Thinking diegetically: Spatiotemporal principles and mimetic rhetorical functions in videographic criticism

Abstract | Abstract

In the process of thinking diegetically, the videographic practitioner is guided by the diegetic (story world) logic of the films or media works under scrutiny. As opposed to videographic approaches that extract audiovisual segments from a narrative and spatiotemporal logic, this form of videographic work engages with the constraints of the source materials’ diegetic tethers to (re)construct a story world in meaningful and productive ways. This essay seeks to explore the ramifications of such diegetic argumentation through an analysis of several videographic works: the author’s “Imagining Orphée | Orphée imaginé” (Oyallon-Koloski 2023), Catherine Grant’s “Fated to be Mated: An Architectural Promenade” (2018), Dayna McLeod’s “Speculative Queer Autoethnography: Desert Hearts” (2023), and Liz Greene’s “Spencer Bell, Nobody Knows My Name” (2022). These examples embrace the intrinsic form of their source material’s diegesis, prioritize the rhetorical impact of spatiotemporal construction, and deliberately balance the pulls between original and videographic diegetic logic through the application of precise videographic techniques. Video essayists use the formal, performative, and nonverbal options afforded by centering diegetic principles in powerful ways to shape their rhetoric.