User:Berna Bereit On Desktop Documentaries & Video Essays
Kevin B Lee: TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE (2014)
Transformers: The Premake turns 355 YouTube videos into a critical investigation of the global big budget film industry, amateur video making, and the political economy of images. The Premake utilizes a “desktop documentary” technique that acknowledges the internet's role not only as a boundless repository of information but as a primary experience of reality. It creatively depicts the process in which we explore a deep web of images and data to reach moments of discovery and decisive action. In a blockbuster cinema culture rife with insipid remakes of franchise properties, The Premake presents a critical counter-image in which personalized digital media asks what Hollywood is really doing in the world.
Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker, media artist, and critic, he has produced over 360 video essays exploring film and media. 🎥 https://vimeo.com/groups/audiovisualcy/videos/94101046
Camille Henrot: Grosse Fatigue (2013)
Camille Henrot’s extensive research across a range of disciplines like philosophy, anthropology, and history often shapes her work, including Grosse Fatigue. She made the video while in residence at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., digging into its vast collections to pull together images of objects and specimens, like animal skeletons and carved figurines, with footage she shot in offices and collection storage. Henrot merges this with additional video clips and images she both made and found online.
Characterizing her structuring of Grosse Fatigue as “an experience of density itself,” she frames this material in layered pop-up windows that continually open and close against the changing background of a computer desktop. Brief pauses in the pacing stand out in Henrot’s otherwise rapid-fire sequencing. Sometimes, a woman’s hands appear in the frames, nails playfully manicured to match the colorful backgrounds. A spoken word-style voiceover, which interweaves stories of creation from across cultures, structures the visual cacophony. Henrot describes this mash-up of scientific discovery and religious myth-making as an “intuitive unfolding of knowledge,” a presentation meant to highlight our abundance of information, as well as its limits.
An excerpt of her work, the original video is around 13 minutes: 🎥 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX7jW00zl3E&rco=1
Adam Butcher: Internet Story (2010)
Told through fragments of internet videos, animations, blogs and news articles – a series of shocking events unfolds when a young man creates a public treasure hunt and a vlogger pursues the riddles across country.
Adam Butcher is a writer and director telling entertaining stories in unique ways. 🎥 https://www.adam-butcher.co.uk/Short-Film/Internet-Story
Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman: Noah (2013)
In a story that plays out entirely on a teenager’s computer screen, Noah follows its eponymous protagonist as his relationship takes a rapid turn for the worse in this fascinating study of behavior (and romance) in the internet age.
Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman are both graduates of the film studies program at Ryerson University in Toronto and together with Matthew Hornick a canadian indie pop band and film-making collective named ‘shy kids’. 🎥 https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2016/08/22/noah/
Levan Gabriadze: Unfriended (2014)
While video chatting one night, six high school friends receive a Skype message apparently from Laura Barns, a classmate who killed herself exactly one year ago because a sex video posted online. At first they think it's a prank, but when the girl starts revealing the friends' darkest secrets, they realize they are dealing with something out of this world, something that wants them dead. Told entirely from a young girl's computer desktop, "Unfriended" redefines 'found footage' for a new generation of teens.
Levan "Leo" Gabriadze is a Georgian-Russian actor and film director.
Aneesh Chaganty: Searching (2018)
When his 16-year-old daughter disappears, a desperate father rummages through her laptop in search of clues.
Aneesh Chaganty is an American film director and screenwriter. 🎥Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ro9ebQxEOY
Rob Savage: Host (2020)
Six friends hire a medium to hold a seance via Zoom during lockdown, but they get far more than they bargained for as things quickly go wrong.
Rob Savage is an English filmmaker. Initially gaining attention at the age of 19 when he wrote, directed, produced, and edited the drama film Strings, he later became more widely known for his work on horror films such as Host, Dashcam, and The Boogeyman. 🎥 Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl6ynEOyaRw
Zia Anger: My First Film (2018)
Zia Anger screens her lost and abandoned works, with live commentary that details the making of, rejections, and lessons that made her the artist and filmmaker she is today.
Zia Anger is a filmmaker and artist known for her unorthodox approach to film production and storytelling. 🎥 Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmHP7CJxffo
Katja Jansen: Desktop Films (2018)
We spend more and more of our lives in front of small screens. We devote more and more of our (leisure) time to online pursuits. Classical forms of entertainment, such as theatrical moviegoing, suffer from this shift from the physical to the virtual. Although summer tentpoles still tout box office records, attendance is dropping off (and only higher ticket prices can conceal that trend). To combat this development, some filmmakers are honoring the old adage “If you can’t beat them, join them”.
