Welcome to [in]Transition Special Issue: Cinematic Bodies/Videographic Forms, Volume 12, issue 4 (2025). This issue is split into two parts: a special collection on Cinematic Bodies/Videographic Forms, preceded by a posthumous tribute featuring a video essay produced by Isabelle McNeill. The special issue highlights works that explore the aesthetic and formal configurations of the visual, sonic, affective, and structural elements that make up the way bodies are seen, interpreted, and felt on and through the screen. This issue features the videos of Desirée de Jesús, Pavitra Sundar, Annalisa Pellino, Steven Sehman, Javier Ramirez, and Julia Rose Camus and Charlotte Scurlock. 

In addition, the [in]Transition team is publishing a posthumous video essay produced by Isabelle McNeill prior to her death in February 2025. Those of us who knew Isabelle are shaken by her untimely passing, and we all are moved by the words written about her and her video by Debbie Martin, Fiona Handyside, and Emma Wilson. We hope this video will endure as a memorial to Isabelle's voice and critical insights.
- Eva Hageman, issue editor for [in]Transition

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[in]Transition Special Issue: Cinematic Bodies/Videographic Forms
Volume 12, issue 4 (2025)
Special Issue Editorial Collective: Desirée de Jesús, Javier Ramirez, Steven S. Sehman, and Pavitra Sundar (lead co-editor)
Issue editor, [in]Transition: Eva Hageman
[in]Transition production team: Kevin Ferguson, Kathleen Loock, Jason Mittell, Barbara Zecchi

Introduction: Cinematic Bodies/Videographic Forms
Javier Ramirez and Desirée de Jesús

This special issue of [in]Transition began shortly after Middlebury College’s "Scholarship in Sight and Sound 2023" workshop, when we—participants Desirée de Jesús, Pavitra Sundar, Javier Ramirez, and Steven Sehman—started exploring the role of embodiment in videographic research practices. We asked ourselves: how might video essays about embodied experiences deepen our understanding of the mechanisms within and the dynamics between character, cinematic, videographic, scholar-practitioner, and viewer bodies? Which interpretive opportunities and constraints are produced when we center these bodies in our research?

Over the summer, we developed this line of questioning into a panel titled “Cinematic Bodies/Videographic Forms,” for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ 2024 conference. Rather than imposing strict methodological constraints, we opted to explore the aesthetics and politics of bodily (con)figurations in video editing and film without adhering to formal parameters. We also developed a collaborative approach to embodied research that resisted the solitary mode of academic production and “unsettled” the relationships between digital, material, and physical bodies (Binotto 2024). Throughout, we reviewed each other’s works-in-progress, offering and incorporating constructive feedback to produce each final draft. Our approach proved fruitful: despite differences in subject matter, analytical frameworks, and film genres, we inadvertently developed a cohesive videographic aesthetic across texts that reflected the theoretical intersections between our scholarly investigations and united our work. We learned how videographic techniques, such as repetition, montage, loops, split screens, and audio manipulation, can make visible (and audible) what is often taken for granted when studying the body in/of cinema. We see these aesthetic expressions of our dialogic analytical approach enriching how we, as a growing videographic community, conceive of creative collaboration: not just in the production of a collective video essay text, but in highlighting the connections between works. In addition, when expanding our scope to consider the social and perceptual entanglements of cinematic, videographic, and scholar-practitioner bodies, we were confronted with the ways that we, as video essayists, can be implicated in matters of power, performance, representation, and stereotype.

As such, this special issue features the four pieces collaboratively developed for the SCMS panel, as well as two additional works that broaden our understanding of cinematic and videographic embodiment. It opens with Desirée de Jesús’s phenomenological analysis of how the video essay body illuminates the aesthetic and affective contours of hysteric black girlhood and cinematic blackness in The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer, 2015). Pavitra Sundar furthers the meaning-making potential of videographic criticism by analyzing the multi-sensoriality and textuality of sound in Sound of Metal (Darius Marder, 2019). Sundar attends to the degrees of deafness presented in the film to dislodge how we think about the embodied practice of “hearing.” Annalisa Pellino presents a different approach to the question of sound through an exploration of the varied uses of bodily vocal expressions in Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010) and Le sorelle Macaluso (Emma Dante, 2020). Pellino uses montage as an explanatory method, elucidating the materiality of vocal and non-vocal utterances in both films. Steven Sehman also concentrates on the material dimensions of sound but shifts attention to the bodily engagement of seeing and feeling the film soundtrack. Sehman examines the musical body’s sonic materiality, its liberation within the film score, and connections to inherently politicized bodies in Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013), The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015), and Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018). Javier Ramirez deploys the videographic body to unsettle the process of “seeing” monstrous embodiment. Ramirez puts into conversation La Llorona (Jayro Bustamente, 2019) and Candyman (Nia DaCosta, 2021) to investigate how gendered and racialized monster bodies serve the dual functions of archiving state-sanctioned violence and acting as tools of liberation. The issue concludes with Julia Rose Camus and Charlotte Scurlock’s doomscroll documentary. They turn attention to the ubiquity of online diet culture on a smartphone interface, constructing, on a fictional protagonist, an unstable archive of disordered and restricted eating practices showcased in reality television, self-surveillance fitness tracking apps, and avoidant relational dynamics. Camus and Charlotte Scurlock invite a new way to perceive the videographic body, one that reflects the affective experience of diet culture. 

Collectively, the works in this special issue rethink how cinematic, corporeal, and videographic bodies shape meaning, navigate ideological and political terrains, and assert their own forms of knowledge, resistance, and liberation. Ultimately, we view our videographic work as embodied—one that sees, hears, moves, and pulses with the rhythms of the cinematic bodies it examines. 

Bibliography
Binotto, Johannes. “Unsettling Bodies: Video Essay as Embodied Research.” Akademisk Kvarter 27 (Fall 2024): 57–70.