i hate video essays reddit

Screen Rant

10 best youtube channels for film video essays, according to reddit.

After watching a movie, one of the best things a fan can do is sit by and watch a video analysis by reviewers like Lindsay Ellis and Possum Reviews.

With Wakanda Forever closing off Phase Four on November 11, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is preparing for an introduction to its fifth phase, and many fans are excited to see what the franchise has to offer. Yet, many are also questioning how all these new Phase 4 characters connect to each other, with the multiverse looming as the main arc. After all, most Marvel movies are now somewhat disconnected.

Thankfully, there is a vast host of YouTube reviewers and analysts who are dedicated to explaining the intricacies of movies and anything fans might have missed. Most of these YouTube video essays are made by some key YouTubers who do an excellent job getting fans caught up in the worlds of Hollywood.

YourMovieSucksDOTorg

Some reviewers do a great job of taking apart popular movies to show why they're excellent. The film YouTuber YourMovieSucksDOTorg is best at showcasing just why fans may dislike certain movies. While that might be inherently more negative, it can still be enjoyable.

"His Toy Story 3 review blew my mind. I knew I hated it but he kind of showed me why," says a now-deleted Reddit user. While he addresses both beloved and critically panned movies, the panned movies tend to be the videos that draw the most love from audiences. Sometimes fans just need to know why a plot feels weak or repetitive.

Possum Reviews

Another YouTuber who tends to focus on movies that received overwhelmingly poor receptions, Possum Reviews has grown a large fanbase by putting his attention on reviewing "garbage" movies, as his possum icon indicates. "I really love watching Possum Reviews even though his reviews of blatantly bad movies are really cynical," says Redditor Owijs .

Most of his reviews tend to be funny, which helps to keep the content engaging even when the actual film he reviews is appallingly bad. While he sometimes addresses beloved movies, it's the mediocre ones that draw the most eyes.

While most moviegoers don't think about soundtracks, the YouTuber Sideways goes into detail on just how the best soundtracks in movies interact with each film and create an environment. Tackling both musical and nonmusical movies, the channel does an extraordinary job of teaching fans about sound in films.

"Genuinely such interesting analysis of music in shows/movies from a very funny, intelligent guy who always sounds like he’s having the best time talking about whatever he’s talking about," states Reddit user ameboleyn . His excitement, even when addressing movies like Cats , is palpable and keeps viewers as engaged as he is.

Red Letter Media

A YouTube channel focused on friends reviewing movies that are both good and bad, RedLetterMedia has picked up many fans through the years, and for good reason. With the channel often known for its dry humor, Redditor TylerKnowy described it as "a mix of comedy and insight."

The channel has different shows with each addressing several topics. From Re:View 's more positive view of film to the often maligning Half in the Bag , the channel has something for everyone — as long as everyone likes their sense of humor. Of course, given that they often tackle movies that divide critics and audiences , they can be contentious.

With videos ranging from 10 minutes to over an hour long, the YouTube channel FilmJoy has things for everyone to enjoy. Of course, while the channel offers several shows, most of the channel's supporters tend to find themselves more engaged by the Movies with Mikey show.

"Intelligent, funny and extremely heartfelt. His whole approach is to discuss beloved films and why they're so special," says Reddit user johnspost . Instead of focusing on cynicism and encouraging fans to dislike certain movies, it brings about positivity, which is somewhat rare among YouTubers.

This Guy Edits

While many film critics focus on acting, character development, plot, or setting, the YouTuber This Guy Edits focuses on the editing in film and how it affects each movie. Instead of critiquing individual movies, the channel educates the public to help them consider editing in their own review of films.

"I find myself analyzing cuts and sound design way more after watching This Guy Edits," shared Reddit user InuitOverit . Considering how many movies are edited after their initial release , it's got a wide array of content to sift through, which means fans have a lot to learn from a true professional.

Lindsay Ellis

A film critic who used her YouTube channel to launch a book of her own, Lindsay Ellis recently left the YouTube scene, but her remaining backlog of content is still fascinating to look through. "Her videos are really funny while also being very interesting," commented Redditor bman9919 .

Often, Ellis considered topics that most fans failed to consider and showcased just why she took that perspective. She focused on a wide array of issues, including animation, the influence of the filmmakers on each film, and even why the greatest movie musicals are no longer particularly popular.

Like Stories Of Old

The YouTuber Like Stories of Old is a critic who likes to go into depth with each video, which is why it's so rare to see content for his channel under 20 minutes long. It's also why he only tends to release videos irregularly, often with a month or more between releases.

"His voice and delivery is so unique and soothing... it's pretty remarkable how well constructed each piece is," says Redditor stumpcity . The channel addresses wide-ranging issues in Hollywood, like the Hero's Journey, entire genres in film, and archetypes within the industry. He offers a fascinating in-depth look at whatever topics he chooses, and it's why he's a beloved critic.

Every Frame A Painting

While there are many visually stunning movies that can awe viewers, the YouTuber Every Frame A Painting takes apart movies to show fans exactly why they come to love the looks and aesthetic of movies. It also takes a look at how to improve those very aesthetic through editing.

"They were mainly about filmmaking techniques, editing, shot composition, blocking, etc., instead of plot/story/theme like the majority seem to be," says Reddit user scoutcjustice . While unfortunately Every Frame A Painting has stopped producing videos, fans still have a lot to learn from the content the channel already produced, as the majority continues to be relevant today.

Thomas Flight

Often addressing topics like director preferences and the impact of particular films, the YouTuber Thomas Flight could give a masterclass in film criticism, as most fans would agree. "Thomas Flight does a really good job at highlighting technical details and is also great at explaining the historical reference points for many directors," posits Reddit user redditaccount001 .

With essays about editing, genres, and sound quality in movies, fans may come for the analysis of their favorite film and leave with a new appreciation for dynamic styles in film. The channel's in-depth analysis explains why each upload comes somewhat inconsistently, but the content is quality enough that fans hardly mind.

Next: 10 Best "Let's Play" YouTubers For Fans To Watch

Cinemaphile

I fricking hate video essays. They're a waste of time and basically just catnip for midwits.

I fricking hate video essays. They're a waste of time and basically just catnip for midwits.

what's a video essay?

Streamed Ted Talk LARPs

i like the ted talks that are stories about people's lives. is that bad?

You don't need me to tell you what you can like.

but i browse Cinemaphile and that is the no1 criteria for being here...

the worst are the ones who start off with some completely pointless backstory/setup >video essay on the shining >spend 15 minutes explaining what "horror movies" and "books" are

>catnip for midwits no wonder you're obsessed with them

>bed time >12 hour analysis of The Matrix Yep, its kino time

>mfw zoomers think I feel any obligation to watch random morons on youtube

Imagine not watching teens nearly half your age make 3 hour analysis videos of the godfather in which read the wiki synopsis & a top reddit comment to you

this. the same goes for reaction videos and livestreams

A video essay is literally just a normal essay that gets read aloud and obviously has a video edited to match up with it. If you hate video essays you pretty much just hate essays. And essays are basically just longer more complex and analytical opinions.

>essays are basically just longer more complex and analytical opinions Longer than what, my own thoughts and opinions? Pfft, yours maybe.

Nobody cares about them more than PC police morons. I’ve heard of Critical Drinker though I’ve never watched a video, but I’ve only heard of him from libtards endlessly posting shit because I guess they’re trying to take him down.

Why are you homosexuals so disingenuous? I'm a libtard and I don't follow any of those homosexuals, let alone bother to post a "NEW OPINION JUST DROPPED!" thread the instant they post a new video. It's literally always been you gays egging each other on into endless rage bait and circlejerk threads. The only time I ever mention any of the dozens of homosexuals you follow is to call you and them morons, because you invariably bring them up in every fricking thread. That's why twitter (or X or whatever the frick that other moron is running into the ground this week is calling it) and youtube threads need to bannable on Cinemaphile.

>Not me, I'm not like those OTHER libtards. Tale as old as time.

Those other libtards don't even exist, moron.

Announcing reports is a bannable offense.

Reported for homophobia and hate speech.

The problem is that video essays are often of much worse quality than the average normal essay. It’s like an essay for people who are too ADHD or dumb to read a real essay.

I like the idea of video essays because I'm not very smart and watching somebody explain the philosophical influences or metaphors to something I know nothing about is interesting but almost all the ones I've seen seem to be made by or for people even stupider than me. For example I wanted to watch one on The Matrix because I love that movie and I know it has a lot of references to all sorts of interesting spiritual and philosophy influences but the video was just a half hour of explaining Neo's character arc like I'm too moronic not to understand the whole crux of the film. You're better off just watching interviews and behind the scenes stuff.

Bet you're watching a video essay right now.

I very much agree. An easy solution is to not watch video essays.

>he's still seething about the blood meridian thread a month later lmao

>catnip for midwits but video essays aren't politics

>"Normal movie with simple ending and nothing complicated whatsoever" >ENDING EXPLAINED >30 minutes >basically just recaps the whole movie

if someone watches ted talks they are beyond saving

I never watch them but they make disneyshills seethe with white hot HRT fueled anger so they're ok in my book >y-you only hate our mouseslop because [insert disneyshill youtube scapegoat of the month] told you to!! t. every disneyshill ever

>I fricking hate video essays. They're a waste of time and basically just catnip for midwits

They're instrumental in shaping the minds of midwits. Zoomers do not watch movies they just watch this shit because they are subhuman cretins who don't even give an effort for fricking media consumption much less finding a job and functioning in the adult world which will be soon enough and society will be even more shit because of that.

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Video Essays Are Terrible

• Thread starter Deleted member 6730
• Start date Dec 27, 2017

Deleted member 6730

User requested account closure.

• Dec 27, 2017

It's not the worst genre on Youtube (yet) but, like let's plays, I've noticed amateurs with basic audio equipment and access to slightly better video editing software than iMovie can pump this stuff out like processed junk food in a factory. What used to be a style used by knowledgeable people explaining a subject they were passionate about for the just as passionate audience to learn from has become diluted into a personality with passable public speaking skills explaining the obvious or elevating the subject to a near god-like level wrapped around in a slick presentation complete with a lo-fi beat (and they always use the same kind of music). Another big problem is how samey they tend to be. I noticed two videos on Fleetwood Mac. And a ton of videos on David Fincher (I'm not going to link them all just Youtube search "David Fincher Video Essay" and the results are endless) all without approaching a new angle or offering new insight. And honestly if you're into music or movies do you really need to be told that Rumours is a good album or how David Fincher is a good director? Now there are good video essays on Youtube, like Lindsay Ellis and Dan Olson, but they all buck some of the trends other essayists used. Their videos tend to be longer and go into way more depth, are more critical of the subject, and are laid back, yet more confident in their presentation. You are not going to see Nerdwriter make an hour long video on The Book of Henry or Rent for example. I just want to get this off my chest. I'm disappointed that there's seemingly another easy way to make money off Youtube with no originality or substance. May god help us all.  

Randomly Generated

There are some good ones, but like a lot of written internet content, in 99% of these things it's painfully obvious they're in desperate need of editors. Not only are they way too long, but they tend to repeat the same point over and over again. Nerdwriter, Folding Ideas, and Lindsay Ellis are indeed good exceptions though.  

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account

You're correct when you say that they need editors but it's insulting to imply they "pump these out like junk food". Long form review content might seem at odds with our increasing social focus on quick consumable info tidbits but I think that they absolutely have a place in discourse. Nerdwriter's work is very brief and consumable but that format will never be able to describe the design intricacies in Zelda (for example). Amateurs not knowing the power of editing is a classic film school mistake. Joseph Andersen and Matthew Matosis fall into that category for me.  

Deleted member 19844

I like Just Write.  

Like Stories of Old check him out, thank me later  

Video essays aren't bad inherently, but the rise in their popularity means you're going to get a lot of bad with the good. This always happens, and eventually diluted hot take criticism with oblique, pseudo-intellectual vocabulary masking very basic and poorly thought out analysis will become the norm and every one will hate it. But there will always be good stuff.  

I like extra credits and extra history. Am i wrong in thinking superbunnyhop videos are essays?  

Deleted member 5545

Chojin said: I like extra credits and extra history. Am i wrong in thinking superbunnyhop videos are essays? Click to expand... Click to shrink...

Yazzees said: Why do you like extra credits Click to expand... Click to shrink...

Spyder_Monkey said: The best Bunnyhop videos tend to be more like pseudo documentaries about the current state of the industry. Actually documentaries are now my favorite Youtube genre. If you aren't watching No Clip or Past Mortem that's way more worth your time. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

I don't know how you'd get annoyed by these videos to the same level as dudes playing video games.  

A Syrian Communist

I appreciate the extra effort that goes into these and I watch a lot of them. I don't really see any inherent problem with the genre, if you don't like someone's writing just watch somebody else.  

Deleted member 32726

I'm thinking were going to be seeing a "I hate video essays" trend. It's really a matter of taste, because one guy with a nice voice, pirated software, cheap hardware, and a rap instrumental and another that's the opposite will be the same to your average YouTube viewer. It's what you wrote on paper that matters for a good video essay, and popular channels are usually not worth watching when you really know all about what they're saying (usually more, you may feel like commenting) and you are basically left with the high of feeling smart and listening to nice voice with visual stimulation for 30 minutes. Even small YouTube "documentaries" can feel like spoken encyclopedia articles if they dont hit the road and record interviews and relevant original footage.  

So you're saying there are good video essays and bad video essays. Just like...literally everything else? I'm not seeing the point here.  

99% of video essays are terrible, just as 99% of non-video essays are terrible. The difference is there isn't a universally common service in which the mass majority people to go read essays everyday. The creators that you see people recommend consistently on individual topics are the rare cream of the crop.  

A lot them aren't great, which helps you appreciate the good channels even more. I really miss Every Frame a Painting...  

passepied joe

Nerdwriter is the most basic Youtuber out there. I have no idea why he's so popular. Spoiler The only good video essays are by Every Frame A Painting. RIP  

Randomly Generated said: Nerdwriter, Folding Ideas, and Lindsay Ellis are indeed good exceptions though. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

PeskyToaster

RIP every frame a painting  

Koukalaka said: A lot them aren't great, which helps you appreciate the good channels even more. I really miss Every Frame a Painting... Click to expand... Click to shrink...

Salty_Piers

pinnacle of video essays imo  

Tony Zhou and his partner probably just didn't have time to do those long detailed and well edited videos as a hobby. His videos being better than the majority of other channels doesn't mean there aren't any other good videos in the same sorta lane.  

Homeworkfilms

First the premise that most of these make money is just not borne out by fact. Second I think you are conflating a much wider space of documentary or documentary adjacent work into "video essay." A lot of these videos would have previously been a segment of a larger TV show or a small part of a larger documentary but have been cut down into single top videos that tend to work best on YouTube. As with a lot of critiques of these works, I think your critique feels a lot like "why is this space so democratic and why are there not gatekeepers to sort out what is or isn't good?!?" I don't need to be told Rumors is a great album but it was nice to encounter a small video on a song that means a lot to me and my relationship with my parents. Where I do agree with your critique is that there is a lot of the same videos popping up. See Dark Souls critiques. Some have been more or less stolen from others. That type of intellectual theft or copying is obviously bad and it would be nice to see it policed. (good luck with that)  

People gotta start somewhere. You don't get professional equipment and software day one, and it takes time to develop a style.  

I'm just gonna post this here http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/...rveys/annual-round-ups/best-video-essays-2017  

These have basically replaced the blogs of yore. Except I think it's hard to write because you can't use production values to try to carry you.  

While I agree that some videos are very low effort and just tend to be churned out, I think other channels deserve to be cut some slack. Someone's first effort at creating anything will obviously look pretty rough, and that's totally fine as long as they make an effort to continue learning and improving. I also think the video format is completely overused these days. There are so many 10-15 minute Youtube video guides for things that would have been more easily absorbed in a two-paragraph Wiki page or Google doc. Not everything needs to be shoehorned into a video where some guy soapboxes about himself for 15 minutes before he gets to whatever you're actually interested in.  

Most of them are very bad. Just faux-intellectual nonsense thrown together after reading some Wikipedia articles. Every Frame a Painting and Vox are the only two channels I pay attention to that do these.  

