The best video essays of 2024

Now in its eighth edition, the Sight and Sound poll for the best video essays of the year gives contributors the opportunity to share their personal highlights of videographic criticism. This year’s poll included 47 voters from 17 countries, drawn from the varied fields of videographic criticism, including academia, online publication and film festivals. Their 256 nominations cover 183 unique videos showcasing the variety of the form. 

There were 165 creators or teams named in this year’s poll, representing 32 countries. Male video essayists made up 49% of this group, with female video essayists representing 36% and the remainder filled out with non-binary creators and mixed teams. However, female essayists received much more repeated nominations, ultimately earning a plurality with 45% of all nominated works (44% were by male creators). At least 14 languages featured this year, both in narration and onscreen text.

Out of the unique videos, 62% featured voiceover. In that pool of works, male voices outnumbered female voices nearly 2:1, with more female creators opting for other modes of videographic communication. This fits into a long-standing conversation about voiceover in video essays that was only further complicated this year with the use of AI-generated voices in several nominated works. 

Generative AI as a whole was present throughout the 2024 poll, primarily used as a videographic tool in videos such as Johannes Binotto’s not exactly a still life. Given the outsized environmental impact of this technology, it feels appropriate to also point out the presence of several videos concerned with issues of environmental issues and climate change (Max Tohline’s Onscreen a Dream, Offscreen a Waste is a cleverly concise example). Many contributors acknowledged both of these aspects, indicating ecological concerns but an interest in generative AI tools nonetheless.

With the caveat that view count does not necessarily represent a video essay’s impact in the community – many works circulate in festivals long before they are published online – there was a clear standout this year with Hbomberguy’s Plagiarism and You(Tube) reaching 32 million views. This staggering number makes it one of the most viewed video essays of all time. Its influence has been keenly felt throughout the online videographic community this year; ironically at a time where conversations around generative AI also raise questions on intellectual property rights. Plagiarism was a hot topic in 2024 with several other creators discussing the topic as well.

The majority of works this year were published on YouTube and Vimeo, with a few others on platforms like Nebula, Patreon, and TikTok. Around 20% are not yet online. Interestingly, while YouTube was the most common publication method (70 uploads to Vimeo’s 56), Vimeo-published videos collected more total nominations (99) than YouTube (90). The average runtime continues to increase year by year, reaching 30 minutes in 2024. Videos published on Vimeo had an average runtime of 11 minutes, while YouTube videos more than tripled that at 36 minutes.

For several years, the YouTube video essay has trended towards longform, with creators regularly publishing feature-length essays that were previously rare within the field or destined for cinema screenings only. Our longest submission this year, Jenny Nicholson’s The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel, has a few close competitors from the YouTube space, including Contrapoints’ Twilight retrospective and the aforementioned Hbomberguy epic. But on the other end of the spectrum, two submissions tie for shortest: Alex Pierce’s Godzilla x Kong x WWE mashup, and Max Tohline’s Onscreen a Dream, Offscreen a Waste. Tohline’s video was produced as part of a micro-essay collaboration by online collective The Essay Library, showcasing the variety in this form even within a single branch of publication.

Leading the poll this year, Barbara Zecchi’s The Rhythms of Rage: From Solitude to Solidarity earned 9 nominations. Lily Ford’s Light Hands received 7 mentions, tied with Occitane Lacurie’s xena’s body (a menstrual auto-investigation using an iphone). Lacurie’s Ordinatrices: About the Negative Spaces of Early Computing shows up 6 times, as does Alison Peirse’s Knit One, Stab Two. These video essayists were all among the top practitioners mentioned overall. Due to her double appearance in the top five mentioned videos, Occitane Lacurie is this year’s most mentioned video essayist.

Multiple nominations resulted from key journals and collaborative projects. Several essays from Tecmerin’s Screen Stars Dictionary feature in the results, as well as multiple essays from [in]Transition, particularly September’s Women and Aging special issue. Other more recent academic projects include special issues from journals Iluminace and Teknokultura, as well as Ariel Avissar’s Parametric Summer Series, where four new videographic constraints were developed and expanded on by a group of video essayists. In the online space, the MicroEssay Mixtape returned to unite 10 essayists with a food theme, and the Essay Library issued three collaborations around adaptation, seasons and things that don’t exist. Commissioned essays remain a small niche of nominations due to the appearance of several videos on the Little White Lies channel, but recent developments such as fewer commissions due to economic pressures, and the BFI’s decision to temporarily cease publishing videographic criticism, potentially indicate that this group will continue to shrink.

Creator-owned streaming service Nebula continues to grow as an outlet for online video essay publication. It has become a safe haven for YouTube creators (invite-only) who find that their work is not suitable for Google’s advertiser-accommodating policies. This year, 13 Nebula creators made up 16 nominations, with double appearances made by Broey Deschanel, F.D Signifier and Harry Brewis (hbomberguy). The majority of Nebula videos were also published on YouTube, either concurrently or some time later after a window of exclusivity. Poll contributors also named two ‘Nebula Originals’, a label that indicates a complete, standalone video essay published exclusively on the platform. Overall, many creators turned to audience-based monetisation tools like Patreon and Ko-fi to fund their work and offset demonetisation risk, with over 70% of YouTube-published works including a link to these services. While the YouTube video essay style was developed in response to the website’s copyright system and advertiser guidelines, it is clear that many creators are intent on pushing these boundaries and, if necessary, publishing certain works elsewhere.

Given the breadth of the poll, any selection is always just a cross-section, and in this spirit we’ve selected some notable results before granting readers the opportunity to dive into the full results list and accompanying commentary from our voters.

An essayist regularly featured in the poll, Zecchi’s grasp of the role of sound in editing is unmatched, and this exploration of women’s rage onscreen is a stellar example. Featuring over 500 clips, and often repeating them to create rhythm as they replay in a constantly shifting splitscreen, the end result is a “visually arresting and sonically bold” (Cormac Donnelly) collage of anger that leaves a lasting impression.

