On Weirdness and Memory: Viewing Tips with Evelyn Kreutzer & Kevin B. Lee

[Music] Hello and welcome to the VideoSA podcast. I'm your host Will DeGravio. Today's episode is the second in an ongoing collaboration between the podcast and Kevin Beley, who in his role as the LaCarno Film Festival Professor for the future of cinema at USI University of Lugano is leading a three-year research project on video essays with Johannes Bnotot and Evelyn Kreitzer, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. On today's episode, Kevin and Evelyn have a conversation about Evelyn's picks from this year's sight and sound poll of the year's best video essays. They use these videos to unpack some of her interests related to their project, the VideoSA, memories, ecologies, bodies. For more information, please visit thevideosa.com and subscribe to our free newsletter notes on videographic criticism at thevideosa.substac.com. Now here is the conversation between Kevin and Evelyn. [Music] Evelyn Kreitzer, welcome to Lugano. Hi Kevin, thank you for having me. It's really great to have you as the newest member of our research team here, especially with the SNSF research grants, video essay, memories, ecologies, bodies. So I'd like to talk a bit about that in your role in the project, but I also want to talk about video essays specifically. And so the way I thought of doing that would be that we could look at a couple of or a few of your selections from the recent sight and sound video essay poll, maybe offer some viewing wrecks for our audience. So from the selection of video essays that you put in the sight and sound list, is there one that you particularly like to recommend to our audience? Yes, I would like to recommend a video that in a way falls outside of my usual area of video essay consumption. This time I made an special effort to go on YouTube and look for video essays and video essayists that work more in a quote unquote popular realm and not so much in the academic realm that I'm more familiar with. And one of the videos I found most intriguing is a video essay called Why Do We Make Comities About Existential Dread by the video essayist After Thoughts. Her name is Sam and she goes by After Thoughts. I believe other people are involved in her account, but she seems to be the main person behind it. I know that she has appeared on the BFI poll before. I believe in 2022 that's probably how I found out about her in the first place because I like to visit past polls once they've come out and and find out about new content as well. And what I really like about this video is that it encompasses an really impressive amount of cultural content, sources, questions and finds a way to spend a really historical narrative from existential dread in the early 1900s and then even more so in response to World War II to our current moment and trying to find find out what the very specific dread and over stimulation media over stimulation is that we're experiencing right now that leads to a new surge in absurdist comedy. Yeah it was fascinating to watch this video in terms of how it narrated or accounted for absurdist theater, this a fun om that happened in a post-Bold War II and using meme language or internet stand-up comedy language as a way of describing it, which since I'm a extent I found a little bit jarring but actually had me thinking about how historical events from the past get re-described, re-articulated and re-understood by new generations and I kind of relate that to one of your main focuses for the project which is memory, like how does memory operate over time and what is the role in the media in both describing memory, articulating it, visualizing it but also transforming it. Yeah I thought it was really interesting. I think it also given given the breath of what the video tries to cover it also neglects a few reasons why perhaps we're seeing a lot of these absurdist comedic shows and films now but I really like this, she starts out with this question of why are we so weird right now, why are we so obsessed with this darkness and this dread right now and then compares it to absurdist theater from the post-war era and in a way compares it in this really intriguing, through this intriguing image of what people like Beckett and UNESCO were doing when they were engaging in existential dread was they stared at a blank wall and they translated that into absurdist theater. What we're doing now is not, we're not staring at a blank wall anymore, we're staring at our phones, we're staring at our devices, we're staring at each other and each others, we're dooms scrolling with each other and besides each other and that kind of overstimulation of images of content that in a way negates any individual fragments or pieces of information that's our blank wall of the current moment and perhaps that's a little provocative or black and white and there's maybe like some nuance that you could bring up but I really like this, I like this comparison and it breaks down a phenomenon that I think we're all quite familiar with in a really interesting way and of course that has a lot of implications to questions of memory, she mentions everything everywhere all at once at large and this all at onceness that we're experiencing in our current media consumption in the way that we use memes as a language for example that all at onceness has a huge impact about the way we might think about memory probably also on the way that just cognitively we experience memory and we store memory and we exchange memory and how we exchange and experience information and actually in a previous conversation that you and I had you used this really nice way of phrasing this of information having become the the protagonists in the way that we