I think the huge problem with guys like Nerdwriter is that they really try and tackle everything. He'll do a video about Bon Iver and then switch to movies and then switch to something specific like how Hitchcock edited dialog. You aren't Vox or Vice Media group. Do one thing really well in your own voice is what I would suggest.  

They were fun and interesting at first but now there's too fucking many of them. You can only listen to so many dudes in their mid-20s wax poetically on Fight Club and Batman v Superman before it just wears on you.  

Bronx-Man said: You can only listen to so many dudes in their mid-20s wax poetically on Fight Club and Batman v Superman before it just wears on you. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

kingocfs said: Most of them are very bad. Just faux-intellectual nonsense thrown together after reading some Wikipedia articles. Every Frame a Painting and Vox are the only two channels I pay attention to that do these. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

OP, I saw you made exceptions, and that's appreciated. You're right about it being a bit of a tired genre, but I agree that there are some genuine masters of the craft. This was the best youtube video I've seen all year.  

vox is pretty awesome as far as the infographics and animation and presentation goes. Plus they have the staff to cover a wide range of topics well. The videos I see about parking, Kanye West, or some unknown native American fruit are well done. to me the review and discussion guys are the ones wasting the most time. I don't need to watch an hour long video about why Batman vs. Superman is a bad movie. What kind of person would even waste their time watching that shit.  

Prophet of Truth

I wasn't aware the quality of these was considered to be that diluted by overexposure. I enjoyed the few Kaptain Kristian videos I've seen, but they are very infrequent.  

Griselbrand

This reminds me of that one video where someone breaks down how Louis CK writes and delivers his jokes. I don't remember what the example was but watching the video I felt like I'd learned nothing and it was just a dude way over analyzing something.  

I bet if I look at uncurated samples of any kind of media, I'm going to have a terrible impression of those media as well. There are great video essayists out there, such as Folding Ideas, Lindsay Ellis, Vox, and even hbomberguy. Separate the wheat from the chaff and don't look back.  

Deleted member 11501

Permanently banned for having an alt account.

I've recently started watching a lot of gid o essays and I have to say they all seem pretty legit to me. Nerdwriter1 and Vox do amazing ones. I've watched smaller channels and they do good ones as well. It's all down to the tone and personality of the editor and writers if you ask me. Every Frame A Painting said for every minute of content they made was about 8 hours of research and editing , so some do make a effort to make quality essays. But I've yet to watch a bad one  

Messofanego

Griselbrand said: This reminds me of that one video where someone breaks down how Louis CK writes and delivers his jokes. I don't remember what the example was but watching the video I felt like I'd learned nothing and it was just a dude way over analyzing something. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

Some are better than others. I think there's one I stumbled on called "charisma on demand" and it's pretty clear there's not much of value happening in those videos. It's all bluff. Certain people have a talent of speaking a lot, without saying anything. But I've seen some good ones.  

Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku!

Salty_Piers said: pinnacle of video essays imo Click to expand... Click to shrink...

Self-requested ban

Terrible video essays are terrible. Good video essays are good. I don't tend to seek them out actively, but the best make their way to me somehow. I watch... Comedy gaming analysis and reviews : Clemps, TheGamingBrit, Stop Skeletons From Fighting, Austin Eruption, Caddicarus, Arlo Upfront gaming analysis and reviews : Super Bunnyhop, Noclip, Nostalgia Nerd, Matthewmatosis, Joseph Anderson Anime analysis and reviews : Glass Reflection, Super Eyepatch Wolf, Mother's Basement Cartoon analysis and reviews : RebelTaxi, Saberspark Film analysis and reviews : Red Letter Media, Movies with Mikey  

I love Vox's essays on rap music, it feels like i'm actually taking a class in production.  

Scullibundo

Nerdwriter is the worst.  

GenericForumName

Banned for suspected use of alt account.

Cipher Peon

One winged slayer.

I LOVE video essays and I feel like there aren't nearly enough. Of course, I want them to be better, but I can't get enough of them ^^ To answer the question of "And honestly if you're into music or movies do you really need to be told that Rumours is a good album or how David Fincher is a good director?", the answer is of course!!!  

HardTimesFamilyPride

Scullibundo said: Nerdwriter is the worst. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

What is a Video Essay? The Art of the Video Analysis Essay

I n the era of the internet and Youtube, the video essay has become an increasingly popular means of expressing ideas and concepts. However, there is a bit of an enigma behind the construction of the video essay largely due to the vagueness of the term.

What defines a video analysis essay? What is a video essay supposed to be about? In this article, we’ll take a look at the foundation of these videos and the various ways writers and editors use them creatively. Let’s dive in.

Watch: Our Best Film Video Essays of the Year

Subscribe for more filmmaking videos like this.

What is a video essay?

First, let’s define video essay.

There is narrative film, documentary film, short films, and then there is the video essay. What is its role within the realm of visual media? Let’s begin with the video essay definition. 

VIDEO ESSAY DEFINITION

A video essay is a video that analyzes a specific topic, theme, person or thesis. Because video essays are a rather new form, they can be difficult to define, but recognizable nonetheless. To put it simply, they are essays in video form that aim to persuade, educate, or critique. 

These essays have become increasingly popular within the era of Youtube and with many creatives writing video essays on topics such as politics, music, film, and pop culture. 

What is a video essay used for?

• To persuade an audience of a thesis
• To educate on a specific subject
• To analyze and/or critique 

What is a video essay based on?

Establish a thesis.

Video analysis essays lack distinguished boundaries since there are countless topics a video essayist can tackle. Most essays, however, begin with a thesis. 

How Christopher Nolan Elevates the Movie Montage  •  Video Analysis Essays

Good essays often have a point to make. This point, or thesis, should be at the heart of every video analysis essay and is what binds the video together. 

Related Posts

• Stanley Kubrick Directing Style Explained →
• A Filmmaker’s Guide to Nolan’s Directing Style →
• How to Write a Voice Over Montage in a Script →

interviews in video essay

Utilize interviews.

A key determinant for the structure of an essay is the source of the ideas. A common source for this are interviews from experts in the field. These interviews can be cut and rearranged to support a thesis. 

Roger Deakins on "Learning to Light"  •  Video Analysis Essays

Utilizing first hand interviews is a great way to utilize ethos into the rhetoric of a video. However, it can be limiting since you are given a limited amount to work with. Voice over scripts, however, can give you the room to say anything. 

How to create the best video essays on Youtube

Write voice over scripts.

Voice over (VO) scripts allow video essayists to write out exactly what they want to say. This is one of the most common ways to structure a video analysis essay since it gives more freedom to the writer. It is also a great technique to use when taking on large topics.

In this video, it would have been difficult to explain every type of camera lens by cutting sound bites from interviews of filmmakers. A voice over script, on the other hand, allowed us to communicate information directly when and where we wanted to.

Ultimate Guide to Camera Lenses  •  Video essay examples

Some of the most famous video essayists like Every Frame a Painting and Nerdwriter1 utilize voice over to capitalize on their strength in writing video analysis essays. However, if you’re more of an editor than a writer, the next type of essay will be more up your alley. 

Video analysis essay without a script

Edit a supercut.

Rather than leaning on interview sound bites or voice over, the supercut video depends more on editing. You might be thinking “What is a video essay without writing?” The beauty of the video essay is that the writing can be done throughout the editing. Supercuts create arguments or themes visually through specific sequences. 

Another one of the great video essay channels, Screen Junkies, put together a supercut of the last decade in cinema. The video could be called a portrait of the last decade in cinema.

2010 - 2019: A Decade In Film  •  Best videos on Youtube

This video is rather general as it visually establishes the theme of art during a general time period. Other essays can be much more specific. 

Critical essays

Video essays are a uniquely effective means of creating an argument. This is especially true in critical essays. This type of video critiques the facets of a specific topic. 

In this video, by one of the best video essay channels, Every Frame a Painting, the topic of the film score is analyzed and critiqued — specifically temp film score.

Every Frame a Painting Marvel Symphonic Universe  •  Essay examples

Of course, not all essays critique the work of artists. Persuasion of an opinion is only one way to use the video form. Another popular use is to educate. 

• The Different Types of Camera Lenses →
• Write and Create Professionally Formatted Screenplays →
• How to Create Unforgettable Film Moments with Music →

Video analysis essay

Visual analysis.

One of the biggest advantages that video analysis essays have over traditional, written essays is the use of visuals. The use of visuals has allowed video essayists to display the subject or work that they are analyzing. It has also allowed them to be more specific with what they are analyzing. Writing video essays entails structuring both words and visuals. 

Take this video on There Will Be Blood for example. In a traditional, written essay, the writer would have had to first explain what occurs in the film then make their analysis and repeat.

This can be extremely inefficient and redundant. By analyzing the scene through a video, the points and lessons are much more clear and efficient. 

There Will Be Blood  •   Subscribe on YouTube

Through these video analysis essays, the scene of a film becomes support for a claim rather than the topic of the essay. 

Dissect an artist

Essays that focus on analysis do not always focus on a work of art. Oftentimes, they focus on the artist themself. In this type of essay, a thesis is typically made about an artist’s style or approach. The work of that artist is then used to support this thesis.

Nerdwriter1, one of the best video essays on Youtube, creates this type to analyze filmmakers, actors, photographers or in this case, iconic painters. 

Caravaggio: Master Of Light  •  Best video essays on YouTube

In the world of film, the artist video analysis essay tends to cover auteur filmmakers. Auteur filmmakers tend to have distinct styles and repetitive techniques that many filmmakers learn from and use in their own work. 

Stanley Kubrick is perhaps the most notable example. In this video, we analyze Kubrick’s best films and the techniques he uses that make so many of us drawn to his films. 

Why We're Obsessed with Stanley Kubrick Movies  •  Video essay examples

Critical essays and analytical essays choose to focus on a piece of work or an artist. Essays that aim to educate, however, draw on various sources to teach technique and the purpose behind those techniques. 

What is a video essay written about?

Historical analysis.

Another popular type of essay is historical analysis. Video analysis essays are a great medium to analyze the history of a specific topic. They are an opportunity for essayists to share their research as well as their opinion on history. 

Our video on aspect ratio , for example, analyzes how aspect ratios began in cinema and how they continue to evolve. We also make and support the claim that the 2:1 aspect ratio is becoming increasingly popular among filmmakers. 

Why More Directors are Switching to 18:9  •  Video analysis essay

Analyzing the work of great artists inherently yields a lesson to be learned. Some essays teach more directly.

• Types of Camera Movements in Film Explained →
• What is Aspect Ratio? A Formula for Framing Success →
• Visualize your scenes with intuitive online shotlist software →

Writing video essays about technique

Teach technique.

Educational essays designed to teach are typically more direct. They tend to be more valuable for those looking to create art rather than solely analyze it.

In this video, we explain every type of camera movement and the storytelling value of each. Educational essays must be based on research, evidence, and facts rather than opinion.

Ultimate Guide to Camera Movement  •  Best video essays on YouTube

As you can see, there are many reasons why the video essay has become an increasingly popular means of communicating information. Its ability to use both sound and picture makes it efficient and effective. It also draws on the language of filmmaking to express ideas through editing. But it also gives writers the creative freedom they love. 

Writing video essays is a new art form that many channels have set high standards for. What is a video essay supposed to be about? That’s up to you. 

Organize Post Production Workflow

The quality of an essay largely depends on the quality of the edit. If editing is not your strong suit, check out our next article. We dive into tips and techniques that will help you organize your Post-Production workflow to edit like a pro. 

Up Next: Post Production →

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The video essay boom

Hour-long YouTube videos are thriving in the TikTok era. Their popularity reflects our desire for more nuanced content online.

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The video essay’s reintroduction into my adult life was, like many things, a side effect of the pandemic. On days when I couldn’t bring myself to read recreationally, I tried to unwind after work by watching hours and hours of YouTube.

My pseudo-intellectual superego, however, soon became dissatisfied with the brain-numbing monotony of “day in the life” vlogs, old Bon Appétit test kitchen videos, and makeup tutorials. I wanted content that was entertaining, but simultaneously informational, thoughtful, and analytical. In short, I wanted something that gave the impression that I, the passive viewer, was smart. Enter: the video essay.

Video essays have been around for about a decade, if not more, on YouTube. There is some debate over how the form preceded the platform; some film scholars believe the video essay was born out of and remains heavily influenced by essay films , a type of nonfiction filmmaking. Regardless, YouTube has become the undisputed home of the contemporary video essay. Since 2012, when the platform began to prioritize watch-time over views , the genre flourished. These videos became a significant part of the 2010s YouTube landscape, and were popularized by creators across film, politics, and academic subcultures.

Today, there are video essays devoted to virtually any topic you can think of, ranging anywhere from about 10 minutes to upward of an hour. The video essay has been a means to entertain fan theories , explore the lore of a video game or a historical deep dive , explain or critique a social media trend , or like most written essays, expound upon an argument, hypothesis , or curiosity proposed by the creator.

Some of the best-known video essay creators — Lindsay Ellis, Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints, and Abigail Thorn of PhilosophyTube — are often associated with BreadTube , an umbrella term for a group of left-leaning, long-form YouTubers who provide intellectualized commentary on political and cultural topics.

It’s not an exaggeration to claim that I — and many of my fellow Gen Zers — were raised on video essays, academically and intellectually. They were helpful resources for late-night cramming sessions (thanks Crash Course), and responsible for introducing a generation to first-person commentary on all sorts of cultural and political phenomena. Now, the kids who grew up on this content are producing their own.

“Video essays are a form that has lent itself particularly well to pop culture because of its analytical nature,” Madeline Buxton, the culture and trends manager at YouTube, told me. “We are starting to see more creators using video essays to comment on growing trends across social media. They’re serving as sort of real-time internet historians by helping viewers understand not just what is a trend, but the larger cultural context of something.”

any video that starts with "the rise and fall of" I'm clicking on it no matter the topic — zae | industry plant (@ItsZaeOk) February 23, 2022

A lot has been said about the video essay and its ever-shifting parameters . What does seem newly relevant is how the video essay is becoming repackaged, as long-form video creators find a home on platforms besides YouTube. This has played out concurrently with the pandemic-era shift toward short-form video, with Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube respectively launching Reels, Spotlight, and Shorts to compete against TikTok.

TikTok’s sudden, unwavering rise has proven the viability of bite-size content, and the app’s addictive nature has spawned fears about young people’s dwindling attention spans. Yet, the prevailing popularity of video essays, from new and old creators alike, suggests otherwise. Audiences have not been deterred from watching lengthy videos, nor has the short-form pivot significantly affected creators and their output. Emerging video essayists aren’t shying away from length or nuance, even while using TikTok or Reels as a supplement to grow their online following.

One can even argue that we are witnessing the video essay’s golden era . Run times are longer than ever, while more and more creators are producing long-form videos. The growth of “creator economy” crowdfunding tools, especially during the pandemic, has allowed video essayists to take longer breaks between uploads while retaining their production quality.

“I do feel some pressure to make my videos longer because my audience continues to ask for it,” said Tiffany Ferguson, a YouTube creator specializing in media criticism and pop culture commentary. “I’ve seen comments, both on my own videos and those I watch, where fans are like, ‘Yes, you’re feeding us,’ when it comes to longer videos, especially the hour to two-hour ones. In a way, the mentality seems to be: The longer the better.”

In a Medium post last April, the blogger A. Khaled remarked that viewers were “willing to indulge user-generated content that is as long as a multi-million dollar cinematic production by a major Hollywood studio” — a notion that seemed improbable just a few years ago, even to the most popular video essayists. To creators, this hunger for well-edited, long-form video is unprecedented and uniquely suitable for pandemic times.

The internet might’ve changed what we pay attention to, but it hasn’t entirely shortened our attention span, argued Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media technology at the University of Alabama. “It has made us more selective about the things we want to devote our attention to,” she told me. “People are willing to devote time to content they find interesting.”

Every viewer is different, of course. I find that my attention starts to wane around the 20-minute mark if I’m actively watching and doing nothing else — although I will admit to once spending a non-consecutive four hours on an epic Twin Peaks explainer . Last month, the channel Folding Ideas published a two-hour video essay on “the problem with NFTs,” which has garnered more than 6 million views so far.

Hour-plus-long videos can be hits, depending on the creator, the subject matter, the production quality, and the audience base that the content attracts. There will always be an early drop-off point with some viewers, according to Ferguson, who make it about two to five minutes into a video essay. Those numbers don’t often concern her; she trusts that her devoted subscribers will be interested enough to stick around.

