This brief series will showcase multiple “video essays” by three amateur video artists who are also professional academics and authors working in religious and theological studies. The idea for the series was motivated by a wildcard session on video essays that took place during the 2024 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in San Diego. During that panel, each of us presented a video work related to our academic research and reflected on the video medium and its potential for new directions in academic expression. The audience response was very positive. During the general discussion following the presentations, many scholars in the room expressed frustration with the current state of academic discourse and its lack of creativity and experimentation. Many in attendance also expressed a desire for a more expansive and immediate relationship between scholarship, art, and aesthetic experimentation within their academic institutions and scholarly communities. In the context of large-scale academic conferences like the AAR, frustration with scholarly expression was connected directly to the oftentimes alienating nature of academic panels of pre-written papers read out loud in monotone voices with little concern for the expressive and aesthetic quality of the ideas being presented. While in recent years there has certainly been a shift towards more thoughtful and creative presentations of academic ideas within the various contexts of academic life, academics, mostly still exclusively trained in text-centered methods and deliveries, are still grappling with a contemporary culture dominated by images and digital technology that has profoundly disrupted the standard traditions of academic expression. They are also grappling with the changing nature of intellectual attention and communication in the age of digital distraction, expanding knowledge of neuro-divergence, the need for a wider range of learning and collaborative environments, and the ubiquity of video and other digital media in academic and non-academic settings alike.
Most academics know that the relationship between academic life and the way in which we experience the world has undergone a profound shift, and perhaps this is why the wildcard session seemed to strike such a chord. A refrain that we heard during the session was a desire to break out of the stale norms of isolated academic labor; to cultivate more creativity, more experimentation, more collaboration, more intellectual vulnerability, more artistic expression, and, to be sure, more weirdness. With the current crisis of short-sighted austerity against the humanities, there’s no doubt that the academic spaces in which such desires might find the freedom to develop are being foreclosed at rapid rates. However, with the current political, economic, and technological upheavals currently rocking the academic landscape, what is desperately needed—in addition to more organized labor power and courage in the face of nihilistic political attacks on academic freedom and the colonization of the academy by the corporate peddlers of artificial intelligence[i]—is a refusal to give up on human creativity and the pursuit of new ways to imagine and represent life in the world.
We believe the video essay is one medium through which academics might experiment with alternative modes of thinking and expression in the age of digital video. Inaugurated in the mid-20th century, there is a deep tradition of the video essay that has largely gone unnoticed by academics outside of cinema and media studies.[ii] One of the unique aspects of the video medium, as an extension of the cinematic tradition, is the capacity of combination, collage, and montage, and herein lies the promise of cinema and video as a distinct mode of thought. This is how Jean-Luc Godard, perhaps the greatest video essayist in the history of cinema, understood the potential of cinematic montage. If the fundamental task of the academic is to bring to concrete expression abstract concepts as they bear on an array of social, historical, and scientific problems, Godard approaches cinematic thinking as “the montage of disparate phenomena in poetic imagery,” where film allows the thinker to “bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.”[iii] This is precisely what the video essays in this series are attempting, all through very different approaches on their use of images, text, music, sound, and temporality. Themes explored in this series through video montage and aesthetic-based reflection include psychoanalysis and subjectivity, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “religionless ethics” and the philosophy of weather, academic burnout and desire, and the category of antinomianism in American history. These works are offered by amateur filmmakers and artists as examples of alternative academic experimentation and creativity. We hope they spark in viewers and readers a curiosity and interest in experimenting with their own material in new mediums and forms.
[i] I’ll leave aside the question of whether AI, which of course bears on the topic of the future of video expression, has the potential to be taken up in academically generative ways, but my position for now is that the damage being done (ecological, intellectual, institutional) by AI is so disproportionate to its potential for good as to warrant a complete disavowal.
[ii] See, for example, Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford University Press, 2011); Laura Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford University Press, 2017);and Rick Warner, Godard and the Essay Film: A Form that Thinks (Northwestern University Press, 2018).
[iii] Quoted in Michael Witt, Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian (Indiana University Press, 2013)2.
