most popular video essay channels

The Best Video Essay Channels, Ranked

Cinephiles and film buffs owe it to themselves to check out these YouTube channels which brilliantly analyze and explain movies using video essays.

If you’re a die-hard movie fan, you don’t have to be a hardcore collector to know that you can find a lot of your special features free on YouTube – from movie trailers and top-ten lists to reaction videos and cast-and-crew interviews. But the crème de la crème for any budding cinephile is YouTube ’s subculture of video essayists.

The best of these content creators, particularly those focused on dissecting and analyzing film and television, give viewers a lot of food for thought, making them consider things they hadn’t before, even when it comes to movies they have watched 100 times. There is an embarrassment of content out there, but this article seeks to separate the wheat from the chaff – we are recommending only the channels with the best, most refreshing, and most original analysis. If you're a film lover or budding buff, you owe it to yourself to check out these great video essay channels.

What’s So Great About That?

UK creator and pop-culture academic Grace Lee makes video essays examining themes and form in both horror and animated media; she has an affinity for the deeper, more unexpected thoughts evoked by her favorite genres. Whereas many content creators are quippy or sarcastic, Lee’s voiceover narrative approach is one of measured thoughtfulness.

Related: Explained: How Twin Peaks Changed Television

While her output as What's So Great About That? is not as large as some other creators on this list, that is far from a bad thing as Lee seems to focus more on quality than quantity. Each video discusses fairly narrow topics within a given property – examples include the “treachery of language” in the work of David Lynch or the concept of the “unnatural” in the original Evil Dead film.

You might mistake Canadian vlogger Sarah Z (pronounced “Zed”) for your best friend. She sits on the couch with a cup of coffee and speaks directly to you, a monologuist spending hours on end about all of her opinions, from toxic fandoms to true-crime documentaries.

But these monologues are not the boring, meaningless yarns that you might expect. Rather, Sarah’s channel is an ever-deepening trove of incisive and engaging media analysis encased in a shell of light and fluffy entertainment. The whole thing is driven by Sarah’s palpable excitement and enthusiasm for the topics she is covering, and a penchant for long, detailed videos that are extensively researched. Some videos will even stretch far beyond the one-hour mark, including a 90-minute video on geek culture and a full two hours on Dear Evan Hansen .

Another Canadian creator steps up to the plate in the form of Sage Hyden , a fantasy novelist whose essay channel Just Write seems particularly preoccupied with film’s place in the cultural conversation. In particular, Hyden is fascinated with the messages that movies send us, what they are trying to communicate (consciously or subconsciously), and how they shape our perceptions and prejudices.

For topics that can sometimes land on the serious side, Hyden’s tone and writing style are conversational and often funny, and his insights are fairly eye-opening. Topics include Willy Wonka and its relationship to misconceptions about poverty, the importance of the original Mulan film, and the cinematic lineage of the modern murder mystery Knives Out .

If you consider yourself an outsider or find yourself disagreeing with most of your friends on their favorite movies, you might find a mutual kinship with creator Yhara Zayd , whose videos examine film and television through lenses both personal and political. Zayd’s is not the kind of detached analysis you can expect from many YouTubers; rather, though she is very well-researched, she is also full of unapologetic hot takes, and her videos are brimming with the caustic personality of a modern-day Pauline Kael.

Related: These Are the Best Marilyn Monroe Movies

In some ways, Zayd has crafted the perfect synergy between the highly-opinionated critic and the relentless deconstructionist, enthusiastically dissecting and questioning the images and media we regularly consume. She also has a distinct knack for self-awareness, gazing inward as she gazes outward, a quality which separates her content from that of many of her peers. Zayd covers such divergent subjects as the commodification of the great Marilyn Monroe, reflections of housing discrimination in 1980s horror films , and the under-appreciated legacy of Not Another Teen Movie .

For something a little less personal but no less fascinating, it is worth checking out the prolific Susannah McCullough and her channel The Take . McCullough and her extraordinary team make what are probably the best “Explained” videos you’ll be able to find, along with character breakdowns, deconstructions of tropes, and the lessons movies can teach us. They’ve got videos that deconstruct and explain Donnie Darko , The Sopranos , Get Out , and many, many more. They’ve also nerded out with full series on different franchises, including detailed character analyses in shows such as Friends and Breaking Bad .

The writing is smart but accessible, and the arguments are utterly convincing. The videos themselves are breezily edited and full of poppy visuals. The channel also covers many, many genres and types of movies, so you are sure to find something on a movie or TV show you love. The Take offers incisive film analysis in a context that is fun and completely unpretentious.

Maggie Mae Fish

Decadent, performance-driven vlogs like ContraPoints and Philosophy Tube are all the rage these days, and film buffs finally have their own version in the form of Maggie Mae Fish . Ms. Fish is a singular, idiosyncratic voice who pivots wildly from dedicated film scholar to sketch-comedy caricature and back again. She typically sits center-frame in a variety of ornately designed sets, dressed in colorful outfits, while she patiently spoons out detailed, thoughtful analysis over the course of long videos.

For any video-essay enthusiast, Fish is the real deal – wickedly entertaining, subversive, accessible, and always thought-provoking. Her recent two-video series on Twin Peaks is catnip for any fans seeking a new perspective on the show – and an excellent dressing-down of Twin Perfect’s infamous 4.5-hour breakdown. She also deconstructs auteur theory through the works of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, and spends two hours discussing Loki ’s debt to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker .

Lindsay Ellis

When it comes to distinct personalities, no vlogger quite matches the likes of the controversial but brilliant Lindsay Ellis . She is a brand unto herself, with an over-the-top, self-deprecating style that can only be described as a hopped-up, sleep-deprived, but no less informed, Adam Curtis. She is often seen drinking wine in her videos, breaking down popular media like Disney movies, musical adaptations, and The Lord of the Rings franchise.

Ellis is one of the originals of the medium, and her work is so singular that her influence has likely extended to all the other creators who occupy this list. Some of her most brilliant work includes “The Whole Plate,” a nine-video series that completely deconstructs the first Transformers film through the lenses of gender, sexuality, and film studies. Her most iconic work includes 40-minute videos ranting about the film adaptations of Rent and The Phantom of the Opera . Due to recent Internet events, she has stopped making videos on YouTube, but her existing videos are still there for all to see and are absolutely worth checking out.

Every Frame A Painting

Sometimes the most obvious answer is still the best one. Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou’s gorgeous video series Every Frame A Painting is still the benchmark against which all other video essayists are judged. You’ve probably seen their video on Edgar Wright and visual comedy, or the one on silence in the films of Martin Scorsese. The channel has been defunct for several years now, but the content still feels as fresh and original as it did when it was first published.

The topics covered are narrow and unexpected, but they all work extraordinarily well. The writing is tight and evocative, and Zhou’s voice is unforgettably soothing and inviting. The editing is also crisp and beautiful. Ramos and Zhou have become so renowned for their work that they were even invited to contribute to David Fincher’s Voir , a video essay project for Netflix.

Favoree's guide to YouTube

13 Best Video Essay YouTubers in 2024 According to Viewers

Tamara Indriana

First of all, what even is a video essay ?

The line between video essays and documentaries is often muddy. While both video essays and documentaries use audiovisual elements to convey ideas and narratives, they differ in their focus, narrative structure, visual style, and intended audience.

Video essays offer critical analysis and interpretation of visual media, while documentaries provide factual information on real-life events and experiences. One key tip to distinguish between the two is that documentaries focus on getting answers from primary sources , like conducting interviews.

Video essays have gained popularity in recent years, particularly on YouTube. The accessibility of digital editing tools and visual media makes it easier than ever for aspiring filmmakers, critics, and scholars to produce and share their own video essays with the world.

In this article, we have compiled a list of the best video essayists on YouTube. Join us as we unravel the intricacies of these digital storytellers who put their viewers on the edge of their seats.

If video essays are not your cup of tea and you’re looking for something more educational, check out our article on the best documentary YouTube channels .

13 Top Video Essay YouTube Channels in 2024

This list is compiled from the opinions of  Favoree  and  Reddit  users.

In no particular order:

1.  EmpLemon  – 1.2M Subscribers

Emplemon blends elements of documentary-style storytelling with humor and cultural critique. Through his videos, Emplemon tells stories about internet culture, dissecting its quirks with razor-sharp wit and insight.

His contents elicit a rollercoaster of emotions, from laughter at absurd internet phenomena to contemplation of the impact of online communities on society.

2.  ContraPoints  – 1.8M Subscribers

Natalie Wynn, better known as Contrapoints, makes incisive video essays about social topics. Initially gaining fame for providing leftist rebuttals to right-wing content, Wynn’s dark humor and elaborate productions captivate audiences.

While her style has evolved to include more intimate settings, Wynn’s content remains intellectually stimulating, featuring detailed philosophical discussions presented in a visually stunning manner.

Natalie is not only an icon for her video essays, she’s also one of the most influential Trans creators on YouTube .

3.  ColdFusion  – 4.7M Subscribers

ColdFusion is a prominent YouTube channel making high-quality videos on corporations and their scandals. The channel’s soothing narration style contributes to a relaxing viewing experience.

With professional editing and a focus on interesting subject matter, ColdFusion delivers compelling insights into the latest trends and developments shaping the world of business and technology.

Check out our article on the best economics YouTube channel if you’re interested in improving your financial knowledge!

4.  Wendigoon  – 3.4M Subscribers

Wendigoon’s exploration of horror and supernatural phenomena certainly gives viewers goosebumps. With a focus on topics like urban legends , paranormal encounters, and mysterious occurrences, Wendigoon delivers chilling narratives that leave viewers intrigued and unsettled.

The channel’s immersive storytelling and atmospheric visuals evoke a sense of unease, drawing audiences into the eerie world of the unknown. Wendigoon’s expertly crafted videos combine suspenseful narration with haunting imagery, creating an unforgettable viewing experience.

Can’t get enough of chilling true crime stories? Our article on the best true crime YouTube channels will help you find more creators to watch.

5.  hbomberguy  – 1.6M Subscribers

Hbomberguy is a highly respected YouTuber famous for his well-researched video essays. With a focus on various topics ranging from video games to social critiques of modernity, Hbomberguy delivers arguments backed by cited facts. His recent video that exposed Internet Historian has gotten the most attention and discourse.

Despite a sporadic upload schedule, his content is eagerly anticipated, offering deep dives into internet culture and thought-provoking analyses.

6.  Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell  – 21.8M Subscribers

Kurzgesagt is incredible at explaining complex scientific concepts and philosophical ideas in a simple way. Through stunning art and animation, Kurzgesagt brings these topics to life.

Covering a wide range of subjects from space exploration to biology, the channel’s videos are both educational and visually captivating, leaving viewers feeling inspired and enlightened. Kurzgesagt offers an immersive journey into the wonders of the universe, sparking curiosity and wonder in audiences worldwide.

7.  Fredrik Knudsen  – 1.2M Subscribers

A cult favorite, Fredrik Knudsen’s acclaimed series “Down the Rabbit Hole” investigates obscure corners of the internet and perplexing aspects of history.

Known for his unbiased and objective approach, Knudsen presents his subjects in a neutral manner, allowing facts to speak for themselves. His thought-provoking content offers insights into the complexities of human experiences and internet phenomena.

8.  blameitonjorge  – 1.7M Subscribers

Blameitonjorge is beloved for his videos centered around lost media, creepy events, and obscure topics. With a soothing and friendly voice, Jorge’s narration style is modest, respectful, and intelligently humorous, offering a refreshing contrast to typical list-making channels.

His videos cover a diverse range of subjects, including UFO sightings, nostalgia, horror movies, true crime, and Mexican urban legends, all presented with meticulous research and informative editing. Blameitonjorge’s efforts to uncover unanswered mysteries and controversies breathe new life into forgotten topics.

9.  Solar Sands  – 1.3M Subscribers

Solar Sands, an American YouTuber, specializes in video essays analyzing and reviewing art, culture, and archaeology. His long form contents concentrate on retrospectives on various aspects of artistic quality, including the history of low-resolution paintings in Minecraft and analyses of artists like Trevor Henderson .

Solar Sands’ content offers unusual insights into the world of art and culture, appealing to viewers interested in thought-provoking discussions and analyses.

10.  Philosophy Tube  – 1.5M Subscribers

Abigail Thorn, AKA Philosophy Tube, is a British YouTuber exploring philosophy, politics, and personal identity through theatrical presentations and insightful discussions. Abigail’s well-researched content creates a deeper understanding of complex topics and provides support for those grappling with personal identity.

Her inclusive and authentic approach transforms philosophical concepts into accessible narratives, while her openness about her transgender journey inspires self-acceptance in viewers. With a blend of academic rigor and theatrical flair, Philosophy Tube continues to educate and entertain her audiences.

Want a deeper understanding of philosophy without breaking the bank? Check out the best philosophy YouTube channels to learn more!

11. Super Eyepatch Wolf – 1.7M Subscribers

John Walsh, also known as Super Eyepatch Wolf , is an Irish YouTuber renowned for his analytical-style videos primarily focused on anime, with occasional forays into manga and video games.

Unlike many other anime YouTubers, his presentation style stands out for its calm and passionate delivery. His content resonates with audiences seeking thoughtful analysis and insightful commentary.

12. Folding Ideas – 920K Subscribers

Dan Olson or Folding Ideas is a YouTube channel offering long-form video essays on internet culture. From NFTs to nuggets, he makes any topic interesting and will leave you looking for more.

While the writing can occasionally seem overly clever, Dan Olson’s thoroughly researched insights provide valuable perspectives into tech grifts and other media. Despite only uploading every few months, the channel’s in-depth and insightful content is highly appreciated by viewers.

13. Jacob Geller – 1.2M Subscribers

Jacob Geller offers thought-provoking video essays that seamlessly blend topics such as video games, history, politics, and more. With a dark yet empathetic tone, Geller digs deep into philosophical, ethical, metaphysical, and psychological themes, using gaming as a springboard for discussions.

Whether discussing a specific video game mod or architectural design, Jacob’s talent shines through in his insightful videos, offering a deep exploration of video games with surprising depth.

Why are video essays important?

Video essays are important as they provide a platform for creators to offer nuanced interpretations and critical perspectives on various subjects. They serve as engaging educational tools, stimulating discussions and deepening understanding of visual media and cultural phenomena.

What are the benefits of video essays?

Video essays offer benefits such as fostering critical thinking, providing accessible and entertaining educational content, and offering a fresh approach to the analysis and exploration of visual media.

What’s the difference between a video essay and a documentary?

The difference lies in their focus, narrative structure, visual style, and intended audience. While video essays offer critical analysis and interpretation of visual media, documentaries provide factual information on real-life events and experiences, often by obtaining answers from primary sources through interviews.

Is video essay a genre?

Video essay is not a genre in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a format or style of content creation that can encompass a wide range of subjects and approaches, from film analysis to cultural critique.

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28 of the Best YouTube Channels for Storytellers

Published by justin on october 22, 2017 october 22, 2017.

UPDATE: This was originally a 23 channel list, but since then I’ve added 5 more. You may want to bookmark this page, since I’ll probably keep adding more channels over time.

I have a new binge-watching habit. But it’s not on Netflix.

No, it’s weirder than that: it’s YouTube video essays.

If you haven’t spent much time in this sector of YouTube, here’s how a video essay usually works: an expert (or a superfan) uses a mix of video, animation, infographics, academia, and humor to explain a complicated subject in simple terms. Think of them as mini-lectures, delivered in a bite-sized format you’ll actually want to finish.

While there’s usually just one voice or presenter onscreen, these channels are often made possible by a small team of collaborative researchers, editors, designers, and animators. (And, if they get popular enough, sponsors.) So, in essence, each video essay is a (usually) brief episode in a loosely-related series on a topic, made either by one artist or by a branded team with a shared vision.

I’ll show you some of what I think are the best YouTube channels for storytellers in a moment. But first, let’s tackle one basic question:

What Does It Take to Make a Great Video Essay?

YouTube is full of video essays on every subject imaginable, from history and science to music, writing, video games, film, and more. From the channels I’ve explored over the past year, I’ve identified five traits that help the best video essays reliably rise above the rest:

• A clear and well-supported premise in each essay
• A consistent voice and tone across all videos
• Simple yet effective visuals
• EITHER a compelling narrative OR a satisfying setup and payoff
• I can easily explain what I just learned to someone else

Each of the following channels excels in at least one of these areas, and often in all five. They’re also fantastic examples of how to structure a headline hook that attracts attention and then holds it throughout the length of the video.

The result?

Not only will these channels teach you something you didn’t know, but they’ll do it in a way you’re more likely to connect with, enjoy, remember, and want to share with others.

With that, let’s take a(n alphabetical) look at…

Austin McConnell

Channel Focus: Half weird pop culture, half media analysis.

Why Do I Dig It? Laid-back delivery, low-key comedy timing, and detailed dives into media I wouldn’t have explored otherwise — like the underground world of China’s bootleg Star Wars comics.

Beyond the Frame

Channel Focus: Explaining the pros and cons of TV and film language.

Why Do I Dig It? Every video feels like a short film school lesson.

Channel Focus: Politics, history, and weird quirks of math and science.

Why Do I Dig It? He’s a poster boy for how to make data interesting.

Coffee Break

Channel Focus: Deconstructing modern life and digital trends.

Why Do I Dig It? Great quick examples of how to frame and support an argument.

Every Frame a Painting

Channel Focus: Deep dives into the styles and trends that shaped the history of film.

Why Do I Dig It? Every video is like a slightly longer film school lesson.

Extra Credits

Channel Focus: It varies. I found them through their fantastic series of historical explainer videos, but they also explore video games, psychology, and more.

Why Do I Dig It? Two reasons. First, they make history lively by structuring their videos as narratives about their subjects’ needs and desires. Second, their innovative use of universally cute icons to represent various historical figures has an unusual effect: it humanizes everyone equally, which allows the audience to invest themselves emotionally in all sides.

Films & Stuff

Channel Focus: Examines what makes a scene, moment, or entire film work… or why it goes wrong.

Why Do I Dig It? Uses popular films to examine the power of specific storytelling tropes.

Half as Interesting

Channel Focus: Weird and obscure trivia about history and geography.

Why Do I Dig It? Quirky content, briefly well-explained.

Hello Future Me

Channel Focus: Analyzes writing and storytelling from a structural perspective: what’s the best way to convey information, and how do cultural tropes affect the way we process stories?

Why Do I Dig It? VERY instructive without being dismissive; uses a wide array of examples from popular culture to show recurring examples of writing techniques and variations. Less of a “one size fits all” guide, and more of a “menu of solutions” approach. (Plus, a solid sense of humor.)

Ideas at Play

Channel Focus: Close looks at the intangible aspects of storytelling, like editing, soundtracks, laugh tracks, and other aesthetic choices that change how we process the onscreen information.

Why Do I Dig It? Clear explanations plus high-quality production values.

In Deep Geek

Channel Focus: Deep deconstructions of Game of Thrones , Westworld , and more.

Why Do I Dig It? Anyone who tells a story will benefit from considering its construction with the same degree of detail that Robert, the host of this channel, applies to the minutiae of what makes stories like Game of Thrones tick. His narrative analysis works more like a scientific inquiry: he’ll ask a question or pose a theory, and then evaluate it from all sides before coming to a conclusion. (Bonus: Robert’s conversational tone and pace are incredibly soothing to listen to.)

Jenna Moreci

Channel Focus: “Tough love” writing advice from a self-published author.

Why Do I Dig It? Jenna’s blunt, sarcastic style is filled with useful advice that aspiring writers need to hear. (Bonus: Check out my quick Q&A with Jenna here .)

Jenny Nicholson

Channel Focus: Deconstructing the downside of your favorite pop culture tropes.

Why Do I Dig It? Jenny’s no-budget aesthetic and disarming delivery is deceptively sharp and consistently dry, and her analysis of why most films are broken is deadly accurate.

Channel Focus: Weird facts and sports trivia, brought to life by (purposely) bad infographics.

Why Do I Dig It? Every video Jon creates is a work of 8-bit art with a nugget about the truth of the human condition buried inside.

Channel Focus: Analyzing films and TV to find out why some stories work and some don’t.

Why Do I Dig It? Channel creator Sage Hyden digs deep into story structure to explain how the format of our media affects the kinds of stories we tell. For example, this video will change the way you think about animated movies.

kaptainkristian

Channel Focus: High-level overviews of huge pop culture topics.

Why Do I Dig It? These are perfect “introduction to ___” videos for anyone who’s always wondered “what’s the deal with ___?”

Karsten Runquist

Channel Focus: Analyzing story structure in film and TV.

Why Do I Dig It? Runquist exposes narrative tricks hiding in plain sight — like during the first few minutes of Stranger Things — in such a way that you suddenly feel like you knew them all along.

Channel Focus: Explaining how life works, both literally and figuratively.

Why Do I Dig It? Possibly the best union of animation and narration on YouTube. Plus, they make super-complex subjects infinitely easier to understand.

Lessons from the Screenplay

Channel Focus: Comparing finished films to their screenplays to find the building blocks that help good scripts become great movies.

Why Do I Dig It? Each video explains a core storytelling technique through visual examples that make what could be dry theories into easily-remembered demonstrations.

Lindsay Ellis

Channel Focus: Cynically exploding the problematic tropes of pop culture.

Why Do I Dig It?   Every video is like a dyspeptic film school lesson.

Channel Focus: Explaining how video games work via examples of good and bad game design.

Why Do I Dig It? When you’re playing a video game, you rarely have time to stop and appreciate how it was built. Every video Mark adds to his Game Maker’s Toolkit series helps you appreciate the multiple systems and creators at work behind the interactive experiences we often take for granted.

Movies with Mikey (on Chainsawsuit)

Channel Focus: Irony-drenched movie analysis that’s almost as long as the movies themselves.

Why Do I Dig It? Deep, smart, wry deconstructions that pull no punches.