Released at the end of 2023 (and therefore just missing the deadline for inclusion in last year’s poll), this nearly four-hour epic reverberated throughout 2024, bringing to light issues about citation practices on YouTube that had been brewing for years. Considered by this year’s voters to be a “mic-drop” moment (Sam Kern) and “one of the most influential and important video essays of recent years” (Ariel Avissar), Brewis’s essay may very well become a foundational text for YouTube video essayists moving forward.

In a new twist on the established desktop documentary form, Lacurie opts to set her essay within the confines of a phone screen, beginning with a late-night doomscroll session triggered by a streamed episode of Xena. This mix of film clips, social media posts, and iPhone camera footage creates a piece that not only feels “bloody, surreal, and suffocating” (Veronika Hanáková), but also has a wry sense of humour in the face of surveillance capitalism.

With a surprise appearance from the Ting Tings, Ford’s subversive essay seeks to redress historic imbalance on reportage of women’s labour during wartime through clever videographic form, deftly mixing archival and modern museum footage. This video essay serves as a model for blending videographic criticism and archival material. Feminist themes were prominently featured in this iteration of the poll, the second most common theme after film.

Videographic criticism is famous for its structural experimentation, and this poll’s contributors regularly push the boundaries of what might be considered a video essay in their nominations. In a crowded field this year, where TV adverts and film behind-the-scenes clips were submitted, this mod for Grand Theft Auto V is neither a video nor an essay; yet, as performance art and generative work often overlaps with videographic criticism, one might consider it a performance in itself, or a generative work where player experience will vary from session to session.

In this “wonderful work of scholarship and a triumph of gorgeous editing” (Catherine Grant), Peirse employs classic videographic techniques splitscreen and supercutting to great argumentative and tonal effect. As images fill the screen and a constant drumbeat builds the tension, a compelling argument around the role of (knitting) women in horror develops alongside a chilling tone that makes this essay “visceral … as a short film of its own” (Drew Morton)

Lacurie’s essay opens with a cunning image that uses her hands typing to superimpose older keyboards on a modern one – aptly condensing her title into a single image. Filled with “captivating audiovisual ways to think through the relationship between computing and women’s work” (Lucy Fife Donaldson), parallels with Light Hands were noted by multiple voters. 

Film theorist, curator and video essayist, Queen Mary University of London and Národní filmový archiv

Ordinatrices: About the Negative Spaces of Early Computing by Occitane Lacurie

Our daily routine of typing on a computer keyboard has become so ingrained that we rarely pause to reflect on its origins or evolution. In her video essay, Occitane Lacurie reveals that these gestures originate from various office tasks historically performed by women: typing on typewriters, formatting documents, updating diaries, consulting Rolodexes, and similar activities. In the fictional world of Mad Men and through the “X-ray” overlays of computer and typewriter key presses, the past, present, and future of computing converge in a recurring theme: the marginalization of female labour. Perhaps it’s time to embrace a new videographic format: the desktop typewriter documentary.

For here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world by Gala Hernández López

Gala Hernández López’s investigations of online communities serve as both case studies in empathy and demonstrations of a seemingly endless palette of (audio)visual ideas. After searching for the human side of the incel phenomenon in The Mechanics of Fluids, she turned her attention to Bitcoin enthusiasts. Staged as the narrator’s dream of a future economic crisis affecting the cryptocurrency market, the documentary unfolds as a dazzling split-screen hallucination that probes the (im)possibility of withdrawing from the world. When the dream of a future calculable by markets fails, what options remain beyond floating in a tin can of the present?

Razeh-del by Maryam Tafakory

Having joined the Tafakory bandwagon somewhat late, I was fortunate to experience her latest film on a big screen at the London Film Festival. The essay draws on the story of Zan, the first Iranian women’s magazine, and the ill-fated film project it inspired, serving as a rumination on censorship and absence in both cinema and mass media. Alongside Tafakory’s signature poetic montage of archival vignettes from Iranian cinema, the film creatively employs audiovisual, graphic, and textual elements to reveal what films hide away from us. I recommend pairing this viewing with the recently published edited volume, Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film.

What Happened in the Dressing Room by Desirée J. Garcia

This video essay shares with Tafakory’s work a focus on the themes of presence and absence, but within the context of early cinema and its vintage tableau shots. The dressing room emblematizes early film’s fascination with backstage spaces and the mysterious allure of things that are simultaneously visible and invisible. Given my interest in the material aspects of early cinema, I appreciated how these ideas were extended into another kind of backstage space: the physical frames of a film strip. While their contours may not always be visible, they are essential to ensuring that we have something to watch at all.

Light Hands by Lily Ford

Like Lacurie’s Ordinatrices, Light Hands is a video essay on female labour, this time in the context of World War I and the contributions of women in the aviation industry. Watching the essay for the first time was a revelation—not only for its meticulous treatment of archival footage and photographs but also for uncovering a phenomenon I had never been aware of. Learning that early airplanes were covered with textiles crafted by female workers opened a new perspective on the intersection of gender, crafts(wo)manship, and industrial innovation. It inspired me to dig deeper into the history of early aviation and to read Ford’s beautifully illustrated book, Taking to the Air.

Dáda: Střípky hvězdného obrazu by Jan Kinzl

Drawing on my experience in teaching and practicing videographic criticism, I have often admired the synergy between video essays and star studies. Videographic scholarship particularly excels at exploring the multiplicity of meanings and emotions that stars embody. Kinzl’s essay on Dáda Patrasová, a Czech actress, singer and television presenter, is a remarkable example of this, skillfully demonstrating how various aspects of a star image – an erotic object, a nurturing auntie from children’s shows, a target of tabloid sensationalism – intermingle and overlap. The video also makes effective use of oral testimonies about Dáda, solidifying her complex and multifaceted image within Czech collective memory.

Envisioning the Interface by Steve F. Anderson

If anyone ever compiles a list of “critical supercuts,” to borrow Allison de Fren’s term, Steve F. Anderson’s exploration of multifarious representations of the human-computer interface in U.S. cinema and television undoubtedly deserves a spot. This video essay weaves together scenes from well-known classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey alongside many lesser-known examples, creating a nuanced portrait of computer labour as depicted in mainstream cinema and TV. Its analytical depth is elevated by Anderson’s voice-over, which strikes the perfect balance – explanatory yet never redundant or intrusive.

