{"id":23,"date":"2014-08-11T08:10:37","date_gmt":"2014-08-11T08:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/?page_id=23"},"modified":"2021-10-18T10:06:01","modified_gmt":"2021-10-18T10:06:01","slug":"catherine-grant","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/audiovisualessay\/frankfurt-papers\/catherine-grant\/","title":{"rendered":"CATHERINE GRANT"},"content":{"rendered":"

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HOW LONG IS A PIECE OF STRING?\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n

On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and Criticism<\/strong><\/p>\n

[toc]<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

A Presentation Given at the Audiovisual Essay Conference, Frankfurt Filmmuseum\/Goethe University, November 23-24, 2013.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

By Catherine Grant<\/strong><\/p>\n

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TRANSCRIPT, SLIDES & VIDEOS<\/h2>\n
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The essay freely associates what can be found associated in the freely chosen object. It doesn’t insist stubbornly on a realm transcending all mediations.<\/p>\n

T.W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form<\/a>“,\u00a01959 [1. Theodor W.\u00a0Adorno, \u2018The Essay as Form\u2019,\u00a0The Adorno Reader<\/em>. Trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor & Frederic Will (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 92\u2013111).]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(Thanks to Lara Perski for expertly and patiently unravelling the below, very, very long piece of string)<\/em><\/p>\n

Thank you so much for inviting me here. [Frankfurt]\u00a0is a really special place to come to in regard to the essay as form [ – Adorno, author of my epigraph, wrote his famous work on the essay form here]. I am sure various speakers will refer to that genealogy. But I\u2019m just delighted to be speaking in a conference on the audiovisual essay. It is, I think, the first time that form has been singled out for discussion in a conference anywhere in the world, to my knowledge, so it\u2019s wonderful to be here.<\/p>\n

In terms of practice and theory [the conference subtitle] I am definitely going to be speaking about practice, and about the theory that comes out of practice. And that is a real shift around for me because I was, I think, for many years, a theorist. Solely a theorist, working alongside filmmakers, who were practitioners, but always looking on at them and seeing what they did as somehow different from what I do. But in the last, I guess, six years now that\u2019s not been true and I, in lots of different ways, have been involved in what I would call practice around film studies.<\/p>\n

But I am involved in film studies practice<\/em>, which is\u00a0[…]\u00a0the focus of my talk. I am going to use the term videographic film studies (and film and moving image studies). I will refer to the essay as a specific category within that, but I am talking about a slightly broader field. And I think I am really speaking about online work — work that has circulated publicly online — and I [hope]\u00a0the reasons for those choices will become clear.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>When Adrian [Martin] and Cristina [\u00c1lvarez L\u00f3pez, the conference organisers] invited us, I think all of the speakers got the same email, possibly in a different language, but one of the [sentences]\u00a0in it\u00a0was this one: \u201cFor we have noticed an intriguing resistance to this work, [this was the reason why this conference needed to happen now<\/em>]: within various pockets of the academic world either the shrug off \u2018It\u2019s nothing new\u2019 or the more aggressive \u2018these are just tools for analysis, not analysis itself\u2019.\u201d And I think this is the thing that really struck me as really interesting to look at right now. It\u2019s going to come up in a number of ways in the presentation, but it\u2019s certainly the case that in the world at the moment there are probably only, I\u2019d say, fewer than thirty people [publicly] making videos in a [film studies] academic context. Even though it\u2019s easy to do so now. So I am interested in [this resistance]\u00a0as a phenomenon: […] why are people still preferring to publish and carry out their research in pretty conventional and traditional written formats? Even though, of course, we are here to discuss why this is changing and how it might change more.<\/p>\n

For me, videographic film studies, including audiovisual essays, is\u00a0creative; I\u2019d say primarily these are creative [forms]. But they are creative critical <\/em>(sometimes I don\u2019t even use a comma to separate those two terms!). Creative, critical, and performative<\/em> film studies practices. Performative because they use the object themselves. They use reframing techniques, remixing techniques, applied to film and moving image excerpts. And in the particular forms I am interested in \u2013 the online videographic forms \u2013 we\u2019ve got a spectrum emerging [in relation to these practices], as Christian Keathley [has written] in his work on this,[2. Christian Keathley, ‘La cam\u00e9ra-stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia.’ In\u00a0The Language and Style of Film Criticism<\/em>, ed. Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan (London: Routledge, 2011).] between, at one end purely explanatory essays – in a way one might even see some sorts of film scientific methods emerging are beginning to use this end of the spectrum: like Tim Smith\u2019s work on eye tracking in cinema.[3. See David Bordwell’s blog entry on Tim Smith’s work here: http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2011\/02\/14\/watching-you-watch-there-will-be-blood<\/a>] Smith\u00a0is partly exploring that ideographically, or at least presenting it videographically. And then at the other end (I won\u2019t say who\u2019s at the other end!)… There is […]\u00a0you might say a purely poetic end of the spectrum, about which\u00a0people might maybe question more “why is this film studies?” “What is film studies<\/em> about this?”<\/p>\n

