best video essay 2022

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The 22 Best Video Essays of 2022

Welcome back to yet another look at my favorite video essays of the year, this time of 2022. I have been just as terminally online this year as I was last, so I have a lot of videos to shout out. And of course, I’m always looking for more, so if you know a video I missed, please share it with me on Twitter ! This list, much like last year’s list , will also not have any real ranking to it, except the final video is definitely my favorite of the bunch. But I clearly would recommend any and all of these videos, and if you’re hungry for more, stay tuned for the end of the article as I do have a lot more recommendations beyond this list. But that’s enough set up, let’s get this started!

Super Bunnyhop – The Abridged Videogaming History of Big-Money Buyouts & Mergers

If you are anything like me, you were also completely flabbergasted by the purchase of Activision-Blizzard-King by Microsoft. Similar to the time that Fox merged with Disney, I felt the dread of this next step in industry consolidation more intensely than I felt the excitement of new franchises (like Call of Duty and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater) coming to Game Pass and the potential revival of dormant franchises like Prototype and Singularity. I instantly knew the news was a massive story with loads of permanent repercussions throughout the industry, but I didn’t know it’d be a story we’d still be talking about almost a year later.

So, I’m immensely thankful for Super Bunnyhop’s video on the history of video game acquisitions and buyouts that lead us to this one. The size of the purchase is so massive that it could only seem like a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but this video showed me that mergers like this are actually pretty common, and we’re only becoming widely concerned about it now that the dollar amounts are ballooning. I even learned a bit about some aspects of the industry that I didn’t even know came about by way of a buyout, like EA’s exclusive deal with the NFL. It’s a great video, and in the case of this list, one of the shorter ones, so it’s worth a watch. And if you like that one, they also made a great video about the Bayonetta series as well.

Lady Emily – The Existential Horror of Making Content About Content

I’ll admit this addition is a very personal one. I’ve been watching Emily’s videos for a while, including the many videos she co-wrote with Sarah Z, and she always makes great content. But this video, even if it is just a quick prelude to a much more massive video , really stuck a chord with me. It’s a really specific story about content creation, but as someone who makes content, it speaks on some feelings universal to everyone like us. There is always that pressure to maintain momentum with a fickle algorithm and often an ethereal user base. And if you’re lucky enough to be able to make a living off of content creation, depending on the internet to put food on the table can be a massive stressor.

This video is less about me learning about something I didn’t know about, that video is already linked in the last paragraph. But I do still love it for how cathartic of a watch it is, and if you are either interested in the mental state of content creators or are one yourself, you will likely enjoy this one as well.

Shaun – Harry Potter

Considering how things have gone with the series’ author in the last few years, I luckily have never gotten into the Harry Potter series. I saw the first movie by way of its yearly holiday showings on ABC Family, but I’ve managed to miss out on that entire cultural movement otherwise. But I know people love Harry Potter, and, in a very different way, I feel a bit for those fans as I too know how it feels to have an artist you respect fall from grace spectacularly while you’re love for thier art has a hard time fading.

But what I never thought to consider is how the books and world of Harry Potter itself could hold hints and problematic aspects that could have warned us all of Rowling’s current comments. Shawn does a fantastic breakdown on how some elements of the franchise rely on some pretty troubling stereotypes about a number of minorities and, as someone who never engaged with the text, it was wild to see. Often, when an artist falls from grace, we collectively look back on their art and question if it was ever good in the first place. This video does not reduce the entire Wizarding World to “it bad” but it does manage to provide context to the worldview that Rowling has always had, but has only more recently laid bare. It’s a great watch and will hit especially hard if you’ve ever loved the franchise to the point of being blinded to these various issues.

Defunctland – Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery

We should all know what’s up with Defunctland by now. What started as a niche channel that I loved solely for its video breaking down the Nickelodeon Hotel is now one of those channels that can release a video and make nothing else in my life matter until I watch it. Last year’s video on Fastpass was excellent, but I think it’s fair to say that he has topped himself with this video about a topic that, on its face, seems to have so much less to say about it.

Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery is the perfect kind of video essay. Its topic is something almost universally recognizable, but no one ever thinks about it much at all. It has production value better than not only every other Defuctland video I’ve ever seen but several of the other videos in this list. And it manages to hit you with a delightful twist near the end of the journey. It really is a masterclass in this weird niche art of online video, and I’d recommend it to anyone who is willing to hear someone talk about a 4-second musical stinger used in commercials a decade ago.

hbomberguy – Deus Ex: Human Revolution is FINE, And Here’s Why

You might have been expecting a different hbomberguy video, huh? Well, no. That video is great and all, but I find myself having loads more to say about his extensive look at Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I’m not particularly a fan of the immersive sim genre, nor am I a fan of Deus Ex specifically, but I did play Human Revolution many years ago once it was given to me for free through PlayStation Plus on PS3. I enjoyed the game well enough. And from the title of the video, you can tell that he also thought the game was fine.

What makes this video so satisfying is not that he likes the game more or less than me. He likes this game exactly as much as I do, but he has a wider arsenal of examples, reasons, and comparisons to explain why. It’s like we both had a decent meal at Applebee’s and we both liked it, but he just happens to be a professional chef who has had every other item on the menu in the year before. So, he uses that expertise and research to more brilliantly and exhaustively describe every flaw and delight of the meal. So often we get videos like this that gush with praise or burn with criticism, but this video manages to do both at the same time with the same amount of detail. Can’t recommend this video enough, it’s absolutely worth the heafty runtime.

Foreign Man in a Foreign Land – Asiaphobia in the BIack Community

Foreign Man is a creator I’ve only recently been introduced to through his awesome video “ Gendering is a Luxury ”, but as far as his output this year, I also really liked his video on Asiaphobia in the Black Community. In this collaboration with another dope content creator, oliSUNvia , he tackles not only the similar harms that come to Asians and Blacks from the white majority but also the harms that happen between our communities alone. We collectively don’t often talk about how minority groups harm each other, and I love that this video highlights those issues. And it, of course, comes at a perfect time, as the racist framing of the Coronavirus by the prior administration really set the country into a massive spike in Asian hate over the last few years.

Plus, while this isn’t about this video specifically, I just really appreciate Foreign Man having these conversations. As a black man, I’ve seen so few of my kind willing to even think about the topics of his videos at any deeper level. And while I’m not Caribbean at all, I’ve been exposed a bit to Jamaican culture through close friends. With that general knowledge, and even with him talking about how his content has an effect on his relationships with people back home, I can only imagine how daunting it is to put yourself out there like this. There is power in someone who looks like him and talks like him saying and doing the things he does, and I am really glad he’s doing it. Not to mention, the production value on all of his videos is way off the charts. So, I recommend this video specifically, but his whole channel is worth subscribing to as well.

Errant Signal – TikTok: Life on the Algorithm

I’ve known about Tiktok for several years, but up until the last year or so, it’s been that dancing app for children that I knew to stay clear of as a whole-ass adult. But I now know it to be an incredibly powerful app and one that I’ve given way too many hours to this year. With exception to particularly wild days on Twitter, like the death of the Queen, Tiktok is most often the app I’m scrolling through when I look up and realize I’ve been in the parking lot after my shift for the last hour instead of driving home.

The fact that the app is this addictive is a bit troubling, though, so I’ve had a more complicated relationship with the app lately as I try to minimize my use of it. And Errant Signal’s video on the app sums up all of my complicated feelings about it. He usually makes excellent videos about video games, and his Children of Doom series has also been a highlight this year. But this video was a refreshing change of pace, and I’m still impressed with how he’s able to translate his very personal experience (as the app is nearly purely algorithmic) into an effective breakdown for everyone, even folks who don’t use the app. TikTok is definitely a double-edged sword, and I think this video paints the most effective picture of each edge. 

Broey Deschanel – Licorice Pizza: Does Depiction Equal Endorsement?

Funnily enough, I have never seen Licorice Pizza. Hell, I didn’t even have any interest in doing so and still don’t really. But there is one aspect of it that found out about due to the discourse around the film: the age gap between the two main characters. Having a love (?) story between an adult and a child seems like the kind of creative decision left firmly in the early 90s, and for good reason, as it created a cloud of controversy around the film for months.

Broey Deschanel’s video looks at Licorice Pizza and tries to see if the film itself endorses this relationship through the filmmaking techniques used within it. But that’s not even the main reason I dig this video. I love it because she goes beyond this movie and looks at other films with age-gap relationships and how they portray them. It was fascinating to have aspects of films I saw long ago, or only knew about vaguely, pointed out and see the effects those choices in shot composition and color grading made on my perception of the characters. She’s made a lot of great videos, this year especially, but I think this look at such a Taboo topic was a compelling enough watch for me to put above the rest.

Folding Ideas – Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs

What is there left to say about this video that dozens of other, likely smarter, people haven’t already said? This video, released at the start of the year, months before the NFT trend truly reached its peak and sharp decline, helped me fully understand what NFTs actually were in a tangible way. But not only was it an effective explainer, but it also showed just why NFTs are bad. The crypto community is a uniquely bizarre and terrifying beast, and Dan Olson is a great travel guide to journey through the madness with. By now, the NFT boom really has blown up, so if you wanna know why it was never destined to stick around, this is probably the perfect video to describe why.

F.D Signifier – Drake and the Death of Hip Hop

I have such a weird relationship with Drake. I could name a dozen or so of his earlier songs that I absolutely love, and I could probably recite a bunch of his earlier features and tracks from memory. Hell, the other night at karaoke with friends, I knew his verse on ASAP Rocky’s Fuckin Problems by heart. But in the last few years, really ever since he released Views , I’ve been more annoyed with him that not. He’s become the poster child for a certain kind of toxic male that makes me cringe, which is wild because one of Drake’s distinguishing traits initially was his sensitivity. Well, he has been trying to separate himself from that persona, or at least just trying complicate that image.

That’s why I love this video from FD Signifyer so much. He chronicles the rise and not-quite fall of the artist, shows why Drake might suffer from some of the insecurities that he seems to have, and shows how the landscape of hip hop itself shifted to even allow an artist like Drake to be so successful in this genre. Most of this story is history I was alive for, so I wouldn’t say this video revealed anything new to me, but it did lay out events and draw connections between them in a way that crystallized a lot of my feelings on Drake overall. Sure, FD has had loads of more important videos on his channel this year, including his excellent videos on the Manosphere , Barack Obama’s legacy , and the fetishization of black men . But I gotta shine light on the Drake video because it just hits differently for me.

Vivian Strange – In Defense of CinemaSins

I’ve been on the internet for a long ass time. So, without having ever seen a video from the channel, I am well aware of CinemaSins. Their “Everything Wrong” series is iconic to the point where I know the ionic dig and error counter exclusively through dozens of parodies of their style. Because of this, though, I only knew CinemaSins as a negative entity and assumed they were only popular due to their snarky tone and willingness to nitpick movies for no good reason. So, I never cared to change that perception for several years.

But then I came across this video by Vivian Strange and it really made me second-guess my view of CinemaSins. I’ll be honest, It’s not like I’m a diehard stan of their content now, but it did provide some missing context and introduce a new perspective to look at their content through. There are dozens of massively popular things on the internet that I write off just so I never have to think about it alongside all of the other content on here, but this video got me to ease up a bit on that mindset, because I may be missing out on something good. And speaking of something good, while Vivian Strange is a relatively new face in this space, she already has dozen or so videos that are at least at the same quality, so it might be a good idea to get in now so you can say you knew about her first when she blows up.

The Penultimate Conquest – How Solarpunk Fiction Envisions a Better Tomorrow

Speaking of smaller channels, here’s another one that I am admittedly biased for. This is from The Penultimate Conquest, and specifically from Cristian Macias, someone who has guested on VGU.TV content and has had me on their own content in the past. But even if I never knew the guy, I’d still add this video to my list. This is the kind of video essay that put words to concepts I’ve been thinking about for a long time now. For the first few months of the year, thanks to the climate nihilism of 2021’s Don’t Look Up and the beautiful nature of Horizon: Forbidden West, I had been thinking a lot about how humanity treats its permanent home of Earth. Last year’s film fed my negativity about our current ecological situation, but Horizon gave me a sense of hope, but I didn’t quite know why until watching this video.

I had never heard the phrase Solarpunk until watching this video, but I’ll be damned, that is exactly the best word for what that is. I love imagining a world where high technology and digital innovation don’t necessarily have to be the enemy of nature and our environment, but so little of the media out there is willing to show me an image of the future like this. But this video not only defines that future but shows a list of examples that I’m now eager to check out. I mean, I knew I was slacking by never having watched a Hayao Miyazaki movie and sleeping on Citizen Sleeper, but this video motivated me to check out both even sooner than I was planning to. Christan has been making video essays for a few months, and I’ve been noticing the progress here and there, but this shows just how good he’s gotten with it, so it definitely deserves a shout-out here.

Daryl Talks Games – A Misguided Guide To Finishing Your Gaming Backlog

Something that I have been increasingly self-conscious of as the year ends is the fact that I just haven’t completed many games this year. Hell, I haven’t even played that many games this year, completion be damned. But despite this, I haven’t slowed down on buying games. Even with me maintaining my PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass subscriptions, my recent purchase of a Steam Deck has led to me buying so many more Steam games than I could ever complete. My backlog, including several releases from 2022 that I still have yet to beat, has been a slowly growing stressor in the back of my head, and it’s something that has actively soured my time playing the games I do get around to playing lately.

So this video from Daryl Talks Game was very cathartic for me, especially coming so late in the year, right as I was procrastinating on beating God of War Ragnarok. Daryl talks about his own journey in organizing and tackling his own backlog, and his experiment leads to some unexpected results. But also, this video really focuses on why folks even care enough to keep backlogs anyway, and why they can sometimes harm our relationships with games. The video feels like both a locker room pep talk to motivate me to check off some games I’ve put on the back burner while also being an informative look at why I’m doing all of this in the first place. So, if you have a bunch of games you’ve been meaning to get around to, definitely check this one out.

The Golden Bolt – PlayStation All-Stars Retrospective: The Failure That Changed Everything

I understand that this article may get a lot of views from folks who have no idea who I am. So, let me make one thing clear: I am exactly the kind of weirdo that likes PlayStation All-Stars way more than any game in the Super Smash Bros franchise. I’m not so far gone that I can’t admit that the game has several fundamental issues, but I still love it very dearly. But no one seems to take my love of the game, or really even the game itself, seriously, as it is often dismissed as nothing more than the failed Smash clone it honestly was.

But thank God for The Golden Bolt for this video. He’s made videos on the game in the past, and he makes great content in general, including his fantastic retrospective on the Ratchet and Clank series , but this video is my favorite of his yet. It manages to have a near documentarian level of research and detail into the development and public reception of the game but also has a very personal perspective on all of the events, as Bolt was one of the more notable fans of the game during its heyday. This video will probably always stand as the definitive video on the legacy of PlayStation All-Stars, and whether you’ve never heard of the game or prayed for a sequel daily like me, it is certainly worth a watch.

FUNKe – EVEN MORE Movement FPS

Here’s another thing you may not know about me if you are new here: My favorite game of all time is Titanfall 2. I love shooting things and I love going fast, so a game that lets me do both and rewards me for doing so handsomely was destined to be a beloved game of mine. But despite the critical acclaim and passionate fanbase, its fast-paced combat never really caught on. Or, actually, it never really caught on in a mainstream way.

In the indie and AA scenes, shooters have been getting so much faster. For every Metro Exodus, there’s an Ultrakill, and for every Call of Duty Modern Warfare, there’s a Dusk. Movement shooters have risen in popularity over the last few years, and FUNKe has been one of the biggest names on YouTube covering the trend. His production values are top-notch, and he understands this subgenre well enough to make great observations on these games, but I gotta be honest: I added this video mostly because it satisfies my niche interests too perfectly. I guarantee there’s no other YouTuber out there at this level willing to devote nearly half of a 40-minute video to the modern Shadow Warrior games. That is just absolutely my shit, and maybe if you check out the video, you might come back with a few cool shooters to check out yourself. The movement FPS is truly one of my favorite genres and I hope this video series introduces it to many more people.

Quality Culture – Kendrick Lamar: Deconstructing a Culture of Trauma

Kendrick Lamar dropped his latest album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, this year and we’ve been talking about it in the months since its release. It’s his first project in several years, plus its subject matter is so deep & deadly serious compared to many other rap albums this year. As a massive Kendrick fan myself, I wrote an exhaustive review of the album and reviewed all of his prior projects in the lead-up to this release. But the scope of all my work was too narrow to outline the story of Kendrick’s creative progression as this video from Quality Culture.