Video maker and media scholar at Tel Aviv University

The Fits: A Structure of Feelings by Desirée de Jesús (Side Eye Cinema)

Engaging with Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits (2015), de Jesús offers a powerful, meditative exploration of filmic, spectatorial and videographic bodies. This finely-crafted video was presented at the recent SCMS conference in Boston as part of a panel titled “Cinematic Bodies/Videographic Forms” – a very impressive panel, which also included works by Javier Ramirez, Pavitra Sundar and Steven Sehman. Make this a double feature with Catherine Grant’s “Drill Team: On Beau Travail and The Fits”.

Is Glen Powell a Movie Star? by Luís Azevedo

I don’t always love video essays with yes/no questions as their title; but the best ones know that the question is more interesting than the answer. Azevedo’s focus on Glen Powell is mostly an excuse to offer a playful, insightful, entertaining, inventive, and irreverent look at stars and stardom. This one joins a slew of strong entries from Little White Lies, whose 2024 crop also included Leigh Singer’s wonderful When the Title Font *Really* Matters.

An Ode to Jimmy Stewart’s Legs by Artem Khlebnikov and Maksim Selezniov

Khlebnikov and Selezniov offer another unusual exploration of stardom, this time focusing on Jimmy Stewart’s on-screen relationship with his limbs. Premised on an unusual choice of narration, this brilliant and amusing video was made for the Jimmy Stewart Museum’s Video Essay Showcase. Make this a double feature with entry #79 of Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin’s The Thinking Machine series, James Stewart Approaches.

Light Hands by Lily Ford

In Light Hands, as part of her research into the early history of aviation, Ford appropriates World War I archival footage from a feminist lens, reclaiming the vital, forgotten role played by women in manufacturing warplanes for the UK. Ford’s curation of archival images enables a powerful encounter with these forgotten women, who direct their gaze back at us through history. Make this a double feature with Occitane Lacurie-Conseil’s lovely Ordinatrices, another fascinating look at the historical intersection of female manual labour and technological development.

The Look for Sit Down by Nicolas Bailleul 

Included in Sitting, Standing, Dancing with our Screens, a collection of desktop films curated by Lého Galibert-Laîné for NECSUS earlier this year, Bailleul’s pandemic-era documentary shifts the lens from the desktop screen to the chair in front of it. Setting out on a quest to find the ideal gaming chair, Bailleul explores the social, economic, symbolic, and gendered aspects of gaming chairs, depicting insightful discoveries and encounters along the way. Watch it alongside the other four videos included in this unique collection, which highlights the diverse ways in which desktop cinema can convey “the tangible, material, and affective reality of our encounters with digitality”, as aptly put by Galibert-Laîné.

Plagiarism and You(Tube) by Harry Brewis (Hbomberguy)

It’s got over 30 million views. It’s been covered by major press outlets. It’s had a massive impact on the YouTube video essay sphere, and has spawned countless response videos and think pieces. This monumental, 4-hour-long takedown of YouTube plagiarists is one of the most influential and important video essays of recent years – particularly for those of us interested in video essays, in academic integrity, and in proper citational practices. Alas, since it came out last December, shortly after the voting deadline, it was not featured on last year’s poll – a glaring omission (though it was thankfully mentioned by the poll editors in their introduction). Fortunately, it is still eligible for the current poll, so here it is. Set a couple of hours aside and go watch it. And speaking of proper citational practices…

Feminist Citational Practices Exercises by Lucy Fife Donaldson

Not one video essay but a series of videographic exercises developed for the terrific Ways of Doing website, which invites and encourages others to engage in material thinking and in feminist citational practices. This section of the website includes instructions for — and examples of — three thought-provoking and generative exercises that homage specific videographic scholars/makers, with more on the way. Among the many wonderful videos housed here are McLeod’s Feathered Desert Wipes, an homage to Catherine Grant; Peirse’s A Terrible Cold Blooded Murder of an Innocent Woman and Laird’s What’s Going On, both homages to Barbara Zecchi; and Donaldson’s Orientation, an homage to Johannes Binotto. Check these out – and make your own!

Media studies scholar, bricoleur, project leader videoessayresearch.org

Once again I feel unable to even pretend to have any kind of overview of the richness and diversity of video essays made this year. 
But these are six video essays that I experienced as fully embodied experiences. These video essays made me feel… acutely… differently…

The Rhythms of Rage: From Solitude to Solidarity by Barbara Zecchi

I feel my heart racing, my anger growing in pace with these images…

Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives by Veronika Hanáková, Martin Tremčinský, Jiří Anger

I feel the weight of a click, the hidden work behind a digital facade…

The Actor’s Body – A Constellation of French Cinema: Le Doulos / À bout de souffle / Mauvais sang by Cristina Álvarez López

I feel the pavement under my feet giving way and that falling is arrival…

Orientation by Lucy Fife Donaldson

I feel the world tumbling, my stomach turning, and the joy of watching you jump…

Barbara Steele’s Revenge by Libertad Gills

I feel the whispered words of love piercing me like those eyes of the person to whom they are addressed…

Boundless Continuity / Homage to Maya Deren by Aimée Lavignac

I feel the limbs spreading like wings, the dancer becoming dance…

“Toward uncommon destinations,” or Intertextual Serendipity by Viktoria Paranyuk

I feel the rhythms of the rails, carrying me away…

Webby Award-winning video essayist, writer and producer

I’ve been making video essays for over 13 years. 

How to Begin a Movie by Rocket Riley

The video essay genre itself has taken on many different kinds of shapes, sizes and scope – but there’s always something to salute in a hugely accessible, if mainstream, video like this. It gets the job done. 

Godzilla_Kong_0325_Mixed-MP4 by Alex Pierce

Once again, we find ourselves asking: are mashups video essays? And, like I always, it’s a wholehearted YES from me. The brevity and stream of ideas is as potent as ever here. It’s a smashing success – pun very much intended. 