“About half of my viewers watch up to the halfway point, and a smaller group finishes the entire video,” Ferguson said. “It’s just how YouTube is. If your video is longer than two minutes, I think you’re going to see that drop-off regardless if it’s for a video that’s 15 or 60 minutes long.”

Some video essayists have experimented with shorter content as a topic testing ground for longer videos or as a discovery tool to reach new audiences, whether it be on the same platform (like Shorts) or an entirely different one (like TikTok).

“Short-form video can expose people to topics or types of content they’re not super familiar with yet,” Maddox said. “Shorts are almost like a sampling of what you can get with long-form content.” The growth of Shorts, according to Buxton of YouTube, has given rise to this class of “hybrid creators,” who alternate between short- and long-form content. They can also be a starting point for new creators, who are not yet comfortable with scripting a 30-minute video.

Queline Meadows, a student in Ithaca College’s screen cultures program, became interested in how young people were using TikTok to casually talk about film, using editing techniques that borrowed heavily from video essays. She created her own YouTube video essay titled “The Rise of Film TikTok” to analyze the phenomenon, and produces both TikTok micro-essays and lengthy videos.

“I think people have a desire to understand things more deeply,” Meadows told me. “Even with TikTok, I find it hard to unfold an argument or explore multiple angles of a subject. Once people get tired of the hot takes, they want to sit with something that’s more nuanced and in-depth.”

@que1ine link in bio #fyp #filmtok #filmtiktok #videoessay ♬ Swing Lynn - Harmless

It’s common for TikTokers to tease a multi-part video to gain followers. Many have attempted to direct viewers to their YouTube channel and other platforms for longer content. On the contrary, it’s in TikTok’s best interests to retain creators — and therefore viewers — on the app. In late February, TikTok announced plans to extend its maximum video length from three minutes to 10 minutes , more than tripling a video’s run-time possibility. This decision arrived months after TikTok’s move last July to start offering three-minute videos .

As TikTok inches into YouTube-length territory, Spotify, too, has introduced video on its platform, while YouTube has similarly signaled an interest in podcasting . In October, Spotify began introducing “video podcasts,” which allows listeners (or rather, viewers) to watch episodes. Users have the option to toggle between actively watching a podcast or traditionally listening to one.

What’s interesting about the video podcast is how Spotify is positioning it as an interchangeable, if not more intimate, alternative to a pure audio podcast. The video essay, then, appears to occupy a middle ground between podcast and traditional video by making use of these key elements. For creators, the boundaries are no longer so easy to define.

“Some video essay subcultures are more visual than others, while others are less so,” said Ferguson, who was approached by Spotify to upload her YouTube video essays onto the platform last year. “I was already in the process of trying to upload just the audio of my old videos since that’s more convenient for people to listen to and save on their podcast app. My reasoning has always been to make my content more accessible.”

To Ferguson, podcasts are a natural byproduct of the video essay. Many viewers are already consuming lengthy videos as ambient entertainment, as content to passively listen to while doing other tasks. The video essay is not a static format, and its development is heavily shaped by platforms, which play a crucial role in algorithmically determining how such content is received and promoted. Some of these changes are reflective of cultural shifts, too.

Maddox, who researches digital culture and media, has a theory that social media discourse is becoming less reactionary. She described it as a “simmering down” of the hot take, which is often associated with cancel culture . These days, more creators are approaching controversy from a removed, secondhand standpoint; they seem less interested in engendering drama for clicks. “People are still providing their opinions, but in conjunction with deep analysis,” Maddox said. “I think it says a lot about the state of the world and what holds people’s attention.”

no u know what i HATE video essay slander......... they r forever gonna be my fav background noise YES i enjoy the lofi nintendo music and YES i want a 3 hour video explaining the importance of the hair color of someone from a show i've never watched — ☻smiley☻ (@smiley_jpeg) January 19, 2022

That’s the power of the video essay. Its basic premise — whether the video is a mini-explainer or explores a 40-minute hypothesis — requires the creator to, at the very least, do their research. This often leads to personal disclaimers and summaries of alternative opinions or perspectives, which is very different from the more self-centered “reaction videos” and “story time” clickbait side of YouTube.

“The things I’m talking about are bigger than me. I recognize the limitations of my own experience,” Ferguson said. “Once I started talking about intersections of race, gender, sexuality — so many experiences that were different from my own — I couldn’t just share my own narrow, straight, white woman perspective. I have to provide context.”

This doesn’t change the solipsistic nature of the internet, but it is a positive gear shift, at least in the realm of social media discourse, that makes being chronically online a little less soul-crushing. The video essay, in a way, encourages us to engage in good faith with ideas that we might not typically entertain or think of ourselves. Video essays can’t solve the many problems of the internet (or the world, for that matter), but they can certainly make learning about them a little more bearable.

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The best video essays of 2020

A year of physical separation and isolation was, not coincidentally, a year of unprecedented outreach and collaboration amongst the artists, critics and scholars at work in the burgeoning form of the video essay. Our poll of 42 of those essayists highlights 170 recommendations.

26 December 2020

By  Ariel Avissar , Cydnii Wilde Harris , Grace Lee

Introduction

As with any retrospective article, newsletter or GDPR -compliant email this year, we must begin with the unavoidable acknowledgement of: wow… what a year.

But while many essayists may have understandably been less prolific than in previous years, this year’s turmoil may have incited an even stronger drive towards the ways we can connect with each other virtually. Last year, the word ‘community’ was suggested as an overarching theme for the poll, and if a theme has emerged through this year’s results it would be an evolution of that same communal spirit into one of collaboration. It has repeatedly been collaborative projects that have helped inspire new ideas in a time when motivation wasn’t easy to find and allowed us to feel closer when we physically cannot be.

The Video Essay Podcast, created by Will DiGravio, has expanded its scope this year, co-curating The Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist (along with Cydnii Wilde Harris and Kevin B. Lee), launching the Notes on Videographic Criticism newsletter to further share news and promote interesting new work, and introducing experimental homework assignments to encourage creativity and new methods of working. Response from the video essay community has been overwhelming: the BLM Playlist (selections of which have already been screened in several online events, discussed and written about) has grown to include over 130 video essays and related audiovisual materials, and nearly 70 videographic exercises have been submitted thus far in response to the various homework assignment prompts.

Another collaborative video essay project, Once Upon a Screen , organised by Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer, was published in the latest issue of The Cine-Files, and consists of a series of fantastic essays responding to a singular theme: how formative, traumatic experiences of cinema go on to impact our lives. Meanwhile, Nando v Movies gathered over 180 essayists on YouTube to come together and create the One X-Cellent Scene playlist (a sequel to 2019’s One Marvellous Scene ), collectively exploring the X-Men franchise.

These efforts were matched by increased institutional engagement, with further venues for the production and circulation of video essays joining the fold, such as the Netflix UK commissions (with an emphasis on Black creators); the new online journal Zoom Out ; Monographs , a new series of commissioned essays on Asian cinema by the Asian Film Archive ( AFA ), which premiered at the Dharamshala International Film Festival; and Thinking Images , a new videographic program at the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival.

Trends and numbers

An overview of the poll, and some numbers and statistics: of the 42 contributors to the poll this year, 27 are male, 13 are female and two are non-binary. They submitted a total of 241 votes, for 170 unique entries which span online video essays, essay films, documentaries, installations and an HBO series; also a Kanye West music video! These works were made – or published – this past year, by both established essayists and newcomers to the field; they range from 24 seconds to 14 hours in length; some were viewed only once or twice prior to appearing on this poll, others had up to 10.4 million views, and everywhere in between.

Unsurprisingly, some prominent trends that emerged in the poll results this year included video essays related either directly or indirectly to the COVID -19 pandemic and its consequences (with 21 mentions); the presence of the BLM movement was also felt (with 22 mentions), as well as a more political slant to this year’s picks in general. The Once Upon a Screen collection was also featured prominently (with 25 mentions), and included the two top-mentioned videos in the poll.

The top-mentioned videos were: Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox by Kevin B. Lee (12 mentions); My Mulholland by Jessica McGoff (ten mentions); Forensickness by Chloé Galibert-Laîné (nine mentions); and Feeling and Thought as They Take Form: Early Steadicam, Labor, and Technology (1974-1985) by Katie Bird (eight mentions). Catherine Grant and Luís Azevedo each had five different videos mentioned on the poll.

The videos are overwhelmingly presented in English (91 per cent) and are predominantly from the US (41 per cent) and the UK (28 per cent), while France makes up 6 per cent of the remaining votes, followed by 18 other countries (mostly in Europe). The dominant focus in terms of medium remains film (71 per cent of videos), with television (five per cent) and gaming (circa two per cent) coming in at distant second and third.

Of the essayists whose work is featured on the poll, 33 per cent are female (up from 24 per cent last year!) and 57 per cent are male (down from 68 per cent last year), with the remaining ten per cent made by mixed-gender teams or non-binary essayists. We did not parse – neither contributors nor picks – by race (among other reasons, as this would have been somewhat challenging), but hope that everyone is thinking more critically about whose voices they’re choosing to listen to and endorse.

We hope this poll continues to contribute to the ongoing conversation among creators and lovers of video essays worldwide, and that next year will see even more opportunities and venues for collaborating on, making and sharing this form that we are all so enthusiastic about; and also, you know, fewer fires and plagues?

Here are the results…

Table of contributors

(click on a name to jump to their picks.)

Film theorist and curator, Charles University in Prague & Národní filmový archiv

Forensickness

Chloé Galibert-Laîné

The author’s ongoing investigation of online communities and desktop interfaces continues to yield fascinating results. This time, it takes the form of a detective story which makes sure that no revelation waits for us at the end, but also, more importantly, that our cultural and technological mechanisms of knowledge-seeking are fundamentally flawed. Instead, it guides us through an endless road of detours whose diversity can surprise even a know-it-all desktop cinema aficionado. Not only a poignant contribution to videographic film studies but also a work that gives the adjective ‘essayistic’ a truly contemporary meaning.

Feeling and Thought as They Take Form: Early Steadicam, Labor, and Technology (1974-1985)

While examining film technology and its impact on the image content, I often wonder how to make these material interventions visible and open to reflection at the same time. Katie Bird’s exploration of the Steadicam and Panaglide camera devices indicates that videographic scholarship can be employed to overcome this dilemma. By understanding the camera operating as, first and foremost, an affective, embodied experience, many supposed ‘imperfections’ and ‘instabilities’ can be revealed as things that make the films tick. Moreover, the essay shows that the application of digital tools in archival research may have a more playful, creative side.

Crossings. On Freak Orlando

Johannes Binotto

This essay resurrects a relatively overlooked cinematic trend – the German queer cinema of the 1970s–80s and the wider tendency of stylistic and bodily excess in avant-garde cinema. What is crucial is that the author uses the short scene from Ulrike Ottinger’s Freak Orlando in a way that renovates the contemporary videographic practice as well. By putting his own body on display and overlaying the action on screen with his performance, he enables us to take the haptic visuality of the shot literally, and not just through the usual analog/digital manipulations. More of this, please.

The Wind in the Trees from Early Cinema to Pixar

Jordan Schonig

I have stumbled upon Schonig’s work thanks to Shane Denson’s new book Discorrelated Images (highly recommended, by the way), and I was happy to find out that he also makes accomplished scholarly video essays. This piece focuses on the contingencies (“rippling waves, rising dust, and fluttering leaves”) in early films and CGI animation, highlighting how digital algorithms make the distinctions between accidental qualities and careful calculation blurrier than ever. Schonig effectively demonstrates the divergences and affinities between the pre-cinematic and post-cinematic modes of staging accidents while also opening ways for addressing this complicated dialectic in the videographic form itself.

There Must Be Some Kind of Way Out of Here

Rainer Kohlberger

This year has seen the completion of a brilliant experimental film essay The Philosophy of Horror: A Symphony of Film Theory (Péter Lichter and Bori Máté). Nevertheless, as I have already mentioned this project in the last year’s poll, I would like to give a shout to another experimental work. Kohlberger’s film brings the spectacular world of disaster movies into contact with the dance of coloured dots on the surface of the image. This unpredictable humming occludes the well-worn explosions and catastrophes in Hollywood cinema and exposes them as mere paltry things compared to the horrors of filmic matter.

Live at Appleville

It may not be a videographic essay per se, but… In this video, as far from a traditional music concert as possible, the American hyperpop duo is goofing around in a dark room with a laptop showing scenes from Ratatouille. This disturbing yet strangely funny exercise creatively exploits the limitations of Covid and opens yet another place where cinema can be relocated. Somehow it could even fit as an unlikely addition to the Once Upon a Screen videographic project – a childhood cinematic trauma turned into a liberating performance. And I am not even a fan of the band…

Thinking Audiovisually

Department of Film Studies, Charles University

This is clearly a biased choice, but I still feel obliged to mention three student video essays. A workshop with Kevin B. Lee saw the birth of many short videographic exercises, some of which were developed into full-length pieces. As the videographic practice in the Czech Republic is being invented practically from scratch, I was surprised how accomplished, original, and funny the videos turned out. Thus, Lucie Formánková’s essay on her fascination with Tom Cruise’s acting, Valerie Špuláková’s work on a failed Czech dubbing of Twin Peaks, and Otto Urban’s look on the synecdochic character of trailers deserve a shout.

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Ariel Avissar

Media scholar, video essayist and lecturer at the Steve Tisch School of Film and TV , Tel Aviv University

What begins as a personal account of the experience of watching Chris Kennedy’s Watching the Detectives evolves into so much more; part essay film, part desktop documentary, part conspiracy thriller with a twist ending, this epistemological audio-visual meditation expertly weaves together some of my favourite preoccupations – cultural depictions of counter-terrorism intelligence efforts, John Carpenter’s They Live!, conspiracy boards, Game of Thrones fandom and Chloé Galibert-Laîné – into one jumbled, coherent, meandering, beautiful whole. My favourite media object of the year.

A Very Long Exposure Time

This silent visual poem was produced for the Time Complex exhibition at the Yerevan Biennial 2020. While aesthetically the polar opposite of Forensickness, it similarly develops Chloé’s ongoing fascination with images – how we see them, what they reveal, what they leave out, what can we use them for. Simple, stimulating, sublime.

To The Lighthouse

Kevin B. Lee

How do you make a video essay about a film you have no access to? Lee has previously wrestled with the challenges of inaccessibility. Commissioned for the 2020 International Film Festival Rotterdam Critics Choice, this enthralling mashup of 36 different films starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, described by Lee as his ‘fanfic version ’of The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers, will make anyone who hasn’t seen the film feel as though they have. Arguably more enjoyable than the original, and with considerably less flatulence.

Extreme Is My Name

Johanna Vaude

Made for ARTE ’s online magazine “Blow Up”, this impressive montage is both a tribute to and a study of the works of one of my favourite directors, Kathryn Bigelow. Vaude takes Bigelow’s raw, adrenaline-fused energy then dials it up to eleven. Her video grabs hold of you from the get-go, and doesn’t let up until it’s – regrettably – over.

The Age of Emptiness

Oswald iten.

Iten’s lovingly-edited video recuts the lush imagery of Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, focusing on shots devoid of human presence, and excluding human faces entirely. Fittingly accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s score from Scorsese’s own Taxi Driver, this tale of Edwardian-era New York aristocracy is recontextualised for our current day and age. The result plays like an annotated relic of the Age of the Coronavirus, such as might be uncovered by future historians seeking to make sense of this bizarre period in human history.

Catherine Grant

This moving epigraphic tribute to the late Irrfan Khan merges Khan’s performance in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool with excerpts from Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second to powerful, touching effect. Another example by Grant of what the videographic epigraph can achieve at its purest and most potent form.

House – Everything but the Kitchen Sink

Jesse Tribble

This ambitious six-part series on House MD , clocking in at four hours(!), is one of the most comprehensive analyses of a television series I’ve seen, certainly one devoted to a network medical procedural (in its early seasons, anyway). House remains one of my favourite (semi-guilty) pleasures, and while this episodic, narration-led effort by Tribble, highly impressive in its intimate familiarity with the show’s eight seasons, might not be ground-breaking in form or content, I found it extremely enjoyable and ridiculously watchable. Try the first part then see if you can resist the urge to keep on going; I certainly couldn’t.

