JCMS Teaching Dossier Vol 5 (3)
Not Another Brick in the Wall: The Audiovisual Essay and Radical Pedagogy
Robert Letizi
A pervasive conceit of contemporary digital culture is the notion that information is freely available at all times. The superficial simplicity of this idea extends outwards by troubling or in some cases overriding what we might now call “traditional” or even “historical” modes of cultural and social literacy. In this contemporary context, the image, forever a site for identity and ideology, is reimagined as a form of personal expression. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr have bound the image to the individual user, and as a result, we see an emergent visual culture that ingratiates subjective identity with cultural understanding and meaning. From this intimate appropriation of digital technology, the proliferation of information access and the conversion of cultural, political, and social discourses into images also reconfigures the power and utility of written language. At tertiary institutions, a generation conditioned to this visual language system is entering higher education and confronted by traditional pedagogies that maintain the hierarchy of written over visual scholarship, and in turn, instruction over intuitive forms of learning. In this relatively new and rapidly-changing environment, the audiovisual essay appears as a beacon for universities that are increasingly seeking to embolden digital education practices, but also because, as a pedagogical form, the audiovisual essay expressly mirrors both the productive and reductive aspects of the art and media cultures that surround it.
It is through Robert Hughes that I would like to consider the enculturation of the audiovisual essay as both a critical and pedagogical form. In 1980, Robert Hughes sought to account for the postmodern philosophy of art, describing the contemporary epoch as “culture as nature” (324). For Hughes, a fundamental principle of the art culture that evolved through the premodern and modernist epochs was the singularity of the image/object and the inability to reproduce it. The introduction of technology, the building of cities, and mass media production dismantled this principle by stripping “every image of its singularity, rendering it schematic and quickly identifiable,” (325) and importantly, reproduceable. This new world described by Hughes negotiates the shift from painting as art to images as signs and advertising, yet it is not difficult to see how these transformations reshape other cultural configurations. Indeed, Hughes points towards this broader application by suggesting that we “live immersed in a haze of almost undifferentiated images” (325). The prescience of Hughes’ work, having barely touched the surface of the new frontier of digitality, is striking when considered in light of the rapid advancements in digital image technology and online practices of today. Images are indeed the substructure of cultural meaning, though the relationships between them are increasingly unclear; new modes of apprehending this culture, of decoding the unending streams of content and information, and of thinking with images and sounds are some of the valuable contributions of the audiovisual essay to what Hughes describes as a “culture of congestion” (324).
The image culture that gave rise to Hughes’ evaluation of postmodern art speaks directly to the current epoch for young students who do not have the benefit of differentiation or the memory of the pre-digital age. Embedded in this amplified world of images, a natural assumption might be that the audiovisual essay is an obvious antidote and a way to reinvigorate images with new meaning, though this premise must be treated with some caution. Indeed, incorporating the audiovisual essay into core curriculum requires careful consideration regarding the ways that the essay manages not only the concept of research as practice, but also how it mimics the very conditions of students’ experiences of the digital world. In this regard, the audiovisual essay speaks to the heart of Hughes’ “culture as nature” principle by forcing students to confront the actuality of their image culture and the impact this might have on their ability to decode the stream of virtual information that accompanies their everyday lives. Understood in a different way, the contrast of the audiovisual essay in relation to the standardised practices of essay writing and research offers yet another challenge: how do students reconcile the creative imperatives of this form of assessment when they have been taught for so long that high grades are the result of an intense relationship between research and a certain structural approach to problem-solving and critical analysis?
Over the past four years, teaching audiovisual essay-making at Monash University, one of the striking moments of revelation for students has been their initial exposure to the dynamic variances in style, aesthetic, and substance of the audiovisual essay. For students, this variety often stirs an initial paradox: the audiovisual essay is highly familiar due to its principles of montage and visual thinking that resemble the mashup culture of memes and gifs (images given new meaning via layering or composite effects), yet at the same time, the essay can seem entirely foreign because its methodology and critical imperatives are difficult to define. In part, one might make sense of this paradox through ontological vagaries that surround the audiovisual essay and inform a great deal of its scholarship. However, the compulsion to resolve the practice’s language and the bemoaning of pop culture’s adoption and intensification of the essay’s dominant features (voiceover narration, rhetorical explanations) masks the productivity of the essay for the cultivation of critical skills that serve the purpose of tertiary education. A necessary shift in this paradigm, and one I have come to accept in my own teaching, is that the pedagogical virtues of the audiovisual essay are both shared and at times different for professional critics and tertiary students.
