best video essays ever

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The best video essays of 2019

Our annual survey of moving-image criticism in movie form features recommendations from 39 essayists and experts, recommending videos from 51 seconds to 4½ hours long that explore the powers and possibilities of cinema and more.

Ariel Avissar , Will DiGravio , Grace Lee Updated: 14 January 2020

A frame from Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s video essay Watching The Pain of Others

Introduction

“I’m not sure I know exactly what a video essay is or is supposed to be… We are using this term as a way to bring a community together.” — Chloé Galibert-Laîné

Three years into this poll, many more years since the form first emerged, and most of us who make and consume this work remain quite unsure of what exactly constitutes a video essay. But one thing is clear: we love watching them, and we love making them.

This year has been a notable one for video essays or, to use the umbrella term, audiovisual criticism, in ways both good and bad. In December of 2018, Fandor ceased operation, leaving a void in the video essay landscape. With even more limited outlets to finance their work, more and more video essayists have turned to venues like Patreon.

That same month, Tecmerin: Revista de Ensayos Audiovisuales began publication, joining [in]Transition as another peer-reviewed academic publication solely devoted to videographic scholarship. Will DiGravio launched the Video Essay Podcast , featuring in-depth conversations with prominent video essayists. Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell and Catherine Grant published a new open-access book and website, The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy , a welcome resource for studying and teaching the form. As video essays are increasingly incorporated into academic institutions and publications, as well as film festivals and journals worldwide, these new initiatives and others illustrate the ever-growing sense of collaboration and community that characterises the world of video essays.

Indeed, if there is one word we would like to suggest as embodying the ethos of this year’s poll, it’s ‘community’. Despite the title of the poll, its true purpose is not to establish a definitive list of the ‘best’ essays of the year, which we recognise is an impossible – and perhaps irrelevant – task. Instead, it is our hope that this list will inspire an ongoing conversation amongst those who make and consume this work, highlighting essays our contributors found noteworthy, memorable, exciting or illuminating. This list hopes to serve as the beginning of that conversation, not its end.

Crunching the results

An overview of the poll, and some numbers and statistics: 39 contributors submitted nominations. They are ⅔ (26) male, nearly ⅓ (12) female, and one non-binary contributor; they are academics (21) and non-academics (18); they are scholars, teachers, critics, journalists, YouTubers, filmmakers, curators and festival programmers; most are active video essayists themselves; they are from 17 countries across five continents; ten of them are from the US, and 26 are from Europe – including eight from the UK alone.

Together they submitted a total of 216 votes, which amount to 134 unique entries, consisting primarily of online video essays, but that also include several short and feature-length films (documentaries, essay films and videographic experiments), a few gallery installations and even a live performance, and ranging in length from a mere 51 seconds to a whopping 4½ hours – attesting to the increasingly diverse range of creations that can be considered as ‘video essays’. These works were made – or published – this past year, by both established essayists and newcomers to the field; some of the videos were viewed only once or twice prior to appearing on this poll, others had up to 5.5 million views, and everywhere in between. Thirty-four videos have previously been published on established online platforms such as MUBI , [in]Transition , Sight & Sound , NECSUS , Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism , De Filmkrant and others. While making up about 25 per cent of the videos featured on the poll, these published videos received 45 per cent of the votes (98 votes).

Works selected for the poll were created by essayists from 21 countries across four continents; 48 of them are from the US, 64 from Europe – including 28 from the UK alone, and 10 from Australia. They are overwhelmingly in the English language, either exclusively or partially (124 works). Not surprisingly, the primary focus in terms of medium is cinema (92 works), with television a considerably distant second (only ten works, a mere seven per cent) –  videographic telephilia , it seems, still remains relatively dormant when compared with its cinematic counterpart. Video games and gaming culture are the focus of eight videos, with others touching on art, philosophy, online culture, photography, architecture, clothing, food and more.

The top-mentioned videos on the list are Watching The Pain of Others by Chloé Galibert-Laîné (12 mentions); The Haunting of The Headless Woman by Catherine Grant and Gesture in A Woman Under the Influence by Tracy Cox-Stanton (nine each); Visual Disturbances by Eric Faden and Pan Scan Venkman by Cormac Donnelly (six each). Essayists with multiple video essays featured on the poll include Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin (six different videos); Catherine Grant and Grace Lee (five); Jason Mittell , Leigh Singer , Luís Azevedo , Thomas Flight and Ariel Avissar (three).

Of the 134 works featured on the poll, 91 are by men, 32 by women. The remaining works were made by mixed-gender couples or teams or by non-binary essayists. This gendered split leaves a lot to be desired – as does the similar gendered split evident in the makeup of the poll’s contributors. That said, it is of note that the three videos that received the highest amount of votes – by far – were all by female essayists; that of the six essayists whose combined films received the highest number of votes, five were female; and that of the four essayists who had the highest number of different videos featured on the poll, three were female.

We hope this poll and the ongoing conversation it seeks to participate in and inform can help further expand the community of practitioners, critics, scholars and enthusiasts of the video essay, and that this community will become increasingly more inclusive – in terms of gender, geography, subject matter and others – in the years to come.

And here are the results…

Table of contributors

(Click on a name to jump to their picks.)

Film theorist and curator, Charles University in Prague & Národní filmový archiv

Watching The Pain of Others by Chloé Galibert-Laîné

Watching The Pain of Others

This essay has been haunting me for the whole of 2019. Whether I have seen it on the internet, at a film festival, at an academic conference or at a video essay symposium, it has always been an enigma waiting to be solved. What intrigued me the most was not the author’s ambiguous fascination with the YouTube Morgellons community but her investigation of online communication as such. Galibert-Laîné feeds into the desktop interface, yet the gaps between her and other subjects become all the more visible. Still, the communication needs to keep going, even to the point of ridicule.

The Algorithmic Nickelodeon by Shane Denson

Despite its formal shortcomings, this must be one of the most thought-provoking videographic works I have seen. Denson’s theoretical manifesto imagines a form of audiovisual criticism that would not be merely expressive but transformative, reinventing our notion of subject-object relations. For this to happen, deformations of the image/object and displacements of the analyst/subject must take place simultaneously. Creative thinking joins forces with EEG headsets and editing programmes to create a media-theoretical ‘perpetuum mobile’, designed for constant questioning of what cinema means in the age of algorithms.

The Philosophy of Horror (Part 1): Etymology by Péter Lichter and Bori Máté ( watch trailer )

Experimental film and video essay circuits still do not communicate nearly as much as they should. This found footage adaptation of Noël Carroll’s famous book on horror certainly provides a lot of inspiration for videographic film studies. Its theoretical investigation delves deep into a filmic matter, specifically into 35 mm film prints of A Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequel. Both manual interventions and autonomous micro-organic processes participate in this enquiry, showing to what extent the horror-in-film and the horror-of-film are closely intertwined.

Indy Vinyl on The Clock (and the clock) by Ian Garwood

Garwood’s research project on record-playing moments in American independent cinema keeps growing, with the aforementioned video being the most exciting instalment so far. Not unlike its role model, Christian Marclay’s 24-hour museum blockbuster , the video essay plays with the ambivalence of cinematic phantasmagoria, deconstructing it yet affirming its mysterious pull. Nevertheless, the way Garwood organises the clips into convoluted multi-screens and editing software interfaces makes this video so much more than a supercut-by-numbers, turning it into a poignant example of reflective videographic nostalgia.

Gesture in A Woman Under the Influence by Tracy Cox-Stanton

Cox-Stanton’s video is kind of a last-minute discovery, taken straight out of the latest NECSUS issue . This ambitious experiment in “delayed cinema” examines gestures on both microscopic and macroscopic levels. A careful study of Gena Rowlands’ singular movements makes them reveal their (not only cinematic) doubles, entwined in multi-faceted histories of female representation in Swan Lake ballet, medical photography, early cinema advertising, etc. The author’s impressive use of superimpositions highlights how the filmic gesture never co-exists with itself, as well as how video essayists may orchestrate their overlapping associations.

Criticism in the Age of TikTok by Charlie Shackleton

As the online media landscape is constantly changing, videographic film criticism needs to keep searching for new platforms. Shackleton’s smartphone essay seeks this potential in TikTok, a mobile app designed for making spontaneous short-form (60 seconds max) videos. Even if this potential was not fulfilled, the idea of making video essays within such strict spatial and temporal limitations provokes my imagination. It could open a space for videographic criticism that would be less explanatory and more gestural, less linear and more iterative, less about analysing films than performing critical spectatorship… it is certainly worth a try.

Reproduction Interdite by Johannes Binotto

Just when I thought that supercuts are beneath me, I encountered this clever and subversive take on the genre. Binotto’s compilation of back views in cinema is paradoxical in essence: it reveals a pattern of images whose aim is to disclose something from us. This paradox works really well, all the more so for its subtle visual variations and the disturbing choo-choo train rhythm.

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Ariel Avissar

Scholar, lecturer and videographic dabbler at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University

An inspired, affective and intellectually stimulating personal voyage of discovery into the lives (and pain) of others, making brilliant use of the affordances of the desktop documentary form. I’ll leave the more detailed recommendations to the (many) other contributors who nominated this one. A must-watch.

Adaptation – Unconventionally Conveying the Conventional by Michael Tucker / Lessons from the Screenplay

An exemplary adaptation of Spike Jonze’s Adaptation into video-essay form, this meta-video essay offers an entertaining portrayal of the video essayist’s creative process; rather than the usual explanatory illustration of screenwriting concepts through a specific film, accompanied by Tucker’s voice-over, this one (fittingly) opts to show rather than tell. After all, “any idiot can write voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character” – or of a video essayist. This video provides a refreshing alternative.

The Two Irises by Eleni Palis

In this fascinating videographic fusion, Palis takes a meticulous look at two films (Taxi Driver and Stanley & Iris) whose relation to one another initially seems merely superficial (both have female characters named Iris, and both star Robert De Niro), and masterfully weaves them together into a coherent flow that uncovers uncanny intertextual reverberations. The video reframes both films anew, suggesting a compelling new reading, achieved exclusively through editing and juxtaposition.

The Problem Solving of Filmmaking by David F. Sandberg

In this unusual instance of a video essay by a filmmaker discussing their own work (Shazam!), Sandberg offers an insightful and amusing peek behind the curtain and a demystification (of sorts) of the creative process – as well as a winking critique directed at the very notion of inferred authorial intent (and of video essays that might be overthinking it…).

The Real Fake Cameras of Toy Story 4 by Evan Puschak (The Nerdwriter)

Puschak is one of the most popular video essayists working today; like the best of his work, this video is both a loving and admiring tribute to its subject, and an engaging, highly watchable lesson in film literacy, enabling everyone from the seasoned cinephile to the layest of laymen an increased appreciation of the aesthetic language of cinema.

Knock-About by Jason Mittell

Another entry in Mittell’s ongoing project The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad , this video picks apart Walter White’s infamous “I am the one who knocks” speech, and offers a scathing critique of the mighty Heisenberg. Perhaps the simplest of Mittell’s Breaking Bad videos, it is elegant, enjoyable and persuasively conveys its argument through editing alone, creating irony through the juxtaposition of sound and image.

Luís Azevedo

Maker of direct-to-video essays at The Discarded Image , Beyond the Frame , and Little White Lies

36 Westerns Timed to First Gunshot by Adam Tinius / Entertain the Elk

Blackface, whitewashing and the grey zone – a two-part video inquiry by Leigh Singer

Spirited Away: What’s in a Name? by Grace Lee / What’s So Great About That?

Stranger/Things by Philip Brubaker

How The Irishman Builds On Goodfellas by Thomas Flight

The Inner Chronicle of What We Are – Understanding Werner Herzog by Tom van der Linden / Like Stories of Old

Dunkirk | How Christopher Nolan Captures the Dunkirk Spirit by Thomas Wijnaendts van Resandt

Johannes Binotto

Researcher and lecturer in film and media studies, hat wearer, video tinkerer

Gesture in A Woman Under the Influence

Since I first saw it I cannot stop thinking about Gena Rowlands’ performance as Mabel Longhetti. In her both dense and dancerly reading Tracy Cox-Stanton connects it to a whole cultural history of the exposed, scrutinised and still inexhaustible gestures of the female body, from Anna Pavlova to the patients in the Salpêtrière to Amelie Hastie’s “vulnerable spectator”. A reading of A Woman Under the Influence not to end all readings but to begin them anew.

Second Time’s the Charm (A Rebecca Sitcom Intro) by David Scanlon

Marrying (sic!) the images of Hitchcock’s Rebecca with the theme song of the eighties sitcom Who’s the Boss? may seem like a simple idea but turns out to be a radical critical act that works in both directions: Not only does it reveal a campiness that was actually always present (but rarely acknowledged) in the classic but also points to a haunting uncanniness in those TV shows we once considered just guilty pleasure.

A Very Rare Bear by Oswald Iten

As I see so many video essays focused on formal questions of the mise-en-scène, I have the feeling that studies on acting styles and techniques are more rare. Undoubtedly an absolute rarity however is the analysis of the acting style not of an actress or actor but of an animated bear. A very rare video essay on a very rare bear indeed.

The Thinking Machine 29: Sigh… by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Another astonishing analysis of acting, this time focused on Robert Mitchum’s syncopating sighs as dramatic punctuation. The true surprise however comes near the end when this video essay literally turns into a dream come true. There is something truly Freudian (and truly daring) about using one’s own dream as utterly convincing argument.

The Barber Approves: A Moment in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine by Will DiGravio

The barber knows best. A small, fleeting and seemingly insignificant gesture at the border of one of film history’s most beloved classics is unfolded and spread out into the grand coordinates of this film and Western movies in general: East/West, civilisation/wilderness, in/out, myself/other. And it doesn’t end for me there. I keep wondering. For example about the odd way the barber holds his customer’s hat. What is it that the barber knows?

FALLING: 3 x Girls in Uniform by Catherine Grant

Among this year’s many video essays by Catherine Grant and besides the now published ultimate online edition of her seminal Dissolves of Passion I particularly liked this juxtaposition of the three versions of Mädchen in Uniform. Presented as a grid of six simultaneous screens it leaves it to the viewer to draw the connections between the excerpts and to see how the three adaptations of the same book seem to rework each other retroactively. The freedom of the viewer to think beyond the frame stands in an interesting contrast to the confinement that the characters in the films experience.

Painting #3 by Ruth Baettig ( see details )

Although not intended as a video essay in the strict sense I consider the installation Painting #3 by Ruth Baettig nonetheless as a high moment of videographic research. Moments from Antonioni’s The Red Desert projected on glass only become visible by the artist applying paint onto the otherwise transparent surface. Rarely has the double meaning of ‘screen’ as both barrier and display been shown so elegantly and that watching films is never passive consumption but dependent on active participation.

Philip Brubaker

Filmmaker, critic, video essayist

IFFR v2 2 by Luís Azevedo

In the greatest tradition of meta filmmaking, Azevedo sums up the intricate process of making a video essay beautifully and with humour. He fine tunes the desktop documentary format to suit this piece commissioned by the Rotterdam International Film Festival. I was impressed with how he turns the camera on himself and smoothly integrates performance with his masterful editing.

Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream by Frank Beauvais

A dazzling, feature length essay film that abstracts hundreds of movies (including Hollywood ones I might recognise) and repurposes them to suit the personal and political narrative of the narrator. I noticed that rarely does Beauvais include imagery where we can see the eyes of another human being; the way he distances himself and us from identifying with the people in the clips over the entire running time is a masterful display of re-appropriation to support his written thesis. This film is a hearty meal for cinephiles.

Pan Scan Venkman by Cormac Donnelly

A charming video essay that strikes just the right note of overthinking and elevates pop culture to an academic level of importance. Donnelly’s observations about pan and scan resonated with me, and probably most video essayists of a certain age who grew up curious about why were allowed to see what we saw on TV and what that unusual lateral camera move was all about.

Why Martin Scorsese Is Right About Marvel Movies by Thomas Flight

A timely video essay that capitalises on an amusing bone of contention on the Internet. Flight uses a spare, but highly effective approach of juxtaposing clips from Marvel films and classic cinema without commentary, and letting the clips speak for themselves. When so many Internet commentators are weighing in with their verbal opinions on the matter, I appreciated the show, don’t tell approach that Flight employs. Good choice of clips, too. 

Nelson Carvajal

Video artist and founder of Free Cinema Now

Martin Scorsese: Hands // Mains de maître by Trois Couleurs

The best supercut of the year. Proves that a mashup can be both montage and magnificently moving.

The Unloved – The House That Jack Built by Scout Tafoya

I’ve been a fan of Scout’s work for quite some time. He’s been at this The Unloved video essay series for years but with this particular entry, he achieves a new level of insight and discovery. There’s not a Criterion special feature that can touch this one. Exceptional.

The Marvelous Soy Cuba by Michael Cumming

Much in the spirit of my own #InformedImages video essay series, this video piece does the most powerful act of enlightening by simply showing us.

Replicant Teleology by Catherine Grant

The esteemed scholar Catherine Grant is constantly searching for new meaning in moving image works, so whenever she takes a crack at it herself, I sit up in my seat and pay attention, happily.

Remake | Remodel – Suspiria (1977) vs Suspiria (2018) by Leigh Singer

I consider myself a good ‘cutter’ and I’ve always considered Mr. Singer’s work to be pretty damn good. Here he shows why he’s one of the best AND he throws in some impressive VO. Show-off! (But seriously, this is one of the best video essays in a long time.)

Tracy Cox-Stanton

Savannah College of Art and Design, founder and editor of The Cine-Files

Mad Science/Mad Love and the Female Body in Pieces by Allison de Fren

I’m (affectionately) theming my 2019 picks ‘wordy academics’ since they are all scholarly videos that feature voiceover. I find them all brilliant and I appreciate the ways they differently invigorate academic discourse. This one by Allison de Fren is a lively tour de force of history, theory, and criticism that helps us trace the cultural threads that run from Franju to Frankenhooker.

‘Say, Have You Seen the Carioca?’ by John Gibbs

‘Say, Have You Seen the Carioca?’

This video describes itself as “an experiment in non-linear and non-hierarchical approaches to film history.” It offers exactly that, beginning with an associative ‘mind map’ scribbled onto a calendar page, and then follows those links. It made me think of more connections, and I could imagine the concept map spilling over onto more and more pages, which is, I think, what this method captures so deftly – history as meshwork.

Visual Disturbances by Eric Faden

This video pulls out all the stops to set up its very compelling argument about the possibilities of cinema as represented in the films of Jacques Tati. It’s really a model of pedagogy, staging learning experiments, integrating scholarship, using multiple screens, titles, graphics, and masking to convey its idea of ‘invisible cinema’ so gracefully and effectively. If anything, it is almost too professional in its presentation with its own score and voice actor, losing a bit of the personal touch that I actually appreciate in video essays. But it is a remarkable accomplishment, so rich and effectual.

Three Video Essays on Lighting and Time by Patrick Keating

Patrick Keating’s videos on Dietrich, You Only Live Once and neorealist lighting are so clear and adept in their analyses. I am certain they will be indispensable to the film analysis classroom.

Andris Damburs

Curator of 35 MM – A GROUP FOR CINEPHILES

STANLEY KUBRICK Shot By Shot | 2001 by Antonios Papantoniou

Stalker – Crafting the Ethical Ideal by Chris Joecken

The Directors Series – Terrence Malick [Part 4] by Cameron Beyl (also: Part 3 )

2018 MOVIE TRIBUTE by Max Shishkin (Clique)

Allison de Fren

Video essayist and media scholar; Associate Professor in Media Arts & Culture, Occidental College, Los Angeles

I know from experience that using female voiceover in a video essay is an act of courage, since female vocals – like all forms of female performance – are submitted to appraisal in ways that male vocals are not. I have decided to focus on video essays made by women that use voice and narration in ways that I find both instructive and inspirational. Each speaks in multiple registers and implicates herself in the work(s) that she is analysing, while also mapping its and her relations to others within the larger visual economy of image making and viewing. Such relational web weaving is not only a highly effective methodological approach to our current networked moment, but it also evokes older lineages of feminist practice, both material and theoretical. Presented in the reverse order in which they were published:

This video essay takes to heart Harun Farocki’s suggestion that the essayistic is found in “not depicting the whole” but rather pursuing holistic understanding “by ‘show[ing] a few particulars in detail’”. Its prismatic retrieval and reworking of the gestural fragments of A Woman Under the Influence across cinematic texts and historical contexts enables a rare clarity of vision about the emotional, and sometimes pathological, labour the female body is often asked to perform culturally.

The Speed (and Stillness) of Being Online by Grace Lee / What’s So Great About That?

In this video essay, the ‘hypernarration’ often associated with the professional male essayist is replaced with ‘hypercognition’, a dizzying associative thinking through of ideas about time, space, speed, slowness, motion, stillness, frequency, volume, fidelity, resolution, signal, noise etc in the media that consume an increasing share of our attentional real estate. No one speaks across media texts, media forms and media platforms quite like Grace Lee.

As in many of her video essays, Galibert-Laîné’s affective and subjective experience of the media text(s) under her scrutiny becomes the focalising lens for her analysis. This ‘video diary’ is, however, more intimate. It gets, both literally and figuratively, under the skin of her own and others’ engagement with the online ecosystem of illness-related media (what some have called cyberchondria). It is a brave and insightful exploration of internet intersubjectivity, especially that of women.

Monica Delgado

Film critic, director of Desistfilm

A horror in the breach: Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day by Jessica McGoff

The correspondences between skin and celluloid texture.

Liquid perception by Catherine Grant

The author materialises a philosophical fragment about the image with perfect scenes of Jean Vigo.

This video shows an interdisciplinary treatment, and deepens on the topic of bodies in the films of Cassavetes.

Physical Storytelling in Céline Sciamma’s Coming-of-Age Trilogy – a Video Essay by Oswald Iten

I love Sciamma’s movies and I feel that this video essay shows her construction processes of female subjectivities.

Will DiGravio

Host, The Video Essay Podcast ; Graduate Student, University of Cambridge; Contributor, One Perfect Shot

Pan Scan Venkman

Perhaps my favourite video essay of the year. Cormac’s tone and substance brilliantly blend the personal and scholarly to create a compelling media artefact and an ode to the beauty of the VHS tape!

Mashup of the Afternoon by Ariel Avissar

I’ve watched Ariel’s piece more times than I can remember. Many of the video essays I watch (and love, and also make myself) about Hitchcock present him as the ground-breaking, endlessly innovate auteur who changed cinema and influenced almost every filmmaker who came after him, blah, blah, blah. But Ariel’s brilliantly edited essay thinks about Hitchcock’s influences and wonders, did Hitchcock have Maya Deren and Meshes of the Afternoon somewhere in his mind as he made Psycho? The answer may be yes, and it’s a truly wonderful thought.

The Haunting of The Headless Woman by Catherine Grant ( Spanish version )

The next time someone asks me for an example of an academic video essay I’m going to send them Katie’s piece. Not only does the essay brilliantly blend montage, music, and text on screen, but the nature of the piece itself illustrates what sets video essays apart from traditional scholarship: the ability to ask well-founded questions that go unanswered or, as Katie told me on the first episode of the Video Essay Podcast, to “construct something that is arguable but not definite”.

As is the case with so many of Grace’s video essays, this piece is too rich and all-encompassing to sum up in 100 words. I’m constantly awed by her ability to blend so much into a single essay without a hitch in the flow or narration. In this video, Grace proves that she is one of the great online philosophers of our time.

As one of the editors of this poll, I had the pleasure of reading everyone else’s reasons for selecting Chloé’s essay, so I could here simply write, “What they said.” But I will add that I had the pleasure of talking about the piece with Chloé on The Video Essay Podcast and our conversation, like her essay itself, was incredibly generative and had me feeling inspired, and has pushed me to think about media and my own objects of study in new ways.

I really appreciate video essays that aim to explain or explore a cultural phenomenon as it happens, and Charlie’s is a perfect example. The piece navigates the world of TikTok and provides us with a glimpse into not only the platform itself, but what that platform can be. Like Watching The Pain of Others and Pan Scan Venkman, the essay is a brilliant media artefact that captures a part of the world we engage with everyday – our phone screen – and manipulates it to challenge our own understanding of an interface that is constantly changing.

Object Oriented Breaking Bad by Jason Mittell

Like so much of Jason’s videographic work, Object Oriented Breaking Bad challenges our (or at least my own) understanding of what a video essay can be. The essay is part of Jason’s audiovisual book The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad, and may seem out of place when compared to the rest of the book’s essays, but its inclusion reminds us that the use of objects in the show is just as deliberate and carefully constructed as the characters and their stories, and thus just as worthy of examination.

Javier H. Estrada (head of programming), Andrea Morán (programmer), Ramón del Buey (programmer)

Romantic Comedy by Elizabeth Sankey ( watch trailer )

An enjoyable review through several milestones of the ‘boy-meets-girl’ that identifies the repetition of plot twists and how film language can build romance.

Peripheral Attention by Victoria Oliver Farner

An interesting device (what we see and what we don’t) to understand how our eyes move across the shot.

Reinaldo’s Motifs by Ricardo Vieira

A playful and minimalist use of sound to highlight the motifs of Reinaldo Ferreira’s cinema. 

It is fair to say that in this video essay, images, words and montage, all together, are up to Denis’s film.

Venetian Shadows by Luís Azevedo

The venetian blinds as a common denominator to illustrate more than just its trademark shadows: it’s the mystery of the genre, its energy, its beat.

Re-Enacting the Future by Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee

A much-needed critical study about recreations and the role of cinema in the writing of the future History. 

Chloé Galibert-Laîné

Filmmaker and researcher, SACRe/Ecole normale supérieure de Paris

Without any claim to comprehensiveness, here are six online video essays that inspired me this year (in alphabetical order):

Beyond Action by Ana Rodríguez León

Hard as You Can by Tiyan Baker

Hollow Jungle by Conor Bateman

La position couchée by Seumboy Vrainom :€

what remains / geriye kalanlar by belit sağ

A Room with a Coconut View by Tulapop Saenjaroen ( watch trailer )

And I’d also like to mention Kodak by Andrew Norman Wilson; these last two short films are not available online, but I found them tremendously compelling in the way they fictionalise an essayistic approach to pre-existing images.

Ian Garwood

Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow

The Haunting of The Headless Woman by Catherine Grant

The Haunting of The Headless Woman

I was lucky enough to see this on the big screen, as part of a presentation by Catherine Grant on her work. This uses superimpositions beautifully, along with economical and evocative captions, to explore the connections between The Headless Woman and Carnival of Souls.

This is a fascinating audiovisual essay that achieves its ambition of offering a non-linear approach to film history. It makes fascinating connections between films, music and cultural practices across different era and geographical locations. It makes use of a lot of different types of sources and amalgamates them all very effectively.

This is a much-feted video essay and deservedly so. It builds great narrative momentum as it explores confessional YouTube videos from the point of view of their spectators, their makers and in the context of a wider online culture.

Reproductive Futurism and the Politics of the Sequel by Kathleen Loock

This is the most fully-realised ‘thesis video’ I saw this year: it delivers a multi-faceted argument about the relationship between Blade Runner and its sequel, utilising superimpositions and split screen expertly to make the connections clear.

I’ve enjoyed seeing different instalments of Jason Mittell’s audiovisual book on Breaking Bad appear online over the year. This one constitutes an ‘interstitial’ chapter, deflating a menacing speech by Walter White through a montage of moments in which the character is subject to a series of pratfalls.

This video essay features three of my favourite things, wonderfully placed in combination: an appreciation of small moments of performance; an ability to connect the parts to the whole; and attention to the significance of non-verbal utterances.