This is another video that doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, which would have been hard for any video to do considering my love for this artist. But much like FD Signifiers’ video on Drake, this video draws a line between Kendrick’s public perception and pressure early in his career to his current position in hip-hop culture and the themes on his latest album. It serves as a nostalgic look back on his discography while also giving a bit of insight of his current mindset. It’s a really solid video, and it was actually my introduction to the channel, which has several solid video essays about everything from a Brendan Frasier classic to my favorite movie of the 20 22 .

Karsten Runquist – What Happened to Studio Comedies?

This might be the most basic thing I ever admit, but I love to laugh. So, naturally, comedies are some of my favorite movies out there, but I gotta admit that comedy is more of a side dish than an entrée nowadays. My favorite comedy of all time is Booksmart, but the non-stop hilarity does take small breaks near the end to make room for drama. The Marvel movies are almost comedies as much as they are action movies, with the exception of some like Eternals and The Incredible Hulk. This isn’t a massive issue, but it does mean that pure comedy is not much of a thing anymore, and it’s a trend I never really thought about until I saw this video from Karsten Runquist.

He uses the recently released Barb & Star Go To Del Mar as a lens to look at why movies are so rarely made to only make you laugh nowadays. Even the Seth Rogan style of comedy, of which I adore Sausage Party and This is the End, now has obligatory injections of other emotions, like romance in The Long Shot being a current example. And once again, I enjoy these movies, but the utter insanity of Barb & Star is just something you don’t see anymore. This video tries to get to the bottom of why that is, and why comedy films have a lot of value. It’s a topic I would never put much thought into, but it’s interesting to hear discussed in this very chill video essay.

Noah Caldwell-Gervais – I Beat the Dark Souls Trilogy and All I Made Was This Lousy Video Essay

You already know I had to get another video on here from one of the GOATs of video essays. This year was the year Noah finally got into From Software’s output, and the fruits of that labor, though few and far between, were delicious indeed. But if you don’t know why Noah is such a favorite of video essay enjoyers, you might be wondering why hearing what he has to say on this series of long overanalyzed games is desired at all. Well, what Noah is so great at is portraying both his personal experience with a game and the cultural touchstones and anecdotes about development with equal, excruciating detail.

His videos are some of the only video essays that I feel are a sufficient replacement for playing through a game. He manages to discuss narrative themes in a way that makes you feel that you’ve made the same emotional connection as he did, without even playing the game. He describes gameplay in a manner so detailed that you can imagine yourself on the sticks. In fact, his breakdown of the original Souls trilogy was so effective that I purchased my first From Software game ever with the Dark Souls 1 Remaster. Elden Ring ended up being the first one I actually played (and while Noah did make a video about it as well, allow me to recommend this video from another video essay GOAT, Joseph Anderson), but this video on From’s most famous trilogy is what encouraged me that I can actually have fun with this studio’s output. And as I’ve discussed on other shows this year, I definitely have.

Knowing Better – The Part of History You’ve Always Skipped | Neoslavery

This video from Knowing Better is, admittedly, the only video here that feels more like homework than entertainment. But, as someone who grew up watching the Discovery Channel for fun, I found it as entertaining as I found it informative. Everyone knows that slavery was a thing, especially in the United States. And I think now more than ever, most of us are aware that the repercussions of slavery are still being felt today. I knew all of that too, but this video, once again, paints a narrative that assembles all of these facts into one massive timeline that shows nakedly just how long-lasting and obvious the injustices of today and the recent past are. It’s a video so densely packed with important information and context that I’m sure it’ll be shown in a few colleges or even high school classes. And while it may feel like eating your vegetables to watch, you should still eat your damn vegetables.

Jacob Geller – Fear of Cold

Jacob Geller is another name that was on the previous list, but this year I chose a video from him that has very little to do with video games. Every now and then, he’ll write about random fears one could have, and in this entry in that series, he talks about the most terrifying aspects of the concept of cold. He does manage to sneak some discussion of Frostpunk in there, but most of the video is about real-world stories, books, and movies about folks battling the most frigid and unforgiving element of nature. The video feels like sitting around a campfire hearing ghost stories, except the ghost here is something we all know very well, especially for those of us on the east coast who had to deal with that nasty cold front. Jacob is an excellent writer, plus his production values are getting more and more top-tier, so hearing him flex his abilities outside of video games was indeed a treat.

Sarah Z – The Horrifying Panopticon of West Elm Caleb

Oh look, Sarah Z is on the list once again! Well, while she had many videos I loved this year, like her videos on Sacrificial Trash , Geek Culture , and the movie Idiocracy , her video on West Elm Caleb is by far my favorite and one of the videos I’ve thought about longest when not watching it. It has the blend of what I expect from her content, a breakdown of a niche internet phenomenon, but accompanies that with a look at a pretty frightening new side effect of existing online. 

It has everything one could crave from a video essay, messy, though ultimately irrelevant, personal drama, a viral conspiracy or two, and a heaping helping of existential dread. The idea of having to be “perfect” on the internet is something I often think about, especially now that I’m apparently at least a V-list internet personality. I have certainly said some things I regret online, and some of those things aren’t even from that long ago. Even now I might do something awkward or outta pocket for the sake of a joke. To think that any of that could end up being what defines me to millions of people at any given time is certainly a bit terrifying, so hearing Sarah Z, and her co-writer Emily, break down these things was very cathartic for me.

Action Button – action button reviews boku no natsuyasumi

I haven’t been organizing all these videos into a properly ranked order because I honestly don’t love playing favorites, especially when video essays are largely personal works. But my one exception to that loose rule is this video right here: the Action Button review of Boku No Natsuyasumi. This is a game I only vaguely know about thanks to ThorHighHeels’ video on Mysterious PS3 Games last year, so I was excited to learn a lot more about this game. But this video ended up being so much more than just a simple review of a simple Japanese PS1 game.

I’ve watched some of Tim Rogers’ content in the past. I watched the Action Button review of The Last of Us and most of his review of Doom , and I even saw a few of his videos from back on Kotaku. But while I appreciated his style, I never really got excited about watching his stuff. But when I saw this game as a topic, I jumped in and, 6 hours later, I was sobbing. This video uses the tranquility of the Japanese countryside and the nostalgia of childhood memory that the game plays with as a jumping-off point to discuss the very concept of memory, nostalgia, and the act of living a life “correctly”. This video is so much deeper, so much more tender, so much more emotionally moving than it had any right to be or I ever even expected from Tim Rogers. It caught me totally off guard and was the only other video essay that made me cry this year (the other being CJ the X’s Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos video , which absolutely should have been on my list last year).

I’ve thought about this video so much over the last few months, and it really does feel like one of those videos that might have changed, or at least deeply enriched, my life a bit. I’m grateful to have seen this video, and I hope whoever is reading this at least checks it out, even if you don’t watch anything else. And yes, I know 6 hours is a long time, but I swear it’s engaging enough for it to blow by pretty quickly. Plus, hey, you can just watch it in parts anyway!

And that’s all I have for you all this year. There were a lot of great video essays this year, and even though I probably spent more time watching YouTube and Nebula (😉) than consuming pretty much any other kind of media, I don’t feel like I wasted my time at all. I played only a handful of video games, barely watched any movies, and watched almost no new TV shows. But the entertainment I got from these independent creators and collectives has given me much to enjoy, think about, and act on going forward. Though, by next year, I hope to have even more new names on this list, as repeating the same few faces is not a habit I want to keep up too much.

Before I get outta here though, allow me to share two YouTube playlists. This first one is of every video I’ve mentioned in this article, including several that I cut but loved anyway. You should find even more new and familiar faces there compared to this list. And this last playlist is my personal list of my favorite video essays of all time, regardless of release year or topic of discussion. If all of these great video essays aren’t enough for you, then first off, seek help, but also enjoy this playlist of 100 video essays that I will forever vouch for. I do update it every now and then with new entries replacing old ones, so feel free to come back to it every few months or so.

Thank you for taking the time to check out my article! Hope you came away with a new favorite channel and I hope you all have a great 2023.

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The best video essays of 2021

Introspection and the act of watching emerged as recurring themes across a year in which video makers responded to the realities of a continuing pandemic. Our poll of 30 video essayists, academics, critics and filmmakers highlights 120 recommendations.

After ‘Year of the Virus 2: 2 Metres 2 Vaccines’, it’s no surprise that we’re presenting yet another poll inevitably marked by isolation and fatigue.

There have been numerous developments and projects of note, continuing the previous year’ s theme of collaboration. There’s been the forming of Video Essay: Futures of Audiovisual Research and Teaching , an academic research project led by Johannes Binotto at Lucerne University in collaboration with the University of Zurich, which has produced some fascinating work this year; the One Villainous Scene collaboration, for which Nando v Movies gathered 230 essayists on YouTube to explore their favourite villains; the TV Dictionary collection, for which 20 essayists followed Ariel Avissar’s open invitation to dabble in videographic ruminations on television series; and two more volumes of the Essay Library Anthology, ‘micro-essay compilations’ by members of the Essay Library Discord community, touching on the very relevant themes of ‘time’  and ‘death’ .

This year also saw the return of several big names, such as Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou (the team behind Every Frame a Painting ) in their contributions to Netflix’s Voir series, and Mike Rugnetta (former host of Idea Channel ), who began uploading essays to a personal account .

But even amid these excellent projects, not only have video makers continued to struggle within the realities of a continuing pandemic, even poll voters have been down from previous years, suggesting that many of us have struggled with not only finding the time to make but also finding the time to watch video essays this year.

That being said, many of the videos that have been made and watched seem to have turned their attention towards the very act of watching, a trend that’s perhaps unsurprising given the amount of time we’ve all been afforded with ourselves this year. Left to our own devices, it’s only a matter of time before we begin to look inward, and thus introspection marks a clear theme in this year’s most talked-about videos. This result may be even more inevitable than any undercurrent of fatigue or isolation, as what would a group of video essay enthusiasts love more than essays about essays and videos about videos.

There’s no shame in a little indulgence this year.

Trends and numbers

Of the 30 contributors to the poll this year (down from 42 last year), 20 are male, 9 are female and 1 is non-binary. Two thirds of them are based in Europe, one third in the USA . They are video essayists, academics, critics and filmmakers. They submitted a total of 178 votes, for 122 unique entries that span online video essays, essay films, documentaries, installations, television series and Twitter threads. These works were made – or published – this past year, by both established essayists and newcomers to the field; they range from 20 seconds to 6 hours in length, with the average length above 22 minutes (5 minutes longer than last year’s average).

Practices of Viewing , “a video essay series on new media and their many old histories” by Johannes Binotto, was the top-mentioned item, receiving a total of 13 mentions (of either the series as a whole or several individual entries). Also of note were: the collaborative TV Dictionary collection, which received 7 mentions (of either the project as a whole or of various individual entries); Screening Room: On Digital Film Festivals by Jessica McGoff (6 mentions); and What Isn’t a Video Essay? by Grace Lee (5 mentions). As previously stated, most of these are devoted to an exploration of the subject of video essays or videographic criticism and of various practices of consuming, engaging with and reacting to media images. This trend also extends to Max Tohline’s A Supercut of Supercuts (4 mentions), Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin’s Videography 1978 (4 mentions), and several other entries featured on the poll.

Of the essayists whose work is featured, 38% are female (up from 33% last year, and 24% the year prior) and 50% are male (down from 53% last year, and 68% the year prior), with the remaining 12% made by mixed-gender teams or non-binary essayists.

The videos are overwhelmingly presented in English (95%) and are predominantly from the US (36%) and the UK (22%), followed by 23 other countries (mostly in Europe), marking a gradual rise in the number of countries featured in the poll. The dominant focus in terms of medium, though somewhat less so than in previous years, remains film (63% of videos), with television a more significant – though still distant – second (13% — up from 5% last year). 23 of the videos (or 19%) were published in various online academic journals, primarily [in]Transition (10 entries) and Tecmerin (5 entries).

Besides voting for their favourite video essays of the year, contributors were also given the option to suggest video essayists to be featured on our new ‘Emerging voices’ section, which seeks to spotlight new makers of note, whose work this year was significant or impactful, and who are well worth keeping an eye on in the following years.

Emerging voices

This year has been one not just of self reflection, but of discovery. In light of all the discoveries we’ve been making, we wanted to use this year’s poll to spotlight new voices who have emerged this year. We asked our peers to submit individual essayists that they believed had truly struck out anew this year, be that through debuting their first works, or by significantly expanding their own profiles.

One journey many of us can relate to is that of finding our voice throughout our academic progression. Many of our emerging voices are students whose works originally developed as academic assignments. Emily Su Bin Ko, from the University of Massachusetts, was one such creator. For her latest piece, the pointed videographic exploration Citizen Kane: Transcending Bazin’s Dichotomy , she was singled out by both Barbara Zecchi and Adrian Martin as having demonstrated her analytical talent, an engaging style and a thought-provoking voice.

Another was Niki Radman from the University of Glasgow, who made her debut this year with the video essay eye/contact , and was noted by Ian Garwood. The piece explores the work of Barry Jenkins through a critical supercut, and demonstrates an exciting mastery of the form and an ability to poetically communicate her ideas.

Matthew Smolenski from the University of Warwick was suggested by Katie Bird as another newcomer of note for their video essay Here, There and Everywhere: Movement in the Beatles’s Fiction Filmography , which deftly addresses movement and sound on screen through the context of the Beatles’ filmography.

Myrna Moretti from Northwestern University was also praised by Katie Bird. Her work, Friends from TV on the Internet , made for the Desktop Documentary Seminar at SCMS 2021, manages to be both lighthearted and poignant as it explores fandom, nostalgia, and climate anxiety.

Not all submissions received were discovered through traditionally academic spaces. Some were video essayists who have been accruing greater audiences on YouTube. Maia, known as Broey Deschanel , was put forth by Dan Schindel for her well-researched and thoughtful analysis of pop culture subjects. Her works on Sofia Coppola and Love Island were mentioned specifically, and while she has been working steadily since 2018, her work of this past year has been exceptional.

Yhara Zayd was also recognised by Dan Schindel for the uniqueness of her topics and the finesse of her analyses. Since 2019, she’s been creating thoughtful and original critiques on everything from Skins US to Reefer Madness (1936), and an acknowledgement of her work is well-deserved.

Corinth Boone is a cartoonist, animator, and now video essayist, with the debut of her piece, So I Decided to Watch All the Lupin III Movies . She was specifically hailed by Shannon Strucci for her wit, editing skills, and the well-researched manner of the work.

Finally, Sophie from Mars was suggested by Grace Lee. While she has been successfully analysing media and culture for many years now, Sophie was specifically heralded for the achievements of their work of the last year, the skilful honing of their visual style, and an affecting personal point of view.

Growth is a term that is wholly dependent on context. Thus, the creators selected for this emerging voices section represent the diversity of the videographic community itself, and we’re pleased to share each of their stories.

All the votes

Film theorist, curator and occasional video essayist, Charles University in Prague and Národní filmový archiv

Screening Room: On Digital Film Festivals by Jessica McGoff

Throughout the pandemic, I have become fascinated with the idea of extending the screen-mediated experience of the world beyond the actual computer or smartphone interface. Chloé Galibert-Laîné already explored this notion in 2020’s Forensickness ; this year, Jessica McGoff utilised the ‘desktop cinema without the desktop’ approach to reflect on attending digital film exhibitions within the spatial monoculture of her apartment. A paper-made quasi-cinematic dispositif crushed by an intervention of a fluffy cat is only one of the many playful experiments McGoff stages to invent new ways in which we can exploit the limitations of the pandemic against the grain.

The Elephant Man’s Sound, Tracked by Liz Greene

One of the great potentialities of videographic criticism is giving insight into the research process in all of its stages and facets. Yet, rarely do videographic essays delve into such meticulous depth as Greene’s investigation of her ongoing encounters with The Elephant Man’s soundtrack. One minor detail – a strangely cleaned-up line of dialogue – serves as a MacGuffin that sparks a journey across often obscure or intimate research artefacts and software interfaces. The essay highlights the alignment between research and post-production as material processes whose gaps, fissures, and excesses tell their own stories.

The Thinking Machine #48: Videography 1978 by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Examination of continuities and discontinuities between analogue and digital images is another area where videographic criticism thrives. Besides the works of Johannes Binotto, whom I mentioned in previous polls and who continues this line of work in the Practices of Viewing series, a moving autobiographical essay on films as material artefacts was created by López and Martin. Videography 1978 offers a fresh look on the ‘unattainable object’ issue, highlighting, for example, the non-identity of analogue and digital frames. The essay testifies that despite the (often justified) criticism, cinephilia as a mode of watching and analysing films remains relevant.

Mediated Auscultation by Emilija Talijan

Out of this year’s essays published in [in]Transition, Talijan’s exploration of the relationship between cinema and the stethoscope resonated most closely with me. I generally appreciate when videographic works reach toward a broader context of audiovisual culture, particularly of its very origins, and Mediated Auscultation finds the proper equilibrium between structured argumentation and formal experimentation. The stethoscope’s technological possibilities deconstruct the audiovisual unity of film back into a multiplicity of deranged, often impenetrable images and sounds, with a nerve-racking heartbeat rhythm always hovering around.

