The debate about the ‘legitimacy’ of videographic film studies is surely over, and—thankfully—won. But healthy methodological self-reflection within the field continues. One question in particular understandably persists: to what extent should—and/or can—videographic criticism “‘translate’ the […] norms and traditions of written film studies into audiovisual versions” (Grant 2014: 49–50)? Our video essay—which took around three years to make—seeks to contribute to this ongoing disciplinary conversation.

The essay is structured around two main, intertwined strands: (1) edited footage of video-calls between the two of us (held regularly since Autumn 2022), in which we reflect upon the relationship between the “norms and traditions” of prose and audiovisual criticism; and (2) videographic experiments, in which we offer critical responses to the wordless concluding montage of Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995), using various videographic methods. Those experiments range from similarly wordless “poetic” techniques to straightforwardly “explanatory” passages of voiceover-led analysis (Keathley 2011), and several other “exploratory” (Mittell 2024: 14) approaches along this spectrum.

As will become clear, we sympathise in certain ways with commentators who have interrogated what ought to constitute specifically scholarly videographic practice. For instance, we share a sense that it is useful to acknowledge a “distinction between videographic practice as methodology and as communication mode” (Kiss 2020); we also assume videographic essays should move “beyond a ‘knowledge effect’ […] [toward] the articulation of an original point of view or argument” (de Fren 2020). However, the “norms and traditions” we are most interested in are less the “entrenched norms of typical academic rhetoric” (Mittell 2019: 229; emphasis added) than those of film criticism. Our title—“Must We Say What We Mean?”—invokes the indispensable article “Must We Say What They Mean? Film Criticism and Interpretation” (1990) by the film critic V. F. Perkins (whose title in turn reworks Stanley Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? [1969]). Once a teacher, mentor and friend to both of us at the University of Warwick, Perkins was perhaps the exemplary practitioner of the tradition most responsible for forming our assumptions about the purposes and aspirations of criticism. For ease, we might call this the ‘MOVIE’ approach (MOVIE [1962-2000] being the influential UK film periodical co-founded by Perkins, later relaunched as MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism).

Perkins and MOVIE owed partial debts to two earlier close reading traditions: New Criticism and the work of F. R. Leavis (both of which we also reflect upon in our video, via engagement with Brooks 1947 and Leavis 2013 [1962]). The most obvious way the MOVIE approach influences us is via our attempt to offer an “explicative”—as opposed to “symptomatic” (Bordwell 1989)—interpretation of a single sequence from Before Sunrise. Of course, close scene analysis is hardly absent within videographic criticism (e.g., Martin and Álvarez Lopez’s “Thinking Machine” series [2016–]; entries in Kiss’s [2018] “Videographic Scene Analyses” dossier, etc.). However, it has remained rarer than one might expect (see: Kiss 2018), which may be due partly to the field’s “reduced dependence on the writerly task of evoking the absent film” (Balsom 2021). By contrast, Perkins argued that it is in fact a “prime task” of film criticism to “articulate in the medium of prose some aspects of what artists have made perfectly and precisely clear in the medium of film” (1990: 4). As such, one concern of our video is what role practices like description might continue to play within videographic criticism.

Another key concern relates to why we chose Before Sunrise as our case study. This film was the subject of a wonderful piece of meta-criticism by another important MOVIE figure: Robin Wood (1996). We were especially inspired by a metaphor for the critical act that Wood derived from some dialogue in this film. In his opening sentence, Wood makes a comparison between his own motivation for writing film criticism and Céline’s (Julie Delpy) stated commitment to the “magic” of “attempting [to] understand someone, share something”:

Wood’s article is titled “The Little Space in Between: Preliminary Notes on Before Sunrise,” which catches nicely something essential but sometimes underestimated about prose criticism: it need not “claim exhaustiveness […] [nor] aspire to be the ‘last word,’ only a ‘clear word,’ on a topic at hand” (Kiss 2024). This in turn recalls the etymology and spirit of the ‘essay,’ which is necessarily offered precisely as an exploratory attempt, not a claim to comprehensiveness or finality. Clarity of expression nonetheless seems necessary to criticism, for two reasons: to assist attempts to “find the words that fit one’s sense of the moment or the movie” (Perkins 1990: 4); and attempts to “share”—i.e., communicate—that sense, by “making one’s articulation acceptable and persuasive to others” (4). This two-sided process is central to what our video characterises as the “discursive” and “communitarian” ethic underlying most of what we would tend to call criticism. An irreducibly humanistic impulse (Wood 1976; contra some calls for “a ‘post-humanistic’ videographic criticism” [O’Leary 2021]), this concern with attempting to “understand someone, share something” inspired the centrality of conversation to our video’s form and content.

For a long time, our working assumption was that the culmination of our making process would be an extended passage of criticism in the ‘explanatory mode.’ However, as it has been for many video essayists, the “material thinking” (Grant 2014) involved in making our video proved revelatory, disclosing routes we could not have reached independently. We discovered that a more fitting mode had been hiding in plain sight. We eventually decided that we wanted our culminating passage of criticism to itself be structured around critical insights that emerged through spontaneous attempts at critical conversation (condensed and augmented by clips and music). This approach appealed partly because it seemed no less ‘medium-specific’ a gesture than, say, associative montages, split-screen experiments, or parametric exercises. Indeed, documenting our iterative, embodied efforts to communicate critically—replete with responsiveness, verbal stumblings, unconscious physical expressions, etc.—notably foregrounds at least one medium-specific characteristic: the creation of photographic records of the contingent and un-anticipatable (Keathley 2006). Moreover, in our video centring the act of conversation receives several meta-justifications, including our focus on the Before trilogy (among the greatest tributes to sustained conversation in film history). However, we also wonder if there might not be scope for further experimentation with this method in the videographic field more generally, regardless of topic.

Creative collaborations of various kinds have long been established, salutary features of videographic scholarly practice (recent examples include the “Once Upon a Screen” [Avissar/Kreutzer 2020] and “Ways of Doing” [Donaldson, Laird, McLeod, Peirse 2022-present]). Meanwhile, incorporating footage from video calls is common within YouTube video essays (e.g., F.D Signifier [2023], Leftist Cooks [2023], Zoe Bee [2024]), and also in some scholarly videographic work (e.g., Galibert-Laîné [2019], Avissar [2024], The Lesser Feat [2024], Mittell [2026]). However, we have been unable to find examples of video essays centred around filmed conversations in which participants closely analyse an individual film (one key precedent is John Gibbs and Douglas Pye’s [2022] “Voices and Viewpoints,” whose conversation is solely auditory). We ultimately offer recorded critical conversations—considerably distilled and effectively illustrated—as one avenue that videographic film criticism might profitably explore further. Indeed, such conversation-focused critical practice would clearly only benefit from incorporating a far wider diversity of voices and approaches than we could offer—in terms not only of participants’ identities, but also the critical postures adopted: oppositional critique, for instance, can be just as valuable an orientation for critical conversation as can sympathetic appreciation. Above all, though, we believe a conversational approach offers one medium-specific means of attempting to achieve what we remain convinced are two obligations of criticism, whatever its orientation or medium: both a (provisional) understanding of one’s object, and the understanding of one’s audience.

Full notes/citations referenced in the video essay can be found here.

Álvarez Lopez, Cristina, and Adrian Martin. 2016–present. “The Thinking Machine” series, Filmkrant. https://filmkrant.nl/author/christina-alvarez-lopez-en-adrian-martin/.

Avissar, Ariel. 2024. “‘This Is Not What I Normally Do’: An Insignificant Step in the Downfall of the Humanities.” Academic Quarter, 28 (September), 18–24. https://doi.org/10.54337/academicquarter.i28.8853.