Notes on YouTube Art (Part One): A YouTube Artworld by James MacDowell / The Lesser Feat

This is a very substantial opening episode to a series about YouTube Art. It manages to present a cohesive well-structured argument about the possibilities of YouTube video as art, whilst also getting the viewer onside through the welcoming tone of the voiceover, and its willingness to admit this is just a starting point in the author’s thinking on the topic.

Video essayist and Professor of Film at the University of Reading

The Extensions of Mad Men by Ariel Avissar

Dietrich Lighting: A Video Essay by Patrick Keating

This is one of a triptych of audiovisual essays on lighting by Patrick Keating, published in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism – I could have picked any of them.

Death and Time in ‘A Ghost Story’ – Videographic Epigraph by Enrique Saunders

Dan Golding

Senior lecturer at Swinburne University, and Screen Sounds host on ABC Classic

Flamenco, As Digested by a Classical Musician by Nahre Sol

I continue to be absolutely amazed by the video essay world of music YouTube, but particularly by Nahre Sol. I could’ve chosen any of her videos (her Steve Reich and Bach videos in particular are highlights) but the intellectual depth to her breakdown of where Flamenco music comes from and how it works really left me speechless. The world of film video essays could still learn a lot about what’s going on here, I think.

Why You Shouldn’t Watch The Birth of a Nation (and why you should) by Kyle Kallgren / Brows Held High

Another great year for Kyle Kallgren, who approaches his videos with good humour, good faith enquiry, and an absolute resolute lack of patience for regressive politics. This video is a pretty definitive exploration of the place (or rather, the ideal lack of place) for Birth of a Nation on our film syllabi.

How To See the First Movies by Sean Yetter/The Museum of Modern Art

Is it unfair to include a video essay by a major institution with comparatively boundless resources, time, and funding to throw at the form – compared to bedroom editors and educators? Perhaps. All I can say is that no video essay moved me or changed the way I view the moving image as much as this one in 2019. If only we all had Dave Kehr’s vocal quality, too.

I’ve really enjoyed Grace Lee’s videos this year. Her relatable, good humoured narration and refusal to accept simple answers make each new video an exciting occasion. This video traces out a few old – and a few new – ideas about Being Very Online. Shout out to Lee’s video about the politics of Untitled Goose Game , too, though as I worked on that game’s music it seems a little self-congratulatory (sorry)!

Catherine Grant

Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies, Birkbeck, University of London; Founding co-editor of [in]Transition

Poor Jessie by Jason Mittell

I love how it uses the vid format to study Jesse’s complete character arc in Breaking Bad. This work is part of Mittell’s The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad – I only selected one video from this work, but all of it is amazing.

One of my favourite videos that we published this year at [in]Transition. If you read the wonderful peer reviews of this work by Maria Hofmann and Alisa Lebow, you can see why.

Another of my favourite [in]Transition videos from this year, and again the peer reviewers Drew Morton and Amanda Ann Klein nail precisely why.

Once Upon a Screen: Lord of the Flies by Ariel Avissar

I love the concept and realisation of this video. It’s kept so simple yet it’s so effective. It’s part of a great series convened by Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer – this one is my favourite to date.

The Thinking Machine 26: Only Free Gestures by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

It’s always hard to pick just one by Álvarez López and Martin as they are my favourite video essayists by far, and are very prolific. But I have loved their videos for Filmkrant and this one was the stand out for me in that series this year – an audiovisual essay inspired by, extending on, and acting upon a quote from Raymond Bellour’s magisterial text Analysis in Flames (1984).

Physical Storytelling in Céline Sciamma’s Coming-of-Age Trilogy by Oswald Iten

Oswald Iten’s work is consistently brilliant. This year it was a toss up for me between this video and his study of coloured lighting in Paris, Texas.

First-Person Shooter: Mysterious Photography in Firewatch by Grace Lee (What’s So Great About That?)

Grace Lee’s work is so well made and consistently engaging. I show it to my students as the best kind of example for them – essential and committed critiques of contemporary audiovisual media.

Reader in Film and Sonic Arts, Liverpool John Moores University.

Videos listed in alphabetical order:

Cox-Stanton brilliantly interweaves film theory and history to offer an interpretation of gesture through a discussion of the essayistic in essay film and the audiovisual essay. The voice over is particularly effective and assured.

Also featured in the same issue of NECSUS is Evelyn Kreutzer’s video essay, The Mighty Maestro on Screen . This special issue on Gesture is compelling and makes the case for Film Studies to incorporate audiovisual material in the production of an argument.

De Fren’s argument develops and extends on from her earlier feature film The Mechanical Bride, and audiovisual essays Fembot in a Red Dress and Ex Machina: Questioning the Human Machine. Here the tone is smart, the voice over is humorous and playful, and the conclusion subverts questions of taste to offer an exploitation revenge narrative that confronts patriarchal control.

Donnelly’s audiovisual essay demonstrates the capacity of the form to draw attention to a small moment in the soundtrack that allows the essayist to reassess a film, and in turn, pan and scan VHS technologies. The voice over is compelling and offers a new way to consider Ghostbusters through a cinephiliac gaze.

Gibbs’s audiovisual essay interweaves archival documents and pedagogy to discuss non‐linear, non‐hierarchical approaches to film history. Intercutting student re-enactments of Brazilian prologues the video essay is inventive and robustly researched.

I first saw a draft of this at the NECS conference in Gdañsk, Poland, June 2019. Two other video essays which were shown as part of a panel on the video essay there deserve a mention, (but unfortunately are not yet published): Jaap Koojiman’s Talking [Heads] About Whitney, and Chiara Grizzaffi and Guilia Scomazzon’s Stories of Haunted Houses: The Representation of Domestic Spaces in Contemporary Gothic Films and TV Series.

Grant’s audiovisual essay draws comparisons between Verónica (María Onetto) in Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman and Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) in Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls. Both women are haunted and haunt the screen. The layering and superimposition of material illustrates the opaqueness of these characters. Here, form expertly follows function.

Loock’s audiovisual essay is exquisite in detail and allows for nuanced theories and ideas about reproduction and seriality to be unpicked. The voice over is highly effective and it is a compelling case for philosophical approaches in film studies to be tested within the audiovisual material itself.

Criticism in the Age of TikTok

Shackleton’s audiovisual essay on TikTok was my entry point to the app and as such has been illuminating not only of this new media but also on how to represent that media. The audiovisual essay is slick, engaging and offers significant critique of TikTok. The ‘phone-top documentary’ style is compelling and appropriate for the argument.

Chiara Grizzaffi

Adjunct faculty at IULM University. Co-editor of [in]Transition

Elsaesser Senses by Catherine Grant

The Thinking Machine 31: Journey to the Centre by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Oswald Iten

Film scholar, video essayist, animator

Early on, Martin states that “certain screen memories are tied not to the most realistic films but the exact opposite – the most artificial, the most fantastic. As if all the obvious seams and props and effects gave more space to the imagination, allowing us to imbue these scraps with a lingering life.” What follows is a deeply personal journey into how both the experience and the memories of seeing Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) shaped his “inner universe”. Formally, I especially like the dreamy pace and use of Benny Herrmann’s music.

Another personal journey down memory lane. But in this one, Donnelly focuses on how seeing Ghostbusters on VHS shaped his subjective reading of the film. Pan Scan Venkman is a reflection on the construction of meaning and the “authenticity of the experience [he] had with the VHS version”. Pan-and-scan as an accidental feature instead of a bug.

Hayao Miyazaki – How Animation Comes to Life by Kristian Williams / kaptainkristian

While Youtube is full of videos that attempt to explain Miyazaki’s animated features, Williams focuses on their powerful aural texture (an aspect that has always fascinated me). What stands out in all of Kristian Williams’s videos is production value (especially top-notch rotoscoping). He masterfully combines images from different sources without drawing attention to it so that Kiki can greet the Chihiro’s train on the water within the same frame. Plus, he actually mentions the names of some of Miyazaki’s unsung collaborators.

Memorias de C/Leo: On Auteurism and Roma  by Jeffrey Middents

The strength of this video lies in its simplicity: Jeffrey Middents’ juxtaposition of a scene from Roma with voice-over narration from Y Tu Mamá También (instead of his own commentary) works perfectly well without any background information. Yet, the accompanying text in Mediático made me want to rewatch the earlier film.

The Rise and Fall of UPA (part 3 of a 3-part series) by Andrew Saladino / The Royal Ocean Film Society

*Special Mention* The story of the highly influential artist-driven cartoon studio UPA is told in a straight-forward documentary format that could well be used as a teaching tool. Saladino also manages to clearly separate fact from opinion and makes good use of his own animation skills to maintain a style that is neither too glossy nor too self-made and perfectly fits his subject.

Rishi Kaneria

Filmmaker & video essayist

How Football and Grime Music Inspired the UK’s Sneaker Culture | Sole Origins by Complex

What This Photo Doesn’t Show by The Art Assignment

Why this creepy melody is in so many movies by Vox

Bohemian Rhapsody’s Terrible Editing – A Breakdown by Thomas Flight

How Aladdin Changed Animation (by Screwing Over Robin Williams) by Lindsay Ellis

Why Jurassic Park Looks Better Than Its Sequels by Jonathan Burdett / Films&Stuff

Why All Movies From 1999 Are the Same by Jack Nugent / Now You See It

Miklós Kiss

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

A true delight to see a thoroughly researched and superbly presented autonomous video among those quick and ephemeral stuff online. My favourite AV work of 2019.

Visual Disturbances – Eye Tracking Demonstration by Eric Faden

A truly informative behind the scenes video for Visual Disturbances – on how did Faden extract plus enhance the visual quality of eye-tracking data and then remap these on an HD film source. The care for quality is admirable and inspiring.

Adaptation – Unconventionally Conveying the Conventional by Michael Tucker (Lessons from the Screenplay)

*me thinking how to pull off a funny meta-comment about this brilliant meta-video on Spike Jonze’s and Charlie Kaufman’s meta-movie Adaptation.

Fairytales of Motion by Alan Warburton

Great balance between well-researched information, explanatory clarity, and aesthetically pleasing presentation; another enlightening video by Alan Warburton (animation by Ewan Jones Morris).

Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Really) by TwinPerfect

This surprisingly convincing (or only confident?) 4.5-hour elucidation, the Sátántangó of explanatory videos, takes up on an impossible (or useless?) task.

Jaap Kooijman

Associate Professor Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.

The Thinking Machine 35: All Inside by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Published in De Filmkrant, All Inside by the prolific duo Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin shows how a relatively simple yet extremely effective audiovisual essay can invite – or even force – viewers to pay full attention to detail. First, the short prologue to a Girls episode is cut up in 20 shots, using multiscreen. Subsequently, the shots are presented in full screen, with Martin’s voice-over providing the analysis. Finally, the sequence is shown in its entirety, allowing viewers themselves to recognise the rich details that otherwise would have been lost in casual television viewing.

Beyond the Screen #nofilter by Maria Hofmann

‘Thought-provoking’ might be the best word to describe Beyond the Screen #nofilter, an audiovisual essay that seduces one with its beauty, while posing questions about the politics of aesthetics and the insatiable quest for authenticity. The voice-over seems disarming, but in fact challenges viewers to question their own subject positions in relation to those who are represented on screen (all images taken from Michael Glawogger’s 2011 documentary Whores’ Glory). The essay is also a reminder that we need to reread Jean Baudrillard to make sense of a world in which the distinction between representation and the represented seemingly has disappeared.

I hesitated to include this work by Catherine Grant in my personal list, as I have worked with her on other audiovisual projects and I want to avoid charges of favouritism. Yet The Haunting of The Headless Woman, published in Tecmerin, is a true masterpiece. The morphing of scenes from the two films Carnival of Souls and The Headless Woman is not only beautifully done (enhanced by the haunting soundtrack), but also effectively visualises the theoretical argument about intertextuality. Grant’s audiovisual essay showcases the added value of videographic criticism to conventional film scholarship.

Dietrich Lighting: A Video Essay

Dietrich Lighting is the second of three audiovisual essays on lighting by Patrick Keating (made in 2018 but published in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism in 2019). Its straightforward explanatory mode is a great didactical tool, demonstrating the effects of different lighting techniques, such as the ‘butterfly pattern’ created by key light. Yet simultaneously, the audiovisual essay works as a tribute to one of cinema’s most charismatic and iconic actresses.

Evelyn Kreutzer

Northwestern University

Hands, Up by A Zinsel

Video essayist

All Gorilla Glue ads but perfectly cut by Álvaro Alcaraz/Averroes

This might seem like a troll entry (and maybe it is a bit) but in a landscape of super-cuts that are increasingly banal, this one manages to not only be funny, but to re-contextualise advertising into the surreal barrage of imminent violence we all know it to be.

As one YouTube commenter writes: “Remember, the possibility of getting attacked by a gorilla at any point is extremely low… But it’s never 0.”

The Case for Asset Flips by Patricia Taxxon

This is a video essay partly done in the form of an original song. That song is a banger!

“Take off your jacket take off your pants, imma teach you how to dance. LET’S KICK IT UP!” 

On Belief by Rie Toguchi

This is a film I saw at the Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art degree show this year, and I sat and watched the whole thing. Sure, it’s only 12 minutes long, but that’s plenty of time for me to usually get up and wander off. It’s a truly captivating piece of work.

Manufactured Discontent and Fortnite by Dan Olson / Folding Ideas

A revealing dive into the insidious practices of Fortnite, a storefront with a game attached.

getting Breened by Shannon Strucci

An insightful explanation of the appeal of possibly the most unappealing director.

(as a companion video, see also: Bad Movies by Curio )

Kevin B. Lee

Video essayist, Professor of Crossmedia Publishing at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart

The author summons 400 films to fashion a self-crafted vessel to navigate through the darkest period of his life. He answers his own condition of being exhausted by the daily suffering of his world with an equally overwhelming array of images he used as cinematic self-medication. The attention given to matching each image to his narration creates a stunning lucidity even while describing so much distress. (Seen at Berlinale 2019.) [ Also nominated by five critics in our Best Films of 2019 poll .]

• Also: The Image Book by Jean Luc-Godard ( watch trailer )

My First Film by Zia Anger

There is now such a thing as a live video essay. Anger’s videographic post-mortem of her failed first feature conscripts its audience as participants in a real-time behind the scenes tour of all the factors informing what went wrong with her production, culminating in a communal act of destruction and creative resurrection. (Seen at a workshop in Merz Akademie, Stuttgart.) [Read: Reclaiming failure: Zia Anger’s My First Film performance ]

• Also: Nos Defaites / Our Defeats by Jean-Gabriel Periot ( watch trailer )

Runtime by Connor Bateman

Just when you think the supercut has worn out its welcome, this ingenious compilation takes an odd trope – horror scenes set in movie theatres – and with the help of resourceful post-production effects, creates a chain of spectatorial terror mean to play in an endless loop. In the post-cinema era, this study of screening room terrors resonates as a poignant historiography.

• Also: Little Lower Than the Angels by Neozoon ( watch trailer )

The Speed (and Stillness) of Being Online

Amidst the ever-growing swarm of YouTube video essays and their ever-swelling bag of visual and narrational tricks, I took the most from this breathtaking critical speedrun through the digital mediascape. It performs the paradoxical feat of both embodying the too-muchness of always-on digital life, while generating a space of reflection within the vortex, like the eye of a hurricane.

• Also: Criticism in the Age of TikTok by Charlie Shackleton

Transformation Scenario by Clemens von Wedemeyer

It’s hard to choose between either of these two outstanding works are breathtaking interrogations of the digital transformations behind today’s image making. They both combine a necessary historical awareness with a rare sensitivity to how reality as we know it is being utterly transformed, with political consequences that too easily go unnoticed: quite literally, they expose the power of seeing.

• Also: Fairytales of Motion by Alan Warburton

The most extensive single work of videographic film scholarship that I’ve seen this year is this study of cinematic non-seeing. It uses a variety of videographic approaches, from eye tracking to filmed experiments, scientific research and cinematic close reads, to give deep attention to an overlooked aspect of film spectatorship.

• Also: works curated by Oana Ghera for History of Romanian Fiction Cinema, an event held at EUROPALIA film festival .

Another outstanding academic video essay (which has also screened at film and media festivals) takes the format to bold and unsettling degrees of self-representation and implication. Video essays have always been about the performance of knowledge as much as they are about the knowledge being performed. By virtue of its ingenious approaches to its subject, this video raises a host of fascinating questions about how experience and knowledge are performed, transmitted and re-performed through the viral ecology of media.

• Also: Adaptation – Unconventionally Conveying the Conventional by Michael Tucker / Lessons from the Screenplay

Kathleen Loock

Department of English and American Studies, University of Flensburg

The first two video essays on my list for 2019 are about spectatorial experiences and wonderfully well-crafted in how they blend personal reflection and close analysis. They take subjective viewing experiences and memories as the starting point for videographic explorations. Based on his memories of watching Ghostbusters (1984) over and over on VHS as a kid, Cormac Donnelly considers the Pan and Scan process (which re-framed widescreen movies for release on VHS) and examines how a recent 4K Blu-Ray release of the movie (without the familiar Pan and Scan modifications) challenged his memories and interpretation of Ghostbusters.

This video essay, too, is analysing a subjective viewing experience, in this case a disturbing one that does not seem to let go of Galibert-Laîné. Adopting a ‘desktop documentary’ approach, she has made a thoughtful, vlog-style video essay in response: viewers can watch her watching, reacting to, researching, analysing and deconstructing Penny Lane’s The Pain of Others (2018), a found-footage documentary (made of online videos) about a mysterious skin disease (Morgellons) and the online community that forms around it. This is a truly exceptional video essay that blurs boundaries and provides new insights into the affective dimensions of spectatorship.

Psycho vs. Psycho: Hitchcock’s Classic vs. Gus Van Sant’s Remake by Leigh Singer

The next two video essays on my list for 2019 are concerned with intertextuality, or, more precisely, with the ways in which repetition and variation play out between two movies and affect their meanings. Both use the video essay form to great effect. Singer’s video essay is part of the series Remake | Remodel that he is currently producing for the UK film magazine Little White Lies. Juxtaposing Hitchcock’s classic with the probably most-discussed film remake in the history of academic quarterlies, Singer succeeds in producing an insightful, new take on the debate.

The other video essay focusing on intertextuality is Catherine Grant’s beautifully composed The Haunting of The Headless Woman (which also appeared in Spanish as El embrujo de La mujer sin cabeza). Grant draws connections between the female protagonists of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (2008) and Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962), drawing attention to the haunting presence of the earlier film in the later one. The result is a stunning video essay and important contribution to the study of intertextuality.

The final three entries on my list for 2019 have all succeeded in expanding my own views on the affordances and aesthetics of videographic criticism. Hofmann’s video essay on Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger’s documentary Whores’ Glory (2011), about prostitutes in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Mexico, makes a theoretically sound and provocative statement about how viewers consume documentaries in the digital age and about the relationship between the realities of globalisation and aesthetic form. The video essay challenges stylised images and the troubling desire for authenticity in order to raise (rather than answer) important questions about documentary viewership.

No Voiding Time: A Deformative Video Essay by Alan O’Leary

This video essay engages in deformative criticism. I found it especially impressive how O’Leary theorises his deformative approach to Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie Inherent Vice (2014) in the written statement. Going beyond the technical or the algorithm, he asks what new kind of knowledge deformative experiments that defamiliarise the original movie can produce, thereby exploring a fascinating mode of videographic criticism in a creative and artistic manner.

Records in American Independent Cinema: 1987-2018 by Ian Garwood

This supercut forms part of Garwood’s larger Indy Vinyl project on vinyl-playing moments in American independent cinema. It compiles record-playing moments in 148 movies within a three-minute pop song timeframe. I was impressed by the quantitative approach to the topic and its visualisation in the video essay form.

Jessica McGoff

Video essayist and film writer

Runtime by Conor Bateman

Daniel Mcilwraith

Video essayist and video editor

Jason Mittell

Video essayist; Professor of Film & Media Culture, Middlebury College; Project Manager, [in]Transition

A masterful video that sets a new standard for how video essays can explore spectatorship. The meta-levels here are dizzying: an online video about a documentary video about online videos, all of which grapple with seeing and being seen, and at the same time, a meditation on the blurring of the different windows we use to view, converse about, research, and process cultural material. While I did not come away feeling empathy for the Morgellons sufferers, I felt deeply implicated by Galibert-Laîné’s own intertwined feelings of researcher, audience member, and conversant. My top video essay of the year!

Visual Disturbances

Like Watching The Pain of Others, this video pushes the boundaries of scholarly videographic criticism in a number of ways: incorporating mixed methods and approaches, shooting original footage to stage an experiment, and extending the typical length of academic videos beyond that de facto standard of 15-20 minutes. Most importantly, it demonstrates how some types of analysis, even in a more analytic and less poetic form, can only be accomplished videographically, as if Faden were to ‘write up’ this research project, it would fail to convey its ideas or convince its audience.

I first saw an earlier version of this video years ago, which Grant categorised as a stalled work-in-progress. Now, transformed by the haunting use of spatial montage, it stands as one of her most accomplished and powerful works, merging affective and analytic power.

Untitled Goose Game: Is it Good to be Bad? by Grace Lee/What’s So Great About That?

The crossover between film/TV video essays and video game video essays is small, but Lee shifts her typically cinematic gaze to the video game world with stunning results. A smart meta-overinterpretation of a stupid game, with a playful mockery of both her own and other video essayists tendencies, this recent video embodies the tone and depth that makes Lee’s channel a delight.

Occupying Time: The Battle of Algiers by Alan O’Leary

One core element of videographic criticism is that the critic does something to a film. O’Leary takes that impulse to ‘do something’ in an array of different directions here, exploring temporality as a multifaceted element. The effect is impactful, even if it is unclear what it ‘means’ or reveals about the film – we see and experience different ways of understanding, which are ultimately sufficiently meaningful.

I’m always looking for videographic works on television, and this short experimental piece merges two things that I don’t particularly like – Marshall McLuhan’s aphoristic media theory and Mad Men – into something that I quite like. It asks why Don Draper et al. were not engaging with McLuhan’s theories on the program, and shows us what it might have been like if they had via a deformative logic.

As someone who has written a book and created a video essay about the film Adaptation, I was smitten by Michael Tucker’s ambitious take that pushes the formal limits of the video essay.

Carlos Natálio

Scholar, Film Critic, Investigator, Film Programmer, Co-creator and co-editor of À pala de Walsh

Video essays are becoming an important part of the long going battle for image representation. This piece reflects on the powers of reenactment in terms of influencing the future for political events and also the way we perceive history. Rhymes will never be alike, the power is in the cut.

Bits and pieces of film shattered. Logics of perception severed. We are now supposed to aim the gaze at the periphery, the small detail, the invisible layers of shot. Would it be possible that decolonising the image will pass through this new way of organising visual shots?

Robert Bresson: The Falls by Alexander Melyan

One of the blessings of video essays is the ability to make us see more. Sudden patterns or contrasts in a director’s oeuvre, for example. This piece not only makes us think of the role of the fall in Bresson’s universe and ethics, but also allows us to understand the specific ways the french master would carve the ethereal from the material world. Objects, humans, animals, they all are from this existence and they all carry alike its weight. To fall doesn’t belong to drama, it belongs to volume, lines and movement.  

The Master: Back & Forth by Jacob T. Swinney

The Master is an enigmatic work. Cinema that both advances in time and tracks back too. Another film emerges, one where motorcycles can appear from the throat of a character, and the sea water can emerge inside an office. From multitasking to overlapping layers of visual meaning, that is a challenge!

Singin’ in the Pain by Colin McKeown

Remembering is also dismembering. Sometimes a past laugh is an actual agony. Or Johnny Depp who was a victim in Nightmare on Elm Street and now gives us a grin. In this piece, as the director states: “A Clockwork Orange, Fame and Singin’ in the Rain. The ghosts of parallel universes dance and sing together.”

Correct Machine by Eva Elcano Fuentes

A beautifully edited piece that reflects on the way we regard the machine. Children look at the camera, they are curious. An engine is burning, we are curious. We look at it, the machines (the cameras) they reply back. Anxiety and curiosity versus the all recording gaze. This is a love story far from complete complicity or divorce

Emergency: Donald Trump’s Touch of Evil by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Sometimes cinema anticipates reality. Donald Trump belongs to the universe of Welles’s Touch of Evil. Cristina and Adrian are not posing a hypothesis, they are reminding us of the obvious. Video essays are also tools for unveiling these nightmares.

Charlie Shackleton

Filmmaker and video essayist

The Proposal by Jill Magid

A forthright statement on a subject close to any video essayist’s heart – the deleterious effects of intellectual property law – Jill Magid’s remarkable essay feature The Proposal is constrained by the very thing it takes to task, and all the more potent for it.

Few video essayists exercise more care with their raw materials than Chloé Galibert-Laîné, and care is exactly what’s required in handling the subject of Morgellons, the scientifically unsubstantiated skin condition which has amassed self-diagnosed sufferers since the early 2000s, not to mention The Pain of Others, a disquieting 2018 film on the subject. Galibert-Laîné navigates this rocky terrain with remarkable poise and refreshing transparency, putting herself on screen to reveal the intimacy at the heart of the superficially sterile desktop documentary form.

Triple Chaser by Forensic Architecture and Praxis Films

Laura Poitras and her team at Praxis Films provide an electric aesthetic complement to the rigorous but prosaic stylings of human rights research agency cum video essay powerhouse Forensic Architecture in this confrontational contribution to the Whitney Biennial, in which they investigate tear gas grenades manufactured by the Safariland Group. (Safariland’s owner is vice chair of the Whitney’s board.)

Zia Anger’s spellbinding desktop documentary exists only as an ephemeral live performance, and as such, may never exist again, having seen its last scheduled performance in November. Coming to terms with that fact is an experience not out of keeping with the performance itself, which for all its dynamism and spectacle, is at heart an intimate study of failure, frustration and loss.

Eric Faden’s mammoth video essay on the cinematic possibilities of ‘inattentional blindness’ was one of the most continually surprising things I saw all year, shuffling liberally through all manner of audiovisual modes, from focus-group commentary, to close textual study, to – most spectacularly – elaborately staged meta-theatre.

The Image You Missed by Dónal Foreman

Dónal Foreman’s rueful film is at once a history of the Troubles and a portrait of his estranged father, the documentarian Arthur MacCaig. Weaving together excerpts from MacCaig’s influential body of work, he grapples – as so many of the best video essays do – with the irresolvable, in this case an admiration for his subject’s achievements and a lament for the costs at which they came.

Leigh Singer

Video essayist, film journalist, film programmer

The only thing I’m certain of in terms of video essay work in 2019 is that I haven’t seen nearly enough of it. Of those I did, these all made a strong impression.

How the Helicopter Chase in Goodfellas Was Made  by Luís Azevedo / Beyond the Frame

Reproductive Futurism and the Politics of the Sequel

Dietrich Lighting: A Video Essay by Patrick Keating~Z

Kogonda’s Columbus Subconscious Reflections  by Mikolaj Kacprzak

Shannon Strucci

video essayist StrucciMovies and Scanline, podcaster Critical Bits and Struggle Session

The Labour of Art by Sarah Zedig / let’s talk about stuff.

Zedig’s work, often autobiographical, is always thoughtfully written and sincere, with an admirable level of vulnerability. This video of hers – on art, procrastination, the internet, hobby monetisation, and the way our culture undervalues art and exploits the artists who produce it – articulates feelings and problems I have struggled with for years and articulates them better than I could have myself.