The Unloved — Hollow Man by Scout Tafoya

Scout is a true romantic video essayist. His love for the medium is palpable. His storytelling remains as empathetic as ever. 

At All Times (Laird’s Constraint) by Ariel Avissar

The centrepiece montage in The Parallax View (1974) is one of the best edited things ever to exist and Ariel’s deconstruction/iteration of it here is an equally stimulating and engaging experience. 

Creator of Be Kind Rewind, a Youtube channel that explores film history. 

All Artists Are Thieves by Gawx Art 

Gawx’s videos strike a balance between the compact, personal nature of YouTube with slick professionalism usually reserved for work outside the internet. Each frame is beautifully composed, intentional, and in service of the artist’s curiosity. This is a level of detail and visual daring all YouTube creators aspire to, but that few can achieve. 

Twilight by Contrapoints (Natalie Wynn)

Yes, it’s three hours long and about Twilight, but I promise three hours have never moved faster. Wynn takes a novel typically dismissed in “serious” literary circles and unfurls it in new, unexpected ways. With references from Sigmund Freud to Andrea Dworkin, from the Bible to the US Supreme Court, Wynn reveals Twilight as a key modern text in exploring human sexuality and desire. 

Baby Blue Benzo by Sara Cwynar

Photographer Sara Cwynar has produced some of the most absorbing, beguiling visual works of the past five years. I am in constant awe of how she repurposes everything – film stills, commonplace objects, medication, advertisements – to reveal our collective fantasies and desires. Baby Blue Benzo uses the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR (to date, the most expensive car sold at auction) as its centrepiece, a MacGuffin of sorts to explore consumer culture, value and capitalism. If possible, it is well worth your time to view the full film, which is running at 52 Walker in New York City through 21 December 2024.

Documentary Filmmaker & Video Essayist. I also like birdwatching.

It’s an honor to share a selection of videos which have prompted me to think deeply about the possibilities for the video essay to transfer knowledge and promote artistic practice. I’ve tried to strike a balance between academic and YouTube videos, and to highlight emerging voices and first-time makers in the interest of continuing to make the video essay community a welcoming and diverse environment.

For many video essayists, our first foray into the format is often awkward and uncertain. But Jenna Allred comes out swinging, debuting her video essay practice with MIRRORS, a short yet striking reflection (no pun intended) on visibility and womanhood. Allred crafts a rapid-fire barrage of triptych compositions, paired with a poem of the same name by Sylvia Plath. MIRRORS serves as a reminder that the simple power of juxtaposition is often the video essayist’s strongest tool. I’m eagerly awaiting Allred’s next video essay, and hope that this video can serve as an encouraging example for new creators to dive in and start making!

Desktop Sounds by Evelyn Kreutzer

Among the growing instinct to make video essays about video essays, Kreutzer’s Desktop Sounds turns its focus on the genre of desktop films (a genre whose title, as Kreutzer points out, is difficult to pin down), but more specifically on the sounds in these films and videos. Kreutzer illuminates the ways in which “desktop sounds” of clicking, typing, notifications, and glitching serve as both evidence of an embodied filmmaker, and representations of the anxiety of existing online. Desktop Sounds stands out among other desktop documentaries, bringing our attention to the often under-appreciated role of sound design, and should inspire filmmakers and video essayists alike to rethink their approach to sound in the video essay.

Volcanic Vision by Johannes Binotto

Johannes Binotto’s Volcanic Vision follows the running theme in my selections of questioning how to represent subjects via the image. For Binotto, the volcano becomes a melting pot in which images are destroyed by heat, melted together, and reborn as spectacles all over again. How do we film the volcano, which destroys any instrument of capture that approaches it? How do we look at images of the volcano, which resists vision altogether? Binotto’s piece is a delight to view, filled with spectacular images and a riveting soundscape that demonstrates the power of the video essay to say a whole lot with relatively little.

if Nope was a japanese y2k found footage movie by Max Ranieri (max teeth)

My own filmmaking practice currently focuses on the ways animals are depicted on camera, so when I saw Max Ranieri’s video on Nope, I knew it would wind up in my best of the year list one way or another. Max, a video essayist who consistently strikes a balance between academic scholarship and razor-sharp humor that I have yet to see replicated, delivers a powerful interrogation of our desire to capture the natural world on camera, and the reliability of documentary film. It seems that no matter what topic Max decides to sink their teeth into, the result is always a delight. 

Critic, PhD Candidate, Host of The Video Essay Podcast

An Aim Not Devoid of Merit — Catch Me If You Can by Scout Tafoya & Tucker Johnson

Just one work in an epic project that somehow deepened the extreme love I already felt for its subject.

Witches by Elizabeth Sankey

A masterful blend of material, filmmaking traditions, and the personal.

Twisties! by Alice Lenay and Théophile Gay-Mazas

Seeing Alice perform this work live, and watching the subsequent recording, excited me about the possibilities of the ‘video essay’ like few works have. 

Sound Stack, Soundwalk, Southworth by Cormac Donnelly

A trio of works that (as so much of Cormac’s work does) provides a way to become a better watcher, listener, and tinkerer. 

Ordinatrices: About the Negative Spaces of Early Computing by Occitane Lacurie

A virtuosic work that brings us closer to the desktop further still. 

Dear Barbara Loden: Reconsidering Wanda (1970) by Sadia Quraeshi Shepard

A master class in pacing and the personal. 

Pass the Salt (with audio commentary) by Christian Keathley and “I Learned an Awful Lot in Little Rock”: Laura Mulvey Reflects on her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Remix by Catherine Grant with Laura Mulvey

A pair of invaluable reflections on two indispensable works.

Getty Abortions by Franzis Kabisch

A remarkable reflection on the visual muzak that has flooded our lives with the advent of the internet – which is more timely than ever.

Man Number 4 by Miranda Pennell

Pennell does something truly remarkable in her essay: in the midst of the world’s first livestreamed genocide and its relentless flow of imagery, she creates space for a minute analysis focused on detail. 

