Ways of Doing Newsletter #5
Our dear WoD subscribers,
It seems that Spring is sprung for those of us in the Northern hemisphere. The days are lengthening and the sun is starting to feel stronger. However dark the world may feel at the moment, seeing new growth and change in nature is a comfort. Wherever you are in the world, we hope you might feel that cheer of newness in the air…
Speaking of newness, we are very excited to introduce our 4th videographic exercise in the feminist citational practice series: The Conceptual Epigraph. Do check it out, along with examples from Alison and Lucy. This one is collaborative, so grab a friend (or several), and try it out - we’d love to see what you come up with.
Since our last newsletter, two special journal issues fronted by WoD members have made their way to publication. At the end of last year, Tecmerin published a wonderful new ‘Screen Stars Dictionary’ collection focused on horror, co-edited by Alison with Ariel Avissar and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega. At the beginning of this year, Dayna’s fantastic ‘Queer/ing Horror: Video Essays at the Intersection of Horror and Queerness’ in Monstrum, 7.2 was released, complete with work from Lucy (‘(dis)Orienting Horror: Feeling Queerly’) and Alison (‘I can hear someone coming’).
Dayna’s work continues to be screened in all sorts of fabulous places. Her long take sex trilogy – How to Fake an Orgasm (1999), Watching Lesbian Porn (2001), Pleasure Zone (2005) – played at the iconic porn theatre, Cinema L’Amour in February, as part of Grind’her in Montreal, and So I didn’t sleep very well last night (2022) had its Montréal premiere at the 8th edition of Festival Filministes in March. Dayna has also taken up an AI residency at University of Montreal, so we’re very excited to see what DaynAI (and new DaynAI!) will get up to. More on that next time.
Colleen has joined Ariel Avissar, Matthew Payne and Barbara Zecchi (what a dream team!) to put on a 5-day workshop at the University of Notre Dame in June. Reframing the Argument is aimed at graduate students, and explores video essays as communicative research practice. Thanks to generous grant funding, tuition is free and there are some travel stipends, so please consider applying or sharing it with folks who might be interested. The deadline is April 15th.
We are also excited to share the news that UMass Amherst is launching an Online Graduate Certificate in Videographic Criticism - developed by the powerhouse that is Barbara Zecchi, this is the first graduate certificate of its kind in the world, and boasts an incredible line-up of acclaimed videoessayists offering courses, including Colleen and Dayna. Applications for program are accepted on a rolling basis, allowing students to start at any time. There is no required course sequence, so students may enroll in courses in any order.
Along with her piece for Monstrum and Screen Stars Dictionary on Mia Goth, Alison has been on fire this year! Not only has she published two other videos – LOOK AT ME in Screenworks, and Suffocated but Screaming for Open Screens (which you might recognise as her WoD ‘Making Materiality Matter’ exercise) – but her new book, Rewriting Television came out. How cool is that?! Even though it’s not anything to do with video essays, it couldn’t not have some kind of videographic form, so she made a stunning trailer.
And finally, Lucy recently signed a contract with Lever Press for a videographic book project, more on that as it develops!
What we are watching (and listening to) right now includes…
Pavitra Sundar, On Listening
Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Environmental Time
Elaine Shemilt, Doppelganger Redux 2016
Desirée de Jesús, The Black Ecstatic
josh (with parentheses), You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.)
Lého Galibert-Laîné, Oswald Iten and Jialu Zhu, Project
Captured by Sam, Why We Shoot Film
Phoebe Pua, How to Cook Marlina’s sup ayam
Lara Callaghan, The Senses of The Silence of the Lambs
Libertad Gills, Aging Faces, Voice, and Barbara Steele’s Revenge
Owl Kitty, Twilight with a Cat
If you want to say hi, please just reply to this message. We’d love to hear from you, and especially if you are using our exercises - if you’ve made something, please do tell us and we may feature it on the website. We’re also always happy to be alerted to new video essays or videographic happenings, so do be in touch….
And finally, if you think there are other people who would like to read this newsletter, please pass it on or even post about it on your social media channels. You can also send people to the newsletter archive on our website.
See you in the Summer,
Love, WoD
(Lucy Fife Donaldson, Colleen Laird, Dayna McLeod and Alison Peirse)