Queer ✨ by Oliver Thorn / Philosophy Tube

Although Thorn’s work – a series of video essays on philosophy – is always well-researched, inventive, and theatrical, his tone and content vary tremendously, and while his more serious and heavy videos are just as valuable, I deliberately chose Queer✨, a celebratory and playful coming-out video (complete with three separate musical numbers and who knows how many costume changes!) because on top of being illuminating and entertaining, it’s also joyful, and that joy is contagious.

How Accessible Were This Year’s Games? By Mark Brown / Game Maker’s Toolkit

In this video Brown catalogs accessibility options from 50(!) different video games, both independent and AAA, pointing out missteps and celebrating particularly effective and inventive triumphs in accessibility. It’s clear a great deal of time and money went into this video, as did a passion for accessibility, and it can be appreciated not only as a tool for selecting games based on what options they provide and as a nudge for developers who are lacking, but also as an example of how to make a fantastic video essay.

Roleplaying, Running the Game #83 by Matt Colville

On a platform full of cynicism and self-aggrandisement, Colville’s emphasis is always on anti-elitism and open encouragement. He takes years of experience in playing, running, and designing games and uses that as a foundation – sharing anecdotes, talking candidly about his own failures, and putting in work to make the tabletop games space more welcoming and less intimidating. In this video Colville goes in-depth into his entire philosophy on roleplaying, and regardless of how much experience you may have in tabletop or how your style and preferences differ from his, you’re guaranteed to find something entertaining and insightful therein.

Fruit Salad by You Suck at Cooking

You Suck At Cooking has evolved its own set of rituals and language, both in how each video’s ‘recipe’ is delivered and in the construction of the videos themselves (which typically end with an original song over footage of animals in an idyllic setting). It even has its own in-universe mythos – it’s the only YouTube cooking show I know of that has a fan wiki. Fruit Salad is a short and accessible episode that showcases a lot of what I love about the show- elaborate in-camera visual effects, dubiously educational food facts, and a good-natured but subversive sense of humour.

Climate Denial: A Measured Response by Harry Brewis / hbomberguy

I hesitated to include hbomb’s work due to bias- we have worked together on multiple projects (though not this one!). But bar-none this is the hardest I have ever laughed at any video essay (at both 1:02 and 4:03) and the humor and energy Harris brings to his work without sacrificing sincerity or depth of research is, as far as I am concerned, unparalleled.

The Bizarre Modern Reality of The Simpsons by John Walsh / Super Eyepatch Wolf

Super Eyepatch Wolf’s body of work is an exploration of nerd media- anime, wrestling, video games- slickly edited yet imbued with warmth and a deep, genuine love for everything he talks about. This video, well-edited and well-researched and using that same lens of openness and sincerity, delves into Simpsons meme culture.

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Scout Tafoya

Video essayist, critic, filmmaker

Joan Mitchell, Departures by Ken Jacobs

A Story From Africa by Billy Woodberry

Euphoria : Visual References by Candice Drouet

Made me see how little media by the children of rich people starts from scratch. Incredible finds from one of my favourite working editors.

Scorsese’s Second Take by Nelson Carvajal

Re-Enacting the Future by Kevin B. Lee & Chloé Galibert-Laîné

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Daniel Mcilwraith

Milad Tangshir

Iranian director based in Italy

Re-Enacting the Future

• [Read: From the firing wall to the barricades: Kevin B. Lee and Chloe Galibert-Laîné interrogate re-enactments and rehearsals ]

Tarkovsky’s Napes by Pavel Tavares

Export/Import: Pedro Almodóvar’s Dark Habits and What Have I Done to Deserve This? by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Rear Window’s Runway by André Ferreira and Ricardo Vieira Lisboa

Irina Trocan

Freelance film critic, Lecturer at the National Theater and Film University, Bucharest

Student Bodies by Ho Rui An

An intellectually elaborate short film on East Asia’s historical relations with the Western world where the filmmaker reframes architecture, monuments and fragments of film so as to both visualise the topic at hand and make us see them with new eyes.

A very erudite take on the feedback loop between animation and visual/social observation, it draws a terrifying (but thoroughly persuasive) straight line between cartoon archetypes and automated pattern recognition in surveillance society.

Kondo-Culture: The Fall of the House of ‘Stuff’ by Grace Lee / What’s So Great About That?

This fluidly edited video spells out why Marie Kondo’s success signifies more than meets the spark-joy receptors: a shift in social values among the comfortable middle class where shiny, orderly, clear surfaces symbolise luxury more than owning an overabundance of stuff (and everything you might be drawn to and miss is crammed in a digital folder).

Replaying a few scenes from the beginning of Coppola’s The Conversation after cutting out the small portion where spectators are likely to focus their attention, it presents straightforward evidence of just how much more there is to look at in every frame.

This analysis of Gena Rowlands’ performance in A Woman Under the Influence digresses quite unexpectedly in various directions (ballet, Laura Mulvey, 19th century photographic observation of ‘hysterical’ women, Harun Farocki’s meditations on the essay film via Song of Ceylon), in order to further illuminate the resonance of Rowlands’ gestures.

Operation Jane Walk by Robin Klengel & Leonhard Müllner

An exquisite architectural tour of New York, produced by hijacking the post-apocalyptic landscape of a multiplayer shooter. Artfully dodging bullets and proper game action, the on-screen characters follow the tour guide who ruminates on Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities as well as the transformations of New York since the 1950s.

A mirror maze of horror films where the action takes place in a cinema, this film shows us characters who watch others suffer a horrible death next to a cinema screen before suffering themselves from an equally tragic fate. It is less similar to Godard’s evocative scenes set in cinemas or Purple Rose of Cairo-type homages and closer to David Cronenberg’s wry short contribution for To Each His Own Cinema. When films and thrills become the only thing that those characters are inhaling, there is no moment to breathe out.

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Further reading

The best video essays of 2018

David Verdeure , Irina Trocan

The best video essays of 2017

Kevin B. Lee , David Verdeure

Blackface, whitewashing and the grey zone – a two-part video inquiry

A horror in the breach: Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day

Criticism in the age of TikTok – a video essay

From the firing wall to the barricades: Kevin B. Lee and Chloe Galibert-Laîné interrogate re-enactments and rehearsals

‘Liquid criticism’: in Uppsala, a fresh look at video essays

The best films of 2019 – all the votes

Sight & Sound contributors

The best TV series of 2019

Caspar Salmon , Molly Haskell

The best Blu-rays (and DVDs) of 2019

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The video essay boom

Hour-long YouTube videos are thriving in the TikTok era. Their popularity reflects our desire for more nuanced content online.

by Terry Nguyen

The video essay’s reintroduction into my adult life was, like many things, a side effect of the pandemic. On days when I couldn’t bring myself to read recreationally, I tried to unwind after work by watching hours and hours of YouTube.

My pseudo-intellectual superego, however, soon became dissatisfied with the brain-numbing monotony of “day in the life” vlogs, old Bon Appétit test kitchen videos, and makeup tutorials. I wanted content that was entertaining, but simultaneously informational, thoughtful, and analytical. In short, I wanted something that gave the impression that I, the passive viewer, was smart. Enter: the video essay.

Video essays have been around for about a decade, if not more, on YouTube. There is some debate over how the form preceded the platform; some film scholars believe the video essay was born out of and remains heavily influenced by essay films , a type of nonfiction filmmaking. Regardless, YouTube has become the undisputed home of the contemporary video essay. Since 2012, when the platform began to prioritize watch-time over views , the genre flourished. These videos became a significant part of the 2010s YouTube landscape, and were popularized by creators across film, politics, and academic subcultures. 

Today, there are video essays devoted to virtually any topic you can think of, ranging anywhere from about 10 minutes to upward of an hour. The video essay has been a means to entertain fan theories , explore the lore of a video game or a historical deep dive , explain or critique a social media trend , or like most written essays, expound upon an argument, hypothesis , or curiosity proposed by the creator.

Some of the best-known video essay creators — Lindsay Ellis, Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints, and Abigail Thorn of PhilosophyTube — are often associated with BreadTube , an umbrella term for a group of left-leaning, long-form YouTubers who provide intellectualized commentary on political and cultural topics. 

It’s not an exaggeration to claim that I — and many of my fellow Gen Zers — were raised on video essays, academically and intellectually. They were helpful resources for late-night cramming sessions (thanks Crash Course), and responsible for introducing a generation to first-person commentary on all sorts of cultural and political phenomena. Now, the kids who grew up on this content are producing their own. 

“Video essays are a form that has lent itself particularly well to pop culture because of its analytical nature,” Madeline Buxton, the culture and trends manager at YouTube, told me. “We are starting to see more creators using video essays to comment on growing trends across social media. They’re serving as sort of real-time internet historians by helping viewers understand not just what is a trend, but the larger cultural context of something.”

A lot has been said about the video essay and its ever-shifting parameters . What does seem newly relevant is how the video essay is becoming repackaged, as long-form video creators find a home on platforms besides YouTube. This has played out concurrently with the pandemic-era shift toward short-form video, with Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube respectively launching Reels, Spotlight, and Shorts to compete against TikTok.

TikTok’s sudden, unwavering rise has proven the viability of bite-size content, and the app’s addictive nature has spawned fears about young people’s dwindling attention spans. Yet, the prevailing popularity of video essays, from new and old creators alike, suggests otherwise. Audiences have not been deterred from watching lengthy videos, nor has the short-form pivot significantly affected creators and their output. Emerging video essayists aren’t shying away from length or nuance, even while using TikTok or Reels as a supplement to grow their online following.

One can even argue that we are witnessing the video essay’s golden era . Run times are longer than ever, while more and more creators are producing long-form videos. The growth of “creator economy” crowdfunding tools, especially during the pandemic, has allowed video essayists to take longer breaks between uploads while retaining their production quality.

“I do feel some pressure to make my videos longer because my audience continues to ask for it,” said Tiffany Ferguson, a YouTube creator specializing in media criticism and pop culture commentary. “I’ve seen comments, both on my own videos and those I watch, where fans are like, ‘Yes, you’re feeding us,’ when it comes to longer videos, especially the hour to two-hour ones. In a way, the mentality seems to be: The longer the better.”

In a Medium post last April, the blogger A. Khaled remarked that viewers were “willing to indulge user-generated content that is as long as a multi-million dollar cinematic production by a major Hollywood studio” — a notion that seemed improbable just a few years ago, even to the most popular video essayists. To creators, this hunger for well-edited, long-form video is unprecedented and uniquely suitable for pandemic times. 

The internet might’ve changed what we pay attention to, but it hasn’t entirely shortened our attention span, argued Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media technology at the University of Alabama. “It has made us more selective about the things we want to devote our attention to,” she told me. “People are willing to devote time to content they find interesting.” 

“People are willing to devote time to content they find interesting”

Every viewer is different, of course. I find that my attention starts to wane around the 20-minute mark if I’m actively watching and doing nothing else — although I will admit to once spending a non-consecutive four hours on an epic Twin Peaks explainer . Last month, the channel Folding Ideas published a two-hour video essay on “the problem with NFTs,” which has garnered more than 6 million views so far. 

Hour-plus-long videos can be hits, depending on the creator, the subject matter, the production quality, and the audience base that the content attracts. There will always be an early drop-off point with some viewers, according to Ferguson, who make it about two to five minutes into a video essay. Those numbers don’t often concern her; she trusts that her devoted subscribers will be interested enough to stick around.

“About half of my viewers watch up to the halfway point, and a smaller group finishes the entire video,” Ferguson said. “It’s just how YouTube is. If your video is longer than two minutes, I think you’re going to see that drop-off regardless if it’s for a video that’s 15 or 60 minutes long.”

Some video essayists have experimented with shorter content as a topic testing ground for longer videos or as a discovery tool to reach new audiences, whether it be on the same platform (like Shorts) or an entirely different one (like TikTok).

“Short-form video can expose people to topics or types of content they’re not super familiar with yet,” Maddox said. “Shorts are almost like a sampling of what you can get with long-form content.” The growth of Shorts, according to Buxton of YouTube, has given rise to this class of “hybrid creators,” who alternate between short- and long-form content. They can also be a starting point for new creators, who are not yet comfortable with scripting a 30-minute video. 

Queline Meadows, a student in Ithaca College’s screen cultures program, became interested in how young people were using TikTok to casually talk about film, using editing techniques that borrowed heavily from video essays. She created her own YouTube video essay titled “The Rise of Film TikTok” to analyze the phenomenon, and produces both TikTok micro-essays and lengthy videos.

“I think people have a desire to understand things more deeply,” Meadows told me. “Even with TikTok, I find it hard to unfold an argument or explore multiple angles of a subject. Once people get tired of the hot takes, they want to sit with something that’s more nuanced and in-depth.”

It’s common for TikTokers to tease a multi-part video to gain followers. Many have attempted to direct viewers to their YouTube channel and other platforms for longer content. On the contrary, it’s in TikTok’s best interests to retain creators — and therefore viewers — on the app. In late February, TikTok announced plans to extend its maximum video length from three minutes to 10 minutes , more than tripling a video’s run-time possibility. This decision arrived months after TikTok’s move last July to start offering three-minute videos .

As TikTok inches into YouTube-length territory, Spotify, too, has introduced video on its platform, while YouTube has similarly signaled an interest in podcasting . In October, Spotify began introducing “video podcasts,” which allows listeners (or rather, viewers) to watch episodes. Users have the option to toggle between actively watching a podcast or traditionally listening to one.

What’s interesting about the video podcast is how Spotify is positioning it as an interchangeable, if not more intimate, alternative to a pure audio podcast. The video essay, then, appears to occupy a middle ground between podcast and traditional video by making use of these key elements. For creators, the boundaries are no longer so easy to define.

“Some video essay subcultures are more visual than others, while others are less so,” said Ferguson, who was approached by Spotify to upload her YouTube video essays onto the platform last year. “I was already in the process of trying to upload just the audio of my old videos since that’s more convenient for people to listen to and save on their podcast app. My reasoning has always been to make my content more accessible.”

To Ferguson, podcasts are a natural byproduct of the video essay. Many viewers are already consuming lengthy videos as ambient entertainment, as content to passively listen to while doing other tasks. The video essay is not a static format, and its development is heavily shaped by platforms, which play a crucial role in algorithmically determining how such content is received and promoted. Some of these changes are reflective of cultural shifts, too. 

Maddox, who researches digital culture and media, has a theory that social media discourse is becoming less reactionary. She described it as a “simmering down” of the hot take, which is often associated with cancel culture . These days, more creators are approaching controversy from a removed, secondhand standpoint; they seem less interested in engendering drama for clicks. “People are still providing their opinions, but in conjunction with deep analysis,” Maddox said. “I think it says a lot about the state of the world and what holds people’s attention.”

That’s the power of the video essay. Its basic premise — whether the video is a mini-explainer or explores a 40-minute hypothesis — requires the creator to, at the very least, do their research. This often leads to personal disclaimers and summaries of alternative opinions or perspectives, which is very different from the more self-centered “reaction videos” and “story time” clickbait side of YouTube.

“The things I’m talking about are bigger than me. I recognize the limitations of my own experience,” Ferguson said. “Once I started talking about intersections of race, gender, sexuality — so many experiences that were different from my own — I couldn’t just share my own narrow, straight, white woman perspective. I have to provide context.”

This doesn’t change the solipsistic nature of the internet, but it is a positive gear shift, at least in the realm of social media discourse, that makes being chronically online a little less soul-crushing. The video essay, in a way, encourages us to engage in good faith with ideas that we might not typically entertain or think of ourselves. Video essays can’t solve the many problems of the internet (or the world, for that matter), but they can certainly make learning about them a little more bearable.

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The best video essays of 2020

A year of physical separation and isolation was, not coincidentally, a year of unprecedented outreach and collaboration amongst the artists, critics and scholars at work in the burgeoning form of the video essay. Our poll of 42 of those essayists highlights 170 recommendations.

26 December 2020

By  Ariel Avissar , Cydnii Wilde Harris , Grace Lee

Introduction

As with any retrospective article, newsletter or GDPR -compliant email this year, we must begin with the unavoidable acknowledgement of: wow… what a year.

But while many essayists may have understandably been less prolific than in previous years, this year’s turmoil may have incited an even stronger drive towards the ways we can connect with each other virtually. Last year, the word ‘community’ was suggested as an overarching theme for the poll, and if a theme has emerged through this year’s results it would be an evolution of that same communal spirit into one of collaboration. It has repeatedly been collaborative projects that have helped inspire new ideas in a time when motivation wasn’t easy to find and allowed us to feel closer when we physically cannot be.

The Video Essay Podcast, created by Will DiGravio, has expanded its scope this year, co-curating The Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist (along with Cydnii Wilde Harris and Kevin B. Lee), launching the Notes on Videographic Criticism newsletter to further share news and promote interesting new work, and introducing experimental homework assignments to encourage creativity and new methods of working. Response from the video essay community has been overwhelming: the BLM Playlist (selections of which have already been screened in several online events, discussed and written about) has grown to include over 130 video essays and related audiovisual materials, and nearly 70 videographic exercises have been submitted thus far in response to the various homework assignment prompts.

Another collaborative video essay project, Once Upon a Screen , organised by Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer, was published in the latest issue of The Cine-Files, and consists of a series of fantastic essays responding to a singular theme: how formative, traumatic experiences of cinema go on to impact our lives. Meanwhile, Nando v Movies gathered over 180 essayists on YouTube to come together and create the One X-Cellent Scene playlist (a sequel to 2019’s One Marvellous Scene ), collectively exploring the X-Men franchise.

These efforts were matched by increased institutional engagement, with further venues for the production and circulation of video essays joining the fold, such as the Netflix UK commissions (with an emphasis on Black creators); the new online journal Zoom Out ; Monographs , a new series of commissioned essays on Asian cinema by the Asian Film Archive ( AFA ), which premiered at the Dharamshala International Film Festival; and Thinking Images , a new videographic program at the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival.

Trends and numbers

An overview of the poll, and some numbers and statistics: of the 42 contributors to the poll this year, 27 are male, 13 are female and two are non-binary. They submitted a total of 241 votes, for 170 unique entries which span online video essays, essay films, documentaries, installations and an HBO series; also a Kanye West music video! These works were made – or published – this past year, by both established essayists and newcomers to the field; they range from 24 seconds to 14 hours in length; some were viewed only once or twice prior to appearing on this poll, others had up to 10.4 million views, and everywhere in between.

Unsurprisingly, some prominent trends that emerged in the poll results this year included video essays related either directly or indirectly to the COVID -19 pandemic and its consequences (with 21 mentions); the presence of the BLM movement was also felt (with 22 mentions), as well as a more political slant to this year’s picks in general. The Once Upon a Screen collection was also featured prominently (with 25 mentions), and included the two top-mentioned videos in the poll.

The top-mentioned videos were: Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox by Kevin B. Lee (12 mentions); My Mulholland by Jessica McGoff (ten mentions); Forensickness by Chloé Galibert-Laîné (nine mentions); and Feeling and Thought as They Take Form: Early Steadicam, Labor, and Technology (1974-1985) by Katie Bird (eight mentions). Catherine Grant and Luís Azevedo each had five different videos mentioned on the poll.

The videos are overwhelmingly presented in English (91 per cent) and are predominantly from the US (41 per cent) and the UK (28 per cent), while France makes up 6 per cent of the remaining votes, followed by 18 other countries (mostly in Europe). The dominant focus in terms of medium remains film (71 per cent of videos), with television (five per cent) and gaming (circa two per cent) coming in at distant second and third.

Of the essayists whose work is featured on the poll, 33 per cent are female (up from 24 per cent last year!) and 57 per cent are male (down from 68 per cent last year), with the remaining ten per cent made by mixed-gender teams or non-binary essayists. We did not parse – neither contributors nor picks – by race (among other reasons, as this would have been somewhat challenging), but hope that everyone is thinking more critically about whose voices they’re choosing to listen to and endorse.

We hope this poll continues to contribute to the ongoing conversation among creators and lovers of video essays worldwide, and that next year will see even more opportunities and venues for collaborating on, making and sharing this form that we are all so enthusiastic about; and also, you know, fewer fires and plagues?

Here are the results…

Table of contributors

(click on a name to jump to their picks.)

Film theorist and curator, Charles University in Prague & Národní filmový archiv

Forensickness

Chloé Galibert-Laîné

The author’s ongoing investigation of online communities and desktop interfaces continues to yield fascinating results. This time, it takes the form of a detective story which makes sure that no revelation waits for us at the end, but also, more importantly, that our cultural and technological mechanisms of knowledge-seeking are fundamentally flawed. Instead, it guides us through an endless road of detours whose diversity can surprise even a know-it-all desktop cinema aficionado. Not only a poignant contribution to videographic film studies but also a work that gives the adjective ‘essayistic’ a truly contemporary meaning.

Feeling and Thought as They Take Form: Early Steadicam, Labor, and Technology (1974-1985)

While examining film technology and its impact on the image content, I often wonder how to make these material interventions visible and open to reflection at the same time. Katie Bird’s exploration of the Steadicam and Panaglide camera devices indicates that videographic scholarship can be employed to overcome this dilemma. By understanding the camera operating as, first and foremost, an affective, embodied experience, many supposed ‘imperfections’ and ‘instabilities’ can be revealed as things that make the films tick. Moreover, the essay shows that the application of digital tools in archival research may have a more playful, creative side.

Crossings. On Freak Orlando

Johannes Binotto

This essay resurrects a relatively overlooked cinematic trend – the German queer cinema of the 1970s–80s and the wider tendency of stylistic and bodily excess in avant-garde cinema. What is crucial is that the author uses the short scene from Ulrike Ottinger’s Freak Orlando in a way that renovates the contemporary videographic practice as well. By putting his own body on display and overlaying the action on screen with his performance, he enables us to take the haptic visuality of the shot literally, and not just through the usual analog/digital manipulations. More of this, please.

The Wind in the Trees from Early Cinema to Pixar

Jordan Schonig

I have stumbled upon Schonig’s work thanks to Shane Denson’s new book Discorrelated Images (highly recommended, by the way), and I was happy to find out that he also makes accomplished scholarly video essays. This piece focuses on the contingencies (“rippling waves, rising dust, and fluttering leaves”) in early films and CGI animation, highlighting how digital algorithms make the distinctions between accidental qualities and careful calculation blurrier than ever. Schonig effectively demonstrates the divergences and affinities between the pre-cinematic and post-cinematic modes of staging accidents while also opening ways for addressing this complicated dialectic in the videographic form itself.

There Must Be Some Kind of Way Out of Here

Rainer Kohlberger

This year has seen the completion of a brilliant experimental film essay The Philosophy of Horror: A Symphony of Film Theory (Péter Lichter and Bori Máté). Nevertheless, as I have already mentioned this project in the last year’s poll, I would like to give a shout to another experimental work. Kohlberger’s film brings the spectacular world of disaster movies into contact with the dance of coloured dots on the surface of the image. This unpredictable humming occludes the well-worn explosions and catastrophes in Hollywood cinema and exposes them as mere paltry things compared to the horrors of filmic matter.

Live at Appleville

It may not be a videographic essay per se, but… In this video, as far from a traditional music concert as possible, the American hyperpop duo is goofing around in a dark room with a laptop showing scenes from Ratatouille. This disturbing yet strangely funny exercise creatively exploits the limitations of Covid and opens yet another place where cinema can be relocated. Somehow it could even fit as an unlikely addition to the Once Upon a Screen videographic project – a childhood cinematic trauma turned into a liberating performance. And I am not even a fan of the band…

Thinking Audiovisually

Department of Film Studies, Charles University

This is clearly a biased choice, but I still feel obliged to mention three student video essays. A workshop with Kevin B. Lee saw the birth of many short videographic exercises, some of which were developed into full-length pieces. As the videographic practice in the Czech Republic is being invented practically from scratch, I was surprised how accomplished, original, and funny the videos turned out. Thus, Lucie Formánková’s essay on her fascination with Tom Cruise’s acting, Valerie Špuláková’s work on a failed Czech dubbing of Twin Peaks, and Otto Urban’s look on the synecdochic character of trailers deserve a shout.

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Ariel Avissar

Media scholar, video essayist and lecturer at the Steve Tisch School of Film and TV , Tel Aviv University

What begins as a personal account of the experience of watching Chris Kennedy’s Watching the Detectives evolves into so much more; part essay film, part desktop documentary, part conspiracy thriller with a twist ending, this epistemological audio-visual meditation expertly weaves together some of my favourite preoccupations – cultural depictions of counter-terrorism intelligence efforts, John Carpenter’s They Live!, conspiracy boards, Game of Thrones fandom and Chloé Galibert-Laîné – into one jumbled, coherent, meandering, beautiful whole. My favourite media object of the year.

A Very Long Exposure Time

This silent visual poem was produced for the Time Complex exhibition at the Yerevan Biennial 2020. While aesthetically the polar opposite of Forensickness, it similarly develops Chloé’s ongoing fascination with images – how we see them, what they reveal, what they leave out, what can we use them for. Simple, stimulating, sublime.

To The Lighthouse

Kevin B. Lee

How do you make a video essay about a film you have no access to? Lee has previously wrestled with the challenges of inaccessibility. Commissioned for the 2020 International Film Festival Rotterdam Critics Choice, this enthralling mashup of 36 different films starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, described by Lee as his ‘fanfic version ’of The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers, will make anyone who hasn’t seen the film feel as though they have. Arguably more enjoyable than the original, and with considerably less flatulence.

Extreme Is My Name

Johanna Vaude

Made for ARTE ’s online magazine “Blow Up”, this impressive montage is both a tribute to and a study of the works of one of my favourite directors, Kathryn Bigelow. Vaude takes Bigelow’s raw, adrenaline-fused energy then dials it up to eleven. Her video grabs hold of you from the get-go, and doesn’t let up until it’s – regrettably – over.

The Age of Emptiness

Oswald iten.

Iten’s lovingly-edited video recuts the lush imagery of Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, focusing on shots devoid of human presence, and excluding human faces entirely. Fittingly accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s score from Scorsese’s own Taxi Driver, this tale of Edwardian-era New York aristocracy is recontextualised for our current day and age. The result plays like an annotated relic of the Age of the Coronavirus, such as might be uncovered by future historians seeking to make sense of this bizarre period in human history.

Catherine Grant

This moving epigraphic tribute to the late Irrfan Khan merges Khan’s performance in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool with excerpts from Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second to powerful, touching effect. Another example by Grant of what the videographic epigraph can achieve at its purest and most potent form.

House – Everything but the Kitchen Sink

Jesse Tribble

This ambitious six-part series on House MD , clocking in at four hours(!), is one of the most comprehensive analyses of a television series I’ve seen, certainly one devoted to a network medical procedural (in its early seasons, anyway). House remains one of my favourite (semi-guilty) pleasures, and while this episodic, narration-led effort by Tribble, highly impressive in its intimate familiarity with the show’s eight seasons, might not be ground-breaking in form or content, I found it extremely enjoyable and ridiculously watchable. Try the first part then see if you can resist the urge to keep on going; I certainly couldn’t.

Luís Azevedo

Filmmaker for hire. Maker of direct-to-video essays for Little White Lies , Mubi, Fandor, Amazon Prime &  Barbican

6ix9ine GOOBA except theres no music

Rob Lopez ( RØB )

Christopher Nolan | Doing It For Real

Julian Palmer (The Discarded Image)

Women Make Film

Mark Cousins ( watch trailer )

Cliff Booth Drives Home

Philip Brubaker

The Visual Architecture of Parasite

Thomas Flight

The Movies Behind Your Favourite GIF s

Leigh Singer (Little White Lies)

What Gordon Parks Saw

Evan Puschak (The Nerdwriter)

Filmmaker/writer

Expands the notion of what a video essay is and can be. Fascinating, even suspenseful. Blends performance in with videographic criticism in a way I had not seen before. Because of Binotto’s video, the way a critic can interact with a film is not what it was even a year ago.

