The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking

Abstract

Long after the advent of the digital era, while most university-based film studies academics still choose to publish their critical, theoretical and historical research in conventional written formats, a small but growing number of scholars working on the moving image have begun to explore the online publication possibilities of the digital video essay. This multimedia form has come to prominence in recent years in much Internet-based cinephile and film critical culture. In this article, I will consider, above all from a personal perspective looking back at two of the sixty or so videos that I have made, some of the possibilities that these processes offer for the production of new knowledge, forged out of the conjunction of the film object(s) to be studied, digital technologies of reproduction and editing tools, and the facticity of the researcher(s). I will argue that digital video is usefully seen not only as a promising communicative tool with different affordances than those of written text, but also as an important emergent cultural and phenomenological field for the creative practice of our work as film scholars.