Smartphone, computer, tablet and television screens seem to have to upper hand on the silver screen that is traditionally the habitat of the feature film. Instead of taking the fight (and their content) to those small screens, a number of recent films have opted to bring those digital screens into their cinematic realm in a very radical way. Desktop films are audiovisual narratives that unfold entirely on a computer screen, using the myriad apps and programs as vessels for parts of their narration.
This video essay by film student Katja Jansen examines the unique opportunities that arise from this self-imposed limitation. (Fittingly, it does so in the form of a desktop video.) Jansen gives a clear overview of the most remarkable examples of this budding genre, and makes some astute observations about the stylistic, narrative and thematic peculiarities and possibilities of the form.
The desktop film may be a format that is uniquely attuned to our times. It might also turn out to be a mere gimmick that will have run its course after a handful of films. For now, it’s a fascinating mini-trend that warrants our attention, and a video essay. 🎥 https://www.filmscalpel.com/desktop-films/
Brian Kramer: Ratter (2015)
Ratter is a thriller told entirely from the perspective of a laptop screen. The film sheds light on the topics of data protection and surveillance in the digital age. 🎥 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l6BwYMhyYw
Mishka Kornai and Zach Wechter: Pocket (2019)
Pocket is a year in the life of an American teenager, told entirely from the perspective of his iPhone. Co-Directed with my longtime collaborator Zach Wechter, it is also the first project of my new smartphone filmmaking collective Pickpocket.
Mishka Kornai is a Director based in Berlin and LA. Zach Wechter is a writer/director from Los Angeles, whose work explores life, technology, and how the two affect each other in the twenty-first century. 🎥 https://mishkakornai.com/portfolio/pocket/
Charlie Shackleton: Criticism in the Age of TikTok (2019)
Charlie Shackleton explores how Gen Z’s favourite app points to a new form of cultural criticism.
Downloaded over a billion times since its launch just two years ago, TikTok has taken the tech world by storm with its endless stream of viral dance routines, comedy lip sync clips and impenetrable intertextual memes. And with a user base seemingly comprised of nothing but whip-smart 15-year-olds, it’s become perhaps the definitive online home of Generation Z.
Last month I went to the Melbourne International Film Festival, intending to mentor a group of young Australian critics on the ins and outs of contemporary film writing. Instead they mentored me on the art of TikTok, and in the process pointed the way to a whole new kind of 21st-century criticism. 🎥 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B8cbrrFEeQ
Queline Meadow: The Rise of Film TikTok (2020)
The Rise of Film TikTok is a look at Gen Z’s latest hub for film appreciation.
Queline Meadows aka kikikrazed is a freelance video producer with focus on video essays about media and culture. 🎥 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqajurNSp1Q
Nestor Siré: Sneakernets and Copy Houses: A Video Essay on Cuban Offline Culture (xxxx)
Sneakernets and Copy Houses is a video essay that draws on our extensive audiovisual archive of interviews, photos, screen recordings, and media snippets about the Cuban alternative media distribution network El Paquete Semanal (The Weekly Package). With online access heavily restricted, Cuba for a long time had one of the lowest internet penetration rates in the world. Yet, Cuban citizens have found a way to distribute all kinds of global media, such as international movies, TV series, YouTube videos, software, or mp3 music albums offline. El Paquete Semanal is a one terabyte collection of data that is compiled on a weekly basis by a network of people with various forms of privileged internet access. It is then circulated nationwide on USB sticks and external hard drives via a sophisticated human infrastructure of delivery persons (so-called paqueteros) who bring the content to the far corners of the island and deliver it right to their customers’ homes. Individual media files (such as the latest episode of a popular series) are further sold in the many puntos de copia (copy houses) that exist in every neighborhood of virtually every city.
Sneakernets and Copy Houses describes the media history of this fascinating phenomenon and explores the networked dynamics of its sophisticated human infrastructure. The video is conceived as a tour through our digital archive that we collected during years of ethnographic fieldwork. The video mimics the structure of the Paquete, which is also organized in a structure of folders and files. It takes place on the researchers’ desktop screen while we click through and comment on our various research materials.
📄Full article: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/sneakernets-and-copy-houses-a-video-essay-on-cuban-offline-culture 🎥Video: https://nestorsire.com/es/video/sneakernets-and-copy-houses-2/