Train Again by Peter Tscherkassky

Once again, my list would not be complete without at least one experimental found footage film. Tscherkassky’s treatise on the ever-present bond between trains and cinema overflows with allusions to early cinema and the avant-garde, yet achieves to marry the old with the always already new. The Austrian artist’s vintage analogue deformations join forces with digital pixelation to show the train-image for what it is – a constantly trembling and crumbling entity on the verge of destruction and rebirth.

Ariel Avissar

Video essayist and media scholar at Tel Aviv University

Viewing the world outside from the comfort/prison of her room, McGoff offers a perceptive meditation on contemporary ways of seeing that is as irreverent as it is reverent. Quintessential viewing for the pandemic era. Make this a double feature with McGoff’s My Mulholland from last year, which likewise investigates the superimposition of online and offline experience.

I am Sitting in a Room, Listening to Mank by Cormac Donnelly

Sitting in a different room, Donnelly offers a sonic counterpoint to McGoff’s, offering a fascinating examination of the sonic soundscapes that envelop us all as we sit, in our own rooms, watching and listening (though perhaps not listening as attentively as we ought to). Make this a double feature with Donnelly’s Sonic Chronicle Post Sound from last year, which investigates (diegetic) sonic soundscapes.

Practices of Viewing by Johannes Binotto

Like McGoff and Donnelly, Binotto’s fascination is with the way we interact with images and sounds, and this phenomenal series, consisting of five entries to date, is a must-watch for anyone interested in the way technology mediates images and sounds, and the possibilities it opens up for interfering with and complicating its own mediation. My personal favourite is the one on screenshots , but it’s dealer’s choice, really. Make that last one a double feature with Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin’s Videography 1978 , Binotto’s explicit source of inspiration, which also explores technologies of viewing – and their pre-digital antecedents.

Irani Bag by Maryam Tafakory

Made as part of the Monographs  series of essays on Asian cinema commissioned by the Asian Film Archive last year, which is finally available online now, Tafakory’s soulful and mesmerising video employs excerpts from 24 Iranian films to interrogate the ways in which a handbag can serve as a surrogate for bodily contact, enabling the performers to “touch without touching”. Make this a double feature with Tafakory’s longer essay film follow-up, the upcoming Nazarbazi ; it is a meditation on the subject (and absence) of touch in Iranian cinema that is powerful, reflective and, yes, touching.

A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek

Misek offers a thoughtful and ever-timely exploration of the ways in which commercial archives mediate – and commodify – our access to the past, and offers a mode of resistance in the form of a direct intervention. Be on the lookout for it when it comes out sometime next year; in the meantime, whet your appetite with this shorter, early iteration of the project titled Captured Images , which can serve as a sort of trailer for the longer film – and also stands on its own.

Mad Men ’s ‘Babylon’  by Ariane Hudelet

Hudelet patiently and diligently traces multiple intertextual threads offered by a song featured on an early episode of Mad Men, presenting the kind of thorough, insightful and enjoyable analysis that I, for one, would love to see dedicated to more works of television in videographic form. On that note, make this a double feature with Occitane Lacurie’s Prendre conscience / perdre connaissance , a fascinating desktop examination of intertextual relations between Westworld and Last Year at Marienbad.

A Supercut of Supercuts: Aesthetics, Histories, Databases by Max Tohline

And finally, Tohline’s epic, feature-length reflection on the supercut is a comprehensively impressive (or impressively comprehensive?) investigation of one of the digital age’s most viral videographic genres. Over its 130 minutes, Tohline examines the supercut’s aesthetics, structures and effects; its complex and multiple contexts and histories; and its relation to technology and ideology, as a simulation of database logic. The analysis is coherent and persuasive, and the diverse perspectives are highly informative and enriching. No need for a double feature on this one (though I dare you not to look up any of the numerous supercuts sampled in the video).

Johannes Binotto

Lecturer in media and cultural studies, video bricolageur, leading videoessayresearch.org

I feel absolutely unable to have an overview of what work has been done in the field throughout this year. Instead the video essays on my list are all works that I came across not because I was searching for them but purely by accident, strangely in-between, and when I least expected them. Each of them hit me sideways so much that I still don’t want to recover from what they did to me.

How to Perform Teaching During a Pandemic Spring Session, 2020: GENDER STUDIES , Rain & Cats Cut by Dayna McLeod

I was watching Dayna McLeod’s haunting take on Lynch’s Wild at Heart when I came across this other piece that perhaps many would not even consider a video essay. McLeod performs the performance of someone who has to perform gender studies (and its interest in performance) under the circumstances of COVID remote teaching and being constantly interrupted. This is really wild, unpredictable, intellectual, clever, very funny, but – and this gets me the most — so extremely touching in its acknowledging one’s own awkwardness and vulnerability. We always joke about the things that hurt us most.

3 x Shapes of Home by Elisabeth Brun

What would seem as a purely conceptual and abstract research on how to investigate landscapes through different film practices turns out to be like a poem by Whitman, encompassing the most intimate and the most universal. A film in which the sudden freeze of an image and the humming of the filmmaker cuts me so much I start to cry. A crab gently poking at the camera is a sight I will keep dreaming of.

RETOURNE - TOI (Reading Ovid’s ‘Orpheus & Eurydice’ in Portrait of a Lady on Fire) by Catherine Grant

I thought I already knew this video but when seeing it during a workshop I was shocked by how much it affected me. It left me overwhelmed yet at the same time made me want to work myself in exactly this state of overload. I guess I heard the Althusserian interpellation in the title. And it is fitting that I had to return to this video to find out its unique power since it is about the hypnosis of repetition, both on narrative and formal level.

The Conversation is the Confessional by Max Tohline

I probably should have picked Max’s incredible jumbo jet of a video essay on the supercut, but this one means a lot to me because it is among many things also a personal present. Seeing a collection of video essays students of mine made on The Conversation, Max not only fell in love with them but wanted to join our group by contributing his own thoughtful, sensitive, and complex analysis of the religious under- under overtones in this film. Like a confession of its own. What a gift!

The Archival In-Between by Evelyn Kreutzer and Noga Stiassny

I don’t know how to talk about this one because it attempts what must remain impossible, approaching the unapproachable. It uses archival material that I am not sure anyone should ever use again but of which I am also convinced that it must be seen. The video’s impossibility seems to me the impossibility of the archive per se Foucault wrote about. So how then even to begin to make this video? It gives no answer but begins and remains beginning. Like the crackling noise on the soundtrack: a needle in the empty grooves of a record before the music starts.

Vertigo - Making Space. A 3D Video Essay by David Bucheli

Who hasn’t fantasised of seeing Vertigo in 3-D? David’s video fulfils the dream but does so by rendering it a disturbing nightmare. There are moments when the 3-D-effect works as one would think it is supposed to, giving us Scotty and Madeleine as seemingly graspable bodies but even more fascinating are those moments when the images we see on left and right eye no longer align but completely diverge, fall apart, splitting your consciousnesses in half. The longer I watch the more I fear this video will damage my brain irrevocably.

TV Dictionary —  On Becoming a God in Central Florida by Clair Richards

This was a triple surprise. A video on a series I had never heard of before by an essayist I hadn’t known before focusing on a term I never cared about before. Watching admiring the scene it picks and how it dances together with the text I ask myself: What is the strength of a video essay? For me it’s not tech-savviness nor the amount of material or concepts it works with. I think it’s rather the willingness to make yourself be seen doing something you haven’t yet nor ever will have mastered. It’s not a confidence thing.

Assistant professor, communication, University of Texas at El Paso

The Elephant Man ’s Sound, Tracked by Liz Greene

Greene’s video leads the viewer through a unique historical investigation of initial discovery, possibility, and lingering questions in a way that allows the viewer to feel how answers to a production’s history are many, and regularly conflicting. Unlike most historical presentations that simply point at the ‘evidence’, Greene allows us to literally ‘search’ and ‘flip the pages’ alongside. Greene focuses on equivocation, back tracking, and talking around, and what is largely left unsaid in many of the interviews. This project cuts around auteurism, without being a critique and articulates Splet amongst a larger set of industrial and and national forces.

Long Take, Pop Song by Ian Garwood

Nothing brought me more joy this year than this little pop diddy composed by Garwood and sung by Anna Miles ear-worming its way into my daily thoughts. Beyond the catchiness of the tune that directs this video on the important of pop music in a scene from Before Sunrise, Garwood brings in a pop aesthetic to the video with the use of animated and freeze frames, turning the conceit of the Before Trilogy into a comic book that takes place within the span of a pop song. It is a delight and a treat to see criticism have fun.

From now on, I won’t be able to watch Jeanne Dielman without also seeing McGoff’s own sink. This moment where a small scene of washing dishes floats about McGoff’s sink (the lines of the tiles almost matching) last only 6 seconds, but the gesture speaks to the intimacy and vulnerability of McGoff’s style. Her now signature approach to desktop, combined anew with the casual recordings of daily life (the record, the cat, the windows, the screens, the screens, the screens) offers a critical and personal glimpse into something that felt/feels all too familiar over the past years.

The TV Dictionary project by Ariel Avissar and various

Ariel Avissar’s TV Dictionary project was enormously generative for my own thinking about what diverse and creative experiments could be produced out of a simple prompt. I was inspired to create my own lists of terms and shows I would apply them to, and though I never made one, this speculative edit was a thrill. There’s too many videos to celebrate. But Libertad Gills and Juan Llamas Rodriguez tapped into the layering of their terms ‘ experience ‘ and ‘ comfort ’: how their shows feel to viewers and what is felt between characters in a moment or shared series of moments.

Beyond inspirational, and field changing, nothing made me want to throw in the towel on making more than seeing Binotto’s playful, critical, and incisive video series Practices of Viewing. Each one challenged our ways of ‘seeing’ and making, each one carefully bringing in new techniques to test the boundaries and possibilities of videographic form. But whatever trepidation I felt, was always overshadowed by the openness and curiosity that grounded each of Binotto’s experiments and his welcomeness as a videographic maker joyfully throwing out these gambits for the rest of us to up our games. But, MASK did me in.

Mourning with Minari by Kevin B. Lee

I’ll need to sit and rewatch Lee’s video essay many more times before I’ll have words good enough to match his evocative “gathering of images” of grieving through making, of holding space, and of breathing this memorial into being. By walking us through Minari, Lee leaves room for the questions trauma and white supremacist violence has left in its wake. By showing what has been made invisible, Lee similarly works through what it means to “manage the politics of presence” in the film and in US visual culture writ large, not to see these images as ‘empty’ but as open

De la femme by Caterina Cucinotta and Jesús Ramé López.

Stitching and Cutting, Stitching and Cutting, Stitching and Cutting! The repetition and overlap of the manual labor of production (seamstresses and editors) woven together with the metaphorical and literal fabrics of the film: its costumes and film strips. A gorgeous meditation on the gendered craft work of Hollywood production using both scraps of fabric and trims of film: materials on display and also what is not meant to be seen. The multi-screen side-by-side creates simple unexpected patterns and delightful sonic parallels to the sewing machine and the editor’s splicing. With these workers we get close in, slow down, and reconfigure.

Steven E. de Souza

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

Listening to Toy Story by Andrew Saladino (The Royal Ocean Film Society)

The almost purest representation of a literal ‘moving picture’, animation’s inevitable accommodation of sound would seem an afterthought hardly worth a thought, its early scores dismissed even by its applicants as ‘mickey mousing’. A century on, any imagined deficiencies of bandwidth inherent in the medium compared to live action demands sound loom even larger in its duty to inform and enhance a narrative.

Here’s Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult to Understand (And Three Ways to Fix It) by Ben Pearson (Slashfilm)

After nodding my head sagely at Andrew Saladino’s essay how diligently animation endeavors to add depth, clarity and content to its simulacrum of reality, I’m now shaking it in dismay at Pearson’s analysis of live action’s race in the opposite direction, coupled with minor relief that it’s not just me, I don’t actually need a hearing aid.

The Coolest Stunt You’ve Never Heard Of by Adam Tinius (Entertain The Elk)

It’s the rare filmmaker who didn’t start down the storytelling path in childhood, in backyards populated by cops n’ robbers, cowboys, pirates, and — most of all — imagination. Sometimes less is more, and we were right all along: simply pretending may be the best trick of all.

Golden Ratio in Cinema by Walter Murch

Mind Blown.

The Aesthetics of Evil by Lewis Michael Bond and Luiza Liz Bond (The Cinema Cartography)

Where would we be without our villains? (I know where I’d be, still teaching ESL at John F. Kennedy Junior High School in Willingboro, New Jersey — Go, Gryphons!) But in a world of increasingly grey tones, with black and white cowboy hats and their corresponding matching horses long dispatched to Boot Hill, how do we signal Villainy before it even opens its mouth? Here, Luiza Liz Bond and Lewis Michael Bond crack the color code; let the Pantone chips fall where they may.

Queen’s Gambit : What Makes a Story Cinematic? by Adam Tinius (Entertain The Elk)

People sitting silently in chairs glaring daggers at each other over seven hours of film will be edge of the seat suspense, said no one ever.

Scott Frank: Hold my beer vodka.

Voir, episode 6: Profane and Profound by Walter Chaw (on Netflix )

Just in time for its 40th anniversary, Walter Chaw spares no superlatives in his pedestaling of 1982’s 48 HRS . as a watershed work of not only genre, but as a seminal, crucial and long overdue vivisection of contemporary society. In an essay flaying metatextual layers aside, he shows us the racism that’s the apex tentpole of the American power structure, and unpacks this archetypical ‘buddy comedy’ as a poisoned chalice of popcorn, its bitter taste sweetened by heaping doses of comedy.

Who am I to disagree?

Will DiGravio

Host, The Video Essay Podcast ; creator, ‘ Notes on Videographic Criticism ’

These seven videos/projects/films, for me, epitomise the greatness of this form: they provide a new way of seeing and engaging with familiar images, sounds, and mediums. Each taught me how to be a better watcher, listener, and reader. They inspired me, and I look forward to returning to them time and time again in the years to come.

A Fish with the Movie Camera: Lucrecia Martel’s Pescados as Metacinema by Barbara Zecchi

All Light, Everywhere by Theo Anthony

What is Neo-Snyderism? by Ariel Avissar

The Rise of Film TikTok by kikikrazed aka Queline Meadows

Citizen Kane : Transcending Bazin’s Dichotomy by Emily Su Bin Ko

Maggie Mae Fish

Actor, writer, film video essayist

The Day Rue ‘Became’ Black by Yhara Zayd

I love all of Yhara’s work, but this video in particular touches on a moment I remember in real-time — the backlash against a canonically young Black girl in the Hunger Games books, who when brought to life in the films illuminated the stunted imagination and racism in YA  audiences.

Bo Burnham’s Inside and ‘White Liberal Performative Art’  by F.D.  Signifier

F.D. Signifier is one of the most cuttingly insightful media critiques, and his work on Bo Burnham’s quarantine ‘masterpiece’ hits into why this type of art can ring hollow or shallow for as many people as it resonates with.

Rac(ism) & Horror by Khadija Mbowe

Khadija is funny, snarky, our ‘Millennial Auntie’ and in this video becomes a film professor to give an overview of the intersection of Blackness and the horror genre. It would be at home in any university course on the subject, but Khadija goes full out swapping costumes and sets to give as much entertainment as insightful analysis of a broad and deeply important topic.

Thomas Flight

Video essayist and filmmaker

What Isn’t a Video Essay? by Grace Lee (What’s So Great About That?)

The video essay is a notoriously hard genre to define. Grace Lee expertly uses the form to examine itself and avoids easy or cliché answers, appealing instead to our subjective intuition.

What Distinguishes the Great Existential Films? by Tom van der Linden (Like Stories of Old)

2021 came as a year of personal video essays. Blending a reading of real-world spaces and film, Tom explores his love of existential cinema through his love of empty churches.

The Game That Won’t Let You See All of It by Jacob Geller

Geller looks at how a video game, several films, and a TV show use their structure to examine the passage of time.

Midsommar ’s Audiovisual Tricks by Spikima Movies

Sometimes video essays serve a very practical purpose. Ari Aster’s Midsommar got under my skin, and I wanted to know why. But I was too unsettled to dive deeply enough into Midsommar’s world to figure out why for myself. Fortunately, Spikima does the dirty work of thoroughly answering that question in this essay. Does knowing a film’s tricks make it less horrifying?

How Movies Helped Me Process My Mother’s Death by Adam Tinius (Entertain The Elk)

Adam Tinius, from Entertain The Elk, offers a deeply personal and emotional examination of how losing his mother to cancer compared to representations of death and grief in film.