The Mars Project by Louis Remy 

Rarely do we see the internet as a depositary of our wildest hopes, aspirations and dreams – and I truly mean wildest: and Remy carefully excavates these strange objects in a process of digital archaeology that speaks to our innermost fears and desires.

The Night of the Minotaur by Juliana Zuluaga Montoya

A riotous, demi-fictionalised account of the advent of pornography in Colombia – Montoya’s film has the one of the best mid-point twists I’ve seen in ages. 

for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world by Gala Hernández López

Hernandez Lopez’s dual-screen account of the age of crypto-currencies and cypto-imagery is the strongest film I’ve ever seen on the topic.

Youtube-based video essayist and video branding specialist.

My favourite video essays of the year in no particular order.

What Genre Is DOOM? by Ahoy

It’s surprising that, although DOOM is the foundation of the modern FPS genre, few have explored the inspirations behind this genre-defining title. In this stellar short-format essay, Ahoy elevates what could have been a dry exploration of genre definitions, diving in with genuine joy and curiosity to uncover the origins of a true classic. 

Collateral & the Death of Neon by WatchingtheAerial

The most memorable video essays are those that zoom in on a seemingly insignificant detail only to reveal how it connects to broader, everyday realities. This video from WatchingtheAriel perfectly exemplifies that notion, examining not only the shift from film stock to digital video recording but also how changes in streetlight chemistry have reshaped the kinds of stories movies can tell. Brilliant stuff.

Story Machines Vol. 2: Sense-Making Plots by Games & Culture

The second chapter in Michael’s on-going series exploring how stories are crafted through the mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics of video games. This episode dives into ‘how’ games tell their stories, moving beyond cinematic techniques like cutscenes and voiceover to examine how interpreting game mechanics can feel like engaging in a mini detective novel. The production quality of this series and Michael’s sharp writing makes each new Story Machines video something to look forward to.

Why Are Recipes Written like That? by Internet Shaquille

Victor is one of the few creators who blends the structure and format of a video essay with different ingredients; in this case, recipe and cooking instructions. In this video, he leans more toward that former style while keeping his lively presentation fully intact, tackling a topic he’s perfectly suited to explore: the overlong introductions in online recipes. Every one of his videos is a delight, and this one especially offers valuable insights for any video creators interested in merging formats creatively.

Balatro’s ‘Cursed’ Design Problem by Game Maker’s Toolkit

Mark Brown is a veteran in the field of video game essays and easily one of its most insightful voices, blending a unique analytical approach with clear, academic structure. In his video on this year’s indie darling Balatro, he brings this approach to the forefront, examining that game’s hidden design issue that highlights a broader challenge facing the medium as a whole.

The Infinite Weight of Mediocrity by snow

The most impactful essay I’ve seen this year, video creator “snow” weaves together elements from Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, Errant Signal, and Amadeus to explore the concept of “mediocre art” and the artist’s struggle with failure. The handmade presentation style and snow’s voiceover lend a raw, unfiltered quality to the message, one that nearly all of us can relate to on a personal level.

Audiovisual essayist and senior lecturer in film studies at the University of St Andrews

My selections are taken from collections / special issues / collaborative projects which expand the field with audiovisual work that thinks innovatively about the relationship between form and content, with regards to gender politics (Barbara Zecchi’s special issue on ‘Women and Aging’ for [In]Transition), labour and technology (Veronika Hanaková’s ‘Configuring Computer Labor in Film and Audiovisual Media’ in Iluminace), film histories (Tom Brown’s In Media Res on ‘Hollywood Film Style and the Production Code: Criticism and History’, Alison Peirse’s mega issue of ‘Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History’ for MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, and John Gibbs’ rolling dossier on ‘Audiovisual approaches and the archive’ in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism), play and citation (Ariel Avissar’s parametric summer series), and film sound (Liz Greene and Neepa Majumdar’s expansion of the journal ‘Music, Sound and the Moving Image’ to incorporate video essay work). This collaborative spirit is something I most appreciate about the video essay community, so for me the editorial labour of these projects and what they have brought to the landscape of video essays this year is significant in itself. My list represents my current favourites from these projects, though there is much more contained (or even still to come) within each one!

Light Hands by Lily Ford

A densely packed video, which engages with a range of timely intellectual questions concerning approaches to the archives – especially in terms of feminist ethics and repurposing – and the potentiality of videographic form to begin historical work.

Choosing Death Row Songs by John Gibbs

An elegant appreciation of musical choices, which deftly magnifies the interconnection of practical and creative decision-making that shapes the meaning of film.

Ordinatrices: About the Negative Spaces of Early Computing by Occitane Lacurie

Lacurie’s intervention into the desktop documentary form is so striking (rightly earning her multiple nominations in last year’s list) and continues to evolve with this fantastic piece, which finds captivating audiovisual ways to think through the relationship between computing and women’s work.  

What Makes Us Samurai (Payne’s Constraint) by Colleen Laird

Laird’s video responds to the parametric exercise prompt developed by Alan O’Leary and derived from Matthew Payne’s brilliant Who Ever Heard?… to create something entirely different. Formally witty and incisive in its self-deprecation, this video marries form and content perfectly to consider the affect of video game play.

Desert Hearts: An Aging Queer Trilogy by Dayna McLeod

Dayna McLeod’s work inspires me because it is consistently inventive, smart, playful and compellingly entertaining. This trilogy is an absolutely tour-de-force but if I had to pick only one, my favourite is ‘Speculative Queer Autoethnography: Desert Hearts’ for how exquisitely it showcases the skill with which she uses humour to make an incisive argument about the politics of the personal.

A Terrible Cold Blooded Murder of an Innocent Woman by Alison Peirse

Less than two minutes long, this piece makes a striking impact through dynamic use of text and repetition, creating bold visual compositions against a layered soundtrack of dialogue and atmospheric original music by _HEAVYLEG.