From screening to (live) streaming

Davide Rapp & Andrea Dal Martello

An incredible marriage of past and present culture. Rapp & Martello have made a drop-dead hilarious critique of pandemic-era social media that is precisely funny because of how it recontextualises the movies that we grew up watching. It is an in-joke that richly rewards those who get it; how would these movies we loved in the past translate in today’s world?

Francisca Lila

A breathtaking, thorough taxonomy of flowers, plants and trees from the film canon. Lila’s brilliant, seamless editing makes the transition from Antichrist to Pather Panchali flow naturally, and part of the joy of this video essay is spotting and identifying the films she draws from.

In the Kitchen with Pedro Almodóvar

Luís Azevedo (Little White Lies)

Azevedo makes videos that are so sensuous and nimbly edited that he breathes new life into the clips on his timeline. Here his sensibility finds the perfect match: the kitchen. He finds captivating gestures from Almodóvar’s films and his speaking voice strikes just the right chord between his ideas and the visuals. Bravo.

Bad Vacations

The Criterion Channel

Criterion makes many great, concise supercuts to advertise the films on their streaming service. I wish they would credit the editors more generously, or at all, even. This is one that I have rewatched many times, because I love the arc; how a promising vacation can turn into a nightmare. This was a year full of miserable events that caused me great dismay, but somehow I delight in the pessimism of this teaser.

Change Needs to Come

Nelson carvajal.

Using simple, unadorned straight cuts set to an iconic song of the civil rights movement, Carvajal says what needed to be said. And oh, is it painful. A collection of cell phone imagery of black people murdered in contemporary life is juxtaposed with archival images dating back to slave times to show that in many ways, nothing has changed. We saw coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement throughout 2020, so I would be remiss not to include what I believe to be a very strong entry in this significant genre. I hate watching this video essay.

Video Artist and Founder of Free Cinema Now

Transcending Heidegger – The Cinema of Terrence Malick

Tom van der Linden (Like Stories of Old)

I was surprised by how moved I was by this video essay. Even with the voiceover element, van der Linden never hits the snooze button; his voice inquires, wonders and keeps insisting. By the end, I was floored by this work’s sincerity, the messaging, and its revelations about the human condition. Malick himself would be proud. It’s the best video essay of the year.

The Unloved – The Siege

Scout Tafoya (RogerEbert.com)

Part of the charm of Tafoya’s The Unloved series is that it gives us all a chance to beat our chests about our sentimental favorite films or guilty pleasure movies. When this entry on The Siege came out, it was a couple of months into the pandemic here in the States. I, like many people, was working from home, and felt really disconnected from the outside world. The way Tafloya injected socio-political urgency into his thesis for Zwick’s film, was like a bolt of electricity; it woke my senses, and reminded me of the very real world outside.

Wash Us In The Blood

Arthur Jafa

It was released as a music video but as soon as the appropriated images hit the screen and it was revealed to be created by video artist Arthur Jafa, it became, for me, a video essay. The striking juxtapositions Jafa creates between images and Kanye West’s music is thrilling. This is a vital work disguised as a music video. As I write this, it has 10,370,226 views on YouTube. That’s a really good turnout for a video essay if you ask me.

Andris Damburs

Cinefile, creator and moderator of 35 MM – A GROUP FOR CINEPHILES

Nothing at Stake

Everything is a remix: reality.

Kirby Ferguson

Aspect Ratio – The Changing Shape of Cinema

Leon Barnard

Physical Storytelling in Céline Sciamma’s Coming-Of-Age Trilogy

Why do you love cinema.

Ignacio Montalvo

Czechoslovak New Wave

Jonathan Keogh

Ian Danskin

Writer/editor/creator of YouTube channel Innuendo Studios .

Children of DOOM

Errant Signal

Errant Signal’s Children of DOOM is a dissection of the first-person shooter, wherein Chris Franklin takes what he considers to be the most important/interesting FPS from a given year and analyses it, planning to do one for every year of the genre’s existence. Chris has long been one of the most thoughtful voices in games criticism, and he’s always at his best discussing FPS . (His video on BioShock Infinite is what set me on the path to becoming a YouTuber.) In a year when watching political deep dives of the kind I typically make felt exhausting, this was my comfort food.

Coronavirus and America’s Death Cult

Carlos Maza

This is the year Carlos Maza – having previously been the main reason to subscribe to Vox’s YouTube – went solo and launched his own channel (he picked a heck of a year). He’s done excellent videos on the primaries and police brutality, but my fave is his video explaining the government’s response to the pandemic through the lens of neoliberalism and slowly devolving into a horror film. It does what all great political essays do: helps you understand a current event while also teaching you something fundamental that will help you understand much else about our world.

In Search of a Flat Earth

Dan Olson (Folding Ideas)

What at first appears to be a feature-length dissection of flat earth conspiracy theories telescopes out into the first comprehensive explanation of QA non I’ve seen, a distillation of the nature of conspiracy theories, a list of what other thinkers tend to overlook about conspiracists, and a sprinkling of love for the pursuit of knowledge. “Ultimately, it’s not about facts, it’s about power” is one of the most important takeaways of 2020.

Is Vine Cinema?

Kyle Kallgren (Brows Held High)

As he did two years ago with his video on bisexual lighting, Kyle Kallgren takes a seemingly innocuous subject – the life and death of Vine – and makes a video about EVERYTHING . About the essential units of filmmaking, about media that crosses social boundaries, about the speed of modern life and the formats best able to capture it, about race uprisings and cultural appropriation, about what happens when every so often The Youth are allowed to dictate culture. And all while montaging together his favorite Vines.

The $150,000 Banana

Sarah Urist Green (The Art Assignment)

Sarah Urist Green’s The Art Assignment didn’t end this year so much as go into low-power mode. The channel is still updated sporadically, but Sarah has refocused her attentions on other work. But, back in January – remember January? – she discussed Maurizio Cattelan’s then-trending art piece in which he duct taped a banana to a wall. Sarah employs her talent for taking strange, pretentious works on their own terms, digging into the banana’s surrounding contexts, the artist’s history, and the movement it’s part of, without ever claiming the work is ‘good’. This is her in her element.

we’re already ded || Zack Snyder, Part 2

Maggie Mae Fish

This year, the criminally under-appreciated Maggie Mae Fish started a series on the works of Zack Snyder, starting with a 15-minute look at how Snyder’s Superman contrasts with Supermen past, and then this 42-minute dive into how Snyder’s calcified, objectivist worldview manifests first in Dawn of the Dead and then across all his films.

Hamilton and the right mess it’s gotten me into

Grace Lee (What’s So Great About That?)

Grace’s dense and kaleidoscopic style proves a perfect match for the captivating yet self-contradictory musical that is Hamilton. The video goes back and forth over what makes Hamilton compulsively likable and also frustrating as heck, with every progressive idea undercut by something that seems to say the opposite, and every troublesome moment looking like it might be commentary on itself. Grace proves up to the task, providing not so much answers as a whole lot to think about.

Steven E. de Souza

It’s a Christmas movie. Bylines: @nytimes @LosAnglesTimes @FadeInMagazine @EmpireMagazine @SightSoundMagazine

How the Safdie Brothers Lie in Uncut Gems

Nehemiah Jordan (Behind the Curtain)

Never has a film essay had so disingenuous a title – but then N.T. Jordan’s essay is all about the art of misdirection. In truth, the brothers dissect as much as they dissemble, revealing more truths about the filmmaking process in 11 minutes than a semester of screenings. From the unanticipated dominoes that fall with casting changes (for instance, from a contemporary setting to a period one and back again), to unexpected sources of inspiration (spoiler alert: a colonoscopy) to the brutal marathon of 160 drafts over 10 years, the Safdies provide an unflinching portrait of the grind that is art.

The Most Important Filmmaker You Haven’t Heard Of

Jack Nugent (Now You See It)

Since silent days, women have been present in the editing suite, far too often unheralded (though not, of course, here). Starting with Margaret Booth in the 1930’s, then turning to Dede Allen and the late Sally Menke, Jack Nugent makes a strong case for these three artists as the midwives of modern film cutting. Both insightful and long overdue, Sight & Sound readers are urged to overlook the essay’s click-bait title… as they undoubtedly have.

Orson Wells a la Cinematheque Francaise

Pierre-André Boutang, Guy Seligmann

This month’s release of a major motion picture from an important filmmaker like David Fincher directly to a streaming platform sent a shock wave through Hollywood…. no, not the potential end of theatrical distribution as we know it, along with the shattering of the livelihood of exhibitioners and the shuttering of countless venues…I mean the impossible-to-shutter endless debate over Orson Welles: Boy wonder, or one-and-done-er? Found by Francois Thomas in the archives of the Cinematheque Francais only months ago, Welles gets another one hour 33 minutes with us… and we, with him.

Every Stormtrooper In Star Wars, Explained by Lucasfilm

Madlyn Burkert <@alohamaddy> and Doug Chiang

Call it classic or kitsch, revolutionary or rehash, but after 14 theatrical pictures and seven television series over 43 years for a total running time of let’s see, the original trilogy, six hours 20 minutes, then in chronological order Star Wars: Droids that’s 13 episodes x 23 minutes, plus 121 episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars… oh wait damn it, between the time I’m typing this and when it gets eyeballs, two more episodes of The Mandalorian will have been out, God knows what their running time will be, @jonfavs and @TaikaWaititi can’t even agree. Anyway, a long overdue taxonomy.

Steven Spielberg’s Use of Reflections

Shera Junushev

Like Bogart, this screenwriter is in a lonely place here with this one: I come to praise it, not critique it – but as observant as this essay is in recognising a signature Spielberg technique, in defining its effect as “allowing the audience to examine the details of a scene without losing connection to the character” it reduces psychology to geography. Rather, the subjective reflection shot’s true dynamic lies in flinging the filmgoer literally headlong into the protagonist’s shoes, bonding the viewer’s sense of self to the character with subliminal power.

The Irishman and the Death of the Gangster Film

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama declared The End of History. In 2020, Luis Azevedo is here to tell us that when we weren’t looking, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) declared the End of the Western, and in 2019, Martin Scorsese… hmm, how to best put this? Let’s just say that Luis thinks we got a real good genre here, it’d be a shame, a real shame if something happened to it…

Doctor Who and The Fourth Wall

Samuel Davis

From Justus D. Barnes’s gunshot in The Great Train Robbery in 1903 to Michael Caine’s seductive asides in Alfie (1966) to Joe Pesci bringing us full circle in Goodfellas (1990), breaking the fourth wall has been a key part of the motion pictures tool box. But those heralded films aren’t where we oh-so sophisticated Cineastes first encountered that jarring technique now, was it? And it wasn’t O Lucky Man, Amélie, or Fight Club, either. Come on, kiddies, fess up, you know the answer: here’s Samuel Davis to refresh your memory.

Monica Delgado

Peruvian film critic, director of Desistfilm.com

Presence: Call Me By Your Name

Fabian Broeker

I really liked this video: the search for a new topic in the treatment of a very hackneyed film.

On Contamination

Jessica McGoff

I felt interested about the political view of McGoff, because in this video she establishes correspondences between the filmmaker universe (animals and humans coexisting together) and social-environmental context.

Notorious Wavelengths

A Wave of the Hand. A way to the photo. An analysis of the use of the zoom in two opposite films, as a provocation. I never imagined watching this strange duel between Snow and Hitchcock.

Can any Johnny Guitar fan be indifferent to this?

Mariana Dianela Torres

There is a musical intention in this montage that attracts me a lot, that recovers a sensation of movement in the films of Chantal Akerman.

The Other Side of the Street

Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

I’m interested in the way in which Adrian and Cristina edit the images, research and voices, in an exact timing and leading us to subtle endings.

For some video essayists it’s a problem to work without complete films (for different restrictions). Kevin finished this challenge in a very playful and fresh way.

Will DiGravio

Host, The Video Essay Podcast ; Creator, Notes on Videographic Criticism ; Contributor, Film School Rejects

Follow the Cat

If there is one video essayist whose style and sensibility I most try to emulate in my own work, it is Johannes Binotto. His videos are rigorous and scholarly, yet deeply personal and emotional. In this video, like much of his work, Johannes turns his cinephilia into a shove which, like Lisa Fremont, he uses to dig deeper and deeper into the fabric of Rear Window. Follow the Cat gives us a new way of understanding familiar images, and thus gets at the heart of what videographic criticism is and what it can do and be.

Jazmin Jones

I think about Unlocked by video artist Jazmin Jones often. In an interview, Jones described the way she shifted the focus of the appropriated videos away from the white people at the centre: “It was a matter of zooming in… trying to reframe so that we’re really focusing on the pleasure and the experience of the black fems.” Jazmin may not have set out to make a ‘video essay’ when she created Unlocked, but the way she manipulates the footage is among the most powerful examples of the form I have seen.

cops ordering food

Manny Fidel

I can’t do justice to Manny’s video in 100 words. It’s hilarious and deeply insightful. I also love his follow-up tweet: “I made this in like four mins do NOT comment on its quality.” Manny’s video was made three weeks after the murder of George Floyd, at a time when a narrative emerged in the United States that police officers were somehow the real victims in society. The video makes a mockery of that absurd notion and, in the process, shows that a definition of ‘quality’ as it relates to videographic criticism is far more nuanced than one might think.

My First Film

Zia Anger ( watch trailer )

My First Film debuted in 2019 as a live film performance; an innovative desktop documentary that earned high praise in last year’s poll. Unable to perform in person this year, Anger began streaming live performances throughout the spring. The work continued to break ground and morphed into something new, a film that reflected Anger’s own pandemic experience. During the performance I saw, Anger texted her dad to say she loved him. Watching “My First Film” during such frightening times was a cathartic experience, one that made me briefly feel like I was back at the movies among friends and strangers.

Indy Vinyl: Records in American Independent Cinema: 1987 to 2018

Ian Garwood

Another ground-breaking work this year came in the form of Ian Garwood’s Indy Vinyl: Records in American Independent Cinema: 1987 to 2018, a project that features a range of video essays and written works. One aspect of video essay-making that often gets overlooked is the amount of time dedicated to making each and every video. Ian’s project, both in size and scope, but also given the fact that he released parts of this project as they were finished, beautifully captures the labor of love that is video-essay making, all while pushing the boundaries of what the form can be.

Tear away Turn back Breathe

Martina Probst and Chantal Hann

Over the past nine months, I have tried to relive my favourite pre-pandemic moviegoing experiences through video essays. This video by Martina Probst and Chantal Hann, two students at the Lucerne School of Art and Design, is among the finest analyses of Portrait of a Lady on Fire I have seen. But what I find so compelling about their essay is their willingness to at times forgo images entirely and embrace a blank canvas: the black screen. Video essayists often feel the need to fill every second with images. Perhaps we should allow our work to, like Marianne, breathe.

It’s Bad Luck to Compare Hands

Alex Slentz

Meshes of the Afternoon is one of those films that I rewatch all the time, just to try and understand how it works; how it was assembled. I feel the same way about Alex Slentz’s video, which blends together footage from Maya Deren’s film, Persona, and Un Chien Andalou. Similar to the video by Probst and Hann, I am inspired by the way Sletz allows us to see the canvas on which the video essay was created. The fluid movements of the images and their interactions with one another blend together in a beautiful collage and insightful analysis.

Video Essayist and Filmmaker

How Edgar Wright Uses Sound

Sound tends to be an underrepresented subject in the world of video essays. Julian’s essay mimics Edgar Wright’s editing and sound design to move effortlessly between his films, showcasing Wright’s unique approach to sound.

The Strange Reality of Roller Coaster Tycoon

Jacob Geller

Jacob Geller expertly ties together internet culture, video game design, and physics in this profound examination of the existential unease that can be found in a theme park simulation game from 1999.

Lies of Heroism – Redefining the Anti-War Film by Tom van der Linden (Like Stories of Old)

Weaving together examples from 49 films during the course of this nearly feature-length video essay, Tom thoughtfully and thoroughly examines depictions of war in cinema and whether it’s truly possible to make an anti-war film.

Dinner with Brad Pitt

Video essays can also just be a lot of fun. I’m not sure who had more fun, Luís Azevedo sitting down to edit this video, or Brad Pitt sitting down to dinner in all these scenes.

Researcher and filmmaker

The Viewing Booth

Ra’anan Alexandrowicz ( watch trailer )

An incredibly careful and thorough examination of the spectatorial mechanisms of two protagonists (a filmed spectator, and the filmmaker who is filming her) that exposes how much our beliefs and ideological convictions determine how we make sense of online images. Though rather pessimistic in its conclusion (no image can change a person’s political opinions – so long for a century-long history of activist media and political filmmaking), the film advocates convincingly for the political power of building respectful interpersonal relationships with our political opponents, and for the potential of images to serve as the basis for such conversations.

Il n’y aura plus de nuit

Eléonore Weber ( watch trailer )

This essay film looks at thermal imagery produced by helicopter pilots in a war context. We hear only one voice, but the words it speaks contain the gazes of many: from the pilots themselves, to the judges in military courts in charge of examining these images to determine retrospectively the legitimacy of the pilots’ decisions to kill, to the filmmaker who questions her mixed fascination for these images, to our own uncertainty about what these images expect from us – their probably unwanted, surplus witnesses.

On Contamination and My Mulholland

I equally love these two videos by Jessica McGoff. Re-watching On Contamination at the end of this year of sanitary crisis gives the video an uncanny, definitely prescient quality, but it is a great work independently from its unfortunate topicality. Like My Mulholland (which McGoff produced in the context of the video essay series Once Upon a Screen ), On Contamination explores an intimate form of narration in which the discussed film becomes not so much the limiting frame of the essay, but the substrate from which it grows in unexpected directions.

Elie Ga ( watch excerpt )

This essay – very much like my other picks – proposes a very personal, partly autobiographical, partly fictional narration, loosely based on a collection of images figuring objects found by ‘beachcombers’. Images come in waves onto the filmmaker’s table, who tentatively combines them into spatial arrangements and explorative superpositions, until the surf of the narration prompts their replacement with other images – some we discover, some we see again and again, constantly re-invested with new meanings.

I know very few video essayists who are willing to implicate themselves as much in their videos as Binotto does in this performative, wistfully celebratory and intensely personal short video piece. I admire the growing abstraction of Binotto’s work (such as in his video Trace , another strong candidate for this poll) for it opens up the possibility of unexpected, sensual engagements with the films with which it dialogues. These are video essays where images burgeon with news meanings and unlikely sensations, rather than being pinned down or constricted by the analysis.

Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed

This year I’ve seen a number of video essays reflecting on images of migrants on their way to Europe, and this film is by far the one I found the most inspiring. It recalls Philip Scheffner’s Havarie in its focus on a single, arguably illegible image, and its investment of the soundtrack as the lieu of meaning production. But the perspective is reversed: Havarie watched a ship sink from afar, Purple Sea plunges us in the water. The presentness of the image serves as the loam from which the story unfolds, made of the narrator’s uncertain memories and hopes.

Wild Heart 1981 / 2020

Zach Dorn ( watch excerpt )

From randomly filming contemporary online media flows to carefully re-animating on paper a decades-old improvised piece of footage (that was later uploaded to YouTube), this short essay deploys an impressively wide, and very personal narrative arc. The diversity of visual techniques that are employed in this virtuoso single-shot speaks to Dorn’s attempts to grasp his digital object and materialise it in the space of his home – a gesture that is fascinatingly articulated as one of self-care and compensation for the anxieties triggered by contemporary online media.

Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow

Desegregating the Two Shot: The Use of the Frame in The Defiant Ones (1958)

Henry Rownd

This finely detailed audiovisual commentary operates in the best tradition of close mise-en-scène analysis – a surprisingly marginal genre in the academic video essay world. Rownd demonstrates astutely how the image construction of the film tells a nuanced and complex story about race and space in the Civil Rights era, even as the surface narrative hammers home a more heavy-handed message.

Lisa Hanawalt: Being Human by Being Animal

This year I taught a dedicated video essay course for the first time in a while and Grace Lee was the go-to for examples of incredibly smart, quick-witted, well-researched and audiovisually engaging work. Lee’s awareness of the possibilities of animation shines through in this video, an awareness developed through both her critical and filmmaking practice.

Satis House

As is often the case with Catherine Grant’s work, Satis House is an exemplary act of collaboration. Firstly, it invites collaboration from the viewer by giving them more and more visual information to compare, without authorial commentary, as the video proceeds. Secondly, Grant’s accompanying writing refines and deepens the viewing experience, collaborating with it rather than simply describing it. Finally, the collaboration through writing is extended by the inclusion of a reflective piece by the cultural historian Lynda Nead, whose thinking about Great Expectations inspired the video in the first place.

My Mulholland

From my admittedly partial perspective, skewed towards video essays published in academic journals, a turn to the overtly personal seemed evident in a number of examples this year. Maybe it was fitting, then, that the year closed with the publication of the Once Upon a Screen collection in the Cine-Files, where video essayists reflected on formative film-viewing experiences. I’ve had a little more time to watch and think about Jessica McGoff’s contribution than the others, and it’s a wonderful reflection on the allure and perils of online media consumption, funnelled through a memorable first encounter with Mulholland Drive.

”Who Ever Heard…?”

Like Catherine Grant’s Satis House, Payne’s video uses an additive multi-screen compositional process that draws attention to repetitions in the source material – in this case a scene from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Payne’s approach is more overtly manipulative than Grant’s, repeating each shot from the scene to create a visual and aural montage that builds then recedes in intensity. The looping effect of the soundtrack, in particular, is mesmerising.

The Before Sunrise Waltz

This was the act of virtual film tourism I needed in the early months of lockdown. By orchestrating a Google Earth tour of the locations visited in Before Sunrise, Stone re-envisages the film from a panoramic perspective, thereby offering a completely different take on the original, which stays determinedly tied to Jesse and Celine’s ground-level progression through Vienna’s streets.

A Machine for Viewing

Richard Misek, Oscar Raby, Charlie Shackleton

Of course it’s a shame that the pandemic put a (temporary?) stop to the VR -video essay roadshow envisaged as part of Machine for Viewing, but the three videos published in NECSUS demonstrate that the project’s potential has already been realised. Whilst the demonstration of the technology is impressive, I related most to the videos’ use of VR to reflect on a traditional 2-D cinema-going experience. Who would have thought that the sight of a packed auditorium, witnessing the live VR presentation and commentary at the Sundance Festival, would now seem so poignant?

Hailey Gavin

Video essay creator

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Absurd Worlds

This is an excellent articulation of the questions Lanthimos asks and the visual and structural tools he employs. This is a must-watch for anyone who loved Nimic and conveys the power of shorts to reframe our understanding of auteurs’ work.

How Portraits Lie – What to be aware of in your portrait photography

Jamie Windsor

I love this clear exploration of a nuanced topic, supplemented by beautiful motion graphics and fluid editing.

This piece illustrates the sometimes inextricable nature of nostalgia and trauma. I also loved the way the essay draws points of connection between media of different formats from different times.

Audiovisual essayist and Professor of Film at the University of Reading.

Slap That Bass Zoomed

The elephant man’s sound, tracked., the original ending: the last acts of black horror heroes.

Cydnii Wilde Harris

Music and Point of View in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Patrick Keating

Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox

Video essayist; founding co-editor of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies ; Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and elected member of Academia Europea. Currently completing https:screenstudies.video

One of my all-time favourite videographic works by foundational artist and essayist Lee, or indeed by anyone. Part of a brilliant project recently published in issue 15 of the Cine-Files in the collection Once Upon a Screen , commissioned and curated by Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer.

Another astonishing work by one of the most innovative and significant of video essayists. Published online in December 2020, this video also deservedly garnered huge festival success, screening in competition at the Marseilles Festival of Documentary Film as well as at the Festival dei Popoli, the Kasseler Dokfest and the festival Caminhos do Cinema Português.

One of my all-time favourite pieces that we have published at [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Studies this last (or any) year. A wonderfully ambitious exploration of the first decade of stabiliser technologies and techniques. In surveying the industrial histories of two competing devices, the Steadicam and the obsolete Panaglide, Bird demonstrates, powerfully and movingly, how “now codified norms of craft labour practice around stabiliser’s aesthetic and generic forms emerged amongst a diverse range of media and eclectic techniques”.

Maryam Tafakory ( read synopsis )

I love Tafakory’s essay films and video essays, and this brilliant piece by her was one of the excellent new series of commissioned essays on Asian cinema, Monographs by the Asian Film Archive ( AFA ).

”Drawing upon histories and archives, both personal and regional, these works reveal new vistas of inquiry; ruminations that evince the essayists’ personal connections to [Asian] cinema, made more poignant by the fact that they were created during various states of isolation and solitude.”

The series had its world premiere at the Dharamshala International Film Festival held online from 29 October to 4 November 2020.

The latest work by hugely talented video essayist and film McGoff; her video was also part of the high quality collection Once Upon a Screen .

One of an outstanding collection of audiovisual essays devoted to explorations of gesture published in NECSUS : European Journal of Media Studies , curated by the wonderful video essayist and scholar Tracy Cox-Stanton, in December 2019. This video was also added to the essential Video Essay Podcast Black Lives Matter video essay playlist , curated by Cydnii Wilde Harris, Kevin B Lee and The Video Essay Podcast founder and host Will DiGravio.

Indy Vinyl, Interrupted

This video, published in 2020, is the tip of the amazing videographic iceberg that is Garwood’s work on his hugely original videographic/monographic project Indy Vinyl, as set out here and here .

Reader in Film and Sonic Arts, Liverpool John Moores University.

This audiovisual essay marries form and content in such an affecting manner that I was completely drawn into the essayist’s world. The universality of the space that Lee re-enacts/re-presents urged me to think back to the complexity of early childhood memories. The camera shot and movement choices coupled with the voice (which is sometimes masked) allows for an intimate story that perfectly reflects this particular moment and the trauma of early childhood.

If I could have made any other audiovisual essay, I wish it could have been this one! I love everything about it, from the voiceover, with its centrality of the cat, to the essayist’s own cat watching the screen. It is beautifully paced and offers an insightful point of entry to Hitchcock’s camera moves. It prompts a personal way into questioning cinematic spectatorship and image-making, and draws from an array of interesting representations of cats in cinema.

This audiovisual essay makes me think and feel differently about camera movement in cinema. It details a rich history drawing from technical manuals, instructional videos, film tests and experiments and other archival material to present an embodied argument that allows me to feel the moves of the Steadicam/Panaglide operator(s). The extent of the research is significant, but this is not merely a dissemination of research – the entire essay builds movement into its shape and form. It is truly inspiring work!

Forensickness is a longer audiovisual essay/experimental film that considers Chris Kennedy’s film, Watching the Detectives. Much like Galibert-Laîné’s earlier work, it deconstructs Kennedy’s film, goes to the online archive of material (this time on Reddit) to consider both the news footage circulating around the Boston Marathon bomb attack in 2013 and the Hollywood depiction of these events. This work is about how we see, how we consume images, and how we think about and through images.

McGoff’s My Mullholland is a poignant consideration of traumatic film viewing. The desktop format is most appropriate for examining the online consumption of film, and here the essayist’s own adventures on the internet and into the cinema of David Lynch are richly depicted through this approach. The audiovisual essay details some darker areas of the internet whilst also re-presenting the edgier moments of Lynch’s, Mulholland Drive. It is often fun and playful and the use of text is brilliantly deployed.

Garwood has had a prolific year creating audiovisual essays and has made a number that are inspired by the Zoom app as an aesthetic device, reflecting these recent months and how we have been collectively engaging online. He has created a showcase of this work which is available to audioview here . In a year where Black Lives Matter is at the forefront of political discussion, “Slap That Bass Zoomed” offers a timely de-centring of the white appropriator, instead offering an array of Black artists (named and unnamed) to take their rightful place onscreen.

