An accented video way of thinking: Becoming videoessay

Abstract | Abstract

“An accented video way of thinking: Becoming videoessay” explores the videoessay as a conceivably “accented” form. (I prefer the spelling “videoessay” —a sort of accented choice, given that it echoes the Spanish “videoensayo”— to better convey a sense of seamless integration between video and essay.) In Thinking with an Accent, Pooja Rangan et al. (2023) argue that the accent should be understood not as a way of speaking but as a mode of thought. Two decades earlier, in Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy used the term “accented” to describe a mode of film production that shapes filmmakers’ “feelings as thought” into an alternative “accented style” (2001, 26). Expanding on these ideas, I propose to consider the position of the videoessay in relation to traditional (i.e. accent-less) scholarship, its imperfect mode of production, and the affective engagement of the “cinephiliac” videoessayist with the media object (Keathley 2000, Grant 2014, 2016). By foregrounding the accented nature of the videoessay form, I suggest that the videoessay represents not only a “video way of thinking”, as Spatz (2018) has indicated, but an accented video way of thinking. In Deleuzian terms, I propose that the videoessay, as an accented practice and epistemology, uses the transforming force of “becoming” (devenir) (1994a, 1994b) to redefine the boundaries and the discourses of the supposedly “accentless” film and media scholarship, thus “deterritorializing” it to make it accented. Through three different segments, not meant to be watched in any specific order, I explore the accented dimensions of the videoessay’s sound (the echo, the stutter, the index of unbelonging, the simulacrum), surface (the haptic shudder, the textural affect-driven style), and thought (the becoming minoritarian, the shifting of the maker) toward a counter-hegemonic onto-epistemology of videographic criticism.