I recently read an article by Michael Renov called “Lost, Lost, Lost: Mekas as Essayist” where he discusses Jonas Mekas’s film in relation to the idea of the essay – a piece of work that is not definable, that deals with the word but more importantly with the seeing of the world.
He points to a tradition of essay writing stretching from Montaigne through Nietzsche and Adorno, to Barthes. I am a big admirer of the essays of Roland Barthes and the idea of using video to address the world in an essayistic style appeals to me. Renov describes it as a process where you are looking at the world and judging it, but it’s the process of judging rather than the verdict that counts. This is a style I think would work extremely well with audio. Doing something similar with video would be more challenging, but I’m intrigued to try.
The essay is a creative act that makes a lot of sense to me.
I also read Catherine Russell’s article “Autoethnography: Journeys of the self”. I have just finished an autoethnographic video myself. It’s a funny and silly piece, but I made it with the idea of an autoethnography in mind.
She talks about the potential of autoethnography to challenge the idea of ethnicity itself, as it focuses on the contingency of experience and location.
She also talks about how the move to video encouraged a “diary mode” and the ability to record huge amounts of footage cheaply. She refers to the “the futuristic medium of video, which promises total instant recall of all history”. This is a fascinating to me – the idea of video as a promise of having everything recorded from now on. Everything becomes footage. The videoblogging dream (nightmare?) in some ways.
