The Digital Video Essay

• Applicant: Evelyn Kreutzer, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2022 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 504325864

The project “The Digital Video Essay,” short DVE, to be conducted at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, explores the current state of critical audiovisual transformations (remixes) of existing moving-image media known under the umbrella term of the digital video essay. It considers how moving-image media in the digital era perform as open, living archives of sounds and images, which are subject to constant audiovisual appropriation, and how their digital accessibility shapes our collective media experiences, environments, and histories. While DVE focuses particularly on academic video essays and digital methods of audiovisual scholarship, it also examines how moving-image media objects (predominantly excerpts from existing films, television programs, and online videos) circulate in-between and transcend formerly distinct media technologies and different realms of media production and audiences more broadly, including experimental, documentary, and installation media. Through close analyses, interviews with moving-image makers, as well as my own engagements with videographic research methods, I aim to lay the groundwork for the first single-authored comprehensive study of the digital video essay in the English language. My objectives are to (1)investigate how contemporary video essayists quote, (re-)contextualize, juxtapose, fragmentize, mix, and transform existing works; (2)to develop a typology of these transformative practices and to draw conclusions about the distinctions and convergences between the different media-cultural realms of their production; and (3)to reflect on their implications for the present and future of digital moving-image media scholarship, specifically in regards to the blurring lines between media theory and practice.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position