Patrick (H) Willems

Channel Focus: Functional film analysis, sometimes on a shot-by-shot basis.

Why Do I Dig It? Willems is an aspiring director who treats every essay like it’s his own short film.

The School of Life

Channel Focus: Love, relationships, and identity.

Why Do I Dig It? Blunt advice, delivered by often beautiful and always emotionally evocative animation.

Terrible Writing Advice

Channel Focus: Storytelling flaws, cheap stereotypes, overused ideas, and bad writing habits.

Why Do I Dig It? The writing “advice” is good, but the details embedded in the animations are even better.

Channel Focus: The oddities of science, math, and statistics.

Why Do I Dig It? Simple explanations of scientific laws and theories, often with easy-to-remember examples.

Channel Focus: Vox Media’s subset of videos that focus on the art, science, and business of pop music.

Why Do I Dig It? Part history lesson and part musicology course, host Estelle Caswell explains how musical trends work using anecdotes and visual aids.

Channel Focus: Pop culture meets philosophy.

Why Do I Dig It? In addition to being one of the highest-quality video essay channels on YouTube, every Wisecrack video analyzes a piece of pop culture from multiple angles — artistically, sociologically, philosophically, and more.

Two Quick Caveats About This List

I study a lot of film and media, so my list of the best YouTube channels is obviously biased in that direction. Also, I’m frustrated to note that my list is mostly made up of white guys, which highlights of the apparent lack of diversity in the video essay field. I’d like to expand this list in both directions, and you can help me out.

So, if you (or someone you dig) are doing great video essays on other topics or from other perspectives, I’d love to see what you’re working on. Tweet me or leave a comment below so others can see what you’re up to!

Want More Posts About Storytelling?

Subscribe to my newsletter and catch every new post! (I send an email weekly-ish.)

You may also enjoy…

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NunyaBiznuss · February 17, 2022 at 3:48 pm

The list is incomplete without Mrballen

malarkodi · June 14, 2019 at 12:20 pm

Hi, I am eager to become a storyteller in both in Tamil and English languages. Kindly guide me to start working on my passion.

Thank you, Best Regards,

Aishwarya Tiwari · November 27, 2018 at 5:14 am

I think that was a pretty researched and exhaustive list. Just a minor suggestion, you should have mentioned the facf that the list will comprise video essayists that discuss films and related spheres extensively, it’d have been better :) Regardless, thanks for creating this list. Means a lot. Can’t wait to devour the various channels that are now new additions to my subscriptions. Love from India!

15 Best Ideas To Create Viral Videos On YouTube · May 7, 2019 at 8:04 am

[…] And in this way, you can attract the attention of so many people. In a word, become the most interesting storyteller on YouTube. […]

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Home » Inspiration » Today’s Top Video Essay Creators

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Today’s Top Video Essay Creators

If you’re looking for daily film inspiration, then these top video essayists should not be overlooked. Their passion for film is obvious in every frame.

Film essays have become all the rage over the last couple of years on Vimeo or YouTube . Video editors around the world slice together these thoughtful pieces to teach, inspire, and enlighten us as to what the world of film can offer. Here are some of the best video essay creators in the game right now.

Burger Fiction

Lets start this list off right with an appropriate send-off for one of the greats, Gene Wilder . Burger Fiction  (helmed by Andy Schneider & Jonathan Britnell ) made this video tribute to Wilder, demonstrating the legend’s comedic timing and genius mannerisms.

The rest of Burger Fiction’s videos are equally enthralling and happen to be extremely easy to watch. Kick back and let this channel’s genuine love for movies take you through the history of awkwardness, fatal kicks, and one liners .

Jacob T Swinney

More likely than not, at some point you’ve probably come across one of Swinney’s essays in the past. Exuding a love for all manner of film, Swinney tastefully pieces together clips that flawlessly work together to focus on topics like similar directing styles, forms of filmmaking, and cinematography.

Every Frame A Painting

Founded by Tony Zhou , Every Frame a Painting offers scholarly, detailed analysis of directors and films. Zhou’s recent video essay on contemporary film scores  went viral (and for good reason), prompting response videos that worked to further the conversation.

Digging Deeper

Instead of supercuts or catchy montages, the minds behind  Digging Deeper focus on walking viewers through their thought process when analyzing some of today’s best movies. In addition to offering thoughtful theories on a film’s subject matter, Digging Deeper provides evidence and audio clips to prove valid points in these insightful think pieces.

Channel Criswell

Taking a long-form approach to video essays, Channel Criswell  (from Lewis Bond ) has given us profound looks into some of our favorite films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey , Her , and The Social Network .

Bond’s wide range of knowledge covers obscure and independent work as well, as demonstrated by his look into the subconscious operatic nature of David Lynch’s  films.

Fandor Keyframe

Fandor Keyframe is one of the more prolific video essay operations on the web. They consistently release high-quality content that both informs and presents thought-provoking questions to viewers.

Lessons from the Screenplay

Relatively new to the video essay scene, Lessons from the Screenplay  (from Michael Tucker ) has already given us some excellent think pieces. Lessons from the Screenplay  focuses on what makes a film flow well and (as suggested by the channel’s name) why a good story and strong dialogue  are the most important aspects of making a great film.

The Nerdwriter

The   Nerdwriter  is an informational joyride. Created by  Evan Puschak , the channel is essential for anyone keeping up with  current events and films . By dissecting ideas and pieces of work, The   Nerdwriter  presents facts and lets viewers decide how to feel. The channel is definitely worthy of your subscription.

Who are some of your favorite video essay creators? Share in the comments below!

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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

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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. 

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• 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 →
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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. 

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The 15 Best Video Essays of 2021

This article is part of our 2021 Rewind .  Follow along as we explore the best and most interesting movies, shows, performances, and more from this very strange year.   In this entry, we explore the best video essays of 2021.

Another bizarre, pandemic-riddled year is in the can. Once again, video essays have provided a welcome distraction with sharp perspectives on all things film, from technical curios to tried-and-true aspects of visual storytelling. Some of 2021’s best video essays shed light on new, under-discussed sides of beloved classics. Others invited us to finally hit play on titles that have been languishing deep in a long-forgotten watchlist. And some attempted to make sense of the stickier corners of filmmaking, untangling knotty subjects with precision and putting intuitions into words.

I have had another wildly fun year of hosting The Queue , a thrice-weekly column dedicated to highlighting short-form video content about films, television, and the craft of storytelling. The following 15 essays are some of my favorites. Choosing just 15 was a difficult task, and I want to sincerely thank all of the video essayists I’ve covered this year for their hard work. Thank you for keeping us edutained for another year. I look forward, as ever, to seeing y’all pop up in my feed in 2022.

But, for now, let’s take a look back on the best video essays of 2021:

Why 4:3 Looks So Good

For a significant period of both film and television history, the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio wasn’t an artistic choice; it was the only way to present footage. While 4:3 fell out of favor with the advent of new technologies, this aspect ratio is making a comeback. And while it’s easy to dismiss the recent revival as a pretentious visual trend, this video essay does a fantastic job of unpacking the ways in which directors deploy it intentionally.

This video on the visual appeal of the 4:3 aspect ratio is by  Karsten Runquist , a Chicago-based video essayist. You can check out Runquist’s back catalog and subscribe to his channel on YouTube  here . You can follow Runquist on Twitter  here .

How Jackie Chan Takes a Hit

A part of what makes Jackie Chan such a compelling action star is his willingness to get hurt. Rather than protecting his ego and presenting himself as a human-sized action figure, he is willing to serve the character, the story, and the stakes of a fight by putting himself on the receiving end of a hard-hitting wallop. Not only that, but as this super entertaining and informative video essay underlines, the actor/director/stuntman repeatedly demonstrates that taking hits is just as much of an art as dolling them out.

This 2021 video essay was created by Accented Cinema , a Canadian-based YouTube series with a focus on foreign cinema. You can subscribe to Accented Cinema for bi-weekly uploads here . You can follow them on Twitter  here .

Return to Oz is an Absolute Nightmare

Not only is  Return to Oz   one of the darkest Disney movies ever made, but it’s also one of the most faithful adaptations of L. Frank Baum’s work. Surprise, surprise, those two facts aren’t totally unrelated. If you’ve only ever heard whispers of this infamous “kids” movie or if you’re looking to confront long-repressed childhood trauma, this video essay is a great way to get familiar with the project’s troubled production and its success as an adaptation.

This video essay is by In Praise of Shadows , a channel run by Zane Whitener  and based in Asheville, North Carolina. They focus on horror, history, and retrospectives. You can subscribe to their YouTube channel here  And you can follow them on Twitter  here .

Paul Thomas Anderson and The Long Goodbye

With Licorice Pizza hitting theaters at the end of 2021, now is as good a time as any to recommend this fantastic video essay on the influence of director Robert Altman on the work of Paul Thomas Anderson . For Anderson fans unfamiliar with Altman’s work, the video is an enticing carrot to dig deeper into one of the biggest names of the 1970s.

This 2021 video essay is by Philip Brubaker , a nonfiction filmmaker based in Gainesville, Florida. He has made a heck of a lot of video essays for Fandor, Vague Visages, and MUBI, in addition to short documentaries. You can browse Brubaker’s video content on his Vimeo page and follow him on Twitter .

Disney’s Robin Hood and the Death of Color

I’m a huge sucker for big-scoped retrospectives, so when this video essay on the cinematic trajectory of Robin Hood hit my subscription queue, I couldn’t hit play fast enough. The essay devotes a good deal of time to Disney’s  Robin Hood and why it’s great, focussing in the back half with the ways that gritty reboots neutralize the power of the mirth-filled myth.

This video on Disney’s Robin Hood is by Jace, a.k.a   BREADSWORD,  an LA-based video essayist who specializes in long-form nostalgia-heavy love letters. Impeccably edited and smoother than butter, BREADSWORD essays boast an unparalleled relaxed fit and an expressive narrative tone. Long essays like this take a lot of time to put together, and somehow BREADSWORD makes it all look effortless. You can subscribe to them on YouTube  here . And you can follow them on Twitter  here .

Related Topics: 2021 Rewind , The Queue

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The best video essays of 2023

Our annual poll spotlights 181 unique video essays, nominated by 48 international voters, showcasing the breadth and depth of current videographic practice.

19 December 2023

By  Queline Meadows , Irina Trocan , Will Webb

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Now in its seventh annual edition, the Sight and Sound poll for the best video essays of the year surveys the online sphere, film festivals and audiovisual research in almost equal measure. Its primary purposes are to mark notable works and keep track of the various schools of thought concerning what video essays can or should be, and how they can communicate to a range of audiences.

The poll was conducted with the assistance of 48 voters from 17 countries, including academics, critics, online creators and festival curators. Together, their 260 nominations include 181 distinct titles. Given the scope and abundance of recent video essays, even an extensive poll can only provide a cross-section of the topics, forms and rhetoric of their contemporary practice – a limitation many voters noted in their submissions. Of the nominated works, 47% were created by male video essayists, 39% by female, with several from non-binary creators and mixed teams. Around two-thirds feature voiceover, with the majority presented in English, although 14 languages feature in the overall poll.

The nominations saw a relatively equal split between essays created for YouTube and those created for academic research, with 50 YouTube and 47 academic videos (or entire series). Publicly available videos’ viewership varies broadly, from 9.5 million views (for MyHouse.wad ) to the low double digits; participants were keen to highlight new and underseen works as well as celebrating the achievements of established creators. Festival films or installation pieces also proved popular, with 53 arthouse shorts, features and documentaries nominated. Also present, although in a smaller proportion, were self-published Vimeo works or collaborative projects unaffiliated with a specific institution. However, within the yearly S&S poll for video essays, there seems to be a slight decline both in independently produced and published Vimeo content, and in video output by cinephile magazines, while the academic sector is slowly but constantly expanding.

The average runtime was 27 minutes, with most around the 15 minute mark – although a few marathon nominations like Will DiGravio’s Against Polish and Adam Curtis’ TraumaZone (three and seven hours respectively) stick out. Three videos were one minute long or shorter.

Leading the nominations, Maryam Tafakory and Johannes Binotto tie for 10 nominations, with Tafakory’s split-screen work chaste/unchaste and Binotto’s Practices of Viewing series coming out on top. A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek received nine nominations, the most for a single work. Returning essayists of note include Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Barbara Zecchi and Ariel Avissar, while new entrants with multiple nominations include Occitane Lacurie (three noms for Xena’s Body: A Menstrual Auto-Investigation Using an iPhone) and James DeLisio (four nominations for Cinema in Pain: Decoding “Mad God” ).

It is worth noting that some videos appear in consecutive polls: among them, Misek’s History of the World According to Getty Images and Galibert-Laîné’s GeoMarkr are now available online, while in the 2022 poll they were occasionally mentioned, but less widely seen. It is often the case that videos travel in festivals or are viewed in conferences and among peers before being made public. While the current poll has several dozen videos to which we cannot presently direct our readers, we hope that in the near future many will be similarly available with unrestricted access.

Videographic collaborations make up a number of nominations in this years’ list. Once upon a Screen: Vol. 2 , edited by Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer, returns with two nominations for its second instalment. Moving Poems , also curated by Kreutzer, received five nominations, chiefly for Desiree de Jesus’ a raisin in the sun. And the 169 Seconds series, commissioned by Danish journal 16:9 to celebrate its 20th anniversary, received three nominations, including returning essayists Catherine Grant and Jason Mittell. Independent videographic community The Essay Library also features with one nomination for Lara Callaghan’s contribution to the When Essay Met Library collaboration.

A number of essays were published through new academic journals, including Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft with five videos nominated; other new entrants include Teknokultura and Feminist Media Histories. [in]Transition, Tecmerin and NECSUS are by now certified in making the works they publish visible among videographic researchers.

Independent streaming service Nebula has continued to grow its base of creators, many of whom are video essayists. Out of 50 unique YouTube videos, seven were also published on Nebula. Three of these were directly cross-posted, another three were Nebula First (published earlier than YouTube), and one nomination – We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot by Big Joel – was a Nebula Plus video, meaning it includes extra content beyond what is available on YouTube. Lily Alexandre’s Nebula-first essay Everything Is Sludge: Art in the Post-Human Era received three nods, bringing the total number of Nebula nominations up to nine.

Billed as a creator-first streaming service , Nebula aims to give its creators the freedom that they cannot find on YouTube. Many video essayists have joined Nebula after finding their work coming up against YouTube’s advertiser-friendly guidelines, restricting the discussion of mature topics. In February 2023, Maggie Mae Fish launched her series Unrated exploring sexuality in film, and Broey Deschanel followed suit in November with the Taboo on Screen series. There’s an oft-noted divide between ‘Vimeo-style’ essays – with their more academic leaning and longer clip length – and YouTube essays – with their quick cuts and careful stepping around automatic copyright claims . This gap may be quickly closing, although whether a Nebula style will arise remains to be seen.

Although content creators can make money through AdSense and sponsorships on YouTube, many turn to community donations and subscriptions to fund their work. Forty-one of the nominated YouTube works included a link to Patreon, Ko-fi or PayPal in the video description. One nominated video, Brad Troemel’s The Literalists , is available exclusively on Patreon, with only a trailer uploaded to YouTube.

Vimeo essayists have also encountered in greater force the problems that have plagued YouTube essayists for years. Formerly a safe haven for video essays containing copyrighted materials, Vimeo has enacted a slew of copyright claims, viewing restrictions and takedowns on well-known video essays in recent months. This brings to mind Fandor’s 2016/2017 removal of multiple video essays from their channels in response to the threat of copyright claims, ringing alarm bells about the mixed potential of the Internet as an archive for videographic work. The long-running TV Dictionary project is just one example with multiple claims, despite its clear origin in academic research practice.

Nostalgia and memory, pop culture and cinephilia – sometimes mixed together – loom large in this year’s list, due in part to some popular academic series including Indy Vinyl for the Masses (curated by Ian Garwood) and the Screen Stars Dictionary (curated by Tecmerin and Ariel Avissar). Gender as spectacle makes its appearance in several videos, from the mainstream end of the spectrum (max teeth’s The Man/Car Gender Binary in John Carpenter’s Christine ) to critical discussions of star personae, cinema’s archetypal female protagonists as well as filmmaking/media practices (Morgane Frund’s short films, among other titles), to direct references to Laura Mulvey and Judith Butler at the other end.

As with all other areas of discourse this year, AI featured in multiple videos, usually more as a thematic concern than as a videographic tool (although text-to-speech and some generative techniques feature in the list). Futurism more generally, whether dystopian or utopian, was a common theme in the YouTube nominations.

Interrogation of the video essay form itself continues to stimulate discussion within the field, including the drawing to a close of Johannes Binotto’s popular Practices of Viewing series. While this self-reflexivity was first noted in the 2021 poll , it was seen more on YouTube in 2023, with videos ranging from assessing the state of the video essay landscape to dispensing advice about how to be a successful video essayist . Harris Michael Brewis, better known as hbomberguy, released a nearly four-hour exposé of plagiarism on YouTube with a particular focus on video essays. The video passed two million views within 24 hours of its publication.

While there are certainly great videos that remained unmentioned even with such dedicated teamwork on behalf of all voters, the present survey should be a solid starting point (and, in a few years’ time, a reminder) of the state of video essays in 2023. Thank you to everyone who participated.

Full list of voters

Ariel avissar, johannes binotto, philip józef brubaker, nelson carvajal, ben chinapen, isabel custodio, will digravio, flavia dima, chloé galibert-laîné, jacob geller, tomas genevičius, libertad gills, catherine grant, maria hofmann, oswald iten, delphine jeanneret, miklós kiss, jaap kooijman, evelyn kreutzer, occitane lacurie, colleen laird, kevin b. lee, adrian martin, daniel mcilwraith, dayna mcleod, queline meadows, carlos natálio, clare o’g ara, alan o’l eary, michael o’n eill burns, julian ross, josé sarmiento hinojosa, jemma saunders, dan schindel, shannon strucci, scout tafoya, max tohline, irina trocan, ilinca vânău, ricardo vieira lisboa, adam woodward, barbara zecchi, all the votes.

Film theorist, curator, and video essayist , Queen Mary University of London and Národní filmový archiv

A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek

A timely meditation on how even public domain images ‘we all know’ can become unattainable when they find themselves in the thrall of commercial archives and data banks. A powerful call for paying attention to copyrights after Vimeo started taking video essays down.

Machines in Flames by Andrew Culp and Thomas Dekeyser

Part desktop documentary, part evocative experimental film, this philosophical video essay succeeds in enacting the ‘detective logic of the digital’ like few other works I have seen. By jumping between the indistinct traces of CLODO , a terrorist group that bombed computer companies in 1980s France, it denies the pretension that the desktop interface is there ‘for us’ to make content readily available and uncovers the fundamental lack and self-destructivity of contemporary visual regimes.

Twisties! by Alice Lenay

A fascinating extension of the videographic impulse into a live performance. Lenay uses Zoom software to embody the experience of participating in the 1996 Summer Olympics and shakes our notions of audiovisual archives as well as the politics of individual and collective bodies.

Notes from Eremocene by Viera Čákanyová

Who would have thought that an essay film on blockchain and artificial intelligence could be so intimate and touching? Čákanyová achieves it through a catalogue of experimental techniques that turn photochemical as well as digital images into emblems of an indistinct future in which we yet have to find our place.

Teletext Revival by Karin Spišáková and David Scharf

A whimsically inventive video essay that resurrects the early 2000s’ teletext interface not just for its nostalgic appeal but chiefly for its unique temporality and inclusiveness.

Back to the Ruins by Jáchym Šidlák

A rare piece of videographic criticism that reworks a short Czechoslovak non-fiction film from the 1940s. Images of post-war reconstruction are poetically deconstructed to give voice to overlooked details and actors that shaped the spectacle in the first place.

Divine Horror by Kryštof Kočtář and Matouš Vaďura

A truly visceral experience that makes us sense how close experimental film, horror, and videographic criticism can be.

• Back to list of voters

Video maker and media scholar at Tel Aviv University

Arbitrary Motion: Accidentally/On Purpose by Farzaneh Yazdandoost

Yazdandoost’s video, exploring the use of the arbitrary motion of fur in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs and other stop-motion films, is an absolute treat, start to finish. It was made under the mentorship of Catherine Grant, as part of a wonderful videographic symposium held in Hanover late last year, where I first got to see it — and was published earlier this year in the ZfM blog Videography, which followed that symposium. Don’t miss it — and also check out her shorter, lovely video, Wes Anderson’s Trains .

The Accented Sound of Camp by Barbara Zecchi

In another video first presented at the Hanover conference and published this year on the ZfM blog, Zecchi offers a 4-part exploration of the use of Italian accents in Hollywood films. Starting from House of Gucci, it examines various screen representations of Italians and Italian Americans and the political and ideological dimensions of the accented voice (following Zecchi’s previous work on the subject). It is insightful, entertaining and highly inventive, experimenting with a diverse range of videographic techniques and forms of voiceover.

Men Shouting: A History in 7 Episodes by Alan O’L eary

One of the explicit inspirations for Zecchi’s video above, O’L eary’s is a tour de force of parametric criticism, or what he calls a form of “cyborg scholarship”. It is a fascinating and highly generative piece, and remains playful throughout; O’L early must have had a lot of fun while making it, like a child playing with Lego. It would be difficult to explain here just what the video does with its subject material (three narrative films made about the 2008 financial crash); luckily, O’L eary has already done that himself, in the accompanying creator’s statement, which you should definitely read prior to watching the video if you want any chance of figuring out what the hell is going on!

Moving Poems: A Raisin in the Sun (1961) by Desirée de Jesús

Evelyn Kreutzer’s Moving Poems collection, which pairs poems with moving images, has generated some remarkable works over the past couple of years. This video by de Jesús is one of the standout pieces. It places the 1961 adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun in dialogue with Langston Hughes’s “Harlem”, from which its title was derived. It is an intelligent and complex piece, employing multiple, dense layerings of image, sound and text, and will benefit from repeat viewings. Check it out, as well as the other pieces in the collection – and consider contributing your own.

