Echoes Of War Video Essay

Critics with an exceptional grasp of language know how to convey the power of the movies to their readers – and there is nothing more satisfying, for a cinephile, than to replay a film in one’s mind, guided by the rich prose of a competent critic, to relive a phenomenological experience, after the fact.But this approach, though undeniably poetic and accomplished, also operates on a certain vagueness, a lack of explicitness.

Critics with an exceptional grasp of language know how to convey the power of the movies to their readers – and there is nothing more satisfying, for a cinephile, than to replay a film in one’s mind, guided by the rich prose of a competent critic, to relive a phenomenological experience, after the fact.But this approach, though undeniably poetic and accomplished, also operates on a certain vagueness, a lack of explicitness.

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Seitz’ video essay reframes the auteur’s canon in order to, for the Wes Anderson fan, de-familiarize and, for the uninitiated, personalize the viewing experience, thereby inviting both groups to partake in a discourse that opens the films to a projection of multiple personal impressions.

I thus see the video essayist as a media-literate Michel de Montaigne crossed with the cinephiliac DNA of a Quentin Tarantino or a Jean-Luc Godard, and equipped with an updated technological interface modeled on Alexandre Astruc’s century language, that of digital units, the affect of film.

The video essay format engenders a form of complex authorship blending the critic’s sensibilities with those of the director in an unprecedented fashion.

The filmmaker’s work is radically re-“written”, yet this act, which admittedly constitutes an aggressive, if reverent form of iconoclasm, is not destructive.

He added his own signature, thereby enriching, not deforming or falsifying, his subject of examination., a recognizable stamp that I can attribute to the work’s producer.

In most cases, they simply recycle what I have already seen, without adding new information.

This dialogue between the film, its potential cinematic inter-texts, the author, the recipient, and numerous other para-texts, constitutes a complex hermeneutic network of consistently shifting spheres of information.

The result is not one essential meaning but a multitude of interpretative frameworks.

At any rate, what was so striking about the essay was its ability to condense the distinctive style of Wes Anderson, not in a reductive or simply reproductive fashion, but in an analytic and poetic one, remixing scenes from the director’s filmography, adding visual material from other films, incorporating rock and pop music, comic book panels, interviews, archival research, splitting the projection screen, injecting multiple screens into it, writing on them and talking over them; the video essay format revitalizes the medium of criticism as a performance.

By means of voice-over commentary, editing, sound design, textual inserts, in short , Matt Zoller Seitz presents the work of Wes Anderson anew, afresh, pleasurably familiar yet invigoratingly different, appropriating and remediating the films’ stylish appeal and the cinematic medium’s form.