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Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age

by Ursula Biemann (Ed.)
Springer, Vienna, Austria, 2003
166 pp., illus. 155 col. Paper, 27.00
ISBN: 3-211-20318-4.

Reviewed by Dene Grigar
Texas Woman’s University

dgrigar@twu.edu

The metaphor of compression sits at the heart of Ursula Biemann’s anthology entitled Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age, for it suggests such physical states as contraction, pressure, squeezing, crowding, reduction, and deflation––the very issues the 15 essays address about the "art, theory and critical practice [of the video essay] in all its variations: from monologues of disembodiment to cartographies of diaspora experiences and transnational conditions, from the essay as the organization of complex social shifts to its technological mutation and increasing digitalization."

Biemann’s introduction sets the tone for the book and elaborates on the origins and trends of the video essay: As she tells us, the film essay was first introduced in the early 1980s by Chris Marker in Sans Soliel. Intrigued by what happened to the genre in the digital age, she hosted a conference, also named "Stuff It," in 2002. The book, like the conference, "recontextualize[s] the audio-visual essay both technologically and culturally," focusing on a "wider development of new media, the Internet and digital image production and understand how these technologies emphasize or mutate the characteristics of the essay while opening up new possibilities for a critical engagement with them" (8).

Two other essays, Nora Alter’s "Memory Essays" and Jorg Huber’s "On the Theory-Practice of the Transitional," help to further expand on Biemann’s introduction.

Alter’s essays situates the video essay in the long tradition of the essay genre, beginning with Montaigne’s 16th C work, Essais, through time to that of De Sade, Emerson, Nietzsche, Lukacs, Adorno, and Barthes. No one who has taught any form of the essay recently will disagree with her stance that it is "critique of ideology" or that "since film, video, or literature is the work of re-presentation, veracity is an impossibility" (13-14). Her final statement that the video essay is now a "full fledged peer of the narrative and documentary films" (21) is substantiated by the other essays that follow, particularly Huber’s, who focuses his attention on theoretical underpinnings of the video essay.

It is Huber’s essay, in fact, that explains to the novice of the video essay the reasons surrounding the shift to postcolonial, cultural studies approach. As he says,

"Practical experience shows that traditional forms of knowledge production with their enclosure into disciplines and dogmatic methods are hardly adequate to this task. It rather requires an approach that understands itself as an open, interminable and transdisciplinary process which is self-reflective of its procedure, also in terms of its style." (92)

Traditional literary studies, particularly those ensconced in formalist and even new critical approaches, insists on objectivity fixed upon a static object, while the "video essayistic mode exposes the process of subjective perception and associative thinking; . . . is involved in translation and transition; [and] . . . focuses on the ambulatory character of imagination, far removed from any programmatic statements" (93). Thus, the video essay is symptomatic of the general ambiguity that has emerged in the late 20th C—what he describes as a "general sliding, gliding and shifting, where any discourse can transform into any other discourse, where it can be continued in other fields, be grafted onto anything and placed anywhere else" (96).

The general nervousness about utilizing theories involving language for discussing the video essay is echoed in Jan Verwoert’s "Double Viewing: The Significance of the ‘Pictorial Turn’ to the Critical use of Visual Media in Video Art" who argues for an approach to the video essay that turns away from semiotics (or a linguistic approach) to a "post-linguistic, post-semiotic rediscovery of the visual image as a complex interplay involving visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurativity" (25). His notion of "double viewing" offers, he suggests, a "model of a mobile, pleasure-oriented, yet emancipated recipient of the media of popular culture . . . based on the presumption of the multidimensional character of identification and consumption processes." His own term for "double viewing," is "disjunctive synthesis," a method that

"seeks to make use of the two contradictory principles of fascination and skepticism, exploiting the power of fascination in the images to the maximum at the formal level, taking advantage of the possibilities for establishing coherency through traditional narrative means (voice-overs, continuous flow of image)––thus using all of the tools that contribute to narrative closure and thereby maximize the effect of a work of video." (29)

No doubt the most provocative essay in the book––and one that exemplifies cultural and political compression––is Walid Ra’ad and The Atlas Group’s "Civilizationally, We Do Not Dig Holes to Bury Ourselves." This essay is a "public interview" with Souheil Bachar, a Lebanese man held captive for 10 years––a three-month period of it with the five Americans captives held in Lebanon during the event that came to be known as the "Arms for Hostages" scandal. The interview was conducted by Maha Traboulsi, a media artist representing the Atlas Group, instrumental in helping Bachar to make videotapes of his experience. At the time of the interview he had made 53 short videotapes about his captivity. Only two of them would he allow to be viewed in North America and Western Europe. His assertion that the kidnapping of Benjamin Weir, Terry Anderson and the others was a political act rather than a criminal one born from frustration and anger at American policies on the Middle East has been repeated as underlying more recent hostilities between the US and the Middle East. What catalyzed him into action in 1999 to make his videos, however, was the way the "contested narratives" (39) that emerged from the investigations into American foreign policy following the scandal were distilled into a single myth of American righteousness. That discovery led him to explore "how this kind of experience can be documented and represented," something the American stories stemming from this experience "failed miserably" at, he believes (43).

Other notable essays include Rinaldo Walcott’s "But I Don’t Want to Talk about That: Postcolonial and Black Diaspora in Video Art," which applies post colonial theory to video essays on issues relating to "black modernity" (58); "En la calle: From an Interview on TropiCola," a discussion the timba, the complex and political music of Cuban youth culture; and Christa Blumlinger’s "Harun Farocki: The Art of the Possible," which questions the "conceptual opposition of analog or videographic media and digital or post-photographic images," which she suggests is derived from a purely technological standpoint. Also, those interested in narrative and cognition will find Maurizio Lazzarato and Angela Melitopoulos’ essay, "Digital Montage and Weaving: An Ecology of the Brain for Machine Subjectivities" helpful. They argue that "the montage technique makes it possible to speak of the second aspect of Bergson’s concept of memory, which involves changing the duration of the input-output relationship through deliberate influence. This function of the human brain can be simulated in the imaging processes used in montage" (121).

The book also provides critiques of 11 video essays, a "Selected Videography," "Selected Bibliography," and Author bios. Missing from this rich trove of resources, though, is an index, which would have been useful for retracing ideas, names, and events expressed in the book.

While the publisher claims that the book is written for "experts and laymen interested in media theory, history of art, cultural science, social theory," I would add to this list those working in the areas of visual rhetoric, composition studies, electronic literature, and digital culture. Certainly it should find its way on the reading lists of any scholar interested in new media.

 

 




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