Bridging the Theory/Practice Divide through Audiovisual Essays

JCMS Teaching Dossier Vol 5 (3)
Not Another Brick in the Wall: The Audiovisual Essay and Radical Pedagogy 
Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Many teachers in the field of screen studies are all too familiar with the split between theory and practice—cemented not only in the structure of course curricula, but also (seemingly from day one) inside the very minds of students, where it’s hardest to combat. Students with a highly practical orientation don’t want their intuitive processes messed with by too much exposure to distanced, intellectual analysis; and those of an analytical or theoretical bent frequently consider that what they do bears no real relation to the creative making of screen works. Both sides, sadly, have internalised an alienation born of professional specialisation, whether in the screen industries or the educational academy.

The nub of this problem, we feel, is that people have essentially learned to associate film analysis with—and perform it through—the act of academic writing, defined in a fairly narrow discursive and institutional fashion. The skill-set that needs to be acquired in order to successfully accomplish clear, rational, detailed, argumentative, analytical writing is nothing to be sneezed at, and we don’t wish to deride it here. All the same, academic writing, as (often implicitly) taught and then (very explicitly) reinforced by university protocols (peer review, etc.) finds itself pinched from two sides. As analytical or research work, it cannot be “creative writing” (that’s a whole other department and vocation, thank you very much!); and as words on a page (print or digital), it is assumed to be an entirely “other” medium than that which, in screen studies, it addresses: sounds and moving images. (This argument, naturally, can be extended to other fields, such as art history, musicology and radio studies, where similar debates have long raged.)

For a decade, we (collaboratively and individually) have been practitioners of a hybrid form that has come to be known as the audiovisual essay (other terms for it that circulate include video essay, videographic criticism, the digital essay, and so on). Its format is, at the basic technological level, quite simple: downloaded digital files (usually not, in the first instance, shot or generated by the audiovisual essayist) re-edited and re-assembled on a computer, using software such as Adobe Premiere. We call it a hybrid form because it aims to be neither video art per se, nor conventional documentary. But it does try to borrow attributes from both of those loose genres: it aspires to the creativity of video art (or, indeed, any audiovisual art), while also intending to “teach”, in the sense of conveying a viewpoint, a perspective or argument on the screen media (cinema TV, digital …) that it references. Hence the complaints that are sometimes muttered that audiovisual essays are “not really art,” or that they are not truly or sufficiently academic!

Our challenge or dare—to ourselves, as well to everyone who comes in contact with audiovisual essays, whether as prospective makers or simply as spectators—is this: can we articulate a thought process about screen media using that media’s own tools, its own language of image and sound? Just as we consider all writing to be—ideally—creative writing, we also understand a thought process, in this context, to be a comprehensive, holistic act of cognition, feeling, sensation, elaboration and reflection. All of us—whether we choose to recognise this or not—“think” using mobile forms, colours, rhythms, gestures and noises just as much as we use (relatively) rational words, sentences, concepts and structures. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897–1979) spent his life elaborating the intuition that thinking is the complicated process we bring to bear in order to process, understand, and at least partially assimilate thoughts, which (according to his schema) enter our being as stark but multi-layered facts, truths, sensations, or experiences (akin to Jacques Lacan’s concept of the brute Real that accosts us). Our approach to audiovisual essays takes a similar path: it is a reworking of the full cinema-media experience, reflecting its purely sensory realm (Gilles’ Deleuze’s concept of Body) while simultaneously tracking its inextricable associations with logic, concepts, analysis (Brain).

In a mundane way, the audiovisual essay can be defined as a work of analysis or critique that mixes language (spoken or written) with images (in the form of re-edited clips or single-frame screenshots) and sounds (music, voices, sampling from film soundtracks). More exactly (and excitingly) for us, it is the creative montage of pieces of pre-existing audiovisual works in order to create a new work that carries, expresses or embodies a critical idea.

Between us, we have made over one hundred audiovisual essays, ranging in length from one minute to around thirty minutes. Some that we regularly use as examples to demonstrate our creative work processes are Death-Drive (2016), Wish I Had a River (2017), and The Gauntlet (2018). Rather than discuss those works in detail in the context of this printed symposium, we would like to set down some of the general lessons and pointers that practice has revealed for us.

Many beginners in the audiovisual essay field rely on the crutch of a pre-scripted text—on the model of a DVD audio commentary, or a traditional documentary voice-over narration—that they record, and to which they then add illustrations; sometimes, the form is taught is exactly this way, at least as a starting point (as is the case at, for instance, the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television). In our experience, it is more productive to begin from a hunch or a loose idea, and go straight into isolating and moving around pieces of the film within the timeline of the editing software. We may end up using writing or text, in some fashion, in our audiovisual pieces; but this is usually created at the very end of the process (rather than the start), or is itself the result of considerable montage (constantly re-recording and re-arranging a voice-over audio file, for example). The interaction of all the pieces “in motion”, as it were, is always the determining factor.