EraserNomad by Liz Greene

Greene discovers an implausible but compelling visual link between Nomadland and Eraserhead. There’s a strange echo in how Jack Nance and Francis McDormand navigate these spaces. Perhaps their characters are haunted by a similar ghost.

Ian Garwood

Senior lecturer in film and television studies, University of Glasgow

Not that anyone will be checking back, but my list this year features only names who I have not picked for previous polls.

Marion Cotillard Doesn’t Exist (And This Is the Proof) by Elena G. Vilela

Not that anyone will be checking back, but my list this year features only names who I have not picked for previous polls. I love the ‘Truman Show’ conceit of this video, which is superbly realised through dead-pan narration and an incredibly astute selection of clips.

This is an exhaustive, yet consistently enlightening and accessible, treatise on the supercut. Three years in the making, Max Tohline’s feature-length essay identifies a dizzying array of precursors to the internet-era supercut, as well as pinpointing its aesthetic and ideological effects.

This is a fascinating essay that makes an imaginative and persuasive association between the technology of cinema and the stethoscope. Its philosophical analysis of cinematic listening is pursued through a wonderful selection of clips.

Practices of Viewing: Muted by Johannes Binotto

On the one hand, Johannes Binotto’s Practice of Viewing could be seen as something of a video essayist’s manual, each entry itemising a technique associated with video essay-making processes. However, there is nothing textbook about the way these techniques are discussed: the address is passionate and wide-ranging, offering enlightenment on why these processes fascinate, rather than a ‘how to’ instruction. I’ve chosen this particular entry as it aligns with my interest in sound. It also provides an ending that resonates uncannily with the preoccupations of Mediated Auscultation – so watch them as a double bill.

[Safe] and The Neon Demon in Dialogue by Oswald Iten

Like Binotto’s work, Oswald Iten’s three-part experimental mash-up of [Safe] and The Neon Demon is accessible through videoessayresearch.org , a research website that should be bookmarked by anyone interested in the development of videographic criticism. Each of the videos combines the films according to a different founding principle, providing captivating evidence for Jason Mittell’s claim that formal parameters lead to content discoveries.

TV Dictionary —  Bron/Broen ( II ) by Barbara Zecchi

Ariel Avissar’s curation of the TV Dictionary  series was a highlight of the year, one in which I was happy to indulge as both creator and viewer. I’m really interested in the range of approaches adopted to address the same brief: to encapsulate a TV series in one word. Barbara Zecchi chooses a distinctive path by allowing a scene to play out at length first, before introducing her chosen word, and then letting the scene resume, now understood in the light of that word. I won’t spoil the surprise by revealing the pivotal word (but it made me laugh)!

Picturing the Collective: Seven Days in May by Libertad Gills

One technique showcased in the TV Dictionary series was to let a scene play out with minimal, yet still integral, textual commentary. Libertad Gills, who added an entry on Derry Girls to the collection, adopts a similarly minimalist approach to her use of captions in this video, which runs through a sequence from Affonso Uchoa’s Seven Days in May. The result is an explanatory scene analysis that displays the lightest of touches.

Tomas Genevičius

Art critic, kritikosatlasas.com

Josephine Massarella: One Woman Walking by Stephen Broomer

The Moment of Recognition: Phantom Lady and Sorry, Wrong Number by Patrick Keating

Silence in The Passionate Friends by Oswald Iten

The Thinking Machine #50: Nicholas Ray — Notes on Style by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Practices of Viewing: F. FWD by Johannes Binotto

Catherine Grant

Screen media-maker and publisher of scholarly video essays, and a former professor of screen studies (Website: https://catherinegrant.org )

Her first video essay and a superbly engaging work on Gen Z’s latest hub for film appreciation by the video essay’s MVP in 2021, which Queline followed up with another excellent study, The Two Worlds of Wolfwalkers . If these two huge achievements weren’t enough, Queline was also instrumental in the wonderful Essay Library Collaboration Project. Join the Essay Library Discord and check it out. And listen to Will DiGravio’s great conversation with her at the Video Essay Podcast ..

We were very lucky, at [in]Transition, the peer-reviewed video-essay journal I co-edit, to be able to publish some marvellous entries by new makers in this emergent scholarly field. Of the three I am highlighting here, one of the strongest in scholarly terms was this work that explored how one form of media (the stethoscope) might reveal something about another (cinema), and in so doing revisited some essential questions of cinema’s medium specificity in a supremely original way.

TERROR NULLIUS Unmixed by Caitlin Lynch

Given the ubiquity of global remix culture, Caitlin Lynch’s highly original proposal for a videographic research methodology designed to tackle this culture deserves a lifetime achievement award! What an amazingly useful concept ‘unmixing’ is, especially when it comes to deeply political work, like that by Australian collective Soda_Jerk. I can only agree with peer-reviewer Jaimie Baron who wrote that TERROR NULLIUS Unmixed shows that ‘the activities of remixing and unmixing, alternating in a potentially never-ending cycle, may constitute a productive strategy for grappling with our mediated traces of history, to which a definitive and closed meaning can never be attached.’

Stories of Haunted Houses: Female Subjects and Domestic Spaces in Contemporary Gothic Films and TV Series by Chiara Grizzaffi and Giulia Scomazzon

My personal favourite video essay on television and film, published in 2021, was co-authored by a new maker (Giulia Scomazzon) and by someone who is better known so far for her brilliant writing on video essays, my [in]Transition co-editor Chiara Grizzaffi (author of the great book I film attraverso i film. Dal «testo introvabile» ai «video essay»). Their collaboration produced a substantial and satisfying work, with affect like no other — a perfect combination of poetic, personal and scholarly approaches to contemporary female gothic films and tv series.

Outside the Lines by Dayna McLeod

One of the most exciting developments of 2021 was the turn to video essays made by established found footage and experimental film artists. Dayna McLeod is an internationally known Montreal based performance artist and video artist whose work often touches on topics of feminism, queer identity, and sexuality. In her first ever online video essays — on Lynch’s Wild at Heart — she shakes up the videographic universe with a wonderful fusion of personal-essay-filmmaking in a film critical vein. I really love what Dayna achieves in the incredibly concise and powerful frame of Outside the Lines.

Stephen Broomer is an internationally renowned experimental filmmaker, film preservationist, and scholar of Canadian cinema. His new turn to video essays in 2021 was both brilliant and prolific, resulting in two new series of high quality work: Art & Trash , which premiered in February 2021 with a twelve-episode first series of video essays on underground, avant-garde, psychotronic and outsider media, which his essay on Josephine Massarella inaugurated; and Detours, an equally rich new videographic series on the bruised soul of film noir . 2021 was an incredibly productive year from a remarkable filmmaker. I can’t wait for more.

TV Dictionary —  Derry Girls by Libertad Gills

My final vote in the poll (as I will retire after a long but happy stint as participant in it this year) goes to yet another young filmmaker, long interested in found footage, who is now making online video essays. Libertad Gills made my very favourite video essay, to date, in Ariel Avissar’s wonderful collaborative project TV Dictionary . Her work gets at the heart of what’s so brilliant about Derry Girls, which is no mean feat in three and half minutes, and reminds us, along the way, what a work of genius the series is.

Chiara Grizzaffi

Postdoctoral Fellow at IULM University. Co-editor of [in]Transition

Montegelato by Davide Rapp (watch trailer )

Screen Glare by Enrico Camporesi, Stefano Miraglia

Rites of THE PASSAGE by Catherine Grant & Deborah Martin

The Thinking Machine #49: The Burning House by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

A Woman’s Place: Home in Cinema by Louise Radinger Field

Practices of Viewing: Screenshots by Johannes Binotto

How Good Filmmaking Brings a Script to Life by Michael Tucker (Lessons From the Screenplay)

Cydnii Wilde Harris

Film scholar and video essayist

I’ve always loved a good homework assignment, and I’ve particularly enjoyed seeing everyone’s responses to Ariel’s prompt. Every one I’ve seen has been a standout. I particularly really enjoyed those that used the video essay medium to play with form and tone, and really capture the essence of their chosen tv shows. But one that stuck with me in particular was Ariel’s own on Seinfeld : A real punch of text, editing, laugh tracks, and humor for the tv show about nothing. A’s all around.

Johannes’s Practices series has been such a marvel throughout the year. With every new entry, I’m confronted with his genius, and it’s been really inspiring to bear witness. Muted in particular really resonated with me. The whole series feels like an interrogation of film history, media present, while somehow remaining deeply meditative and personal. Johannes’s work, without fail, always leaves me feeling invigorated, about what I’ve just seen, and what I could possibly do.

Rio Bravo Diary by Will DiGravio

Watching the Rio Bravo Diary unfold all year has been such a treat. I didn’t grow up with any real affinity for the western, so to read Will’s essays about what this film in particular meant to him growing up and coming of age really helped me reappraise this specific film. His transparency has been really revelatory to see, and I really appreciate how he’s invited us all to get to know him a little better through this year-long project. Further, the consistency and discipline of dealing with a single text for a full 365 is such an interesting experiment in the first place.

It is so, so cool to see someone top themselves so consistently. The things Jessica accomplishes here, the introspection, the way she was able to tackle the issue of accessibility while also broadening the topic, the interplay between film, the internet, and the various windows surrounding us all from literal glass panes to phone, tablet, tv, and theater screens. I don’t think I’ve ever wished a video essay would keep going while also being so impressed by how perfectly it ends. It’s just so dynamic in every sense of the word, and incredibly well done.

let’s talk about sexless media | feminism, christianity, violence, etc by wit and folly

This is a video essay that somehow managed to synthesise an online conversation with such care and context that I can’t help but share it with friends. What they accomplish is one of my favourite forms of video essays on YouTube. It’s informative, well researched, yet personable and accessible. Their argument flows really nicely, and the citations do a lot to back up the personal statements made. It also really nicely laid out something that maybe I had felt about a recent media trend, but hadn’t yet been able to articulate myself. If I had to answer the question of sex scenes in films, I would simply point to this video essay as my answer.

Gab the Goat (ft. Yhara Zayd): A Celebration of Gabrielle Union & An F-U to Colorism and Tokenism by Melina Pendulum

I’m so happy I waited to submit, because these are two of my favourite video essayists discussing one of my favourite actresses (I’m also happy because it means I get to nominate them both under a single entry). I think sometimes we have a knee jerk reaction to group projects, and I think this video essay is a perfect example of how to combine two distinct voices and visions into a single project. The exploration into Union’s career is long overdue and so deserved. I think what struck me most was how strong the voice was. They make no apologies for their stance, and really challenge Hollywood to not just reflect but act. They really manage to ask some tough questions of not just the Hollywood system, but those that benefit from it. It’s theory with praxis and it’s all deliciously powerful.

Oswald Iten

Film scholar, video essayist, animator, PhD researcher

‘The Lighthouse’ (2021) by Leonardo Govoni, Cristina López Caballer, Mehran Abdollahi

Amuse-œil by Eric Faden

Barbara Stanwyck Rides Again by Shannon Harris, Catherine Russell

Sound and Silence in Gravity: Fidelity vs Intelligibility by Jordan Schonig

Special Mention: A Supercut of Supercuts by Max Tohline.

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 wonderfully rich follow-up of Visual Disturbances (on my S&S best of list of 2019) on the analytical urge of ‘interrogating’ filmic images, obsessing on a rather invisible 1.14-second-long shot from Citizen Kane, and on those ‘small gifts for the eye’ that subtly but abundantly appear in Playtime. Like I said earlier: Faden’s care for quality is admirable and inspiring.

Mike Figgis on Timecode and Split-Screen Cinema by Leigh Singer

The COVID pandemic has normalised a once special technique of split screen, forcing its ‘cubist psychology’ on us while locked in our homes with only virtual split-windows to the world. Singer’s interview with Mike Figgis, director of the quadruple split screen film Timecode, is a highly informative, superbly comprehensive, and abundantly illustrated walkthrough of the (cinematic) history and effect of the technique.

Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, but as an ethnographic documentary exploring the life of lighthouse keepers in the early 20th century, directed by Robert Flaherty. An ‘ethnographic screwmeneutics’ project by the students of my Videographic Criticism course at the University of Groningen.

A massive (two hours!) video on supercuts, covering every possible angle on the technique, thereby forcing all the other supercut-researchers to find another subject of study.

Keating, with his signature analytical thoroughness, walks us through his audiovisual thinking process, distinguishing between camera movements delivering characters’ ‘revelation’ and ‘recognition’.

VR supercut diorama, the first of its kind, piecing together 180 films, TV series and commercials of the Monte Gelato waterfalls (near Rome) in 3D and with spatialised audio. Great idea, incredible effort, and superb implementation. Cinephile goosebumps are guaranteed!

Jaap Kooijman

Associate professor in media studies, University of Amsterdam, organiser ASCA videographic criticism seminar

The Black and White Coffee Set by Barbara Zecchi

Barbara Zecchi’s The Black and White Coffee Set is brilliant in its simplicity. The focus on one prop (he black-and-white coffee set in Ana Muylaert’s Que horas ela volta?) and the way the design of the audiovisual essay aesthetically repeats it, effectively work together to show the narrative importance of a seemingly mundane object. While its playfulness makes the audiovisual essay enjoyable to watch, its more ‘serious’ argument about Brazilian class and race relations remains clear throughout.

Staring Back by Sara Delshad

Although Staring Back works perfectly well as a study of auteurism, convincingly showing a signature style of filmmaker Chris Marker, Sara Delshad’s audiovisual essay stands out for me in the way it forces the viewer to become aware of their own subject position. The audiovisual essay highlights the human and non-human animal subjects staring back at the camera and, in extension, at the viewer. Those moments when the subjects answer the viewer’s gaze evokes a feeling – at least in me – of being caught staring. Delshad cleverly uses slow motion and freeze frame to enhance this sensation.

Sonic Chronicle, Post Sound by Cormac Donnelly

Some audiovisual essays really teach you something new. In Sonic Chronicle, Post Sound, Cormac Donnelly applies R. Murray Schafer’s definition of the soundscape to sonically analyze the newsrooms scenes in Zodiac, The Post, and All the President’s Men. Donnelly uses both sonic and visual techniques to make sound tangible, enabling those with untrained ears, like myself, not only to pay attention to, but also make sense of sound.

Evelyn Kreutzer

Postdoctoral researcher, Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf

Practices of Viewing: Mask by Johannes Binotto

I always attempt to curate my suggestions for the annual best video essays lists in a way that represents the breadth of video-essayistic output. Binotto’s Practices of Viewing series reflects sophisticated, in-depth, and yet very accessible and informative introductions to film-analytical concepts that are very suitable for both teaching purposes and film-scholarly thinking more broadly. I like Mask in particular because it evokes multiple layers of cinematic framing and spectatorship that seems to speak intuitively to our current moment of increasingly ‘masked’ experiences of the world.

Silence and Words: Voice-over and Trauma in Coixet & Campion by Barbara Zecchi

Barbara Zecchi’s video essay is a powerful, deeply affective video on cinematic sound, specifically the transcendence of internal and external sound (experience and narration). As a sound scholar, I always look and listen for videos like these.

The Typewriter (Supercut) by Ariel Avissar

Ariel Avissar’s video is less an academic video essay than it is an impressive, entertaining, and insightful supercut of a single object/motif across numerous media sources that is simple in its conceptual premise but very sophisticated in its execution and certainly provocative of critical reflexion.

TV Dictionary —  Marcella by Barbara Zecchi

Like the entire TV Dictionary  series (curated by Ariel Avissar), Barbara Zecchi’s video on Marcella turns the seemingly narrow pairing of a dictionary entry to a TV series into a multi-faceted, scholarly evocative, and visually stunning exercise. I like the whole series but so far this entry has been my favorite.

Video essayist

I don’t know what I was doing this year, but apparently it wasn’t watching a whole lot of videos, so no ‘hidden gems’ from me this year. But these three entertaining and engaging videos, while popular in terms of views, may have slipped through the more academic net. So enjoy!

Space Jam 2 is a Lie by John Walsh (Super Eyepatch Wolf)

I’m a sucker for some fiction, and Super Eyepatch Wolf sure knows how to have fun with the video essay format, making some of the most creative uses of the form. This video was a stand out for me this year.

The Battle of SHARKS ! By CGP  Grey

A charming story of the battle between art and city council planning permission, I don’t know if I’ve ever finished a video feeling more giddy and delighted. Review from my mum: “That video is worth more than every other video on YouTube put together, and deserves an award.”

CO - VID s: the 90’s neoliberal fantasia as experienced by daria morgendorffer, millennial by Ian Danskin (Innuendo Studios)

A wonderful defense of a defense of millennial teens, and an account of millennial nostalgia, which I am already nostalgic for. Ahh 28th Jan 2021, when I was still so full of hope for the year ahead. Ian Danskin continues to make exceptionally engaging videos from a deeply personal perspective that perfectly balances anecdote and academia.

