criticism


By Catherine Grant

[A Presentation Given at the Audiovisual Essay Conference, Frankfurt Filmmuseum/Goethe University, November 23-24, 2013.]


“Look. I Know You’re Not Following What I’m Saying Anyway.”: The Problem of the “Video Essay” and Scorsese as Cinematic Essayist.


Drew Morton, [in]Transition, 12 Dec 2014


A Manifesto for the Video Essay


Adam Batty, Hope Lies at 24 Frame per Second.

FILM VIDEO ESSAY Drew Morton’s Cross-Cut

Cross Cut


By


Drew Morton

Explore the narrative, stylistic, and thematic connections between Michelangelo
Antonioni’s BLOW-UP, Francis Ford Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION, and Brian DePalma’s BLOW OUT with this video essay entitled “Cross-Cut.” Note: This video essay originally began as a more theoretical project. The other drafts have been posted to Vimeo for the sake of pedagogy.

CROSS-CUT (AKA Cinefilea, Version .5)


CROSS-CUT (AKA Cinefilea, Version .75)


CROSS-CUT (AKA Cinefilea, Version 1.0)

What began as “A poetic introduction to the fiction film as videographic criticism that seeks to illustrate the works of Raymond Bellour and Laura Mulvey through BLOW OUT, BLOW UP, and THE CONVERSATION” eventually became a more modest experiment in exploring the narrative, stylistic, and thematic connections between Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOW-UP, Francis Ford Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION, and Brian De Palma’s BLOW OUT. This is the final version of the theoretically framed “Cinefilea” version.

Differences from Version .75: Thanks to notes from Benjamin Sampson and Adrian Martin, I’ve tried to be more evocative in the opening (hence the use of the photographs from BLOW OUT and BLOW UP). I’ve also broken up the text quotations to assist in this and the reader.

Rationale for Why This Version Was Ultimately Abandoned:

My objective was to make a video essay about video essays through these three films with three theoretical texts without resorting to voice-over. After asking a range of colleagues for notes (including Corey Creekmur, Chiara Grizzaffi, Adrian Martin, and Benjamin Sampson), it became quickly apparent that clearly did not work. I typically make video essays that are either argumentative and theoretical (and thus voice-over driven and incredibly structured according to a progression of evidence) or largely evocative and poetic pieces. I had never really tried to cross the streams before and this piece functions as an artifact of that rather contradictory impulse and the dialogue that ensued between us afterwards. To boil it down, it isn’t easy to fuse scholarship and poetry when you’re making a found footage film. When I tried to superimpose cinephilia onto these three films, their original meanings and contexts exerted too much of a hold.

Drew’s comments associated with the videos have been included in full.

FILM VIDEO ESSAY Layers of Paradox in F for Fake

Catherine Grant highlighted [in]Transition in one her posts a few weeks back. Looks like a jolly good thing, as we say in Blighty, rather than arsum as you good ‘ol boys say in the US of A. If you use the ars**[**] word and you are from Blighty, stop it immediately. Things, as we know in the old country, are usually not quite as aw…shucks I nearly said it…as they appear to be.

I’ve side-linked [in]Transition under film blogs/mags/jounos.

As an example, Benjamin Sampson’s Layers of Paradox in F for Fake.

This is a thought-provoking, well-produced, good-looking video essay (often the delivery of the commentary lets a video essay down..) – an example of what [in]T has to offer.

NB: curators notes [i.e. from Drew Morton, the poster] accompanying the video, which lasts 17 mins., and a single comment by Chiara Grizzaffi, a film PhD student, writing about the oft-on-the-lips-question about the video essay – What is it? [etc.] – and then a reply by Drew Morton. Both of these are well worth reading, providing a lot of info, ideas and questions.

In the editor’s introduction to [in]Transition, by Catherine Grant, Christian Keathley and Drew Morton, the point is made that there are video essays, audio-visual essays and visual essays.