Avissar, Ariel, and Evelyn Kreutzer. 2020. “Once Upon a Screen: Audiovisual Essays.” The Cine-Files, Issue 15. https://www.thecine-files.com/issue15-audiovisual-essays/.

Balsom, Erika. 2021. “Naming the Nebulous: An Excerpt from Ten Skies.” Mubi, May. https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/naming-the-nebulous-an-excerpt-from-ten-skies.

Bordwell, David. 1989. Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Harvard University Press.

Brooks, Cleanth. 1947. “The Heresy of Paraphrase.” In The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, pp. 192–214.

Cavell, Stanley. 1969. Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Cambridge University Press.

de Fren, Allison. 2020. “The Critical Supercut: a Scholarly Approach to a Fannish Practice.” The Cine-Files, Issue 15. https://www.thecine-files.com/the-critical-supercut-a-scholarly-approach-to-a-fannish-practice/.

Donaldson, Lucy Fife, Colleen Laird, Dayna McLeod and Alison Peirse. 2022–present. “About.” Ways of Doing. https://waysofdoing.com/.

F.D Signifier. 2023. “What Makes Anime So Appealing to Young Men?” YouTube, 10 July. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T8JX5b2IMo.

Galibert-Laîné, Lého. 2019. “Watching the Pain of Others.” [in]Transition, 6, no. 3. https://doi.org/10.16995/intransition.11428.

Gibbs, John, and Douglas Pye. 2022. “Le Plaisir: Voices and Viewpoints.” NECSUS. https://necsus-ejms.org/le-plaisir-voices-and-viewpoints/.

Grant, Catherine. 2014. “The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking.” ANIKI: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, 1, no. 1, 49–62. https://hdl.handle.net/10779/uos.23400746.

Keathley, Christian. 2006. Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees. Indiana University Press.

---. 2011. ‘La caméra-stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia.” In The Language and Style of Film Criticism, edited by Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan. Routledge, pp. 188–203.

Kiss, Miklós. 2018. “Videographic Scene Analyses, Part 1.” NECSUS. https://necsus-ejms.org/videographic-scene-analyses-part-1/.

---. 2020. “Videographic Criticism in the Classroom: Research Method and Communication Mode in Scholarly Practice.” The Cine-Files, Issue 15. https://www.thecine-files.com/videographic-criticism-in-the-classroom/.

---. 2024. “Being Clear – Guest Post by Miklós Kiss.” The Video Essay Podcast, 25 November. https://thevideoessay.com/being-clear-guest-post-by-miklos-kiss.

Leavis, F. R. 2013 [1962]. Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow, edited by Stefan Collini. Cambridge University Press.

Mittell, Jason. 2019. “Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold. University of Minnesota Press, pp. 224–242.

---. 2024. The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad: An Audiovisual Book. Lever Press. https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/6395wb270.

---. 2026. “The Video Essay About The Show.” Open Screens, 7, no. 3. https://doi.org/10.16995/OS.24412.

O’Leary, Alan. 2021. “Workshop of Potential Scholarship: Manifesto for a Parametric Videographic Criticism.” NECSUS. https://necsus-ejms.org/workshop-of-potential-scholarship-manifesto-for-a-parametric-videographic-criticism/.

Perkins, V. F. 1990. “Must We Say What They Mean?” Movie, 34, 1–6.

The Leftist Cooks. 2023. “This Is Not a Video Essay.” YouTube, 9 March. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaYWpNwLvxw.

The Lesser Feat. 2024. “Reading With the Grain: Queer Theory, Interpretation & the Hays Code (with Richard Dyer).” YouTube, 7 July. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrr9rUdDggU.

Wood, Robin. 2006 [1976]. “Big Game: Confessions of an Unreconstructed Humanist.” In Personal Views: Explorations in Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant. Wayne State University Press, pp. 17–42.