Kevin B. Lee

Video essayist and educator; @alsolikelife

Three Minutes: A Lengthening by Bianca Stigter (watch trailer )

Three minutes of home movie footage taken in 1938 are explored through an impressive array of videographic techniques to create a vast and deeply moving contemplation on lives lost and history regained.

Also: ‘One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean’ by Wang Yuyan (watch trailer ), whose epileptic temporality goes in the polar opposite direction to achieve its own revelatory experience of the extreme online present.

Home When You Return by Carl Elsaesser (see details )

Stretching and blurring the boundaries of video essay, experimental film and home movie, traces of a 1950s homemade melodrama by amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin intermingle with a mournful homage to the author’s grandmother and her vacated home. A powerful mélange of cinematic and domestic spaces, past and present.

Also: Screening Room: On Digital Film Festivals , by Jessica McGoff

Launched this year, this series currently consists of five video essays, each concerning a different method through which viewing is mediated (muting, screenshot, pausing, fast forwarding, masking). With an arresting combination of playfulness and obsessiveness, Binotto re-performs and reflects upon the techniques that govern spectatorship.

Also: Amuse-oeil by Eric Faden

What Isn’t a Video Essay? By Grace Lee (What’s So Great About That?)

YouTube video essays have generally bloated into hours-long vlogfests to maximize monetization algorithms, but here is a rigorously crafted tour de force that rewards rewatching for the many memeic details it contains. It breathlessly performs a mind engaging the internet on its own terms, utilizing the temporal and audiovisual affordances of always-on networked life to reflect thoughtfully back upon itself.

Also: The Scholarly Video Essay by Ian Garwood. Garwood demurs from calling this a video essay, but they certainly demonstrate how pre-recorded lectures can evolve from a lowly COVD -era necessity into an arresting videographic form in its own right.

This was released just around last year’s poll; since then it’s become a go-to reference for film dinosaurs like me to make sense of how film culture can thrive among a new generation and its preferred platforms.

Also, this .

Transitional Moments in Cinematic Virtual Reality by Sarah Atkinson

A critical and revealing interrogation of the gender (en)coding of virtual reality as it has been presented in cinema, implicitly calling for a more inclusive re-coding of these mediums not only as a means for entertainment but for social co-presence.

Also: Michael Ironside and I by Marian Mayland (watch trailer )

The Best Simpsons Episode is About Losing Everything You Love by Jacob Geller

As also evidenced in his The Game That Won’t Let You See All of It , Geller is able to narrate the YouTube video essay and its pop culture preoccupations into areas of uncommon sensitivity and existential poignancy.

Also: Mad Men’s Babylon: Mapping out a Musical Metaphor by Ariane Hudelet

Adrian Martin

Film critic and audiovisual essayist

Satirical pastiches are good when they are accurate, and this one is so accurate it manages to satirise several things at once, from nerd-fan culture to the Kogonada craze.

Prendre conscience / perdre connaissance by Occitane Lacurie

The smart conjunction of Last Year at Marienbad and Westworld via a quote from surrealist cinephile Robert Benayoun – I could hardly ask for anything more.

Most audiovisual essays depend on some level of prior film analysis, but not so many are actually very good at really achieving an analysis above the most obvious and basic undergraduate level. Keating is an excellent analyst and he turns his insights into finely constructed montage pieces, like this one.

A lot of so-called remix culture simply, from Adam Curtis downward, simply celebrates the brute fact of being able to sample and throw things together — often quite incoherently. Lynch’s superb work takes a patient strategy of unmixing to comment on those genuine remix masters, the Soda_Jerk team.

Vedette — For Laura Mulvey by Catherine Grant

Catherine Grant’s dispositifs of audiovisual comparison, often with an inscribed text component, can look deceptively simple. This one revealingly lines up words from Laura Mulvey’s recent work with breathtaking passages of two classic Max Ophüls films.

Dialogue III : CAROL / JESSE by Oswald Iten

This is the culminating and best work in Iten’s series interweaving Todd Haynes’ Safe and Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon. More than a matter of demonstrating the banal influence of one film or filmmaker on another, this audiovisual essay achieves a dreamy, hallucinatory intensity and texture.

Secrets of Ghosts by Johanna Vaude

If you’re going to re-imagine a pre-existing film in a new and creative montage, really push it to something extreme. Vaude, among the most masterful of all practitioners in this field, works her special magic on Mulholland Drive, part of her series of ongoing commissions from Arte’s BLOW UP  program.

Daniel Mcilwraith

Video essayist and video editor

in process… | james benning at neugerriemschneider by Erika Balsom

The Representation of Rape on Screen by Lucie Emch

Alan O’L eary

Associate professor of film and media in digital contexts at Aarhus University. His manifesto for a parametric videographic criticism was published this year in NECSUS .

Nuit Debout/Up At Night by Nelson Makengo (watch trailer )

Congolese artist-filmmaker Nelson Makengo spreads his portrait of Kinshasa, a city beset by power cuts, across three screens punctuated with bare lightbulbs and the dancing beams of torches, the whole underpinned by an evocative sound world of generator noises, off-screen conversations and voices from the radio. Some participants at the ethnographic film festival where I saw Up At Night complained they found the three-screen format distracting, but it is precisely the reflexive use of multiscreen—sometimes showing identical images, sometimes different, and sometimes nothing—that places Up At Night in the essay film tradition and lifts it clear of documentary or auto-ethnography.

Obliged to placate a UK funding system structurally suspicious of academic and artistic enquiry, Screenworks , the journal of practice research in screen media, insists on a detailed setting out of research questions and social impact for each of its video publications. Elisabeth Brun duly complies in the statement accompanying her intimate and spectacular 3 x Shapes of Home, but the film contains all the elements it needs to explain itself. I love how it’s unsatisfied with, and unafraid to compromise, its own beauty, and how the playful voiceover interacts dynamically with content and form. It’s a sensual and conceptual treat.

Ian Garwood has used tweets as ‘research outputs’ in a novel way as part of his Indy Vinyl project (see his 2020 article in NECSUS ) but Will DiGravio has actually deployed the structural affordances of Twitter in his year-long analysis of Rio Bravo. In 365 daily tweets, DiGravio methodically posted 22-second clips from Hawk’s film prefaced by an observation or reaction in 280 characters. This is ‘video/essay’ as iterative performance rather than reporting of analysis and I like to think of it in the tradition of Barthes’ S/Z, where scientific method is pushed to absurdist (and intensely personal) ends.

The Television Will Not Be Summarized by Elizabeth Alsop

Elizabeth Alsop is concerned in this video essay with an ‘exhibitionism’ that resists and exceeds plot summary in shows like The Leftovers, Hannibal and Twin Peaks: The Return. Alsop talks in her [in]Transition creator statement of confronting the methodological challenge of dramatizing (rather than summarizing) spectacular televisual phenomena without merely appropriating their rhetorical force. I admire how she meets this challenge with wit and economy (and without voiceover) through a combination of sound and cryptic imagery, multiscreen and onscreen text. The framing sections effectively stage the meditative experience of the extended extracts that form the central bulk of the video essay.

OUT OF PLACE (Or, Lost in NOMADLAND ) by Catherine Grant

Apparently, Catherine Grant has asked not to be mentioned in this year’s poll, but it would be strange to omit our leading role model in ‘filmmaking research’ (Grant’s preferred term). Anyway, I have chosen an epigraphic video I don’t particularly like. Grant’s treatment of onscreen text is exemplary, as ever, but the quote from Sarah Ahmed is coercive and folksy, while the juxtaposition of quirky music and looped images of Frances McDormand risks whimsy. The point for me, though, is that this sketch forms part of a broader practice that is always more than the sum of its video parts.

He Almost Forgets That There Is a Maker of the World by Ben Spatz, N. Eda Erçin, Caroline Gatt and Agnieszka Mendel

In this essay, onscreen text is used to annotate a 30-minute single-take recording of researcher-performers using speech, song and body to interact with books and each other to investigate some meanings of Jewishness. This ‘illuminated video’, as maker Ben Spatz dubs it, is an expression of what Spatz refers to in a series of writings as ‘the video way of thinking’ (see 2018 article of that name and the 2020 book ‘ Making a Laboratory ’). What I particularly value here is the idea and practice of essay-making as an experimental situation rather than as the mere documentation or reporting of research.

Julian Palmer

YouTube video essayist, The Discarded Image

A trip into the video essay metaverse, but done in a unique and funny style that makes potentially academic content propulsively entertaining.

Using a combination of self-shot footage (mostly churches) and some of the great existential films from Bergman, Schrader, Tarkovsky, Malkick, etc, LSOO explores why he’s drawn to religious art and architecture, without being overtly religious himself, which I can relate to.

The Invisible Horror of The Shining by Kristian T. Williams (kaptainkristian)

After being away from the scene for two years, it was great to see the return of Kristian’s trademark slick style. He takes arguably the most talked to death film of all time, and makes it fresh.

Why Is Bo Burnham’s Inside like That? by Thomas Flight

Clearly inspired by Bo Burnham’s groundbreaking achievement, Flight applies many similar techniques—with numerous camera set-ups and video essay styles—to explore that work in a wholly original way.

The Transformation of Anthony Hopkins by Luís Azevedo (Little White Lies)

A touching and creative tribute to the legendary actor. Azevedo has Hopkins in dialogue with himself, creating an emotional journey through his many roles.

I’m sure we all use movies to guide us through the toughest times. And this emotionally raw video uses them as a way to remember a loved one, and deal with a devastating loss.

Jemma Saunders

Audio-visual PhD student at the University of Birmingham

Epigraph —  Grand Budapest Hotel by Owen Mason-Hill

Concise videographic epigraph that explores and pleasingly manipulates colour, maintaining an Anderson aesthetic throughout.

Documentary as a Genre of Fiction by Oscar Mealia

A complex reflection on documentary storytelling that focuses on Orson Welles’ F for Fake and includes a performative element from the creator. Rich in its academic grounding and playful in execution.

Audiovisual Film Criticism and Cosmopolitanism ( AKA The Haunting of the Headful Academics) by Ian Garwood

A video essay that ate other video essays. This really resonated with me, not only for its acknowledgement and incorporation of the Zoom space we have inhabited for much of the last two years, but for the important questions it poses about how we choose our material as essayists.

I just find this joyous to watch: beautifully paced and a brilliant example of how the supercut can reveal as well as revere.

This is a powerful and haunting piece of work. In slowing down, repeating, and zooming in to archival footage, it forces the viewer to confront and re-engage with what may seem familiar images of the Holocaust.

BBC Inside Cinema series

Many of these bite-size explorations are essentially well-crafted compilations with voiceovers rather than more experimental or academically essayistic pieces, but I learn something every time I watch one. There’s an eclectic range of topics, from uncanny spaces and nuns on film; to examinations of the macguffin and credit sequences.

An Investigation of Colour in Black Mirror by Matt Cook

I’m a firm believer that any video essay should make the most of the form and this is a strong example of an undergraduate doing just that through employing various audio-visual techniques to develop his argument. It’s great to hear a regional accent too!

Daniel Schindel

Associate editor, Hyperallergic

ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS Tokimeki Memorial by Tim Rogers (Action Button)

Tim Rogers transitioned from being a leader within New Games Journalism to producing some of the most in-depth video reviews about video games and how they create meaning. This epic six-hour essay goes in-depth on a little-known Japanese romance game, including summaries of two playthroughs of it. In line with the rest of Rogers’s work, it is not merely about this game, but about a sprawling, branching series of fascinating tangents around interpersonal relationships and how interactive art can engage them.

Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other? by Grayson Earle

A terrific example of found commentary in pop culture. The designers of Grand Theft Auto V likely didn’t intend to make a statement on the ‘Blue Wall of Silence’, but by programming police officers not to attack one another, no matter what, they unwittingly replicated real-world dynamics. Earle turns his tinkering with the game’s code into an intriguing investigation into media message-making.

Identity: A Trans Coming Out Story by Abigail Thorn (Philosophy Tube)

This is the least ‘essay-like’ work on my ballot, but Abigail Thorn is pushing the creative envelope so much within the field of popular YouTubers that I feel she deserves mention. One thing I love about Philosophy Tube is how Thorn finds a way to incorporate the concepts she discusses into the forms of the videos themselves. Here, she makes clear the performative nature of gender by having a cis male portray the closeted, male-presenting version of herself. The moment when that actor steps aside and Thorn comes out (sorry) is one of my favourite in any video this year.

The way that Binotto scrutinises the structures and conventions of digital modes of viewing through the lens of analog interfaces is consistently engrossing. It’s always a treat each time a new instalment in this series pops up.

There had to be something here acknowledging the pandemic, and McGoff’s literate and deeply considered rumination on the experience of a virtual film festival spoke more to my supremely odd times as a cinephile under lockdown than anything else I’ve seen on the matter.

The History of the Atlanta Falcons by Jon Bois, Alex Rubenstein, Joe Ali

Jon Bois might just be my favourite documentarian working today, and I have a strong suspicion that soon a lot more internet videos are going to be taking cues from his work. This multipart look at the trials and tribulations of the Falcons is a longform study of failure in all its myriad forms. In the hands of Bois and his collaborators, we see in this team a devastating series of near-misses, could-have-beens, and lost opportunities. Sports narratives often focus on snatching victory from the jaws of defeat; who knew the opposite could be so engrossing?

My only complaint about Grace Lee is that she doesn’t upload more often! Especially since in her recent work she’s demonstrated an incredible visual sensibility, casually packing tons of information — jokes, easter eggs, and more — into every shot. This video is near and dear to my heart because it speaks to my own struggles to define video essays, and my gnawing feeling that sometimes we might be getting too permissive with the term, or alternatively too restrictive. Few essayists explore this kind of ambivalence as well as Lee.

Shannon Strucci

Video essayist,  StrucciMovies

how i would defeat the immortal snail by Faline San

Faline San’s videos are typically anecdotes about her life or explanations of her thought process regarding bizarre niche topics. They caught my attention due to her quick pacing, engaging storytelling, her finely-tuned (and very funny) editing style, and her self-deprecating sense of humor. how i would defeat the immortal snail is a great example of this – it’s essentially a ten minute rant about a Reddit thought experiment , but it’s very funny and complex. This is especially impressive considering she is still a teenager, and I look forward to seeing what work she produces in the future!

The Bizarre World of Fake Psychics, Faith Healers, and Mediums by John Walsh (Super Eyepatch Wolf)

John’s essays are always funny and thought-provoking and he had some more avant-garde videos this year that pushed video essays as a medium (specifically his Space Jam and Dell nightmare videos, which I’d also recommend) but his fake psychics video stood out to me as something with the potential to help save a viewer from being taken advantage of, which is tremendously valuable. It’s dense with research and history and comes from both a place of anger and empathy. It’s a fantastic video.

Scout Tafoya

Johannes had a hell of a year. This whole series is superb.

Tenderness — Rio Bravo Diary by Will DiGravio

De la femme by Caterina Cucinotta and Jesús Ramé López

Reimagining Blackness and Architecture ( MOMA ) by Russell Yaffe, Rafael Salazar Moreno ( RAVA  Films)

Great series.

Our Focus by Kevin B. Lee

Max Tohline

Independent media scholar and video essayist

Flight of the Navigator | VFX Cool by Alan Melikdjanian (Captain Disillusion)

Captain Disillusion’s videos debunking viral hoaxes or misinformation about visual effects wizardry have been top-tier YouTube content for years, but nothing could have prepared me for this ravishing deconstruction of the technical magic in the cult-classic Flight of the Navigator. I don’t have euphoric superlatives extreme enough for how I felt watching this video the first time — not only does C.D. use VFX to analyze VFX (probably the final boss of videographic criticism); his attention, research, wit, obsession, and good old fashioned formal analysis blow everything else out of the water.

Though it has stiff competition from Faden, Keating, Mittell, and others, Mediated Auscultation is my favorite peer-reviewed essay of the year. Like many film scholars, I’ve never given enough attention to sound — precisely because sound never struck me as being essentially ‘cinematic’. But Talijan shows that cinema’s promise of immersive sensing from a distance applies as much to sound as image. The icing on the cake is that while plenty of video essays are ‘meditative’, few have made the tone demonstrate the argument as Talijan does here, with the audio putting me in a near- ASMR  haze.

I never realized it was possible to deploy a parody of a video essay (in this case a classic on neorealism from kogonada) in the service of an argument that is not only NOT a joke, but possibly richer than that of the original. Whereas kogonada merely illustrated a reasonably conventional understanding of the difference between de Sica’s style and classical Hollywood style, Avissar completely overturned my narrow-minded received takes on Snyder by offering me a different mode of attention. Even if an ambiguity remains as to what Snyder’s style ‘means’, I’ll never pigeonhole him the same way again.

