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The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy

Catherine Grant

Catherine Grant is Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. A prolific experimental video-essayist, she has authored and edited numerous studies of audio-visual forms of film and moving image research and scholarship, including: The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image (co-authored with Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell, 2nd ed., 2019); screenstudies.video ( 2019), a monographic website collecting and reflecting on her own practice; and another website collection The Audiovisual Essay (2014-present). She is also creator of Film Studies for Free and a co-founding editor of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic and Moving Image Studies.

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The above video forms an integral part of Catherine Grant’s contribution to THE VIDEOGRAPHIC ESSAY: CRITICISM IN SOUND AND IMAGE, a forthcoming collection of work edited by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell (Caboose Books, 2016; https://www.caboosebooks.net/the-videographic-essay and https://www.caboosebooks.net/node/150). Focusing on a number of videographic explorations of matters of film editing (including her study of the dissolves and "Hollywood montages" in David Lean’s 1945 BRIEF ENCOUNTER, a film that is currently celebrating the 70th anniversary of its release), Grant explores what such practical and audiovisual modes of research and presentation—ones which themselves evidently turn on editing—can add to the study of a feature that (with a number of key exceptions) has not received much sustained attention to date in written film scholarship.

Catherine Grant is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. She established (and continues to curate for) the open access campaigning website Film Studies For Free, and the Audiovisualcy video group, and is also founding editor of the academic digital publishing platform REFRAME. She has published widely on theories and practices of film authorship and intertextuality, and has edited volumes on world cinema, Latin American cinema, digital film and media studies, and the audiovisual essay. A relatively early and prolific adopter of the online short video form, she is founding co-editor (with Christian Keathley and Drew Morton) of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies. This new peer-reviewed publication was awarded the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award of Distinction for 2015.