A video essay is an

essay An essay ( ) is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a Letter (message), letter, a term paper, paper, an article (publishing), article, a pamphlet, and a s ...

presented in the format of a

video Video is an Electronics, electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving picture, moving image, visual Media (communication), media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, whi ...

recording or

short film A short film is a film with a low running time. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of not more than 40 minutes including all credits". Other film o ...

rather than a conventional piece of

writing Writing is the act of creating a persistent representation of language. A writing system includes a particular set of symbols called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which they encode a particular spoken language. Every written language ...

; the form often overlaps with other forms of video entertainment on online platforms such as

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

. A video essay allows an author to directly quote from film, video games, music, or other digital media, which is impossible with traditional writing. While many video essays are intended for entertainment, they can also have an academic or political purpose. This type of content is often described as

educational entertainment Educational entertainment, also referred to by the portmanteau edutainment, is media designed to educate through entertainment. The term has been used as early as 1933. Most often it includes content intended to teach but has incidental entert ...

Predecessors

A film essay (also essay film or cinematic essay) consists of the evolution of a theme or an idea rather than a plot per se, or the film literally being a cinematic accompaniment to a narrator reading an essay. From another perspective, an essay film could be defined as a

documentary film A documentary film (often described simply as a documentary) is a nonfiction Film, motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". The American author and ...

visual basis combined with a form of commentary that contains elements of self-portrait (rather than autobiography), where the signature (rather than the life story) of the filmmaker is apparent. The cinematic essay often blends

documentary A documentary film (often described simply as a documentary) is a nonfiction Film, motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". The American author and ...

fiction Fiction is any creative work, chiefly any narrative work, portraying character (arts), individuals, events, or setting (narrative), places that are imagination, imaginary or in ways that are imaginary. Fictional portrayals are thus inconsistent ...

, and experimental film making using tones and editing styles.Cinematic Essay Film Genre
. chicagomediaworks.com. Retrieved March 22, 2011. The genre is not well-defined but might include propaganda works of early

Soviet The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

filmmakers like

Dziga Vertov Dziga Vertov (born David Abelevich Kaufman; – 12 February 1954) was a Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary ...

, documentary filmmakers including

Chris Marker Chris Marker (; 29 July 1921 – 29 July 2012) (born ''Christian-François Bouche-Villeneuve'') was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and Essay#Film, film essayist. His best known films are ''La Jetée' ...

Michael Moore Michael Francis Moore is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and author. Moore's work frequently addresses various Social issue, social, political, and economic topics. He first became publicly known for his award-winning debut ...

(''

Roger & Me ''Roger & Me'' is a 1989 American documentary film written, produced, directed by, and starring Michael Moore, in his directorial debut. Moore portrays the regional economic impact of General Motors CEO Roger Smith's action of closing several ...

'', ''

Bowling for Columbine ''Bowling for Columbine'' is a 2002 documentary film written, produced, directed, and narrated by Michael Moore. The documentary film explores what Moore suggests are the primary causes for the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 and other a ...

'' and ''

Fahrenheit 9/11 ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' is a 2004 American documentary film directed, written by, and starring Michael Moore. The subjects of the film are the presidency of George W. Bush, the Iraq War, and the media's coverage of the war. In the film, Moore state ...

''),

Errol Morris Errol Mark Morris (born February 5, 1948) is an American film director known for documentaries that interrogate the epistemology of their subjects, and the invention of the Interrotron. In 2003, his '' The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Li ...

('' The Thin Blue Line''),

Morgan Spurlock Morgan Valentine Spurlock (November 7, 1970 – May 23, 2024) was an American documentary filmmaker, writer, and television producer. He directed 23 films and was the producer of nearly 70 films throughout his career. Spurlock received acclaim f ...

(''

Super Size Me ''Super Size Me'' is a 2004 American documentary film directed by and starring Morgan Spurlock, an American independent filmmaker. Spurlock's film follows a 30-day period from February 1 to March 2, 2003, during which he claimed to consume o ...

'') and

Agnès Varda Agnès Varda (; born Arlette Varda; 30 May 1928 – 29 March 2019) was a Belgian-born French film director, screenwriter and photographer. Varda's work employed location shooting in an era when the limitations of sound technology made it easier ...

Jean-Luc Godard Jean-Luc Godard ( , ; ; 3 December 193013 September 2022) was a French and Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as ...

describes his later works as "film-essays". Two filmmakers whose work was the antecedent to the cinematic essay include

Georges Méliès Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès ( , ; 8 December 1861 – 21 January 1938) was a French magic (illusion), magician, toymaker, actor, and filmmaker. He led many technical and narrative developments in the early days of film, cinema, primarily in th ...

and

Bertolt Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known as Bertolt Brecht and Bert Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a p ...

. Méliès made a short film about the 1902 coronation of King

Edward VII Edward VII (Albert Edward; 9 November 1841 – 6 May 1910) was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 22 January 1901 until Death and state funeral of Edward VII, his death in 1910. The second child ...

, which mixes actual footage with shots of a recreation of the event. Brecht was a playwright who experimented with film and incorporated film projections into some of his plays.

Orson Welles George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American director, actor, writer, producer, and magician who is remembered for his innovative work in film, radio, and theatre. He is among the greatest and most influential film ...

made an essay film in his own pioneering style, released in 1974, called ''

F for Fake ''F for Fake'' (, "Truths and lies"; , "Fraud") is a 1973 docudrama film co-written, directed by, and starring Orson Welles who worked on the film alongside François Reichenbach, Oja Kodar, and Gary Graver. Initially released in 1973, it focu ...