Often, when we start on a piece, we begin from certain repeated stylistic or formal choices that we have perceived (and annotated for reference) in the audiovisual “texts” we are analysing. This could relate, for instance, to a certain color scheme tendency, or a particular use of the camera, or a recurring gesture made by an actor. However, it is only by physically working with the fragments—selecting, combining and manipulating them—that we gain an insight into how such choices form a larger and more systematic pattern. (Of course, we may well end up discarding as much initially gathered material as we include—especially if it does not give up evidence of a truly patterned or logical systematisation.) It is by working with clips that we decide how to structure our piece in order to expose or reveal the pattern we perceive. And only at the end can we even attempt to translate the complete audiovisual idea into words, or summarise it for the purposes of introduction or presentation.

Our Golden Rule is: Don’t be afraid to break apart both the horizontal (chronological) and vertical (image/sound synchronisation) dimensions of a given audiovisual object. Keep from these fragments only what is essential (beginners routinely keep too much of a clip, as if they cannot bear to cut anything out). Work with accumulation: multiple series formed by short fragments. Define clusters or groups of interrelated fragments, and play with their possible order. Find points of transition, such as overlaps in the material. Consider a structure of parts or sections—and whether you need to mark that structure explicitly (e.g., “Part 1”), or leave it implicit.

Moreover, even within each fragment, whether of image or sound, it is usually necessary to be brutally selective. Many times, in order to pursue an argument or an idea, we have to select from the clips only that which really contributes to the expression of the idea—and this can mean selecting only the image track or the audio track. Don’t get caught in retelling or somehow re-evoking the entire original narrative and its arc; it’s important to remember that you are creating a new analytical story, a story of ideas (as every form of criticism, audiovisual or written, does).

So an audiovisual essay is not just an assembly of clips end-to-end, on the YouTube model of the supercut, or fragments set to a song. It helps to be clear on these distinctions of type. A supercut—a collection of clips that present the same motif—is not (yet) an audiovisual essay. An audiovisual essay can include elements of a supercut, can work with motifs that repeat, but instead of just collecting and ordering them, it tries to communicate, express, build and reveal a certain idea about how (and why) these motifs are used and developed by the work.

That’s why the structure of an audiovisual essay is important. To truly engage with creative montage is always to work with structure, whether simple or complex. Even with music, we don’t just “lay it over” the image assemblage in the relentlessly dreary mode of so many YouTube mash-ups, gag-videos and supercuts. We analyse and work with the musical qualities of the piece, its parts, changes, and so forth—breaking them apart and moving them around just as we do with the image.

The most important thing of all to make clear is what we might call the through-line of the development of your critical idea. The key question is always: can the spectator catch onto and follow the connection you are making, the thread you are laying out? Do you need to underline or isolate a particular feature of a fragment in some way (such as subtraction, visual vignetting, replay of a detail, changing the soundtrack, etc.)? Does your audiovisual essay announce (in its title, its first fragments, the framing introduction if it has one) its central, guiding idea?

The final point we wish to make here is that an audiovisual essay is always more than its verbal summary or preview, precisely because it uses creative rhetoric and affect. We are always trying to lead the viewer to their own moment of epiphany, of seeing and grasping something for themselves. Audiovisual essays can stage that process of revealing. So do not be afraid to use dramatic effects in the construction of your piece, such as: surprising associations, unexpected ellipses and ruptures, pulsating rhythms (fast or slow), stepping up or down in intensity. We are dealing with things that work differently in an audiovisual form than in a written one; things like duration, speed, sensation, mood, and atmosphere. In short, we need to be attentive to every detail related with creative montage—the audiovisual “writing form” that Agnès Varda aptly named cinécriture.

© Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin, July 2019

Cristina Álvarez López is a film critic and video maker based in Vilassar de Mar (Spain). Her work has appeared in MUBI Notebook, LOLA, and De Filmkrant, and in books on Chantal Akerman, Philippe Garrel, New Portuguese Cinema, Bong Joon-ho, and Paul Schrader. Her website is: cristinaalvarezlopez.wordpress.com.

Adrian Martin is an arts critic based in Vilassar de Mar (Spain) and Adjunct Associate Professor at Monash University. He is also an online tutor on the base the Teaching Media community. He is the author of eight books on cinema, including Mysteries of Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). His ongoing archive website of film reviews, covering forty years of writing, is at filmcritic.com.au.

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