Luís Azevedo

Filmmaker for hire. Maker of direct-to-video essays for Little White Lies , Mubi, Fandor, Amazon Prime &  Barbican

6ix9ine GOOBA except theres no music

Rob Lopez ( RØB )

Christopher Nolan | Doing It For Real

Julian Palmer (The Discarded Image)

Women Make Film

Mark Cousins ( watch trailer )

Cliff Booth Drives Home

Philip Brubaker

The Visual Architecture of Parasite

Thomas Flight

The Movies Behind Your Favourite GIF s

Leigh Singer (Little White Lies)

What Gordon Parks Saw

Evan Puschak (The Nerdwriter)

Filmmaker/writer

Expands the notion of what a video essay is and can be. Fascinating, even suspenseful. Blends performance in with videographic criticism in a way I had not seen before. Because of Binotto’s video, the way a critic can interact with a film is not what it was even a year ago.

From screening to (live) streaming

Davide Rapp & Andrea Dal Martello

An incredible marriage of past and present culture. Rapp & Martello have made a drop-dead hilarious critique of pandemic-era social media that is precisely funny because of how it recontextualises the movies that we grew up watching. It is an in-joke that richly rewards those who get it; how would these movies we loved in the past translate in today’s world?

Francisca Lila

A breathtaking, thorough taxonomy of flowers, plants and trees from the film canon. Lila’s brilliant, seamless editing makes the transition from Antichrist to Pather Panchali flow naturally, and part of the joy of this video essay is spotting and identifying the films she draws from.

In the Kitchen with Pedro Almodóvar

Luís Azevedo (Little White Lies)

Azevedo makes videos that are so sensuous and nimbly edited that he breathes new life into the clips on his timeline. Here his sensibility finds the perfect match: the kitchen. He finds captivating gestures from Almodóvar’s films and his speaking voice strikes just the right chord between his ideas and the visuals. Bravo.

Bad Vacations

The Criterion Channel

Criterion makes many great, concise supercuts to advertise the films on their streaming service. I wish they would credit the editors more generously, or at all, even. This is one that I have rewatched many times, because I love the arc; how a promising vacation can turn into a nightmare. This was a year full of miserable events that caused me great dismay, but somehow I delight in the pessimism of this teaser.

Change Needs to Come

Nelson carvajal.

Using simple, unadorned straight cuts set to an iconic song of the civil rights movement, Carvajal says what needed to be said. And oh, is it painful. A collection of cell phone imagery of black people murdered in contemporary life is juxtaposed with archival images dating back to slave times to show that in many ways, nothing has changed. We saw coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement throughout 2020, so I would be remiss not to include what I believe to be a very strong entry in this significant genre. I hate watching this video essay.

Video Artist and Founder of Free Cinema Now

Transcending Heidegger – The Cinema of Terrence Malick

Tom van der Linden (Like Stories of Old)

I was surprised by how moved I was by this video essay. Even with the voiceover element, van der Linden never hits the snooze button; his voice inquires, wonders and keeps insisting. By the end, I was floored by this work’s sincerity, the messaging, and its revelations about the human condition. Malick himself would be proud. It’s the best video essay of the year.

The Unloved – The Siege

Scout Tafoya (RogerEbert.com)

Part of the charm of Tafoya’s The Unloved series is that it gives us all a chance to beat our chests about our sentimental favorite films or guilty pleasure movies. When this entry on The Siege came out, it was a couple of months into the pandemic here in the States. I, like many people, was working from home, and felt really disconnected from the outside world. The way Tafloya injected socio-political urgency into his thesis for Zwick’s film, was like a bolt of electricity; it woke my senses, and reminded me of the very real world outside.

Wash Us In The Blood

Arthur Jafa

It was released as a music video but as soon as the appropriated images hit the screen and it was revealed to be created by video artist Arthur Jafa, it became, for me, a video essay. The striking juxtapositions Jafa creates between images and Kanye West’s music is thrilling. This is a vital work disguised as a music video. As I write this, it has 10,370,226 views on YouTube. That’s a really good turnout for a video essay if you ask me.

Andris Damburs

Cinefile, creator and moderator of 35 MM – A GROUP FOR CINEPHILES

Nothing at Stake

Everything is a remix: reality.

Kirby Ferguson

Aspect Ratio – The Changing Shape of Cinema

Leon Barnard

Physical Storytelling in Céline Sciamma’s Coming-Of-Age Trilogy

Why do you love cinema.

Ignacio Montalvo

Czechoslovak New Wave

Jonathan Keogh

Ian Danskin

Writer/editor/creator of YouTube channel Innuendo Studios .

Children of DOOM

Errant Signal

Errant Signal’s Children of DOOM is a dissection of the first-person shooter, wherein Chris Franklin takes what he considers to be the most important/interesting FPS from a given year and analyses it, planning to do one for every year of the genre’s existence. Chris has long been one of the most thoughtful voices in games criticism, and he’s always at his best discussing FPS . (His video on BioShock Infinite is what set me on the path to becoming a YouTuber.) In a year when watching political deep dives of the kind I typically make felt exhausting, this was my comfort food.

Coronavirus and America’s Death Cult

Carlos Maza

This is the year Carlos Maza – having previously been the main reason to subscribe to Vox’s YouTube – went solo and launched his own channel (he picked a heck of a year). He’s done excellent videos on the primaries and police brutality, but my fave is his video explaining the government’s response to the pandemic through the lens of neoliberalism and slowly devolving into a horror film. It does what all great political essays do: helps you understand a current event while also teaching you something fundamental that will help you understand much else about our world.

In Search of a Flat Earth

Dan Olson (Folding Ideas)

What at first appears to be a feature-length dissection of flat earth conspiracy theories telescopes out into the first comprehensive explanation of QA non I’ve seen, a distillation of the nature of conspiracy theories, a list of what other thinkers tend to overlook about conspiracists, and a sprinkling of love for the pursuit of knowledge. “Ultimately, it’s not about facts, it’s about power” is one of the most important takeaways of 2020.

Is Vine Cinema?

Kyle Kallgren (Brows Held High)

As he did two years ago with his video on bisexual lighting, Kyle Kallgren takes a seemingly innocuous subject – the life and death of Vine – and makes a video about EVERYTHING . About the essential units of filmmaking, about media that crosses social boundaries, about the speed of modern life and the formats best able to capture it, about race uprisings and cultural appropriation, about what happens when every so often The Youth are allowed to dictate culture. And all while montaging together his favorite Vines.

The $150,000 Banana

Sarah Urist Green (The Art Assignment)

Sarah Urist Green’s The Art Assignment didn’t end this year so much as go into low-power mode. The channel is still updated sporadically, but Sarah has refocused her attentions on other work. But, back in January – remember January? – she discussed Maurizio Cattelan’s then-trending art piece in which he duct taped a banana to a wall. Sarah employs her talent for taking strange, pretentious works on their own terms, digging into the banana’s surrounding contexts, the artist’s history, and the movement it’s part of, without ever claiming the work is ‘good’. This is her in her element.

we’re already ded || Zack Snyder, Part 2

Maggie Mae Fish

This year, the criminally under-appreciated Maggie Mae Fish started a series on the works of Zack Snyder, starting with a 15-minute look at how Snyder’s Superman contrasts with Supermen past, and then this 42-minute dive into how Snyder’s calcified, objectivist worldview manifests first in Dawn of the Dead and then across all his films.

Hamilton and the right mess it’s gotten me into

Grace Lee (What’s So Great About That?)

Grace’s dense and kaleidoscopic style proves a perfect match for the captivating yet self-contradictory musical that is Hamilton. The video goes back and forth over what makes Hamilton compulsively likable and also frustrating as heck, with every progressive idea undercut by something that seems to say the opposite, and every troublesome moment looking like it might be commentary on itself. Grace proves up to the task, providing not so much answers as a whole lot to think about.

Steven E. de Souza

It’s a Christmas movie. Bylines: @nytimes @LosAnglesTimes @FadeInMagazine @EmpireMagazine @SightSoundMagazine

How the Safdie Brothers Lie in Uncut Gems

Nehemiah Jordan (Behind the Curtain)

Never has a film essay had so disingenuous a title – but then N.T. Jordan’s essay is all about the art of misdirection. In truth, the brothers dissect as much as they dissemble, revealing more truths about the filmmaking process in 11 minutes than a semester of screenings. From the unanticipated dominoes that fall with casting changes (for instance, from a contemporary setting to a period one and back again), to unexpected sources of inspiration (spoiler alert: a colonoscopy) to the brutal marathon of 160 drafts over 10 years, the Safdies provide an unflinching portrait of the grind that is art.

The Most Important Filmmaker You Haven’t Heard Of

Jack Nugent (Now You See It)

Since silent days, women have been present in the editing suite, far too often unheralded (though not, of course, here). Starting with Margaret Booth in the 1930’s, then turning to Dede Allen and the late Sally Menke, Jack Nugent makes a strong case for these three artists as the midwives of modern film cutting. Both insightful and long overdue, Sight & Sound readers are urged to overlook the essay’s click-bait title… as they undoubtedly have.

Orson Wells a la Cinematheque Francaise

Pierre-André Boutang, Guy Seligmann

This month’s release of a major motion picture from an important filmmaker like David Fincher directly to a streaming platform sent a shock wave through Hollywood…. no, not the potential end of theatrical distribution as we know it, along with the shattering of the livelihood of exhibitioners and the shuttering of countless venues…I mean the impossible-to-shutter endless debate over Orson Welles: Boy wonder, or one-and-done-er? Found by Francois Thomas in the archives of the Cinematheque Francais only months ago, Welles gets another one hour 33 minutes with us… and we, with him.

Every Stormtrooper In Star Wars, Explained by Lucasfilm

Madlyn Burkert <@alohamaddy> and Doug Chiang

Call it classic or kitsch, revolutionary or rehash, but after 14 theatrical pictures and seven television series over 43 years for a total running time of let’s see, the original trilogy, six hours 20 minutes, then in chronological order Star Wars: Droids that’s 13 episodes x 23 minutes, plus 121 episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars… oh wait damn it, between the time I’m typing this and when it gets eyeballs, two more episodes of The Mandalorian will have been out, God knows what their running time will be, @jonfavs and @TaikaWaititi can’t even agree. Anyway, a long overdue taxonomy.

Steven Spielberg’s Use of Reflections

Shera Junushev

Like Bogart, this screenwriter is in a lonely place here with this one: I come to praise it, not critique it – but as observant as this essay is in recognising a signature Spielberg technique, in defining its effect as “allowing the audience to examine the details of a scene without losing connection to the character” it reduces psychology to geography. Rather, the subjective reflection shot’s true dynamic lies in flinging the filmgoer literally headlong into the protagonist’s shoes, bonding the viewer’s sense of self to the character with subliminal power.

The Irishman and the Death of the Gangster Film

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama declared The End of History. In 2020, Luis Azevedo is here to tell us that when we weren’t looking, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) declared the End of the Western, and in 2019, Martin Scorsese… hmm, how to best put this? Let’s just say that Luis thinks we got a real good genre here, it’d be a shame, a real shame if something happened to it…

Doctor Who and The Fourth Wall

Samuel Davis

From Justus D. Barnes’s gunshot in The Great Train Robbery in 1903 to Michael Caine’s seductive asides in Alfie (1966) to Joe Pesci bringing us full circle in Goodfellas (1990), breaking the fourth wall has been a key part of the motion pictures tool box. But those heralded films aren’t where we oh-so sophisticated Cineastes first encountered that jarring technique now, was it? And it wasn’t O Lucky Man, Amélie, or Fight Club, either. Come on, kiddies, fess up, you know the answer: here’s Samuel Davis to refresh your memory.

Monica Delgado

Peruvian film critic, director of Desistfilm.com

Presence: Call Me By Your Name

Fabian Broeker

I really liked this video: the search for a new topic in the treatment of a very hackneyed film.

On Contamination

Jessica McGoff

I felt interested about the political view of McGoff, because in this video she establishes correspondences between the filmmaker universe (animals and humans coexisting together) and social-environmental context.

Notorious Wavelengths

A Wave of the Hand. A way to the photo. An analysis of the use of the zoom in two opposite films, as a provocation. I never imagined watching this strange duel between Snow and Hitchcock.

Can any Johnny Guitar fan be indifferent to this?

Mariana Dianela Torres

There is a musical intention in this montage that attracts me a lot, that recovers a sensation of movement in the films of Chantal Akerman.

The Other Side of the Street

Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

I’m interested in the way in which Adrian and Cristina edit the images, research and voices, in an exact timing and leading us to subtle endings.

For some video essayists it’s a problem to work without complete films (for different restrictions). Kevin finished this challenge in a very playful and fresh way.

Will DiGravio

Host, The Video Essay Podcast ; Creator, Notes on Videographic Criticism ; Contributor, Film School Rejects

Follow the Cat

If there is one video essayist whose style and sensibility I most try to emulate in my own work, it is Johannes Binotto. His videos are rigorous and scholarly, yet deeply personal and emotional. In this video, like much of his work, Johannes turns his cinephilia into a shove which, like Lisa Fremont, he uses to dig deeper and deeper into the fabric of Rear Window. Follow the Cat gives us a new way of understanding familiar images, and thus gets at the heart of what videographic criticism is and what it can do and be.

Jazmin Jones

I think about Unlocked by video artist Jazmin Jones often. In an interview, Jones described the way she shifted the focus of the appropriated videos away from the white people at the centre: “It was a matter of zooming in… trying to reframe so that we’re really focusing on the pleasure and the experience of the black fems.” Jazmin may not have set out to make a ‘video essay’ when she created Unlocked, but the way she manipulates the footage is among the most powerful examples of the form I have seen.

cops ordering food

Manny Fidel

I can’t do justice to Manny’s video in 100 words. It’s hilarious and deeply insightful. I also love his follow-up tweet: “I made this in like four mins do NOT comment on its quality.” Manny’s video was made three weeks after the murder of George Floyd, at a time when a narrative emerged in the United States that police officers were somehow the real victims in society. The video makes a mockery of that absurd notion and, in the process, shows that a definition of ‘quality’ as it relates to videographic criticism is far more nuanced than one might think.

My First Film

Zia Anger ( watch trailer )

My First Film debuted in 2019 as a live film performance; an innovative desktop documentary that earned high praise in last year’s poll. Unable to perform in person this year, Anger began streaming live performances throughout the spring. The work continued to break ground and morphed into something new, a film that reflected Anger’s own pandemic experience. During the performance I saw, Anger texted her dad to say she loved him. Watching “My First Film” during such frightening times was a cathartic experience, one that made me briefly feel like I was back at the movies among friends and strangers.

Indy Vinyl: Records in American Independent Cinema: 1987 to 2018

Ian Garwood

Another ground-breaking work this year came in the form of Ian Garwood’s Indy Vinyl: Records in American Independent Cinema: 1987 to 2018, a project that features a range of video essays and written works. One aspect of video essay-making that often gets overlooked is the amount of time dedicated to making each and every video. Ian’s project, both in size and scope, but also given the fact that he released parts of this project as they were finished, beautifully captures the labor of love that is video-essay making, all while pushing the boundaries of what the form can be.

Tear away Turn back Breathe

Martina Probst and Chantal Hann

Over the past nine months, I have tried to relive my favourite pre-pandemic moviegoing experiences through video essays. This video by Martina Probst and Chantal Hann, two students at the Lucerne School of Art and Design, is among the finest analyses of Portrait of a Lady on Fire I have seen. But what I find so compelling about their essay is their willingness to at times forgo images entirely and embrace a blank canvas: the black screen. Video essayists often feel the need to fill every second with images. Perhaps we should allow our work to, like Marianne, breathe.

It’s Bad Luck to Compare Hands

Alex Slentz

Meshes of the Afternoon is one of those films that I rewatch all the time, just to try and understand how it works; how it was assembled. I feel the same way about Alex Slentz’s video, which blends together footage from Maya Deren’s film, Persona, and Un Chien Andalou. Similar to the video by Probst and Hann, I am inspired by the way Sletz allows us to see the canvas on which the video essay was created. The fluid movements of the images and their interactions with one another blend together in a beautiful collage and insightful analysis.