Paris Bagdad: Fantasies of America(na) in German-American Cinema

Evelyn Kreutzer

Paris Bagdad: Fantasies of America(na) in German-American Cinema offers a personal route through Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) and Baghdad Café (Percy Adlon, 1987). This essayistic approach includes the use of superimposition, which is beautifully rendered and speaks to the sense of place and wanderlust that Kreutzer narrates her way through. This feels like a logical follow on from her earlier inspired work on German cinema, Berlin Moves (2017).

Chiara Grizzaffi

Postdoctoral Fellow at IULM University – co-editor of [in]Transition

MADELEINE / JUDY

The philosophy of horror: a symphony of film theory.

Péter Lichter, Bori Máté ( watch trailer )

Once Upon a Screen: Titanic

Victoria Wegner

Safe Bodies, Safe Environment: The Atmosphere of Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995)

Kelsey Draper

Film scholar and video essayist

That she was able to commute the cinematic trauma of Lynch’s work to the universal trauma of growing up during the Wild West years of the internet was a sublime insight. From the choice to take her audience on a journey through her desktop, to her recreations of jump scares and the IMD b message boards, this piece resonated with me on so many levels.

It’s one thing to understand that your colleague is brilliant. It is another experience entirely to watch an artist, independent of your relationship to them, so handedly exceed their own boundaries. Kevin’s piece on his childhood experiences with the film Platoon are an example of the very power of cinema to shape our relationship with the world, and the world’s relationship with us. Include that footage, and his deeply personal voiceover all combine to create an experience of childhood trauma so visceral, that I haven’t just gained new insight on the war epic itself.

This piece redefined what I believed to be the parameters of the video essay. By making manifest his own desire to enter a film, Joannes transcends the medium technically, and does so by seamlessly immeshing his own visuals, music, and handwriting into the groundbreaking work, Freak Orlando. He uses the style of his piece to supplement both that of the existing property and what the essayist has to say about it. Johannes didn’t just redefine how I’d like to create video essays. He redefined the limitations of how I can enter a film itself.

The greater focus of Dan’s essay, distilled what I’ve found so troubling about conspiracy theories, from the Illuminati to QA non, and how more often than not, their unstated purpose is to oppose my very existence. By laying bare the historical context of these theories and their creators, Dan articulated the harm these theories stand to enact, and makes them far less easy to laugh off.

As far as works responding to or including elements of our current reality, Ian’s use of Zoom is perhaps one of the most hopeful. This may also be a standout for how it combines both the Zoom revolution with the Racial Equity revolution, and may be one of the most effective ways I’ve seen the Zoom framework employed. Add to that, the editing is impeccably timed, and I left the video with a healthy list of performers to whom I was newly introduced.

Coco’s Feel-Good Oppression

Eliquorice’s video essay on Coco was my gateway drug to the rest of his works. His analysis of the film’s depiction of immigration within the narrative is poignant, but his comparisons between the failings of the immigration system in Disney’s magical realm to the failings of the system in our reality make a compelling case for how political ideology is communicated in family films. The inclusion of his own experiences with the immigration system come at just the right moment, thereby narrativising his analysis, while giving a human face to an issue often overshadowed by the enormity of the system.

The Satirical Resurgence of Reefer Madness

Yhara’s recent video essay on Reefer Madness delves into the historical context that lead to the film, its reception upon release, and its place in the canon of midnight features. Her candour, humour, and personality transcend what could have been a simple history lesson into an engaging conversation about the mutability of everything from social attitudes about cannabis to the constantly shifting legacy of a specific film alongside those attitudes. It’s Yhara’s deft balance of humour and context that reveals to her audience the absurdity that is racial stereotyping and discrimination.

Film scholar, video essayist, animation artist

When was the last time I found myself enjoying a supercut for almost seven minutes? Conforme has a relentless urgency thanks in large part to the driving score by Vaude herself. For me, it captures that contradictory state of frantic stasis that was and is 2020.

Johannes Binotto keeps exploring the possibilities of the video essay in all kinds of directions sidestepping technological wizardry by relying on household items. In Trace he creates tactile sensations from a single film still on a tablet. Seeing it again now, I wonder if it was about that one question all along: what does physical contact feel like?

With her well paced self-reflective long form essays, Chloé Galibert-Laîné has more than once managed to entice me into agreeing then disagreeing with her narration before finally realising that I had been too immersed to “pay attention to that woman behind the curtain”, so to speak.

With his entry in the Once Upon a Screen collection, Kevin B. Lee confirms that he is an incredible storyteller. Explosive Paradox looks deceivingly simple, but works on so many levels. Most importantly, I found it a deeply moving experience.

Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist

Curated by Cydnii Wilde Harris. Kevin B. Lee and Will DiGravio

As our field becomes ever wider, curated lists have become crucial to make sure that notable video essays and voices do not go unnoticed. Among them, the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist is an essential contribution, has a clear-cut profile and is co-organised by three widely connected practitioners.

Nehemiah Jordan

Creator of Behind the Curtain , an online community of screenwriters

The Social Network – Ten Years Later

The Royal Ocean Film Society

The reason why I chose this was primarily its experimental form. Using the topic of Facebook and social media, Andrew Saladino (creator) builds the entire video essay off of the Facebook feed – scrolling from clip to graphic to clip. Something to watch for its inventiveness.

Brave was a Disappointment

This video does a great job of walking through the origins of making this film, breaking down how it’s structured, and finally, how it could’ve been rewritten to be stronger. A long video, but extremely entertaining and well-organised.

The Psycho Chord – Consonance vs Dissonance

Listening In

This channel takes a deep look into an unexplored section of filmmaking: the sound. Specifically, the music and how it’s an integral part of the storytelling. Also, the production quality of these videos are incredibly high.

How Martin Scorsese Integrates The Shadow: A Jungian Practice

Jillian Snead (Jilloms)

A deep but practical analysis of the Shadow, using examples from Martin Scorsese’s filmography to explore how it’s been utilised in different characters. What’s so great here is that she translates all of the analysis into practical application for ourselves. How does one begin integrating their own Shadow into their lives? This video gives you the steps.

Christian Keathley

Professor of Film & Media Culture, Middlebury College; Founding co-editor of [in]Transition

Santa y Teresa

Michelle Farrell

Tarkovsky’s Napes

Pavel Tavares

Miklós Kiss

Associate Prof. in Audiovisual Arts and Cognition at University of Groningen, NL /co-author of Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video

One of the best audiovisual research essays of the year, through its presented information (a rich exploration of the first decade of film stabiliser technologies and techniques) and quality of presentation (technical skill, soundtrack, use of split-screen, etc.).

All Is Not Lost

Amy Rachlin

The video that managed to squeeze all the suspense of living in isolation during a pandemic AND one of the most goose-bumpy scenes of my favourite TV series into less than four minutes. Bonus: it’s also funny.

Davide Rapp and Andrea Dal Martello

Famous film scenes appear in TikToks, Skype calls, distance learning and online conferences. Another COVID -19 cinephile fun.

If you want to watch only one video about GIF s, it should be this one. [insert Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson nodding meme.]

Repeating Terror: Contemplating Death in Amat Escalante’s Heli (2013)

Niamh Thornton

A calm but powerful side-by-side reflection on the ethics of the slow depiction of hyper-realist violence in Amat Escalante’s 2013 Heli, using repetition and variation of the ‘same’ scene. A brilliant demonstration of the potentiality of videographic criticism.

“Parasites move from animal to human. Are we the parasites or the hosts?” An eerily prophetic video ‘on contamination’ (a response to Janis Rafa’s KALA AZAR ), made for the Critics’ Choice panel of the 2020 International Film Festival Rotterdam – thus released just weeks before the COVID -19 virus turned into a pandemic.

Contagion – Willy and Rutty

Luca Gentile, Sasha Quinlan Narciso, Romy Weggeman, Sam Klement

A naughty little video made by my Videographic Criticism students at the University of Groningen, mixing Soderbergh’s Contagion with the TV speeches of the Dutch king and prime minister during the first wave of COVID -19. It’s in Dutch, but you’ll get the point without understanding the language.

Jaap Kooijman

Associate Professor Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

Explosive Paradox undoubtedly is one of the most personal and moving audiovisual essays that I have after watched, and at the same time presents a convincing criticism of the way Hollywood glorifies violence, not only in films themselves, but also in the way these films are celebrated by film critics and Academy Awards. The essay contrasts the mundaneness of the cinema-turned-liquor-store where Lee first saw the film, back in the 1980s, and the seriousness of the trauma he experienced when confronted with this racially motivated violence. A wonderful piece of videographic criticism and art.

Mastering Dialogue: American Crime

Andreas Halskov and Previously on Perry Mason

Henrik Højer

I select these two audiovisual essays together, because they are the first two of a new series by the Danish 16:9 film journal which is based on a very specific parameter, a constraint in length. The audiovisual essays are 169 seconds (thus 2:49 minutes) long and described by the journal as ‘condensed audiovisual breakdowns’. Both take a US American television series as case study. The constraint in length forces the authors to focus on one specific element and to come straight to the point. Viewers are reminded of the short length as the seconds literally tick away.

Although I find the arguments of both audiovisual essays on, respectively, American Crime and Perry Mason, compelling and convincing, I am most fascinated by their shared form and how a relatively arbitrary constraint in length succeeds in condensing academic arguments about US American television into very seductive bites of television studies knowledge.

Days of Linda

One does not have to be familiar with Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978) to make sense of Days of Linda, a tribute to the actress Linda Manz, whose first film role was playing Linda. The audiovisual essay highlights Manz’s ‘central authorial contributions’ by combining Manz’s voiceover with footage from the film presented in split screen, with shots of a non-speaking Linda on the left and other scenes (some including Linda) on the right. In this way, character Linda does not only get a voice through actress Linda, but her original marginalised and silenced role is emphasised as well.

Adjunct lecturer and video essayist, Northwestern University

This year I was so short on time that I missed out on seeing a lot of videographic work, so even more than in other years, my suggestions are highly subjective. I picked three videos whose originality and/or currentness caught my attention this year.

Katie Bird’s video essay on early stabilisation technologies is a marvellously executed demonstration of videographic scholarship’s ability to simultaneously communicate historical film scholarship and evoke aesthetic, phenomenological experiences. Reflecting upon an under-researched, complex topic in a very accessible (and fun!) way, it’s also a perfect video essay to show in film classes.

Who Ever Heard…?

Matthew Thomas Payne

Payne’s short and playful videographic engagement with a single scene from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance spoke to me because of its marvellous use of rhythm, repetition, and sonic layering. As a sound scholar, I often ponder on the possibilities and limitations of videographic methods to investigate and/or express one’s ideas via sound. Payne’s video certainly does both.

Before the End

Before the End is an interesting case in terms of its circulation and 2020-ness (rather than conceptual or formal novelty). It’s a very simple, short video that uses the basic principles of editing and the Kuleshov effect to join excerpts from separate zoom interviews with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (without the audio) to suggest a narrative sequel to the Before film series. Stone’s video went viral, eventually reaching way more viewers than the original interviews had. It speaks to various intersecting technological, narrative, and communicative desires of this particular moment.

Video essayist

What Do I Want?

This video makes great use of the looping format of social media video and, originating from TikTok, an exciting addition to the ever-monstrously-expanding field of video essay.

For All Mankind: Is The Moon Landing Cinema?

Kyle Kallgren

I mean, if your video essay doesn’t have lego recreations of your subject matter… what are you even doing here? Get out of my house!

Sorry to Bother You – You can’t just tame people

Curio (Eric Sophia and Natalie)

Curio has made so many amazingly ambitious essays this year, but I especially liked this more low key video on white supremacy and capitalism in Sorry To Bother You which people may have missed amidst the excellent creative flair of their higher profile videos.

I’m sure this will be on many lists this year, but Kevin continues to be the most inventive, versatile video essayist out there and… come on… I couldn’t NOT mention this video (as well as the Once Upon a Screen project in general).

We Are Here Because of Those That Are Not

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

I’m maybe stretching the definition of video essay more than I ever have but if there isn’t at least one pick on a list that makes you think “come on now, this is just taking the piss” then is it even a Sight & Sound video essay poll list? This interactive archive of black trans experiences may be neither strictly video nor essay, but it’s one of the most important, creative and emotional things I saw this year. It’s got audio, it’s got visuals and it’s going on the list!

Filmmaker, Director of the first Masters program for Video Essays and Desktop Documentaries (at Merz Akademie)

Purple Sea and Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea: 28 October 2015

Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, Forensic Architecture

These are separate works, but together they encompass the vast range of possibilities that video essays can have in using the same source material. Explanatory in the best sense, Forensic Architecture uses Alzakout’s footage as part of a potent account of a disastrous shipwreck. Alzakout takes her footage in the opposite direction, with a deep exploration into the thoughts and experiences the footage does not reveal. In doing so the film offers a strong rebuke to the instrumentalisation that dominates image discourse.

More about Purple Sea can be found here .

Originally a VR video essay performed live at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, this virtual exploration of the cinematic experience is all the more poignant in a year in which cinemas face an existential crisis and so much of daily life has migrated to a digital simulacrum of itself. Along with Zia Anger’s live online performances of My First Film, it points to exciting new directions for the video essay – interactive and in real time.

Various Creators with the Asian Film Archive (detailed info here )

I should acknowledge that I served as editorial consultant on this, but there is simply no precedent for this massive series of video essays on Asian cinema commissioned by the Asian Film Archive in Singapore, involving an impressive roster of filmmakers, moving image artists and scholars. They premiered last month at the Dharamshala International Film Festival and will circulate over the coming months. I am especially enamoured of Ghosts Like Us by Riar Rizaldi, Spirit Film by Raya Martin, and Irani Bag by Maryam Tafakory.

The most thoroughly and impressively researched academic video essay I’ve seen this year, bringing a heightened and expanded awareness of the physical labor that goes into a shot and how different approaches to technology and craft yield different effects of cinematic embodiment. A video essay that deepens one’s appreciation for the bodily experience of film viewing and filmmaking alike.

Also: Sonic Chronicle Post Sound by Cormac Donnelly.

An experiment in watching propaganda leads to a wholesale reassessment of the assumptions behind progressive documentary filmmaking. A brave self-critique of one’s longstanding practices and ideals in the face of an emerging set of sobering realities.

See also: Indy Vinyl, Interrupted by Ian Garwood.

Part of the Once Upon a Screen series of video essays on childhood film viewing-as-trauma, published on the Cine-Files Journal – this particular entry brings the topic out of the past tense with an exceptional liveness and presence. As my other selections would attest, questions of spectatorship and an expanded cultural and technological framework for understanding cinema are the foci for the video essays that I find most exciting right now. This desktop documentary engages all those themes brilliantly.

Real Talk: Is Breadtube Discussing Race ‘Right’?

Professor Flowers

Working on the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist was among the most significant experiences of the year for me, and through it I learned about several fantastic video essayists working in academia, YouTube and social media. I found especially noteworthy this careful consideration of the performativity of progressive racial politics on YouTube.

Eric Sophia McAllister

Video essayist working on YouTube covering media and cultural analysis, with a particular political focus on queer and leftist topics

I have to get this pick up front because it is the single greatest piece of video essay/documentary content on YouTube, not just this year. Olson has raised the bar absurdly high with this moving, insightful, well-researched, funny, well-shot and ideologically devastating look into the worlds of internet conspiracy theory. This isn’t just a YouTube video about conspiracy theorists, it is a phenomenology. What is always impressive about Dan Olson is how well he structures information for maximum impact, and the “mid point twist” of this video hits like an atom bomb.

A Prison of Our Own Loneliness

Sarah Zedig (let’s talk about stuff.)

This piece subverts the oft-derided talking head form of the YouTube video essay by having Sarah sit staring into the camera NOT talking while her pre-recorded voice-over delivers this essay about the pandemic, loneliness, nations, world politics and media, culminating in a silent scream and then breakdown into tears that is simply one of the most moving things I have ever seen on the platform. By the end of watching this you definitely will feel the catharsis of letting everything out with a ‘good old cry’, but most likely because you will actually cry.

Tyr & Grem (Pamphleteer)

It’s best to acknowledge up front that this video is aping off the style of a video that I made, simply because I want to say that I see how self-serving it might appear to select it but I had to anyway, because this video is simply so so SO good. Tyr & Grem had a double realisation earlier this year when Tyr came out as a trans woman and Grem realised they were, and always had been, a lesbian. This video takes the form of a “Martian Poem” inspired by Alan Moore’s Watchmen and will knock your socks off.

The Ideology of Apocalypse

Jack has been at the top of his game as a media analysis and political commentary essayist for a while – from his ‘Copaganda’ trilogy about police movies to his evolving series on cartoon animals as race metaphor and all the inherent problems therein – but this masterwork taking a broad survey across apocalyptic fiction to study its cultural and ideological trends is the tippy top of the tippy top. Not to mention that in the year of our Lord 2020 the cultural question of how we perceive and process the apocalypse seems uncomfortably relevant.

Twitter and Empathy

In the world of liberal and progressive politics, the notion of ‘empathy’ is often invoked as a virtue, but this essay is really special for questioning what we actually mean when we talk about empathy. Big Joel knocks it out of the park by dissecting the way we evoke this concept and the revelation that it’s actually several different, intersecting and nebulous concepts being crammed under the one umbrella.

Oblivion &  Women

Lilly (mothcub)

Did you know feminism makes games more fun, not less? Lilly knows this. While her channel doesn’t usually engage in media analysis or produce video essays, this was still one of my favourite media analysis essays this year. Lilly takes us on a journey through a quest in Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion and how it seemingly for no reason at all pulls the rug out from under itself and makes the quest less fun, when the obvious answer to any feminist gamer chad would be to go the other way entirely.

The Beginner’s Guide: This Is Not For You

Grace’s essays are always stunningly good. Shockingly good. Upsettingly good. Their essays are sharp, funny, insightful, well researched and paced so well that at the end of a ten-minute What’s So Great About That video I feel like I’ve just watched an hour, but in the best possible way. To paraphrase my esteemed colleague in political commentary, Mr. Rubin, Grace’s videos put my brain in recovery mode from all the high-level important ideas. This particular essay takes a hard look at the cultural, social, and personal implications of interpretation and when and how we should and shouldn’t do it.

Critical writer and video essayist

Days Passed: Lee Kang-Sheng Through the Eyes of Tsai Ming-Liang

Michelle Cho

Once Upon a Screen: On Psycho and The Witches

Daniel mcilwraith.

Video essayist and video editor

Blissfully Between Binaries with Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Carlos natálio.

Film Teacher and Researcher at Católica University (O Porto); Film Programmer at IndieLisboa Film Festival; Film Critic at À pala de Walsh website

One of the reasons why Kevin B. Lee’s work is ground-breaking in video essays because his imagination is always one step ahead. He is constantly reminding us that working with the body of cinema is working with your memories and affections, and circumventing material limitations. Here, childhood cinema is projected on a shadowy wall of a former movie theatre, Platoon is remembered between leaves and trees’ reflections. Violence of the past, violence of the present. An essay about memory and the permanence of racism. Video essays are tools to reedit the present.

Forensickness is a real detective story. Chloé understands the whodunnit potential of the desktop film form and the intellectual investigation of a visual construction. She takes us by the end through her own investigation processes, while making us realise that there are only combinations, versions of the truth. We’ve passed the moment where critical theory intellectuals would point out the ‘spectacle’ in images. At the moment, the faking and ‘unfaking’ of images is a two-way business, intellectuals go along with pastors and internet police works share regards with so-called police experts.

Some Visual Thoughts About Perceptions in Rebecca

Ricardo Vieira Lisboa

Lisboa is a very ironic and shrewd video essayist. Here he is fooling around with Hitchcock’s Rebecca, using cinema’s toolbox of directors and works – Kiarostami’s Copie Conforme, Lang’s Secret Behind the Door, Godard’s Adieu au Language, Cláudia Varejão’s No Escuro do Cinema Descalço os Sapatos. The essay dismantles Rebecca’s work from the themes of signature, drop/marriage, sea/see, idealisation, signature appropriation. In Lisboa’s works always expect the unexpectable: a laugh or an unhappy emoticon, next to a brilliant capacity for film analysis.

In Memoriam

Lucía Alonso Santos

2020 is a year of confinement, although we are able to film inside our homes, inside our heads, and travel virtually. In this honest video essay, Lucía Santos is ‘verifying’ what she knew of Thailand through Apichatpong’s films using Google Street Views. Memories of something not happening as she anticipates Memoria by the Thai director. In what way do the images we have access to replace the cinematic experiences we might have?

L’Assassinat Kennedy au cinéma

Editing together various films and also archive footage, this video essay signals the assassination of John F. Kennedy 57 years ago. More than just documenting and representing the tragic event, Luc Lagier aims at expanding our perception by combining several other films that confuse, momentarily, our perception and feelings towards the event. Suspense without graphic violence is also at play here.

I have always had a fascination with the idea that directors’ works and films can sensually meet and clash through video essays. Which beautiful monsters can be brought to life via these experiments? Ian Magor does this by joining an iconic shot from Notorious by Alfred Hitchcock to Michael Snow’s classic avant-garde Wavelength. The result is disquieting and this tells us how video essays, despite their analytical potentialities, might also look like Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment laboratory.

Shadows of Our Forgotten Montages

Dianela Torres

From watching films other films are born. Giving a form to our cinephile gaze, a body of montage made with what I see and what I make of that seeing. In this beautiful, oneiric video essay, on Sergei Parajanov’s film Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, Dianela states she aimed for “interpretation and dialectical appropriation of rhythmic and metric”, “emotions and the fluid time-space, music and colours”. Montage unto montage, organic appropriations, essay convey aesthetics and we are reminded of Marcus Aurelius’ words: “all things are implicated in one another.”

Daniela Persico

Programmer, Locarno Film Festival / founder, filmidee.it

A video about the investigation as a drive of contemporary man and a gesture of cinematic love.

The expressive elegance of making the art of editing perceived in Parajanov (and in particular in the film Shadows of our forgotten ancestors) as a process of bringing shadows back to life. Fantasmatic and inspiring.

Once Upon a Screen

A collection of gazes on the evocative theme of traumatic childhood encounters: different styles and perspectives that articulate a critical and cinephile discourse open to different interpretations.

Managing Editor at No Film School

Kevin lays bare something you don’t often see in film analysis: a personal account of how a film traumatises. He takes us to the theatre, now a BevMo!, where he first saw Platoon and tells the intensely intimate story of how the film affected him as a kid. It’s a direct emotional connection between the film analyst and the film he’s analysing: the site of traumatisation may have changed but the trauma itself remains.

This video is a shock to the system of film analysis.

How Movies Prepared Us For Coronavirus

Answer: Surprisingly, they pretty much didn’t.

We’re living in a disaster movie.

No, in My Room | A desktop documentary on the making of a video essay

Beyond the Frame

Video essays make me feel dumb. This one makes me feel like we’re all dumb. I love it so much.

David Lynch | Movies As Therapy

The Discarded Image

Clearly there’s a pattern to my selections this year, you guys. I’m very obviously a nervous and emotional wreck or something because I really gravitated to this video essay by The Discarded Image about how David Lynch uses filmmaking as his therapy.

Why The Red Shoes Looked So Stunning

If you want to know how colour can be used to tell a story, watch The Red Shoes. Boom. It’s an absolute masterclass and it’s beautiful and it almost convinced me that ballet was kinda cooler than basketball. This video essay is an excellent primer into the film’s aesthetic and narrative use of red.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Film critic

In alphabetical order:

L’Année Dernière à Dachau

Mark Rappaport ( read synopsis )

A look at the emotional and historical complexity of our aesthetic preferences.

Her Socialist Smile

John Gianvito ( watch trailer )

It offers some things we may not have known about Helen Keller, socialism, and ourselves.

A House is Not a Home: Wright or Wrong

Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa ( watch trailer )

It offers a lyrical and personal look at the relations between architecture and familial dysfunction by examining Frank Loyd Wright’s Rosenbaum house in Alabama. It isn’t my film, but I was interview subject, consultant, and camera assistant on it.

The Social Dilemma

Jeff Orlowski ( stream on Netflix or watch trailer )

It examines the corruption of communications via marketing, demonstrating how capitalism isn’t a victimless crime.

Sportin’ Life

Abel Ferrara ( watch trailer )

Ferra accurately calls it a documentary on the act of making documentaries.

Women According to Men

Saeed Nouri ( watch trailer )

An archival look at Iranian gender relations.

Charlie Shackleton

Filmmaker and sometime film critic

How To with John Wilson

John Wilson (stream on HBO Max or watch trailer )

I can’t think of anything that gives me greater pleasure than lo-fi on a hi-budget, and nobody’s fi is loer than John Wilson, whose sublime new HBO (!) show captured the beauty of the mundane with an ethereal grace made only more poignant by Wilson’s trademark fumbled voiceover. I didn’t expect the field of video essay to produce a more unexpected mainstream crossover this year than Theo Anthony getting an ESPN special (the excellent Subject to Review) but here it was.

Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another

Jessica Sarah Rinland ( watch trailer )

At one of the last social gatherings I attended before the pandemic, a friend told me that their favourite kind of film is one in which “nothing happens, many times”. That description stuck with me in Britain’s first national lockdown, as I rediscovered my taste for cinematic minimalism in newly streaming films like Ben Rivers’s Now, At Last! and – most memorably – this mesmerising study of archaeological restoration. As with all the best films where nothing happens, many times, Rinland’s work was a catalyst for a torrent of personal imaginative thought, and just when I was starting to feel incapable of it.

In a busy year for video essays on conspiratorial thinking (I also enjoyed Dan Olson’s In Search of a Flat Earth and Kirby Ferguson’s Constantly Wrong ), Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s characteristically probing and precise film was the only offering that seemed more concerned with asking questions than giving answers—surely a prerequisite of getting to grips with a cultural sphere increasingly dominated by conspiracy theories.

Leigh Singer

Film Journalist, programmer, video essayist

One of the saving graces of this awful year has been a greater involvement and engagement with student video work. The results across various courses and different countries has been a revelation – so much insight, originality and technical accomplishment. Though I advised on a couple of the videos below, the finished pieces are entirely the students’ own and I feel very fortunate to have watched the work take shape and then become so expertly realised. In the world of video essays, at least, the future looks bright.

Elizaveta Gushchynskaya

A brilliant, probing pop culture mash-up reflecting and refracting life under lockdown that doubles up as a superlative music video. It’s also the first video essay as part of a student course at the Polish-Japanese Institute of Technology, produced within five days, which makes the results even more extraordinary.

Ways of Looking: Playtime

Sergio Martínez Esqueda (password: Tati)

A dazzlingly original, present tense negotiation of Jacques Tati’s comic masterpiece that reveals so much about its multiple, often simultaneous visual delights and examines how different viewing experiences play a part in these discoveries. Another revelatory first time student video, made on the UK ’s National Film & TV School’s MA in Film Studies, Programming and Curation.

Mandy: The Film Concert

Too few video essays go into the audio textures of a film and its score. This one does a superbly effective, visually striking job at conveying complicated technical effects with great clarity. Yet another unbelievably accomplished student project, from the ever-impressive University of Warwick Film Studies department.

So simple, original, elegant, and strangely haunting.

Magnolia Zoomed

A terrific idea, beautifully executed, that resonates in a range of different ways in this most unsettling of years. Could be 2020’s video essay anthem.

Comedy and Tragedy in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite

A video essayist whose growing sophistication and playful touch when examining serious issues gets better every year. Parasite is the video essay gift that keeps on giving, but this is up there with the best feeding off of Bong’s hits.