---. 1996. “Little Space in Between: Preliminary Notes on Before Sunrise.” CineAction, 41, 4–13.

Zoe Bee. 2024. “YouTube and the Death of Media Literacy.” YouTube, 2 September. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFzvbbthxLY.

James MacDowell is Associate Professor in Film Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and Irony in Film (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). His current research concerns the aesthetics of YouTube, and he produces video essays on his YouTube channel The Lesser Feat.

James Zborowski is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Hull. He teaches film analysis, filmmaking, and media history. His current research explores the history and the aims of arts education.

In 1967, the Italian film critic Luigi Faccini, who would later become a film director, stated that “film criticism is generally a culpable practice; culpable of deciphering the meanings of the film exclusively through the description or transcription of its contents” (Faccini 1967: 179). According to Faccini, the possible responses to this ‘fault’ were only two, distinct yet complementary: on the one hand, a written language that tends to bring its own “rhythmic structure” closer to the film’s “narrative and cultural structure,” ultimately placing the “reader-spectator in a condition analogous to that experienced during the screening of the film” (1967: 182), and thereby preserving its polysemic richness intact. On the other hand, he proposed abandoning written and verbal language as the exclusive analytical tool, turning instead to an audiovisual approach to film criticism, thus adopting the language proper to the film itself. Both approaches were driven by the same ambition: that of “founding the science of cinema” (1967: 180), that is, legitimizing the totalizing passion and urgency characteristic of cinephilia by transforming them into a rational and shareable mode of inquiry.

I have always found it fascinating how certain discourses recur persistently throughout the history of film criticism across different national contexts. One such recurring issue concerns the value of description for film criticism, coupled with the enduring sense that this descriptive effort—for decades confined to the written page and, at best, supplemented by a few stills—was insufficient. It is true that, in its early formulations, much of the debate surrounding the emergence of videographic criticism seemed to suggest that the audiovisual essay might offer an alternative to the labour—and the perceived betrayal—of ekphrasis. Yet, ultimately, verbal language has not disappeared: words, discursive argumentation, and even descriptive-analytical procedures have instead found new and unexpected spaces. This is evident, for instance, in the many accompanying statements of videographic works, which frequently deploy a descriptive-analytical reading of the very audiovisual essay they accompany.

That said, the authors’ work does what relatively few works do, including Jason Mittell’s (2026) “The Video Essay About The Show”: it brings its own videographic style closer to that of its object of analysis—the hyper-dialogic mumblecore of Richard Linklater—and, at least on the surface, distant from the scene that the two authors focus on in their close reading, namely the ending of Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995).

It is precisely in this singular blending with its subject that lies the main strength of this submission. This is a work that challenges the viewer with a monumental duration—just slightly shorter than that of the film it comments on—and that condenses three years of conversations. Both Linklater and the authors engage with long duration: the three years devoted to the development of this project certainly do not correspond to the twenty that the director took to complete his trilogy, but in the world of academic research this nonetheless represents a markedly extended timeframe, a rare choice in an era characterized by AI-inflated outputs and an accelerated race to publication. Working with such extended timelines has also contributed to the overall sense of spontaneity that characterizes the conversation—even though, in the opening section, the framing of the topic arguably takes a little longer than necessary.

The viewer’s patience, however, is rewarded with a work that takes a very interesting direction: it makes visible its own processuality, its coming-into-being, advancing through trial and error. It is also notable how what in the first part appears primarily as a rhetorical strategy—namely that of dissatisfaction, since it is clear from the outset that the initial experiments will be the least successful—ultimately comes to sound more and more authentic and genuine. There is an irreducible resistance of the film to being articulated in a fully satisfactory way by film criticism, but there is nonetheless value in the attempt itself, which lies in the many encounters made possible through that interpretive gesture.

