VIDEO ESSAY
Special Interest Group
Dead Time
Claire Perkins Monash University & Catherine Fowler University of Otago.
Co-ordinated by: Catherine Fowler and Arezou Zalipour
After roughly a decade of development video essays are now accepted forms for teaching, assessing and research in the wider film and media community. Groups, both ad-hoc and more formalised, now exist in Europe, the UK and North America, and there are regular events, cfp’s, debates and discussions with most recently a Discord channel formed with 250 members. On that same channel at the end of 2022 a brief post lamented the Euro-American bent of video essay discourse. It seems timely then for all of us teaching with, creating or simply interested in video essays in this part of the world to make ourselves seen and heard.
The Video Essay SIG aims to create visibility for the video essay community in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, to provide a space for connections and to develop opportunities for collaboration.
Introducing the Convenors
Catherine Fowler
I teach at Otago University and have been interested in video essays since about 2015. As a skill-less newbie I was fortunate enough to work with a team using video essays to present eye tracking research. The result was the video ‘Dead Time’ with Claire Perkins and Andrea Rassell. Inspired by the experience, I worked with colleagues to incorporate video essays as assessment tasks into my teaching beginning in 2019. Currently our first year students make a Videographic Epigraph and our third years have the option of Desktop Documentaries. The results have been very rewarding and inspiring for all concerned. Being involved with ‘Not another brick in the wall - teaching and research the audio-visual essay’ a symposium at Monash University abutting the 2018 SSAAANZ conference was the next step towards this proposal. The encounter included over two dozen Australian and New Zealand colleagues talking about their work. Skilled up, my first sole authored video essay, focusing on representations of harassment and abuse in tv series will be published in [in]transition. 5 years on from the Monash symposium, with the international scene increasingly crowded with interest, more co-ordination, to create gatherings and ensure visibility seems urgent.
Arezou Zalipour
I teach screen production, both documentary and drama and use video essays as teaching/learning and assessment strategies. My research focuses on the intersections of culture, screen storytelling and diversity in screen production, practice and industry research. I intend to use various dissemination strategies and new forms of scholarship and publishing, including video essays as well as research outputs that arise from the application of distinctive methodologies of screen practice as research. Check out my recent article using filmmaking as research in the short documentary Shama which won several awards. My video essay Pushing Racial Diversity Forward in Filmmaking: What's at Stake?, exhibited in the 34 Flow Virtual Cinema, allowed me to provide a snapshot of the diffusion of diversity discourses in film practices. I have a couple of video essays in the production stage.
Since 2020 I have been on the New Zealand Film Commission’s Diversity and Inclusion Industry Leadership Group for the development and implementation of New Zealand’s first diversity and inclusion screen policy ‘He Ara Whakaurunga Kanorau’, which was published in June 2022.
I enthusiastically embrace the idea of working as part of the SIG-Video Essay across Australia and New Zealand as it can provide excellent visibility and collaborative opportunities for anyone interested in video essay work.
Arezou’s public profile: https://academics.aut.ac.nz/arezou.zalipour