Video Essays: Curating and Transforming Film Education through Artistic Research

This article is dedicated to all my SOAS undergraduate and postgraduate class members of the academic year 2019-2020, Marguerite Culot, Maximilian Frederik, Umloda Emad Ibrahim, Mostafa Khattab, Ewa Kataryna Kiszelka, Alix Lafosse, Peiwen Li, Yuan Liao, Leen M. Fouad, Donovan Mathews, Ying Sang, Clara Katharina Von Harling, Hsueh Liang Wong, Jianbin Zhang, Cameron McGrath, Greta Alexandra Bassett, Harriet Louis Bessant Marsh, Samantha Carrick, Kim Eckersley, Alexander Hall, Christopher Stump, Ha Linh To, Inhe Yang and Jemima Presland. They were part of my first-year experience of implementing video essays as a creative assessment method. I am very grateful for their enthusiastic response to my invitation to create audiovisual criticism, and impressed by the quality of the work they produced. In their uncertainty lies my learning experience, the one that encourages me to keep engaging with this creative assessment method, and to produce them for various purposes. They have been my main partners in this collaborative task of working together towards finding some academic room for audiovisual criticism. They have been active participants in the learning and teaching of the study of film through film. My deepest gratitude also to all those colleagues who have been great sources of inspiration and supportive of my creative initiatives, starting from Prof Lindiwe Dovey. Many thanks to her and the whole Screen Worlds Team. I am so grateful to fellow colleagues at the School of Arts in SOAS, such as Prof Shane McCausland, who enthusiastically embraced and shared my interest in recursion, Dr Caspar Melville, Prof Lucy Duran, and Dr Morgan Davies, who welcomed me to a sonic discussion to share my experience teaching (or rather, being taught) video essays. I further thank the SOAS Decolonising Working Group. I am also grateful to Bartolomeo Meletti, for his eagerness to join me in the challenging endeavour of creating a guide to make video essays. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewer of this article, for their thorough feedback and generous engagement with my work.