Output details

Bonus Tracks: The making of 'Touching the film object' and 'Skipping ROPE (through Hitchcock’s joins)'

This work, published in ‘Film and Moving Image Studies: Re-Born Digital?’, a peer-reviewed collection of essays I commissioned for Issue 1 of Frames Cinema Journal (http://framescinemajournal.com/?issue=issue1), forms part of my experimental investigation into new digital forms of audiovisual film studies research. It consists of two online videos (Skipping ROPE (Through Hitchcock’s Joins) and Touching the Film Object) presented alongside versions of the same videos with added explanatory audio commentary tracks (transcripts are accessible on a linked webpage).

The ‘original’ videos use quotations from existing film scholarship to explore the phenomenological and epistemological possibilities for theoretical and critical practices when these are performed synchronously with extracts from films using digital remix and compilation techniques. The ‘commentary’ videos offer further metatextual reflection on new videographic forms of film studies, pastiching commercial forms of documentary ‘infotainment’, which I have previously researched (C. Grant [2008], ‘Auteur machines? Auteurism and the DVD’, in Bennett and Brown [eds], Film and Television After DVD]), manifesting their essential ‘wordiness’ and tautological tendencies, and underscoring the argument of the work as a whole – which argues greater trust should be placed in less ‘verbal’ film scholarly forms.

The videos have been played online 3724 times (by October 2013), screened in the 'Film Studies in Motion' programme curated by Volker Pantenburg and Kevin Lee for the International Oberhausen Short Film Festival, April-May, 2012, and shown at numerous academic workshops (including at the 2012 and 2013 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conferences) and invited lectures, including my British Film Institute “Researchers’ Tale”, November 21, 2011, and my keynotes at the ‘Film and Moving Image Studies: Re-Born Digital?’ event at Filmbase, Dublin, April 19, 2013, and ‘The Audiovisual Essay’ conference at Goethe University, Frankfurt, November 23-24, 2013.