Abstract

This chapter carefully considers the practice of the audio-video essayist, reflecting on the topics of subjectivity, textuality, and technology. Grant is a film scholar who, in the last ten years, has begun to produce, write about, and publish creative-critical digital-video essays on film and media studies subjects, essays that use footage from the films studied, as well as other moving image/sounds from existing media. Her chapter examines the critical and theoretical threads that surround the audiovisual essay as it belongs to the tradition of the essay film and as it belongs to the broader realm of creative practice. She also thinks through some of the spectatorial implications of her online practice as research.

Keywords: audiovisual essay, film and media studies, creative critical practice as research, material thinking

In a sense, the cinephiliac moment may be understood as a kind of miseen- abyme wherein each spectator's obsessive relationship with cinema is embodied in its most concentrated form. […] But if we see cinephiliac moments as the flashes of another history, how to develop that history?’

‘[I]t is in the joining of hand, eye and mind that material thinking occurs, but it is necessarily in relation to the materials and processes of practice, rather than through the “talk”, that we can understand the nature of material thinking. Words may allow us to articulate and communicate the realizations that happen through material thinking, but as a mode of thought, material thinking involves a particular responsiveness to or conjunction with the intelligence of materials and processes in practice.