Video Essay in Spring 2023 NECSUS AudioVisual Issue on Desktop Documentary co-edited by Kevin B. Lee and Ariel Avissar. Received several mentions in the "Best Video Essays of 2023 BFI Poll": Max Tohline: "A time-capsule doc from 1967 resurfaces recut online and inspires a bevy of reaction videos. Why’d that happen? If we can’t explain why, maybe we can at least reproduce the effect, but with all the tools out in the open. And that’s what this essay does. After a forensics of the recut itself and a cataloguing of the reactions, a little zoom and slow motion unexpectedly imbue me with the same fascination with wonder and impermanence for contemporary online culture." Catherine Grant: "The other entries in the dossier were of excellent quality across the board, and I would particularly point to Ritika Kaushik and Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco’s great video essays for the ways in which, like Bird’s, their work points to how screen capture techniques can be harnessed to investigate very important and highly diverse screen studies research questions. "
Indians from 1967: A ReactionIn this video, I remix and re-appropriate footage from the films of Indian filmmaker SNS Sastry, who worked at India’s primary state institution of documentary and short film, Films Division of India (FD). I use a poem by an Indian documentary filmmaker S. Sukhdev ("Mass Message Medium") written in the late 1960s as an epigraph to audiovisual material from the films of Sastry made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While working within official mandates, Sastry creatively and subversively reused and re-appropriated FD’s own documentaries, newsreels, and intermedial forms from other sources (like still photographs, newspaper clippings, fiction film clips, political speeches, popular songs and dances et al). By remixing the work of this remix filmmaker, I implore us to see these sounds and images in a different light and open a new avenue for Indian documentary historiography.
A Screen Stars Dictionary entry for Tecmerin. Journal of Audiovisual Essays Mentioned in the Best Video Essays of 2023 BFI Poll: Catherine Grant: "This was the video essay I most enjoyed watching in 2023! It was part of a joint venture inaugurated this year in which I was delighted to participate - The Screen Stars Dictionary, launched by the Spanish audiovisual essay journal TECMERIN in conjunction with video-essay entrepreneur extraordinaire Ariel Avissar..."
https://tecmerin.uc3m.es/project/screen-stars-dictionary/?lang=enStranger Things in one word. Created for Ariel Avissar's TV Dictionary —a collaborative collection of audiovisual essays that capture the essence of a television series using a single word, and its dictionary definition(s): TV Dictionary (cstonline.net/the-tv-dictionary-an-introduction-by-ariel-avissar/).