"Videos that serve an analytic or critical purpose, exploring and presenting ideas about films and moving images via sounds and images themselves." (Jason Mittell)
"The creative principles informing any literary, social or cultural construction, or the theoretical study of these; a theory of form." (OED)
The practice of videographic criticism has grown exponentially in recent years, generating dedicated journals, lively events and debates, and an ever-increasing quantity and variety of videographic work. Now is the moment to reflect on and to clarify the characteristics and potential of the medium, and so this videographic book project is designed to set out, and to exemplify, a poetics of videographic criticism: the principles that underpin its procedures and that should guide its development.
The planned book is divided into four sections, dubbed ‘Sorties’, thematic/argumentative excursions that combine audiovisual and textual material in dynamic relation in order to elucidate videographic criticism in terms of the four concerns — poetics, epistemics, politics, and address — present throughout. The book will contain about 100 minutes of video and 30,000 words of prose. The prose sections will take the form of: (1) short passages that accompany a given video or batch of videos, similar in function to the creator statements found in [in]Transition; (2) entries on key topics, similar in form, though more ironic, provocative or playful in tone, to entries found in a companion or encyclopaedia. The latter will dialogue, contextualize, or resonate with, rather than explain or interpret, the video material.
An early version of the project ethos is set out in this article.
Here is a draft version of the First Sortie video, an overture to the project as a whole.
This project is associated with the new research unit Filmmaking Research, Academic Film and Videographic Criticism, part of the Cultural Transformations research programme in the School of Culture and Communication.