communicate and understand and experience content for lack of a better word and that definitely that's also a way of breaking it down maybe in a very simple way but that's something that we see reflected in the crazy weird absurdist comedy and dark comedy that we experience and consume now. It's interesting thing that you said about relating this kind of maximalist that's called it a doom scroll aesthetic of just like a constant feed of content and audiovisual stimulation somehow being our equivalent of the blank wall that you know Beckett was there at like to think that the doom scroll is our blank wall because on this on the one hand it seems like so opposite but on the other hand it might actually be leading to similar effects and I think that like yeah yesterday's minimalism is today's maximalism and it in terms of what it basically amounts to because it makes me wonder about what you know what it means to what does it really amount to to experience so much and to also be able to produce so much I found this video essay rather virtuosic in in terms of all the different videographic little tips and techniques that it utilizes all the sort of like YouTube gestures and you know jokia sides and visual puns I mean I remember my first encounter of this type of aesthetic was some years ago with the video essays of Grace Lee who I considered to be like you know a true like maximalist video essayist and this one video essay called the speed and the stillness of being online somehow resonates with what we're talking about of like how all the speed that you experience online is amounts to a kind of stillness but it also yeah I'm kind of left marveling at again this array of tools and kind of audio visual linguistic techniques that are at the disposal of today's creators and how how capable and how competent especially young creators are like Gen Zier millennials I I feel very old just kind of and exhausted and tired, just like watching what they're able to pack into any five seconds band of their video essays and how much time it would take for me to learn those skills and practice them compared to how natural I assume they're able to articulate those skills. And so I'm wondering what you might think about that in terms of seeing the skill sets of young creators, especially those that are on YouTube, I and TikTok, and how do they relate to videographic scholarship, to yours or those that you see others doing. Yeah, I think it's really interesting what Sam does in this video, given how, especially compared also to the other videos that I picked, she definitely covers the biggest topic and the largest historical frame. There are other videos that I picked that really focus in on very specific details, like the very different use of scale cultural and source related scale. And interestingly, I agree she replicates a lot of, she's very meta in her approach, she replicates a lot of the aesthetics from the shows and films that she refers to, including visual puns, and in a way this very disjunctive rhythm between explanatory sections where she lays out the history and then these inserted YouTube aesthetic kind of jockey comments that she adds. But in a way, I think the perhaps the most important skill that all of us, regardless of the video essay rounds that we operate in, given the content that she's talking about is to be able to distill tons of information that comes at us everywhere, all at once, at the same time, on the same scale, to put water into that flood of images and sounds, to sort it into hierarchies of, this is the overarching narrative, these are the details, these are the examples, this is the content that it floods into, to unpack it and repack it. Obviously, it's one of the main things that we all do as video essayists, but in this particular case where the whole video is about this loudness as she calls it, this loudness of thoughts and information and I guess making, remixing the different volumes and the different audio tracks of this metaphorical loudness, that's one of the main tasks that we all have and that's definitely something that she does really, really well. When you talk about loudness and you talk about states of mind, at least that's what I'm thinking about now and again, given memory is one of the themes of the project and how memories are reflections of states of mind, what states of mind can we attribute to the different video essays that you've selected because I feel like on the opposite end of this spectrum of, you know, why do we make copies about existential dread? I look at Johannes Benelto's video, practices of viewing description, which I find to be so calm and so minimalist, like it doesn't have any images that we would typically describe as images. I mean, we see a film script, a film strip being projected with, you know, writing that becomes abstracted in the form of its projection and we're listening to these fairly meditative, contemplative accounts of cinematic memory by different videographic scholars and I find this very effective and remarkable in terms of how few elements are necessary to create a real sense of contemplation and appreciation of the cinematic experience. So I don't know, when you put these two video essays side by side, what comes to your mind as comparisons? Well, I hadn't thought about it about Johannes's video that way before, but now I'm thinking if we stick with this image of the blank wall, what he's doing here and of course he's, he's, I'm sure he took inspiration from video pieces like Zenfour Film by Namjoon Pake and a few others. He is creating a blank wall. So, of course it's not completely blank, it is abstracted colors and writing, but it is a reduced strip of film and a reduced imagery that highlights the, it's very