KEYNOTE VIDEOESSAYISTS
Johannes Binotto, researcher and senior lecturer in cultural and media studies at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and at the English Department of the University of Zurich.
He is a regular contributor to the film magazine Filmbulletin, curator, experimental filmmaker and video essayist. Johannes Binotto obtained his PhD with a book on the Freudian uncanny and its spatial representation in art, literature and cinema which has been awarded 2011 with the annual prize of the University of Zurich and in 2018 he received the Karsten-Witte-Preis for best German film studies paper. He has published an edited volume on Film and Architecture in the legendary book series “Bauwelt Fundamente”. In the “Best Video Essays of 2021” poll, hosted by Sight and Sound Magazine and the British Film Institute his video essay series “Practices of Viewing” received the most nominations. He is currently working on a large study on Classical Hollywood film technology and its relations to the psychoanalytical unconscious. And since 2021 he is leading the research project “VideoEssay. Futures of Audiovisual Research and Teaching” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) with Dr. Chloé Galibert-Laîné, M.A. Jialu Zhu and M.A. Oswald Iten as research team: videoessayresearch.org
Johannes Binotto‘s keynote: «Accenting the Accidental. Video Essay Research as Experimental Practice»
In contrast to understand video essays as an explanatory representational format with which to argue an authorised knowledge about film objects in a more fitting audiovisual form this presentation wants to plea for something more radical: Videgraphic practice taken seriously as experimental research puts traditional understandings of expertise into question with severe ramification also for the system of academia as a whole, putting video essay researchers instead into the position of what Jacques Rancière called the “ignorant schoolmaster”.
Rather than mastering the audiovisual material this presentation wants to put to the test a videographic practice that is accentuating the accidental not only within the material to be analysed but also in our own analytical practice. We will do so by turning this presentation itself into a an experimental laboratory in which everybody present can take part in – doing research as communal live performance.
Chloé Galibert-Laîné, French researcher and filmmaker, currently working as a post-doctoral researcher at the Lucerne School of Art and Design – HSLU in Switzerland. She regularly teaches theory classes and artistic workshops about film and media, such as CalArts (US), Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Marseille (FR), Université Paris 8 (FR), Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (NL), Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (DE) and Merz Akademie in Stuttgart (DE). Galibert-Laîné’s work takes different forms (texts, films, video installations and live performances) and explores the intersections between cinema and online media, and addresses questions related to modes of spectatorship, gestures of appropriation, processes of knowledge production and mediated memory. Her films have shown at festivals such as the IFFRotterdam (NL), FIDMarseille (FR), Ji.hlava DFF (CZ), True/False Festival (US), EMAF (DE), transmediale (DE), Images Festival (CA), Kasseler Dokfest (DE), Ars Electronica Festival (AT), WRO Media Art Biennale (PL) and FIPADOC (FR).
Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s keynote: «GeoMarkr, Critical Variations»
This presentation will focus on the making of my latest video essay, GeoMarkr (co-authored with video game scholar Guillaume Grandjean, 2022). Bringing together the online video game GeoGuessr and the filmography of Chris Marker, the video explores past and present mediated world exploration practices.
Developed in conversation with Catherine Grant’s notion of «material thinking», this presentation will reflect on the two-fold methodology I designed for the production of this video. First, the exploration of GeoGuessr‘s visual language through the recreation of some of its most identifiable elements, via an editing software, using Marker travel footage as a substitute for ingame images; and conversely, the application of «Markerian operations» to GeoGuessr screen recordings. I will contextualize these two reverse gestures as «variations» – a term of musical origin that I suggest can denote critical and creative re-interpretations of existing audiovisual forms.
Catherine Grant, British film scholar and prolific video maker, former Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Reading, UK. She runs the Open Access scholarly website and social media accounts for Film Studies For Free, founded in 2008/9, Audiovisualcy, founded in 2011, the Audiovisual Essay website, founded in 2014, and is co-author and editor (with Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell) of the website The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy (2019). Since 2009, Grant has also focused on making and reflecting upon audiovisual works on film and television studies for numerous journals and platforms. In 2014 Grant became founding co-editor (with Keathley and Drew Morton) of [in]Transition, the first ever peer-reviewed journal of videographic film and moving image studies and a collaboration between MediaCommons and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ official publication Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. This groundbreaking publication was awarded the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award of Distinction for 2015. The SCMS award selection committee wrote, in its recommendation for the Award, that [in]Transition had “the potential to reshape the field.” In 2020, she was elected member of Academia Europaea’s Film, Media and Visual Studies section in recognition of this research, and she also holds a number of other international fellowships and artistic residencies in this field.
Catherine Grant‘s keynote «The Musicality of Videographic Criticism»
Looking back at my film scholarly work in videographic form, from its beginnings in 2009 onwards, I have been struck not only by how much of it focuses – at both macro and micro levels – on musical subjects, but also by how its processes of making often turn on what might be best regarded as specifically musical practices. The same would be true, I think, of the work of a number of other essayists whose videos often centre on film sound and music, including Ian Garwood, Liz Greene, and Evelyn Kreutzer, to name but three. For me, in particular, I’m aware that this area of my production has led me into explorations not just of research questions pertaining to film music and sound in particular media objects, but also into performative procedures involving music selection and editing in my videos that – quite often unexpectedly – enable acts of material thinking about the musicality of audiovisual practices more generally, including of videographic criticism itself. To reflect on this, I will show and discuss a small sample of my work – from experimental pieces to more elaborated scholarly videos – including a current commissioned work in progress, which explores and pays tribute to the writing and research of the late film music scholar Danijela Kulezi?-Wilson, who contributed so much to our understanding of the musicality of (especially, narrative) film form and of the potential benefits of a musical approach to film and to film soundtrack scholarship.
Jason Mittell, Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College. He is the author of Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture, (Routledge, 2004), Television and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2010), Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NYU Press, 2015), and Narrative Theory and ADAPTATION. (Bloomsbury, 2017), co-author with Christian Keathley and Catherine Grant of The Videographic Essay, and the co-editor of How to Watch Television (NYU Press, 2013; second edition, 2020). He maintains the blog Just TV. His research interests include television history and criticism, media and cultural history, narrative theory, genre theory, videographic criticism, animation and children’s media, videogames, digital humanities, and new media studies & technological convergence. He is Project Manager for [in]Transition, a journal of videographic criticism, and co-leader of the NEH-sponsored digital humanities workshop “Scholarship in Sound & Image” a two-week intensive workshop focused on producing video-based scholarly criticism since 2015.
In 2022, he received an NEH/Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication for his project, “The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad: An Audiovisual Book,” the first NEH fellowship awarded for videographic criticism.
Jason Mittell‘s keynote: “What Is A Videographic Book?”
Over the past decade, film and media studies has seen the exciting rise of videographic criticism as an important and legitimate form of scholarship, with numerous publication and presentation venues emerging for academic video essays. While the parallels between video essays and journal articles are inexact, a videographic essay typically functions at roughly the same scope of a written article—but what would the videographic parallel be to an academic book? In this presentation, Jason Mittell explores the possibilities of a longer-format mode of videographic criticism, focusing both on potentials of the newly launched book series Videographic Books that he is editing for Lever Press, and his videographic book-in-progress, “The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad“.