Unsteady (for Elisabeth Bronfen) by Johannes Binotto

I will not say much about Binotto’s touching tribute to his former teacher and close friend, Elisabeth Bronfen, who retired from Zurich university this summer. You should simply watch it (all the way to the very end) and smile.

Watching the Rehearsal by Jason Mittell

Why leave scholarship to chance? You’d better watch Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal before watching this one; and while you’re at it, watch some of Professor Mittell’s previous pieces, where he established some of the ideas and approaches he’s developed here in elaborate and unexpected ways; specifically, this and this .

Mast-del مست دل by Maryam Tafakory

This last one is unfortunately not available for viewing online, and has been making the festival round this past year – go and watch it if you get the chance. Is this a video essay? I don’t know. Here is how Tafakory describes it: “A love song that would never pass through the censors, Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.” Anyone who’s seen her previous work (and if you haven’t, you’re missing out), would recognise these themes and ideas that she has dealt with before. Here, she approaches them from a radically different aesthetic, masterfully blending clips from existing films, original footage, a scripted narrative and original score, to mesmerising and moving effect.

Media studies scholar, bricoleur, project leader videoessayresearch.org

No representative overview, no proper summaries. But a collection of echoes, reverberations of works I have seen this year and which keep playing in my head.

Moving Poems: Eine Erinnerung [A Memory] by Evelyn Kreutzer

“Sometimes I still picture myself.” Part of Evelyn’s fantastic Moving Poems initiative, yet a whole universe of its own. It pierces me. Everything in it. The artefacts of the video signal that devour the image, the high pitched hiss of the TV , the calm and sober voice that speaks of memories which sound innocuous but frighten you, and then the look on this face I recognise and which I have never seen like that.

With a Camera in Hand, I Was Alive + Introduction by Katie Bird

“I keep thinking about gestures”.

Katie Bird’s haunting video essay and its bittersweet introduction makes us keep thinking, keep wondering, about the weight and value of labour, of film labour, scholarly labour, of what it means to hold, a camera, a child, a body, yourself, and how we can continue by letting go.

Film Thought 5. Kuchar at Kmart by Will DiGravio

“In such places, he finds the people, the ones like my family, and friends, and neighbours from home…”

A videographic haiku, from one loving observer to the other, beautiful, personal, careful, vulnerable. It makes me fall in love with the filmmaker it portrays, with the people the filmmaker met, and with the person who made this video.

“How did you get it? I ask — They don’t know.”

An analysis of, as well as an act of resistance against visual capitalism going rampant. We need to fight a system that is already well ahead in co-opting, privatising, watermarking, and sealing the archives, depriving more and more people of their past, their collective memories. This video essay is an emergency call and a road map.

Thelma & Louise: Rape Culture, Mudflaps, and Vaginal Horizons by Dayna McLeod

“Ain’t it beautiful?” Playful. Painful. So precise. I cannot choose among the works of Dayna but I feel particularly connected to this one because I cannot separate it from all the conversations we had around it. Here is a beautiful artist and thinker driving at high speed to where video essays usually do not dare to go. Please take me with you, I will sit on the backseat.

Super Volume – A Tactile Art by Cormac Donnelly

“Intention re-situates to the hands and fingers.” Abstract and visceral at the same time it is this experimental video essay that made me suddenly and fully understand and feel what “working with sound” could mean, how it feels to grasp what cannot be touched. When you see it, everything vibrates.

mini_essay_5 (Body Parts) by Occitane Lacurie

“Balayez vers le haut pour afficher plus.”

Occitane’s mini-essays (what an understatement!) show iPhone navigation as a method of thoughts taking shape. Scrolling, clicking, touching, feeling through images and associations, a flow of intertexts at the tip of your invisible finger. You better be careful with what you open next. In this one I feel seen by all these bodies, dismembered, scattered, commodified. Looking through the mirror stage and back again. And what about this little screen in my hand? Part of my body or not?

Video essayist/experimental filmmaker

The 169 Seconds Series

I couldn’t pick only one video essay from this stellar series, so I nominate the entire body of work from 2023. I love the length requirement, which results in some creative interpretations of the source material.

It’s a Zabriskie Zabriskie Zabriskie Zabriskie Point by Daniel Kremer

A personal, feature-length essay film about Death Valley and its importance to the history of cinema as well as its longstanding resonance with the filmmaker. Kremer has admirably unearthed many underground and lesser known works that were filmed in this desert and included them here, to my delight. Kremer’s playful juxtapositions between the two main films is humorous and well-edited.

Memories of “It” by Kathleen Loock

Loock entwines her own experience growing up in a reunified Germany with the 1990 TV movie version of Stephen King’s It. A surprising association, but one that is fully realised and supported with her examples. Loock’s observations enrich the popular horror story as well as educate the audience about complications resulting from the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

The Thinking Machine #64: Inkblot by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Two cosmically intertwined tragedies from different films are synchronised beautifully in this succinct video mashup.

Webby Award-nominated video essayist, writer and television producer

Fire Film Supercut by Daniel Pope

The supercut, often an overlooked subgenre of the video essay, is much harder to pull off than it seems. When done right, you almost don’t even notice the splice. This supercut is, pun intended, fire.

New Beverly Cinema — October 2023 by Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith has cut a lot of the New Beverly’s monthly previews and to me, they’re pure video essays, on a pure pop-level. This one for October, a la Halloween, is especially captivating.

An electric and gripping use of animation and multi-screen to really get its thesis across. McLeod understands the exciting heights of the video essay form and has all the cylinders firing here.

YouTube creator /video editor and essayist

Why Tom Cruise’s Run Matters by Scene It

Scene it is a fairly new channel I came across, I found his content very refreshing as a new voice in the more standard “film essay” area.

string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard by acollierastro

This video came out of nowhere and blew everyone’s mind who saw it. An intriguing title, with a clearly stressed out person and also The Binding of Isaac in the thumbnail? What’s going on? Within 1 minute the purpose becomes clear; this woman who has very strong opinions and credentials will break down exactly what happened with the String Theory phenomenon while simultaneously stumbling through a playthrough of the vintage roguelike indie darling Binding of Isaac. A premise so absurd and hilarious (dare I say groundbreaking?) that you instantly want to watch and listen. It’s very informative and HIGHLY entertaining for the joke of the idea alone. I’m glad this took off because it was worth it. This is probably my most firm nomination out of the group.

Attack the Block: A Subversive Masterpiece by Kay and Skittles

Coming from very very early 2023; this one about John Boyega’s first leading role stood out for me; a beautiful look at an indie darling from one of my favourite creators breaking down the politics of crime in poor communities.

YouTuber ( Be Kind Rewind ) and film critic

Art Without the Artist (and Other Horrors from the Machine) by Dan Simpson, Eyebrow Cinema on YouTube

AI became a hotly contested subject in 2023, with studios eager to capitalise on its apparent ease and speed, and artists fighting to establish guardrails for its growth and use. Dan Simpson argues for the integrity of the artist over the dispassionate, surface-level results AI often prompts. It’s a rallying cry for those of us who advocate and appreciate the work of creative human beings.

We Must Destroy What the Bomb Cannot by Big Joel

Big Joel’s essays always stand out for their fluency in art history. Here, he weaves several works together, connecting material as disparate as Jenny Holzer and Godzilla in a stunning exploration of what words mean, contradictions, and subjectivity.

The Literalists by Brad Troemel

I’ve yet to find a better interpreter of online culture than artist Brad Troemel, whose work satirises some of the internet’s most exasperating modes of expression. In fact, he so effectively mocks these aesthetics that his work often goes viral, with choruses of the terminally online taking it, well, literally (a recent post about the unionisation of the Taylor Swift fandom comes to mind). In addition to these posts, he creates video essays outlining his observations of online behaviour. In The Literalists, he takes a look at “millennial cultural liberalism” and the inclination to scrub content clean of any possible offence, connecting the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s to the modern, flawed reasoning that it is morally bad to watch films with immoral characters. His essays are available exclusively on his Patreon, but it’s well worth at least a month’s subscription to binge them. You won’t regret it.

The Four horse_ebooks of the Apocalypse by Grace Lee/What’s So Great About That?

Everything happens so much. It’s an iconic tweet, an evergreen feeling, and the subject of Grace Lee’s exploration of the apocalyptic unease of modern life. She charts the decline of the relatively literal disaster film with the rise of a looming, paralysing belief in our pre-determined doom. It’s a fascinating topic, made even more compelling given that Lee is the best editor of video essays on YouTube.  

Host of The Video Essay Podcast; assistant editor, Cineaste; PhD candidate, University of Amsterdam

Each year, it gets more difficult to be a viewer of video essays; it is a beautiful and frustrating thing. More people are making them. They are longer. They screen at festivals, and in varied corners of the internet. Below are a few of the video essays that have resonated with me this year. Rather than try and explain why I picked them, I will instead attempt to describe something in each work. Here’s hoping it might inspire you to give them all a watch.

Joséphine Baker Watches Herself by Terri Francis

[3:43] On the left, Joséphine Baker performs in the famous skirt made out of bananas. On the right, a clip from a 1968 CBC interview with Baker. Below, a translation on screen: “No, it’s about work. You have to work hard.” A video essay that grows richer with each rewatch.

Apostles of Cinema (Tenzi za sinema) by Cece Mlay, Darragh Amelia, Gertrude Malizana, Jesse Gerard Mpango

“I like quality films. And I like difficult films,” says DJ Black. But if it is bad, “I can’t dub it.” [04:51] An incisive documentary about film culture in Tanzania.

watch me sleep: self-surveillance and middle-aging queer performance anxiety by Dayna McLeod

There’s a moment in the second minute I felt throughout my whole body. A revelation.

Void by Kevin Ferguson

The persistence of Robert Duvall’s bald head, especially at [00:13] and [04:46].

Why the Internet Loves Buster Keaton by Don McHoull

I imagine Don’s masterful montages of the internet’s response to Keaton’s artistry, and also that of Fayard and Harold Nicholas, playing on the wall of a gallery.

moving poems: a raisin in the sun (1961) by Desirée de Jesús

Water ripples. Sidney Poitier, playing with his lighter, gestures for a drink. His finger points to the text on screen, “in the sun?” Off-screen dialogue plays. [00:26] A harmonious blend of sound, image, and text.

Miss Me Yet by Chris Bell

Each episode begins with George W. Bush raising his middle finger to the camera, a gesture that becomes more grotesque and poignant the more one watches.

Film critic, programmer ( BIEFF )

A fleeting list — quite heterogeneous, and I must admit I’m not sure whether all of them are “ontologically” video essays, as definitions seem to become increasingly porous — of films that I discovered together with my colleagues at BIEFF during our work for this year’s editions.

Home Invasion by Graeme Arnfied

Simply stunning. Perhaps the best zero-budget film in many years — which affords itself the very rare “luxury” of playfully engaging with the legacy of Harun Farocki. You’ll never look at a doorbell with the same eyes after this film, not ever again.

Dear Gerald by Jasper Rigole

Rarely does the perspective of film archivists — with its particular way of looking at film, and its entire universe of both material and ethical dilemmas — actually transpire in film. Jasper Rigole’s short (aside from spotlighting his delightful IICADOM archives, a true goldmine for home movie enthusiasts) does exactly that, while also bringing into question the spectatorship of archival footage.

GeoMarkr by Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Guillaume Grandjean

Galibert-Laîné, brilliant as usual.

Bliss.jpg by Emily Rose Apter and Elijah Stevens

Some of the world’s most famous (digital — in all senses of the term) landscapes, reexamined, almost à la Richard Prince, or rather, a y2k take on the method of James Benning — brought back into materiality through 16mm film.

The Film You Are About to See by Maxime Martinot

Despite all the hand-wringing in recent years, content warnings are by no means something new to cinema — and the double helix-like structure (going both backwards and forwards throughout the history) of Martinot’s incisive and irreverent short reveals this to the fullest, together with excavating the various mores and taboos that cinema was transgressing at various times in modern history.

Gods of the Supermarket by Alberto Gonzalez Morales

I’m a sucker for any and all films that use ‘Wicked Game’ on their soundtrack. Especially so if they’re found-footage essays on queerness and bodybuilding culture.

Dancing at My Parents’ Wedding by Andreea Chiper

Finally, a pick from the local scene, still very much emergent — a tender exploration of personal videographic artifacts, as seen through the eyes of the child that knows how life is going to work out for those captured on a seemingly innocuous wedding tape.

Filmmaker and senior researcher at the Lucerne School of Art and Design

Having once again decided to nominate for this poll only makers whose work I discovered this year, I realise that the five videos that I want to highlight are works I watched in the presence of their authors. Not only did their films inspire me, but I was moved by all five Q&A sessions, for very different reasons. This may testify to a growing need for personal connection through videographic practices, in the midst of a media landscape that grows more cluttered and anonymous by the day. I also want to salute the engagement of makers who are committed to accompanying their creations in person and helping them reach an audience, even when economic or political circumstances are not favourable. My list is non hierarchical.

Artistes en zone troublés by Stéphane Gérard and Lionel Soukaz

Lionel Soukaz’s video diary Journal annales is not only a milestone in the history of French experimental cinema, it is also an essential piece of LGBTQIA + heritage. There is something extremely moving about the care and tenderness with which Stéphane Gérard approaches this audiovisual document, as he edits a new short portrait of Soukaz’s late lover Hervé Couergou from the thousands of hours of footage Soukaz shot, making this testimony to the history of the «années sida» and the evolution of the gay movement accessible to a new generation of spectators, artists and activists.

Ours / Bear by Morgane Frund

A personal exploration of the complex power dynamics between a male filmer and female filmed subjects, when the camera is suddenly turned towards he whose gaze had hitherto remained unchallenged. Frund’s video essay is uncomfortable in the best sense of the word, and leaves its viewers with more questions than answers, providing a starting point for an essential conversation about gender, class and generational differences, and the ethics of documentary.

Personne n’était sympa / Nobody Was Cool by Hélèna Villovitch and David TV

The film is a moving and hilarious evocation of a walk through the streets of Paris on 1 May 1986, based on the filmmakers’ memories and a wide range of audiovisual archives. Images and sounds are saturated, superimposed, iridescent; facts and fantasies merge in a hallucinatory stream of real and fabricated memories, to which a final twist gives a whole new meaning.

Dreams About Putin by Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez

Based on a selection of actual dreams that the filmmakers collected online, this essay explores how the figure of Vladimir Putin has crept into the psyches of Russian citizens since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Disturbing, violent, absurd, the dreams are narrated in voice over and accompanied by a visual score created with the 3D graphics program Unreal Engine, interspersed with bizarre and equally absurd archival footage of Putin. A nightmarish response to a nightmarish war, waged both on the frontline and on social media.

Non-alignés: Scènes des archives Labudović / Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels by Mila Turajlic

A portrait of Tito’s official cameraman Stevan Labudović, this feature-length essay film exhumes previously unseen archival footage from the 1961 Belgrade conference to explore the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement. As educational as it is politically sharp, the film accounts for the difficulties faced by Turajlic in working with unprocessed, barely identified archives, and offers Labudović an opportunity to share his personal and often humorous take on this turning point in the history of world politics.

YouTube-based video essayist writing about the intersection of games, culture, art, and politics

Everything Is Sludge: Art in the Post-Human Era by Lily Alexandre

Alexandre’s dissection of how algorithms are morphing our artistic tastes is insightful and biting. Although viewers may expect a video about AI , more time is spent on how humans are more than willing to start producing AI -esque content by hand in order to serve the tastes of their perceived audience. The real star of this video is the production, however. Alexandre speaks as a kaleidoscopic projection of Subway Surfer, minecraft montages, and other “sludge” is projected onto their face. As interesting as the essay’s script is, the viewer’s eye will inevitably slip to the endless stream of meaningless attention-grabbing clips – just as Alexandre intended, I imagine.

History of Handedness in Video Games by Face Full of Eyes

Equal parts essay and visual compendium, Face Full of Eyes’ video contains a dizzying amount of clips from hundreds of video games, all answering the same seemingly inconsequential question: how do the game’s characters handle guns with their dominant and non-dominant hands? The answer for any particular game isn’t important. The point of the video is instead that no decision is meaningless when creating art. In a created world like a video game, everything is a chance for storytelling— even the choice to depict how a left-handed person might have to reload a right-handed gun.

Four-Byte Burger by Ahoy

The experience of watching Ahoy attempt a perfect replication of a digital illustration from 1985 somehow captures the energy of a 21st-century sculptor attempting to re-carve Michelangelo’s David. While he starts with modern Photoshop tools, the latter half of the video is a deep dive into save file formats and 40-year old display technology; a crucial realisation in the video comes from a monitor’s changing colour tone when turned to portrait orientation. The fact that all this is in service of a delightfully whimsical picture of a burger? Even better.

Film critic, kritikosatlasas.com

This video essay gives additional meaning to the idea that cinema is a warehouse of memory.

The Thinking Machine #73: Revealing Leone by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Video essay exploring Sergio Leone’s technique of “revealing”. But revealing what was hidden in the scene is also the most interesting feature of the video essay. This video “opens the doors” with a wonderful rhythm and music.

Practices of Viewing: Description by Johannes Binotto

A video essay that doesn’t use any film footage, but which is still very interesting to watch and listen to. A video essay about a description technique that can make you see things better than any images.

Some Thoughts Occasioned by Four Desktops by Ariel Avissar

A video essay made as a response and as a dialogue with the other four video essays, each of which uses desktop documentary form in different and unique ways.

Sensuous and Affective by Oswald Iten

Using various techniques, it explores how cinema affects us through audiovisual experiences and how video essays can reveal this.

Rain: A Phenomenal Catalogue by Stephen Broomer (Art &  Trash)

Many important avant-garde films were made in 1929, Joris Ivens’ Rain being one of them. This video essay shows what an amazing and groundbreaking film it is.

Memories of It by Kathleen Loock

Relationship between collective and personal memory, It (1990), VHS , the fall of the Berlin Wall – all of these somehow connect to my personal experience, interest and history, which, as this video shows, is not entirely unique.

Audiovisual essayist and professor of film at the University of Reading

Although it may not have been where I first encountered them, all of my nominations appear in two consecutive issues of [in]Transition. This is a reflection of the quality of work being published by the journal, rather than a lack of imagination on my part.

‘Isn’t That Going to Be Awfully Dull and Drab?’ George Hoyningen-Huene’s Use of Neutrals by Lucy Fife Donaldson

A follow up to the video essay on George Hoyningen-Huene’s work published in Movie last year, this piece again draws on archival research to sharpen our perception of production design choices, this time in relation to the potential of a muted colour palette.

This video was mentioned a couple of times in last year’s poll but has since been published. A brilliant interweaving of gaming, Chris Marker and reflection on the politics of Google Street View.

Mad Men’s ‘Babylon’: Mapping Out a Musical Metaphor by Ariane Hudelet

A compelling tracing of multi-stranded connections in an end-of episode musical montage: expertly and elegantly done.

Eye-Camera-Ninagawa by Colleen Laird

Graphically striking, temporally inventive, technically dazzling, formally compelling, surprising throughout.

I downloaded this film from its dedicated website, before the option to stream became available, and watched it without reading anything about it, thereby experiencing the full impact of its dramatic payoff.

Filmmaker, videoessayist, researcher and critic

It is exciting to finally be able to engage with Joséphine Baker’s media presence through film historian Terri Francis’ research and video essay. I had been waiting to see this video essay for some time so I was very happy to see it published in the journal Feminist Media Histories this year.

“Why this accent?” Barbara Zecchi takes a closer look -or listens more carefully- to the accents employed in House of Gucci (Ridley Scott, 2021) in order to explore (and undo) Hollywood representations of Italians. This video essay builds off her previous work on the subject of the accented video essay, with a once again playful and creative, as well as thought-provoking result.

Roberto Cobo: Screen Stars Dictionary by Catherine Grant

This video essay is part of the Screen Stars Dictionary, published by Tecmerin and edited by Ariel Avissar and Vicente Rodríguez. Although there are so many great ones to choose from, I am highlighting this one because in it Catherine Grant gives us the special opportunity to remember and rediscover the “rare” and wonderful late Mexican actor Roberto Cobo (1930-2002).

chaste/unchaste by Maryam Tafakory

A beautifully crafted and compelling video essay from filmmaker Maryam Tafakory which cuts together images from 32 films, spanning three decades, in order to dissect the binary of chaste/unchaste women in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema.

Practices of Viewing: Ending by Johannes Binotto

The final video essay in Binotto’s series titled Practices of Viewing. These videos are made with so much care and love for the artistry of filmmaking that we will surely come back to them with time, as these gestures of film viewing begin to transform and, in some cases, even disappear.

Nitrate: To the Ghosts of the 75 Lost Philippine Silent Films (1912-1933) by Khavn De La Cruz

Nitrate: To the Ghosts of the 75 Lost Philippine Silent Films (1912-1933) and National Anarchist: Lino Brocka’ are two masterful works made by filmmaker Khavn De La Cruz about Filipino film history through the recycling of archival materials. Both are fascinating films, made in a video-essayistic spirit, that will hopefully circulate widely after their premiere this year at IFFR .

A fresh take on the beloved film Thelma & Louise by video essayist and artist Dayna McLeod in which the final suicidal leap is transformed into a deep dive of the vagina (using an endoscopic camera)! Soon to be published in the special issue, ‘Right to Rage: Subjectivity and Activism’ edited by Barbara Zecchi and Diana Fernández Romero, in Teknokultura: Journal of Digital Culture and Social Movements (forthcoming). Final note: I promise to see everything that Dayna McLeod makes (which also goes for everyone else on this list).

