For this version of Hyperallergic’s video essay column, we’re doing one thing a bit of totally different. Somewhat than the standard record of 5 current net movies of word, we’re together with one commercially launched function movie, in addition to a brand new instrument of which essayists could make enjoyable use. Essays on video video games, sports activities, and clothes spherical out the month’s lineup. Get pleasure from!
The Interactive Video Grid by Quan Zhang
Impressed by “Paradoxes of Suture,” Shane Denson’s interactive essay analyzing a scene from Don’t Look Now (1973), Zhang has constructed easy-to-use open-source software program. Video essayists can feed in numerous video clips and the instrument will create a grid of them, which may be performed or paused at will. One instance grid made with the instrument replicates a second from “Paradoxes of Suture” that juxtaposes each particular person shot from the Don’t Look Now scene for comparability. One other grid highlights the heightened sound of footsteps in numerous scenes from Mouchette (1967). Zhang desires to create new prospects for video enhancing with nonlinear instruments, and I’m eager to see what makers would possibly be capable to obtain with this.
“Why You Can’t Keep in mind the Story of any Videogame” by videogamedunkey
Jason Gastrow, aka videogamedunkey, embeds stable criticism in his humorous posts of himself taking part in numerous video games. This video is nothing however Gastrow itemizing and really briefly summarizing video games whose tales function characters with amnesia. The vanity is very simple, but the sheer variety of titles he enumerates for greater than 10 minutes renders an more and more damning portrait of mainstream sport writing’s lack of creativity. It additionally will get funnier because it goes alongside.
“REFORM!” by Secret Base
The sports activities and tradition channel Secret Base launched its new paid membership program by reviving co-founder Jon Bois’s long-dormant sequence Fairly Good, his compilation of tales about unusual episodes in US historical past. This three-part documentary (the primary half is freely obtainable, whereas the subsequent two are at the moment accessible to Secret Base’s Patreon supporters solely) appears on the Reform Occasion and the ever-so-brief second when there was a viable third-party problem to the Democrat/Republican dichotomy in america. This was in the end undermined by the celebration’s management of principally cranks and weirdos — in different phrases, the proper Bois topics.
“What You ACTUALLY Must Make Garments in an Apocalypse” by Bernadette Banner
Gown historian Bernadette Banner turns her consideration from the previous to the (hypothetical) future on this video. The premise remembers the primary episode of James Burke’s seminal BBC science/historical past sequence Connections, by which Burke examines how deeply up to date humanity depends on expertise, and the way any catastrophic lack of infrastructure would imply a reversion to the usage of the plough to outlive. As a historian, Banner illuminates the elemental instruments required to make and preserve clothes. What’s fascinating is how easy, and comparatively few, these instruments are, reminding viewers of how a lot trendy expertise has alienated most of us from abilities that had been as soon as widespread.
Energy by Yance Ford
It’s not day by day that an essay movie is launched in a number of theaters earlier than being made obtainable on the world’s hottest streaming platform. Yance Ford’s Energy is a essential overview of the historical past and evolution of policing as an establishment within the US. This can be a broad subject, however he winnows it down with exacting focus to the elemental philosophical query of what the police are and what they exist for. The reply is a darkish reflection of theorist Stafford Beer’s maxim that “The aim of a system is what it does.”