Let’s Repo! Repo Man’s Plate O’ Shrimp Logic

Miklos Kiss & Shant Bayramian

An inventive, pretzel-logicked (is that a word?), suitably anarchic blast from start to finish, a hit-and-run job that makes you want to (re-)watch the film it hijacks immediately.

Shannon Strucci

video essayist StrucciMovies

Street Cat Rescue: Lionel

Flatbush Cats

Every video by Flatbush Cats is its own touching, elegantly written and edited and edifying little story about a cat. Together they make up a channel that is both a tremendous educational resource and a series of charming vignettes about individual animals and their personalities. You know from the outset that Lionel’s video has an unhappy ending and that it will break your heart, but it’s worth watching anyway, and it’s a fantastic example of what makes this channel so unique and so worth celebrating.

Scout Tafoya

Video essayist, critic and filmmaker

There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse

Nicolás Zukerfeld ( watch trailer )

The video essay casually makes it to the festival circuit. Hypnotic and funny.

last night i dreamt that somebody loved me , The Tale of Eurydice and a letter to adolescence

Haaniyah Angus

My new favourite filmmaker. She doesn’t make traditional video essays, so much as essays written in images. Heartbreakingly raw and emotionally open, even though she’s put barriers between her and her audience (footage from other movies), the connection between them is deeper for its distance. She reaches across mediums with a report on her melancholy, which becomes universal when painted with faces.

A Revolt Without Images (Una revuelta sin imágenes)

Pilar Monsell ( watch trailer )

What Makes a Movie Line Memorable?

Luís Azevedo & Mark Forsythe (Little White Lies)

Crystalline editing from Luis. Just soft as snow.

Milad Tangshir

Iranian filmmaker based in Italy

The Rising of the Moon

James Slaymaker

Surviving Memories

Alessandro Luchetti and Manuela Lazic

Irina Trocan

Lecturer in Film Studies, freelance film critic

Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea: 28 October 2015

While there are many moving films trying to sway the audience into empathy with the perils of migration, few provide such a watertight demonstration: using footage and data from various sources, this video essay/installation follows the play-by-play of an avoidable tragedy. A visually coherent, meticulous and fact-based plea to put human lives ahead of national interests and structure competent institutions accordingly.

The crackdown before Trump’s photo op

Washington Post/Dalton Bennett, Sarah Cahlan, Aaron C. Davis & Joyce Sohyun Lee

Should We Still be Watching Gone with the Wind? Part 1 + Part 2

Cold Crash Pictures

YouTube-standard in form but amazingly communicative in content, this take on the racism of Gone with the Wind is the best chance for anyone on the internet to be heard by the other side. Serge’s imagined viewer is initially respectful of Southern legacy, the monumentality of the 1939 film, skeptical towards accusations of racism and historical inaccuracy. Approaching the film through various videographic means, he builds a case by tackling counterarguments one by one.

Clean with Me (After Dark)

Gabrielle Stemmer ( watch trailer )

A nightmarish vision of what lies behind the shiny surfaces of Cleaning Motivation YouTube, this desktop documentary is borderline-voyeuristic (most likely in tune with how YouTube is meant to be used) and heart-on-its-sleeve empathetic toward the socially isolated women broadcasting themselves (along with the daughters they raise to take on their role). Social media is performative, which is a surprise to no one except the performers themselves.

Repeating Terror in Amat Escalante’s Heli (2013)

Violence is always a tricky subject for videographic exploration – and this take on how the threat of bodily harm exudes from the screen outwards is guaranteed to make you uncomfortable, which is precisely the point.

Like Watching Paint Dry – Éric Rohmer’s My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend

Putting a cinephile spin on a famed diss of Rohmerian cinematic style, this video uses digital wizardry for emphasising individual blocks of colour in an ostensibly plotless film to show where the story really is located: it is to be found in the slow completion of the colour scheme, inspired by a Nicolas de Staël painting that fleetingly appears on a wall as if to confirm an inside-joke of a climax. Like watching paint dry, indeed.

Manual for a Disassembly of Cinema (A Machine for Viewing, episode 3)

A theoretical excursion from cinematic projection to VR interactive gear via North Korean mass gymnastics with a “broken human pixel”, it makes you think of how seeing is altered when mediated by man rather than machine.

David Verdeure

Creator, collector and curator of video essays under the nom de video Filmscalpel

Swings Don’t Swing

Leonhard Müllner

The visual regimes of video games balance between realism and absurdity, between aesthetic refinement and ethic crudeness. There’s a wealth of great video essays and machinima about games. YouTuber eurothug4000 fascinatingly focused on virtual photography within games . But I chose this piece by Leonhard Müllner which virtually visits children’s playgrounds in shooter games. Those playgrounds are used as innocent-looking backdrops to the violent mayhem. Müllner’s video uses the games’ mechanics against themselves to lay bare their visual cynicism. He enacts the revenge of innocence on gamified violence, not in the least through the elegant spatial arrangement of his piece.

I Can’t Stop Watching Contagion

Lockdown life boosted the output of some video essayists and made others sour on the form, but it left nobody indifferent. Several pieces poked fun at our Zoomified existence or lamented our Skyped interactions. Rob Stone fabricated a touching video call between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. The fact that his Before the End went viral proves our need for comforting connections – even if they’re not our own.

Dan Olson watched Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion on repeat. The radical form of his confessional video essay visualises how a film can mark us and how it can serve as ‘emotional inoculation”.

Michigan Coronavirus Protestors Roots

The rhetorical strategies of the video essay can be applied to other subjects than film or television. In this US election year, I saw them being used for political purposes in a variety of ways. There were downright deceitful remixes (no, I won’t link one). There were revelatory side-by-side pieces . There were online experiments that made harrowing use of the absence of image and sound. But because politics (and 2020) can benefit from some levity, I chose a frivolous example for this poll. TikToker rebabeba used the desktop documentary format to get to the root of the problem .

Academic practitioners of the video essay served up some fascinating fare in 2020. It is especially great to see some practitioners confidently conduct formal experiments instead of sticking to tried and tested audiovisual strategies. Jill Walker Rettberg for instance enthusiastically embraced Snapchat technology in her video essay on the app’s biometrics .

Katie Bird’s video essay starts off conventionally with a mini-documentary on the early history of Steadicam and Panaglide. But her piece then builds on this historical research with a series of imaginative (and even speculative) visual experiments that make the most of the videographic form.

John Cleese + Anthony Braxton

Olivier Godin

Video essays and performance studies are a natural match. This piece for the Canadian website Zoom Out is another fine piece of evidence. Olivier Godin matches up the work of two performers: one an actor and the other a musician. Scenes from the legendary British sitcom Fawlty Towers are rescored using Anthony Braxton’s free-jazz composition For Alto. The music emphasises Cleese’s erratic physical comedy and brings out the unpredictable dynamism of his dialogue delivery. This counterintuitive combination prompts the viewer to consider Cleese’s dialogue delivery as a musical improvisation – one with the unpredictable energy of Braxton’s jazz.

Michael Witt

Professor of Cinema at the University of Roehampton, London

Characteristically sharp, inventive audiovisual film criticism from the great Mark Rappaport.

Illuminating audiovisual study of the history, uses and effects of the Steadicam and Panaglide.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman

Moving personal exploration of the terms of the film’s title.

Golden Gate

William Brown

Insightful audiovisual investigation of the cinematic representation of the Golden Gate Bridge from a post-humanist perspective.

Thought-provoking poetic study of the relationship between successive image recording technologies and what they capture and omit.

Against the Day

Succinct reflection on the role of light in Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre (1998).

Further reading

The best film books of 2020, the best blu-rays and dvds of 2020, the 50 best films of 2020, sign up for sight and sound’s weekly film bulletin and more.

News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month.

Other things to explore

The best video essays of 2023.

By Queline Meadows

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.

40 Best Essays of All Time (Including Links & Writing Tips)

I wanted to improve my writing skills. I thought that reading the forty best essays of all time would bring me closer to my goal.

I had little money (buying forty collections of essays was out of the question) so I’ve found them online instead. I’ve hacked through piles of them, and finally, I’ve found the great ones. Now I want to share the whole list with you (with the addition of my notes about writing). Each item on the list has a direct link to the essay, so please click away and indulge yourself. Also, next to each essay, there’s an image of the book that contains the original work.

About this essay list:

Reading essays is like indulging in candy; once you start, it’s hard to stop. I sought out essays that were not only well-crafted but also impactful. These pieces genuinely shifted my perspective. Whether you’re diving in for enjoyment or to hone your writing, these essays promise to leave an imprint. It’s fascinating how an essay can resonate with you, and even if details fade, its essence remains. I haven’t ranked them in any way; they’re all stellar. Skim through, explore the summaries, and pick up some writing tips along the way. For more essay gems, consider “Best American Essays” by Joyce Carol Oates or “101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think” curated by Brianna Wiest.

40 Best Essays of All Time (With Links And Writing Tips)

1. david sedaris – laugh, kookaburra.

A great family drama takes place against the backdrop of the Australian wilderness. And the Kookaburra laughs… This is one of the top essays of the lot. It’s a great mixture of family reminiscences, travel writing, and advice on what’s most important in life. You’ll also learn an awful lot about the curious culture of the Aussies.

Writing tips from the essay:

• Use analogies (you can make it funny or dramatic to achieve a better effect): “Don’t be afraid,” the waiter said, and he talked to the kookaburra in a soothing, respectful voice, the way you might to a child with a switchblade in his hand”.
• You can touch a few cognate stories in one piece of writing . Reveal the layers gradually. Intertwine them and arrange for a grand finale where everything is finally clear.
• Be on the side of the reader. Become their friend and tell the story naturally, like around the dinner table.
• Use short, punchy sentences. Tell only as much as is required to make your point vivid.
• Conjure sentences that create actual feelings: “I had on a sweater and a jacket, but they weren’t quite enough, and I shivered as we walked toward the body, and saw that it was a . . . what, exactly?”
• You may ask a few tough questions in a row to provoke interest and let the reader think.

2. Charles D’Ambrosio – Documents

Do you think your life punches you in the face all too often? After reading this essay, you will change your mind. Reading about loss and hardships often makes us sad at first, but then enables us to feel grateful for our lives . D’Ambrosio shares his documents (poems, letters) that had a major impact on his life, and brilliantly shows how not to let go of the past.

• The most powerful stories are about your family and the childhood moments that shaped your life.
• You don’t need to build up tension and pussyfoot around the crux of the matter. Instead, surprise the reader by telling it like it is: “The poem was an allegory about his desire to leave our family.” Or: “My father had three sons. I’m the eldest; Danny, the youngest, killed himself sixteen years ago”.
• You can use real documents and quotes from your family and friends. It makes it so much more personal and relatable.
• Don’t cringe before the long sentence if you know it’s a strong one.
• At the end of the essay, you may come back to the first theme to close the circuit.
• Using slightly poetic language is acceptable, as long as it improves the story.

3. E. B. White – Once more to the lake

What does it mean to be a father? Can you see your younger self, reflected in your child? This beautiful essay tells the story of the author, his son, and their traditional stay at a placid lake hidden within the forests of Maine. This place of nature is filled with sunshine and childhood memories. It also provides for one of the greatest meditations on nature and the passing of time.

• Use sophisticated language, but not at the expense of readability.
• Use vivid language to trigger the mirror neurons in the reader’s brain: “I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from train windows”.
• It’s important to mention universal feelings that are rarely talked about (it helps to create a bond between two minds): “You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings when the lake was cool and motionless”.
• Animate the inanimate: “this constant and trustworthy body of water”.
• Mentioning tales of yore is a good way to add some mystery and timelessness to your piece.
• Using double, or even triple “and” in one sentence is fine. It can make the sentence sing.

4. Zadie Smith – Fail Better

Aspiring writers feel tremendous pressure to perform. The daily quota of words often turns out to be nothing more than gibberish. What then? Also, should the writer please the reader or should she be fully independent? What does it mean to be a writer, anyway? This essay is an attempt to answer these questions, but its contents are not only meant for scribblers. Within it, you’ll find some great notes about literary criticism, how we treat art , and the responsibility of the reader.

• A perfect novel ? There’s no such thing.
• The novel always reflects the inner world of the writer. That’s why we’re fascinated with writers.
• Writing is not simply about craftsmanship, but about taking your reader to the unknown lands. In the words of Christopher Hitchens: “Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.”
• Style comes from your unique personality and the perception of the world. It takes time to develop it.
• Never try to tell it all. “All” can never be put into language. Take a part of it and tell it the best you can.
• Avoid being cliché. Try to infuse new life into your writing .
• Writing is about your way of being. It’s your game. Paradoxically, if you try to please everyone, your writing will become less appealing. You’ll lose the interest of the readers. This rule doesn’t apply in the business world where you have to write for a specific person (a target audience).
• As a reader, you have responsibilities too. According to the critics, every thirty years, there’s just a handful of great novels. Maybe it’s true. But there’s also an element of personal connection between the reader and the writer. That’s why for one person a novel is a marvel, while for the other, nothing special at all. That’s why you have to search and find the author who will touch you.

5. Virginia Woolf – Death of the Moth

Amid an ordinary day, sitting in a room of her own, Virginia Woolf tells about the epic struggle for survival and the evanescence of life. This short essay is truly powerful. In the beginning, the atmosphere is happy. Life is in full force. And then, suddenly, it fades away. This sense of melancholy would mark the last years of Woolf’s life.

• The melody of language… A good sentence is like music: “Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow- underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us”.
• You can show the grandest in the mundane (for example, the moth at your window and the drama of life and death).
• Using simple comparisons makes the style more lucid: “Being intent on other matters I watched these futile attempts for a time without thinking, unconsciously waiting for him to resume his flight, as one waits for a machine, that has stopped momentarily, to start again without considering the reason of its failure”.

6. Meghan Daum – My Misspent Youth

Many of us, at some point or another, dream about living in New York. Meghan Daum’s take on the subject differs slightly from what you might expect. There’s no glamour, no Broadway shows, and no fancy restaurants. Instead, there’s the sullen reality of living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. You’ll get all the juicy details about credit cards, overdue payments, and scrambling for survival. It’s a word of warning. But it’s also a great story about shattered fantasies of living in a big city. Word on the street is: “You ain’t promised mañana in the rotten manzana.”

• You can paint a picture of your former self. What did that person believe in? What kind of world did he or she live in?
• “The day that turned your life around” is a good theme you may use in a story. Memories of a special day are filled with emotions. Strong emotions often breed strong writing.
• Use cultural references and relevant slang to create a context for your story.
• You can tell all the details of the story, even if in some people’s eyes you’ll look like the dumbest motherfucker that ever lived. It adds to the originality.
• Say it in a new way: “In this mindset, the dollars spent, like the mechanics of a machine no one bothers to understand, become an abstraction, an intangible avenue toward self-expression, a mere vehicle of style”.
• You can mix your personal story with the zeitgeist or the ethos of the time.

7. Roger Ebert – Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Probably the greatest film critic of all time, Roger Ebert, tells us not to rage against the dying of the light. This essay is full of courage, erudition, and humanism. From it, we learn about what it means to be dying (Hitchens’ “Mortality” is another great work on that theme). But there’s so much more. It’s a great celebration of life too. It’s about not giving up, and sticking to your principles until the very end. It brings to mind the famous scene from Dead Poets Society where John Keating (Robin Williams) tells his students: “Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary”.

• Start with a powerful sentence: “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear.”
• Use quotes to prove your point -”‘Ask someone how they feel about death’, he said, ‘and they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die’. Ask them, ‘In the next 30 seconds?’ No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen”.
• Admit the basic truths about reality in a childlike way (especially after pondering quantum physics) – “I believe my wristwatch exists, and even when I am unconscious, it is ticking all the same. You have to start somewhere”.
• Let other thinkers prove your point. Use quotes and ideas from your favorite authors and friends.

8. George Orwell – Shooting an Elephant

Even after one reading, you’ll remember this one for years. The story, set in British Burma, is about shooting an elephant (it’s not for the squeamish). It’s also the most powerful denunciation of colonialism ever put into writing. Orwell, apparently a free representative of British rule, feels to be nothing more than a puppet succumbing to the whim of the mob.

• The first sentence is the most important one: “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me”.
• You can use just the first paragraph to set the stage for the whole piece of prose.
• Use beautiful language that stirs the imagination: “I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains.” Or: “I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have.”
• If you’ve ever been to war, you will have a story to tell: “(Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.)”
• Use simple words, and admit the sad truth only you can perceive: “They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching”.
• Share words of wisdom to add texture to the writing: “I perceived at this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his freedom that he destroys.”
• I highly recommend reading everything written by Orwell, especially if you’re looking for the best essay collections on Amazon or Goodreads.

9. George Orwell – A Hanging

It’s just another day in Burma – time to hang a man. Without much ado, Orwell recounts the grim reality of taking another person’s life. A man is taken from his cage and in a few minutes, he’s going to be hanged. The most horrible thing is the normality of it. It’s a powerful story about human nature. Also, there’s an extraordinary incident with the dog, but I won’t get ahead of myself.

• Create brilliant, yet short descriptions of characters: “He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting mustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the mustache of a comic man on the films”.
• Understand and share the felt presence of a unique experience: “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man”.
• Make your readers hear the sound that will stay with them forever: “And then when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”
• Make the ending original by refusing the tendency to seek closure or summing it up.

10. Christopher Hitchens – Assassins of The Mind

In one of the greatest essays written in defense of free speech, Christopher Hitchens shares many examples of how modern media kneel to the explicit threats of violence posed by Islamic extremists. He recounts the story of his friend, Salman Rushdie, author of Satanic Verses who, for many years, had to watch over his shoulder because of the fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini. With his usual wit, Hitchens shares various examples of people who died because of their opinions and of editors who refuse to publish anything related to Islam because of fear (and it was written long before the Charlie Hebdo massacre). After reading the essay, you realize that freedom of expression is one of the most precious things we have and that we have to fight for it. I highly recommend all essay collections penned by Hitchens, especially the ones written for Vanity Fair.

• Assume that the readers will know the cultural references. When they do, their self-esteem goes up – they are a part of an insider group.
• When proving your point, give a variety of real-life examples from eclectic sources. Leave no room for ambiguity or vagueness. Research and overall knowledge are essential here.
• Use italics to emphasize a specific word or phrase (here I use the underlining): “We live now in a climate where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal. In consequence, several things have not happened.”
• Think about how to make it sound more original: “So there is now a hidden partner in our cultural and academic and publishing and the broadcasting world: a shadowy figure that has, uninvited, drawn up a chair to the table.”

11. Christopher Hitchens – The New Commandments

It’s high time to shatter the tablets and amend the biblical rules of conduct. Watch, as Christopher Hitchens slays one commandment after the other on moral, as well as historical grounds. For example, did you know that there are many versions of the divine law dictated by God to Moses which you can find in the Bible? Aren’t we thus empowered to write our version of a proper moral code? If you approach it with an open mind, this essay may change the way you think about the Bible and religion.

• Take the iconoclastic approach. Have a party on the hallowed soil.
• Use humor to undermine orthodox ideas (it seems to be the best way to deal with an established authority).
• Use sarcasm and irony when appropriate (or not): “Nobody is opposed to a day of rest. The international Communist movement got its start by proclaiming a strike for an eight-hour day on May 1, 1886, against Christian employers who used child labor seven days a week”.
• Defeat God on legal grounds: “Wise lawmakers know that it is a mistake to promulgate legislation that is impossible to obey”.
• Be ruthless in the logic of your argument. Provide evidence.

12. Phillip Lopate – Against Joie de Vivre

While reading this fantastic essay, this quote from Slavoj Žižek kept coming back to me: “I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves”. I can bear the onus of happiness or joie de vivre for some time. But this force enables me to get free and wallow in the sweet feelings of melancholy and nostalgia. By reading this work of Lopate, you’ll enter into the world of an intelligent man who finds most social rituals a drag. It’s worth exploring.

• Go against the grain. Be flamboyant and controversial (if you can handle it).
• Treat the paragraph like a group of thoughts on one theme. Next paragraph, next theme.
• Use references to other artists to set the context and enrich the prose: “These sunny little canvases with their talented innocence, the third-generation spirit of Montmartre, bore testimony to a love of life so unbending as to leave an impression of rigid narrow-mindedness as extreme as any Savonarola. Their rejection of sorrow was total”.
• Capture the emotions in life that are universal, yet remain unspoken.
• Don’t be afraid to share your intimate experiences.

13. Philip Larkin – The Pleasure Principle

This piece comes from the Required Writing collection of personal essays. Larkin argues that reading in verse should be a source of intimate pleasure – not a medley of unintelligible thoughts that only the author can (or can’t?) decipher. It’s a sobering take on modern poetry and a great call to action for all those involved in it. Well worth a read.

• Write about complicated ideas (such as poetry) simply. You can change how people look at things if you express yourself enough.
• Go boldly. The reader wants a bold writer: “We seem to be producing a new kind of bad poetry, not the old kind that tries to move the reader and fails, but one that does not even try”.
• Play with words and sentence length. Create music: “It is time some of you playboys realized, says the judge, that reading a poem is hard work. Fourteen days in stir. Next case”.
• Persuade the reader to take action. Here, direct language is the most effective.

14. Sigmund Freud – Thoughts for the Times on War and Death

This essay reveals Freud’s disillusionment with the whole project of Western civilization. How the peaceful European countries could engage in a war that would eventually cost over 17 million lives? What stirs people to kill each other? Is it their nature, or are they puppets of imperial forces with agendas of their own? From the perspective of time, this work by Freud doesn’t seem to be fully accurate. Even so, it’s well worth your time.

• Commence with long words derived from Latin. Get grandiloquent, make your argument incontrovertible, and leave your audience discombobulated.
• Use unending sentences, so that the reader feels confused, yet impressed.
• Say it well: “In this way, he enjoyed the blue sea and the grey; the beauty of snow-covered mountains and green meadowlands; the magic of northern forests and the splendor of southern vegetation; the mood evoked by landscapes that recall great historical events, and the silence of untouched nature”.
• Human nature is a subject that never gets dry.

15. Zadie Smith – Some Notes on Attunement

“You are privy to a great becoming, but you recognize nothing” – Francis Dolarhyde. This one is about the elusiveness of change occurring within you. For Zadie, it was hard to attune to the vibes of Joni Mitchell – especially her Blue album. But eventually, she grew up to appreciate her genius, and all the other things changed as well. This top essay is all about the relationship between humans, and art. We shouldn’t like art because we’re supposed to. We should like it because it has an instantaneous, emotional effect on us. Although, according to Stansfield (Gary Oldman) in Léon, liking Beethoven is rather mandatory.

• Build an expectation of what’s coming: “The first time I heard her I didn’t hear her at all”.
• Don’t be afraid of repetition if it feels good.
• Psychedelic drugs let you appreciate things you never appreciated.
• Intertwine a personal journey with philosophical musings.
• Show rather than tell: “My friends pitied their eyes. The same look the faithful give you as you hand them back their “literature” and close the door in their faces”.
• Let the poets speak for you: “That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no
• more, / And all its dizzy raptures”.
• By voicing your anxieties, you can heal the anxieties of the reader. In that way, you say: “I’m just like you. I’m your friend in this struggle”.
• Admit your flaws to make your persona more relatable.

16. Annie Dillard – Total Eclipse

My imagination was always stirred by the scene of the solar eclipse in Pharaoh, by Boleslaw Prus. I wondered about the shock of the disoriented crowd when they saw how their ruler could switch off the light. Getting immersed in this essay by Annie Dillard has a similar effect. It produces amazement and some kind of primeval fear. It’s not only the environment that changes; it’s your mind and the perception of the world. After the eclipse, nothing is going to be the same again.

• Yet again, the power of the first sentence draws you in: “It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass”.
• Don’t miss the extraordinary scene. Then describe it: “Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring”.
• Use colloquial language. Write as you talk. Short sentences often win.
• Contrast the numinous with the mundane to enthrall the reader.

17. Édouard Levé – When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue

This suicidally beautiful essay will teach you a lot about the appreciation of life and the struggle with mental illness. It’s a collection of personal, apparently unrelated thoughts that show us the rich interior of the author. You look at the real-time thoughts of another person, and then recognize the same patterns within yourself… It sounds like a confession of a person who’s about to take their life, and it’s striking in its originality.

• Use the stream-of-consciousness technique and put random thoughts on paper. Then, polish them: “I have attempted suicide once, I’ve been tempted four times to attempt it”.
• Place the treasure deep within the story: “When I look at a strawberry, I think of a tongue, when I lick one, of a kiss”.
• Don’t worry about what people might think. The more you expose, the more powerful the writing. Readers also take part in the great drama. They experience universal emotions that mostly stay inside.  You can translate them into writing.

18. Gloria E. Anzaldúa – How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Anzaldúa, who was born in south Texas, had to struggle to find her true identity. She was American, but her culture was grounded in Mexico. In this way, she and her people were not fully respected in either of the countries. This essay is an account of her journey of becoming the ambassador of the Chicano (Mexican-American) culture. It’s full of anecdotes, interesting references, and different shades of Spanish. It’s a window into a new cultural dimension that you’ve never experienced before.

• If your mother tongue is not English, but you write in English, use some of your unique homeland vocabulary.
• You come from a rich cultural heritage. You can share it with people who never heard about it, and are not even looking for it, but it is of immense value to them when they discover it.
• Never forget about your identity. It is precious. It is a part of who you are. Even if you migrate, try to preserve it. Use it to your best advantage and become the voice of other people in the same situation.
• Tell them what’s really on your mind: “So if you want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language”.

19. Kurt Vonnegut – Dispatch From A Man Without a Country

In terms of style, this essay is flawless. It’s simple, conversational, humorous, and yet, full of wisdom. And when Vonnegut becomes a teacher and draws an axis of “beginning – end”, and, “good fortune – bad fortune” to explain literature, it becomes outright hilarious. It’s hard to find an author with such a down-to-earth approach. He doesn’t need to get intellectual to prove a point. And the point could be summed up by the quote from Great Expectations – “On the Rampage, Pip, and off the Rampage, Pip – such is Life!”

• Start with a curious question: “Do you know what a twerp is?”
• Surprise your readers with uncanny analogies: “I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It’s as though I had taken over the family Esso station.”
• Use your natural language without too many special effects. In time, the style will crystalize.
• An amusing lesson in writing from Mr. Vonnegut: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college”.
• You can put actual images or vignettes between the paragraphs to illustrate something.

20. Mary Ruefle – On Fear

Most psychologists and gurus agree that fear is the greatest enemy of success or any creative activity. It’s programmed into our minds to keep us away from imaginary harm. Mary Ruefle takes on this basic human emotion with flair. She explores fear from so many angles (especially in the world of poetry-writing) that at the end of this personal essay, you will look at it, dissect it, untangle it, and hopefully be able to say “f**k you” the next time your brain is trying to stop you.

• Research your subject thoroughly. Ask people, have interviews, get expert opinions, and gather as much information as possible. Then scavenge through the fields of data, and pull out the golden bits that will let your prose shine.
• Use powerful quotes to add color to your story: “The poet who embarks on the creation of the poem (as I know by experience), begins with the aimless sensation of a hunter about to embark on a night hunt through the remotest of forests. Unaccountable dread stirs in his heart”. – Lorca.
• Writing advice from the essay: “One of the fears a young writer has is not being able to write as well as he or she wants to, the fear of not being able to sound like X or Y, a favorite author. But out of fear, hopefully, is born a young writer’s voice”.

21. Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation

In this highly intellectual essay, Sontag fights for art and its interpretation. It’s a great lesson, especially for critics and interpreters who endlessly chew on works that simply defy interpretation. Why don’t we just leave the art alone? I always hated it when at school they asked me: “What did the author have in mind when he did X or Y?” Iēsous Pantocrator! Hell if I know! I will judge it through my subjective experience!