Benjamin Sampson is a second year MA student in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. He worked for four years as a freelance videographer and video editor. His current research focuses on the later films of Orson Welles, audience segmentation in the 1950s, and essay films.


F for fake was on British tv many decades ago, but I can’t remember them putting it back on in the intervening years. Pity.


And I can’t remember if I have posted on the video essay, but certainly it’s a thing that all film enthusiasts have thought about. I’ve seen a lot which strike me as being pointless [= failing in intended object] except in that they do use the visual (excerpts from films/stills) – and diegetic and extra-diegetic audio in some cases – to deal with the visual, while failing in the overall premise by relying on the commentary to be the essay. Just a slide show by another name. It’s good to have film clips or stills examples to go with a text but to me it’s not a video essay until the visuals themselves are a significant part of the explanation/interpretation/analysis. In other words: many audio-visual presentations are put out as being video essays. Benjamin’s Orson Welles video essay is most certainly a video essay and not a text tagged onto film clips. But the whole issue must include whether a video essay is any different from a made for t.v. film documentary, that is apart from it’s webby DIYness. And of course it’s shortness.

(side-thought : think how poor the stills are in most film books…I’m reading Valerie Orpen’s Film Editing. Even this good book on a subject which is marginalised in film writing, has too-small stills looking like poor photocopies…o.k. it’s the editor’s fault not hers, but it’s her text and those still are meant to represent some aspect of editing she’s going into in great detail)

In many cases the video essayists are not themselves experienced video/film-makers so falling for the Godard-ism* of not grasping you can’t rub your head and pat your tummy. (And should we say in Godard’s* case expect more than his 1000 to watch ans appreciate his films if he makes them in French in away that is impossible to unscramble as a film experience in another language) There are endless papers, not about film per se, explaining how you can’t talk and attend properly to what the eyes are looking at (e.g. on a mobile phone while driving). It should be obvious you can’t look with a critical eye at a series of film clips if the video essay is one long talk. The trick as demonstrated in Layers of Paradox in F for Fake is to make the clips really short and tailor the delivery to avoid too much overlap. Mind you in this case it’s not a film but a documentary about a film being video essayed, where Welles can be allowed to speak for himself in a way that a character in a film can’t. Film clips of a fiction film can stand for themselves in terms of mise en scene, editing and so on, but they tend to have to be laboriously explained in words, because the moving images themselves are no trusted to do the job. (I’ve been reading the final chapter of Orpen which deals with the way the film’s mise en scene/ decoupage/editing is used to highlight the star. So thinking about how that could be done in a video essay.)

As is made clear in editor’s introduction to [in]Transition and the comments accompanying the video essay, the video essay is evolving, and it’s evolution alone, by the look of it, is providing fodder for a few score research papers and PhDs.

* Jamais deux sans trois? if you can always try to get the word Godard in a post three times at a minimum.

There is that thing about 6 degrees of separation on any subject till the conversation gets round to Hitler and the Nazis. I like to think this is true of Godard. Just like the Actress and the Bishop Joke [in it’s endless forms], which can be fitted around any conceivable topic and situation, it should be possible to write a post on film and always manage to say the G.-word at least once.

NNB. A few post back I introduced the God./ God distinction. God. [full-stop > ‘God-point’ is a lot easier to mouth, though strictly it might sound suspiciously like something meteorological]. So from now on, ‘God. thinks he’s God’ [or someone else says he thinks he is or say they think he is..] is now quite clear and not mistaken for some sort of theological atheist argument. Though I’m sure someone could write 3 A4s on God. and G** with no trouble at all.

FILM VIDEO ESSAY Chinatown

Jim Emerson’s video essay on Polanski’s Chinatown:

Chinatown, My Chinatown: An Andalusian Dog love poem in images and music

“…..Eyes, frames, lenses, doorways, windows, photographs, mirrors, smoke, hands, flesh, water, power…”