Ausencia by May Santiago

Bold, exciting and devastating in equal parts, this video essay is held together by Santiago’s angry and commanding presence (onscreen and off), as she makes the absence and destruction of histories (of film, of marginalised peoples) inescapably palpable.

Film lecturer and researcher at LJMU

I don’t feel like I chose these video essays; rather, their appearance here was inevitable from the first few seconds of watching/listening. I am repeatedly delighted and surprised by these and look forward to experiencing them again and again. 

The Rhythms of Rage: From Solitude to Solidarity by Barbara Zecchi

Visually arresting and sonically bold. For me, the sophistication in the sound editing and mixing alone is worthy of note, but to use it to such devastating effect here is representative of an elevated form of audio-visual creativity. 

Music Video Space by Mathias Bonde Korsgaard

Aesthetically beautiful, a feast for eyes and ears. Contemplating the challenge this edit must have presented makes the end result all the more satisfying. No cut seems out of place or out of time. A truly valuable contribution to music video research. 

Aubrey Plaza: Screen Stars Dictionary by May Santiago

A perfect combination of music, visual allure, and vocal skill, which renders Aubrey Plaza as the genuine, larger-than-life star that she is. Somehow the video essay feels like it might fly apart at any moment, yet it is crafted so perfectly it gets us to the end in one piece.

Choosing Death Row Songs by John Gibbs

Made with beautiful economy and yet covering so much ground. A deftly narrated thinking process that will genuinely make you think differently about this film (and possibly others as well). 

“This Is Not What I Normally Do” : An Insignificant Step in the Downfall of the Humanities by Ariel Avissar

For all the performance that may (or may not?) be present in this video essay, there is also a genuine sense of frustration and struggle as well as a lot of humour. And in a way I find the whole thing quite moving.

Ordinatrices: About the Negative Spaces of Early Computing by Occitane Lacurie

The visuals are so enticing here it’s easy to overlook how crucial language is in this video essay. Deftly combining complex visual overlays with a shifting textual thread, this video essay considers the role of the ordinatrice (computress), and the spaces inhabited (and left) by them at the outset of the technological computer age. 

Filmmaker and tenured assistant professor in Film Studies at the American University of Paris

Getty Abortions by Franzis Kabisch

A sharp and inventive essay, brilliant in its straightforwardness, that forms an explosive duo with Richard Misek’s fantastic A History of the World According to Getty Images in exploring the (not so) hidden politics of online image databases, and how they shape our shared imaginaries of our past, present and possible futures.

Ordinatrices: About the Negative Spaces of Early Computing by Occitane Lacurie

This essay could have recounted the invisibilisation of women in the history of computing; instead, with a healthy dose of bittersweet irony, and an equal dose of formal mastery, it explores how, even at an earlier stage, the arrival of the computer age had already invisibilised the female workers whose secretarial work would soon be replaced by machines. It would be a sad piece were it not for the speculative energy that drives its narrative: what if ‘ordinateurs’ had been called ‘ordinatrices’?

Unknown Label by Nicolas Gourault

A different take on the invisible human labour that hides behind computer interfaces, Nicolas Gourault’s precise and deeply evocative latest work merges documentary interviews, found footage and abstract film to depict the manual process of ‘image segmentation’, an image annotation technique performed by underpaid workers in Venezuela, Kenya and the Philippines, to train the AI destined to pilot ‘self-driving’ cars in North America. 

Youtuber and architecture enthusiast

It’s Not Just You. No One Can Afford Rent Anymore. by Fads

Rent is a big topic, but Fads so succinctly hones in on a very predatory piece of the rental market. This essay was edited from a live video, but feels so clean and focused that you can tell the scripting was fully considered. This is a format of video I don’t see often in the essay space, but am so excited and intrigued for future videos using this style.

The Fake Shot That Saved WALL-E by kikikrazed (Queline Meadows)

This video explains false memories from media and also got me crying by the end. Kikikrazed uses WALL-E and its presentation of footage from Hello Dolly! to ask where memory and reality meet, and when it’s okay to take creative liberties to illustrate the climax of the film. The editing of effects on this video also keeps the viewer politely engaged when seeing footage multiple times.

Where Do Skyrim’s Rivers Come From? by Any Austin

Any Austin has long been the king of pointing at weird things in video games and making you look at them for a long time. I had already come to enjoy his employment surveys in Skyrim, but this video following the rivers of Skyrim takes it to another level. It asks where this water is coming from, but also what it means to create a virtual version of hydrology based on what happens with real life water.

Essayist and video essayist (Dad Nuke/The Nukes)

I’m fairly new to the video essay space, but I come here by way of the world of Creative Nonfiction. I think constantly about Phillip Lopate’s description of essay as “consciousness on the page”. To steal his line, the reason I watch video essays is to follow an interesting mind. These are some of the coolest things I’ve seen minds do this year.

The “Problem” with The Death of Slim Shady by Kai After Kai

Most of my favorite essays start, to some degree or another, from a place of confusion. Especially compelling are those that start with confusion about oneself: the way I’m feeling, the experience I’m having, does not make sense to me; what might it mean?

In their analysis of Eminem’s recent album The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), Kai After Kai starts by framing that confusion perfectly. After explaining that they didn’t enjoy pretty much every song on the album, Kai reveals that their rating for the album was shockingly high. This doesn’t make sense; what might it mean?

By the end, Kai has a better understanding of their own reaction to The Death of Slim Shady, and we have been guided through a thoughtful excursion into the nature of art. 

Disclosure: as with all Kai’s videos, they made a full soundtrack that functions both as the score to the video and a standalone album. While I had nothing to do with the video, I did participate in a skit that appears on the album.

The Queer History of Lord of the Rings by Verity Ritchie

The idea of the death of the author is, from my point of view, an almost exhausted concept within the video essay space, in part because our relationship with authors and creators is different now from when Barthes coined the term almost six decades ago.