Freelance film scholar and video essayist

In my opinion, it was an excellent year for video essays and so it was especially hard to make a selection for this poll. I used three parameters in the composition of my list: I had to choose works by different essayists from those for whom I voted in 2022; and my selection could only feature personal favourites in the field of videographic criticism, that is, a specific film, television and screen studies subset of the “video essay”. The videos also needed to be already published and freely available online, which ruled out a lot of great works for which I will undoubtedly be voting next year. I’m betting that 2024 will be an even more excellent year for video essays!

Shah Rukh Khan. Screen Stars Dictionary by Ritika Kaushik

This was the video essay I most enjoyed watching in 2023! It was part of a joint venture inaugurated this year in which I was delighted to participate - The Screen Stars Dictionary , launched by the Spanish audiovisual essay journal TECMERIN in conjunction with video-essay entrepreneur extraordinaire Ariel Avissar, whose own contribution to the dictionary (on Tom Cruise ) I also really loved.

Creative Geography, Creative Connections: Candyman by John Gibbs

An ambitious and highly significant work, published in Movie , that is the perfect match of videographic critical form and content. I am simply in awe of John Gibbs’ audiovisual research and composition here. A great and powerful model for future work on the performativity and facticity of film and television locations.

The Responsive Eye, or, The Morning Show May Destroy You by Catherine Fowler

Fowler’s magnificently inventive video essay on the two television series The Morning Show and I May Destroy You compared the relational technique that each takes to sexual abuse using a ‘feminist videographic diptych’ method. Her video formed part of a brilliant special issue on that method that she proposed, produced and guest edited for [in]Transition, the peer-reviewed journal I co-edit, which was full to the brim with similarly urgent and powerful feminist works using multiscreen and other juxtapositional procedures.

This was the most original work of those I loved this year, and one I was fortunate to follow the making of while it was in progress. Academic film and TV studies video essays have taken a very performative and embodied turn in recent years, but Mittell characteristically pushes this even further into the realm of extremely ambitious, very entertaining and deeply insightful pastiche. I can’t wait to see where his videographic approaches to televisual reflexivity will take him, and us, next.

A superbly made, genuinely risk-taking work that asks and answers ongoing urgent questions about the circulation of public domain images and films. We were delighted to publish Misek’s work at [in]Transition, where it headed a huge and very strong issue featuring numerous other works I would have loved to select for my best-of-the-year videos had it been a Top Twenty list, rather than a Top Seven one.

Filling (Feeling) the Archival Void: The Case of Helena Cortesina’s Flor de España by Barbara Zecchi

Zecchi gets my vote for Video Essayist of the Year for her prolific, always brilliant videographic work. This particular video, published in issue 9(4) of the journal Feminist Media Histories, is extraordinary. As the editor of that journal Jennifer Bean wrote of it in her marvellous introductory essay for the issue of FMH , “[Zecchi’s] voice as well as her embodied, emotive presence on the screen are intrinsic features of a project that deploys videographic tools to sustain what she calls a ‘practice-based counterarchive’ capable of reversing the ongoing ‘dispossession’ of women’s contributions to media history.” Terri Francis’s remarkable 2019 video essay Joséphine Baker Watches Herself is also published in the issue’s exploration of the potential of videographic criticism for feminist media historiographies, alongside powerful new work by Celia Sainz.

With a Camera in Hand, I Was Alive by Katie Bird

Katie Bird’s virtuosic exploration of the affordances of desktop filmmaking to access the sensations of using a physical camera (and its highly original and moving audiovisual maker’s statement) made a magisterial contribution to Kevin B. Lee and Ariel Avissar’s audiovisual essay dossier on the desktop documentary, for the Spring 2023 issue of NECSUS : European Journal of Media Studies. The other entries in the dossier were of excellent quality across the board, and I would particularly point to Ritika Kaushik and Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco’s great video essays for the ways in which, like Bird’s, their work points to how screen capture techniques can be harnessed to investigate very important and highly diverse screen studies research questions. 

Film scholar and video essayist ; University of Minnesota

Kiss me softly | crackly | sharply by Lucy Fife Donaldson

The combination of visuals and sound in this intriguing video forces the viewer into attention, listening and watching carefully while examining one’s own expectations and intimate reactions to individual moments.

Nebular Epistemics by Alan O’L eary

Incredibly dense on a theoretical level, performatively innovative, and yet still accessible and hilarious — what an accomplishment to combine these elements into a coherent whole and convincing argument.

Being Dolls (or Not): Spinning Mothers and Daughters in Elena Ferrante’s Adaptations by Barbara Zecchi

A dazzling watching experience that masterfully interweaves critical argument with audiovisual spectacle; a prime example of Zecchi’s superior sense of rhythm that permeates all her work.

Home Is Bleak. Is Home Bleak? by Delal Yatci

With Yatci’s piece too, rhythm is what captures my fascination. An examination of the home in Turkish films by female filmmakers takes shape by meandering between different film scenes, tied together by beautifully selected sound.

The Body • S05E16 • TPN ’s Buffy Guide by Passion of the Nerd

While I’m a fan of Passion of the Nerd’s entire series on Buffy, the episode on “The Body” weaves together such powerful narratives and meditations on grief and, at the same time, on the effect and personal meaning of media objects and their embeddedness not only in a cultural context but in our own private archives of (media) memories.

Once upon a Screen Vol. 2, Part 2

The second part of Once upon a Screen Vol 2 (edited by Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer) seems to have a much more sombre atmosphere in comparison to Part 1 and features another inspiring array of videos based on other creators’ written screen memories. To me, Avissar’s The 39 Shots, Oswald Iten’s Recreated Memories, and Johannes Binotto’s Down a Dark Spiral stand out in this collection of amazing works.

Film scholar , video essayist , animator, PhD researcher

Arbitrary Motion: Accidentally / On Purpose by Farzaneh Yazdandoost

Inventive videographic research about stop motion animation is still rare, but Farzaneh Yazdandoost finds striking images and sounds to draw our attention towards the arbitrary motion of animated fur.

A pamphlet, an act of deliverance, and a moving found (and partly licensed) footage film.

Critics’ Choice 9 : (putting) on Aftersun by Inge Coolsaet

When we see the same film, we each see a different film, especially when that film invites us to inhabit it ourselves. Inge Coolsaet’s refreshingly minimalist take on this idea did the same for me.

“Isn’t That Going to Be Awfully Dull and Drab?” George Hoyningen-Huene’s Use of Neutrals by Lucy Fife Donaldson

The wonderfully muted colour schemes of Technicolor movies have always fascinated me. Thanks to the well-researched video essays (the first one came out the year before) by Lucy Fife Donaldson I am now also aware of one of the creators and proponents behind those concepts.

Overflowing with ideas and hilarious moments, this personal multi-part investigation of Italian accents in American mainstream cinema feels a lot shorter than it actually is.

Twisties! A Live Performance by Alice Lenay

The notion of what videographic criticism can do has been constantly challenged for a few years now. Alice Lenay is pushing the boundary further with her fully embodied live video essay performance in which she inserts herself into television footage from the 1996 Olympics, obscuring bodies, revealing camera angles, and the setup’s inherent dissociation.

Lecturer at University of Art and Design HEAD – Genève, co-director Festival Cinéma Jeune Public, curator at Locarno Film Festival and Int. Short Film Festival Winterthur

La Maison by Sophie Ballmer

Sophie recounts the renovation of a house inherited by her partner Tarik in the Vallée de Joux. Attracted by the potential, they began by destroying everything. Then it was time to rebuild. To the weight of the rubble cans was added the weight of their families’ dreams and values. With affection and humour, Sophie deconstructs patriarchy, capitalism and inheritance in an attempt to make room for achievable utopias.

Marungka Tjalatjunu (Dipped in Black) by Derik Lynch, Matthew Thorne

The film follows Yankunytjatjara man Derik Lynch’s road trip back to Country for spiritual healing, as memories from his childhood return. A journey from the oppression of white city life in Adelaide, back home to his remote Anangu Community (Aputula) to perform on sacred Inma ground. Inma is a traditional form of storytelling using the visual, verbal, and physical. It is how Anangu Tjukurpa (story connected to country / dreaming / myth / lore) have been passed down for over 60,000+ years from generation to generation.

Æquo by Eloïse Le Gallo, Julia Borderie

The sound of an alphorn echoes in the mountains while glaciers are dripping. Far away, on an oceanographic boat, researchers probe the invisible seabed. Geological bodies of salt and ice emerge from the digital depths of a software. They melt and disintegrate in the hands of scientists. The filmmakers place encounters at the heart of their approach, anchoring their creative process in a poetic approach.

Pacific Club by Valentin Noujaïm

In 1979, the Pacific Club opened in the basement of La Défense, the business district of Paris. It was the first nightclub for Arabs from the suburbs – a parallel world of dance, sweat, young love, and one-night utopias. Azedine, 17 years old at the time, tells us the forgotten story of this club and of this generation who dreamed of integrating into France but who soon came face to face with racism, the AIDS epidemic, and heroin. The film gives visibility to the forgotten, the invisible and reflects on the power dynamics and dominance system within French society. 

Out of the Blue by Morgane Frund

In 2013, an auteur film causes a scandal due to its sex scenes. The filmmaker is 16 and one of the angry viewers. Ten years later, she is ready to settle the score with this film in the form of a video essay. Her film visits ways to tame the ‘male gaze’ and understand her position in a still man-made/thought world.

Tierra de leche by Milton Guillen and Fiona Guy Hall

On New England dairy farms, daily life orbits around the milking parlour. Here, machinery and cows come together as an exploitation mechanism of migrant workers from Central America, consuming their every waking hour and even infiltrating their dreams. The film denounces a terrible reality told in the most poetic and respectful way. 

Not sure what a video essay is, so my choices might be slightly off-topic.

Mickey Takes Acid by AI Generated Nonsense

It is great, very funny, and not sure a human could find all those weird connections.

TraumaZone by Adam Curtis

I heard many people complaining that Adam Curtis’s essay is simplistic, you cannot express the collapse of the USSR in such a short time etc. Maybe it is so, but it is exactly because of this method that he achieves a kind of poetic truth, if I may say so.

Der Elvis by Joe Moritsugu

It is older, but since I never have heard of it, I consider it new. I heard of this filmmaker because two of his films were freeleech on karagarga. This short essay is ahead of its time and has a punk energy not so easy to find anymore.

Video essayist and Subaru nomad. Co-moderator of the wonderful Essay Library .

The “Pay For It” Scam by Carlos Maza

I’ll start my list off strong by fudging the numbers – this video came out in the last months of 2022, and yet Carlos Maza’s work demands a spot in my recommendations. Maza is an online video veteran, previously creating for Vox. His independent work allows him to flex his style: a blend of professionalism that says “this is worth taking seriously and I’ve put in the work” and casualness that says “we’re still going to make a tough topic go down easy.” He tackles some of the most contentious topics affecting our political landscape – this video covers the manufacturing of the “debt crisis” in the minds of the American public. The heart of each video lies in the wrap-up: Carlos has a knack for leaving viewers off with a perfect mix of “this sucks,” and “but I believe in us” and finally, “fuck yeah.”

Cinema in Pain: Decoding “Mad God” by James DeLisio

“Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.”

This thought-provoking video is an approachable look at a notoriously repulsive film (which I do not say lightly, as a squeamish viewer myself!). It proposes one lens of interpretation: what if a film like Mad God is our best chance as an audience to experience an articulation of pain through art? If pain is incommunicable through words, what sights and sounds, what deviations from expectation, can bring us into that headspace? This examination of the non-straightforward means through which cinema may operate has bent my brain, and I must recommend that you experience it for yourself.

The Man/Car Gender Binary in John Carpenter’s Christine by max teeth

“Men are of course men and cars are cars but women are also cars.”

In the vein of Women Are Not Objects, but Objects Are Still Women, Max takes us through the special cinematic relationships between a man and his car, a man and his car who is also a woman, and a man and another man and a car which is somewhere nearby. The point: how have we learned to signify masculinity on screen? And how does John Carpenter’s Christine induce horror by perverting those signifiers? A cherry on top: this video is hilarious.

As a bonus, I’ll also recommend their video on Hereditary for its crisp, creative, and playful visual style.

The Essential Whiteness of One-Hit Wonders by The Nukes

“Hey Josh, you’re white. Who sang Tainted Love? I answered easily and without thought: ‘Soft Cell.’ But a few have offered me a truth that I, in my whiteness, did not know then, but do know now. Soft Cell’s Tainted Love is a cover.”

This is a tale as old as time, and yet even if you think you know this story, this video is a journey worth taking. Josh from The Nukes takes us on a personal musical tour through the many, many hidden (and not so hidden) ways that the music industry has historically catered to white sensibilities. Interesting, frustrating, and relentlessly funny – make sure to read the chapter markers for an extra dose of “this creator is having way too much fun.”

(Another bonus recommendation: Josh’s “ Is it Impossible to Dad ” is a heartfelt, prescient examination of the gap we attempt to bridge in parenthood – and in all relationships, really. Watch both, enjoy!)

I Watched 151 Celebrity House Tours and They’re Full of Lies by Kendra Gaylord

You might’ve noticed that I lean toward thoughtful, exploratory content that pulls you in with a premise, then surprises you with a run of jokes. Well, in that vein, Kendra’s channel has been a fantastic discovery for me this year. Kendra talks about architecture the way I talk about That One Funny Thing My Friend Did That One Time. Her style feels comfy and inclusionary, like you’re both laughing together.

It’s always fun letting someone take you on a journey through their random obsession, and watching all 151 Architectural Digest home tours probably enters “obsession” territory (and yet, one gets the sense that if not for the video, Kendra still would’ve done this anyway). The impression is less “I self-flagellate for content,” and more “let me give you my best takeaways from a task that you will likely never do yourself.” The difference between the two, I realised, is surprisingly important to me!             

The Importance of Spaces in The Last Black Man in San Francisco by KaiAfterKai

This video is a lovely exploration of the importance of personal connection to space, the ability to self-actualise through space, and connection to history through space, which all feel especially prescient to a generation of young adults who have been gatekept from home ownership.

It feels like listening to a guided meditation tape; Kai is, as always, soothing in their delivery, punctuated by perfect music choices and encapsulated within a flawless structure. This is the essay equivalent of sitting back in a field, relaxing, letting ideas wash over you.

Is the “Off-Grid” Lifestyle a Lie?? by Maggie Mae Fish

Also on the topic of spaces, Maggie explores a trend that may seem like a dream to young people growing increasingly unsure that they will ever be able to afford typical homeownership: off-gridding. Specifically, she calls attention to the way that people discover new lifestyles through the Internet, and whether the people selling that lifestyle are leaving out important details (and why they may be incentivised to do so!).

Following up on her 2022 video on the Netflix show Motel Makeover, this video continues Maggie’s deep dives into the ways in which the lens of “content” turns building and designing spaces into a sales pitch, while unearthing the hidden costs that these shows are not incentivised to reveal.

Associate professor in audiovisual arts and cognition at University of Groningen, NL / co-author of Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video

Trying to have a full grasp on a year’s videographic output is increasingly becoming an impossible effort. This inevitably leads to a highly personal selection (and possibly less overlap among the featured videos – perhaps Kevin B. Lee will figure that out for us), but it’s also great news as it is due to a rapidly expanding videographic scene and community.

From what I’ve seen, this was one of this year’s most eloquent videographic ruminations on the theory and then applied practice of audiovisual t(h)inkering, brilliantly marrying an appeal for the exploratory research method with its explanatory mode of clear presentation.

Mind Autopsy by Johanna Vaude

(One of the) best producer(s) of supercut mashups these days is Johanna Vaude. Fans can watch her treatment of variously similar criminal investigations in Fincher’s oeuvre until we get our 3rd season of Mindhunters.

Sound Before Picture by Cormac Donnelly

I always enjoy it when someone finds an unexplored cinematic niche (in this case the sounds, full with clues and anticipation, leading the movies in before they even begin) and makes the most out of it through engaging audio(!)visual presentation.

Embodied Visual Meaning [in] Motion by Maarten Coëgnarts

Imagine how challenging it would be to argue for the functioning of abstract dynamic patterns as fundamentals for representing a variety of cinematic drama – a challenge Coëgnarts himself is dealing with in his excellent writing. Beyond its inevitable scholarly qualities, this video’s virtue is how simple it makes such (textually) difficult concepts understandable (in videography).

Rain: A Phenomenal Catalogue by Stephen Broomer

Making me want to view the movie they’re studying is one of my (very personal) benchmarks for evaluating the quality of video essays. A 27-minute contemplatively thorough dissection of Joris Ivens’ 12-minute short film Regen [Rain] – that creates an ‘archetypal rainstorm’ out of an 8-month sampling of rainy images – is exactly such a videographic work.

An attentive response, in desktop video form, to the four desktop videos (by Johannes Binotto, Katie Bird, Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco, and Ritika Kaushik – wish I could include all these videos in this best-of selection) that were part of the audiovisual section of the Spring edition of the Necsus journal. It does the work viewers normally do when watching and assessing video essays.

Koker in Fragments by Ardeshir Shirkhani and Arshia Shirkhani

A student project for my videographic criticism class, this little ‘screwmeneutic cinemagraph’ pauses the main action and keeps running the peripheral happenings and sound around it. Such tender intervention is not only a lovely tribute to Kiarostami but in fact a brilliant way of illustrating his characteristic “gentle humanism … that reveals the cosmic majesty and mystery of ordinary life” (The Criterion Collection for Kiarostami’s The Koker Trilogy).

Associate professor Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam

Natalia Oreiro by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková

Part of the innovative Screen Stars Dictionary series published by Tecmerin, “Natalia Oreiro” by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková stands out in both topic and aesthetics. The essay breaks with the US -dominance in the study of (global) stardom by focusing on a Latin American star who becomes famous in Russia, Israel, and Central-European countries, thereby calling attention to a transnational movement that is not often addressed in star studies. The playful aesthetics of early 2000 digital culture highlights the importance of the internet in this transnational movement between “periphery” and “periphery.

Published in Feminist Media Histories, “Joséphine Baker Watches Herself” by Terri Francis shows the added value of videographic criticism to more conventional academic work. By connecting archival footage of early stage performances by Joséphine Baker to televised interviews with the iconic star in which she looks back and comments on her own star image, provides space for the Baker’s agency and voice within the narrative of her stardom in a way that could not be done so effectively (and affectively) in a written essay.

chaste/unchaste by Maryam Tafakory Published in [in]Transition, “chaste/unchaste” by Maryam Tafakory effectively challenges the binary that is spelled out in the title. Starting with a four-way split screen and a graphic that looks like a target finder from a rifle (or like a measuring rod), the audiovisual essay presents images of women from Iranian cinema, thereby highlighting how they are continuously scrutinised and policed, yet also how they challenge the omnipresent gaze. Using mirroring and repetition, combined by an uncanny soundtrack, the essay forces viewers (at least me) to question their preconceived notions and binary thinking. And what a surprise when the credits reveal that the footage comes from 32 films! As Maria Walsh concludes in her peer-review of the essay: “This is brave work.”

Postdoctoral researcher and video essayist , Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf

Just like in past years, I want to emphasise that I do not consider this a or my “best of” list but rather a list of video essays from different sub-genres and platforms that I found particularly interesting this year and with which I aim to hint at the breadth of video essay production.

An evocative and very layered meditation on poetry, drama, film and their (cross-)adaptations. A wonderful contribution to the Moving Poems project, which I’m running on Vimeo.

A dense, rich audiovisual analysis of the two Candyman films (1992 and 2021) that delves deeply into the films themselves but at least as much into questions of urban planning, architecture, and racial segregation in Chicago and beyond.

Extra Local: Extras as Actors in Breaking Away by Jacob Smith

A fascinating analysis of a commonly overlooked type of film labour and performance — extras — that starts and returns to a rich microanalysis and in the meantime provides a thorough historical and conceptual discussion of this form of acting. The video also includes one of the best “plot twists” I’ve seen in video essay work so far!

Why Do We Make Comedies about Existential Dread? by Afterthoughts

A highly entertaining and evocative video on contemporary absurdist, dark, “meme-y” comedy that asks questions like “Why are we so weird and sad right now?” and ponders on realisations like “When I’m alone with my thoughts, I’m alone with y’all’s thoughts.”

Another great piece from Binotto’s Practices of Viewing series – one that I referred to as an “anti video essay” when I first saw it.

Hello Dankness by Soda Jerk

An impressive assemblage of excerpts from all kinds of Hollywood films from the past ca. 40 years, sampled into a dark comedic take on the 2016 US elections and the Trump presidency.

How to Make Money from Video Essays: A Guide to Pitching by Will Webb

An unconventional pick since it’s not a video essay itself but a video about how to make (specifically pitch) video essays but one that I find useful to include here (perhaps as a bonus pick) because it provides insights into the ways in which video essayists produce and monetise their work outside the direct infrastructures of academic institutions.

Video essayist, critique and researcher in visual culture

Cycles of Labor: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives by Veronika Hanáková, Martin Tremčinský, Jiří Anger

Using interfaces familiar to anyone who grew up in the 2000s and 2010s, the authors reedit a film that recently won the votes of the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of all Times poll: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. I really loved how they manage to produce a feminist and environmental analysis of the film using these layouts, subverting our video-essayistic habits (using cinema as a hermeneutic tool) by calling on videogame grammar to study film.

O fumo do fogo (Smoke of the Fire) by Daryna Mamaisur

Daryna Mamaisur is a Ukrainian artist and a refugee in Portugal. In her essay, she films closeups of her Portuguese handbooks, finding echoes of dispatches her friend sends her from their country – the dots and shapes of the three-colour printing of the old-fashioned books resemble the low-quality videos. I was fascinated by the way Mamaisur films her hands hovering over her desktop covered by childlike images, and how as soon as the editing flips them, the war and its trauma appears.