No Face Is an Incel by CJ the X

Generally I’d exclude wall-to-wall-talking-head channels from a list of great video essays, but CJ the X is in the middle of an annus mirabilis. So, for those who don’t have the 2.5 hours for CJ ’s urgent cry-of-the-soul Burnham/Bezos essay , here’s an intoxicating 100-mile-an-hour sprint of an essay that performs a Žižekian looking-awry on Spirited Away that might not be dressed up in academic finery, but has a more nimble intellect than many who’ve put up with the steamroller of peer review.

As we enter the eighth or ninth wave of rumination on what ‘counts’ as a video essay and how to think videographically, Johannes Binotto has become the undisputed master of reflection on the everyday practices of viewing that form the foundation of what video essayists do. Watching his ongoing Practices of Viewing series (in particular the one on the screenshot, but also others on pausing, fast-forwarding, muting), I felt like I’d found Arne Saknussemm’s name scratched into the cave wall— a fellow traveler.

eye / contact by Niki Radman

This essay takes its time and a good deal of text setting up its argument, but when it finally unveils its purely visual denouement — a 3x3 grid of images that jaw-droppingly links one note of Barry Jenkins’s formal language with his whole symphony of themes surrounding identity — I felt like I was gonna turn into drops.

Inside: Are Video Games Art? by Arttective

The tip of the YouTube iceberg conceals a Sierpinski triangle of icebergs beneath it — so many that it’s mathematically remarkable that any individual essay ever made it to my eyes at all. Had I not met Arttective on the Essay Library Discord server, I wouldn’t have seen this gem, which uses the rewind and skip keys on YouTube to inject some tantalizing interactivity into the grammar of the video essay. But I’m so glad I did: the experience is engrossing. If anyone out there solves the puzzle in this video, please let me know the answer!

David Verdeure

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

The pandemic proves fertile ground for video essays. Changing film distribution models mean movies are available sooner to audiovisual critics. In-person and live events have been replaced with pre-taped materials, creating another vein of visuals for video essay makers to tap into. We’re often confined to our personal visual echo chambers that are filled with screens that confound as much as they clarify. And that we’re forced to spend more time in close quarters may also contribute to the unmistakable trend that video essays are getting longer. In 2021 audiovisual strategies that are common to the video essay popped up everywhere. In academia and the arts. In news broadcasts and film festivals. In talk shows and on TikTok. These are just a few remarkable examples.

In his feature-length video Tohline gives an overview of the history, the aesthetics and the modus operandi of the supercut. He examines the tension between its dueling impulses of (fannish) desire and serious analysis, and he proposes strategies to increase the form’s critical impact. But most important is how Tohline regards the supercut not as a mere editing technique but as the material expression of a specific and novel way of thinking. We try to make sense of the world by ordering it into either archives or databases, and the supercut is the poster child for that database mode.

Just when you think the whole supercut model has been mapped, along comes an innovative application of this strategy. Davide Rapp combines clips of the Monte Gelato waterfalls near Rome into a 28-minute VR collage. Scores of rectangular film and television scenes together form a full circle, recasting the role of the spectator from immobile viewer in a theater seat to participatory flaneur. Montegelato is an immersive three-dimensional palimpsest that puts the viewer at the center of this nexus of cinematic storytelling: a location that inspired filmmakers working across different genres, in different times and with very different means.

Gyres 1-3 by Ellie Ga (watch excerpt )

American artist Ellie Ga’s single channel video installation Gyres 1-3 is another example of how to put an inventive spin on a classic videographic strategy. This is a desktop video essay of sorts, with the desktop being a light table onto which she arranges and rearranges transparent photographs. Her essayistic voice over narration is triggered by the succession of (often) archetypal images that serve as lodestars for the video’s loose narrative structure. But unlike the more traditional virtual desktop, Ellie Ga’s physical handling of the transparent slides adds a tactile and more personal touch to the process.

Under the White Mask: The Film That Haesaerts Could Have Made by Matthias De Groof (watch trailer )

In 1958 Paul Haesaerts made Under the Black Mask, a documentary on Congolese art. That Belgian film was formally inventive but it also perpetuated racist stereotypes. Scholar and filmmaker Matthias De Groof remixed Haesaerts’ film into a scathing critique of colonialism. He combined the footage of mute masks with an impassioned voice over by slam poet Maravilha Munto. In Haesaerts’ version, art hid atrocities. Aestheticism was used as a mask for the ugly face of colonialism to hide behind. This powerful remix tears off that mask: it uses exactly the same artistic means but reclaims their critical potential.

Cinema Turns: Catalan Creative Documentary by Celia Sainz

In this beautifully paced and expertly constructed video essay Celia Sainz focuses on a quartet of documentary films made in Catalonia over the past two decades by female filmmakers. She does not seek to ascribe a collective national identity or ideological agenda to these works but looks for shared artistic (cinematographic and narrative) strategies. Like the creative documentaries it studies, this video essay uses time and tone to drive home its points. The assured audiovisual approach and well-judged rhythm of this piece are part and parcel to its intellectual and affective impact.

Lucie Emch’s video essay deals with the troublesome on-screen representation of rape. She starts off in a conventional way but then brings music videos into the mix. The video essay really hits its stride when it mashes up Jenny Wilson’s RAPIN * music video (from 2018) with Ida Lupino’s film Outrage (from 1950).

This fine piece was published by Tecmerin. That online journal deserves to be lauded for its persistent efforts to bring to the fore the work of video essay makers who are not native English speakers, and for the fact it reviews and publishes pieces in many different languages.

Barbara Zecchi

Professor and director of the film studies programme, University of Massachusetts Amherst

The most intelligent video-essay I’ve seen on sound (or rather, on lack of sound) in cinema. Brilliant!

With over 40 works to date, Ariel Avissar’s intelligent project has certainly accomplished its expected goal of increasing the video essay’s interest in television products. It has also achieved a less expected result: it strengthened a community of video essayists who have engaged playfully in this almost addictive collaborative endeavor.

Film Thought 1. Will the Plausible: On FIVE CARD STUD by Will DiGravio

Skillfully produced (superb storytelling and rhythm), this video-essay takes full advantage of the form’s possibilities by centering in a simple perceptive observation. A little gem which marks the beginning of a promising new series by Will DiGravio

Cinephilia translated into an audiovisual essay at its best. A deeply personal and emotional account of Adrian Martin’s love for film and for film analysis becomes one of the best pieces I can think of on a rigorous and theoretical reflection on the video-graphic essay as a form.

Public Controversy and Film Censorship. The release of All Quiet on Western Front (1930) in Berlin by Manuel Palacio y Ana Mejón

I saw this video-essay for the first time when Ana Mejón presented it at the video-graphic webinar organized by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in September. I was immediately impressed. It’s a superbly crafted video-essay that condenses thorough and serious work of scholarly research.

A powerful and chilling work that did not go unnoticed at the Adelio Ferrero Festival, Italy. I look forward to the multi-modal project that will be published in the upcoming issue of Research in Film and History together with this video-essay.

It’s so smart and funny, and, as Jason Mittell said, it “speaks to many of us.”

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The best video essays of 2021

An escape from the most popular to the most captivating

by Ransford James and Wil Williams

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As coronavirus cloistered the world, the genre of video essays continued to augment in popularity on Youtube. Despite the homogeny of the creator space being apparent from a cursory glance, 2021 saw POC video essayists gaining momentum on the platform. From behemoths like D’Angelo Wallace to humble creators like myself, there is a gradient of experiences that are finally being represented thanks to YouTube’s algorithm “apparently” being an equalizer. That being said, this article hopes to shed light on some of gems you may have missed.

Beyond the players, the format of video essays has also evolved. Gone are the days when a midwestern man could aggregate thousands of views on a video about why water is wet. (OK, jk, that still happens.) But most of today’s video essays now amalgamate several genres of YouTube videos. Whether it’s the commentary crossovers à la Tara Mooknee , or the stand-up comedy stylings of Chill Goblin , there is a variety of variations to find. Here are a few that surprised us in the last year. —Ransford James, aka Foreign

[ Ed. note: This list is ordered chronologically rather than ranked by preference, meaning everything is worth checking out. And if you need more to watch, check out last year’s list .]

“Your Island is a Commune pt. 1,” Nowhere Grotesk

I first discovered this touching series on Animal Crossing: New Horizons via the social posts on F. D. Signifier’s YouTube channel — more on him later, but credit where credit’s due. Nowhere Grotesk’s bio on social media reads, “We’re two visual artists that create and examine art through a utopian leftist lens,” and that feeling permeates this series.

Discussing Animal Crossing: New Horizons through the lens of communal living and pastoral nostalgia, Nowhere Grotesk pushes back on the easy joke that Tom Nook is a greedy capitalist. Instead, this series shows how Animal Crossing: New Horizons conveys the concept of community as directly in conflict with urbanization and capitalism, thriving only when everyone’s needs are met without the turmoil of work. Even the addition of the Happy Home Paradise DLC , which gives players the option to work for additional outcomes, doesn’t nullify the anticapitalist argument here; working is a choice you can but don’t have to make. The island even meets more of the players’ needs by providing free healthcare. Animal Crossing isn’t the apolitical fluff many seem to think; instead, it’s a lovely, immersive argument for anarcho-communism, mutual aid, and rooting our politics in community. —Wil Williams

“The Market of Humiliating Black Women,” Tee Noir

This offering is far from obscure, but by the off chance that Tee Noir has evaded your eyes and eluded your ears, consider my favorite video from her so far: “ The Market of Humiliating Black Women .” Without spoiling this masterpiece, Tee breaks down what is such an innocuous experience that not many people even notice: How quotidian Black women’s pain is in popular media. From high-budget Tyler Perry movies to grainy WorldstarHipHop videos, the parodying of pain that Black women face on the daily is rewarded with thousands of millions of views and thousands of shares.

This is an experience that is far from second-hand with regard to Tee Noir, as she faces scrutiny that men don’t, simply by virtue of being a Black woman on this platform — let alone her queerness. —RJ

“The Day Rue ‘Became’ Black,” Yhara Zayd

After hitting shelves in 2008, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games was praised for the way it conveyed real-life modern class struggles in a strange, borderline fantastical world. The Hunger Games was clear about what it was saying and referencing, but apparently, some readers didn’t get the memo — or perhaps they refused to.

In this video, Zayd pulls on the Hunger Games fandom’s history to dissect what made some readers so shocked when Amandla Stenberg, a young Black actress, was cast as Rue, a young girl who is ... canonically Black. This isn’t just about people reading a book wrong, though; it’s about why audiences felt less protective of Rue the moment she “became” Black “in casting.” It’s also about why most of those comments have since been scrubbed from the internet.

Yhara Zayd’s work has been featured on all of my video essay lists , and for good reason. Her sharp, concise, passionate analysis is scored by a low-key (but not necessarily relaxed) aesthetic and narration style. Her occasional breaks to make a joke or loosen up her script emphasize what’s so important about the topic at hand: the humanity. —WW

“Infantilization and the Body Hair Debate,” Shanspeare

Unironic ASMR, charismatic candor, and witty humor are but a few of Shanspeare’s calling cards. Despite the myriad of channels dedicated to analyzing pop culture, none do it quite like Shanspeare. “ Infantilization and the Body Hair Debate ” is one of the most eye-opening videos that I have encountered, and it has provoked me — a cishet Afro-Caribbean man — into thoroughly addressing my own contributions to the subject matter. This deep dive into how the world incentivizes childlike behavior from women is as unnerving as it is necessary to watch. From the way I speak to women, to my subconscious preference of nicely shaven legs, Shanspeare details how all of that is essentially the product of a purposeful inculcation that was underway far before I was even a thought. I cannot emphasize to you enough that you should watch this masterpiece and all of her other ones as well. —RJ

“Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos,” CJ the X

Thanks to my specific symptoms of ADHD, it can be really hard for me to devote time to watch video essays that are over an hour long, and even harder for me to really fall in love with them. I hope this will help convey the gravity with which I am saying that I watched this two-and-a-half-hour video more times than any other video on YouTube this year. What starts as an analysis of Bo Burnham’s Inside slowly morphs into something else, then something else, then something else . This video transitions so gracefully between discussions of posthumanism, the internet, online fame, and what makes something funny, all while being punctuated with CJ the X’s hallmark near-absurdist blink-and-you’ll-miss-it humor. What makes this video an instant classic of the medium, though, is how it lands: a deep, sincere, vulnerable love letter to empathy and human connection, wound up in a personal anecdote that makes the thesis feel even more real.

I struggled to have basic hope or faith in humanity this year. I struggled to tell myself that everything is worth it. No piece of media helped me more with those struggles than this video. I wrote a piece on my read of Inside before seeing this video, and after watching it, my read on Inside has changed. And I’m so grateful. — WW

“The Reign of the Slim Thick Influencer,” Khadija Mbowe

I hope that this creator needs no introduction, because I feel woefully unequipped to introduce them myself. Khadija Mbowe walks the walk, and the walk is an onerous one. Being a feminine-presenting nonbinary creator of an obsidian hue, they brazenly break down some of the most nuanced topics with empathy and levity. Moreover, they pay it forward by promoting creators that the algorithm may have missed — much like myself, and in the same way Tee Noir promoted them a year ago.

“ The Reign of the Slim-Thick Influencer ” is arguably my favorite Khadija Mbowe video this year. It’s a discussion of the trend of Brazilian butt lifts , how influencers like Kim Kardashian perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards, and the awful origins of commodifying the Black woman’s body. This is a must-see for everybody who consumes social media, which is … everybody. — RJ

“make more characters bi, you cowards: why (not) romance?,” voice memos for the void

An installment of Voice Memos for the Void’s Romance in Media series, “make more characters bi, you cowards: why (not) romance?” does what it says on the tin. This video analyzes the strange state of bisexual characters in media, pointing out how rarely bisexual characters get to fall in love. Not have sex, but fall in love. Voice Memos for the Void effortlessly combats rebuttals to this idea that we hear every time we ask for more representation and romance: “Why do they need to be queer?” “Why do they need to be in love?” It also dives into different depictions of masculinity, a history of Byronic heroes, and the troubling tropes that follow bisexual characters around in media, like that of the Magical and/or Hedonistic Bisexual . Forgive the glitchy camera in this video; equipment is expensive, and the commentary more than makes up for the video fidelity. We can thank F. D. Signifier’s feed for putting this video on my radar, too. — WW

“The Black Right Wing,” Anansi’s Library

While Tee Noir enjoys (?) a visibility that many POC creators don’t, Anansi boasts a dedicated 15,000 subscriber count but is deserving of far more. They stay closer to the format that many video essays have in the past of concealing their face in their videos, relying more on the merit of their musings than the luster of their looks. Many of us simply create and comment on the actions of others, but Anansi, for lack of a better term, is really in the field. They are deeply entrenched in American activism, which makes their videos simply an accompaniment to a much larger concerted effort.

This video on The Black Right Wing is redolent of the very fight that they have fought on many occasions. It details this unique subset of Black Americans that embraces the Trumpian conservatism that still plagues the United States to this very day. If you are fascinated by the neurosis necessary to align oneself with a party that is antipodal to your existence, then this is the video for you! — RJ

“On Leftist Disunity,” St. Andrewism

By now you must see the peaks and valleys that this list is riding, from creators who have passed the 100,000 mark to those who are still in the 10,000s. The themes that combine in all of them are apparent: their marginalized status, the video essay format, and most of all, the quality. Over the last year, the Trinibagan St. Andrewism has amassed over 50,000 subscribers, and his video On Leftist Disunity is a highlight. This video is the quintessential love letter to the leftist community that encourages the embrace of the many differences it has within it. Instead of approaching this with the pessimism that many people do, St. Andrew seems gleefully optimistic that this diversity of thought will end up saving not only the United States but the world. —RJ

“Break Bread,” F. D. Signifier

OK, now we can talk about F. D. Signifier in earnest. In my video essay list for our Masterpieces of Streaming series, I gave a brief history of video essays through the lens of educational videos. In “Breaking Bread,” F. D. Signifier offers an uncomfortably accurate parallel history: the rise of video essays from rant reviewers like The Nostalgia Critic. The trend of debate bros and, in F. D. Signifier’s words, every LeftTuber making a video about Ben Shapiro, isn’t just rooted in the medium’s history, though; it’s also rooted in whiteness. That lens and style of video stays prominent thanks to the YouTube algorithm, and while the homogeneity of video essays has been critiqued many times, “Break Bread” breaks down the issue with an astounding level of complexity, research, and guests from all over the video essay ecosystem. How much of a video essayist’s success comes down to talent? How much comes down to luck? And how much comes down to the algorithm knowing that what keeps people watching is simply who looks familiar? — WW

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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 Essay Channels, Ranked

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Audiences Still Question the Ending of Jennifer Lawrence's Passengers

The forgotten dune miniseries adapted something denis villeneuve would like to avoid, young sheldon had a big problem with its side characters.