Video Essayist and Filmmaker

How Edgar Wright Uses Sound

Sound tends to be an underrepresented subject in the world of video essays. Julian’s essay mimics Edgar Wright’s editing and sound design to move effortlessly between his films, showcasing Wright’s unique approach to sound.

The Strange Reality of Roller Coaster Tycoon

Jacob Geller

Jacob Geller expertly ties together internet culture, video game design, and physics in this profound examination of the existential unease that can be found in a theme park simulation game from 1999.

Lies of Heroism – Redefining the Anti-War Film by Tom van der Linden (Like Stories of Old)

Weaving together examples from 49 films during the course of this nearly feature-length video essay, Tom thoughtfully and thoroughly examines depictions of war in cinema and whether it’s truly possible to make an anti-war film.

Dinner with Brad Pitt

Video essays can also just be a lot of fun. I’m not sure who had more fun, Luís Azevedo sitting down to edit this video, or Brad Pitt sitting down to dinner in all these scenes.

Researcher and filmmaker

The Viewing Booth

Ra’anan Alexandrowicz ( watch trailer )

An incredibly careful and thorough examination of the spectatorial mechanisms of two protagonists (a filmed spectator, and the filmmaker who is filming her) that exposes how much our beliefs and ideological convictions determine how we make sense of online images. Though rather pessimistic in its conclusion (no image can change a person’s political opinions – so long for a century-long history of activist media and political filmmaking), the film advocates convincingly for the political power of building respectful interpersonal relationships with our political opponents, and for the potential of images to serve as the basis for such conversations.

Il n’y aura plus de nuit

Eléonore Weber ( watch trailer )

This essay film looks at thermal imagery produced by helicopter pilots in a war context. We hear only one voice, but the words it speaks contain the gazes of many: from the pilots themselves, to the judges in military courts in charge of examining these images to determine retrospectively the legitimacy of the pilots’ decisions to kill, to the filmmaker who questions her mixed fascination for these images, to our own uncertainty about what these images expect from us – their probably unwanted, surplus witnesses.

On Contamination and My Mulholland

I equally love these two videos by Jessica McGoff. Re-watching On Contamination at the end of this year of sanitary crisis gives the video an uncanny, definitely prescient quality, but it is a great work independently from its unfortunate topicality. Like My Mulholland (which McGoff produced in the context of the video essay series Once Upon a Screen ), On Contamination explores an intimate form of narration in which the discussed film becomes not so much the limiting frame of the essay, but the substrate from which it grows in unexpected directions.

Elie Ga ( watch excerpt )

This essay – very much like my other picks – proposes a very personal, partly autobiographical, partly fictional narration, loosely based on a collection of images figuring objects found by ‘beachcombers’. Images come in waves onto the filmmaker’s table, who tentatively combines them into spatial arrangements and explorative superpositions, until the surf of the narration prompts their replacement with other images – some we discover, some we see again and again, constantly re-invested with new meanings.

I know very few video essayists who are willing to implicate themselves as much in their videos as Binotto does in this performative, wistfully celebratory and intensely personal short video piece. I admire the growing abstraction of Binotto’s work (such as in his video Trace , another strong candidate for this poll) for it opens up the possibility of unexpected, sensual engagements with the films with which it dialogues. These are video essays where images burgeon with news meanings and unlikely sensations, rather than being pinned down or constricted by the analysis.

Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed

This year I’ve seen a number of video essays reflecting on images of migrants on their way to Europe, and this film is by far the one I found the most inspiring. It recalls Philip Scheffner’s Havarie in its focus on a single, arguably illegible image, and its investment of the soundtrack as the lieu of meaning production. But the perspective is reversed: Havarie watched a ship sink from afar, Purple Sea plunges us in the water. The presentness of the image serves as the loam from which the story unfolds, made of the narrator’s uncertain memories and hopes.

Wild Heart 1981 / 2020

Zach Dorn ( watch excerpt )

From randomly filming contemporary online media flows to carefully re-animating on paper a decades-old improvised piece of footage (that was later uploaded to YouTube), this short essay deploys an impressively wide, and very personal narrative arc. The diversity of visual techniques that are employed in this virtuoso single-shot speaks to Dorn’s attempts to grasp his digital object and materialise it in the space of his home – a gesture that is fascinatingly articulated as one of self-care and compensation for the anxieties triggered by contemporary online media.

Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow

Desegregating the Two Shot: The Use of the Frame in The Defiant Ones (1958)

Henry Rownd

This finely detailed audiovisual commentary operates in the best tradition of close mise-en-scène analysis – a surprisingly marginal genre in the academic video essay world. Rownd demonstrates astutely how the image construction of the film tells a nuanced and complex story about race and space in the Civil Rights era, even as the surface narrative hammers home a more heavy-handed message.

Lisa Hanawalt: Being Human by Being Animal

This year I taught a dedicated video essay course for the first time in a while and Grace Lee was the go-to for examples of incredibly smart, quick-witted, well-researched and audiovisually engaging work. Lee’s awareness of the possibilities of animation shines through in this video, an awareness developed through both her critical and filmmaking practice.

Satis House

As is often the case with Catherine Grant’s work, Satis House is an exemplary act of collaboration. Firstly, it invites collaboration from the viewer by giving them more and more visual information to compare, without authorial commentary, as the video proceeds. Secondly, Grant’s accompanying writing refines and deepens the viewing experience, collaborating with it rather than simply describing it. Finally, the collaboration through writing is extended by the inclusion of a reflective piece by the cultural historian Lynda Nead, whose thinking about Great Expectations inspired the video in the first place.

My Mulholland

From my admittedly partial perspective, skewed towards video essays published in academic journals, a turn to the overtly personal seemed evident in a number of examples this year. Maybe it was fitting, then, that the year closed with the publication of the Once Upon a Screen collection in the Cine-Files, where video essayists reflected on formative film-viewing experiences. I’ve had a little more time to watch and think about Jessica McGoff’s contribution than the others, and it’s a wonderful reflection on the allure and perils of online media consumption, funnelled through a memorable first encounter with Mulholland Drive.

”Who Ever Heard…?”

Like Catherine Grant’s Satis House, Payne’s video uses an additive multi-screen compositional process that draws attention to repetitions in the source material – in this case a scene from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Payne’s approach is more overtly manipulative than Grant’s, repeating each shot from the scene to create a visual and aural montage that builds then recedes in intensity. The looping effect of the soundtrack, in particular, is mesmerising.

The Before Sunrise Waltz

This was the act of virtual film tourism I needed in the early months of lockdown. By orchestrating a Google Earth tour of the locations visited in Before Sunrise, Stone re-envisages the film from a panoramic perspective, thereby offering a completely different take on the original, which stays determinedly tied to Jesse and Celine’s ground-level progression through Vienna’s streets.

A Machine for Viewing

Richard Misek, Oscar Raby, Charlie Shackleton

Of course it’s a shame that the pandemic put a (temporary?) stop to the VR -video essay roadshow envisaged as part of Machine for Viewing, but the three videos published in NECSUS demonstrate that the project’s potential has already been realised. Whilst the demonstration of the technology is impressive, I related most to the videos’ use of VR to reflect on a traditional 2-D cinema-going experience. Who would have thought that the sight of a packed auditorium, witnessing the live VR presentation and commentary at the Sundance Festival, would now seem so poignant?

Hailey Gavin

Video essay creator

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Absurd Worlds

This is an excellent articulation of the questions Lanthimos asks and the visual and structural tools he employs. This is a must-watch for anyone who loved Nimic and conveys the power of shorts to reframe our understanding of auteurs’ work.

How Portraits Lie – What to be aware of in your portrait photography

Jamie Windsor

I love this clear exploration of a nuanced topic, supplemented by beautiful motion graphics and fluid editing.

This piece illustrates the sometimes inextricable nature of nostalgia and trauma. I also loved the way the essay draws points of connection between media of different formats from different times.

Audiovisual essayist and Professor of Film at the University of Reading.

Slap That Bass Zoomed

The elephant man’s sound, tracked., the original ending: the last acts of black horror heroes.

Cydnii Wilde Harris

Music and Point of View in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Patrick Keating

Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox

Video essayist; founding co-editor of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies ; Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and elected member of Academia Europea. Currently completing https:screenstudies.video

One of my all-time favourite videographic works by foundational artist and essayist Lee, or indeed by anyone. Part of a brilliant project recently published in issue 15 of the Cine-Files in the collection Once Upon a Screen , commissioned and curated by Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer.

Another astonishing work by one of the most innovative and significant of video essayists. Published online in December 2020, this video also deservedly garnered huge festival success, screening in competition at the Marseilles Festival of Documentary Film as well as at the Festival dei Popoli, the Kasseler Dokfest and the festival Caminhos do Cinema Português.

One of my all-time favourite pieces that we have published at [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Studies this last (or any) year. A wonderfully ambitious exploration of the first decade of stabiliser technologies and techniques. In surveying the industrial histories of two competing devices, the Steadicam and the obsolete Panaglide, Bird demonstrates, powerfully and movingly, how “now codified norms of craft labour practice around stabiliser’s aesthetic and generic forms emerged amongst a diverse range of media and eclectic techniques”.

Maryam Tafakory ( read synopsis )

I love Tafakory’s essay films and video essays, and this brilliant piece by her was one of the excellent new series of commissioned essays on Asian cinema, Monographs by the Asian Film Archive ( AFA ).

”Drawing upon histories and archives, both personal and regional, these works reveal new vistas of inquiry; ruminations that evince the essayists’ personal connections to [Asian] cinema, made more poignant by the fact that they were created during various states of isolation and solitude.”

The series had its world premiere at the Dharamshala International Film Festival held online from 29 October to 4 November 2020.

The latest work by hugely talented video essayist and film McGoff; her video was also part of the high quality collection Once Upon a Screen .

One of an outstanding collection of audiovisual essays devoted to explorations of gesture published in NECSUS : European Journal of Media Studies , curated by the wonderful video essayist and scholar Tracy Cox-Stanton, in December 2019. This video was also added to the essential Video Essay Podcast Black Lives Matter video essay playlist , curated by Cydnii Wilde Harris, Kevin B Lee and The Video Essay Podcast founder and host Will DiGravio.

Indy Vinyl, Interrupted

This video, published in 2020, is the tip of the amazing videographic iceberg that is Garwood’s work on his hugely original videographic/monographic project Indy Vinyl, as set out here and here .

Reader in Film and Sonic Arts, Liverpool John Moores University.

This audiovisual essay marries form and content in such an affecting manner that I was completely drawn into the essayist’s world. The universality of the space that Lee re-enacts/re-presents urged me to think back to the complexity of early childhood memories. The camera shot and movement choices coupled with the voice (which is sometimes masked) allows for an intimate story that perfectly reflects this particular moment and the trauma of early childhood.

If I could have made any other audiovisual essay, I wish it could have been this one! I love everything about it, from the voiceover, with its centrality of the cat, to the essayist’s own cat watching the screen. It is beautifully paced and offers an insightful point of entry to Hitchcock’s camera moves. It prompts a personal way into questioning cinematic spectatorship and image-making, and draws from an array of interesting representations of cats in cinema.

This audiovisual essay makes me think and feel differently about camera movement in cinema. It details a rich history drawing from technical manuals, instructional videos, film tests and experiments and other archival material to present an embodied argument that allows me to feel the moves of the Steadicam/Panaglide operator(s). The extent of the research is significant, but this is not merely a dissemination of research – the entire essay builds movement into its shape and form. It is truly inspiring work!

Forensickness is a longer audiovisual essay/experimental film that considers Chris Kennedy’s film, Watching the Detectives. Much like Galibert-Laîné’s earlier work, it deconstructs Kennedy’s film, goes to the online archive of material (this time on Reddit) to consider both the news footage circulating around the Boston Marathon bomb attack in 2013 and the Hollywood depiction of these events. This work is about how we see, how we consume images, and how we think about and through images.

McGoff’s My Mullholland is a poignant consideration of traumatic film viewing. The desktop format is most appropriate for examining the online consumption of film, and here the essayist’s own adventures on the internet and into the cinema of David Lynch are richly depicted through this approach. The audiovisual essay details some darker areas of the internet whilst also re-presenting the edgier moments of Lynch’s, Mulholland Drive. It is often fun and playful and the use of text is brilliantly deployed.

Garwood has had a prolific year creating audiovisual essays and has made a number that are inspired by the Zoom app as an aesthetic device, reflecting these recent months and how we have been collectively engaging online. He has created a showcase of this work which is available to audioview here . In a year where Black Lives Matter is at the forefront of political discussion, “Slap That Bass Zoomed” offers a timely de-centring of the white appropriator, instead offering an array of Black artists (named and unnamed) to take their rightful place onscreen.

Paris Bagdad: Fantasies of America(na) in German-American Cinema

Evelyn Kreutzer

Paris Bagdad: Fantasies of America(na) in German-American Cinema offers a personal route through Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) and Baghdad Café (Percy Adlon, 1987). This essayistic approach includes the use of superimposition, which is beautifully rendered and speaks to the sense of place and wanderlust that Kreutzer narrates her way through. This feels like a logical follow on from her earlier inspired work on German cinema, Berlin Moves (2017).

Chiara Grizzaffi

Postdoctoral Fellow at IULM University – co-editor of [in]Transition

MADELEINE / JUDY

The philosophy of horror: a symphony of film theory.

Péter Lichter, Bori Máté ( watch trailer )

Once Upon a Screen: Titanic

Victoria Wegner

Safe Bodies, Safe Environment: The Atmosphere of Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995)

Kelsey Draper

Film scholar and video essayist

That she was able to commute the cinematic trauma of Lynch’s work to the universal trauma of growing up during the Wild West years of the internet was a sublime insight. From the choice to take her audience on a journey through her desktop, to her recreations of jump scares and the IMD b message boards, this piece resonated with me on so many levels.

It’s one thing to understand that your colleague is brilliant. It is another experience entirely to watch an artist, independent of your relationship to them, so handedly exceed their own boundaries. Kevin’s piece on his childhood experiences with the film Platoon are an example of the very power of cinema to shape our relationship with the world, and the world’s relationship with us. Include that footage, and his deeply personal voiceover all combine to create an experience of childhood trauma so visceral, that I haven’t just gained new insight on the war epic itself.

This piece redefined what I believed to be the parameters of the video essay. By making manifest his own desire to enter a film, Joannes transcends the medium technically, and does so by seamlessly immeshing his own visuals, music, and handwriting into the groundbreaking work, Freak Orlando. He uses the style of his piece to supplement both that of the existing property and what the essayist has to say about it. Johannes didn’t just redefine how I’d like to create video essays. He redefined the limitations of how I can enter a film itself.

The greater focus of Dan’s essay, distilled what I’ve found so troubling about conspiracy theories, from the Illuminati to QA non, and how more often than not, their unstated purpose is to oppose my very existence. By laying bare the historical context of these theories and their creators, Dan articulated the harm these theories stand to enact, and makes them far less easy to laugh off.

As far as works responding to or including elements of our current reality, Ian’s use of Zoom is perhaps one of the most hopeful. This may also be a standout for how it combines both the Zoom revolution with the Racial Equity revolution, and may be one of the most effective ways I’ve seen the Zoom framework employed. Add to that, the editing is impeccably timed, and I left the video with a healthy list of performers to whom I was newly introduced.

Coco’s Feel-Good Oppression

Eliquorice’s video essay on Coco was my gateway drug to the rest of his works. His analysis of the film’s depiction of immigration within the narrative is poignant, but his comparisons between the failings of the immigration system in Disney’s magical realm to the failings of the system in our reality make a compelling case for how political ideology is communicated in family films. The inclusion of his own experiences with the immigration system come at just the right moment, thereby narrativising his analysis, while giving a human face to an issue often overshadowed by the enormity of the system.

The Satirical Resurgence of Reefer Madness

Yhara’s recent video essay on Reefer Madness delves into the historical context that lead to the film, its reception upon release, and its place in the canon of midnight features. Her candour, humour, and personality transcend what could have been a simple history lesson into an engaging conversation about the mutability of everything from social attitudes about cannabis to the constantly shifting legacy of a specific film alongside those attitudes. It’s Yhara’s deft balance of humour and context that reveals to her audience the absurdity that is racial stereotyping and discrimination.