البحث عن السوري الإرهابي In Search of the Syrian Fanatic by Abou Naddara

The Syrian filmmaker collective Abou Naddara conducted this year a multimedia investigation about an image and a corpse, both hidden underneath layers of French colonial propaganda. The images come from one of the first silent fiction films, The Assassination of General Kléber (Georges Hatot, 1897), depicting the murder of the Napoleonic officer in 1800 by a Syrian student in Egypt. Abou Naddara discovered the remains of the presumed perpetrator, Soleyman El-Halebi, are kept by a French Museum, in its colonial collection and decided to take action: he wrote both a written and a videographic letter to French authorities, asking them to return the body as well as renounce the racist cliché, first printed in visual culture by the 1897 film, of the fanatic Syrian.

Alain Krivine, le trotskisme permanent (Alain Krivine, the Permanent Trotskism) by Usul and Ostpolitik

This video is part of a series created by the French videaste Usul and Ostpolitik, the “Portraits” telling the stories of central figures of French political history in a critical perspective (the series is published for the online channel Blast, continued by Ostpolitik and another youtuber, Modiie; meanwhile, Usul started another series, “Rhinoceros” about the rightisation of media). Together, they also produced “Ouvrez les guillemets” (“Open the Quotes”) (for the online journal Mediapart) about political news. I wanted to cite one of their works for several reasons. One of them is that I find it very interesting how a video essay can engage with social and political criticism through mediatic images – the way Serge Daney, for instance, used to do it in a textual way in Libération. I also wanted to pay a specific homage to Usul, who for the last ten years, is, in my opinion, the most stimulating political video essayist of the French YouTube landscape and draws me to the art of montage and media criticism with his latest series “Mes chers contemporains” (“Dear Contemporaries”).

I Would Like to Rage by Chloé Galibert-Laîné

Finally and above all, I wanted to mention a piece by Chloé Galibert-Laîné, whose work in general is of crucial importance to me, and whose I Would Like to Rage, in particular, touched me enormously. As I had the chance to tell them, their work navigates brilliantly the tricky art of self-memeification to address gendered and intimate political issues, escaping every trap set by the internalised (patriarchal) injunctions of concealing the “I” and its revolts.

Assistant professor of Japanese cinema, The University of British Columbia

Thelma & Louise: Rape Culture, Mudflaps, & Vaginal Horizons by Dayna McLeod

With this righteous and riotous very close look at Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (1991), Dayna McLeod continues to be one of the boldest and bravest new practitioners of the video essay. Constructed in three acts, the piece highlights the interplay between actions and reactions, both in the film and beyond to the discourse surrounding it. The end result, and in particular the resulting ending, is a thought-provoking dive into videographic criticism and film scholarship.

Every time I watch a piece by Maryam Tafakory, I am overwhelmed by contradictory emotions. “chaste/unchaste,” Tafakory’s contribution to the ‘Feminist Videographic Diptych’ special issue of [in]Transition, is no exception. The use of uncanny repetition and graphic matches is both mesmerising and agitating, familiarising and defamiliarising, grounding and destabilising. And as always, I’m stunned by the quantity of films Tafakory uses to create the illusion of effortless coherent cohesion.

A Tactile Art by Cormac Donnelly

It’s worthwhile to access Cormac Donnelly’s “second iteration of the Super Volume project” on his Deformative Sound Lab website to read about the process of making a video that is very much about process and processing. While Donnelly considers the piece a representation of a tactile art, what haunts me about the video is the juxtaposition of the ephemerality in the piece—both of the transparent layering of the participants’ hands as well as the audio track itself—with the technology at the intersection of the two: the artefact of interaction. I find this work unsettling in the very best of ways.

Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives by Veronika Hanáková, Martin Tremčinský, and Jiří Anger

With each collaborative work, I find the dynamic duo of Veronica Hanáková and Jiří Anger increasingly enchanting. I can’t help it; I like their style. I was torn between this video and their entry in Ariel Avissar’s new Screen Stars Dictionary project which has some similar formal conceits, but the tongue-in-cheek nature of reframing Jeanne Dielmann’s daily routine as a “The Sim’s”-esque video game was the deciding factor. All too often, scholarly videographic criticism can feel heavy and bleak, particularly with trends in exploring thematised trauma. Here, along with Martin Tremčinský, Hanáková and Anger make a case for serious fun.

Crochet Is Sick by Alison Peirse

A companion piece to last year’s award-winning and frequent festival feature “Knit One, Stab Two,” here Alison Peirse shifts a feminist lens from the needle to the hook, and from the voice-over to the visualised voice, in this work on the role of crochet in horror. Peirse is developing a distinct videographic style and “Crochet” is a prime example of this aesthetic that takes the video essay (and what we think we know about horror) delightfully and impishly up a notch (or three). Note the original soundtrack created especially for the work.

Currently only available on the festival circuit, Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s most recent work is a deeply personal performance of catharsis years in the making. It is also, thankfully, very funny. The video is an inspiring whirlwind through multiple media objects and platforms, a flurry of failed and forced expressions of rage, that sticks its landing and compels us, once again, to rethink what we know about the potentials of the video essay. Details about forthcoming availability are likely to be found on their website in the future.

Xena’s Body: A Menstrual Auto-Investigation Using an iPhone by Occitane Lacurie

I had the pleasure of seeing this video as a work in progress piece at the ‘In the Works: Makings and Unmakings of the Video Essay’ conference held at the Lucerne School of Art and Design at the beginning of November of this year. Even in an unfinished form, it was still one of my favourite videos I encountered this year, as well as one of the most timely. A desktop video in cell phone portrait mode, and perhaps even edited on one, Lacurie’s remarkable production brings together the personal and the political through the act of “doom scrolling” that involves, among other things, an episode of “Xena: Warrior Princess,” the iPhone menstruation application, text messages, online message boards, demonic imaginations of cell phone home screens, website searches, and an online tarot reading. Forthcoming and not soon enough.

Video essayist , filmmaker , professor

More than ever, the video essays that left their imprint on me were ones which staked a position not only within film and media objects, but in the world at large.

Dreams Have No Titles by Zineb Sedira

When I first saw this at the 2022 Venice Biennale, I didn’t recognise it as videographic, using physically reconstructed movie scenes for what might be called “spatial remix”. Seeing it again this year at the Hamburger Bahnhof, I could appreciate how much care it takes in reconstructing sites of Algerian cinema: not only sets from films set in Algeria, but also spaces where Algerian cinema is screened, preserved and contemplated. The video essay as artistic theme park, in the best sense possible, film history playfully resurrected. (See also: Goddess of Speed , Frederic Moffet)

Pictures of Ghosts by Kleber Mendonça Filho

A deeply personal psychogeographic exploration of film as home, even in the face of a looming societal ruin. Even while keeping within the format of a feature film, it is as expansive as Sedira’s installation, bravely projecting itself into a post-cinematic, post-human finale. (See also: Mast-Del , Maryam Tafakory)

Introduction to “With a Camera in Hand I Was Alive” by Katie Bird

As excellent as — and somehow longer than — the video essay it introduces, it is also a radical new proposition for videographic scholarship. Creator statements are usually written, but instead we have an experimental selfie-video layered with reflections — academic, political, personal — on women’s labour in cinema. (See also: Jill, Uncredited , Anthony Ng)

A scholarly video essay that pursues its research object so thoroughly that it becomes its mirror reflection, art and life entwined in an inextricable dialogue. (See also: Laterally , Maria Hofmann)

An inspired series of interrogations of the Italian accent in Hollywood movies as a contested site of cultural identification. This video asks who cinema really speaks for, and in doing so speaks its own truth back into cinema. (See also: Dressed to Kill Cis Hetero Patriarchy , Nicole Morse)

Feeling Cynical About Barbie by Broey Deschanel

This vlog-style essay brilliantly links two phenomena from the summer — Barbie and the Hollywood strikes — to critique media capitalism’s insidious strategies for possessing and exploiting the cultural imaginary. (See also: A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek)

Games That Don’t Fake the Space by Jacob Geller

Among the video essays occupied with audiovisual form, I especially admire Geller’s vast research and deft navigation through the surprising spatial environments found in video games. (See also: Sensuous and Affective by Oswald Iten)

Film critic

In this list, I have tried to avoid simply listing my friends, and instead tried to cover a little of the diversity of audiovisual essay venues existing today.

Performance: Divine Horror by Kryštof Kočtář and Matouš Vad’ura

Puts the destruct in deconstruction.

The Mechanics of Fluids by Gala Hernández López

A deep dive into online incel culture.

@Concert: Liveness in the Time of Coronavirus by Landon Palmer

An inspired assemblage of awkward moments in a live-but-not-living world.

Searching for Incognita by Johanna Vaude

Another stunning work by this master of the form: the motif of ‘adventuring’ in film, deftly gathered and revealed.

Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now? by Thomas Flight

An extended, thoughtful reflection on ‘metamodernism’ in recent popular cinema.

The Address from Beyond the Grave by Roz Mortimer

Mortimer illuminatingly relates her own filmmaking work to that of other women, films in which ‘spectrality’ is hauntingly tied to historic, socio-political traumas.

Undercurrents: Meditations on Power by Margot Nash

Nash, among Australia’s greatest artists, would probably prefer this to be known as a film, but it has a special relation to the audiovisual essay: a montage from her previous works, it forms a powerful, urgent poem for our times.

Video essayist, filmmaker

Sleeping Sickness: The Downtrodden in Pedro Costa’s Cinema by Alexander Melyan

A beautifully crafted video. It got me lost in the images of Costa’s films all over again.

Great concept, better execution. A very satisfying watch and listen.

Takes me back to my days in foley classes. Brought a smile to my face watching and the odd grimace.

Queer performance-based media artist

What an incredible video essay! This enthralling and meticulously edited piece uses a binary of chaste vs. unchaste to collapse in on itself as a gendered structure of representation in Iranian cinema. Tafakory uses repetition and juxtaposition to emphasise this undoing and mirrors clips of women in grids of four where they are (now) engaged with each other onscreen. She overlays certain clips, which seep into and onto each other as a form of touching, as if to queer the materiality of these clips as well as the newly formed relationships she has created through her editing.

A masterful and hypnotic piece that is seemingly edited on a smartphone that simultaneously demonstrates the source materials and inspiration for the work, while showing the methods and thinking of its construction. Lacurie takes us on an expansive menstruation journey that is personal and political—navigating apps, memes, video clips, and a tarot card reading through the analysis of a fatal penetrative wound on Xena Warrior Princess’s body. A mesmerising video essay from, In the Works: Makings and Unmakings of the Video Essay, Lucerne School of Art and Design, Switzerland. See Lacurie’s other work: https://vimeo.com/lacurieo

A video essay with an ending you can dance to, I Would Like to Rage is smart, tender, and funny. Galibert-Laîné’s thorough and thoughtful practice is fully on display as they take us through various machinations of online and mediatised rage, its performativity, expression, and ownership, and how they experience or rather, attempt to experience rage authentically. A triumph of intelligent vulnerability expressed through an assemblage of self-reflection, video clips, memes, gifs, and Leslie Knope homages, this endearing delight of a video essay is surely coming to a film festival near you.

An impeccable experimental video essay that exaggerates and emphasises the uncanny through foley and feminist intervention. Fife Donaldson aptly mixes and amplifies the sharp edges of ASMR sound artist Julie Rose Bower’s work by replacing the soundtrack for the knife scene in Kiss Me Deadly. Switchblades pop and fist punches snap and crack onscreen through Fife Donaldson’s use of this unique collection of sound, and her use of visual repetition and slow motion. I am particularly drawn to how she lingers on sound during a slow motion shot of the would-be attacker’s descent to the ground as he slides down a wall after the attempted knife fight.

A gong repeatedly sounds as ‘The End’ title text from a variety of films are shown onscreen in several languages. We hear a tapping—a soft clicking that is perhaps his keyboard, our viewership guided by his hand. The way that Binotto has arranged these endings and silenced their corresponding soundtracks are filled with loss as they each mark an ending to a specific film as well as the end of his incredible Practices of Viewing series . Binotto cites Roland Barthes while seemingly articulating his own work ethic: “writing as absolute brings with it a particular existential movement: the drive to finish the work in order to start again”. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Using Evelyn Kreutzer’s Moving Poems prompt that asks makers to pair a poem with a media object, moving poems: a raisin in the sun (1961) is a poignant and poetic work that capitalises on affecting performances from the 1961 film adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun. De Jesús engages Langston Hughes’s short poem Harlem in onscreen text while expertly and artfully using opacity, repetition, movement, dialogue, and match cuts to sound in this stunning and layered poetic video essay.

Jeanne Dielman: On / Off by Dan Noall

A sublime supercut of every time the title character of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles turns on and off the lights. Noall jumpcuts us through each of the rooms of this film and the quiet bland domesticity of house and sex work with this simple task. Only fans of this iconic film will recognise the importance of Noall’s final shot where Jeanne turns off the light of the kitchen while firmly grasping her silver scissors and shutting the door behind her with a thud.

Video essayist (as kikikrazed ) and community manager for The Essay Library

Everything is a Remix (Complete Updated 2023 Edition) by Kirby Ferguson

Kirby Ferguson has revisited this project multiple times since it debuted in 2010, remixing his own work to create new iterations. The 2023 edition, described as “the definitive Everything is a Remix experience” by Ferguson, includes a new part about AI art, also released individually in 2023. Unfortunately, the video currently sits at under 100,000 views on YouTube due to unjust copyright claims that contradict fair use and the remix philosophy.

The PS1 Start-up Tells a Story by Dennis Gallagher

Gallagher’s 40-second essay (really only 30 seconds if you forget the credits) is a perfect example of a video essay with zero fluff. He narrates alongside the PlayStation startup sequence, guiding us through it with a sense of awe. The fantastic digital portal metaphor doesn’t overstay its welcome in this bite-sized treat.

Four-Byte Burger by Stuart Brown (Ahoy)

Brown documents his faithful recreation of his favourite piece of Amiga art, Jack Haeger’s Four-Byte Burger. In the process, he reveals how technological constraints can foster creativity. His passion and personal investment in the original artwork is clear throughout this journey.

The Chaos Behind The Wizard of Oz (and why it turned out ok anyway) by Isabel Custodio (Be Kind Rewind)

Custodio explores the production of The Wizard of Oz through each of its four directors, balancing substantial research with personal evaluations of their filmographies. In my own video essay work, Be Kind Rewind is one of my biggest inspirations. Every video amazes me with the sheer knowledge and passion for film on display. This essay is no different as it juggles the interconnected careers of actors, producers, and directors within the studio system at the time.

Some video essays that rely on literature to examine a film can become too text-heavy, but this essay never feels like that. DeLisio’s careful narration and textured sound design allows him to speak with the film instead of over it. This intelligent, well-edited video cements James DeLisio’s status as one of the most exciting emerging video essayists.

Film teacher and researcher at Escola das Artes in Católica University (O Porto); film programmer at IndieLisboa Film Festival; film critic at À pala de Walsh website.

Exotic Words Drifted by Sandro Aguilar

At the edge of the word lies silence, hesitation. On the other side of colour, there are bright colours, gray, black and white. This is a film that sits on the other side of the mirror and takes us through the tense and enigmatic reverse side of classic cinema. In Aguilar’s audiovisual essay, everything floats, expectantly, waiting to happen, inaugurating a new order, like a tense relationship between day and night, between the negative and the positive of a film stock.

Audiovisual essays are tools to unlock the imaginary and highlight possible paths and barriers. Misek’s work invites us to understand the struggles to show and hide images in contemporary digital agoras, where public versus private ownership is at stake in order to disseminate controlled versions of history.

Réseau des sens by Mirjam Leutwiler

For each contact, each touch there is a split “I”, a network of sensation. Mirjam Leutwiler’s short audiovisual essay is not only interpreting Michel Serre’s text “The Five Senses. A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies”, but also telling us how that network about touching and feeling is underway in the cinematic phenomenology.

Kinoapparatum Remade. A Videographic Montage Experiment. by Johannes Binotto, Maurice Dietziker, Linus Bolliger, Arseni Gavrilov, Kilian Frei, Andrina Moos, Cécile Brossard, Sven Friedli, Mirjam Leutwiler, Jana Schlegel, Melina Hofer, Anja Hubmann, Fynn Groeber, Nora Gruetter.

Kinoapparatum Remade is not only an homage to Vertov, Kaufman and Svilova’s seminal film Man with a Movie Camera. And also not only a reflection on Manovich’s ideas on the film regarding new media. It is all of this but it is also a collective collaborative effort in which we can see that recreation it also followed by actualisation, complementation and creative choices based on movement and form. And these particular choices of the “collective with the moving images” tells us that it is not only a question of past versus incoming future when we look at 1929’s masterpiece.

Against Polish or, Notes on Videographic Labor or, You Could Remix Blazing Saddles Today Will Digravio

Digravio’s original audiovisual essay may work against the idea of perfection and neatness as a possible disguised style. But it is also an exposition of the work involved in the audiovisual essay. In this sense, it enters a loop, a mise-en-abîme where a “meta worker” develops a similar “meta mirror” to better highlight the nature of what is involved when reworking the images and sounds of a film. 

Media and cultural studies graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

The Future Is a Dead Mall — Decentraland and the Metaverse by Dan Olson (Folding Ideas)

Another long-form triumph from the creator of Line Goes Up – The Problem with NTF s and In Search of a Flat Earth .

Searching for Humanity in Fortnite’s Battle Royale by Jonathan McIntosh (Pop Culture Detective)

A fusion between a “Let’s Play” and a conventional YouTube video essay, this moving autoethnography finds optimism and community in one of the most unlikely online gaming spaces.

Alexandre’s cleverly profound work on gender, sexuality, art, and digital culture never disappoints. Everything Is Sludge, which interrogates the rise of split-screen “sludge content” on TikTok, is yet another home run, and takes particular advantage of the traditional YouTube format. 

Associate professor of film and media in digital contexts at Aarhus University, Denmark; visiting researcher in the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, University of Leeds, UK ; author of Workshop of Potential Scholarship: Manifesto for a Parametric Videographic Criticism, NECSUS  2021.

There has been so much exciting work to learn from in 2023 that I found it near-impossible to make this selection, even limiting myself (as I have) to ‘scholarly’ video essays. Let me name some makers in addition to the many mentioned below that have impacted my understanding of the practice this year: Ariane Hudelet, Cormac Donnelly, Dayna McLeod, Irina Trocan, Jemma Saunders, John Gibbs, Kevin Ferguson, Liz Greene, Maria Hofmann, Maud Ceuterick, Oswald Iten, Richard Misek, Susan Harewood… My point with this list, which could have been indefinitely extended, is that investigating the possibilities of the video essay is a collective endeavour. Brian Eno has a notion of collective ‘scenius’ (as opposed to individual ‘genius’) which refers to “the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene”: it’s this boisterous collective intelligence that I think we’re witnessing with the explosion of the video essay. Can it last? I do worry that the period of expansion, exploration and experimentation will exhaust itself, and that a single preferred mode of audiovisual rhetoric will be asserted or be insisted upon by the journals. I’m relieved this hasn’t happened yet, not in 2023 at any rate. And so my selection (which could easily have been several further sets of seven videos) is intended to indicate some of the striking variety, as well as the quality, of the work being done. Memories of It by Kathleen Loock ‘Memories of It’ mixes film, trailer and documentary footage with personal reflection and interview in order to tease out Kathleen Loock’s traumatic memory of watching (and fast-forwarding) the 1990 adaptation of It on VHS as a child. She links this memory with the condition of the Wendekinder, children like her of the former GDR forced to cope with a new world after German reunification. Does Kathleen over-sociologise her act of retrospectatorship by invoking shared generational experience? Is the video an attempt to contain as well as explain the threat of traumatic eruption? I’ll just have to watch ‘it’ again… Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime by Drew Morton

Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland is my favourite novel and one joy of my 2023 was encountering Peter Coviello’s Vineland Reread, a book that mixes literary criticism, cultural theory and autobiography to evoke the presence of Vineland in Coviello’s life and teaching. Drew Morton’s account of re-viewing and teaching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at intervals since that film’s release is a similarly rich and joyful intellectual experience – Drew even shares some hard-earned lessons in love. (I recommend comparing the earlier version of the video linked in the creator statement, to see how an adept maker engages with challenging peer review.)

Desktop Documentary by Johannes Binotto

Johannes Binotto’s literally/ironically titled ‘Desktop Documentary’ is expressly a “call to clutter”. As such, it makes me terribly anxious. But this is a brilliantly conceived and engagingly performed piece of explicatory and programmatic rhetoric that draws on YouTube how-to videos even as it nods to the opening of Cléo de 5 à 7. I am happy to grant Binotto’s fiction that his desk has not been curated because I am persuaded by his account of the desktop as recalcitrant technology. And I am especially seduced by his call for productive accident and a-rational research methods that look back to surrealism.

True Enough by Chloé Galibert-Laîné

True Enough might seem a jeu d’esprit compared to Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s longer video essays. But even as it draws on the functional aesthetic of the karaoke video, this adaptation of a text by Will Webb, made for Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer’s Once upon A Screen project, is a work of great refinement. Galibert-Laîné creates a “fictional offscreen space” with beautifully composed filmed footage enlivened by dancing light from an unseen television. The cheerful font and sung accompaniment extend the possibilities of onscreen text and voiceover. As an added bonus (or intrinsic moment), it contains the best Simpsons allusion ever.

This has been a vintage year for multiscreen. Like the videos by Mittell and Arlander discussed below, Colleen Laird’s Eye-Camera-Ninagawa and Adam Cook’s A Cinema of Bodily Sense deploy multiscreen in powerful but contrasting ways. Maryam Tafakory uses it differently again in ‘chaste/unchaste’. The video is a supercut of female faces (plus one big cat and a gas hob) made from thirty-two Iranian films. It stages its imagining of queer desire as a progression from multiscreen to single screen to superimposition. ‘chaste/unchaste’ is a condensed masterclass in how argument can be made in formal terms without the aid of voiceover.

