Critique-en-scène: o videoensaio como gesto crítico

Abstract

A phenomenon whose emergence is directly linked to self-publishing platforms, such as YouTube, video essays are becoming more and more popular. Short lenght films generally dedicated to reflect on the audiovisual, video essays operate a complex relationship of meanings, denaturalizing the original mise-en-scène, turning plastic works that were previously crystallized, thus extracting further discursive possibilities through the recombination of images, an occurrence I named as critique-en-scene. To understand how this unprecedented concept is articulated, I propose a dive into the concepts of “video”, by Philippe Dubois (2013) and Arlindo Machado (2011), and “essay”, by Timothy Corrigan (2013), Nora Alter (2018) and Laura Rascaroli (2007). Both video and essay converge on the notion of thought. To understand how a video essay is structured, I take the concepts of database, by Lev Manovich (2002 and 2015), and Atlas Mnemosyne, by Aby Warburg (2009). And, finally, to reflect on how critique-en-scène is structured, I undertake the analysis of the channel Every Frame a Painting, which will itself be treated as a database and reorganized into a Mnemosyne, applying to the video essays the same “thought by editing”, by Georges Didi-Huberman (1998) that video essays apply to films.