Altered Perspectives

An audio-visual debate exploring issues of scale – from the macro to the micro, from the distant to the intimate, from the visible to the invisible and back. 4 video responses to a selection of 4 video essays of FILMEXPLORER’s Video Essay Gallery.

Introduction

by Lého Galibert-Laîné

The four videos published here are the result of a collaboration between Filmexplorer and twelve students from The American University of Paris, who took part in a semester-long course I taught in the fall of 2024, entitled “The Video Essay”.

The assignment that led to the production of these videos was two-fold. After having watched the catalogue of all the works that have been curated for the Video Essay Gallery thus far, comprising 23 videos and films, the twelve students were invited to imagine an original curation of four of these works. This curation was to be screened in public at Cinéma Saint-André des Arts in downtown Paris (an event organized in December 2024, in collaboration with the French online journal Débordements). As this event was designed to appeal to a general audience, we had a conversation about the criteria we wanted to apply to our selection: formal diversity, total duration of the event, and also countries of origins and languages used in each video, identities of the makers… After each student had had a chance to defend which works they had found the most stimulating, we formulated a common desire to propose a curation with a strong thematic throughline: questions of scale, and gestures of zooming in / zooming out. The selected works were capricorn sunset [a constellation] by Johannes Binotto; grain by belit sağ; Life without Dreams by Jessica Bardsley; and One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean by Yuyan Wang.

Once the curation was established, the students formed groups of three, and were tasked to produce a “video response” to each of the curated works. This was inspired by other initiatives led by fellow video essayist in different educational contexts, among which the pedagogical experiments of Ariel Avissar, documented in a special issue on pedagogy published in the online journal [in]Transition in 2023. In the context of our project the notion of what constitutes a “response” was purposefully left very open: students could explore a related theme, replicate a formal gesture, re-use the same audio-visual material as their chosen video… The results of these experimentations were shown on the big screen of the Cinéma Saint-André des Arts (14/12/2024) right after the curation that had inspired them, leading to a long and productive exchange between the students, Yuyan Wang who gave us the honour of being in attendance, and the audience; they can now be watched here.

As a final note: after having shared the students’ “responses” with each of the original makers, I received a video note by Johannes Binotto – his own response to their response. We publish it here with his permission, as a celebration of the profoundly dialogical nature of videographic criticism, and an invitation to continue these exchanges in ever new contexts, places and formats.