Film scholar, video essayist, animation artist

When was the last time I found myself enjoying a supercut for almost seven minutes? Conforme has a relentless urgency thanks in large part to the driving score by Vaude herself. For me, it captures that contradictory state of frantic stasis that was and is 2020.

Johannes Binotto keeps exploring the possibilities of the video essay in all kinds of directions sidestepping technological wizardry by relying on household items. In Trace he creates tactile sensations from a single film still on a tablet. Seeing it again now, I wonder if it was about that one question all along: what does physical contact feel like?

With her well paced self-reflective long form essays, Chloé Galibert-Laîné has more than once managed to entice me into agreeing then disagreeing with her narration before finally realising that I had been too immersed to “pay attention to that woman behind the curtain”, so to speak.

With his entry in the Once Upon a Screen collection, Kevin B. Lee confirms that he is an incredible storyteller. Explosive Paradox looks deceivingly simple, but works on so many levels. Most importantly, I found it a deeply moving experience.

Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist

Curated by Cydnii Wilde Harris. Kevin B. Lee and Will DiGravio

As our field becomes ever wider, curated lists have become crucial to make sure that notable video essays and voices do not go unnoticed. Among them, the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist is an essential contribution, has a clear-cut profile and is co-organised by three widely connected practitioners.

Nehemiah Jordan

Creator of Behind the Curtain , an online community of screenwriters

The Social Network – Ten Years Later

The Royal Ocean Film Society

The reason why I chose this was primarily its experimental form. Using the topic of Facebook and social media, Andrew Saladino (creator) builds the entire video essay off of the Facebook feed – scrolling from clip to graphic to clip. Something to watch for its inventiveness.

Brave was a Disappointment

This video does a great job of walking through the origins of making this film, breaking down how it’s structured, and finally, how it could’ve been rewritten to be stronger. A long video, but extremely entertaining and well-organised.

The Psycho Chord – Consonance vs Dissonance

Listening In

This channel takes a deep look into an unexplored section of filmmaking: the sound. Specifically, the music and how it’s an integral part of the storytelling. Also, the production quality of these videos are incredibly high.

How Martin Scorsese Integrates The Shadow: A Jungian Practice

Jillian Snead (Jilloms)

A deep but practical analysis of the Shadow, using examples from Martin Scorsese’s filmography to explore how it’s been utilised in different characters. What’s so great here is that she translates all of the analysis into practical application for ourselves. How does one begin integrating their own Shadow into their lives? This video gives you the steps.

Christian Keathley

Professor of Film & Media Culture, Middlebury College; Founding co-editor of [in]Transition

Santa y Teresa

Michelle Farrell

Tarkovsky’s Napes

Pavel Tavares

Miklós Kiss

Associate Prof. in Audiovisual Arts and Cognition at University of Groningen, NL /co-author of Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video

One of the best audiovisual research essays of the year, through its presented information (a rich exploration of the first decade of film stabiliser technologies and techniques) and quality of presentation (technical skill, soundtrack, use of split-screen, etc.).

All Is Not Lost

Amy Rachlin

The video that managed to squeeze all the suspense of living in isolation during a pandemic AND one of the most goose-bumpy scenes of my favourite TV series into less than four minutes. Bonus: it’s also funny.

Davide Rapp and Andrea Dal Martello

Famous film scenes appear in TikToks, Skype calls, distance learning and online conferences. Another COVID -19 cinephile fun.

If you want to watch only one video about GIF s, it should be this one. [insert Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson nodding meme.]

Repeating Terror: Contemplating Death in Amat Escalante’s Heli (2013)

Niamh Thornton

A calm but powerful side-by-side reflection on the ethics of the slow depiction of hyper-realist violence in Amat Escalante’s 2013 Heli, using repetition and variation of the ‘same’ scene. A brilliant demonstration of the potentiality of videographic criticism.

“Parasites move from animal to human. Are we the parasites or the hosts?” An eerily prophetic video ‘on contamination’ (a response to Janis Rafa’s KALA AZAR ), made for the Critics’ Choice panel of the 2020 International Film Festival Rotterdam – thus released just weeks before the COVID -19 virus turned into a pandemic.

Contagion – Willy and Rutty

Luca Gentile, Sasha Quinlan Narciso, Romy Weggeman, Sam Klement

A naughty little video made by my Videographic Criticism students at the University of Groningen, mixing Soderbergh’s Contagion with the TV speeches of the Dutch king and prime minister during the first wave of COVID -19. It’s in Dutch, but you’ll get the point without understanding the language.

Jaap Kooijman

Associate Professor Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

Explosive Paradox undoubtedly is one of the most personal and moving audiovisual essays that I have after watched, and at the same time presents a convincing criticism of the way Hollywood glorifies violence, not only in films themselves, but also in the way these films are celebrated by film critics and Academy Awards. The essay contrasts the mundaneness of the cinema-turned-liquor-store where Lee first saw the film, back in the 1980s, and the seriousness of the trauma he experienced when confronted with this racially motivated violence. A wonderful piece of videographic criticism and art.

Mastering Dialogue: American Crime

Andreas Halskov and Previously on Perry Mason

Henrik Højer

I select these two audiovisual essays together, because they are the first two of a new series by the Danish 16:9 film journal which is based on a very specific parameter, a constraint in length. The audiovisual essays are 169 seconds (thus 2:49 minutes) long and described by the journal as ‘condensed audiovisual breakdowns’. Both take a US American television series as case study. The constraint in length forces the authors to focus on one specific element and to come straight to the point. Viewers are reminded of the short length as the seconds literally tick away.

Although I find the arguments of both audiovisual essays on, respectively, American Crime and Perry Mason, compelling and convincing, I am most fascinated by their shared form and how a relatively arbitrary constraint in length succeeds in condensing academic arguments about US American television into very seductive bites of television studies knowledge.

Days of Linda

One does not have to be familiar with Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978) to make sense of Days of Linda, a tribute to the actress Linda Manz, whose first film role was playing Linda. The audiovisual essay highlights Manz’s ‘central authorial contributions’ by combining Manz’s voiceover with footage from the film presented in split screen, with shots of a non-speaking Linda on the left and other scenes (some including Linda) on the right. In this way, character Linda does not only get a voice through actress Linda, but her original marginalised and silenced role is emphasised as well.

Adjunct lecturer and video essayist, Northwestern University

This year I was so short on time that I missed out on seeing a lot of videographic work, so even more than in other years, my suggestions are highly subjective. I picked three videos whose originality and/or currentness caught my attention this year.

Katie Bird’s video essay on early stabilisation technologies is a marvellously executed demonstration of videographic scholarship’s ability to simultaneously communicate historical film scholarship and evoke aesthetic, phenomenological experiences. Reflecting upon an under-researched, complex topic in a very accessible (and fun!) way, it’s also a perfect video essay to show in film classes.

Who Ever Heard…?

Matthew Thomas Payne

Payne’s short and playful videographic engagement with a single scene from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance spoke to me because of its marvellous use of rhythm, repetition, and sonic layering. As a sound scholar, I often ponder on the possibilities and limitations of videographic methods to investigate and/or express one’s ideas via sound. Payne’s video certainly does both.

Before the End

Before the End is an interesting case in terms of its circulation and 2020-ness (rather than conceptual or formal novelty). It’s a very simple, short video that uses the basic principles of editing and the Kuleshov effect to join excerpts from separate zoom interviews with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (without the audio) to suggest a narrative sequel to the Before film series. Stone’s video went viral, eventually reaching way more viewers than the original interviews had. It speaks to various intersecting technological, narrative, and communicative desires of this particular moment.

Video essayist

What Do I Want?

This video makes great use of the looping format of social media video and, originating from TikTok, an exciting addition to the ever-monstrously-expanding field of video essay.

For All Mankind: Is The Moon Landing Cinema?

Kyle Kallgren

I mean, if your video essay doesn’t have lego recreations of your subject matter… what are you even doing here? Get out of my house!

Sorry to Bother You – You can’t just tame people

Curio (Eric Sophia and Natalie)

Curio has made so many amazingly ambitious essays this year, but I especially liked this more low key video on white supremacy and capitalism in Sorry To Bother You which people may have missed amidst the excellent creative flair of their higher profile videos.

I’m sure this will be on many lists this year, but Kevin continues to be the most inventive, versatile video essayist out there and… come on… I couldn’t NOT mention this video (as well as the Once Upon a Screen project in general).

We Are Here Because of Those That Are Not

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

I’m maybe stretching the definition of video essay more than I ever have but if there isn’t at least one pick on a list that makes you think “come on now, this is just taking the piss” then is it even a Sight & Sound video essay poll list? This interactive archive of black trans experiences may be neither strictly video nor essay, but it’s one of the most important, creative and emotional things I saw this year. It’s got audio, it’s got visuals and it’s going on the list!

Filmmaker, Director of the first Masters program for Video Essays and Desktop Documentaries (at Merz Akademie)

Purple Sea and Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea: 28 October 2015

Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, Forensic Architecture

These are separate works, but together they encompass the vast range of possibilities that video essays can have in using the same source material. Explanatory in the best sense, Forensic Architecture uses Alzakout’s footage as part of a potent account of a disastrous shipwreck. Alzakout takes her footage in the opposite direction, with a deep exploration into the thoughts and experiences the footage does not reveal. In doing so the film offers a strong rebuke to the instrumentalisation that dominates image discourse.

More about Purple Sea can be found here .

Originally a VR video essay performed live at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, this virtual exploration of the cinematic experience is all the more poignant in a year in which cinemas face an existential crisis and so much of daily life has migrated to a digital simulacrum of itself. Along with Zia Anger’s live online performances of My First Film, it points to exciting new directions for the video essay – interactive and in real time.

Various Creators with the Asian Film Archive (detailed info here )

I should acknowledge that I served as editorial consultant on this, but there is simply no precedent for this massive series of video essays on Asian cinema commissioned by the Asian Film Archive in Singapore, involving an impressive roster of filmmakers, moving image artists and scholars. They premiered last month at the Dharamshala International Film Festival and will circulate over the coming months. I am especially enamoured of Ghosts Like Us by Riar Rizaldi, Spirit Film by Raya Martin, and Irani Bag by Maryam Tafakory.

The most thoroughly and impressively researched academic video essay I’ve seen this year, bringing a heightened and expanded awareness of the physical labor that goes into a shot and how different approaches to technology and craft yield different effects of cinematic embodiment. A video essay that deepens one’s appreciation for the bodily experience of film viewing and filmmaking alike.

Also: Sonic Chronicle Post Sound by Cormac Donnelly.

An experiment in watching propaganda leads to a wholesale reassessment of the assumptions behind progressive documentary filmmaking. A brave self-critique of one’s longstanding practices and ideals in the face of an emerging set of sobering realities.

See also: Indy Vinyl, Interrupted by Ian Garwood.

Part of the Once Upon a Screen series of video essays on childhood film viewing-as-trauma, published on the Cine-Files Journal – this particular entry brings the topic out of the past tense with an exceptional liveness and presence. As my other selections would attest, questions of spectatorship and an expanded cultural and technological framework for understanding cinema are the foci for the video essays that I find most exciting right now. This desktop documentary engages all those themes brilliantly.

Real Talk: Is Breadtube Discussing Race ‘Right’?

Professor Flowers

Working on the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist was among the most significant experiences of the year for me, and through it I learned about several fantastic video essayists working in academia, YouTube and social media. I found especially noteworthy this careful consideration of the performativity of progressive racial politics on YouTube.

Eric Sophia McAllister

Video essayist working on YouTube covering media and cultural analysis, with a particular political focus on queer and leftist topics

I have to get this pick up front because it is the single greatest piece of video essay/documentary content on YouTube, not just this year. Olson has raised the bar absurdly high with this moving, insightful, well-researched, funny, well-shot and ideologically devastating look into the worlds of internet conspiracy theory. This isn’t just a YouTube video about conspiracy theorists, it is a phenomenology. What is always impressive about Dan Olson is how well he structures information for maximum impact, and the “mid point twist” of this video hits like an atom bomb.

A Prison of Our Own Loneliness

Sarah Zedig (let’s talk about stuff.)

This piece subverts the oft-derided talking head form of the YouTube video essay by having Sarah sit staring into the camera NOT talking while her pre-recorded voice-over delivers this essay about the pandemic, loneliness, nations, world politics and media, culminating in a silent scream and then breakdown into tears that is simply one of the most moving things I have ever seen on the platform. By the end of watching this you definitely will feel the catharsis of letting everything out with a ‘good old cry’, but most likely because you will actually cry.

Tyr & Grem (Pamphleteer)

It’s best to acknowledge up front that this video is aping off the style of a video that I made, simply because I want to say that I see how self-serving it might appear to select it but I had to anyway, because this video is simply so so SO good. Tyr & Grem had a double realisation earlier this year when Tyr came out as a trans woman and Grem realised they were, and always had been, a lesbian. This video takes the form of a “Martian Poem” inspired by Alan Moore’s Watchmen and will knock your socks off.

The Ideology of Apocalypse

Jack has been at the top of his game as a media analysis and political commentary essayist for a while – from his ‘Copaganda’ trilogy about police movies to his evolving series on cartoon animals as race metaphor and all the inherent problems therein – but this masterwork taking a broad survey across apocalyptic fiction to study its cultural and ideological trends is the tippy top of the tippy top. Not to mention that in the year of our Lord 2020 the cultural question of how we perceive and process the apocalypse seems uncomfortably relevant.

Twitter and Empathy

In the world of liberal and progressive politics, the notion of ‘empathy’ is often invoked as a virtue, but this essay is really special for questioning what we actually mean when we talk about empathy. Big Joel knocks it out of the park by dissecting the way we evoke this concept and the revelation that it’s actually several different, intersecting and nebulous concepts being crammed under the one umbrella.

Oblivion &  Women

Lilly (mothcub)

Did you know feminism makes games more fun, not less? Lilly knows this. While her channel doesn’t usually engage in media analysis or produce video essays, this was still one of my favourite media analysis essays this year. Lilly takes us on a journey through a quest in Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion and how it seemingly for no reason at all pulls the rug out from under itself and makes the quest less fun, when the obvious answer to any feminist gamer chad would be to go the other way entirely.

The Beginner’s Guide: This Is Not For You

Grace’s essays are always stunningly good. Shockingly good. Upsettingly good. Their essays are sharp, funny, insightful, well researched and paced so well that at the end of a ten-minute What’s So Great About That video I feel like I’ve just watched an hour, but in the best possible way. To paraphrase my esteemed colleague in political commentary, Mr. Rubin, Grace’s videos put my brain in recovery mode from all the high-level important ideas. This particular essay takes a hard look at the cultural, social, and personal implications of interpretation and when and how we should and shouldn’t do it.

Critical writer and video essayist

Days Passed: Lee Kang-Sheng Through the Eyes of Tsai Ming-Liang

Michelle Cho

Once Upon a Screen: On Psycho and The Witches

Daniel mcilwraith.

Video essayist and video editor

Blissfully Between Binaries with Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Carlos natálio.

Film Teacher and Researcher at Católica University (O Porto); Film Programmer at IndieLisboa Film Festival; Film Critic at À pala de Walsh website

One of the reasons why Kevin B. Lee’s work is ground-breaking in video essays because his imagination is always one step ahead. He is constantly reminding us that working with the body of cinema is working with your memories and affections, and circumventing material limitations. Here, childhood cinema is projected on a shadowy wall of a former movie theatre, Platoon is remembered between leaves and trees’ reflections. Violence of the past, violence of the present. An essay about memory and the permanence of racism. Video essays are tools to reedit the present.

Forensickness is a real detective story. Chloé understands the whodunnit potential of the desktop film form and the intellectual investigation of a visual construction. She takes us by the end through her own investigation processes, while making us realise that there are only combinations, versions of the truth. We’ve passed the moment where critical theory intellectuals would point out the ‘spectacle’ in images. At the moment, the faking and ‘unfaking’ of images is a two-way business, intellectuals go along with pastors and internet police works share regards with so-called police experts.