169 Seconds: Trimming Time in Breaking Bad by Jason Mittell

To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, the Danish film journal 16:9 has been publishing 169-second video essays in a series that features makers like Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, Jaap Kooijman, Catherine Grant, and Barbara Zecchi, with two impressive videos by my Aarhus colleague Mathias Bonde Korsgaard. My favourite is Jason Mittell’s cheeky afterthought to his videographic project on Breaking Bad (it traces Walter White’s story arc through his hairstyles). I like how the application of strict but ludic formal parameters, which Mittell derives from the journal name and video duration, generate a cryptic visual tapestry of the entire series.

Revisiting the Aspen Tree by Annette Arlander

Between 2002 and 2014, artist Annette Arlander recorded weekly visits to locations on Harakka Island near Helsinki in a series of videos. In Revisiting the Aspen Tree, she returns to one such site and embeds those videos in the video document of the more recent visit. Differently from Mittell’s Trimming Time, Arlander uses parameters to dictate a practice that is physical, repetitive and durational. But it reminds me of Will DiGravio’s Rio Bravo project, and like DiGravio’s four-hour Against Polish, it suggests the value of an ‘ambient’ scholarship, in which iterative academic labour is presented in something like real time.

Host and producer at Wisecrack

My selections focus on creators who are pushing the critical boundaries of the video essay format. In particular, these are creators who both utilise critical theory, social theory, and philosophy while also producing videos that are entertaining and accessible. They also make the types of videos that leave you feeling like more questions have been opened than answered. Which, especially on YouTube, is an increasingly rare thing.

Griftonomics: Why Scams Are Everywhere Now by Tom Nicholas

This video might be Nicholas’s magnum opus, and it feels more like a digital documentary than it does a traditional video essay with a runtime of almost two hours. But he earns every minute of the video by not only exploring the growing phenomenon of digital grifters, but by showing how the logic of grifters exists in an ongoing dialectical relationship with the larger economic structures in our world. In this way he arrives at the logical core of the modern digital grifter, and shows how this same logic is at the heart of much of modern culture. He balances this out by also exploring the psychological factors that have made grifter scams and content so popular. Nicholas also deserves credit for working a level of theatricality into this video (and all of his videos) that’s visually engaging without being distracting. In a world of sad ex-grad students making videos about capitalism ruining our world, Nicholas is the relatable and entertaining lad that takes you just as deep without any performative nihilism.

What Red Pill Philosophy Gets Wrong by Then &  Now

2023 was a banner year for content made by reactionary young men utilising various philosophical and political ideas to justify a sense of growing alienation. While it’s easy to dismiss this contingent of creators completely, the harder task is to engage with these trends, openly interrogating their ideological core. And this video does an exemplary job at this task, taking red pill philosophy to task, and in the process, exposing how it offers a shallow simulacrum of actual philosophical responses to complex social problems. The video acknowledges the alienating cultural conditions that produce the “manosphere” while exposing the illogical core at the heart of these ideas. In doing so, Then & Now has created a video that pushes the viewer to not simply dismiss the modern reactionary, but to understand the logic of this movement, and see how this manner of thinking is more common than we might realise. Ultimately, it’s a video that skillfully uses seemingly esoteric and academic ideas to re-frame the contemporary crisis of masculinity while showing us all why we should care.

the parasite class is killing us. by Alice Capelle In this video, Alice Capelle uses the logic of vampire capitalism to show how the modern digital economy increasingly depends on acts of parasitism. She shows how the type of parasitic class relationships exemplified in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is replicated in digital spaces, and in particular, among self-styled business gurus using YouTube videos as a way to repeat the logic of class exploitation in the guise of self-help and business advice. Like most of Capelle’s work, this video utilises her ability to synthesise a French brand of critical social theory with an English-language based digital cultural space. This video feels like a sort of ethnography of the contemporary digital parasite, one that both exposes the exploitative core of their content, while hopefully encouraging us to undermine this logic however we can.

Assistant professor, Leiden University, and film programmer

Ross’s recommendations were submitted without comment.

El juicio by Ulises de la Orden Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image by Adam Piron

Silence of Reason by Kumjana Novakova

Mast-del by Maryam Tafakory

Limitation by Elene Asatiani, Soso Dumbadze

An Asian Ghost Story by Bo Wang

Still Film by James N. Kienitz Wilkins

Film critic and curator of The Moving Image from Lima, Perú

This year has been particularly scarce in terms of what I’ve seen or experienced in cinema due to various reasons. But here is a small selection of works I deem worthy to be mentioned, all from the fantastic [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies.

A magnificent view on the dual nature of the portrayal of women in Iranian cinema.

Through the spirit of Chris Marker, this playful video essay runs the gamut of exploration via the Geo Guesser application and Marker’s cinema.

“Visual capitalism.”

Audio-Visual PhD student at University of Birmingham

Double Takes: A Series of Short Video Essays by Sarah Atkinson

Elegantly simple in their conception and execution; and cumulatively damning.

Insincere Inclusion? Ignorant Appropriation? A Symphony Orchestra Plays South Indian Film Music by Sureshkumar P. Sekar

I listened and I learned. A truly audio-visual piece.

Why Does Gotham Look like That? by Will Webb

An extensively researched and engaging exploration of this fictional city’s screen history.

A fascinating, haptic, personal inquiry that I couldn’t stop thinking about afterwards.

Indy Vinyl for the Masses: Lollipop by Ariel Avissar (curator) Matt Payne, Mingyue Yuan and Charlotte Scurlock

Pure fun and a wonderfully cohesive melding of song, theme (walking) and chosen keyword (kids). Hats off to Ian Garwood too for conceiving this project!

Freelance critic

I was flabbergasted last year when I somehow missed Mark Brown’s Platformer Toolkit , which I’m noting here because I think it absolutely represents a vital step forward for this art. I hope to see more work in interactive essays in the future.

Plenty of essays are about specific issues. This one manages to also embody its own ethos by acting as a conduit to get good-quality public domain imagery into the actual public.

A great rumination on acceptable expressions of anger, mediated through the desktop form in the same way that our emotions are mediated through technology.

The History of the Minnesota Vikings by Jon Bois et al

I think at this point Jon Bois just has a permanent spot in my ballot each year. He continues to innovate and refine his form. No one is making documentaries like this.

Pictures of Ghosts by Kleber Mendonça Filho et al

A beautiful meditation on memory as channeled through both personal and public archives, and the relationship between cinema spaces and their communities.

Brilliant in its simplicity, a Rorschach test that reveals the underlying absurdity of its own premise, and in turn the entire premise of censorious morality.

Nonbinary scholar-practitioner working at the intersections of artistic research and critical theories of embodiment and identity; reader in media and performance at University of Huddersfield; founding editor of Journal of Embodied Research.

I am a performance theorist and practitioner who has been working for several years to educate myself in the ways of videographic thought. My selection is eclectic and formally diverse, mostly coming from outside film and media studies.

Peribiophoty by Tom Murray, Karen Pearlman, Stephanie Russo, Hsu-Ming Teo, Rowan Tulloch, Rachel Yuen-Collingridge, Malcolm Choat

This item is from the journal I edit. I chose it from our 2023 video articles because of how it uses a formally simple concept to stage a deep dive into a range of scholarly projects. This is a co-authored video article sharing the research of five academics, who not only speak to the camera about their work but also interact physically with various objects on a sparse kind of set. It is elegantly produced and designed to examine “the personal and intellectual contexts (peri) surrounding academics and their biographies (bio) through audio-visual representation (photy).”

The World like a Jewel in the Hand by Ariella Azoulay

This film is technically from 2022 (I don’t know which month), but since this is my first Sight and Sound poll, I have decided to include it. As far as I can tell, it has primarily been screened in 2023. In the film, scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay explores the complex history of colonialism between Algeria and Israel, with an emphasis on the gradual erasure of the important figure of the Arab Jew. Azoulay manages to put this history in the broader context of European colonialism in Africa and to interrogate the ongoing practices of colonial museums, all through the simple action of touching and talking about a wide array of books, photographs, mezuzot, and other objects on her desk. When I first saw this film, I immediately felt that it brings an extraordinary depth and power to the concept of the “desktop documentary.”

Familiar Phantoms by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind

I have to confess that I have not seen this film, only the trailer. I recently got a chance to see In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016) and In Vitro (2019) by the same creators. One of the challenges in selecting the “best” video essays from a given year is that so much videographic thought still takes place within the economy of fine arts and is therefore not made available online because it would thereby lose its aura. Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian video artist and filmmaker whose work is powerfully situated and discussed in Gil Z. Hochberg’s book, Becoming Palestine. I am including Familiar Phantoms on my list of selections as the 2023 video work I most wish to see.

A Short Film About Stealing (in Norway) by Pouria Kazemi

I have been able to find very little about Pouria Kazemi online and nothing about this film, which I had the chance to watch when it was submitted to a video festival I co-curated. This short animated video essay is a perfectly composed, brilliantly understated autobiographical statement about the necessity of petty theft under late capitalism. Among the more delightful and poignant touches is that the author’s friends, to protect their anonymity, are given as pseudonyms the names of the Norwegian royal family.

Hold On, This Matilda Musical Snapping 💀💀 by @wonder_kidd

Hold On, This Matilda Musical Snapping was a TikTok / Instagram trend in which a scene of dynamic choreography from the movie version of the musical Matilda is overlaid by various alternative musical tracks. While putting forward a 25-second social media remix as one of the best video essays of the year is certainly pushing the limits of the form, all the key elements are there: a creative and incisive juxtaposition of a video track with a distinct audio track is contextualised by the critical commentary of a textual annotation. The version I have chosen to link uses @wonder_kidd’s remix of Beyonce’s ‘Cuff It’, a choice that (as many of the Instagram commenters noted) effectively brings out the black cultural roots of Ellen Kane’s choreography, in sharp relief against the massively predominant whiteness of the British schoolchildren who perform it. In just a few seconds, this remix gives us both a snapping new version of Matilda and a cultural critique of how black dance knowledges circulate in predominantly white cultural fields.

Video essayist at StrucciMovies , actual play host on Oddity Roadshow

Colleen Ballinger and Commentary Culture by Ro Ramdin

Ro Ramdin’s work is incredible. Always sharply written, insightful, very funny, beautifully shot, and deeply thoughtful under the meticulous aesthetic and entertaining editing style. She’s one of those essayists I am more than happy to watch even if I have zero interest in the subject matter. I chose this video of hers in particular because I found her reflection on her place in the commentary channel ecosystem navigating the “algorithmic nightmare” of YouTube (as she puts it) especially compelling.

Does Fresh Garlic Actually Taste Better than Garlic in a Jar? by Ethan Chlebowski

Ethan Chlebowski has made several videos posing the question of whether more expensive versions of the same ingredient are worth it and why, including on balsamic vinegar, olive oil, parmigiano reggiano, vanilla, and, here, garlic. Each video is a deep dive on the cultural history of how the food is used and why, the basics of the culinary science behind it, and Chlebowski doing several taste tests and then giving recommendations at varying price points. While some of his conclusions are down to personal preference, his videos are nevertheless fascinating and done without judgement or pretension. I’d consider them a must-watch for new home cooks or those looking for a great example of engaging educational content that doesn’t condescend.

Wayfinding Flight Rising Dailies & Accessibility by PSJ ulie

I started a Neopets account in elementary school, over twenty years ago. My interest in Neopets or other pet sim sites has long since waned but I’m still fascinated by the work of Pet Simmer Julie, who crafts in-depth videos on virtual pet games. Her depth of knowledge and passion for these games and communities is immediately evident with any of her videos. This video, for example, helped me understand my own problems navigating real-world attractions that had poor wayfinding, and I’ve thought back to it many times after watching.

Filmmaker , author, video essayist, critic

A perfect capper to Johannes’ indispensable series

It’s a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point by Daniel Kremer

Daniel finally makes his epic, a great odyssey about why we get lost in movies.

Against Polish or, Notes on Videographic Labor or, You Could Remix Blazing Saddles Today by Will DiGravio

With the insouciance of late Godard or Leos Carax’s New Order music video, Will disassembles our need to assemble.

Ozu Without Ozu by Green and Red

Deliciously busy exploration of auteurism.

Once upon a Screen: The 39 Shots by Ariel Avissar

A recontextualisation of what’s in plain sight.

Random Acts of Flyness Season 2 by Terence Nance

Terence and co’s vibrant and deeply necessary attack on commerce and media’s hideous parasitic relationship is an inspiration to all creators. One of the best to ever do it.

Independent scholar, video essayist

Practices of Viewing by Johannes Binotto

I remember where I was, shaking my head, beaming, and stifling a gasp, when I realised that Practices of Viewing is our generation’s Ways of Seeing or Histoire(s) du Cinema. A project of this scope, originality, insight and depth of audiovisual thinking may never happen again.

Jill, Uncredited by Anthony Ing

The log line says it’s a subtle, masterful tribute to the nearly-invisible labour of a background actress you’ve never heard of. But really, it’s a ground-up retraining of your whole visual cortex. Squint between the film grains, and you might even find a remake of Rose Hobart that outdoes Cornell.

Non-Euclidean Therapy for AI Trauma [Analog Archives] #SoME3 by neoknowstic

I’ve been meaning to include a mathematics video essay for years, and this one’s a revelation. A horror film starring an AI image generator lost in its own vector space, trying to remember enough matrix algebra to escape from the ‘dream’ of a grotesque face that it can’t stop making.

William Shakespeare’s Course of True Love by Lara Callaghan

Full disclosure: I was a participant in the group project that this essay belongs to, but I had nothing to do with this inspired entry. Unfortunately. I’m so jealous that I never realised that a video essay could parody other genres – in this case, the infomercial – to enclose its insights into an envelope of fleet-footed wit that belies their depth.

Elaine Scarry says pain can’t be expressed in words, but this essay claims that Phil Tippett’s film Mad God offers a counter-argument: maybe using a different system of signification CAN express pain. Magnificently, this essay doesn’t assume that scholars have more authority than artists, and opts instead to orchestrate a coequal conversation between two of them.

Indians from 1967: A Reaction by Ritika Kaushik

A time-capsule doc from 1967 resurfaces recut online and inspires a bevy of reaction videos. Why’d that happen? If we can’t explain why, maybe we can at least reproduce the effect, but with all the tools out in the open. And that’s what this essay does. After a forensics of the recut itself and a cataloguing of the reactions, a little zoom and slow motion unexpectedly imbue me with the same fascination with wonder and impermanence for contemporary online culture.

The AI Revolution Is Rotten to the Core by Jimmy McGee

This is ground zero of visual culture now, and most of us are either too tired to catch up or hoping it’ll just go away. If you don’t know where to turn, turn here. It’s rigorously researched, historically grounded, theoretically canny, sardonically wise, and as quotable as Casablanca. “We need to choose between building a world for money to live in or building a world for people to live in.”

Freelance film critic , film studies lecturer at UNATC  Bucharest

In retrospect, I seem to have compiled a mostly glum list, if not directly referring to contemporary events, at least haunted by them:

Scenes of Extraction by Sanaz Sohrabi

This installation work surveys the history of Iran over several decades, focusing on oil extraction by the foreign company soon to be known as British Petroleum, through a technique called reflection seismography. The challenge, of course, as postcolonial scholarship taught us, is to look beyond the audiovisual self-representation of the company – and the artist accomplishes this extraordinarily well. A voiceover accompanies a collage/montage documenting industrial processes, while the collage in itself operates on the images – which sometimes look like spectral cutouts – workers disconnected from the background, initially black, that slowly takes shape behind them), while at other times these images show their age (for instance, when 1930s maps are juxtaposed with recent CGI ).

Between Revolutions by Vlad Petri

Films about revolutions often – and quite paradoxically – treat the event like a solidly contained point on the historical axis, with a beginning and an end, missing exactly their transformative potential and their collective character. One way to avoid this is to resort to the not-entirely-manipulable archives from the depicted era (and not just in short clips to lend the veneer of truth to fictional reenactments), and Between Revolutions is a pretty convincing demonstration of this strategy. Maria and Zahra are fictional med students from Romania and Iran, trying to figure out life amid social turmoil – but the footage, poems and songs that illustrate their journey existed in the world long before the making of this film, and even when made with obvious artistic or educational intent (not to mention elaborate choreography!), these reworked materials contain some trace or emotional truth of their times.

This Is the End by Vincent Dieutre

By the most expansive definition a “videographic” work, Dieutre’s Los Angeles pandemic film has, I would argue, a family resemblance with Thom Andersen’s survey of polysemic Californian cityscapes. Love, longing and poetry readings (with actors’/directors’ cameos!) interrupt the grim silence of lockdown.

She Asked Me Where I Was From by Aulona Fetahaj

I reviewed this short film for Kortfilm.be.

Incident by Bill Morrison

Bill Morrison is known to be interested in film only when it is analogue and beautifully degraded, and in this respect the CCTV /bodycam-sourced Incident is a long distance from Buried News . The killing of Harith Augustus by the Chicago police was previously examined by Forensic Architecture to persuasively oppose the authorities’ version of the event, but Morrison and Jamie Kalven at the Invisible Institute set out to do something else. The 30-minute film, often showing in split-screen multiple angles and parallel events, only tracks a short span of time, although 1) it seems dispiritingly endless and 2) it already anticipates the community’s reaction to seeing yet another African American killed, while the policemen, in an onlooker’s phrasing, “get their story straight”. Augustus’s lifeless body is present in the frame for a long stretch of the runtime, contrary to the CPD ’s attempt to erase the “accident” from memory, while the eloquent rage of everyone in the community seems tragically rehearsed in similar prior events. The victim’s neighbours don’t get to express solidarity, but the colleagues of the policemen who fired the gun can, and do, help erase criminal guilt.

Makeover Movie by Sue Ding

You’d think this is the second-oldest topic in the feminist book (immediately after suffrage), but makeovers seem here to stay. Just look at what the too-radical teen in Barbie has to go through, or scroll down any social media app on a new account. Luckily, well-informed critiques, spanning many decades of US films, and listing all the problematic tropes implicit in the “makeover” are also competing for our attention. I can only hope that more young spectators see “The Makeover Movie”, where Sue Ding conjures a multiracial telephone slumber party with her girlfriends to understand how these films taught them “not only how to be a woman, but also how to be American”. Teen classics provide most material, but a handful of musicals plus Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale and Vertigo also fit the bill.

Screen Stars Dictionary. Natalia Oreiro by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková

I grew up with Natalia Oreiro in her many disguises on my TV screen only to realise that nobody referred to her in the many pop surveys of Film and Media Studies. Therefore, I owe Veronika and Jiří many thanks and a loud high-five for allowing me to mention her again as a media scholar in my 30s. Autobiography aside, this playful video is a throwback to 2000s TV series, music clips and shows, computer interfaces, and a persuasive argument about how the model-periphery theory of dissemination is a far from rigorous model.

Film programmer and researcher

Where Is Little Trixie? by Carlos Baixauli

A very moving work that packs a lot of wonder and attentive detail in under four minutes, building a bridge between the works of two women filmmakers more than a century apart.

Who Speaks? Possessing Lyotard by Oscar Mealia

It points the way to new possible intersections between philosophy, film research, and video essay formats.

Isn’t That Going to Be Awfully Dull and Drab?’ George Hoyningen-Huene’s Use of Neutrals by Lucy Fife Donaldson

Packs surprise and captivating visuals into a video essay able to pleasurably unpack original academic and archival research.

Film critic ( À pala de Walsh ) and film programmer (Cinemateca Portuguesa, IndieLisboaIFF)

The latest film by James N. Kienitz Wilkins is an intriguing and exhausting audio play voiced by the director, who plays the four main characters in a court inquiry about film memories, film still photographers, Kodak as a pharmaceutical enterprise, the negative aura of Tom Hanks, boom operators, and the elusiveness of Hollywood as a cultural agent. All of this is put together with a seemingly random selection of film stills. As usual, in Kienitz Wilkins’ work, discourse is moving and images are ecstatic.

Le film que vous allez voir by Maxime Martinot

Maxime Martinot’s 11-minute film is an immensely funny compilation of disclaimer cards presented at the beginning of films throughout history. Edited as a frantic accumulation of non-images, we expect the worst and suffer the anticipation of immoral, violent, or graphic images. Without the images themselves, we are left with an essay on morality and sensibility as they evolve through time and shape the way we see the world around us and ourselves.

Où en êtes-vous, Tsai Ming-Liang? by Tsai Ming-Liang

A 20-minute meditation by the greatest living filmmaker on back pain, the pleasure of sitting, the beauty of chairs and how to paint them.

Chambre 999 by Lubna Playoust

A conceptual remake of Wim Wenders’ Chambre 666, made 40 years later. Cinema has changed, and today’s issues concerning viewership, distribution, and production are radically different from those of 1982. An uneven collection of thoughts that includes a wonderful opening act by Wenders himself as a burlesque doomsday prophet.

Onde está o Pessoa? (Where is Pessoa?) by Leonor Areal

From a few minutes of film, shot in 1913, Leonor Areal loops, zooms, pans, and examines every detail (as in Ken Jacobs’ Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son), looking for the poet Fernando Pessoa, who was a cinephile, designed the logo of a movie company, wrote several film scripts, and was never caught on film. Or was he?

Even if Godard is dead, he lives in Maryam Tafakory. Mast-del is a collage of post-revolution Iranian cinema that produces mesmerising film compositions of gestures, textures, sounds, and words. A thin narrative line runs through public images and intimate feelings, delineating a complex web of recollections where memory and film history merge together.

Filmmaker , video essayist . Commissions include Sight and Sound / BFI , Little White Lies, Curzon and Arrow.

As ever, excited to see constant variety within the video essay world. My picks prioritise new creators and formal inventiveness.

MyHouse. WAD – Inside Doom’s Most Terrifying Mod by Power Pak

A masterpiece of recapping, Power Pak’s video is essentially a narrated journey through an ingenious mod. A good recap doesn’t just communicate plot, but also the point of the essay; this does both. Excellent pacing and vocal delivery communicates the tone of the map, and becomes a jumping off point for an analysis of horror in gaming / the oft-discussed topic of liminal spaces. And, a special shoutout to an almost unedited six-minute segment of black and silence in the middle. Commitment to the bit!