'', which dealt specifically with art forger

Elmyr de Hory Elmyr de Hory (born Elemér Albert Hoffmann; April 14, 1906 – December 11, 1976) was a Hungarian-born painter and art forger. It is claimed he was responsible for producing over a thousand forgeries that were sold to reputable art galleries a ...

and with the themes of deception, "fakery", and authenticity in general. David Winks Gray's article "The essay film in action" states that the "essay film became an identifiable form of filmmaking in the 1950s and '60s". He states that since that time, essay films have tended to be "on the margins" of the filmmaking the world. Essay films have a "peculiar searching, questioning tone ... between documentary and fiction" but without "fitting comfortably" into either genre. Gray notes that just like written essays, essay films "tend to marry the personal voice of a guiding narrator (often the director) with a wide swath of other voices". The

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Uni ...

Cinematheque website echoes some of Gray's comments; it calls a film essay an "intimate and allusive" genre that "catches filmmakers in a pensive mood, ruminating on the margins between fiction and documentary" in a manner that is "refreshingly inventive, playful, and idiosyncratic".

Popularity

While the medium (or as film scholar Eric Faden called it "media stylos") has its roots in

academia An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of tertiary education. The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 386 BC at Akademia, a sanctuary of Athena, the go ...

,Is the Video Essay a New Avant-Garde? - The EDGE
/ref> it has grown dramatically in popularity with the advent of online video-sharing platforms like

and

Vimeo Vimeo ( ) is an American Online video platform, video hosting, sharing, and services provider founded in 2004 and headquartered in New York City. Vimeo focuses on the delivery of high-definition video across a range of devices and operates on a ...

. In 2021, the

Netflix Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple lang ...

series ''

Voir ''Voir'' was a francophone alternative weekly newspaper in Montreal, Quebec, published by Communications Voir. ''Voir'' was founded by Pierre Paquet in November 1986. The first issue of the newspaper was published on 27 November 1986. Later o ...

'' premiered featuring video essays focusing on films like ''

48 Hrs ''48 Hrs.'' (pronounced 'forty-eight hours') is a 1982 American buddy cop action comedy film directed by Walter Hill, from a screenplay co-written with Larry Gross, Steven E. de Souza and Roger Spottiswoode. It stars Nick Nolte and Eddie Murp ...

'' and ''

Lady Vengeance ''Lady Vengeance'' (; titled ''Sympathy for Lady Vengeance'' in Australia and Russia) is a 2005 South Korean neo-noir psychological thriller film directed by Park Chan-wook. The film is the third and final installment in Park's '' Vengeance Tril ...

''. Fellow video essayist Thomas Flight observes videos about popular media receiving more clicks as part of the video essay economy.18 Great Essays from 2018 - Thomas Flight
/ref> In 2017, ''

Sight & Sound ''Sight and Sound'' (formerly written ''Sight & Sound'') is a monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI). Since 1952, it has conducted the well-known decennial ''Sight and Sound'' Poll of the Greatest Films of All Time. ...

'', the magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI), started an annual polls of the best video essays of the year. The 2021 poll reported that 38% of the essayists whose work received a nomination are female (which implies an increase of the 5% from the previous year), and that predominantly the video essays are in English (95%).

Academic application

Academics, especially in regard to film, find video essays great for critique and analysis. Academics also believe that video essays are an excellent way for students to explore creativity whilst being scholarly. Professors have found that students benefit and become better writers after learning how to make video essays. In 2014, a new

peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

academic journal, '' n/nowiki>Transition'', was created to have a platform for scholarly videographic work and video essays. '' n/nowiki>Transition'' is a collaborative project between ''MediaCommons'' and the official publication of the

Society for Cinema and Media Studies The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (formerly the Society for Cinema Studies) is an organization of professors and scholars. Its home office is at the University of Oklahoma, but it has members throughout the world. SCMS holds an annual confer ...

, ''Journal'' ''of Cinema & Media Studies''''.'' The goal of '' n/nowiki>Transition'' is to bolster videographic work as a legitimate and valid medium for scholarship. Since 2015 under a grant from the

National Endowment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...

, and under the auspices of Middlebury’s Digital Liberal Arts Summer Institute, Professors

Jason Mittell Jason Mittell (born 1970) is a professor of American studies and film and media culture at Middlebury College whose research interests include the history of television, media, pop culture, culture, new media, and digital humanities. He is author ...

, Christian Keathley and Catherine Grant have organized a two-week workshop with the aim to explore a range of approaches by using moving images as a critical language and to expand the expressive possibilities available to innovative humanist scholars. Every year the workshop is attended by 15 scholars working in film and media studies or a related field, whose objects of study involve audio-visual media, especially film, television, and other new digital media forms. In 2018, ''Tecmerin: Revista de Ensayos Audiovisuales'' began as another peer-reviewed academic publication exclusively dedicated to videographic criticism. The same year Will DiGravio launched the Video Essay Podcast, featuring interviews with prominent video essayists.

References

External links

Peer Reviewed Journal In-TransitionScholarship in Sound and ImageThe Video Essay Research ProjectHow-To Video EssaysVideo essay collection on MUBI
{{film genres Essays

Media studies Visual arts Film theory 1980s in film 1990s in film 2000s in film 2010s in film 2020s in film 2000s in Internet culture 2010s in Internet culture 2020s in Internet culture Collage film Collage television Film fandom

Documentary film styles

Predecessors

Popularity

Academic application

See also

References

External links