This work offers a reflection on videographic criticism as a methodology, thus making a further, substantial contribution to the debate surrounding it, but above all it pairs one of the most classical critical practices—close reading—with an innovative approach: that of conversation. A conversation between human subjects, mediated and supported by technology, and therefore capable, in practice, of bringing together rather than setting in opposition the humanism mentioned by the authors and O’Leary’s (2021) post-human approach.

Faccini, Luigi. 1967. “Riflessione prima sui metalinguaggi critici.” Cinema&Film, 2, 179–186.

Mittell, Jason. 2026. “The Video Essay About The Show.” Open Screens, 7, no. 3. https://doi.org/10.16995/OS.24412.

O’Leary, Alan. 2021. “Workshop of Potential Scholarship: Manifesto for a Parametric Videographic Criticism.” NECSUS. https://necsus-ejms.org/workshop-of-potential-scholarship-manifesto-for-a-parametric-videographic-criticism/.

[In my review I am intentionally evoking the conversational style of the film, Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995), and the conversational style of the video essay “Must We Say What We Mean?”]

It’s a long but, I think, very interesting reflective piece on videographic criticism that uses Before Sunrise as a case study for discussion and I thought immediately of you.

[in[Transition] shepherding editor] Alan O’Leary’s e-mail reaches me on holiday in Lisbon, where the Cine Society’s film for that week’s open air rooftop screening is… Before Sunrise.

Yeah, sure—if the deadline is not too onerous. I know of the piece although I haven’t seen it yet, so yes, happy to do so.

Much as I love Before Sunrise beyond words (perhaps that’s my problem), I’ve never been able to write well on it (and here I go again). I have nothing to add. Who adds colour to a Van Gogh? I’m just happy to point at the screen for the first few minutes until, gobsmacked and teary-eyed, I’m in Vienna again.

I think you’ll find it interesting. Take your time with it. As I say, it’s a long piece, and quality of engagement is more important than speed.

A glimpse reveals kinship: the Jameses enthralled by Robin Wood’s declaration that he “knew, the first time [he] saw Before Sunrise, that here was a film for which [he] felt not only interest or admiration but love” (1996: 4).

It really is long though!

A video essay that’s almost as long as the film it parses: a nearly 1:1 ratio for what the Jameses describe as an attempt “to live up to the experience of the artworks that we love.”

It IS long—but engrossing I found, so I didn’t mind (I think the duration is earned by the character of the exchange—of course you may disagree!).

No, I agree. Wholeheartedly.

At first, “Must We Say What We Mean?” reminds me of Sans Soleil (1983), in which Chris Marker identifies three girls on a road in Iceland as an “image of happiness” and then wonders what to do with it. Juxtaposition fails, so does flow. The Jameses identify the final three minutes of Before Sunrise as their images of happiness and a three-year dialogue ensues in which the purpose and variations of videographic criticism are explored with rhetorical questions and coffee-driven invitations to experiment with explanatory and/or poetical embedded video essays that explore the need to understand something, share it, and be understood.

“Must We Say What We Mean?” patiently strives to … what? It’s not as if the Jameses have a plan beyond getting off the train together. Still, as the years pass, and beards come and go, incomplete critical acts or ‘experiments’ create a sense of progress. Putting the film’s locations side by side, re-ordering them, ‘Seuratizing’ images to evoke their transitoriness (transitoriness?), putting text onscreen, purloining dialogue, then adding voiceover are all intellectual strategies bursting with craftsmanship and wit.

The investigation coheres into a monumental and intimate work that illustrates how scholars and filmmakers creatively confront a problem: the Jameses end up making their own film in which the allusive and inclusive dialogue is profound and moving, the batting-back and forth of ideas is fondly engaging, and the slow fades to black on their most articulate reflections are worthy of Céline.

O’Leary, Alan. 2025. E-mails to the author, 16 September at 13:34 and 17 September at 09:15 and 19:25.

Wood, Robin. 1996. “Little Space in Between: Preliminary Notes on Before Sunrise.” CineAction, 41, 4–13.

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