much an audio piece, right? So it highlights the audio track and it provides a blank wall for us to stare at and to fill with what we're hearing and what we're thinking. And perhaps there's a way to read this as a generational difference in how we might approach it or really a different way of approaching the relationship between sound and image, in this case. I actually referred to Johannes's video as an anti-video essay for that reason because it takes away the familiar imagery that we might expect here. It really draws on our imagination to fill the blank page, so to speak. But perhaps it is actually an even more not conservative but more traditional approach to video essay making. I haven't thought about it that way before. Well, when you say what is a conservative, a traditional approach, well, the answer video essay without images, I don't know, conservative, traditional, that would be, when I think of what's conservative, a traditional, I think of the classic analytical mode where it entails a kind of close reading of a scene or of audio visual footage. And so I think of two examples from your selections, creative geography, creative connections by John Kibb's and extra local by Jacob Smith. And yeah, it's interesting to think of these both as instances of, I mean, they are made by film scholars, professors, and institutions who were practicing film studies and a close reading based type of film studies before they even started doing videographic work. But at the same time, I think of them as really upholding a certain relationship to images that, again, I find to be on the opposite end of the spectrum as why do we make companies about existential dread. Because that video essay probably has more images than your other six videos combined. But I don't know if there's ever a moment where it's analyzing or commenting directly on an image that is being presented. And there are different reasons for that. I mean, I think that's just become the norm with YouTube video essays because of the way the algorithm works. They're not allowed to let a scene play out for an extended duration that would then allow you to comment analytically on that footage. So these two video essays, they work outside of YouTube. And for that reason, they're allowed to really immerse themselves in a analytical mode studying the footage that they're presenting. So then it's also getting back to this question of memory in mind, like what kind of memory and what kind of mind do these video essays produce? Maybe also to clarify what I meant by a more conservative or traditional approach that one might see in Johannes's work. And I also don't want to offend him by calling him a conservative video essay is by any means. And his video is in part very directly, obviously, engaged with the question of analog and digital in just in the aesthetics that he uses with a film strip, the stripped down film strip, but also with his engagement with people's memories of early film experiences. And that's a different type of approach to memory or reawakening of a memory than what I see in the in the afterthoughts video, which first of all is not concerned with analog or digital questions at all, I don't think. And not so much with the history of visual references or visual referentiality in the specific pieces that she that she talks about, but more so with imbuing this, this loudness that she replicates with an historical trace. And actually, I agree that it is a much more explanatory video in many ways. And it doesn't alter or manipulate the footage that it uses in the way that a lot of the other video essays that I picked or a lot of the video essays that we usually talk about and that we make does. I mean, there seems to be a day. difference between "youtube" popular video essay making and "scallily" video essay making this concern for altering the image or letting images play out. But there's an interesting dichotomy here between what can we call explanatory or traditional and what can we call experimental and image manipulation? It's interesting what you just said about what this afterthoughts video essay might really be doing. It's not so much analyzing these movies but more conveying and overall, well, to use the cliché term vibe of what it is to watch these films within the context of living today. So to me, that makes me wonder, yeah, our video essays sometimes meant to just transfer the vibe that one gets from watching the films that they're being talked about or what is at stake in the act of transferring that video essay's perform. So I think about raising in the sun the moving poems video essay that you highlighted and how that itself is a video essay about transference, like how a written play gets transferred into a performance and then how that performance gets transferred into a film and then how that film gets transferred into a video essay based on a poem that I think somehow inspired the play. Yeah. Right? Yeah, it's a very beautiful piece. And so you have that as an example and then Hello Dagnus, which is really a surprising and delightful selection because I saw that at the Berlinala in the cinema and it was just kind of a strange experience to be in this big screening room watching footage from different movies from the 80s and 90s, remixed in such a way as to tell the story of the Trump administration. And that was a very strange feeling of transference of like, yeah, and not just Trump, the Trump presidency, but the Trump presidency as understood through different means that circulated during his presidency. So it's like memes as a way of telling history and mediating current events, but then memes getting transferred to 1980s and 1990s Hollywood movies so that they like memes were being turned into movies or