Some Visual Thoughts About Perceptions in Rebecca

Ricardo Vieira Lisboa

Lisboa is a very ironic and shrewd video essayist. Here he is fooling around with Hitchcock’s Rebecca, using cinema’s toolbox of directors and works – Kiarostami’s Copie Conforme, Lang’s Secret Behind the Door, Godard’s Adieu au Language, Cláudia Varejão’s No Escuro do Cinema Descalço os Sapatos. The essay dismantles Rebecca’s work from the themes of signature, drop/marriage, sea/see, idealisation, signature appropriation. In Lisboa’s works always expect the unexpectable: a laugh or an unhappy emoticon, next to a brilliant capacity for film analysis.

In Memoriam

Lucía Alonso Santos

2020 is a year of confinement, although we are able to film inside our homes, inside our heads, and travel virtually. In this honest video essay, Lucía Santos is ‘verifying’ what she knew of Thailand through Apichatpong’s films using Google Street Views. Memories of something not happening as she anticipates Memoria by the Thai director. In what way do the images we have access to replace the cinematic experiences we might have?

L’Assassinat Kennedy au cinéma

Editing together various films and also archive footage, this video essay signals the assassination of John F. Kennedy 57 years ago. More than just documenting and representing the tragic event, Luc Lagier aims at expanding our perception by combining several other films that confuse, momentarily, our perception and feelings towards the event. Suspense without graphic violence is also at play here.

I have always had a fascination with the idea that directors’ works and films can sensually meet and clash through video essays. Which beautiful monsters can be brought to life via these experiments? Ian Magor does this by joining an iconic shot from Notorious by Alfred Hitchcock to Michael Snow’s classic avant-garde Wavelength. The result is disquieting and this tells us how video essays, despite their analytical potentialities, might also look like Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment laboratory.

Shadows of Our Forgotten Montages

Dianela Torres

From watching films other films are born. Giving a form to our cinephile gaze, a body of montage made with what I see and what I make of that seeing. In this beautiful, oneiric video essay, on Sergei Parajanov’s film Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, Dianela states she aimed for “interpretation and dialectical appropriation of rhythmic and metric”, “emotions and the fluid time-space, music and colours”. Montage unto montage, organic appropriations, essay convey aesthetics and we are reminded of Marcus Aurelius’ words: “all things are implicated in one another.”

Daniela Persico

Programmer, Locarno Film Festival / founder, filmidee.it

A video about the investigation as a drive of contemporary man and a gesture of cinematic love.

The expressive elegance of making the art of editing perceived in Parajanov (and in particular in the film Shadows of our forgotten ancestors) as a process of bringing shadows back to life. Fantasmatic and inspiring.

Once Upon a Screen

A collection of gazes on the evocative theme of traumatic childhood encounters: different styles and perspectives that articulate a critical and cinephile discourse open to different interpretations.

Managing Editor at No Film School

Kevin lays bare something you don’t often see in film analysis: a personal account of how a film traumatises. He takes us to the theatre, now a BevMo!, where he first saw Platoon and tells the intensely intimate story of how the film affected him as a kid. It’s a direct emotional connection between the film analyst and the film he’s analysing: the site of traumatisation may have changed but the trauma itself remains.

This video is a shock to the system of film analysis.

How Movies Prepared Us For Coronavirus

Answer: Surprisingly, they pretty much didn’t.

We’re living in a disaster movie.

No, in My Room | A desktop documentary on the making of a video essay

Beyond the Frame

Video essays make me feel dumb. This one makes me feel like we’re all dumb. I love it so much.

David Lynch | Movies As Therapy

The Discarded Image

Clearly there’s a pattern to my selections this year, you guys. I’m very obviously a nervous and emotional wreck or something because I really gravitated to this video essay by The Discarded Image about how David Lynch uses filmmaking as his therapy.

Why The Red Shoes Looked So Stunning

If you want to know how colour can be used to tell a story, watch The Red Shoes. Boom. It’s an absolute masterclass and it’s beautiful and it almost convinced me that ballet was kinda cooler than basketball. This video essay is an excellent primer into the film’s aesthetic and narrative use of red.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Film critic

In alphabetical order:

L’Année Dernière à Dachau

Mark Rappaport ( read synopsis )

A look at the emotional and historical complexity of our aesthetic preferences.

Her Socialist Smile

John Gianvito ( watch trailer )

It offers some things we may not have known about Helen Keller, socialism, and ourselves.

A House is Not a Home: Wright or Wrong

Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa ( watch trailer )

It offers a lyrical and personal look at the relations between architecture and familial dysfunction by examining Frank Loyd Wright’s Rosenbaum house in Alabama. It isn’t my film, but I was interview subject, consultant, and camera assistant on it.

The Social Dilemma

Jeff Orlowski ( stream on Netflix or watch trailer )

It examines the corruption of communications via marketing, demonstrating how capitalism isn’t a victimless crime.

Sportin’ Life

Abel Ferrara ( watch trailer )

Ferra accurately calls it a documentary on the act of making documentaries.

Women According to Men

Saeed Nouri ( watch trailer )

An archival look at Iranian gender relations.

Charlie Shackleton

Filmmaker and sometime film critic

How To with John Wilson

John Wilson (stream on HBO Max or watch trailer )

I can’t think of anything that gives me greater pleasure than lo-fi on a hi-budget, and nobody’s fi is loer than John Wilson, whose sublime new HBO (!) show captured the beauty of the mundane with an ethereal grace made only more poignant by Wilson’s trademark fumbled voiceover. I didn’t expect the field of video essay to produce a more unexpected mainstream crossover this year than Theo Anthony getting an ESPN special (the excellent Subject to Review) but here it was.

Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another

Jessica Sarah Rinland ( watch trailer )

At one of the last social gatherings I attended before the pandemic, a friend told me that their favourite kind of film is one in which “nothing happens, many times”. That description stuck with me in Britain’s first national lockdown, as I rediscovered my taste for cinematic minimalism in newly streaming films like Ben Rivers’s Now, At Last! and – most memorably – this mesmerising study of archaeological restoration. As with all the best films where nothing happens, many times, Rinland’s work was a catalyst for a torrent of personal imaginative thought, and just when I was starting to feel incapable of it.

In a busy year for video essays on conspiratorial thinking (I also enjoyed Dan Olson’s In Search of a Flat Earth and Kirby Ferguson’s Constantly Wrong ), Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s characteristically probing and precise film was the only offering that seemed more concerned with asking questions than giving answers—surely a prerequisite of getting to grips with a cultural sphere increasingly dominated by conspiracy theories.

Leigh Singer

Film Journalist, programmer, video essayist

One of the saving graces of this awful year has been a greater involvement and engagement with student video work. The results across various courses and different countries has been a revelation – so much insight, originality and technical accomplishment. Though I advised on a couple of the videos below, the finished pieces are entirely the students’ own and I feel very fortunate to have watched the work take shape and then become so expertly realised. In the world of video essays, at least, the future looks bright.

Elizaveta Gushchynskaya

A brilliant, probing pop culture mash-up reflecting and refracting life under lockdown that doubles up as a superlative music video. It’s also the first video essay as part of a student course at the Polish-Japanese Institute of Technology, produced within five days, which makes the results even more extraordinary.

Ways of Looking: Playtime

Sergio Martínez Esqueda (password: Tati)

A dazzlingly original, present tense negotiation of Jacques Tati’s comic masterpiece that reveals so much about its multiple, often simultaneous visual delights and examines how different viewing experiences play a part in these discoveries. Another revelatory first time student video, made on the UK ’s National Film & TV School’s MA in Film Studies, Programming and Curation.

Mandy: The Film Concert

Too few video essays go into the audio textures of a film and its score. This one does a superbly effective, visually striking job at conveying complicated technical effects with great clarity. Yet another unbelievably accomplished student project, from the ever-impressive University of Warwick Film Studies department.

So simple, original, elegant, and strangely haunting.

Magnolia Zoomed

A terrific idea, beautifully executed, that resonates in a range of different ways in this most unsettling of years. Could be 2020’s video essay anthem.

Comedy and Tragedy in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite

A video essayist whose growing sophistication and playful touch when examining serious issues gets better every year. Parasite is the video essay gift that keeps on giving, but this is up there with the best feeding off of Bong’s hits.

Let’s Repo! Repo Man’s Plate O’ Shrimp Logic

Miklos Kiss & Shant Bayramian

An inventive, pretzel-logicked (is that a word?), suitably anarchic blast from start to finish, a hit-and-run job that makes you want to (re-)watch the film it hijacks immediately.

Shannon Strucci

video essayist StrucciMovies

Street Cat Rescue: Lionel

Flatbush Cats

Every video by Flatbush Cats is its own touching, elegantly written and edited and edifying little story about a cat. Together they make up a channel that is both a tremendous educational resource and a series of charming vignettes about individual animals and their personalities. You know from the outset that Lionel’s video has an unhappy ending and that it will break your heart, but it’s worth watching anyway, and it’s a fantastic example of what makes this channel so unique and so worth celebrating.

Scout Tafoya

Video essayist, critic and filmmaker

There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse

Nicolás Zukerfeld ( watch trailer )

The video essay casually makes it to the festival circuit. Hypnotic and funny.

last night i dreamt that somebody loved me , The Tale of Eurydice and a letter to adolescence

Haaniyah Angus

My new favourite filmmaker. She doesn’t make traditional video essays, so much as essays written in images. Heartbreakingly raw and emotionally open, even though she’s put barriers between her and her audience (footage from other movies), the connection between them is deeper for its distance. She reaches across mediums with a report on her melancholy, which becomes universal when painted with faces.

A Revolt Without Images (Una revuelta sin imágenes)

Pilar Monsell ( watch trailer )

What Makes a Movie Line Memorable?

Luís Azevedo & Mark Forsythe (Little White Lies)

Crystalline editing from Luis. Just soft as snow.

Milad Tangshir

Iranian filmmaker based in Italy

The Rising of the Moon

James Slaymaker

Surviving Memories

Alessandro Luchetti and Manuela Lazic

Irina Trocan

Lecturer in Film Studies, freelance film critic

Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea: 28 October 2015

While there are many moving films trying to sway the audience into empathy with the perils of migration, few provide such a watertight demonstration: using footage and data from various sources, this video essay/installation follows the play-by-play of an avoidable tragedy. A visually coherent, meticulous and fact-based plea to put human lives ahead of national interests and structure competent institutions accordingly.

The crackdown before Trump’s photo op

Washington Post/Dalton Bennett, Sarah Cahlan, Aaron C. Davis & Joyce Sohyun Lee

Should We Still be Watching Gone with the Wind? Part 1 + Part 2

Cold Crash Pictures

YouTube-standard in form but amazingly communicative in content, this take on the racism of Gone with the Wind is the best chance for anyone on the internet to be heard by the other side. Serge’s imagined viewer is initially respectful of Southern legacy, the monumentality of the 1939 film, skeptical towards accusations of racism and historical inaccuracy. Approaching the film through various videographic means, he builds a case by tackling counterarguments one by one.

Clean with Me (After Dark)

Gabrielle Stemmer ( watch trailer )

A nightmarish vision of what lies behind the shiny surfaces of Cleaning Motivation YouTube, this desktop documentary is borderline-voyeuristic (most likely in tune with how YouTube is meant to be used) and heart-on-its-sleeve empathetic toward the socially isolated women broadcasting themselves (along with the daughters they raise to take on their role). Social media is performative, which is a surprise to no one except the performers themselves.

Repeating Terror in Amat Escalante’s Heli (2013)

Violence is always a tricky subject for videographic exploration – and this take on how the threat of bodily harm exudes from the screen outwards is guaranteed to make you uncomfortable, which is precisely the point.

Like Watching Paint Dry – Éric Rohmer’s My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend

Putting a cinephile spin on a famed diss of Rohmerian cinematic style, this video uses digital wizardry for emphasising individual blocks of colour in an ostensibly plotless film to show where the story really is located: it is to be found in the slow completion of the colour scheme, inspired by a Nicolas de Staël painting that fleetingly appears on a wall as if to confirm an inside-joke of a climax. Like watching paint dry, indeed.

Manual for a Disassembly of Cinema (A Machine for Viewing, episode 3)

A theoretical excursion from cinematic projection to VR interactive gear via North Korean mass gymnastics with a “broken human pixel”, it makes you think of how seeing is altered when mediated by man rather than machine.

David Verdeure

Creator, collector and curator of video essays under the nom de video Filmscalpel

Swings Don’t Swing

Leonhard Müllner

The visual regimes of video games balance between realism and absurdity, between aesthetic refinement and ethic crudeness. There’s a wealth of great video essays and machinima about games. YouTuber eurothug4000 fascinatingly focused on virtual photography within games . But I chose this piece by Leonhard Müllner which virtually visits children’s playgrounds in shooter games. Those playgrounds are used as innocent-looking backdrops to the violent mayhem. Müllner’s video uses the games’ mechanics against themselves to lay bare their visual cynicism. He enacts the revenge of innocence on gamified violence, not in the least through the elegant spatial arrangement of his piece.

I Can’t Stop Watching Contagion

Lockdown life boosted the output of some video essayists and made others sour on the form, but it left nobody indifferent. Several pieces poked fun at our Zoomified existence or lamented our Skyped interactions. Rob Stone fabricated a touching video call between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. The fact that his Before the End went viral proves our need for comforting connections – even if they’re not our own.

Dan Olson watched Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion on repeat. The radical form of his confessional video essay visualises how a film can mark us and how it can serve as ‘emotional inoculation”.

Michigan Coronavirus Protestors Roots

The rhetorical strategies of the video essay can be applied to other subjects than film or television. In this US election year, I saw them being used for political purposes in a variety of ways. There were downright deceitful remixes (no, I won’t link one). There were revelatory side-by-side pieces . There were online experiments that made harrowing use of the absence of image and sound. But because politics (and 2020) can benefit from some levity, I chose a frivolous example for this poll. TikToker rebabeba used the desktop documentary format to get to the root of the problem .

Academic practitioners of the video essay served up some fascinating fare in 2020. It is especially great to see some practitioners confidently conduct formal experiments instead of sticking to tried and tested audiovisual strategies. Jill Walker Rettberg for instance enthusiastically embraced Snapchat technology in her video essay on the app’s biometrics .

Katie Bird’s video essay starts off conventionally with a mini-documentary on the early history of Steadicam and Panaglide. But her piece then builds on this historical research with a series of imaginative (and even speculative) visual experiments that make the most of the videographic form.

John Cleese + Anthony Braxton

Olivier Godin

Video essays and performance studies are a natural match. This piece for the Canadian website Zoom Out is another fine piece of evidence. Olivier Godin matches up the work of two performers: one an actor and the other a musician. Scenes from the legendary British sitcom Fawlty Towers are rescored using Anthony Braxton’s free-jazz composition For Alto. The music emphasises Cleese’s erratic physical comedy and brings out the unpredictable dynamism of his dialogue delivery. This counterintuitive combination prompts the viewer to consider Cleese’s dialogue delivery as a musical improvisation – one with the unpredictable energy of Braxton’s jazz.

Michael Witt

Professor of Cinema at the University of Roehampton, London

Characteristically sharp, inventive audiovisual film criticism from the great Mark Rappaport.

Illuminating audiovisual study of the history, uses and effects of the Steadicam and Panaglide.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman

Moving personal exploration of the terms of the film’s title.

Golden Gate

William Brown

Insightful audiovisual investigation of the cinematic representation of the Golden Gate Bridge from a post-humanist perspective.

Thought-provoking poetic study of the relationship between successive image recording technologies and what they capture and omit.

Against the Day

Succinct reflection on the role of light in Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre (1998).

Further reading

The best film books of 2020, the best blu-rays and dvds of 2020, the 50 best films of 2020, sign up for sight & sound’s weekly film bulletin and more.

News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month.

Other things to explore

The best video essays of 2023.

By Queline Meadows

The best films of 2023 – all the votes

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The best video essays of 2022

10 videos that will entertain you and make you feel smarter. What’s not to like?

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An educational and argumentative style has exploded in popularity across video platforms over the past few years, part of the broader wave of explainer-based content in social media. It’s gotten to the point where the form now constitutes an extremely wide tent covering an incredibly deep well of works — or, in the parlance of one subgenre, a gargantuan iceberg . We now see everything from wordless editing experiments to vlogs with occasional image wallpapering called “video essays.” (It’s gotten to the point where one of my favorite videos released last year waded into these definitional weeds, to thought-provoking results.)