• Leave the art alone: “Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities”.
• When you have something really important to say, style matters less.
• There’s no use in creating a second meaning or inviting interpretation of our art. Just leave it be and let it speak for itself.

22. Nora Ephron – A Few Words About Breasts

This is a heartwarming, coming-of-age story about a young girl who waits in vain for her breasts to grow. It’s simply a humorous and pleasurable read. The size of breasts is a big deal for women. If you’re a man, you may peek into the mind of a woman and learn many interesting things. If you’re a woman, maybe you’ll be able to relate and at last, be at peace with your bosom.

• Touch an interesting subject and establish a strong connection with the readers (in that case, women with small breasts). Let your personality shine through the written piece. If you are lighthearted, show it.
• Use hyphens to create an impression of real talk: “My house was full of apples and peaches and milk and homemade chocolate chip cookies – which were nice, and good for you, but-not-right-before-dinner-or-you’ll-spoil-your-appetite.”
• Use present tense when you tell a story to add more life to it.
• Share the pronounced, memorable traits of characters: “A previous girlfriend named Solange, who was famous throughout Beverly Hills High School for having no pigment in her right eyebrow, had knitted them for him (angora dice)”.

23. Carl Sagan – Does Truth Matter – Science, Pseudoscience, and Civilization

Carl Sagan was one of the greatest proponents of skepticism, and an author of numerous books, including one of my all-time favorites – The Demon-Haunted World . He was also a renowned physicist and the host of the fantastic Cosmos: A Personal Voyage series, which inspired a whole generation to uncover the mysteries of the cosmos. He was also a dedicated weed smoker – clearly ahead of his time. The essay that you’re about to read is a crystallization of his views about true science, and why you should check the evidence before believing in UFOs or similar sorts of crap.

• Tell people the brutal truth they need to hear. Be the one who spells it out for them.
• Give a multitude of examples to prove your point. Giving hard facts helps to establish trust with the readers and show the veracity of your arguments.
• Recommend a good book that will change your reader’s minds – How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

24. Paul Graham – How To Do What You Love

How To Do What You Love should be read by every college student and young adult. The Internet is flooded with a large number of articles and videos that are supposed to tell you what to do with your life. Most of them are worthless, but this one is different. It’s sincere, and there’s no hidden agenda behind it. There’s so much we take for granted – what we study, where we work, what we do in our free time… Surely we have another two hundred years to figure it out, right? Life’s too short to be so naïve. Please, read the essay and let it help you gain fulfillment from your work.

• Ask simple, yet thought-provoking questions (especially at the beginning of the paragraph) to engage the reader: “How much are you supposed to like what you do?”
• Let the readers question their basic assumptions: “Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like”.
• If you’re writing for a younger audience, you can act as a mentor. It’s beneficial for younger people to read a few words of advice from a person with experience.

25. John Jeremiah Sullivan – Mister Lytle

A young, aspiring writer is about to become a nurse of a fading writer – Mister Lytle (Andrew Nelson Lytle), and there will be trouble. This essay by Sullivan is probably my favorite one from the whole list. The amount of beautiful sentences it contains is just overwhelming. But that’s just a part of its charm. It also takes you to the Old South which has an incredible atmosphere. It’s grim and tawny but you want to stay there for a while.

• Short, distinct sentences are often the most powerful ones: “He had a deathbed, in other words. He didn’t go suddenly”.
• Stay consistent with the mood of the story. When reading Mister Lytle you are immersed in that southern, forsaken, gloomy world, and it’s a pleasure.
• The spectacular language that captures it all: “His French was superb, but his accent in English was best—that extinct mid-Southern, land-grant pioneer speech, with its tinges of the abandoned Celtic urban Northeast (“boned” for burned) and its raw gentility”.
• This essay is just too good. You have to read it.

26. Joan Didion – On Self Respect

Normally, with that title, you would expect some straightforward advice about how to improve your character and get on with your goddamn life – but not from Joan Didion. From the very beginning, you can feel the depth of her thinking, and the unmistakable style of a true woman who’s been hurt. You can learn more from this essay than from whole books about self-improvement . It reminds me of the scene from True Detective, where Frank Semyon tells Ray Velcoro to “own it” after he realizes he killed the wrong man all these years ago. I guess we all have to “own it”, recognize our mistakes, and move forward sometimes.

• Share your moral advice: “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs”.
• It’s worth exploring the subject further from a different angle. It doesn’t matter how many people have already written on self-respect or self-reliance – you can still write passionately about it.
• Whatever happens, you must take responsibility for it. Brave the storms of discontent.

27. Susan Sontag – Notes on Camp

I’ve never read anything so thorough and lucid about an artistic current. After reading this essay, you will know what camp is. But not only that – you will learn about so many artists you’ve never heard of. You will follow their traces and go to places where you’ve never been before. You will vastly increase your appreciation of art. It’s interesting how something written as a list could be so amazing. All the listicles we usually see on the web simply cannot compare with it.

• Talking about artistic sensibilities is a tough job. When you read the essay, you will see how much research, thought and raw intellect came into it. But that’s one of the reasons why people still read it today, even though it was written in 1964.
• You can choose an unorthodox way of expression in the medium for which you produce. For example, Notes on Camp is a listicle – one of the most popular content formats on the web. But in the olden days, it was uncommon to see it in print form.
• Just think about what is camp: “And third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling”.

28. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self-Reliance

That’s the oldest one from the lot. Written in 1841, it still inspires generations of people. It will let you understand what it means to be self-made. It contains some of the most memorable quotes of all time. I don’t know why, but this one especially touched me: “Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design, and posterity seems to follow his steps as a train of clients”. Now isn’t it purely individualistic, American thought? Emerson told me (and he will tell you) to do something amazing with my life. The language it contains is a bit archaic, but that just adds to the weight of the argument. You can consider it to be a meeting with a great philosopher who shaped the ethos of the modern United States.

• You can start with a powerful poem that will set the stage for your work.
• Be free in your creative flow. Do not wait for the approval of others: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness”.
• Use rhetorical questions to strengthen your argument: “I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly say a new and spontaneous word?”

29. David Foster Wallace – Consider The Lobster

When you want simple field notes about a food festival, you needn’t send there the formidable David Foster Wallace. He sees right through the hypocrisy and cruelty behind killing hundreds of thousands of innocent lobsters – by boiling them alive. This essay uncovers some of the worst traits of modern American people. There are no apologies or hedging one’s bets. There’s just plain truth that stabs you in the eye like a lobster claw. After reading this essay, you may reconsider the whole animal-eating business.

• When it’s important, say it plainly and stagger the reader: “[Lobsters] survive right up until they’re boiled. Most of us have been in supermarkets or restaurants that feature tanks of live lobster, from which you can pick out your supper while it watches you point”.
• In your writing, put exact quotes of the people you’ve been interviewing (including slang and grammatical errors). It makes it more vivid, and interesting.
• You can use humor in serious situations to make your story grotesque.
• Use captions to expound on interesting points of your essay.

30. David Foster Wallace – The Nature of the Fun

The famous novelist and author of the most powerful commencement speech ever done is going to tell you about the joys and sorrows of writing a work of fiction. It’s like taking care of a mutant child that constantly oozes smelly liquids. But you love that child and you want others to love it too. It’s a very humorous account of what it means to be an author. If you ever plan to write a novel, you should read that one. And the story about the Chinese farmer is just priceless.

• Base your point on a chimerical analogy. Here, the writer’s unfinished work is a “hideously damaged infant”.
• Even in expository writing, you may share an interesting story to keep things lively.
• Share your true emotions (even when you think they won’t interest anyone). Often, that’s exactly what will interest the reader.
• Read the whole essay for marvelous advice on writing fiction.

31. Margaret Atwood – Attitude

This is not an essay per se, but I included it on the list for the sake of variety. It was delivered as a commencement speech at The University of Toronto, and it’s about keeping the right attitude. Soon after leaving university, most graduates have to forget about safety, parties, and travel and start a new life – one filled with a painful routine that will last until they drop. Atwood says that you don’t have to accept that. You can choose how you react to everything that happens to you (and you don’t have to stay in that dead-end job for the rest of your days).

• At times, we are all too eager to persuade, but the strongest persuasion is not forceful. It’s subtle. It speaks to the heart. It affects you gradually.
• You may be tempted to talk about a subject by first stating what it is not, rather than what it is. Try to avoid that.
• Simple advice for writers (and life in general): “When faced with the inevitable, you always have a choice. You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it”.

32. Jo Ann Beard – The Fourth State of Matter

Read that one as soon as possible. It’s one of the most masterful and impactful essays you’ll ever read. It’s like a good horror – a slow build-up, and then your jaw drops to the ground. To summarize the story would be to spoil it, so I recommend that you just dig in and devour this essay in one sitting. It’s a perfect example of “show, don’t tell” writing, where the actions of characters are enough to create the right effect. No need for flowery adjectives here.

• The best story you will tell is going to come from your personal experience.
• Use mysteries that will nag the reader. For example, at the beginning of the essay, we learn about the “vanished husband” but there’s no explanation. We have to keep reading to get the answer.
• Explain it in simple terms: “You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma”. Why complicate?

33. Terence McKenna – Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness

To me, Terence McKenna was one of the most interesting thinkers of the twentieth century. His many lectures (now available on YouTube) attracted millions of people who suspect that consciousness holds secrets yet to be unveiled. McKenna consumed psychedelic drugs for most of his life and it shows (in a positive way). Many people consider him a looney, and a hippie, but he was so much more than that. He dared to go into the abyss of his psyche and come back to tell the tale. He also wrote many books (the most famous being Food Of The Gods ), built a huge botanical garden in Hawaii , lived with shamans, and was a connoisseur of all things enigmatic and obscure. Take a look at this essay, and learn more about the explorations of the subconscious mind.

• Become the original thinker, but remember that it may require extraordinary measures: “I call myself an explorer rather than a scientist because the area that I’m looking at contains insufficient data to support even the dream of being a science”.
• Learn new words every day to make your thoughts lucid.
• Come up with the most outlandish ideas to push the envelope of what’s possible. Don’t take things for granted or become intellectually lazy. Question everything.

34. Eudora Welty – The Little Store

By reading this little-known essay, you will be transported into the world of the old American South. It’s a remembrance of trips to the little store in a little town. It’s warm and straightforward, and when you read it, you feel like a child once more. All these beautiful memories live inside of us. They lay somewhere deep in our minds, hidden from sight. The work by Eudora Welty is an attempt to uncover some of them and let you get reacquainted with some smells and tastes of the past.

• When you’re from the South, flaunt it. It’s still good old English but sometimes it sounds so foreign. I can hear the Southern accent too: “There were almost tangible smells – licorice recently sucked in a child’s cheek, dill-pickle brine that had leaked through a paper sack in a fresh trail across the wooden floor, ammonia-loaded ice that had been hoisted from wet Croker sacks and slammed into the icebox with its sweet butter at the door, and perhaps the smell of still-untrapped mice”.
• Yet again, never forget your roots.
• Childhood stories can be the most powerful ones. You can write about how they shaped you.

35. John McPhee – The Search for Marvin Gardens

The Search for Marvin Gardens contains many layers of meaning. It’s a story about a Monopoly championship, but also, it’s the author’s search for the lost streets visible on the board of the famous board game. It also presents a historical perspective on the rise and fall of civilizations, and on Atlantic City, which once was a lively place, and then, slowly declined, the streets filled with dirt and broken windows.

• There’s nothing like irony: “A sign- ‘Slow, Children at Play’- has been bent backward by an automobile”.
• Telling the story in apparently unrelated fragments is sometimes better than telling the whole thing in a logical order.
• Creativity is everything. The best writing may come just from connecting two ideas and mixing them to achieve a great effect. Shush! The muse is whispering.

36. Maxine Hong Kingston – No Name Woman

A dead body at the bottom of the well makes for a beautiful literary device. The first line of Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name Is Red delivers it perfectly: “I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well”. There’s something creepy about the idea of the well. Just think about the “It puts the lotion in the basket” scene from The Silence of the Lambs. In the first paragraph of Kingston’s essay, we learn about a suicide committed by uncommon means of jumping into the well. But this time it’s a real story. Who was this woman? Why did she do it? Read the essay.

• Mysterious death always gets attention. The macabre details are like daiquiris on a hot day – you savor them – you don’t let them spill.
• One sentence can speak volumes: “But the rare urge west had fixed upon our family, and so my aunt crossed boundaries not delineated in space”.
• It’s interesting to write about cultural differences – especially if you have the relevant experience. Something normal for us is unthinkable for others. Show this different world.
• The subject of sex is never boring.

37. Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is one of the most famous collections of essays of all time. In it, you will find a curious piece called On Keeping A Notebook. It’s not only a meditation about keeping a journal. It’s also Didion’s reconciliation with her past self. After reading it, you will seriously reconsider your life’s choices and look at your life from a wider perspective.

• When you write things down in your journal, be more specific – unless you want to write a deep essay about it years later.
• Use the beauty of the language to relate to the past: “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing ‘How High the Moon’ on the car radio”.
• Drop some brand names if you want to feel posh.

38. Joan Didion – Goodbye To All That

This one touched me because I also lived in New York City for a while. I don’t know why, but stories about life in NYC are so often full of charm and this eerie-melancholy-jazz feeling. They are powerful. They go like this: “There was a hard blizzard in NYC. As the sound of sirens faded, Tony descended into the dark world of hustlers and pimps.” That’s pulp literature but in the context of NYC, it always sounds cool. Anyway, this essay is amazing in too many ways. You just have to read it.

• Talk about New York City. They will read it.
• Talk about the human experience: “It did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young?”
• Look back at your life and reexamine it. Draw lessons from it.

39. George Orwell – Reflections on Gandhi

George Orwell could see things as they were. No exaggeration, no romanticism – just facts. He recognized totalitarianism and communism for what they were and shared his worries through books like 1984 and Animal Farm . He took the same sober approach when dealing with saints and sages. Today, we regard Gandhi as one of the greatest political leaders of the twentieth century – and rightfully so. But did you know that when asked about the Jews during World War II, Gandhi said that they should commit collective suicide and that it: “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” He also recommended utter pacifism in 1942, during the Japanese invasion, even though he knew it would cost millions of lives. But overall he was a good guy. Read the essay and broaden your perspective on the Bapu of the Indian Nation.

• Share a philosophical thought that stops the reader for a moment: “No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid”.
• Be straightforward in your writing – no mannerisms, no attempts to create ‘style’, and no invocations of the numinous – unless you feel the mystical vibe.

40. George Orwell – Politics and the English Language

Let Mr. Orwell give you some writing tips. Written in 1946, this essay is still one of the most helpful documents on writing in English. Orwell was probably the first person who exposed the deliberate vagueness of political language. He was very serious about it and I admire his efforts to slay all unclear sentences (including ones written by distinguished professors). But it’s good to make it humorous too from time to time. My favorite examples of that would be the immortal Soft Language sketch by George Carlin or the “Romans Go Home” scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Overall, it’s a great essay filled with examples from many written materials. It’s a must-read for any writer.

• Listen to the master: “This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose.” Do something about it.
• This essay is all about writing better, so go to the source if you want the goodies.

Other Essays You May Find Interesting

The list that I’ve prepared is by no means complete. The literary world is full of exciting essays and you’ll never know which one is going to change your life. I’ve found reading essays very rewarding because sometimes, a single one means more than reading a whole book. It’s almost like wandering around and peeking into the minds of the greatest writers and thinkers that ever lived. To make this list more comprehensive, below I included more essays you may find interesting.

Oliver Sacks – On Libraries

One of the greatest contributors to the knowledge about the human mind, Oliver Sacks meditates on the value of libraries and his love of books.

Noam Chomsky – The Responsibility of Intellectuals

Chomsky did probably more than anyone else to define the role of the intelligentsia in the modern world . There is a war of ideas over there – good and bad – intellectuals are going to be those who ought to be fighting for the former.

Sam Harris – The Riddle of The Gun

Sam Harris, now a famous philosopher and neuroscientist, takes on the problem of gun control in the United States. His thoughts are clear of prejudice. After reading this, you’ll appreciate the value of logical discourse overheated, irrational debate that more often than not has real implications on policy.

Tim Ferriss – Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide

This piece was written as a blog post , but it’s worth your time. The author of the NYT bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek shares an emotional story about how he almost killed himself, and what can you do to save yourself or your friends from suicide.

Edward Said – Reflections on Exile

The life of Edward Said was a truly fascinating one. Born in Jerusalem, he lived between Palestine and Egypt and finally settled down in the United States, where he completed his most famous work – Orientalism. In this essay, he shares his thoughts about what it means to be in exile.

Richard Feynman – It’s as Simple as One, Two, Three…

Richard Feynman is one of the most interesting minds of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant physicist, but also an undeniably great communicator of science, an artist, and a traveler. By reading this essay, you can observe his thought process when he tries to figure out what affects our perception of time. It’s a truly fascinating read.

Rabindranath Tagore – The Religion of The Forest

I like to think about Tagore as my spiritual Friend. His poems are just marvelous. They are like some of the Persian verses that praise love, nature, and the unity of all things. By reading this short essay, you will learn a lot about Indian philosophy and its relation to its Western counterpart.

Richard Dawkins – Letter To His 10-Year-Old Daughter

Every father should be able to articulate his philosophy of life to his children. With this letter that’s similar to what you find in the Paris Review essays , the famed atheist and defender of reason, Richard Dawkins, does exactly that. It’s beautifully written and stresses the importance of looking at evidence when we’re trying to make sense of the world.

Albert Camus – The Minotaur (or, The Stop In Oran)

Each person requires a period of solitude – a period when one’s able to gather thoughts and make sense of life. There are many places where you may attempt to find quietude. Albert Camus tells about his favorite one.

Koty Neelis – 21 Incredible Life Lessons From Anthony Bourdain

I included it as the last one because it’s not really an essay, but I just had to put it somewhere. In this listicle, you’ll find the 21 most original thoughts of the high-profile cook, writer, and TV host, Anthony Bourdain. Some of them are shocking, others are funny, but they’re all worth checking out.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca – On the Shortness of Life

It’s similar to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam because it praises life. Seneca shares some of his stoic philosophy and tells you not to waste your time on stupidities. Drink! – for once dead you shall never return.

Bertrand Russell – In Praise of Idleness

This old essay is a must-read for modern humans. We are so preoccupied with our work, our phones, and all the media input we drown in our business. Bertrand Russell tells you to chill out a bit – maybe it will do you some good.

James Baldwin – Stranger in the Village

It’s an essay on the author’s experiences as an African-American in a Swiss village, exploring race, identity, and alienation while highlighting the complexities of racial dynamics and the quest for belonging.

Bonus – More writing tips from two great books

The mission to improve my writing skills took me further than just going through the essays. I’ve come across some great books on writing too. I highly recommend you read them in their entirety. They’re written beautifully and contain lots of useful knowledge. Below you’ll find random (but useful) notes that I took from The Sense of Style and On Writing.

The Sense of Style – By Steven Pinker

• Style manuals are full of inconsistencies. Following their advice might not be the best idea. They might make your prose boring.
• Grammarians from all eras condemn students for not knowing grammar. But it just evolves. It cannot be rigid.
• “Nothing worth learning can be taught” – Oscar Wilde. It’s hard to learn to write from a manual – you have to read, write, and analyze.
• Good writing makes you imagine things and feel them for yourself – use word pictures.
• Don’t fear using voluptuous words.
• Phonesthetics – or how the words sound.
• Use parallel language (consistency of tense).
• Good writing finishes strong.
• Write to someone. Never write for no one in mind. Try to show people your view of the world.
• Don’t tell everything you are going to say in summary (signposting) – be logical, but be conversational.
• Don’t be pompous.
• Don’t use quotation marks where they don’t “belong”. Be confident about your style.
• Don’t hedge your claims (research first, and then tell it like it is).
• Avoid clichés and meta-concepts (concepts about concepts). Be more straightforward!
• Not prevention – but prevents or prevented – don’t use dead nouns.
• Be more vivid while using your mother tongue – don’t use passive where it’s not needed. Direct the reader’s gaze to something in the world.
• The curse of knowledge – the reader doesn’t know what you know – beware of that.
• Explain technical terms.
• Use examples when you explain a difficult term.
• If you ever say “I think I understand this” it probably means you don’t.
• It’s better to underestimate the lingo of your readers than to overestimate it.
• Functional fixedness – if we know some object (or idea) well, we tend to see it in terms of usage, not just as an object.
• Use concrete language instead of an abstraction.
• Show your work to people before you publish (get feedback!).
• Wait for a few days and then revise, revise, revise. Think about clarity and the sound of sentences. Then show it to someone. Then revise one more time. Then publish (if it’s to be serious work).
• Look at it from the perspective of other people.
• Omit needless words.
• Put the heaviest words at the end of the sentence.
• It’s good to use the passive, but only when appropriate.
• Check all text for cohesion. Make sure that the sentences flow gently.
• In expository work, go from general to more specific. But in journalism start from the big news and then give more details.
• Use the paragraph break to give the reader a moment to take a breath.
• Use the verb instead of a noun (make it more active) – not “cancellation”, but “canceled”. But after you introduce the action, you can refer to it with a noun.
• Avoid too many negations.
• If you write about why something is so, don’t spend too much time writing about why it is not.

On Writing Well – By William Zinsser

• Writing is a craft. You need to sit down every day and practice your craft.
• You should re-write and polish your prose a lot.
• Throw out all the clutter. Don’t keep it because you like it. Aim for readability.
• Look at the best examples of English literature . There’s hardly any needless garbage there.
• Use shorter expressions. Don’t add extra words that don’t bring any value to your work.
• Don’t use pompous language. Use simple language and say plainly what’s going on (“because” equals “because”).
• The media and politics are full of cluttered prose (because it helps them to cover up for their mistakes).
• You can’t add style to your work (and especially, don’t add fancy words to create an illusion of style). That will look fake. You need to develop a style.
• Write in the “I” mode. Write to a friend or just for yourself. Show your personality. There is a person behind the writing.
• Choose your words carefully. Use the dictionary to learn different shades of meaning.
• Remember about phonology. Make music with words .
• The lead is essential. Pull the reader in. Otherwise, your article is dead.
• You don’t have to make the final judgment on any topic. Just pick the right angle.
• Do your research. Not just obvious research, but a deep one.
• When it’s time to stop, stop. And finish strong. Think about the last sentence. Surprise them.
• Use quotations. Ask people. Get them talking.
• If you write about travel, it must be significant to the reader. Don’t bother with the obvious. Choose your words with special care. Avoid travel clichés at all costs. Don’t tell that the sand was white and there were rocks on the beach. Look for the right detail.
• If you want to learn how to write about art, travel, science, etc. – read the best examples available. Learn from the masters.
• Concentrate on one big idea (“Let’s not go peeing down both legs”).
• “The reader has to feel that the writer is feeling good.”
• One very helpful question: “What is the piece really about?” (Not just “What the piece is about?”)

Now immerse yourself in the world of essays

By reading the essays from the list above, you’ll become a better writer , a better reader, but also a better person. An essay is a special form of writing. It is the only literary form that I know of that is an absolute requirement for career or educational advancement. Nowadays, you can use an AI essay writer or an AI essay generator that will get the writing done for you, but if you have personal integrity and strong moral principles, avoid doing this at all costs. For me as a writer, the effect of these authors’ masterpieces is often deeply personal. You won’t be able to find the beautiful thoughts they contain in any other literary form. I hope you enjoy the read and that it will inspire you to do your writing. This list is only an attempt to share some of the best essays available online. Next up, you may want to check the list of magazines and websites that accept personal essays .

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Rafal Reyzer

Hey there, welcome to my blog! I'm a full-time entrepreneur building two companies, a digital marketer, and a content creator with 10+ years of experience. I started RafalReyzer.com to provide you with great tools and strategies you can use to become a proficient digital marketer and achieve freedom through online creativity. My site is a one-stop shop for digital marketers, and content enthusiasts who want to be independent, earn more money, and create beautiful things. Explore my journey here , and don't miss out on my AI Marketing Mastery online course.

The Best Video Essays of 2022

This article is part of our 2022 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 2022.

2022 has, inconceivably, come to an end. And in the spirit of reflection and gratitude, it’s time to appreciate the thing that had our back when times were tough; the thing that helped us wind down after a long day at work; the thing that made that first cup of coffee in the morning go down just a little easier: video essays.

This year, I had the pleasure of once again curating The Queue , a thrice-weekly column dedicated to highlighting short-form video content about films, television, and the craft of visual storytelling. As a result, the focus of the video essays below is movies and TV shows — if you’re wondering why there are no video essays on speed running mechanics or broadway musical drama, that’s why!

There were, it must be said, a heck of a lot of top-shelf video essays this year that fell outside the scope of this list (including, but not limited to, Jacob Geller’s poetic eulogy to sea monsters ; People Make Games’ anthropological exploration of VRChat , and Jenny Nicholson’s sarcastically long portrait of Evermore , the theme park that tried to sue Taylor Swift).

Once again, I had a doozy of a time narrowing down a short list of this year’s selections. So if you could all stop making such good #content, that would be great (just kidding, never stop). I want to sincerely thank all the essayists I’ve covered this year for their hard work. I hope I get to continue seeing you in my feed in 2023 and beyond.

Bergman Island: Art, Love, and the Unbearable Process of Making

French director Mia Hansen-Løve embraces the notion of autobiographical filmmaking. And the video essay above does a beautiful job illustrating how her first English-language film,  Bergman Island , draws attention to the process of its own making without sacrificing its own story. I love how this essayist unravels the tapestry of the film’s twisty relationship with metatext with tangible examples and accessible language.

This video essay on the metatextuality of Mia Hansen-Løve’s  Bergman Island   is by  Broey Deschanel  a self-described “snob (and YouTuber) whose video essays cover everything from new releases like Licorice Pizza  and  Euphoria  to camp classics like  Showgirls . You can subscribe to their YouTube account  here  and you can follow them on Twitter  here .

Realism and Fantastic Cinema

We’re living during an interesting time in visual effects, where more often than not, realism is the goal. The following video essay offers a convincing gospel that preaches a different approach, which proposes that “fantastic cinema” that actively doesn’t chase photorealism or expose its own trickery is different, special, and worth fighting for. If you’ve found other arguments against  modern CGI unconvincing — or if your love of practical effects starts and stops with fetishism — I urge you to give this a look.

This video essay on why the pursuit of realism in special effects is hurting the fantasy genre is by APLattanzi , a freelance filmmaker and illustrator who hails from the Philadelphia area. You can subscribe to them on YouTube  here . Their essays cover a large swath of topics, from film scores to short films. You can also find them on Letterboxd  here .

Gen Z needs more slacker movies

In all fairness, this video essay is preaching to the choir: I’m a huge sucker for slacker movies. And if for  whatever reason you’re not, this essayist articulates something that feels True about what the sub-genre offers to the 2020s, an age where we’re increasingly bumping up against the political spirit of fucking off and the price of who can afford to do nothing.

This video essay on why the younger generation (I’m dating myself, whoops!) need some new slacker movies   is by  Niche Nonsense , a video essay channel that provides, well, just that: niche nonsense. The channel was only created in mid-December of 2021. And you can get in on the ground floor and subscribe here .

Leslie Cheung & Hong Kong LGBT Cinema

Love letters are contagious, and if you’re unfamiliar with Hong Kong star Leslie Cheung , this is a great introduction to one of the greatest LGBTQ+ icons in film history and how he left his impact on the Queer Hong Kong films that came in the wake of his trailblazing.