If you’re a die-hard movie fan, you don’t have to be a hardcore collector to know that you can find a lot of your special features free on YouTube – from movie trailers and top-ten lists to reaction videos and cast-and-crew interviews. But the crème de la crème for any budding cinephile is YouTube ’s subculture of video essayists.

The best of these content creators, particularly those focused on dissecting and analyzing film and television, give viewers a lot of food for thought, making them consider things they hadn’t before, even when it comes to movies they have watched 100 times. There is an embarrassment of content out there, but this article seeks to separate the wheat from the chaff – we are recommending only the channels with the best, most refreshing, and most original analysis. If you're a film lover or budding buff, you owe it to yourself to check out these great video essay channels.

What’s So Great About That?

UK creator and pop-culture academic Grace Lee makes video essays examining themes and form in both horror and animated media; she has an affinity for the deeper, more unexpected thoughts evoked by her favorite genres. Whereas many content creators are quippy or sarcastic, Lee’s voiceover narrative approach is one of measured thoughtfulness.

Related: Explained: How Twin Peaks Changed Television

While her output as What's So Great About That? is not as large as some other creators on this list, that is far from a bad thing as Lee seems to focus more on quality than quantity. Each video discusses fairly narrow topics within a given property – examples include the “treachery of language” in the work of David Lynch or the concept of the “unnatural” in the original Evil Dead film.

You might mistake Canadian vlogger Sarah Z (pronounced “Zed”) for your best friend. She sits on the couch with a cup of coffee and speaks directly to you, a monologuist spending hours on end about all of her opinions, from toxic fandoms to true-crime documentaries.

But these monologues are not the boring, meaningless yarns that you might expect. Rather, Sarah’s channel is an ever-deepening trove of incisive and engaging media analysis encased in a shell of light and fluffy entertainment. The whole thing is driven by Sarah’s palpable excitement and enthusiasm for the topics she is covering, and a penchant for long, detailed videos that are extensively researched. Some videos will even stretch far beyond the one-hour mark, including a 90-minute video on geek culture and a full two hours on Dear Evan Hansen .

Another Canadian creator steps up to the plate in the form of Sage Hyden , a fantasy novelist whose essay channel Just Write seems particularly preoccupied with film’s place in the cultural conversation. In particular, Hyden is fascinated with the messages that movies send us, what they are trying to communicate (consciously or subconsciously), and how they shape our perceptions and prejudices.

For topics that can sometimes land on the serious side, Hyden’s tone and writing style are conversational and often funny, and his insights are fairly eye-opening. Topics include Willy Wonka and its relationship to misconceptions about poverty, the importance of the original Mulan film, and the cinematic lineage of the modern murder mystery Knives Out .

If you consider yourself an outsider or find yourself disagreeing with most of your friends on their favorite movies, you might find a mutual kinship with creator Yhara Zayd , whose videos examine film and television through lenses both personal and political. Zayd’s is not the kind of detached analysis you can expect from many YouTubers; rather, though she is very well-researched, she is also full of unapologetic hot takes, and her videos are brimming with the caustic personality of a modern-day Pauline Kael.

Related: These Are the Best Marilyn Monroe Movies

In some ways, Zayd has crafted the perfect synergy between the highly-opinionated critic and the relentless deconstructionist, enthusiastically dissecting and questioning the images and media we regularly consume. She also has a distinct knack for self-awareness, gazing inward as she gazes outward, a quality which separates her content from that of many of her peers. Zayd covers such divergent subjects as the commodification of the great Marilyn Monroe, reflections of housing discrimination in 1980s horror films , and the under-appreciated legacy of Not Another Teen Movie .

For something a little less personal but no less fascinating, it is worth checking out the prolific Susannah McCullough and her channel The Take . McCullough and her extraordinary team make what are probably the best “Explained” videos you’ll be able to find, along with character breakdowns, deconstructions of tropes, and the lessons movies can teach us. They’ve got videos that deconstruct and explain Donnie Darko , The Sopranos , Get Out , and many, many more. They’ve also nerded out with full series on different franchises, including detailed character analyses in shows such as Friends and Breaking Bad .

The writing is smart but accessible, and the arguments are utterly convincing. The videos themselves are breezily edited and full of poppy visuals. The channel also covers many, many genres and types of movies, so you are sure to find something on a movie or TV show you love. The Take offers incisive film analysis in a context that is fun and completely unpretentious.

Maggie Mae Fish

Decadent, performance-driven vlogs like ContraPoints and Philosophy Tube are all the rage these days, and film buffs finally have their own version in the form of Maggie Mae Fish . Ms. Fish is a singular, idiosyncratic voice who pivots wildly from dedicated film scholar to sketch-comedy caricature and back again. She typically sits center-frame in a variety of ornately designed sets, dressed in colorful outfits, while she patiently spoons out detailed, thoughtful analysis over the course of long videos.

For any video-essay enthusiast, Fish is the real deal – wickedly entertaining, subversive, accessible, and always thought-provoking. Her recent two-video series on Twin Peaks is catnip for any fans seeking a new perspective on the show – and an excellent dressing-down of Twin Perfect’s infamous 4.5-hour breakdown. She also deconstructs auteur theory through the works of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, and spends two hours discussing Loki ’s debt to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker .

Lindsay Ellis

When it comes to distinct personalities, no vlogger quite matches the likes of the controversial but brilliant Lindsay Ellis . She is a brand unto herself, with an over-the-top, self-deprecating style that can only be described as a hopped-up, sleep-deprived, but no less informed, Adam Curtis. She is often seen drinking wine in her videos, breaking down popular media like Disney movies, musical adaptations, and The Lord of the Rings franchise.

Ellis is one of the originals of the medium, and her work is so singular that her influence has likely extended to all the other creators who occupy this list. Some of her most brilliant work includes “The Whole Plate,” a nine-video series that completely deconstructs the first Transformers film through the lenses of gender, sexuality, and film studies. Her most iconic work includes 40-minute videos ranting about the film adaptations of Rent and The Phantom of the Opera . Due to recent Internet events, she has stopped making videos on YouTube, but her existing videos are still there for all to see and are absolutely worth checking out.

Every Frame A Painting

Sometimes the most obvious answer is still the best one. Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou’s gorgeous video series Every Frame A Painting is still the benchmark against which all other video essayists are judged. You’ve probably seen their video on Edgar Wright and visual comedy, or the one on silence in the films of Martin Scorsese. The channel has been defunct for several years now, but the content still feels as fresh and original as it did when it was first published.

The topics covered are narrow and unexpected, but they all work extraordinarily well. The writing is tight and evocative, and Zhou’s voice is unforgettably soothing and inviting. The editing is also crisp and beautiful. Ramos and Zhou have become so renowned for their work that they were even invited to contribute to David Fincher’s Voir , a video essay project for Netflix.

The Best Video Essays of All Time (IMO)

The video essay is not a brand new art form and it wasn’t created from scratch by YouTube’s algorithmic interest in long-form video that increases “watch time.” People have been constructing commentaries on popular culture and on “important works of art” since there was culture popular enough to be commented upon by others. And yet, the video essay as it exists today has grown into a community of thinkers and writers who have transformed the consumption of media into an urgent and participatory act.

As one Wellesley College film studies course puts it , the Video Essay is the result of the following process:

• [Or book, piece of news media, poem, painting, etc.]
• [i.e., speaking her own opinions to others about the work]
• [It is the audio and visual elements that do a great deal of the persuasion and therefore, it isn’t just coming up with the argument, but rather coming up with the plan for how the argument will be laid out visually to achieve the greatest impact.]
• [These visual elements can be direct references of the work itself or entirely new visuals and audio elements that help to prove her point or further make meaning for her audience.]
• [Such a process is the modern act of responding to digital media, and is therefore the primary tool we have for understanding our world.]

I believe that this process of observing, reacting with others, building a cohesive thought, gathering media to prove that thought, and then creating a trans-media representation of that thought is the work not just of Video Essayists. Rather, it is the work of meme artists, of journalists, of TikTok personalities, and of every person on social media that is attempting to understand the barrage of information that is too voluminous to understand without some kind of means to process it.

Video essays are just the purest form of this way of understanding, and I love them for that. I love watching the finished product of this process. It is simultaneously poignant and persuasive. It causes me to see the original artwork or moment in time that is being commented upon as having context. It encourages me to see the world more complexly and be okay with the muddy nature of modern society. The Video Essay is, for lack of a better term, truly modern art. Sure, it might be post-post-modern too, but given that it is the process we are all doing as a natural part of our day as consumers of content and “havers of opinions,” I want to celebrate the Video Essay as the Art Form of Now.

And these are my favorite representations of Now:

Spaceship You – CGP Grey created this Video Essay in direct response to the initial lockdown orders and the feeling of anchorlessness that many felt in their wake. The media that Spaceship You was commenting on was ‘the whole of society’ needing to reorganize itself around a new problem, the ongoing and ever worsening pandemic. It was a critique of ”survival skills” that were for a different era. We didn’t need to know how to stock up on food or prepare for the oncoming apocalypse. Rather, we needed a way to deal with the onslaught of bad news of 2020 and the isolation that social distancing ensured. In that way, Spaceship You is a time capsule of a Video Essay. It was critiquing a moment in time, but the lessons of what we learned in the early pandemic I believe will far outlast our memory of staying home, ordering in, and generally trying to wait out the worst of the unknown.

If There Are No Pics, Did It Happen? – Until Idea Channel stopped posting new videos in 2017, it was reliably one of the best places to find new Video Essays which critiqued the exact kinds of things I was most interested in: the ways in which the internet has influenced our society. Whether that was critiquing post-modern masterpieces like Community or simply questioning one of the internet’s strongest beliefs (pics or it didn’t happen), Mike Rugnetta built a strong approach toward questioning the media landscape. In this particular piece, he helps us all to question our need to validate our own experiences with pictures and our further need to share them with others to prove that we are worthy of love and attention.

In Search of a Flat Earth – In my favorite example of a Video Essay that claims to be about one thing (flat earthers), while really being about something entirely different (Qanon ideology), Dan Olson expertly builds the case that the Qanon community is, in their own incomprehensible way, trying to make sense of the complexity of modern life. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but I can unequivocally state that the final line in the video is the most satisfying conclusion to any video essay. There isn’t any other work that earns “the prestige” more than this does. Please watch.

The Cruel Optimism of Steven Pinker – There is nothing quite like a Video Essay for helping to re-contextualize an author or a work in a brand new way. For me, there is no better representation of this than the way I have come to understand Steven Pinker after watching this work of scathing critique.

Auld Lang Syne: The Anthropocene Reviewed – Seeing as how this podcast-turned-book ( The Anthropocene Reviewed ) was literally written as a series of essays, it is hard to frame this as a true “Video Essay.” However, I believe that the way this essay comments on a piece of media, the classic song Auld Lang Syne, demonstrates just how adaptable this model of modern critique can be. We can comment on the despair of the world while still bringing hope to the table. Definitely worth a watch/listen.

Why is Gen Z Humor So Weird? – While I do not believe the humor is strictly generational, this video essay makes the case that the always-on nature of the ways Gen Z grew up have made for a distinct brand of humor that is both post-ironic and self-referential. By watching this, I became for more adept at understanding my children’s preferred method of simply repeating lines from the most ridiculous TikTok video they can find.

Sony MiniDisc: The (Not) Forgotten Audio Format That (Never) Failed – As you can tell by the title, this video essay is attempting to reframe a technology in our collective consciousness. Rather than commenting on a particular piece of media, this style of video is rather digging into the media format itself. I find these deep dives into our past (whether you personally experienced MiniDisc or not) and seeing what it might mean for modern life to be entirely satisfying. Your mileage may vary depending on your ability to get past some of the nerdier bits.

Wes Anderson: Breaking Formality | Deconstructing Funny – I feel like Wes Anderson is a filmmaker built for the Video Essay. His particular style of ”everything just right” is exactly what a video essayist is trying to construct in their argument. In this video, though, we go deeper and try to understand the ways in which Anderson uses juxtaposition of order and chaos to create humor. It is an attempt to appreciate the media through a different lens, and it is effective in its precision for doing so.

Human Test Regarding Your Creativity – No list of Video Essays would be complete without at least one entry for Ze Frank . As the ”grandfather of online video,” his work played a pivotal role in forging what Video Essays could become. In this instance, he critiques the very notion of creativity and what it means to be human. Ze Frank places seemingly nonsensical images next to incredibly earnest questions. It is partially existential yearning and partially a description of everyday life. Minus the small ad for coffee in the middle, it is a perfect Video Essay filled with nothing but questions that seemingly make more of a statement than stating the conclusion outright would.

What This Photo Doesn’t Show – While not technically another John Green video, it does feature his wonderful and resonant voice for social critique. This video takes a photographic work of art and explodes it so that we can see the true context in which it was created. This historical approach is not always present in Video Essays, but I appreciate the level of depth that it requires.

The Absolute Pleasure of the Rocky Horror Picture Show – Queer theory and critique is a rich vein of media criticism that is only aided by modern Video Essay conventions. Matt Baume’s understanding of Camp and his ability to create narrative significance around touchstone media for the queer community is on full display here. If you have never really understood “Rocky Horror” or its importance to ‘weirdos, goths, and other alternative types’ of kids, this is for you.

The Yellow Wallpaper: Crash Course Literature 407 – I could probably include all of the Crash Course as examples of ‘Peak Video Essay,’ but I am particularly drawn to Crash Course Literature because of my own affinity for literary criticism. The Yellow Wallpaper had a strong impact on me when I first read it, as I was looking for feminist works to help understand my world and the patriarchal structures that are ever-present. This Crash Course episode dives into some of the historical context for why this short story (of a bed-ridden woman who questions her sanity as she is forced to stay in a single room) was so important. Also, it is another way that I can sneak John Green into this list.

Tragedy In Comedy: Unraveling The Genius of Bo Burnham – Before Burnham’s pandemic masterpiece, Inside , was released in May of 2021, Bo Burnham’s genius was not yet well established. This Video Essay changed that for me. It let me understand where Burnham was headed, and just how impressive his type of introspection and “reflective practice” can be. Even though the video looks a little dated with inclusions of Louis CK as “establishing shots” for a type of comedian who pushes boundaries, the essay quickly moves on to what make Burnham such a unique voice. Ultimately it is a critique of modern culture, which any good Video Essay should be.

I Can’t Stop Watching Contagion – In the early parts of the pandemic, I felt absolutely trapped by the existential dread of knowing the world I knew was collapsing in on itself. I felt like all I could do was refresh twitter and watch movies. This is a very real representation of this time period, and is the best way I have found of understanding just what it was like in those initial moments. They feel so far away now in March of 2022, but in March of 2020, we knew nothing. We had no idea how bad things were going to get, and the only thing we could do is to watch Contagion and try to understand our mortality. Whenever I need a reminder of just how scared we all were, I watch this. And yes, I need to be reminded of it, because the “raw nerve” that the pandemic exposed is still very much there.

The Social Network: Sorkin, Structure, and Collaboration – This video essay is one of my favorite examples of the genre because of the direction of the first scene of the movie. It lays out the ways in which Sorkin’s writing, Eisenberg’s acting, and the college culture of the early 2000s became a perfect match for one another, making meaning out of an incredibly mundane conversation. In long works of video essay, you can forget single lines pretty easily. But, by studying the text in such great depth, as if it were poem, there is far more that can be understood about just why this white college-dropout would change the world.

Find the Hidden Opportunities – John Spencer is one of the only educators I know who understands video essays and their power. He has made visual storytelling into a teaching tool and one that resonates far beyond the confines of his own classrooms. His style of using hand drawn visuals mixed in with video excerpts shows that we are not limited to filming our critiques. We can comment on the world around us (or our given vocation) with whatever tools best suit us.

Casey Neistat: What You Don’t See – One of the best Video Essayists of all time is Casey Neistat. Although he would probably argue that his videos, when he was still making them regularly, were Vlogs. He even talks about them as Daily Vlogs much of the time. And yet, when you look at the vast majority of what he has made since March 2015, they are little movies. They are explainers of this life and of the world around him. They are critiques of his city and of the police. They are deep dives into the world of technology and the impact of wealth upon all parts of the art-making process. And the below video essay goes into all of that, but better, because it wasn’t made by Casey Neistat. Rather, it is done by one of my other favorite Video Essayists, The Nerdwriter . By having the distance that this Video Essay about a Video Essayist creates, you can actually appreciate the craft of both far more easily.