As much as the variety of practice and theorisation of audiovisual essays has evolved, so too has my teaching in this area in order to negotiate the nuanced challenges of this unique style of assessment. Currently, audiovisual essays are offered in two final-year subjects at Monash: “Film and Screen Studies in the Digital Era” and “The Audio Visual Essay.” Experience teaching in both subjects has been instructive in terms of successful pedagogical methodologies, primarily because each subject has its own distinct theoretical basis: the former seeks to understand the patterns of cultural and medium-specific developments through the advent of digital technology, while the latter is a semester-long consideration of the audiovisual essay as a critical form. In the “Digital Era” subject, due to the contextual nature of the weekly material, students often self-guide their projects towards their own intermedial and interdisciplinary interests. Projects that are regularly proposed include audiovisual essays interested in the “cinematic” approach to narrative in video games or the evolution of transnationalism in minority cinemas. Yet the ulterior possibilities of the material can be difficult to communicate because the subject is deeply engaged in digital contexts that are highly conspicuous; the notion that visual culture is intensified by technological innovation and usage is not illuminating for students, however, advocating the requirement to be actively critical of their technological environment often compels even the most cynical of digital patrons.
A great deal of my learning in the “Digital Era” unit has led to a significant redesign of “The Audio Visual Essay,” running in the second half of 2019. In principle, the redesign seeks to intensify the process of criticism: weekly film screenings are now tightly connected to required readings and approaches to criticism (for example, a week on textual analysis through the lens of The Searchers (1956) features Ross Gibson’s magnetic deconstruction of the film’s opening sequence in “The Searchers—Dismantled” [2005]); assessment—consisting of a review of literature and audiovisual essays, an audiovisual treatment, written exegesis, and final audiovisual essay project—now strongly reflects the process of critical development that is necessary to produce complex and thoughtful audiovisual essay work; and in-class activities reinforce the relationship between written theory and creative expression. Yet two further revisions stand out as possible resolutions to some of the ongoing challenges of audiovisual teaching: firstly, more extensive feedback in order to better guide students through the transition from written to audiovisual assessment, and more radically, a return to writing. In both instances, the impetus stems from a single premise: audiovisual thinking is a skill that aligns closely with the essay film and therefore the literary essay, where the often-contradictory features of personal, transgressive, sincere, and even playful forms of expression are valued.
Re-issuing writing activities—in this case, a weekly critical reflection task where students work through their first impressions of the screening material and share their writing with classmates—focuses students’ attention on the processes of critical analysis and deconstruction, treating the concept of audiovisual expression as the final stage of an intense relationship to the subject and a desire to investigate, uncover, and respond. Asking students to return to this analog process may also encourage or embolden a deeper exultation of smaller and more nuanced details that are often lost in the shadows of the traditional pillars of film studies: authorship, genre, and ideology. In a sense, then, this return to the written form will also perform the function of repurposing traditional aspects of writing by asking students to catalogue and detail their primal impressions of a film or audiovisual essay: a sensation, a tangential thought or idea, a connection between things, a rhythm, or a subterranean interpretation. This kind of thought experiment expressly mimics the personal intuition of audiovisual essay-making, but crucially asks students to clarify their thinking prior to the practical process.
Despite the apparent intensification of audiovisual activity at tertiary level, the phenomenon of the audiovisual essay has the potential to falter under the weight of its own promise. The adoption of the format for media and news services, for example, is evidence of both its timeliness and convenience as a form that can expedite populist and topical lessons. This suggests that the appetite to learn and communicate through images not only persists, but thrives in the technological pursuit of access, availability, and ubiquity. Yet as teachers, a certain sense of responsibility should inform the enculturation of audiovisual practice into tertiary curriculum. Beyond the concerns of the long-term future of this practice and the instability of its ontology, a more pragmatic approach is required when issuing the audiovisual essay as a new learning pathway for students. It is here, in the practical and philosophical challenges facing both students and educators, that writing, perhaps paradoxically, becomes most important. If, as Hughes suggests, visual literacy is the currency of contemporary culture, then one might argue that it is the practice of writing that has become defamiliarized and disarticulated from digital critical practice. As a descendant of this cultural transformation, the audiovisual essay’s longevity is in some ways dependant on its ongoing relevance as a critical artefact, yet its undervalued function might be the reinvigoration of the links between the written word and images, theoretical and empirical forms of evidence, and thus, between traditional and progressive modes of pedagogy.
References
Gibson, Ross. 2005. “The Searchers – Dismantled.” Rouge 7. http://www.rouge.com.au/7/searchers.html
Hughes, Robert. 2016 (1980). The Shock of the New. London: Thames and Hudson.
Dr. Robert Letizi is a lecturer at Monash University. His research and teaching interests encompass digital media, technology and aesthetics, ontologies of the image, and film sound. He is one of the leading proponents of audiovisual essay practice and study at Monash in two capstone units: The Audio Visual Essay and Film and Screen Studies in the Digital Era.
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