This growth makes rounding up a mere 10 exemplary videos a bigger challenge each year. My guiding principles when formulating this list were not just depth of insight, originality, and diversity of subject matter and creators, but also trying to find video essays that truly make the most of both parts of that name — which demand visual attention and engagement. The essays are listed in order of release date.

Climate Fictions, Dystopias and Human Futures by Julia Leyda and Kathleen Loock

As the prognosis around global warming gets more urgent, pop culture has been taking notice, and “cli-fi” has emerged as its own storytelling genre. Leyd and Loock use the recent Don’t Look Up as a starting point, questioning what role — if any — films like these can hope to have in affecting actual activism and reform on climate change. How strong is the connection between art’s power to move us and tangible action?

Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb by Secret Base

No one is making documentary content quite like Jon Bois, Alex Rubenstein, and the rest of the crew at Dorktown. Bois is an artist who paints with data points and historical detritus, editing all this material together in a way that feels more forward-thinking than almost anyone else making films today — whether for the internet, television, or theaters. An epic four-part series on Dave Stieb, an also-also-also-ran of baseball history, sounds ridiculous. And yet Dorktown turns him into one of the most compelling characters of the year.

[ Ed. note: Secret Base is part of SB Nation, which along with Polygon is part of Vox Media. This played no part in including the video.]

Deconstructing the Bridge by Total Refusal

This is perhaps the least “essay-like” video on this list. It’s more of a university-level lecture, but set in the least academic forum imaginable: a session of Battlefield 5. Such unusual ventures are the modus operandi of Total Refusal , a “pseudo-Marxist media guerrilla” which has used The Division to explain urban design , Red Dead Redemption 2 to explain class , and much more. Within the Battlefield 5 map is a re-creation of Dutch city of Nijmegen, the site of a decisive battle during World War II. Total Refusal takes viewers on a survey of the area in a virtual form, and in the process they delve not just into the history involved but also the entire concept of war tourism and re-creations, questioning how culture remembers these events.

Why Panzer Dragoon Saga Is the Greatest RPG Nobody Played by Michael Saba

If this doesn’t send the 1998 Sega Saturn game Panzer Dragoon Saga to the top of your must-play list, then I don’t know what to tell you. More than an intriguing look at a game that was incredibly ahead of its time and took years to find its audience, this video is a treatise on a pressing issue within gaming. See, if you want to play Panzer Dragoon Saga , you will almost certainly have to pirate it, which might stir ethical qualms in some. Saba mounts an impassioned defense of piracy as a form of archival practice and game preservation. Even if you disagree with such a conclusion, the problems he highlights within the industry cannot be denied.

Nice White Teachers, Bad Brown Schools: Hollywood’s Pedagogy on Urban Education by Yhara Zayd

Yhara Zayd makes her third consecutive appearance on our annual video essay list, and for good reason. Not content to retread ground covered by other pop culture video creators, she finds both novel subjects and interesting lenses on them. Here she scrutinizes the “inspirational” story trope of well-intentioned white teachers making a difference in urban environments, seen in the likes of Dangerous Minds and The Ron Clark Story . Most incisively, she contrasts the conventions of this genre with the stark realities and lived history of actual outsider intervention in nonwhite education.

Intimate Thresholds by Desiree Garcia

Less than four minutes long, this essay is nonetheless entrancing, thanks to Garcia’s continually inventive editing. Instead of a drawn-out exploration of the theme of female artistic competition in film, she contrasts two examples through visceral juxtaposition: 1940’s Dance, Girl, Dance and 2010’s Black Swan. With split screens, hazy picture-in-picture, precise cuts, and some remarkable use of captions, the essay makes its ideas intuitively felt rather than explaining itself through lecture.

Instagram Hates Its Users by Jarvis Johnson

The long story made short is that Instagram has continually sabotaged any actual enjoyment of using its app through trying to imitate whatever new trend has come down the cultural pipeline. But the long story, as relayed by Johnson, is so much more entertaining. We often forget the direct relationship between interface design and user experience, but this is a terrific deep dive into how that process works, pinned to an easy-to-grasp timeline of Instagram’s calamitous history.

Fixing My Brain With Automated Therapy by Jacob Geller

Jacob Geller is exceptionally good at drawing in a web of disparate sources to discuss ideas you might not have even thought about before. Here, the story of “ the first chat bot ,” the 2019 visual novel Eliza, and the app-based 2021 game UnearthU are used to explore the use of artificial intelligence in modern therapy. But as the title suggests, Geller goes one step further, testing out several different therapy apps that purport to help you improve your mental health without the need of any human therapists. His results, and what they suggest about the true intention behind these apps and the way therapy is incorporated into contemporary society, are… well, disquieting.

Parking lots are everywhere and nowhere by What’s So Great About That?

The concept of “liminal space” is currently popular in online culture discourse. But Grace Lee seldom tackles a topic from the same angle as everyone else. With reference points as wide-ranging as Seinfeld, Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” and the work of artist Guillaume Lachapelle, she discusses how parking lots appear in media, and in a wider view how they and similar urban-industrial spaces figure into our everyday lives. Lee’s essays demand your attention like few others; look away and you’re liable to miss a great little visual gag. Because of this, despite her videos seldom going longer than 15-20 minutes, they often pack in much, much more information than you’ll expect.

How Degrowth Can Save the World by Andrewism

Andrew Sage describes himself not just as an anarchist but as “solarpunk” — focused on solutions for a sustainable future for humanity. In this video he elucidates one of the key features of the destructive capitalist status quo: the idea of unlimited economic and industrial growth. Insistence of “degrowth” practices can often elicit fears of some vague loss in one’s standard of living. But Sage debunks this and many other arguments against degrowth, while building a more inspiring and hopeful vision for an environmentally sound, egalitarian existence.

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What to do if you dislike writing research or academic papers.

BY DAVID GUTIERREZ

Unfortunately, even if you hate writing academic papers more than anything else in the world, you still have to do it if you want to graduate successfully. However, it is possible to alter one’s attitude towards something – often to a greater degree than you may believe. Here are some techniques that can make writing your next academic assignment bearable, if not outright pleasant.

1.    Take breaks

Taking regular breaks is important in any kind of work, and writing is no exception. Divide your assignment into a number of reasonably small parts and promise yourself to take a break after you successfully complete each of them. Both the parts and the breaks may be as large or small as it is useful for your situation. For example, if you write an essay, you can take 5-minute breaks every 200 words. If you write something more substantial, both the parts and the breaks can be larger. Do something pleasant in the course of your breaks – this will motivate you to complete each part faster.

2.    Eliminate distractions

When you do something you hate, every potential distraction is twice as enticing as it usually is. This means that if you are surrounded by distractions while you write your academic paper, you are likely to get distracted all the time. To prevent this, single out the things that are likely to attract your attention as you work and remove them from you. If it is structure and general layout of the paper that give you trouble, consider custom term papers for sale. Block distracting websites using Leechblock or RescueTime, turn off notifications, switch off your smartphone, block out the external noises by some music in your earphones.

3.    Find a writing place that works for you

If you do something you hate, you should at least do it somewhere you feel comfortable. Where it exactly depends on your preferences: some like to work at home, others prefer a nice café; still others find it inspiring to work in the park. Take your pick.

4.    Don’t try to write like somebody else

One of the reasons why you may hate writing is because you believe that you shouldn’t write in your own voice. You think you need to imitate either someone else or to write in an affected manner that has little in common with your own way of thinking and writing. Most likely, you are wrong, and your writing will only be improved if you choose to follow your heart and write the way you like.

5.    Practice

Another reason why students hate writing academic assignments is that they are not very good at writing. The reverse is true as well – once you learn how to write more or less well, you start feeling pleasure doing it. Do a bit of practice writing assignments of the type you have to write most often. Who knows? Perhaps, it will grow on you.

6.    Don’t be perfectionistic

Perfectionism is equally deadly both for enjoyment received from writing and the results achieved. Don’t try to make every sentence perfect – it is impossible. Write reasonably well, don’t go crazy correcting what you’ve already written because you will never finish doing it.

Learning to love writing is hard and long work, and we don’t claim that everybody is capable of doing it at first attempt. But making writing pleasant is achievable – and you can do it.

David Gutierrez has worked in the field of web design since 2005. Right now he started learning Java in order to get second occupation. His professional interests defined major topics of his articles. David writes about new web design software, recently discovered professional tricks and also monitors the latest updates of the web development.

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If you Hate Writing Papers or Essays, Here’s what to Do

Hate Writing Papers or Essays

It is very common for students to hate writing papers and even avoid writing college essays. Some students perceive writing as a laborious task that takes much time to complete.

For a student to write a complete paper, they must first understand the various writing components, making the process difficult.

I have been there when I was a student. I used to hate writing essays. However, I am now a seasoned writer and offer academic writing services here at Grade Bees. You can seek our services whenever you need them. However, I will teach you how to handle the problem and practice what I did to become a good writer.

We can Write your Papers! No Plagiarism

Get that A on your next essay assignment without the hassles. Any topic or subject. 100% Plagiarism-Free Essays.

What to do if you Hate Writing College Papers

As noted, some students hate writing papers because of the process and the time used to complete them. Since writing papers is inevitable for students, there are some things you can do if you hate writing papers.

If you hate writing papers or college essays, you can hire writers. The other best approach is to plan your work, write informally, try using pen and paper first, create your own deadlines, and avoid distractions that take you away.

1.     Use Informal Language

One of the things you can do if you hate writing papers is to use informal language. What this means is that you should write the same way you talk.

Do not try forcing yourself to write using a formal communication style you are not used to.

This will make you hate the writing process even more. Once you are done with putting words into a page, you can formalize the language as you proofread and edit your paper.

Another tip is to record yourself talking about the contents of your paper and then write a transcript based on what you have said.

2. Start Writing with a Pen and Paper

Another thing you can do if you hate writing papers is to start with pen and paper. You can write your work on paper and later type what you have written by hand.

The good thing about starting with pen and paper is that it allows your thoughts to flow freely.

This is because writing using a computer makes the process feel official, creating a tense atmosphere. You will feel at ease when using pen and paper.

3. Create your own Deadlines

You can also create an artificial deadline if you hate writing papers. There is a tendency for students to procrastinate until the due date reaches.

It is best to create artificial deadlines by which you will be tackling your paper in parts. You can set a timer whereby you must complete a paragraph or a subtopic within the allocated time.

When the designated time is over, you can give yourself a break and continue later. Try to write something even when it is not perfect.

4. Plan in Advance

Planning in advance can also help if you hate writing papers. For example, if you must develop a formal paper, it is best to create an outline before you write.

Just imagine staring at a blank screen that you will have to populate with, let’s say, 5 pages of content.

5. Create an outline

Creating a comprehensive outline for the different sections of your paper will help you know exactly what to do and what will follow next. Let the outline be your starting point.

6. Avoid social media

Another thing you can do if you hate writing papers is to get rid of anything that distracts you, especially social media and the internet.

While the internet is a valuable source of research for papers, it can also divide your attention. When writing, stick to the internet sources that provide content for your paper and avoid wandering into other websites.

It is also important to avoid visiting social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Instagram while writing your papers. Also, silence your phone to avoid further distractions.

7. Start with the End in Mind

Finally, do not start at the beginning if you hate writing papers.

Though your paper should be structured in such a way that it begins with an introduction, followed by body paragraphs, and finally, a conclusion, there is no rule that you should begin with an introduction while writing.

You can start with the body paragraphs followed by an introduction. However, do not start with a conclusion.

Ghostwriting Service for College Research Papers and Essays

Why Students Hate Writing Papers and Essays

When a student says that ‘I hate writing,’ he or she means they are not motivated and are negative about the writing process. Well, there are several reasons why students hate writing essays. Let us explore each of these in detail.

Writing Papers is Uncomfortable

One of the reasons is that students may feel uncomfortable while writing. The writing process, which includes reading, researching, typing, creating citations and references, formatting, editing, and proofreading, can be taxing to students.

Students who lack the proper writing skills will find the process uncomfortable and therefore hate it.

The second reason students hate writing essays is that they lack proper spelling and grammar skills.

Student’s writing skills are tested when instructed to write essays, and they may be afraid to look bad if they possess weak spelling and grammar skills.

They are afraid to look stupid, thus the reason they may hate writing essays.

However, the good thing is that writing programs such as MS Word and online editing platforms such as Grammarly can help students correct their spelling and grammar.

Do not see the Purpose of writing papers

Another reason why students hate writing essays is that they do not see the need to write. This especially applies to students pursuing technical subjects such as mathematics, chemistry, etc.

They perceive writing as irrelevant to their career paths. Students pursuing subjects that require writing essays may end up loving writing.

However, those dealing with statistics, data, or numbers may find writing unnecessary and therefore decide that they hate it.

 Some Topics are Irrelevant

Another reason why students hate writing essays is that some essay topics may feel irrelevant. Most essay topics given to students may be boring and completely irrelevant to students’ day-to-day lives. Again, those topics may deviate from the topics or issues students love and can relate to.

Students view writing as Subjective

Students hate writing essays because it is subjective. There are no right or wrong answers. Students have to present arguments and support them in writing.

It is up to the instructor to decide which paper presents the best argument. Finally, the editing and revising process is boring and repetitious. This attitude of viewing writing as a subjective task makes students hate writing essays.

Why I Hate Writing College Essays

One of the reasons why I hate writing papers is that I have a hard time starting the whole writing process. This especially applies to long papers requiring much background information and content.

This is very overwhelming. When it comes to actual writing, I find it difficult to organize my thoughts and utilize writing mechanisms. In fact, I prefer to use legal ghostwriting services , which leaves me with more time to do my chores.

A good paper should be organized in such a way that the reader understands what the writer is trying to communicate. Organizing a paper to appeal to the reader is difficult, hence why I hate writing papers.

Another reason I hate writing papers is finding the most appropriate words to express myself. This is a slow process that requires much thought and practice.

Sometimes, I may be stuck trying to find the right words or phrases to communicate my thoughts. This brings in the issue of developing ideas. I find ideation to be a very difficult process.

At the same time, keeping track of those ideas is a struggle. I might forget some ideas while writing. I realized that the best remedy is to outline the different ideas to avoid forgetting them.

How to Love Writing College Essays

Now that we have discussed what to do if you hate writing papers let us explore how to love writing papers. As noted, writing papers is inevitable for students because writing papers is part of the curriculum. The following are some strategies you can utilize to help you love writing papers.

One of the strategies to help you love writing papers is to ensure that you do not worry about other things during the writing process.

When you begin writing, it is imperative to clear your mind and focus on your writing objectives and goals.

You should sit silently and meditate on the paper for a few minutes to achieve this. Ensure that whatever you think about and do is centered on the topic.

The next strategy you can utilize to help you love writing papers is to discover the style of writing you love and the topics that interest you.

However, the topics administered to write about may not align with the topics you love. In such cases, you should stick to the writing style you love.

If, for instance, your instructor has given you several topics to choose from, select the topic containing the areas and genres you love.

Various writing formats are used in writing papers. Select the format you are most comfortable with and one that you love to avoid boredom. You can learn how to select research topics and know how to pick the one that interests you and has content.

Another method to help you love writing papers is to devise a reward system when you achieve your writing goals. For example, if you must submit a 10-page paper within a week, you can decide to divide the task as per the deadline.

You can decide to write 2 pages every day. If you achieve the goal of writing the two pages, reward yourself. The reward does not have to be something big.

It can be, for example, taking a walk, laying down, taking your favorite snack or drink, and so on. Doing so will subconsciously connect writing with something you look forward to and love.

The next strategy you can use to help you love writing papers is to put on the music of your choice while writing. This especially applies to students who prefer background music while performing other tasks.

Your favorite music can help put you in the correct mindset and even inspire your thought process. However, you should avoid loud or distracting music.

To sum up, it is undeniable that writing papers and essays are sometimes a pain in the ass for some students. They constantly seek ways to escape their assignments and get good grades. Writing essays presents a job that requires writing competencies and skills.

Because of this, students tend to have and even avoid the writing process. Since writing is inevitable for students, embracing it and finding ways to love it is important. If you still cannot like it, think of ways to escape doing your homework and earn the grade.

Jessica Kasen is experienced in academic writing and academic assistance. She is well versed in academia and has a master’s degree in education. Kasen consults with us in helping students improve their grades. She also oversights the quality of work done by our writers.

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