What is a video essay?
I haven’t even heard of them until this class. How can a
video be an essay and vice versa? Unthinkable, but it has been done and will
continue to be done. The examples posted were each unique, and I think, very
powerful. The unknown to me, like John Bresland, Claudia Rankin, and Lauren Mullen
are now known through this transgender/transgenre class. But the really
question is what is a video essay?
When I look online this is what I got.
“A video essay is a video work that
explores a topic using various sources of information and that experiments with
form and content. This genre combines various art forms (pictures, music,
video, words, voice, etc.)”
And
GOOGLE web definitions
“a video which presents factual information
about a specific topic.”
Although these are important, I think
it is much more important to find the definition through watching them and experiencing
them first hand. So that is what I’m going to do.
What is a video to me?
I think it is people capture moments of
time or topics, through both word and visual scene.
For example, in the Mullen piece about
the chair she shows the marks on the floor and explained they are like an
archive. Which is beautiful and sad. So when she put the number on them
counting up to her age. It was more than numbered archives, from me it looked
like a crime scene where some died. Which maybe someone had…
Another example is from my favorite
from all three, which is John Bresland. I like the Mangoes. Which even in the
titles tell what the essay or topic is about. How his wife is allergic to
mangoes, and he feed it to his son, because he wants his son to be strong, and
maybe even depicted as manly. A man goes to different place to be manly. By
having a bike or not wearing a baby pact. I also love how he layer the video
like one would layer word like stein. So many story going on in one video MANGOES
TO MAN goes.
