Inspired by philosopher Hermann Lotze’s observation that “the constant sharpening of knives is boring if one never gets around to cutting,”[1] I recently explored the video essay form and its rhetorical methods in a fourth-year undergraduate Film Studies seminar at the University of British Columbia. The course, which took place entirely online, ran for thirteen weeks and was held during the COVID-19 lockdown that had forced all UBC classes to move online in September 2021. Over the course of a term, students engaged with both written scholarship on video essays as well as a large number of video essays made by established film and media scholars (many of whom have “published” their work in the video-essay-exclusive online journal [in]Transitions), as well as those made by more casual YouTube and Vimeo hobbyists. The course also required students to produce two video essays using software called Camtasia – a program made freely available to all UBC students and whose interface is a simplified and much friendlier version of film industry-standard editing software. Following the style of [in]Transitions, students also needed to write accompanying creators’ statements for each of their video essays. A substantial portion of the course dedicated itself to peer assessment and to individual creators being “interviewed” by their classmates in online forums about their rhetorical and aesthetic choices.

Although the rise of the video essay’s popularity as an alternative assignment in the academic humanities (in the sense of “you may submit either a formal written essay or a video essay”) interests me, I do think that this designation as “alternative” severely limits its pedagogic potential. As such, in this particular course, I focused on getting students to question how video essays could function alongside written essays as meta-commentaries on argumentation and the rhetorical choices we make to persuade our readers and viewers. The course explicitly required students to draw on their longstanding, familiar academic knowledge of film form to explore what it means to make visual and auditory arguments. In this respect, when evaluating the video essays, I tried not to assess them on their aesthetic appeal or ingenuity, but rather on the quality of the arguments therein.[2] I maintained this notion of creative persuasion as an adjunct to or even a substitute for rhetoric as a central concern in the course’s conception; eventually it became a nodal point in the students’ course discussions. Such discussions also reflected the course’s primary aim: to teach students to think critically about—and not just use—this relatively new form of academic expression.

Rather than asking students to end their degrees writing yet more formal essays, the course, in its newness and strangeness, sought to create some space for them to reflect on all manner of things: their own relationship to cinema, the links between form, feeling, and knowledge, the examples that they use to illustrate points, and the many unconscious rhetorical choices they make when constructing arguments. The course gave the students an opportunity to step back and think critically about all of these habituated scholarly practices that had, over the course of four years, become natural but are actually anything but. In this respect, the course not only examined the video essay as a cinematic form, but also, by extension, interrogated the form and idea of anything that calls itself “essayistic.”

The two major assignments in the course required students to make a video essay on a given topic, to write a creator’s statement explaining the motivation for their formal choices, and to act as respondents to one another’s video essays. For their first video essay, I asked students to closely explore a single sequence, scene, moment, or gesture from any film that affected and resonated with them in some way. I requested that they craft something difficult to conceive as a written essay, using this new form to their advantage rather than just adding words to images.

The second video essay assignment was more complex, and combined concerns and issues that had arisen throughout the term. This video essay needed to be between eight and twelve minutes long, requiring students to relate a particular aspect of a film (or films) to a central citation of their choice; additionally, students had to use the relationship between the film(s) and citation to make a meta-commentary on video essays themselves as a format/genre/mode of expression, examining their purpose, potential, advantages, and drawbacks in the process. The results of this assignment were markedly consistent among students; almost all students produced meta-reflections on what it means to write, edit, assemble an argument, or persuade. They also produced astute commentary on the typically disavowed affective dimension in written scholarly work. By estranging students from an overly familiar medium (the written essay) and instead requiring them to “translate” everything they knew about argumentation, persuasion, structure, and citation into a novel medium (the video essay), the course forced this alien form to highlight and bring into relief the contours of other rhetorical forms.