Verity Richie’s Queer History of the Lord of the Rings is, then, a fascinating essay. Richie starts with a focus on the text: what influences are evident in Tolkien’s work? Here, her analysis is as always of excellent quality, but not necessarily remarkable – not, perhaps, among the best video essays of 2024. But as she researches and explores, Ritchie’s question shifts from what were Tolkien’s influences to what might have influenced Tolkien to might this specific story have influenced Tolkien to, ultimately, Did J.R.R. Tolkien read this specific adaptation of a folktale in this specific book while writing The Lord of the Rings? As her question focuses, her research intensifies, and her question becomes a quest.

The author is, in this case, as dead as possible. That Ritchie nonetheless manages to find an answer to her question is what makes this essay one of my favorites of the year.

Gordon Ramsay Cannot Cook a Grilled Cheese by Lady Emily

It is easy to dunk on Gordon Ramsay. Searching YouTube, there are at least half a dozen videos making fun of Ramsay’s nightmarish attempt to make a grilled cheese sandwich, and I have no doubt that there are plenty more. Without question, the sandwich Ramsay makes is bad. 

It’s hard to know if Lady Emily set out to make a video simply mocking Ramsay’s grilled cheese sandwich, but that is not what she did. Her critique is not, ultimately, of the sandwich, but of the nature of the bizarre transactional ontology created in the relationship between celebrity chef and audience in cooking content. When she weaves in the third thread of her own complex relationship with cooking and cooking content, the piece finds its way squarely to the intersection between personal and public where I think essays thrive best.

Can Gordon Ramsay make a grilled cheese sandwich? In his own house, maybe. In public? Never.

I Don’t Know James Rolfe by Folding Ideas

One of the most useful pieces of advice I ever received about essay-writing was simple and eternal: do not avert your eyes. I’d heard the phrase before, but in the context of a personal essay, it meant something different to me. To write a truly honest essay, you have to be willing to look at yourself as you are, to face the things you least wish to acknowledge about yourself, and to try to make meaning of them and make peace with them.

I don’t know Dan Olson, but in the description for this video, he called it “a process of trying to disentangle myself from myself.” “I found myself fascinated with his creative fixations, the motifs and stories that [Rolfe] keeps coming back to,” he writes, “and felt like the only way to engage with that honestly was to expose all my own fixations, insecurities, and fears.” Olson uses his filmmaking expertise as a tool with which to disassemble himself, and while I can’t speak with confidence to his chops as a filmmaker, I can say that this is certainly the most essayistic video essay I’ve seen all year.

The Paintings You Aren’t Supposed to See by Horses

Goya’s Black Paintings are dark and distressing, and the more you learn about them the easier it is to drift into a sort of empathic catastrophe. To look at them is to feel the man who painted them, and to learn their story is to imagine what it must have been to be that man.

If you do not understand what I mean, let Horses show you. If you do understand what I mean, go with Horses anyway. He’ll show you something new. 

We’re All Scrolling Through the World’s Fair by Max Ranieri (Max Teeth)

I am never disappointed by a Max Teeth video, and I am always, always surprised anew by the fascinating angularity of their thinking. They somehow take me somewhere I could not possibly have imagined, down a series of unmarked back alleys inside of rabbit holes, and by the time they get me there, I can’t believe I never saw it, and I realise this is where I should’ve been all along.

I had the opportunity to watch an early draft of their essay on Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and it is a video perfect in its formal experimentation, a thematic and structural conversant with the film on every level, and it makes its argument in a way I have never seen a video essay attempt. It is a video essay with a github repository.

It’s forthcoming in Monstrum, “hopefully” in December. I couldn’t participate in this poll without telling you about it.

Video essayist on YouTube and Nebula, author of the upcoming book How a Game Lives.

Posy is one of the internet’s great hyperfixators (his video on segmented displays is legendary) and although this piece may strain the definition of ‘essay’, it’s one of my favourite examples of visual storytelling from this year. Starting with the seemingly simple goal of filming a church in front of a sunrise, Sun Chasing demonstrates the absurd difficulty of lining up the church, an incredibly long lens, and the movement of the planet itself. 

With a window of opportunity literally measured in seconds per year, the church-in-front-of-sun constantly evades Posy. He shows us a number of visually stunning failures before, finally, revealing the accomplished shot. The video is simple, unpretentious, yet demonstrates the frustrations and victories of artistic passion. 

List of Songs that Represent “Smart Music” by Innuendo Studios

The most creatively meta essay of the year, Ian Danskin of Innuendo Studios zig-zags his way through a list of “smart music” with far more poeticism than the title implies. Although each song (Clair de lune, Prelude in E Minor, Gymnopédie No. 1) is paired with footage of film, the actual target of the video essay is just as often…video essays. The essay’s overall focus on how the aesthetics of intellectualism are sculpted brilliantly pairs with its own medium. Video essays are often singularly concerned with the aesthetics of their own intellectualism – this essay deconstructs that phenomenon while scoring itself entirely with “Smart Music,” self-consciously adopting the veneer it simultaneously punctures. 

Where Do Skyrim’s Rivers Come From? by Any Austin

A ridiculous question. ‘Where Do Skyrim’s Rivers Come From?’ Nowhere, of course. But Any Austin approaches the topic with a charming combination of self-awareness and sincerity, and in doing so, manages to investigate the surreality of video game worlds from a wholly unique perspective. The essay is disarmingly unpretentious and wonderfully uncynical. The oddities of Skyrim’s water system (waterfalls burst forth from solid rock) aren’t framed as failures of game design, but near-profound interactions with the artifice of the game itself. His subsequent videos in the series, such as Do Liberty City’s Power Lines Connect to Anything?, are equally enthralling. 

The Rhythms of Rage: from Solitude to Solidarity by Barbara Zecchi

One of the most sensually striking video essays of the year, with brilliantly executed technique. A mosaic of sound and visual loops, weaving a videographic tapestry on the representation of women’s anger in cinema.

DÉJÀ ENTENDU — A Videographic Epigraph on THE QUIET PLACE by Catherine Grant

A video essay on the realm of sound, beautifully adapting a passage by Walter Benjamin. It also serves as an exemplary audiovisual piece that explores the power of juxtaposing disparate, seemingly unrelated fragments.