movies turned into memes, whatever, it's just transferring layers of transference happening all around with this film. Yeah, it's really interesting to think about Hello Dagnus and the Afterthoughts video essay side by side because in some ways I think they're fairly close to each other within my selection in terms of the flood of images that they provide. As you said, the Afterthoughts video shows you a ton, a ton of footage and a ton of different sources. And so does Hello Dagnus. How many films they're using and remixing. And also both of them appeal to this, this memified way of remembering through audiovisual media and remembering them. And both of them are also concerned with imbuing their media objects with a sense of history, only that Afterthoughts or Sam goes by, or Afterthoughts is trying to create a historical narrative and backing for why we're so obsessed with a certain type of absurdist comedy right now. And Hello Dagnus really creates an artificial or an anachronistic history of the media that they're using where they're openly manipulated and really skillfully so I would say and fit into a way, in a way fit into, or in a way the history is taking out of these sources that come from very different times in American cinematic history and they're all put into a relatively short history of the present or of the last few years. So they're both dealing with memory and history and creating new, mnemonic narratives but they're going in opposite directions with how they're going about it. And at the same time, there are also polar opposites in the way that they're being received these videos. That's partly why I picked them. I find it quite fascinating that Hello Dagnus is in a way as this reminds me of Garea video art from the 60s and 70s and that it really lives on the basis of word of mouth and events in person events. It only shows at festivals. It's not available online. It's not available for purchase, I don't think, because of the copyright issues involved and just the vast amount of sources that they're using. As far as I know, they're traveling with the film, probably still, I'm not sure, maybe they've just taken a break after doing it for a year. So it's really, it's almost like a concert that's on tour, on a global tour. Whereas the After Thoughts video is a YouTube, a fairly classical YouTube popular video that is openly available and accessible. So it's really interesting how we might think of either of those as archival practices and archival revitalizations where they're both, I mean, I consider video essayistic practice as an archival practice anyway and curating any amount of media sources into a conversation, a videographic conversation is an archival undertaking. But they're in poll, they go in polar opposites in terms of how that archive is being made accessible or not. Okay, so this question of audience accessibility, distribution, it kind of leads us to the final video essay that was on your list, how to make money from video essays by Will Webb, which I watched with a great sense of appreciation. Like watching this video, you can really just tell how much experience, how much thought Will has put into his creative practice as a YouTube video essayist, how he studied the field. And I have to say, I felt a lot of nostalgia vibes for how I started with YouTube back in 2006, 2007. It was just really a completely different ecosystem than what it is today because I didn't put nearly as much thought in what I was doing as he has. I was just grateful to have a platform where I could, you know, nerd out on movies, analyze whatever came to my mind when I was watching a film experiment with different modes of montage and, you know, arranging footage in a timeline, export that and upload it for whoever was possibly interested in seeing what I had to share. No, you're still haven't reached that part yet, but yeah, it was just, you know, it was a very kind of Edenic, rather naive period. And watching Will's video, I was very impressed, but I also kind of wondered like if I were coming up today, would I even bother because it just feels like so much work. But my question for you is, you know, as a videographic scholar, primarily situated in academia, what is it like for you to watch this video and to see someone else's circumstances in pursuing video essays and videographic scholarship? In some ways, would you just laid out the transition that you've experienced and seen sort of parallels what we were talking about earlier, right, with what afterthoughts is going for this incredibly vast mass and increasing mass of content that's out there. And that has fed into video essay production as well. There's just, I mean, even I, who has been part of this community for a much shorter amount of time than you have, constantly find myself torn between being really excited about how much this field is growing and at the same time really overwhelmed and stressed out by the amount of stuff that's out there and the amount of videos that I want to see, I feel obliged to see. And then in the end, I find myself on my phone, Doom's crawling as well and returning that into the blank space that I'm looking at. So I think that it's very much part of what you're describing. I found it important to include this video, which of course is not a video essay in and of itself, but I find it important to add it to the larger conversation because Because I'm very aware that you and I are both in the privileged position that we're being institutionally funded and supported to do the work that we do. I so far have never had to seriously worry about whether or not I would have the money to make my video essays because I have made them out of the comfort of an academic position. And I'm very aware that