As I briefly mentioned earlier, video essays have become an increasingly popular form of alternative assignment for instructors in all manner of academic fields, and particularly in the academic humanities. Some may hope that this alternative can creatively recapture the attention of Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok users. The typical undergraduate’s life is inextricably enmeshed with social media, and many of these platforms allow their users to engage in micro-filmmaking and video diary-style projects. Platforms like TikTok have basic continuity editing techniques built into their platforms, meaning that even a simple video diary may contain all manner of formal play. Above all else, social media demands hyper-curation (the need to angle the smartphone camera perfectly so as to avoid a double chin, to crop out material that doesn’t conform to one’s online image, to word one’s Twitter posts in such a way as to preempt any potential offense that could be taken, either now or in an unknowable future). With this in mind, one could argue that “editing”—concealing the imperfect, undesirable, or superfluous—has always been a central component of social media and therefore, perhaps somewhat cynically, comes naturally to our students. Provided that they are filming themselves doing anything at all and posting the results to social media, our students are already video essayists. Accordingly, it makes sense to “meet students on this fast-paced road” rather than forcing them to write formal essays.[3]

But this unexamined understanding of the video essay views it as just another, “easier” or more contemporary way to communicate (why write ideas down when you can speak them? Why not take ten minutes to make an argument rather than ten pages?) rather than as a reflective rhetorical form in its own right. From this perspective, one doesn’t deploy the video essay for its formal exceptionalism (one could say its “means”) but for its capacity to say something (“an end”). But both film and media instructors and students readily recognize that we can enlist film form in service of an argument; we know, for example, that lighting, framing, stylization, and montage editing can be used to subtly “compare and contrast” ideas, or that engaging with cinema requires one to occasionally read “against the grain of the image” and into the film’s omissions and silences.[4] Although many humanities and education scholars who are unfamiliar with cinema studies are dazzled by these revelations, they strike any student who has encountered the elementary formalism of textbooks such as Film Art: An Introduction as decidedly old news.

This means that, as film and media instructors, we owe our students more than relegating the video essay to the basement of the “alternative” assignment along with mood boards, magazine collages, 140-character Tweets, and interpretive dances (all of which we can consider equally emancipatory “resistances to forms of rationalised and goal-oriented governance within higher education”).[5] Can one still perform an interpretive dance summarizing Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”? Certainly, but to offer it as an alternative to “real” (traditional) assessment methods emerges as meaningless unless its form enters the equation and can itself fall under scrutiny. In the same way, the video essay deserves formal pedagogic focus: to be taught in terms of its technique (rather than with the assumption that social media has taught our students about editing), its form and structure (in the same way that we hone our students’ abilities to write strong thesis statements and use signposts in their essays), and as an idea, method, and mode of communication (which is a meta-treatment not typically bestowed upon the academic essay in university-level film and media studies curricula).

This need not occur exclusively in upper-year courses—indeed, research shows that learning to make video essays in lower-year university courses and in secondary school creates more mindful and confident academic writers. However, such an assignment can, in my experience, function well as a meditative denouement for upper-year students nearing the completion of their degrees.[6] All of my video essay students reported feeling more nimble when exploring ideas through moving images and sounds; more pertinently, many also claimed that the experience of working through their feelings (“why did I choose this topic/this film/this clip?”) apropos of form (“why did I slow down/speed up this clip?,” “why did I choose this music?”), provided them with a new outlook on these formal aspects of academic writing. As such, while engaging with and creating video essays can prove a useful way for students to learn about this increasingly popular form of new media scholarship, it also provides them with a fresh and active outlook on what it means to make an argument about and grapple with an artwork at all.

1. Hermann Lotze, Metaphysik (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1841), sec. 9. ↑

2. The assignment sheet for their first video essay and creators’ statement draws the following comparison: “Just as a student’s beautiful PowerPoint presentation in a typical Film Studies course may be dazzling, it also needs to be rigorous, well-researched, and rhetorically sound in order to actually be persuasive. Keep this comparison in mind while constructing your video essays and evaluating one another’s work.” ↑

3. Gideon Petrus Swanepoel and Armand Bruwer, “Educating the Always-on Generation in an Instant(Gram) #blendedlearning,” Perspectives in Education 38, no. 1 (2020): 17. ↑

4. Sean Redmond and Joanna Tai, “What’s Outside the Learning Box? Resisting Traditional Forms of Learning and Assessment with the Video Essay: A Dialogue between Screen Media & Education,” Media Practice and Education 22, no. 1 (2021): 11. ↑

5. Redmond and Tai, “The Learning Box,” 8. ↑

6. Juuso Henrik Nieminen and Laura Tuohilampi, “‘Finally Studying for Myself’—Examining Student Agency in Summative and Formative Self-Assessment Models,” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 45, no. 7 (2020): 1031–45. ↑