These videos on the impact of Leslie Cheung on Hong Kong queer cinema is by  Accented Cinema , a Canadian-based YouTube video essay series with a focus on Asian cinema. You can subscribe to Accented Cinema for bi-weekly uploads here . You can follow them on Twitter  here .

The Secret Ingredient That Makes Raimi’s ‘Spider-Man’ So Great

When people say that modern superhero movies feel soulless, you don’t always get a lot of concrete examples or arguments as to why this is the case aside from a general feeling . Luckily, the above video essay takes the time to nail something specific about why Sam Raimi ‘s Spider-Man   trilogy feels so much more sincere and front-the-heart than modern, irony-poisoned Marvel fare.

This video essay on why everyday people make Sam Raimi’s  Spider-Man  films feel so special is co-written by  Patrick (H) Willems  and  Siddhant Adlakha .  You can find their own directorial efforts and their video essays on their channel  here . You can also find Willems on Twitter  here . And you can find Adlakha on Twitter  here .

The Lion King and Disney’s Sequel Curse

Frankly, I didn’t know that I  needed  an hour-long defence of The Lion King 1 ½ until it was sitting in my YouTube subscriptions. The Disney animated feature-length sequel landscape is, by and large, pretty mid. And while  The Lion King 2  is one of the better ones out there,  The Lion King 1 ½  is in a class all of its own. If you’re not familiar, the sequel takes place during the events of the first film, but it’s told from the perspective of Timon and Pumba. The following video essay does a stellar job describing why it rules, how it ties into Shakespeare, and why it’s a great example of self-aware filmmaking.

This video on the incredible Disney sequel  The Lion King 1 ½  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 .

Twin Peaks Actually, ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, But For Real)

This is, quite frankly, one of the most lucid explanations of “why  Twin Peaks is the way it is” that I’ve ever seen. Maybe its my small screen ignorance showing, but the idea that TV reflexivity is the key that unlocks Twin Peaks really feels capital-t True. The above is the first of a two-parter, and will hit harder if you’ve seen all three seasons and  Fire Walk With Me . I’m also a massive fan of how this essayist choses to frame their work; the Socratic dialogue is alive and well.

This video essay on what Twin Peaks is about, actually, is by Maggie Mae Fish , a Los Angeles-based comedian, actress, and culture critic who releases short films and video essays on her  YouTube account . Fish has been featured on College Humor, Screen Junkies, and JASH. She was also a former lead actor and writer at Cracked.com. You can follow Fish on Twitter  here .

Nothing But Trouble is a Very Weird Movie

Even if you haven’t had the pleasure of watching Nothing But Trouble  with your own two, God-given eyes, you may still have heard rumblings of its notorious status. I appreciate that this video essayist takes the time to give complicated stories — like the making of this movie and why it came to be thought of as a massive bomb — the time they deserve to breathe and speak for themselves.

This video essay on why  Nothing But Trouble  is good, actually comes to us from  In Praise of Shadows , a video essay channel run by Zane Whitener  and based in Asheville, North Carolina. The channel focuses on horror, history, and retrospectives. Under their “Anatomy of a Franchise” banner, they break down horror properties including  Tremors ,  The Stepfather , and  Re-Animator,  in addition to  The Hills Have Eyes . You can check out the series’ playlist  here . And you can subscribe to the In Praise of Shadows YouTube channel  here . And you can follow them on Twitter  here .

Why The Bear Hits So Hard

There’s a special bond between cooking and the moving image and Hulu’s The Bear  is the latest piece of pop culture to bring the two art forms together. I love how this video essay balances its analysis of the technical and scripted aspects of the show to explain the controlled chaos that defines the feel of the show. Breakdowns like this, that do as much showing as they do telling, are really what the video essay format is all about.

This video essay on the appeal of  The Bear  is by Virginia-based filmmaker and video editor  Thomas Flight . He runs a YouTube channel under the same name. You can follow Thomas Flight and check out his back catalog of video essays on YouTube  here . You can follow him on Twitter  here .

Under The Skin | Audiovisual Alienation

While I do think that  all  movies partake in non-verbal storytelling (they are moving  pictures, after all), I do think some films are more non-verbal than others. This isn’t to say that these films aren’t about  anything or that, more disparagingly, they are “just vibes” (yeesh). Case in point: this thoughtful analysis of Under the Skin , a film that uses non-verbal storytelling to put us in the shoes of an alien visitor trying to make sense of the confusing, predatory, and often beautiful human world.

This video essay on how  Under the Skin  uses non-verbal storytelling to explore the question of what it means to be human   is by  Spikima Movies , a Korean-Canadian who’s been dropping gems on YouTube since 2019. You can subscribe to Spikima’s channel for more incredible essays  here . And you can follow them on Letterboxd  here .

How a 10-year-old girl wrote Japan’s most insane horror film

Just when I thought that House   was starting to slip into that special category of movies that have been “talked to death,” someone goes ahead and makes a video essay like this. I adore the messy human stories behind canonized films. And the way that this video essayist describes the father-daughter relationship behind the deeply personal making of House  is impeccable, even if you’re already familiar with the general beats.

This video essay on the uncanny origins of the 1977 horror film  House   is by  k aptainkristian, a YouTube-based video essay channel that peddles visual love letters to filmmakers, musicians, and syndicated cartoons. The account is run by  Kristian T.   Williams , whom you can follow on Twitter  here . You can subscribe to kaptainkristian, and check out their back catalog on YouTube  here .

Studio LAIKA and the Ghosts of Invisible Labor

Given that conversations on labor and animation are becoming more and more prescient and pointed, this video essay feels like a must-watch. This essayist’s analysis is deeply insightful, compelling, and well-argued. The idea that animators on Laika films are in-universe Lovecraftian gods tickles my brain something fierce.

This video essay on the self-reflexive industrial allegory of Laika studios is written and directed by  Mihaela Mihailova . It is produced by Alla Gadassik and edited by Gil Goletski, with Jacqueline Turner providing the narration. The end of the video credits the Vancouver-based Emily Carr University of Art and Design for support. Mihailova is an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the editor of the essay collection Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft  (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Why This 1950s Studio Made Movies Backwards

We love a gimmick. And we especially love a gimmick that produces some wildly kick-ass movie posters. This video essay offers a lucid explanation of how AIP cracked the code for making B-Movies: poster first, movie later. Has this principle of making a film from a marketing perspective mutated into something more insidious over time? Yep. Will that make me any less charmed by exploitation cinema? Nope. Look, someone  had to make the movies that play at the drive-in while teens suck face in the back of their parents’ Cadillac.

This video on how American International Pictures marketed their films backward is by  Andrew Saladino , who runs the Texas-based  Royal Ocean Film Society . You can browse their back catalog of videos on their Vimeo account  here . If Vimeo isn’t your speed, you can give them a follow on YouTube  here .

Why Did Spaghetti Westerns Look Like That?

On the one hand, this is something of a biased pick because I eat Spaghetti Westerns for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. On the other hand, this video essay does a really solid job honing in on one specific aspect of the sub-genre and asking: why? I love laser-focused topics like this, and the fact that it’s about one of the most iconic shot types in genre cinema is just icing on the cake.

This video essay on Sergio Leone’s filmography and how he perfected the use of the close-up shot is by  Adam Tinius , who runs the YouTube channel  Entertain the Elk . They are based in Pasadena, California. You can follow them on YouTube  here . And you can follow them on Twitter  here .

The Catharsis of Body Horror

Frankly, the fact that this video essay managed to stay online for as long as it has (thus far) without getting sent back to the shadow realm by YouTube’s AI censor bots is a straight-up miracle. Luckily, as of writing this, the essay is still live and absolutely worth your time, especially  if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t vibe with body horror. There’s no shame in having likes and dislikes. But this essay very clearly articulates why body horror is a lot more than the sum of its goo-covered, fleshy parts.

This video essay on the catharsis themes of body horror is by  Yhara Zayd . They provide insightful deep dives on young adult content from  Skins  to  My Best Friend’s Wedding . You can check out more of their content and subscribe to their channel on YouTube  here . If you like their stuff and you want to support them, you can check out their Patreon  here .

Related Topics: 2022 Rewind , The Queue

Recommended Reading

Anatomy of a suspense scene: alfred hitchcock’s 4-part formula, how a24 revived studio loyalty, can we have more solarpunk movies, please, why “day for night” is so hard to pull off.

Visual Investigations

How a Haitian Gang Is Trying to Turn Itself Into a Militia

By Christiaan Triebert, Maria Abi-Habib and John Ismay

In recent years, one of Haiti’s most powerful and best armed gangs, 5 Segonn, promoted itself with brash rap videos posted on social media.

But videos and photos recently posted by the gang to TikTok show a shift: It’s trying to present itself as an organized security force.

The gang members are now uniformed and wielding more powerful weapons.

One of these weapons is the Belgian-designed FN FAL rifle.

It’s typically carried by militaries and hasn’t been seen in the hands of 5 Segonn before.

The group now appears to be more capable as a Kenyan-led multinational police force is set to arrive in Haiti.

Since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, the security situation in Haiti has deteriorated and gangs have stepped in to fill the void. They now control or exert their influence across most of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The recent transformation of 5 Segonn coincided with the unification of several rival gangs in late February. Days later, the allied groups orchestrated a massive prison break, plunging the country into further chaos and leading Prime Minister Ariel Henry, the country’s de facto ruler, to resign.

Together, the gangs have commandeered key roads that criss-cross Haiti and enter neighboring Dominican Republic, and have occupied several strategic police stations, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

Port-au-Prince

Gang control

Primary areas

Many police

stations have

been seized

PORT-AU-PRINCE

Port-au-Prince Bay

Sources: Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, Human Rights Watch; MakyavelStudios via X; the National Human Rights Defence Network (RNDDH), the U.N. Human Rights Office and the U.N. Integrated Office in Haiti.

Note: These are estimates, and the situation is fluid. Areas of control change frequently, and gangs may operate outside their main territory.

The Kenyan-led deployment, aided by U.S. supplies and funding, could face a far more volatile situation than past international U.N. peacekeeping missions. Earlier this month, 5 Segonn’s leader took to social media to taunt and threaten the incoming security force, which will be based at the capital’s airport.

The U.S. is investigating whether European and American weapons, made exclusively for militaries and sold in Latin America, are being smuggled to 5 Segonn and other Haitian gangs, according to two senior Justice Department officials who were not authorized to speak publicly.

5 Segonn’s promotion of its new image began with the creation of a TikTok account, shortly after the rival gangs united. Posts display the gang’s military appearance and weaponry.

Although the account was suspended after just 11 posts, The Times archived and analyzed the contents, along with hundreds of media files posted by gang members, to track how 5 Segonn's capabilities have evolved.

5 Segonn’s name is Creole for Five Seconds. They are thought to be one of Haiti’s biggest cocaine traffickers, according to Western diplomats and a regional intelligence official.

Their leader is 27-year-old Johnson André, known as Izo, whom the U.S. sanctioned in December for the kidnapping of U.S. citizens, assassination, possession of illegal firearms, hijacking and documented cases of sexual violence.

On social media, Izo often posts videos of himself dancing and drinking.

But starting in March he added a new persona, openly declaring himself a cartel leader and the head of a new “tactical corps.”

Its logo bears the corps’ name: Unité Village de Dieu, or Unite Village of God, the name of Izo’s neighborhood.

Videos show Izo using live drone feeds to direct attacks against the police.

And he’s seen in highly choreographed footage overseeing men in tactical gear.

Their vehicles’ appearance was once inspired by the notorious Los Angeles Crips gang.

Now their vehicles are wrapped in camouflage and organized with sequential license plates.

And 5 Segonn’s actions are growing bolder, attacking targets deeper in government-held territory.

They’ve taunted security forces by destroying one of their vehicles near the National Palace, a major government symbol.

And in April, they hijacked a cargo ship, moored it at a gang-controlled dock and plundered some of the rice it carried.

The weapons that historically fueled Haiti’s violence were usually stolen from the Haitian Army and police or purchased from stores in the United States and smuggled to the Caribbean.

But the FN FAL rifles seen with the 5 Segonn gang, for instance, are a newer model than the version acquired by the Haitian Army in the 1980s, a former high-ranking Haitian official told The Times, raising questions about their origin.

The group’s possession of the weapon was first publicly identified by Michael Deibert, an author focused on Haiti.

The new weapons could be coming from Colombia, where President Gustavo Petro announced last month that millions of bullets, thousands of grenades and other weapons were looted from military warehouses. They were sold to armed groups, like cartels, he said, and on the international black market, including to Haitian gangs.

Associated Press

The Justice Department officials say the sources may be more widespread, with weapons coming from other militaries in South and Central America. Brazil is one of the largest weapons manufacturers in the world, they note, manufacturing some of the military weapons that are now used by Haitian gangs.

Still, U.S. officials say they have limited insight into what is happening in Haiti as the dire security situation means they have insufficient personnel on the ground to monitor gang activity.

The growing lethality of the gangs’ arsenals may also indicate a strengthening tie with cartels in Latin America, said a senior regional intelligence official and two diplomats who spoke on background to discuss sensitive information. They pointed to Haiti’s growing importance as a cocaine trafficking route to Europe.

Izo is now working with one of the key suspects in Mr. Moïse’s 2021 assassination: Dimitri Hérard, the one-time chief of the president’s security detail, according to the intelligence official, a senior State Department official, and a third Western diplomat based in Haiti who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Mr. Hérard was among the inmates freed during the February prison break, according to Haitian officials.

A wanted poster for Mr. Hérard released by the Haitian police this month warns that he is armed and dangerous, and is wanted on several charges including: rape, homicide, terrorism and prison escape.

Haitian National Police via Facebook

The sources said Mr. Hérard seems to be helping organize and advise Izo’s gang to look beyond local turf battles and pursue more strategic goals tied to drug trafficking and national politics, and that he may be a link to larger criminal organizations in the region, including drug cartels.

The rise of Haitian gangs started a few decades ago. The armed bandits were used by politicians to suppress voter turnout or anti-government protests and by the business elite to secure land for industrial purposes or to attack rival businesses.

But like many things in Haiti that has now all been upended.

Haiti’s Gangs Grow Stronger as Kenyan-Led Force Prepares to Deploy

Gang leaders with suspected links to the 2021 Haitian president’s assassination now control key infrastructure, and pose a major threat to the incoming Kenya-led force.

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The best video essays of 2018

From scene breakdowns to ideological deconstructions, selections from YouTube’s sharpest voices

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Anyone who clocks serious time on YouTube knows it’s a full-blown cosmos, housing everything from Vine compilations to weird algorithm-generated kids videos and fascists talking about phrenology. But the site also hosts a strong crop of creators engaging with politics, philosophy, culture, and more in thoughtful, critical ways.

Video essays have flourished in recent times, and the best ones can even eclipse a lot of traditional documentaries in their production and intelligence. On top of recommending Polygon’s own staff of video craftspeople , here are 10 of the best video essays of 2018, a shortcut down the rabbit hole of intriguing work on YouTube.

“David Lynch: The Treachery of Language”

By What’s So Great About That?

This is simply the most well-made, intelligently laid-out video on a single filmmaker this year. Through some masterful editing, Grace Lee explores the use (or more accurately, consistent warping) of language in the films of David Lynch ( Mulholland Drive , Blue Velvet , TV’s Twin Peaks ). Film criticism generally gravitates toward discussion of visuals, whether that’s in terms of cinematography, editing, acting, mise-en-scene , and the like. The actual construction and implementation of dialogue is less studied, and by drilling down into the specific use, Lee’s video gets at a defining element of why Lynch’s films are so off.

“CTRL+ALT+DEL”

By hbomberguy

Taking on one of the biggest punching bags in both webcomics and gaming is no small task, but H. Bomberguy proves more than up to it. But rather than make yet another piece on all the ways Tim Buckley’s Ctrl+Alt+Del is supposedly terrible, the video essayist instead draws out all the ways it’s similar to popular, even beloved, properties. The unsettling conclusion is that works like these become whipping boys not because of their actual quality (or lack of it), but because they provide a reflection that too many within a subculture find unflattering. That it’s all delivered via an increasingly unhinged parody of traditional YouTube critic tropes is a huge bonus.

The Hobbit Trilogy

By Lindsay Ellis

Lindsay Ellis defies the paradigm of movie criticism through nuanced, researched nitpicking. Her in-depth series on Hobbit films goes beyond a dismantlement, instead connecting the dots between what happened during the series’ production, Peter Jackson’s entire approach to the adaptation, and by her estimation, the film’s critical failures. The third part of the “duology” even incorporates reporting, with Ellis talking to actors and filmmakers in New Zealand about the effect that foreign film production had on the country. It all culminates in a powerful rumination on how “no ethical consumption under capitalism” applies to entertainment, and the different ways people grapple after learning how beloved art was made.

“Designing for Disability”

By Game Maker’s Toolkit

Mark Brown is one of the most measured and meticulous people working in games criticism today. As the name of the channel suggests, Game Maker’s Toolkit approaches video game analysis from the angle of helping developers improve their work. Any one of his videos is invaluable on this front, and this ongoing series about keeping differently abled people in mind when making games is a great showcase of his perspective. Besides providing a survey of what games already do to accommodate players who can’t necessarily interact with them in the standard ways, these videos subtly call attention to how so much of the basic ways in which we interact with games are taken for granted.

“Lady Eboshi is Wrong”

By Innuendo Studios

If this were just a video on how masterful Hayao Miyazaki is at making movies without clear good-and-evil conflicts, in which no character is two-dimensional and everyone’s point of view is expressed, then it would be notable. But what pushes the essay (made for FilmJoy’s “Lessons Animation Taught Us” series) into greatness is how uses Princess Mononoke ’s central conflict to basically pick apart the idea of centrism as a political position. Ian Danskin knows culture and politics; he also happens to be producing an incisive series on the rhetorical foundations and strategies of the far right. Wielding the knowledge, the essayist finds echoes of the man-vs-nature peril at the heart of Miyazaki’s period fantasy to today’s current political climate without being so blunt as to become an entirely different type of video.

“FAKE FRIENDS EPISODE TWO: parasocial hell”

By StrucciMovies

You may balk at the two-hour running time, but Shannon Strucci more than earns the runtime as she exhaustively dissects the social landscape of the modern age. The second part of her ongoing series on parasocial relationships (when a person develops a “relationship” with someone or something that cannot reciprocate, like a celebrity) continually finds new stories to develop its ideas.

Strucci will let a clip of a Twitch streamer making an emotional confession play out in full length, all to hammer home the kind of closeness the internet fosters between people with no actual connection. She also brings up examples one might not expect, such as a robotic seal doll made to calm the elderly, or the famous story of Grape-kun , the penguin who fell in love with an anime standee. “Fake Friends” will make you reconsider your own relationships with your favorite writers, podcasters, actors… and possibly video essayists.

By ContraPoints

Natalie Wynn, who dropped out of Northwestern’s Ph.D philosophy program and now applies her knowledge to the headache of contemporary American discourse, specializes in responding to talking points from modern conservatism. It helps that, besides being smart as hell, she also employs some extraordinarily elaborate costuming and spectacular (usually horny) punchlines into her work. In her most impressive video to date, it would be all too easy to go for easy jabs at those who identify as incels, but Wynn approaches the subject with empathy without ever making excuses for their toxic rhetoric.

“DOOM: The Fake Outrage”

Shaun is quite possibly the most droll human on the internet, and has carved out a niche in poking holes in the hole-poking antics of channels like CinemaSins. Here, he demonstrates the common internet strategy of cherry-picking a few tweets or comments to trump up a non-issue like “The SJWs are angry.”

“Disney - The Magic of Animation”

By kaptainkristian

There was much rejoicing with Kristian Williams returned to YouTube after a year’s hiatus, and his first new video proved well worth the wait. Disney is a tremendously popular subject for video essays, and there are plenty about the studio’s revered 12 principles of animation. But none of them tackle the subject with the visual and editing skill that Williams brings to the table.

“Nostalghia Critique”

by KyleKallgrenBHH

This essay is simultaneously and seamlessly many things: an exegesis on a single scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 film Nostalghia , playing it without any cuts; a look at how video creators work around content copyright rules with various editing and presentational tricks; and a meditation on creator Kyle Kallgren’s time with a company that frequently struggled with the strictures of YouTube’s copyright rules, and how it eventually fell apart under the malfeasance of the people running it. “Nostalghia Critique” is an unshowy but wonderful union of personal, aesthetic, and corporate concerns.

Dan Schindel is an editor, writer, and critic based in Los Angeles.

I just found the best horror-action movie ever on Prime Video — and it’s better than ‘28 Days Later’

Nothing can ready you for the sheer madness that is ‘Overlord’

I write about movies and TV shows for a living, so I’ve seen plenty of them in my time. However, there are only a select few that have truly stuck with me, and it’s those that I often go back to for comfort. Is it strange that I usually go to horror movies for that comfort? Maybe, but sometimes horror is just so dang good that I need to watch the movie more than once.

A perfect example, and one of my favorite movies to ever exist, is “Overlord” (2018). This chaotic masterpiece is everything you need in a horror-action flick, from the grimy setting to the unexpected gore to a group of protagonists with completely different personalities. There is so much to enjoy in such a simple movie, and that’s what makes it better than apocalyptic dramas like “28 Days Later” (and that’s not to say this isn’t good, because it definitely is).  

Fortunately “Overlord” is on Prime Video , one of the best streaming services . Here's why I think it's such a good movie.

What is ‘Overlord’ about?

“Overlord” takes place in an alternate 1940s setting on the eve of D-Day. American paratroopers must drop behind enemy lines to reach a German radio tower built underneath a church used for “communication," but of course, there are always secrets. As these soldiers proceed further into their mission, they discover that the Nazi-occupied town isn’t what they expected, and their simple military operation takes a turn for the worse when a sinister experiment unleashes hell. 

In the forest near the patrolled village, they also meet Chloe Laurent (Mathilde Ollivier), one of the villagers who keeps the soldiers safe inside of her home. But the mission gets complicated when she wants to join the mission for reasons of her own. The integrated military unit includes second-in-command Corporal Ford (Wyatt Russell) and the private team members Boyce (Jovan Adepo), Tibbet (John Magaro), Chase (Iain De Caestecker), and Rosenfeld (Dominic Applewhite). 

“Overlord” is definitely chaotic, but that’s what makes it so good. The action-packed narrative, frightening sequences, and plot twists will have your mouth hanging open in shock, which is a moment I’ll never forget when I watched this masterpiece for the first time. 

‘Overlord’ is entertainingly grungy and fun

One of the best things about “Overlord” is that it’s an intentional B-movie. The grungy environments and slasher-type violence is perfect for the horror genre it’s supposed to be in. And critics clearly agree with this too, as they’ve given the movie a high score of 81% on Rotten Tomatoes .

There haven’t been many zombie war movies, making “Overlord” a unique concept that everyone should experience. Chris Nashawaty from Entertainment Weekly is especially a fan of this combination: “A surprisingly well-made mash-up of old-fashioned war movie tropes and proudly disgusting horror-flick shocks. It's a ton of fun.” 

Chicago Reader’s Andrea Thompson is just as passionate about the movie since it "takes many elements you've seen before and creates a mashup that's able to deliver some gory fun, riveting suspense, zombie horrors, and terrifying depictions of modern war in equal measure.” 

If you’re into video games too, you’ll probably enjoy the vibes that this movie gives off since you become part of the story. Rafer Guzman from Newsday highlighted this in the perfect way by saying: “Overlord has a bit of a video-game feel at times, though that just adds to the overall sense of pulpy, gory fun.”  

Audiences also agree, with comments like “the special effects are phenomenal”, “beautifully horrific visuals”, and “a great story and ending.”

You have to give ‘Overlord’ a chance

So, what are you waiting for? “Overlord” is waiting to be added to your watchlist. It’s a brilliant action-packed horror movie that won’t necessarily give you nightmares, but it will make you jump a few times. The cinematography, character development, and constant tension is so well done for a movie that is under two hours.

Although at the time the cast weren’t highly recognizable, they did go on to bigger projects that grew their fame. Russell starred in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”, “Black Mirror”, and “Night Swim” while Caestecker became a regular on “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

And yes, before we close off, I do truly believe that this movie is better than “28 Days Later." It’s something I’ve never experienced before in the zombie horror genre, and the action is entertaining but realistic enough to leave you feeling exhilarated. You don’t have to pay so much attention to the plot, meaning you can focus more on just having fun. 

Need more? Check out this disturbing AI movie that has just been added to Netflix or stream “Overlord” on Prime Video .  

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Alix is a Streaming Writer at Tom’s Guide, which basically means watching the best movies and TV shows and then writing about them. Previously, she worked as a freelance writer for Screen Rant and Bough Digital, both of which sparked her interest in the entertainment industry. When she’s not writing about the latest movies and TV shows, she’s either playing horror video games on her PC or working on her first novel.

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• Kafx99 You need an education if you think Overlord is better than 28 days later. It’s not even close. Reply
• DapsDP The only zombie nazi movie I need is Dead Snow. Reply
• Jackyfranklin76 Except……it’s not on Prime. Well, it is, but you have to pay to rent it. Your article is misleading. It sounds like the film is on Prime and therefore free to stream if you have the service. Lame. Reply
• niteowljr Better than 28 Days Later, eh? Your taste in film is doodoo. Reply
• View All 4 Comments

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‘Bachelorette’ star Trista Sutter says she’s ‘safe and sound’ amid husband’s cryptic posts about her absence

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Trista Sutter is setting the record straight.

Amid speculation about her mental and physical health, the former reality star posted a lengthy explanation on Instagram Saturday.

“Geez people. Can’t a girl have a nervous breakdown/trial separation/midlife crisis/death/divorce in peace around here?! 😜🤣,” she jokingly began alongside a photo of herself posing with husband Ryan Sutter and their kids, Maxwell, 16, and Blakesley, 15, in Mexico.

The “Bachelorette” alum, 51, explained that an “opportunity for perspective and personal growth” came along and she “chose [herself] and betterment, knowing that my stay-at-home-mom job and my kids end-of-the-school-year needs were in the best, most capable hands.”

Rumors began swirling earlier this month when Ryan, 49, posted a cryptic message on Instagram suggesting that Trista wasn’t with the family to celebrate Mother’s Day.

“I know you wish you were here for Mother’s Day,” he wrote. “We wish you were too. But sometimes being a mom means letting go of their hands, granting independence and stimulating their courageous spirit.”

Two days later, he shared yet another post, explaining, “Trista is at a place in life where she is searching a bit. An opportunity presented itself that may help her on that quest.

“With her family’s support, she has taken it. Part of that process means that she is temporarily inaccessible to us.”

On Sunday, the firefighter revealed he had been reunited with his wife.

“They say absence makes the heart grow fonder…. We found out it’s true. It also makes the heart more grateful, more sympathetic, more appreciative for what someone does for you, with you, alongside of you,” he captioned a family photo .

“It brings questions and wonder and worry and then answers and peace and celebration. It brought time for reflection, for projects, prayer and independence but mostly it brought joy at its conclusion. Real joy. And that’s really what it’s all about.”

Meanwhile, Trista criticized news outlets for calling out her husband’s “cryptic/confusing/attention-seeking/dramatic” posts.

She said, “To me, they gave me exactly what my Words of Affirmation love language needed to get me through some serious self doubt and fear…and that’s all that matters. He doesn’t owe anyone any explanation or require permission to post what he wants to post and share what he wants to share.”

Trista added that she’s “safe and sound, happy and healthy in love and grateful 🥰. For those who’d rather focus on being critical and searching way too hard for darkness, good luck with that.”

Trista and Ryan are the longest-standing couple from “The Bachelor” franchise. They married in 2003 after meeting during Trista’s season of “The Bachelorette.”

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