Interrogating one of the strangest releases of last year, this essay takes on the unenviable task of articulating how the film articulates the inarticulable (via Elaine Scarry). DeLisio’s commentary includes text elements that are ingeniously expressed in a similar visual language to the film’s (faded, grainy, blurry). As commenter Max Tohline puts it, “not under the knife of Scarry, but in coequal conversation with Scarry”.

Is It Impossible to Dad? by The Nukes

A trademark The Nukes / Josh Geist essay in its analysis of a throwaway family animation property through a serious academic viewpoint – not (just) for the comedy of applying highbrow to lowbrow, but to recognise that even (and maybe especially?) the forgotten parts of pop culture express truths about humanity. Josh reorders his text via its characters’ viewpoints to tell a story about father-son communication – and, perhaps, the impossibility of communication itself.

Alexandre investigates ‘sludge’ content – those splitscreens of a narrated reddit post and a Subway Surfers video, for instance – through a clever visual device. Talk about ‘embodied practice’: hard for me to imagine a more clear example than Alexandre projecting the edited video text onto their own body for the entirety of this video. An interruption a few minutes in from YouTube’s algorithm –a split-screen beer advert no less– just added to the gag on my viewing. And throughout the to-camera presentation, I found my eye drawn off to the Minecraft parkour constantly, in a clever proving of Alexandre’s argument. Behind the overstimulating presentation, Alexandre’s analysis offers an insightful categorisation of a media type inexplicable on the surface but ever-present in the developing digital landscape.

The breezy recap of the man/car binary in the opening moments of max teeth’s essay is authoritative, funny, and thought-provoking – everything a video essay can be, especially on YouTube. And the speed with which that’s just assumed and dropped as we speed into the main matter is a great example of how to explain succinctly. YouTube’s got too many 1hr+ essays – more like this, please.

Seinpeaks by @seinpeaks

There’s a fine line between a shitpost and a videographic work; ironically, the more academic end of video essays (with their lack of in-video explanation due to abstract support, and leaning towards supercuts and split-screens) are more like this than popular YouTube works. Seinpeaks illustrates the fine line beautifully. It’s a long-running project mashing up Twin Peaks and Seinfeld (with guest appearances from other stalwart shows like Always Sunny and Friends). These two shows aired simultaneously and their shared visual language provides a jumping-off point for a surprising collab that draws out the humour in Twin Peaks and the absurdism in Seinfeld.

Editor-at-large and YouTube channel manager at Little White Lies magazine

How Jane Campion Subverts the Violence of the Male Gaze by Carly Mattox

This was an idea pitched to me around focusing on the image of the woman on the street in cinema, especially at night, and especially in films directed by women. It took a little bit of back and forth to nail the structure and pacing, but the tone and central thesis of the piece was rock solid from the outset. I was delighted with how it turned out, and am really excited to see what Carly comes up with next.

Oppenheimer Is the Perfect Christopher Nolan Protagonist by Lara Callaghan

There was a lot published around Nolan’s atom bomb opus, but I’m not sure anything I’ve seen has managed to tap into his preoccupations as a filmmaker as astutely as this.

Adam Driver Driving by Luís Azevedo

This video stemmed from a silly conversation Luís and I had, but I think the result – aside from being superbly edited – speaks to something more serious about how actors choose to present themselves in certain ways on screen.

Professor and director of the film studies programme, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Very hard to limit myself to these nominations only.

Practices of Viewing series by Johannes Binotto

By all means this is the major project in videographic criticism of the year – or I should say of the last three years, since FFW , the first one (I believe) was produced in 2020. A work of art that redefines the boundaries of what’s possible in the medium. Its richness, originality, and creativity combine to create an experience that truly blows the mind. This videographic project is a testament to the limitless potential of form, its academic rigour, and artistry. It’s a visual and intellectual rollercoaster that will leave you in awe from start to finish.

RAWR by Maud Ceuterick

Beginning as a creative spark in an Aarhus workshop, it expanded at Middlebury College to become a true gem. Drawing from Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work, Ceuterick passionately interprets and deforms scenes of female rage, challenging gender norms. This transformative journey echoes Audre Lorde’s call for a radical change through the expression of rage. It’s a brilliant fusion of scholarship and creativity.

This is Not What I Normally Do: An Insignificant Step in the Downfall of the Humanities by Ariel Avissar

This is THE video essay of the year. A bold departure from convention, this video defies expectations with its remarkable layers of provocation. Meticulously edited and expertly crafted, it pushes the boundaries of videographic criticism, skilfully weaving a captivating tapestry of thought-provoking insights in the field

One of the most captivating sound projects I’ve ever encountered. This video essay ventures into uncharted territory, pairing the audio from the beginning of films with the closing images, creating an extraordinary mosaic of sound and visuals. The result is an auditory and visual tapestry that defies conventional expectations. It’s a seamless blend of the familiar and the unexpected, challenging our perception of film narratives.

169 Seconds: Una mujer reflejada / A Reflected Woman by Catherine Grant

In this brief but profoundly impactful exploration, Catherine Grant manages to distil the essence of the film’s themes, performances, and significance with remarkable precision, a testament to the art of succinct and effective storytelling. It’s a research gem that demonstrates the power of brevity in conveying complex ideas. In just 169 seconds, this video essay is the best piece of research ever “written” on Sebastián Lelio’s film.

This provocative video essay skillfully employs desktop editing on an iPhone to present a feminist perspective on the enduring control of women’s bodies through the dissemination of misinformation about menstruation and the menstruation apps. It is an awe-inspiring blend of resourcefulness, scholarly research, activism, art, exceptional editing skills, and creativity. 

Sensuous and Affective: The Potential of Videography for Studying Audio-Visual Relations by Oswald Iten

A beautifully edited and profoundly insightful exploration of the dynamic interplay between sight and sound.

Emerging voices

The voters had the option to nominate essayists to the ‘Emerging voices’ section as a way to highlight new and exciting talent in the video essay space.

acollierastro (nominated by Ben Chinapen)

[Ben also nominated this creator’s video on string theory in the main poll, and resubmitted his explanation from there to clarify why he was nominating them for Emerging voices.]

This video came out of nowhere and blew everyone’s mind who saw it. An intriguing title, with a clearly stressed-out person and also The Binding of Isaac in the thumbnail? What’s going on? Within one minute the purpose becomes clear; this woman who has very strong opinions and credentials will break down exactly what happened with the String Theory phenomenon while simultaneously stumbling through a playthrough of the vintage roguelike indie darling Binding of Isaac. A premise so absurd and hilarious (dare I say groundbreaking?) that you instantly want to watch and listen. It’s very informative and HIGHLY entertaining for the joke of the idea alone. I’m glad this took off because it was worth it. This is probably my most firm nomination out of the group.

Morgane Frund (nominated by Delphine Jeanneret)

Morgane Frund was born in 1997 in Lausanne, Switzerland. She studied Film Studies, English and German at the University of Lausanne. From 2019 to 2022, she studied Video at Hochschule Luzern, Design and Kunst, graduating with a Bachelor degree. BEAR (2022), her graduation film, screened in numerous festivals and won several prizes. OUT OF THE BLUE (2023) premiered in competition at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur. She is active in the fields of documentary film, video essay and performance arts.

Eloïse Le Gallo and Julia Borderie (nominated by Delphine Jeanneret)

Born in 1989, Julia Borderie and Éloïse Le Gallo have been a duo since 2016. They graduated from Le Fresnoy in 2023. In an exploratory mode, they approach water as a substance that influences the territories it flows through and the bodies that live in it. Taking a poetic, documentary approach, they make the experience of otherness a condition of artistic creation. The camera eye acts as a catalyst for encounters, while questioning the human gestures that shape materials and territories.

At the heart of a mesh of viewpoints and disciplines (craft techniques, geology, chemistry, marine biology, etc.) and at the crossroads of sculpture and cinema, they are interested in the origin of the materials that form a landscape. Recently, their research has led them to question more specifically the complementarities between learned form and sensitive form, working with scientists on objects generated by their cutting edge technologies. [Bio from Le Fresnoy]

Rodrigo Campos (nominated by Evelyn Kreutzer)

Campos participated in a mentorship program I co-organised with Anna-Sophie Pilippi, Maike Reinerth, and Kathleen Loock, as part of the Videography conference in Hanover 2022. There he worked with Barbara Zecchi. The resulting video, published in the ZfM Videography blog this year, is a deeply poetic, affective, and analytically profound investigation of Brazilian colonial screen history.

Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History Collaboration (nominated by Colleen Laird)

A collaboration of 30 makers, the Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History project has been in the works since an original call for proposals in February 2022. Although just a few of the participants are experienced (full disclosure: myself included), the grant-funded project was designed by Alison Peirse to train and mentor new talent from around the globe through a series of online videographic workshops over the course of approximately six months. Thereafter, participants would produce their first video essay and would refine their edits through online peer feedback. As one of the collaborators, it has been my great privilege to see the works of so many new creators grow and evolve and I am excited for their collective debut. The collaboration will be published online in the first quarter of 2023 in the journal MAI : Feminism & Visual Culture .

Carlos Baixauli (nominated by Adrian Martin)

Sometimes, audiovisual essays can do a simple thing very well. Baixauli’s ingenious mix of the silent Falling Leaves (1912) by Alice Guy with Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021) hits that spot.

Green & Red (Kasra Karbasi and Mohammad Amin Komijani) (nominated by Adrian Martin)

These Iranian cinephiles pursue very original film analyses.

Martín Vilela (nominated by Adrian Martin)

Like Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return, Chandler from Friends is multiplied and interacts with himself, uncannily. In Argentina, Vilela’s country!

May Santiago (nominated by Dayna McLeod)

A queer Puerto Rican feminist filmmaker, May Santiago’s unique voice and perspective makes her a video essayist to watch out for. She will have new work in Alison Peirse’s Doing Women’s (Global) (Horror) Film History ( DWGHFH ) project which will be featured in a special issue of MAI Feminism & Visual Culture in 2024. I was lucky enough to see May’s practice first hand at Embodying the Video Essay, a videographic workshop in Maine this summer and was blown away by May’s spectacularly intricate and layered work. She crafts soundtracks to complement a unique and riveting visual language, combining archive and horror while using herself as narrator and performing subject in front of the camera. Do keep an eye out for May’s work at film festivals and online: https://www.maillim.com/

Svanik Surve ( SUAVE , SUAVE cinema , svanik SUAVE ) (nominated by Queline Meadows)

Svanik Surve has been making video essays steadily for a few years now, but expanded his output in 2023 when he created two new YouTube channels. This year, his work explored Indian culture, international art cinema, and philosophy. His creative, intelligent, and funny videos deserve a much larger audience.

framemygaze (nominated by Queline Meadows)

In my eyes, there is nobody more immersed in the YouTube media and culture video essay landscape than framemygaze, and I say that as someone who runs a Discord server for video essay creators! I’ve found her in the comment sections of countless videos writing detailed notes that reflect her care and close attention to everything she watches. Framemygaze has only released one video so far, but if her deep understanding of the video essay community is any indication, there will be many more great videos in the future.

Alice Cappelle (nominated by Michael O’N eill Burns)

Alice’s videos offer an intriguing perspective at the borders of Francophile and Anglophile culture. She’s a French creator making videos in English, often about topics and phenomena specific to English language digital spaces and culture. This perspective allows her to use the critical force of a French leftist theorist to tackle seemingly vapid and conceptually empty trends and practices. At other times, she’s able to translate the specificity of the French political moment to a broader audience in a way that’s far more accessible than standard news coverage.

Jackson Maher (nominated by Michael O’N eill Burns)

Jackson is an already accomplished editor who in recent years has put himself in front of the camera to create video essays that lure viewers in with analysis of popular media properties, but uses this as the occasion to expose deeper cultural ideologies buried within pop culture. His series of videos on Copaganda does a masterful job at showing us how the logic of policing has infected so much of our culture, down to popular children’s programme Paw Patrol. But maybe most impressively, Jackson does all this while being relatable and curious, never making the viewer feel judged but instead inviting us to dig deeper alongside him.

Lara Isobel Callaghan (nominated by Will Webb)

Lara is a new face on the video-essay scene, with a number of commissions across Little White Lies and the BFI . Although the commissioned work is excellent, I’m highlighting this video from the Essay Library collab, When Essay Met Library, due to its formal inventiveness and cheeky sense of humour. Using Hindi film Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan as a jumping off point, Lara examines Shakespeare’s influence on the rom-com genre through the lens of a 1980s infomercial. William Shakespeare’s Course of True Love: available now!

Jemma Saunders (nominated by Will Webb)

A doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham, Jemma’s particular focus on sense of place (and Birmingham especially) comes to the fore in this fascinating essay examining automotive representations of the city. Other works in this vein include Reaching Out Remotely , covering UK soap Doctors’ covid episode, made all the more poignant by its cancellation this year.

Carly Mattox (nominated by Adam Woodward)

I met Carly in late 2022 when I gave a talk to the second year students at NFTS . She reached out to me earlier this year and has since contributed a handful of videos to the LWL ies YouTube channel.

The new issue of Sight and Sound

Hamaguchi Ryūsuke: insights on and from the Japanese auteur Plus: Mica Levi on their innovative score for The Zone of Interest – Víctor Erice interviewed about his masterful return to feature filmmaking, Close Your Eyes – a festival report from a politically charged Berlinale

Other things to explore

The best films of 2023 – all the votes, martin scorsese on winning sight and sound’s best films of 2023 poll with killers of the flower moon, the 50 best films of 2023.

Total solar eclipse 2024 live updates: Watch video and see what time it will hit your area

EAGLE PASS, Texas − In a moment of cosmic alignment that was precisely predicted yet undeniably mysterious , the moon crept across the face of the sun as seen from Earth, now casting its shadow onto the United States. 

The total eclipse has arrived. 

The partial shadow crossed into the U.S. in Texas just after noon local time, and a bit more than an hour later, the minutes of “totality” began. The total eclipse of the sun now traces a path from southern Texas to northern Maine.

The rare event is an astronomical experience like no other. Today's eclipse will be unusually accessible to millions of people. It was widely anticipated not only for its remarkable period of darkness, but for its rare timing: No total solar eclipse will be visible from the contiguous United States again until 2044. While millions of Americans may see today’s eclipse, a small group in Texas was among the very first.

Where is the solar eclipse right now? Edge of eclipse shadow begins in south Texas

Alejandra Martinez, a 7th-grade science teacher from the south Texas border city of Eagle Pass, peered up at the gray, gauzy sky, anxiously awaiting the solar eclipse’s entrance into the USA. Sitting with a telescope under a camping tent in a corner of the county airport, Martinez, 42, and two other science enthusiasts had been recruited by NASA to participate in an effort called Citizen CATE 2024, where more than 30 teams perched in the eclipse’s path will record the shadowy trek across the country. 

In this spot, less than five miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, she and her team would be among the first people in the U.S. to witness the phenomenon. Eagle Pass sits near the very beginning of the eclipse’s track from southwest to northeast across the country. It also sits very near dead-center of it, where the period of “totality” will be the longest. That total shadow was still more than an hour away when the edge of the shadow began to darken the sky. 

Martinez, dressed in a “This Totality Rocks” T-shirt and eclipse-themed skirt, watched as the penumbra crept across the airfield, about 10 minutes past noon local time. She put on her eclipse glasses and peered up at the sky. The gauzy clouds parted. “There it is! There it is!” she yelled. “First contact. It’s begun!”

Clouds came and went as the shadow grew for the next hour. As totality approached Eagle Pass, the sky shaded a dull gray then a heavy brown and the temperature dropped a few degrees. Only a sliver of the sun remained.

As totality approached Eagle Pass, the sky shaded a dull grey then a heavy brown and the temperature dropped a few degrees. Only a sliver of the sun remained.

A few seconds before 1:27 p.m. CT, the crowd counted down, “3..2..1…” The sun was gone, completely covered by the moon. Darkness spread over the small airport grounds. “Oh my god,” Martinez said, a hand covering her heart. “This is so cool!”

What time is the 2024 solar eclipse?

The total eclipse began in Mexico at about 11:07 a.m. PDT, Monday before crossing into Texas at 1:27 p.m. CDT. It will end in Maine at 3:35 p.m. EDT. The partial eclipse will last for awhile longer. Even if you're not in the path of totality and won't see the full eclipse, you may still see a percentage of it.

To find out exactly when the eclipse will be happening in your area, you can search by  USA TODAY's database by ZIP code  for a viewing guide.

Witnessing the first total eclipse from a cruise ship

Passengers aboard Holland America's Koningsdam cruise ship eagerly gathered on the top decks at 10 a.m. local time to watch the spectacle of a solar eclipse.

Positioned off the coast of Mazatlan, Mexico − the first city in North America to witness the total eclipse − the ship provided an ideal vantage point for viewing the celestial event. Accompanied by an astronomer, the captain meticulously adjusted the ship's position to ensure the best possible view.

Dan Fueller, an experienced eclipse observer who had previously seen similar phenomena from ships in 1991 and 1998, emphasized the advantages of viewing the eclipse from a cruise ship. He noted the flexibility of the ship's mobility allowed for optimal positioning along the eclipse's path, ensuring unobstructed views.

"You're on a cruise ship and (the best view) is a little bit farther to the west or a little bit farther to the east − along the path, there's a clear sky − the ship can move. If you're on land and there's not a road there, you better have a tank."

− Joshuan Rivera

Kids bring homemade eclipse viewers to National Mall

Lucas and Lucy Porto Banco didn’t need to buy fancy eclipse glasses – the 7- and 10-year-old siblings made their own eclipse viewers from two cardboard shoe boxes left over from a couple of their mom’s recent shoe purchases.With the help of a YouTube tutorial video, they made two holes in each box with a whittling knife and taped tin foil over. Then they used dry spaghetti to poke holes in the tin foil for the sun’s light to pass through and project onto the dark inside of the box.The kids put together the viewer in little more than five minutes, Lucy said. “Maybe 15, with covering all the gaps in the shoe box,” she said.Even with his own eclipse-viewing creation, Lucas said he may still take advantage of his eclipse glasses. “I’m going to do both,” he said.

− Cybele Mayes-Osterman

A last-minute search for glasses for 'a perfect spot'

Patsy Faoro walked toward a half dozen people gathered at the gate of Turner Farm Park in Great Falls, Virginia. The people were awaiting the opening of an eclipse viewing event complete with telescopes and educational presentations.

Faoro, who lives near the park in this upscale Northern Virginia neighborhood, just wanted glasses to safely view the eclipse.

She visited CVS, Safeway and a 7/11 convenience store, all of which had advertised the availability of glasses to view the eclipse. None of the retailers had any glasses remaining when Faoro checked this morning.

“We have this great big open space that’s a perfect spot,” said Faoro, who viewed her first eclipse in the 1970s. “We just need some glasses.”

− Ken Alltucker

Indianapolis Motor Speedway event draws tens of thousands

Tory Patrick, 41, is hoping to give her four children a once-in-a-lifetime learning opportunity. Patrick and her family traveled 160 miles to Indianapolis Motor Speedway from their home in Granger, Indiana. They were expected to have 97% totality at home, but it’s not the same as total coverage, she said.

“They will be getting the full experience that they can’t read about in textbooks,” Patrick said.

Patrick and her sister Cally Gannon, 39, from Cincinnati, met in Indianapolis to view the eclipse from the speedway. They camped outside IMS over the weekend ahead of the event and on Sunday afternoon saw a double rainbow over the speedway’s iconic pagoda. An estimated 50,000 tickets were sold for the day’s festivities, presented in partnership with NASA and Purdue University.

Elsewhere in the stands, Ryan Harper, 30, knows today is special.

“We’re right in totality,” he said. “This sometimes doesn’t happen in people’s lifetimes.

— Sarah Bowman and Jade Thomas

Family travels from Baltimore to Rochester, N.Y., to view the eclipse

When Maze Pelham of Baltimore was a fifth-grader, he watched news of the 2017 solar eclipse and vowed to witness the next notable solar eclipse. That eclipse, and that day, has come. And this is why he and his parents, Janice and Sonney Pelham, left Maryland around 1 a.m. on Monday and drove nearly seven hours to Rochester, New York.

“I said to myself I would go to the next one,” Maze Pelham said while seated with his parents on lawn chairs at downtown Rochester’s Parcel 5 park, where he and hundreds of others are awaiting a view of the full eclipse. “It’s a promise I made to myself.”

– Democrat and Chronicle, part of the USA TODAY Network

In Brooklyn: Eclipses glass, check. Lawnchair, check.

Ralph Emerson held a pair of paper sunglasses in his hands while riding the subway to Brooklyn's sprawling Prospect Park on Monday. He exited the train with a folded lawn chair strapped across his shoulder, and said he felt energized and full of anticipation.

"This is special," Emerson, 61, said. "I haven't woken up with this much excitement since the Super Bowl."

Walking to the park's botanic garden, Emerson said appreciating natural phenomena makes it easier to manage the stresses that come with living in a big city. Also like a big sports game, the eclipse will draw lots of people together to experience something much larger than themselves, in community, he said.

"A lot of times it's tragedies that bring us together, but sometimes things like this do," he said.

− Claire Thornton

Texas Eclipse Festival cut short by weather

The Texas Eclipse Festival was canceled Monday in Burnet County, 50 miles northwest of Austin, because of weather concerns. The festival, which included bands and other events, began Sunday and was supposed to wrap up Tuesday.

"We regret to inform you of the severe weather forecast, including risks of high winds, tornadic activity, large hail, and thunderstorms for later today, including during the eclipse, Tuesday, and Wednesday," festival organizers said on their website. "Your safety is our top priority."

Festivalgoers were urged to leave early for safety and to beat traffic. Guests, however, were allowed to stay "provided they pack and are prepared to depart after totality."