Additional Master Works of Video Essay:

• What Makes This Song Stink Ep 3 – Weezer Beverly Hills: A Retrospective
• Why I wish I didn’t get 9s in GCSE – A Spoken Word
• How did the Enigma Machine Work?
• Rendering game worlds in text
• The First Video Game
• I built myself a proud parent machine
• Why Do Crimes Expire?
• Why I’m Not a Boy
• How Southern Socialites Rewrote Civil War History
• What I’ve Learned about Community Design
• The Case for Ai Weiwei
• The Alt-Right Playbook: Always a Bigger Fish
• The Politics of the McElroy Brothers
• Why Do People Like Being Parents?
• The Iron Giant (1999) – Movies with Mikey
• It’s Not Easy Being Blue
• Draw My Life
• Hustle Culture is worse than you think…
• Adam McKay – What Is Smart Dumb Comedy
• Adaptation.
• Over the Hedge: Peak Trash
• The Failure of Victorious
• The Story of Tetris

Now that you have read a few hundred words on my favorite Video Essays and perhaps even watched a few of them, it is time to explore your own reactions to the media that saturates our world. Now, I’m not recommending that you hone your own video creation skills for years before releasing your own masterpiece of video essay. Rather, I am advocating that you make memes or share gifs or write blog posts or do something else that is, in fact, the same act of creation that video essayists do. I am saying that you are already a video essayist. You are already critiquing the movies you have seen or the books that you have read. You are a pioneer of the modern internet, and you are making meaning however you can.

But, I want you to keep going, and to feel like you are a part of this broader movement toward all of us making things as we consume . We are not merely consumers of media, we are makers of it, too. And the sooner we recognize that, the better stories we will be able to tell and the more sophisticated our understanding of the world will become.

So, as I said in 2014: We should tell the stories of us. In any way that we know how. And all of us, now, know video essays and we have the tools to create them, in our pockets.

[FYI, if you want to watch all 40 of these amazing video essays as a single playlist, here it is. ]

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2022

Featuring bob dylan, elena ferrante, zora neale hurston, jhumpa lahiri, melissa febos, and more.

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime ; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing  by Elena Ferrante (Europa)

12 Rave • 12 Positive • 4 Mixed

“The lucid, well-formed essays that make up In the Margins  are written in an equally captivating voice … Although a slim collection, there is more than enough meat here to nourish both the common reader and the Ferrante aficionado … Every essay here is a blend of deep thought, rigorous analysis and graceful prose. We occasionally get the odd glimpse of the author…but mainly the focus is on the nuts and bolts of writing and Ferrante’s practice of her craft. The essays are at their most rewarding when Ferrante discusses the origins of her books, in particular the celebrated Neapolitan Novels, and the multifaceted heroines that power them … These essays might not bring us any closer to finding out who Ferrante really is. Instead, though, they provide valuable insight into how she developed as a writer and how she works her magic.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Star Tribune )

2. Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri (Princeton University Press)

8 Rave • 14 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Lahiri mixes detailed explorations of craft with broader reflections on her own artistic life, as well as the ‘essential aesthetic and political mission’ of translation. She is excellent in all three modes—so excellent, in fact, that I, a translator myself, could barely read this book. I kept putting it aside, compelled by Lahiri’s writing to go sit at my desk and translate … One of Lahiri’s great gifts as an essayist is her ability to braid multiple ways of thinking together, often in startling ways … a reminder, no matter your relationship to translation, of how alive language itself can be. In her essays as in her fiction, Lahiri is a writer of great, quiet elegance; her sentences seem simple even when they’re complex. Their beauty and clarity alone would be enough to wake readers up. ‘Look,’ her essays seem to say: Look how much there is for us to wake up to.”

–Lily Meyer ( NPR )

3. The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster)

10 Rave • 15 Positive • 7 Mixed • 4 Pan

“It is filled with songs and hyperbole and views on love and lust even darker than Blood on the Tracks … There are 66 songs discussed here … Only four are by women, which is ridiculous, but he never asked us … Nothing is proved, but everything is experienced—one really weird and brilliant person’s experience, someone who changed the world many times … Part of the pleasure of the book, even exceeding the delectable Chronicles: Volume One , is that you feel liberated from Being Bob Dylan. He’s not telling you what you got wrong about him. The prose is so vivid and fecund, it was useless to underline, because I just would have underlined the whole book. Dylan’s pulpy, noir imagination is not always for the squeamish. If your idea of art is affirmation of acceptable values, Bob Dylan doesn’t need you … The writing here is at turns vivid, hilarious, and will awaken you to songs you thought you knew … The prose brims everywhere you turn. It is almost disturbing. Bob Dylan got his Nobel and all the other accolades, and now he’s doing my job, and he’s so damn good at it.”

–David Yaffe ( AirMail )

4.  Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos (Catapult)

13 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an excerpt from Body Work here

“In her new book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative , memoirist Melissa Febos handily recuperates the art of writing the self from some of the most common biases against it: that the memoir is a lesser form than the novel. That trauma narratives should somehow be over—we’ve had our fill … Febos rejects these belittlements with eloquence … In its hybridity, this book formalizes one of Febos’s central tenets within it: that there is no disentangling craft from the personal, just as there is no disentangling the personal from the political. It’s a memoir of a life indelibly changed by literary practice and the rigorous integrity demanded of it …

Febos is an essayist of grace and terrific precision, her sentences meticulously sculpted, her paragraphs shapely and compressed … what’s fresh, of course, is Febos herself, remapping this terrain through her context, her life and writing, her unusual combinations of sources (William H. Gass meets Elissa Washuta, for example), her painstaking exactitude and unflappable sureness—and the new readers she will reach with all of this.”

–Megan Milks ( 4Columns )

5. You Don’t Know Us Negroes by Zora Neale Hurston (Amistad)

12 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed

“… a dazzling collection of her work … You Don’t Know Us Negroes reveals Hurston at the top of her game as an essayist, cultural critic, anthropologist and beat reporter … Hurston is, by turn, provocative, funny, bawdy, informative and outrageous … Hurston will make you laugh but also make you remember the bitter divide in Black America around performance, language, education and class … But the surprising page turner is at the back of the book, a compilation of Hurston’s coverage of the Ruby McCollom murder trial …

Some of Hurston’s writing is sensationalistic, to be sure, but it’s also a riveting take of gender and race relations at the time … Gates and West have put together a comprehensive collection that lets Hurston shine as a writer, a storyteller and an American iconoclast.”

–Lisa Page ( The Washington Post )

6. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed Listen to an interview with Rachel Aviv here

“… written with an astonishing amount of attention and care … Aviv’s triumphs in relating these journeys are many: her unerring narrative instinct, the breadth of context brought to each story, her meticulous reporting. Chief among these is her empathy, which never gives way to pity or sentimentality. She respects her subjects, and so centers their dignity without indulging in the geeky, condescending tone of fascination that can characterize psychologists’ accounts of their patients’ troubles. Though deeply curious about each subject, Aviv doesn’t treat them as anomalous or strange … Aviv’s daunted respect for uncertainty is what makes Strangers to Ourselves distinctive. She is hyperaware of just how sensitive the scale of the self can be.”

–Charlotte Shane ( Bookforum )

7. A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors (Graywolf)

11 Rave • 1 Positive Read an excerpt from A Line in the World here

“Nors, known primarily as a fiction writer, here embarks on a languorous and evocative tour of her native Denmark … The dramas of the past are evoked not so much through individual characters as through their traces—buildings, ruins, shipwrecks—and this westerly Denmark is less the land of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and sleek Georg Jensen designs than a place of ancient landscapes steeped in myth … People aren’t wholly incidental to the narrative. Nors introduces us to a variety of colorful characters, and shares vivid memories of her family’s time in a cabin on the coast south of Thyborøn. But in a way that recalls the work of Barry Lopez, nature is at the heart of this beautiful book, framed in essay-like chapters, superbly translated by Caroline Waight.”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

8. Raising Raffi: The First Five Years by Keith Gessen (Viking)

4 Rave • 10 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Raising Raffi here

“A wise, mild and enviably lucid book about a chaotic scene … Is it OK to out your kid like this? … Still, this memoir will seem like a better idea if, a few decades from now, Raffi is happy and healthy and can read it aloud to his own kids while chuckling at what a little miscreant he was … Gessen is a wily parser of children’s literature … He is just as good on parenting manuals … Raising Raffi offers glimpses of what it’s like to eke out literary lives at the intersection of the Trump and Biden administrations … Needing money for one’s children, throughout history, has made parents do desperate things — even write revealing parenthood memoirs … Gessen’s short book is absorbing not because it delivers answers … It’s absorbing because Gessen is a calm and observant writer…who raises, and struggles with, the right questions about himself and the world.”

–Dwight Garner ( The New York Times )

9. The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser (Doubleday)

8 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan Watch an interview with CJ Hauser here

“17 brilliant pieces … This tumbling, in and out of love, structures the collection … Calling Hauser ‘honest’ and ‘vulnerable’ feels inadequate. She embraces and even celebrates her flaws, and she revels in being a provocateur … It is an irony that Hauser, a strong, smart, capable woman, relates to the crane wife’s contortions. She felt helpless in her own romantic relationship. I don’t have one female friend who has not felt some version of this, but putting it into words is risky … this collection is not about neat, happy endings. It’s a constant search for self-discovery … Much has been written on the themes Hauser excavates here, yet her perspective is singular, startlingly so. Many narratives still position finding the perfect match as a measure of whether we’ve led successful lives. The Crane Wife dispenses with that. For that reason, Hauser’s worldview feels fresh and even radical.”

–Hope Reese ( Oprah Daily )

10. How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo (Viking)

8 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from How to Read Now here

“Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now begins with a section called ‘Author’s Note, or a Virgo Clarifies Things.’ The title is a neat encapsulation of the book’s style: rigorous but still chatty, intellectual but not precious or academic about it … How to Read Now proceeds at a breakneck pace. Each of the book’s eight essays burns bright and hot from start to finish … How to Read Now is not for everybody, but if it is for you, it is clarifying and bracing. Castillo offers a full-throated critique of some of the literary world’s most insipid and self-serving ideas …

So how should we read now? Castillo offers suggestions but no resolution. She is less interested in capital-A Answers…and more excited by the opportunity to restore a multitude of voices and perspectives to the conversation … A book is nothing without a reader; this one is co-created by its recipients, re-created every time the page is turned anew. How to Read Now offers its audience the opportunity to look past the simplicity we’re all too often spoon-fed into order to restore ourselves to chaos and complexity—a way of seeing and reading that demands so much more of us but offers even more in return.”

–Zan Romanoff ( The Los Angeles Times )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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SKIN PLEASURE

Skin Pleasure  is a video essay that investigates the different functions of the skin – as a protective barrier, a sensory organ, a producer of meaning and as a surface that wants to (be) touch(ed) – in relation to the reception of internet pornography.

Interweaving found footage – like amateur porn, ASMR videos and other web-based body genres – with close-ups of the filmmakers’ body, Skin Pleasure is a highly reflective and at the same time deeply personal exploration of our bodily engagement with online media.

Through its intimacy, immediacy and reflectiveness, Skin Pleasure touches and at the same time exposes itself to the touch of the spectator.

Watch the trailer

For more info or preview link: contact

14 – 19/10/2023 –  ULTRAcinema XII (MX)

20/05/2023 – Cineteca Madrid (ESP)

19/05/2023 – Montreal Underground Film Festival (CA)

01/04/2023 – Onion City Experimental Film Festival (US)

16/11/2022 – Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival (TUR)

28/10/2022 – MalatestaShort Film Festival (IT)

13/10/2022 – Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris (FR)

24/04/2022 – Brussels Porn Film Festival (BE)

Skin Pleasure was included in Sight & Sound’s list of the best video essays 2022

Quotes about the work:

“If there ever was a case study of haptic criticism, it is this film.”

Jiří Anger, film theorist, curator, video essayist and researcher/lecturer at the Department of Film Studies, Charles University in Prague

“It’s a powerful testimony to the skin’s capacity to heal, protect, and communicate.”

Dr. Laura U. Marks, Grant Strate University Professor at Simon Fraser University and author of i.a. The Skin of the Film and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media

This project was supported by The Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) of the Government of Flanders

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The film doctor.

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• Sight and Sound
• Wickham Flannagan

The Best Video Essays of 2022, the Sight and Sound poll

 It's fascinating how the art form of the video essay has evolved. The Sight and Sound poll of the best video essays has been released . 

Here's one of my favorites, Wickham's Flannagan's Maschinenmensch :

Maschinenmensch by Wickham Flannagan, Batuhan Buldu & Ruya Nese from Sanarchy Collective on Vimeo .

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"Irrepressible thoughts of death": appreciating Greta Gerwig's Barbie

"The weak are meat the strong do eat": 8 notes on Cloud Atlas

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The best video essays of 2022

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Jenna Ortega Gave Us One of the Scream Franchise's Best Cold Opens

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Jenna Ortega is now a household name in the horror genre, known for her roles in Ti West ’s X, Wednesday Addams in Netflix’s Wednesday , and most recently, Astrid Deetz in Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice . It’s hard to remember that when she took on the role of Tara Carpenter in the 2022 reboot of Scream , she was relatively unknown. In fact, most of the marketing material implied she wouldn't even survive the opening credits. However, Ortega ended up giving us the best cold open since Drew Barrymore as Casey Becker in the 1996 original, and Jada Pinkett-Smith dying in the theater at the start of Scream 2 . The scene pays homage to Barrymore's iconic opening kill that started it all but gave Tara a completely different personality that allowed the scene to feel modern and inventive. Yet, it still retains the tension and gore that proved that 2022’s Scream would live up to the standard of the iconic franchise.

2022’s ‘Scream’ Utilized a Different Angle of Self-Awareness

The Scream franchise is known for its meta-humor and light-hearted critique of horror tropes . However, since the original, the horror genre has developed hugely and the cold open of the 2022 requel acknowledges this. The scene has the self-aware essence of the franchise but with a modern lens , almost self-deprecating towards the original through the conversation about the in-movie franchise "Stab." Ortega’s sarcastic tone when describing the first "Stab" movie as "super 90s" and explaining how she prefers elevated horror that is more than "wall-to-wall" jump scares is the franchise growing and offering new criticisms on how the genre has evolved. Tara even name-drops The Babadook , The Witch , and Hereditary .

The meta-commentary also toys with the audience's expectations when Tara explains that she dislikes how formulaic the "Stab" movies have become; you have to remember in the in-movie timeline, they are on "Stab 8!" She notes that "they always start with a kill scene," paralleling the audience expectations and marketing indication that Ortega would die in the cold open. The reveal of her survival is a subversion of Scream ’s own self-confessed tropes .

Jenna Ortega Contrasts Drew Barrymore - And That’s Why It Works!

Tara’s knowledge and appreciation for the horror genre make her feel totally different from Drew Barrymore's Casey in the original. Ortega’s acting transcends simple terror, she shows genuine agony at the thought of her friend being hurt . Yet she doesn’t feel helpless, despite her fear she is strong-willed and talks back to the killer. It is her fierce loyalty that causes her to open the door to Ghostface — she immediately shows she does not hide away. Throughout the opening sequence, her terror feels raw and palpable. Tara confronts death and is completely broken by the scene’s climax; to have her survive and carry this trauma through the movie is a refreshing and surprising angle for the reboot. Unlike Casey Becker, who was only a school acquaintance to the main characters of the original Scream , Tara’s attack feels personal for everyone — especially her sister, Sam ( Melissa Barrera ), the movie’s protagonist.

'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' Review: Jenna Ortega Leads Tim Burton's Fun Throwback

Tim Burton's latest is a return to form.

The scene is also extremely brutal with Tara having her ankle broken by Ghostface and being stabbed through the hand. It proved the new Scream would be unforgiving and relentless. The most interesting development was the growth in technology from the iconic clunky landline from the original. Although Ghostface still rings Tara on her home phone, it is interspersed with texting and video calls. The footage of Amber ( Mikey Madison ) coupled with the texts coming through whilst Ghostface is talking is a subtle nod to the two killers as well as leading audiences away from Amber being a killer. It is even more of a gut punch to see Tara betrayed by the friend she was so fearlessly protecting. However, the most effective use of new technology is the hands-free remote door locks which Ghostface manages to hack into. The unlocking and locking of the doors create a real sense of hopelessness.

The original opening of Scream is iconic for a reason, and the 2022 reboot doesn’t just try to simply recreate it. Instead, it is a modern reimagining; the visceral gut stab and the victim being dragged across the floor call back to 1996 alongside Tara being quizzed about "Stab." Yet, it doesn’t feel cheap, or simply fan-service. It plays into the self-awareness of Scream and proved that it was a worthy successor to the iconic 1996 original.

Scream (2022)

Scream (2022) is available to stream on Paramount+ in the US

Watch on Paramount+

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