Ways of Doing Newsletter #4 revised
Our dear WoD subscribers,
As you know, one of the foundations of our collective is the practice of care: care in our work and care with each other. In that spirit, we dedicate this newsletter to Dayna’s wife Maria-José Miranda Raposo who left us on December 17. A born community leader, queer feminist, and activist, MJ will be deeply missed by the people she loved, advocated and cared for. MJ wanted you to donate to your local foodbank or community organization, or Centre d'aide à la Famille.
We write at the time of the Winter Equinox here in the Northern hemisphere, where days are short, the air is cold, and the light is thin. For many, it is a time of slowing down and hunkering down; it is a time of joy and sorrow ever intertwined. We hope that you find yourself in the midst of love and comfort. At the very least, we suggest that such times are well-suited for staying inside, perhaps for watching and making video essays.
There is, indeed, so much to watch. As you may be aware, the results of the Sight and Sound “Best video essays of 2024” are out. It is a tremendous selection of fantastic works. We are so honored to have been included in these commendations. In addition to recognition of our Ways of Doing collective, each of us is grateful for the individual nominations our independent works received. We (Colleen, Dayna, and Lucy) are especially celebrating Alison’s Knit One, Stab Two, which earned six mentions, third in the totals to Barbara Zecchi’s “The Rhythms of Rage: From Solitude to Solidarity” (first place) and Lily Ford’s “Light Hands” (second place). By the way, now might be the perfect time to harness some of that brilliant Zecchi energy and try our Feminist Citation Exercise “Dis/Re/Orienting Cinematic Language: Barbara Zecchi’s Feminist Mechanisms.” But if you are more in the mood for watching, if you haven’t seen these works by Zecchi and Ford yet, off with you now. We’ll be here.
We are similarly happy to announce that our Lucy received first prize in the international video contest at the Adelio Ferrero Award for '"Isn't that going to be awfully dull and drab?": George Hoyningen-Huene's use of neutrals' in October. She also gave a public keynote - ‘Feeling the beat: pop music and the body in film’ - for The Norwegian Federation of Film Societies’ film seminar on Popular Music and Cinema at The Norwegian Cinematheque in Oslo.
Dayna has just published Potbelly, which might be, here in the WoD camp (at least from the perspective of Lucy, Colleen and Alison) our new absolute favourite Dayna video essay. She also recently screened FoUBARthes: Death of the Author at the Musée de la chasse et de la nature, Paris in the AI: Disorder and Freedom program for Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and Speculative Queer Autoethnography: Desert Hearts, for the Explorations visuelles et narratives au cœur des identités 2ELGBTQ+ program by Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV), one of the few centers in the world dedicated to the preservation and promotion of media artworks by women.
The details of the Parametric Summer Series organized by Ariel Avissar, in which Lucy and Colleen were active participants, are now available to the public. The exercises (four in total) are all online–another opportunity for structured making here at the end of the Gregorian calendar. Lucy and Colleen’s videos from the workshop are also now public as well:
Lucy
Colleen
Alison is supposed to be writing her next book, so, as anyone will know who is Supposed to Be Writing a Book (*Colleen*), she has been tremendously busy with many other incredibly pressing and urgent work activities that simply cannot wait a moment longer. These have included finally finishing off HELLO? - a video essay she first started at Middlebury in (cough) the summer of 2022. It’s now done and out on review for a journal, so keep your fingers crossed for her…
She has also been very busy devouring the feminist, practice-based publications of Miriam Kent, including Unmasking Inequality: An Arts-Based Response to a Feminist Pandemic and Marking gender studies: the (Radical) value of creative-critical assessment (this one is on ZINES yaass), reflecting upon Nobunye Levin & Palesa Nomanzi Shongwe’s essay In Reverie: Two Love Letters to Vinah which is a response to their videographic film Reverie, and delighting at the publication of Miradas by Pablo Serrano Torres, which she had the pleasure in seeing take shape during the Embodying the Video Essay workshop in 2023.
And, if that isn’t quite enough of all of us, we recently recorded an interview about WoD with Kevin B. Lee, for the brilliant The Video Essay Podcast, which you may well enjoy (given you have read this far, well done) and can listen to here.
Last time we promised… a guide to festivals for the videographic critic. There are thousands of festivals out there that *might* be interested in video essays, possibly, so it can be totally daunting knowing where to begin. So, we made this - a list of the festivals that we (or people we know) have had some success submitting to and screening at:
Marienbad Film Festival (Czech Republic)
Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (Romania)
Prismatic Ground (USA)
Ultra Cinema (Mexico)
Cinetoro Experimental Film Festival (Colombia)
Interface Video Art Festival (Croatia)
Videoart.ist (Turkey)
Montréal Underground Film Festival (Canada)
Victoria Film Festival (Canada)
Wunderground Film Festival (Belgium)
Bogota Experimental Film Festival (Colombia)
Uppsala Short Film Festival (Sweden)
Ribalta Experimental Film Festival (Italy)
Hope you find it useful. Let us know if you submit and get anywhere.
What we are watching (and listening to) right now includes…
Sadia Quraeshi Shepard, Shadow Self: On Agnès Varda’s Documenteur
Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, What Would Manu Say? Mothering, Midlife, and Mayhem in Netflix's Mai
swatpas, soaked leggings glitch
Pavitra Sundar, On Listening
Cormac Donnelly, Sound Stack, Soundwalk, Southworth
Pinar Fontini, Şehnaz, Elmas, Mina, and the Others, Who Kill The Angel in Their Houses
Steven Sehman, The Present Is the Past Is the Present: Sonic Repetition and Temporal Distortion in Enys Men
Catherine Grant and Lynda Nead The Haunted Mirror
Also, public service announcement, keep your eyes peeled for the imminent publication of issue 14 of the Screen Stars Dictionary, a horror special co-edited by Ariel Avissar, Alison Peirse and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega, and featuring video essays from Alison, Quan Zhang, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, May Santiago and Catherine Grant.
As usual, if you want to say hi, just reply to this message. We’d love to hear if you are using our exercises - whether that is for teaching, or for your own work -, if there are any amazing video essays we need to know about right now, or just something excellent in the videographic world that you think should be on our radar. Similarly, if you think there are other people who would like to read this newsletter, please feel free to shout about it on social media (and then we will love you forever), or send them to the newsletter archive on our website.
See you in the Spring,
Love, WoD
(Lucy Fife Donaldson, Colleen Laird, Dayna McLeod and Alison Peirse)