Traffic jams, collisions mar eclipse watchers' travel

Traffic crashes and road delays were reported across the nation as Americans flocked to prime locations to gaze up at the rare solar eclipse . Local roads and highways in states including Texas, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Vermont and New Hampshire were overwhelmed with eclipse chasers, many of whom were from out of state. The most intense bottlenecks appeared to be in the path of totality , where spectators will be able to view the full eclipse.

In Oklahoma, a crash around 7:30 a.m. local time narrowed eastbound lanes on I-40, a major transcontinental highway that runs from California to North Carolina. The crash occurred not far from several state parks that were hosting eclipse events, and it's also within driving distance of the full eclipse path, which includes parts of southeastern Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Multiple crashes were reported on an interstate in Waco, Texas, a city in the path of totality, where several festivities and eclipse viewing events were scheduled. The crashes all occurred on I-35, which runs from southern Texas to Minnesota.

"Expect major traffic delays in this area," the Texas Department of Transportation said in a statement .

− Christopher Cann

Airport draws a crowd of jets for eclipse

EAGLE PASS, Texas − Maverick County International Airport in Eagle Pass, Texas, usually sees maybe three private planes a day. By 10 a.m. CT on Monday, more than 10 planes crowded the tarmac, including Cessnas, Pipers and at least one corporate jet − all there to catch an early glimpse of the total solar eclipse. Eagle Pass will be one of the first American cities to witness the phenomenon. Some watchers, like Brandon Beck, 43, flew in Sunday night from San Diego and spent the night in a sleeping bag on the tarmac next to his friend’s Mooney single-prop piston four-seater.“We’re so lucky to be on a planet where the sun is the perfect size and perfect distance to create that effect,” he said. “It’s obligatory. We have to see it.”

First the Cherry Blossoms, then the eclipse

WASHINGTON − The Cherry Blossoms brought Ali and Aurore Youssouf to the city all the way from Paris, but the pair were delighted to learn that their trip would overlap with the eclipse. The day is extra special for Aurore Youssouf, 43, who has never seen an eclipse before. On Monday morning, the couple arrived by chance at the National Mall early enough to snag a few pairs of free eclipse glasses distributed by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum for the occasion.“We didn’t even know. We just ended up here and found out that they were giving away some glasses,” said Ali Youssouf, 46.

Awaiting eclipse − and hail − in Texas

KERRVILLE, Texas − Forecasts called for considerable cloudiness, rain and possible hail, but retired NASA engineer Jeff Stone stayed positive as he and his wife prepared to host more than a dozen people for a watch party at their hilltop home in Texas Hill Country. Stone, an eclipse enthusiast who had met family in Missouri to watch the solar eclipse of 2017, said he recently reviewed video footage of that event and said current conditions weren’t that much different than they were back then.

“I’m outside and seeing patches of blue among scattered clouds, so we’re remaining hopeful,” he said.

About 150 miles to the northeast in Gatesville, lead pastor Eric Moffett of Coryell Community Church said a similar forecast did little to deter an expected gathering of about 800 visitors for the church’s family-oriented “Eclipse at the Crosses” event. Many, if not most, were from out of town or even out of country − Canada, Wales, France, Italy. Many locals were staying home to avoid the crowd, he said.

“It’s partly cloudy, but the sun is shining on me right now,” he said. “We are praying that it stays that way.”

− Marc Ramirez

National Mall hosting Solar Eclipse Festival

WASHINGTON − A four-hour Solar Eclipse Festival organized by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum was kicking off at the National Mall beginning at noon. The festival will feature activity stations where attendees can observe the sun through a satellite's UV cameras to see its solar storms and create their own portable eclipse models and pinhole projection cameras. All eyes will turn to the skies at 3:20 p.m. local time, when the moon will block out 87% of the sun visible from the area.

Welcoming the eclipse in Mexico

MAZATLÁN, Mexico − Elizabeth Rigdon and her son Kristopher Kirk were celebrating some memorable firsts on Monday in this beach resort town. It was their first time traveling outside the U.S., they said, and their first time viewing a total solar eclipse. Monday’s eclipse first enters its North American path of totality in Mexico. Rigdon and Kirk flew in from Orange County, California, and were headed to a NASA viewing party, they said. Rigdon said she was so excited she could hardly sleep.

“I can’t stop smiling, I’m so glad we did this,” she said. “Now we think we want to start chasing eclipses.”

− Omar Ornelas and Lauren Villagran

Eclipse weather forecast: Where will there be clear skies?

Surprisingly, weatherwise, the best spot for viewing the eclipse was northern New England, specifically northern portions of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, according to the Weather Prediction Center .

Skywatchers in northern Maine celebrated Monday morning, as clear skies were reported across the state. "Viewing conditions look excellent," the weather service in Caribou, Maine, said. In northern Vermont, an approaching deck of clouds was keeping both eclipse chasers and meteorologists on edge: "It will be a close one in regards to eclipse viewing ," the weather service in Burlington, Vermont, reported Monday morning.

A stretch from Central Arkansas to southern Indiana also could be prime viewing, but this is an area of greater uncertainty due to the potential for high clouds, the Weather Prediction Center said.

Where will it be cloudy or stormy for the eclipse?

As predicted, skies were cloudy across much of central and southern Texas on Monday morning, a precursor to some potentially severe weather that could rumble across the state later in the day, forecasters said. San Antonio and Austin reported overcast skies, while Dallas-Fort Worth had mostly cloudy skies, according to the National Weather Service.

"A high probability of poor eclipse viewing conditions continues for nearly all of South-Central Texas for midday today," the weather service said earlier. The Weather Prediction Center said clouds could also hinder viewing from Texas into southern Arkansas, and across Ohio, northwest Pennsylvania, and New York.

Indianapolis and Cleveland were anxiously hanging on every forecast update. In Indianapolis, the forecast looked good: Only some scattered high clouds were expected during the eclipse. Weather service meteorologist Joseph Nield said, "We're cautiously optimistic that things are looking pretty good for us."

In Cleveland, unwelcome light rain was reported Monday morning, but improving weather and partly sunny skies were predicted for eclipse time.

Hundreds of thousands expected to watch in southern Illinois

CARBONDALE, Ill. – Southern Illinois University-Carbondale officials expect 200,000 to 300,000 people to flood southern Illinois today for viewing in the path of totality, and a projected 50,000 in Carbondale – roughly double the town's population. Michelle Nichols, director of public observing at Adler Planetarium, will co-host an eclipse show in Saluki Stadium.

"Thousands of people are here today to see this eclipse, feel the temperature drop and feel the overall excitement and hear the reactions of everyone around them," she said. "This is a multi-sensory experience involving the sun, the moon, and you. It involves one single action: Looking up."

− Dave Eminian, Peoria Journal Star

Clear skies, high hopes in Vermont

ST. JOHNSBURY, Vt. − Out of state plates vastly outnumbered Vermonters near the state border with New Hampshire Monday morning. Connecticut was well-represented, followed by Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and New Jersey. Interstate 91 was clear sailing, but I-93, which comes up from the Boston area was already quite congested before 10 a.m. Skies were uncharacteristically crystal clear for this time of year and though it’s called “mud season,” none was evident and only a few traces of recent snow fall.

In St. Johnsbury, population 7,300, more than 100 people were already lined up at the doors of the 135-year-old Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium waiting for the first astronomy program of the morning. Dozens more set up lawn chairs, blankets and cameras in the churchyard across the street.

− Karen Weintraub

What is the difference between a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse?

A  total solar eclipse  occurs when the moon comes in between the Earth and the sun, blocking its light from reaching our planet, leading to a period of darkness lasting several minutes. A total lunar eclipse occurs when the moon and the sun are on exact opposite sides of Earth. The Earth blocks the sunlight that normally reaches the moon. Instead of that sunlight hitting the moon’s surface, Earth's shadow falls on it.

A lunar eclipse can last for a few hours, while a solar eclipse lasts only a few minutes. Solar eclipses also rarely occur, while lunar eclipses are comparatively more frequent. While at least two partial lunar eclipses happen every year, total lunar eclipses are still rare, NASA says. Another major difference: No special glasses or gizmos are needed to view the a lunar eclipse, and people can directly stare at the moon.

− Saman Shafiq

Solar eclipse, lunar eclipse: What is the difference?

Can you drive during the solar eclipse?

The  2024 solar eclipse  will shroud much of the United States in darkness on Monday, leaving many people to wonder: Is it safe to drive during the solar eclipse?

It is safe to drive during an eclipse as long as you don't look up at the sky. AAA is telling drivers to be focused on the road if they are operating a car during the total solar eclipse. But the automobile insurance company is advising Americans who want to safely view the total eclipse to "find a safe place to park (not on the side of a road or highway) away from other traffic and then wear your eclipse glasses," said Aixa Diaz, a spokeswoman from AAA.

"Pack your patience, whether traveling a great distance or locally," Diaz said. "People will be out and about to catch a glimpse of the eclipse."

A similar scenario  played out in 2017 during the nation's last total solar eclipse : Congestion in some areas lasted for up to 13 hours after totality,  according to Transportation Research News , a National Research Council publication. An analysis of traffic patterns from that year suggests the worst of the traffic – on interstates and rural back roads alike – will kick off after the eclipse ends and everyone tries to leave all at once.

− Kayla Jimenez

When will the next solar eclipse happen?

It will be 20 years before there's a chance to  witness a total solar eclipse  in the United States again. According to NASA, after Monday's total solar  eclipse , the next one viewable from the contiguous U.S. will be on Aug. 23, 2044.

Unfortunately, the 2044 total  solar eclipse  won't have the broad reach across the U.S. as the 2024 eclipse. The path of totality during the 2044 eclipse will only touch three states, according to the Planetary Society, a nonprofit involved in research, public outreach and political space advocacy. The eclipse will begin in Greenland, sweep through Canada and end around sunset in Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota.

But another eclipse scheduledfor Saturday, Aug. 12, 2045, will trace a path of totality over California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Georgia.

− Mary Walrath-Holdridge, Gabe Hauari and Eric Lagatta

Eclipse and pets: It's not the sky that's the problem

An  eclipse  itself isn't dangerous for domestic animals such as dogs and cats, but experts say it's probably best to not bring pets to  experience the April 2024 total solar eclipse . Experts' biggest concern is not what’s happening in the sky but on the ground as crowds of excited and  eager people gather , said Dr. Rena Carlson, president of the American Veterinary Medical Association. Dogs especially will take their cues from their owners rather than  the celestial event.

“Rather than the effects of the eclipse, I would be more worried about the excitement and all of the people,” Carlson said.

− Elizabeth Weise

A guide to the solar eclipse for kids

Here's an easy-to read, illustrated guide to help kids understand what the  April 8 total solar eclipse  means, where it will be visible and how you can watch it safely. It also shows them how an ordinary kitchen colander can easily be used to view a solar eclipse − the colander's holes can project crescent images of the sun onto the ground. There are even pages that can be downloaded and colored.

Trump's eclipse experience lit up internet in 2017

Seven years ago, when the last  total solar eclipse  crossed over North America, a photo of then-President Donald Trump  seemingly gazing at the sun with his naked eyes set the internet ablaze . During the afternoon of Aug. 21, 2017, Trump, who was president at the time, was joined by then first lady Melania Trump and their son Barron  to watch the rare phenomenon from the Truman Balcony  at the White House. Photos taken by members of the media captured all three donning eclipse glasses while looking at the eclipse.

But at one point during the viewing, the former president was captured in photos and videos without proper eye protection, seemingly gazing directly at the sun. Looking at an eclipse before or after the brief phase of totality without proper eyewear  can lead to eye damage .

− Natalie Neysa Alund

When is the next total solar eclipse? What to know about the next eclipse's path, timing

How to make a solar eclipse viewer

People who didn't manage to get their  hands on glasses  are not completely down and out. There are other safe ways to view the eclipse , say experts, and a lot of them only require a little bit of craftiness and items you can find lying around the house.

Steps to make the cereal box eclipse viewer (And here is a video aid) :

• Get an empty, clean cereal box.
• Cut a white piece of cardboard that will fit snuggly in the bottom of the box, or secure it permanently by gluing it in place.
• Cut the top of the cereal box, removing both ends and leaving the center intact.
• Put a piece of tape across the center of the top to securely hold it closed.
• Tape a piece of heavy-duty foil or double a single layer for additional strength, covering one of the openings at the top of the cereal box. The other opening will remain open for viewing.
• Using a small nail (approximately 3mm in diameter) push a hole in the foil.
• Cover the entire box with construction paper, leaving the single-viewing opening and the foil uncovered.

The finished box should be held with the pin-hole side facing the sun. It may take a little practice pointing the box. With your back facing the sun, look through the viewing opening. A small image of the sun, about ½ cm in diameter, can be seen projected on the white paper inside the box.

− Mary Walrath-Holdrid

What is the path of the solar eclipse called?

Those in the direct line of the eclipse will be treated to an incredible sight as the moon completely blots out the sun's disk, ushering in uncharacteristic darkness and revealing the sun's elusive outermost layer called the corona. That moment is called "totality" and this year the path of totality crosses through 13 U.S. states.

The last total solar eclipse to cut through North America was in August 2017.

How to look at eclipse without glasses

A total solar eclipse offers skygazers the rare opportunity to witness the eclipse with the naked eye. However,  solar eclipse glasses  are still needed until totality is reached. 

Certified solar eclipse  glasses are crucial for spectators to avoid the sun's retina-damaging rays. But when the moon moves completely in front of the sun and blocks its light, you'll know it's  safe to remove the glasses  for a short period of time.

How fast does an eclipse shadow travel?

According to a post from the  National Weather Service  in Indianapolis on X, an eclipse shadow travels at speeds from 1,100 to 5,000 mph. Near the equator, it travels at around 1,100 mph and increases in speed as it approaches the poles.

The eclipse party is over? Time to recycle those glasses!

Astronomers Without Borders , or AWB, a non-profit organization running its second nationwide  eclipse glasses recycling drive . Her business will join over 300 schools, museums, city governments, commercial businesses, community organizations and local libraries that will collect and ship an estimated  millions of glasses  to be repurposed for use by underserved communities around the world in  future solar eclipses .

AWB launched its first run of the program after the last solar eclipse in 2017 when volunteer centers across the country collected millions of the glass. After vetting them for reuse, more than  half a million glasses were distributed to Africa, Asia and South America.

People can visit  AWB's website  to find their nearest participating collection center and learn more about recycling the glasses, said Andrew Fazekas, the organization's communication manager.  

"We figure there's probably going to be tens of millions of glasses out there at the very least," he said. "And most of them are probably very gently used."

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The best video essays of 2023

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Share All sharing options for: The best video essays of 2023

Looking at the year’s notable video essays, many grapple with issues at the heart of contemporary media itself. There are dissections of video-playing tools, exposés of how corporations restrict access, contrasts between tropes and reality, and thorough investigations of trends in plagiarism and/or fabrication. As the essay landscape refines, it seems to peer inward as much as out.

On the making of this list: I’ve been trying to stay up to date on video essays for a while, and have been contributing to lists and/or voting in polls about the best videos made each year since 2018. Over this time, doing these kinds of roundups has gotten exponentially more difficult. As YouTube has grown to become a mega-business hosting powerful creators (part of the general trend of social media video sites becoming the new primary forum for cultural influence), I’ve seen essayists I once thought of as niche accrue follower counts in the millions. It’s been surreal. For this year’s list, I tried to shake things up by keeping the essayists who have appeared in previous editions to a minimum, along with the usual considerations about incorporating a diversity of creator backgrounds and video style. Once again, the videos are presented simply in order of publishing date.

[Also, I’m going to preface this with a mega mea culpa: It was absolute malpractice of me to not include Platformer Toolkit by Game Maker’s Toolkit in the best video essays of 2022 list . I don’t have a good excuse, either; I just straight up missed the essay at the time it came out, and then overlooked it during my catch-up phase at the end of the year. But an essay about game design that instructs you on its ideas by letting you actively engage with them through interactivity feels like a breakthrough in the form.]

Practices of Viewing by Johannes Binotto

Johannes Binotto is a Swiss researcher and lecturer who has been adding to his “Practices of Viewing” series for several years now, and every installment preceding 2023’s videos, “Ending” and “Description,” is well worth checking out. With each essay, Binotto examines a specific element of the media viewing interface, and how they affect an audience’s engagement with it. Some subjects, like fast-forwarding, pausing, or muting, may seem like obvious touchstones, while others, like sleep, are more out-there approaches to the conversation.

A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek

This technically debuted last year, making the rounds at film festivals, but it was made available online this past spring, so I’m including it here. A History of the World According to Getty Images is a great example of a work embedding its own ethos into its construction. Misek, another academic, is scrutinizing how for-profit companies (specifically Getty Images) mediate information that’s supposed to be available for all. In practice, a great deal of visual material that’s technically in the public domain can only be accessed in decent quality by paying an archive like Getty. Misek circumvents this by paying the fee to use select footage in this essay and then making this essay itself available for anyone to cite and clip from, putting that footage out into the world for real.

The Faces of Black Conservatism by F.D Signifier

I feel that video essays that consist mainly of the creator talking directly into a camera stretch the definition of the term – to me, the best cinematic and argumentative potential of the form lies in the power of editing. F.D Signifier’s contrast between fictional depictions of Black conservatives and the reality of how they appear across media exemplifies is what sets him apart in this genre: not just the depth of his thought (though it is considerable), but also the playful ways in which he presents the objects of his discussion. The running gag here in which he films himself holding hairstyling tools over the heads of various people on his screen had me laughing harder with each appearance.

Games That Don’t Fake the Space by Jacob Geller/Why We Can’t Stop Mapping Elden Ring by Ren or Raven

I don’t actually think this is the best essay Jacob Geller released this year (that would be either “Games that Aren’t Games” or “How Can We Bear to Throw Anything Away?” ), but it pairs so incredibly well with Renata Price’s essay (an impressive video debut building on her experience as a games critic) that it felt more appropriate to present them as a double feature. Both videos are sharp examinations of the ways that video games conjure physical space. Geller illuminates the shortcuts and tricks games often employ through examples of ones that, as the title suggests, don’t use such devices, while Price analyzes the impulses beneath what one could call the “cartographic instinct” in open-world games.

Why Do Brands Keep Doing These Crazy Influencer Trips?? by Mina Le

It’s been encouraging in recent years to see Le grow more confident in her mixing of media in her videos on fashion and film/television. You might remember the controversy around Shein granting influencers a limited hangout in a clothing factory this past summer. Le contextualizes this story by delving into the wider, supremely odd world of sponsored tours. If you watch this on your phone, the transitions between Le speaking to the camera and the clips of TikToks and other videos and photos flow together in a manner not unlike how one would scroll a social media feed, creating queasy resonance between message and medium.

Feeling Cynical About Barbie by Broey Deschanel / The Plastic Feminism of Barbie by Verilybitchie

I present these two videos not as a contrarian attack on Barbie (a film I enjoyed), but to highlight the important role of considered critical voices that dissent against prevailing opinions. Both Maia Wyman and Verity Ritchie unpack the issues with a heavily corporate product attempting to capitalize on feminist sentiment. Ritchie emphasizes the history of Barbie the brand and how the movie fits into it, while Wyman reads more into the specifics of the film’s plot. Together these videos do a good job of elaborating on legendary critic Amy Taubin’s Barbie reaction : “It’s about a fucking doll !’”

TikTok Gave Me Autism: The Politics of Self Diagnosis by Alexander Avila

There’s a lot of social media discourse over who can and can’t — and should or shouldn’t — claim the label of “autistic.” As someone who’s struggled with both the logistics and appropriateness of sussing out whether I’m on the spectrum, this video hit me hard. There are parts that feel like they veer so far into philosophical query that they threaten to obfuscate rather than elucidate the subject, but the essay as a whole is undeniably compelling. Avila’s own confessed stake in the question of self-diagnosis is itself affecting. This is the most searingly personal video on this list, uniting self-inquiry with rigorous research.

Chaste/Unchaste by Maryam Tafakory

This years shortest entry is a deceptively simple interrogation of the concept of “chastity” as defined by Iranian censorship standards. Takafory is a veteran of the academic essay scene, and I’m delighted by the opportunity to present her work to a wider audience. The video’s text is minimal, and its visuals are simply a montage of clips from Iranian films, but the implicit question of propriety grips the viewer with each cut.

Journey to Epcot Center: A Symphonic History by Defunctland

This is the most boundary-pushing essay on this year’s list. Completely lacking commentary, it instead emphasizes visuals and reenactment in telling the story of how Disney’s Epcot park went from concept to realization over the decades. Kevin Perjurer also provides a detailed set of notes that are meant to be read along with watching the video, further demanding one’s full attention. This is a direct acknowledgement of how we use the internet, the windowed experience of browsing and watching videos. I don’t think everything works; many of the reenactments, while impressively professional, feel somewhat redundant. But I’d prefer a creator take big swings that result in a few flaws rather than play it safe, and I hope both Perjurer and others continue in such an experimental vein.

Plagiarism and You(Tube) by Hbomberguy

Harry Brewis is popular enough that he doesn’t need any boost, but even in the very brief period since this video’s release as of the time of writing, Plagiarism and You(Tube) has made seismic impact on the YouTuber scene . Does it need to be almost four hours long? Maybe not. Yet the sheer volume of evidence it pulls together to support various accusations of plagiarism does seem vital. The main focus of the piece, James Somerton, went into lockdown over the fairly comprehensive evidence presented against him (and has since attempted to apologize ). I’m seeing conversations flourish around the endemic problem of plagiarism on the internet and what is to be done about it, and a surge of creators recognizing and calling out others who have taken their work without credit. There’s a deeper issue at play here, which is that the growth of YouTube entertainment has come with a truly daunting mountain of crap content that nonetheless attracts views (and thus dollars).

On the subject of low quality standards on YouTube, beyond plagiarism, Todd in the Shadows’ recent exhaustive effort to fact-check various false claims Somerton has made in his work is a useful supplement to this video.

Polygon’s Best of the Year 2023

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