VIDEO – Motion Studies #33: Touching the Film Object?

The Oberhausen International Short Film Festival presents "Film Studies in Motion", a Web Series curated by Volker Pantenburg and Kevin B. Lee. This series, available on the festival's website and Facebook page, presents weekly selections of analytical video essays on the web, in preparation for Pantenberg and Lee's presentation  "Whatever happened to Bildungsauftrag? – Teaching cinema on TV and the Web", scheduled for April 28 at the festival.

Episode 7: Critics and Scholars on Video

The online video essay format opened a new playing field for critical and scholarly analysis of movies, providing opportunities for innovative explorations of films while also challenging the established conventions and limitations of text-based film criticism and scholarship. In its early stages, the video essay format was legitimized by the involvement of such prominent critics as Jonathan Rosenbaum and Matt Zoller Seitz and scholars such as Nicole Brenez and Kristin Thompson. One characteristic of these early videos is that they often resembled narrations of written texts with the video serving a secondary role as illustration. Over time, the relationship between text and media has evolved into more sophisticated works that seek to fully utilize the potential of the medium to illuminate itself. As more people continue to adopt the medium to advance their scholarship, the creative and analytical possibilities of this emerging genre will continue to evolve.