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 Womans University
dgrigar@twu.edu
The metaphor of compression sits at the
heart of Ursula Biemanns anthology
entitled Stuff It: The Video Essay
in the Digital Age, for it suggests
such physical states as contraction, pressure,
squeezing, crowding, reduction, and deflationthe
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."
Biemanns 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 Alters "Memory
Essays" and Jorg Hubers "On the
Theory-Practice of the Transitional,"
help to further expand on Biemanns
introduction.
Alters essays situates the video
essay in the long tradition of the essay
genre, beginning with Montaignes
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
Hubers, who focuses his attention
on theoretical underpinnings of the video
essay.
It is Hubers 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 Cwhat
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 Verwoerts
"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 bookand one that exemplifies
cultural and political compressionis
Walid Raad and The Atlas Groups
"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 yearsa
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 Walcotts
"But I Dont 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
Blumlingers "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 Bergsons 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.