Where all of our work is situated is, I think, an interesting question. I am trying to explore different parts of the spectrum myself, not in a particularly systematic way. But it just occurs to me, for different projects, that different places on that spectrum are important.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But one of the questions that really strikes me at the moment, working as an academic who is having to justify what I do all the time (this is the context of contemporary humanities academia), is this one: should we be aiming to translate written film studies into audiovisual ones? What is the relationship between this body of work of written film studies and this emerging body of work of audiovisual film studies? Or […], should we embrace from the onset that we are creating new scholarly forms that may or may not have particular reference to earlier forms? Should we be less anxious about this process? And I am very clearly arguing that yes<\/em>, we should be less anxious about it. Partly because these new forms are not replacing the old forms. I don\u2019t think they will ever replace the old forms, they are not really about<\/em> replacing the old forms. They are living alongside the old forms and some of us are doing both, and I have to do both in my job, although as Adrian [Martin said in his introduction to my presentation, it seems] I certainly find it easier to [work with]\u00a0the new forms.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>[The] essential question I am posing in my talk, though, is the one in my title, how long is a piece of string? – which Wiktionary very usefully defines<\/a> as \u201c(often humorous) used as a response to a question such as \u2018How long will it take?\u2019 or \u2018How big is it?\u2019 when the length or size is unknown, infinite, or variable.\u201d And that is the position I feel we are in, in this field: unknown, infinite and variable in different ways. We are clearly at a stage of primary exploration of potential formats, [in terms of] the scope of these studies, these essays, and also – it is not a word we often use in discussing academic work, since it has got such nasty economic associations – but what is<\/em> the value of this work? And lots of writers have already been writing about that, I think Christian Keathley, Adrian and Cristina have [all]\u00a0contributed essays to\u00a0a collection I [commissioned and guest-edited]\u00a0of around forty pieces of work on digital film studies,[4. Frames Cinema Journal<\/em>, Issue 1.1, July 2012: Special Issue on Film and Moving Image Studies Reborn Digital. Online at:\u00a0http:\/\/framescinemajournal.com\/?issue=issue1<\/a>.]\u00a0on digital forms of film studies; but around twenty of them dealt specifically with the video essay. So lots of people are weighing up the value of this work at the moment, […]\u00a0 the value as alternatives but also as additions to hegemonic and conventional text-based academic research and publication processes and forms.<\/p>\n

Now in my [university] context, working in the UK where we are, you know, subject to [audits on on our published work], humanities research [often] still simply means weighty monographs and journal articles. And, in a way, I am “getting away with” my work because I am putting my videos into the [academic] context of written articles [published in online journals]. [Then]\u00a0my colleagues – wonderful as they are\u00a0–\u00a0can, if they like, ignore the videos, and look at the written work which is about the videos, and in a way that [might make] more sense to them. So there is a real problem [about]\u00a0how academics spend their time. Can we justify making these things? Are they just seen as playful extras to our serious academic work? And although this isn\u2019t stopping me, it is a serious concern about being able to do this as a paid academic, and I suppose [also about the] academic and intellectual freedom that we are otherwise generally encouraged to exercise.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>So I am saying that, at the moment, especially in the UK and America where a lot of the video essays are being produced – especially in America – that there are pressures to codify [this work in order to support its role in academic career structures]. And in a way we might say that holding an event like this forges a space for that kind of codification, if we want it to. I would really warn against that, though, and say there are dangers to prematurely doing this. It will probably happen. I happen to know that various journals are being set up [to publish]\u00a0audiovisual work and the discussions taking place to establish\u00a0those journals is absolutely about what length should [videos]\u00a0be, how “big” should they be, should they have footnotes, should they have annotations, should people always write a commentary about their work to accompany it? So there is a lot of that kind of discussion going on. But I am absolutely warning against us trying to copy the signifiers of weightiness in writing in the audiovisual version of our work. And in a way that is why I am a little bit more sceptical than many about the term \u201cessay\u201d. I will come back to that but I think “essay” has a certain code<\/em> imbedded in it.<\/p>\n

\"Slide1\"<\/a>One of the things I am going to clearly argue to my colleagues and others at the moment is that this work doesn\u2019t have to have any difficulties in assimilating it into an academic context. [The qualities listed\u00a0in the adjacent slide here]\u00a0are actually UK government criteria about what our research is supposed to do, and our work is judged against these in our system of\u00a0awarding our work\u00a0one to four stars according to how well it achieves these criteria. I think these are very interesting definitions […]\u00a0but […] we are not expected to do [achieve each] of them equally. And so when you start looking at them in relation to written work or audiovisual work, you see it makes no difference: these are supposed to apply to science as well. So, you know what? There really is no\u00a0problem, unless we want to there to be\u00a0one, and of course that\u2019s<\/em> the problem: some people do<\/em> want to have a problem with the audiovisual essay.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>[As an aside, recently,] I happened to see a reference to a [very favourable Humanities] book review […].\u00a0But even this [great] review of the book, which is on one of the most untraditional<\/em> subjects in contemporary psychosocial\/gender studies, is obsessed with length […]\u00a0an obsession [which is] particularly anxious in the context of non-traditional work.<\/p>\n

So [we probably shouldn’t be surprised that] there is an anxiety about [whether] audiovisual essays are “proper,” [about] whether they are “real research!\u201d But this [anxiety] isn\u2019t new. I wanted to take us back to the days of the early digital video essay work \u2013 2011! \u2013 and to an earlier [workshop]\u00a0which didn\u2019t focus solely\u00a0on the kinds of things we are looking at today but had a strand that did. [I have embedded video interviews at the conference with the two participants who talked\u00a0about video essays below.]<\/p>\n