that's not true of most of the YouTube video essayists. I find a lot of the film critics that produce content in this format. This is really a scholarly privilege for the most part. And since the BFI poll is also, I think, a really good platform to bring those different realms of video essay production together, I find it important to highlight that. I think as scholars we sometimes, when we're just talking with each other, we forget that there's a real financial issue involved, not just in terms of securing copyright for anything, but for making revenue with it, making. We might look at the number of our reviews with existential dread because not enough people are watching our content, but other people who look at these numbers as indicative of whether they'll get to make another video essay or not. Yeah, it kind of takes us back to the start of this conversation because you were encouraging our listeners to have an expansive, curious and diverse diet of video essays. But of course that's easier said than done, partly because how do you know about video essays that you don't know about that aren't already inside your bubble or your immediate interests? And then given what we've been saying about the afterthoughts video essay, how do you protect yourself against this very real anxiety of having too many things to watch, always feeling like you have to catch up and feeling overwhelmed with what's out there. So for this year, what's your. If not a resolution, what's your strategy for how you're going to approach your video essay viewing habits? I haven't figured out a perfect solution for this yet at all. I'm really. If I'm asking people to go after a diverse diet of video essays, it's really above all it's an instruction to myself. And I take the BFI poll as an invitation to do exactly that. My approach in the last few years has been to go back to the poll, look through it, look for video essayists, for video essay platforms and publication venues that I'm not familiar with yet, check them out, follow them, and gradually by doing so expanding my bubble. And that has worked out fairly well for myself. But I'm not nearly at the point where I feel confident in saying I have a good sense of all the different modes of production that are out there. There's also of course very practical things like language that limit the content that you might be exposed to. But I think it's the. So far, that it's the best way that I've found to do that. And in the end, I also think of course, like any historical art historical movement has had that community and bubbly. This bubble aspect to it. It's not something that is inherently negative or that we need to fight. It's human nature. It's human nature. You will be more inclined to consume things that are. That we're made by your friends than strangers, but you can expand your friend's circle. You expand your social media bubble bit by bit and expand your exposure in this manner. And of course, it's a network community issue as well because I know that you and any of my other friends and colleagues in video essay world are also doing exactly that gradually expanding what they're exposed to and then they might share it and then it becomes. It can have this larger effect. But in the end, I'm really curious to see where the larger infrastructure of video essay production will go and if perhaps we will see in video essay production the same trends that we're seeing in mainstream media production where now all the different niche of production that we've seen grow out of the streaming age, etc. that I think very much influences what afterthoughts is talking about as well. Now we seem to go back to a more hierarchical, more less maximalist approach to media production where production companies and networks are joined and perhaps in a few years we'll actually go back to a three network era. Oh wow, the three networks of video essays. So maybe we'll go there. I don't know. Well, I kind of have that formulation in my mind because my side of this project is ecologies of the video essay and I have this general easy to reference set of parameters like three dimensions of video essays, the academic, YouTube, and popular and cinematic and visual art. But I don't know. Of course, these are very porous spheres and very much an evolution. Who knows if a fourth one might come to replace them or compliment them or if they might merge. Who knows. What's going on with the streaming wars and broadcasting companies and movie studios? I just think history works that way. It's a key call in that way. But also now where I know you had talked about this in the previous podcast conversation. We're seeing a lot of videos being taken down from Vimeo for copyright issues that had been there for a long time. And now I hear more and more video, scholarly video makers talk about uploading their content on YouTube instead of Vimeo. And we always had this weird dichotomy between the YouTube world and the Vimeo world. So that seems to be colliding. Perhaps that's where we're going. Now soon or later, it'll just be YouTube or personal conferences in person events. It really makes your husband think that YouTube is now more amenable or hospitable than Vimeo. But hey, just the start of strange plot twists to expect for this year. So yeah, and we'll have to organize some watch parties here just to kind of keep each other reprised and what's coming our way. Looking forward to that. And thank you very much for these recommendations. I hope our listeners check out these video essays. You can find them listed in the sight and sound poll under Evelyn's name. But I think we'll also post some links in the podcast page as well. So thanks Evelyn and looking forward to seeing more with you this year. [Music]