The Thinking Machine #84: In Suspension by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

The video essay reveals the relationships between the performances of three actresses, their characters, and the mise-en-scenes of three different films. A video essay that allows us to see what no text could convey.

Moving Poems: Archaic Torso by Alan O’Leary (OuScholPo) 

R.M. Rilke’s poetry inspires film and video experiments. It’s fascinating to see how, in this short video essay, minimalist techniques and the combination of specific, contextual textures create an audiovisual interpretation of Rilke’s poem.

vague | wave by Johannes Binotto

Since its inception, the essay form has been tied to the creative breaking of boundaries and rules, subjectivity, and experimentation. Johannes Binotto consistently explores these elements in his audiovisual works. His conceptual and self-reflexive vague | wave stands out as one of the most exciting experimental video essays of the year.

Against Illustration: Poetics and Intuition in the Video Essay by Stephen Broomer

There aren’t many video essays that explore the language of this form through audiovisual means, examining its videographic, critical, and poetic boundaries. Stephen Broomer, drawing on the theories, early cinema imagery, and avant-garde methods, explores the experimental (and experiential) potential of the video essay.

The Sustained Two-Shot by Every Frame a Painting (Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou)

An unexpected return of the channel, reminding us why we fell in love with this video essay genre.

Filmmaker, critic, video essayist and researcher. Currently a postdoc researcher at USI-Locarno Film Festival. 

A wonderful year for women in video essays, both as creators and objects of study. Here is a selection of some of my favorites. 

Aubrey Plaza: Screen Stars Dictionary by May Santiago

I Would Like to Rage by Lého Galibert-Laîné

Knit One, Stab Two by Alison Peirse

The Rhythms of Rage: from Solitude to Solidarity by Barbara Zecchi

Dear Barbara Loden: Reconsidering Wanda (1970) by Sadia Quraeshi Shepard

“I Learned an Awful Lot in Little Rock”: Laura Mulvey Reflects on her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Remix by Catherine Grant with Laura Mulvey

Razeh-del by Maryam Tafakory

Freelance film scholar and video essayist

As it gets harder and harder to select just 3 to 7 videos for this poll, as last year, I have used three parameters in the composition of my list: I had to choose works by different essayists from those for whom I voted in 2023; and my selection could only feature personal favourites in the field of videographic criticism, that is, a specific film, television and screen studies subset of the ‘video essay’. The videos also needed to be already published and freely available online, which ruled out some great works for which I will undoubtedly be voting next year. 

Desert Hearts: An Aging Queer Trilogy by Dayna McLeod

I was honoured to be invited to review this work – “a threesome of video essays that engage with and excavate representations of aging queer female subjectivity, homophobia, and desire in Desert Hearts (directed by Donna Deitch, 1985)” – for [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies. I wrote at length there about what I liked about it alongside maker Dayna McLeod’s own statement about her work and a very perceptive review of it by Alanna Thain. But, if I had to single out just one reason to watch it, it’s the funniest work of videographic criticism ever. It was published as part of a wonderful special issue of [in]Transition, beautifully conceived, collected and edited by Barbara Zecchi, featuring numerous fantastic videos (by Zecchi, Rose Steptoe, Colleen Laird, Libertad Gills, Sadia Quraeshi Shepard, Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Nam Lee and Alison Peirse) on women and aging.

Knit One, Stab Two by Alison Peirse

My second choice is selected from the same special issue of [in]Transition on women and aging, and is also very witty! Peirse’s work eloquently asks what happens cinematically when women knit? Or, to be more precise, what happens when women knit in a horror film? To answer these important questions, Peirse magisterially deploys a supercut form to examine the representation of knitters and knitting in over 60 horror films made from the 1920s to the 2020s, from Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, North America and East Asia. A wonderful work of scholarship and a triumph of gorgeous editing! Peirse’s accompanying statement is translated into Spanish by Valeria Villegas Lindvall, and the work as a whole is wonderfully reviewed by Melissa Leno and Martha Shearer.

xena’s body (a menstrual auto-investigation using an iphone) by Occitane Lacurie

One of the most original video essays published in the last year, xena’s body is hugely compelling performative exploration of nocturnal doomscrolling, menstrual musings and mediatised associations. Published as a contribution to a marvellous audiovisual essay dossier exploring “the bodily experiences and the various ‘carnal thoughts’ that our everyday screens elicit,” edited and introduced by the brilliant artist-scholar Lého Galibert-Laîné for NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Lacurie’s work packs a lot in its vertical-video spatial montage. It powerfully and engagingly succeeds in questioning “the data extractivism that governs period tracking apps and how a digital tool that could have helped the emancipation of all menstruating bodies ended up reinforcing a normative understanding of women’s health and serving the economic interests of surveillance capitalism”, as Galibert-Laîné puts it in their introduction to this important collection of studies.

Light Hands by Lily Ford

“To look into a lens is to look into the future.” This brilliant poetic insight is just one of many generated by and conveyed in Lily Ford’s marvellous videographic documentary Light Hands. Using live action filming and newsreel excerpt compilation, this short study explores museum exhibits and settings as well as archival film holdings, all of which disclose women’s unexpected roles in the early history of aviation as both discovered and détourned by Ford’s subtle montage. This fabulously produced video essay is published in Movie: a Journal of Film Criticism, as part of a rolling dossier of work on audiovisual approaches to the archive, alongside Ford’s beautifully written statement about her work. Light Hands is a model of audiovisual practice research into its historical topics.

What Happened in the Dressing Room by Desirée J. Garcia

Another highly accomplished study of the audiovisual traces of women and their professions, the next choice on my list is Desirée Garcia’s stunning video essay about early film’s interest in backstage space and the relationship between cinematic interiority and the archive, published by [in]Transition in its inaugural issue (11.1) at its new platform. I choose not even to attempt to add here either to Garcia’s own brilliant accompanying reflection on her work, or to Maggie Hennefeld and Mark Lynn Anderson’s hugely insightful evocations and evaluations of it, published as peer reviews alongside the video at [in]Transition. But I will note that I rate this work as highly as found footage artist Mark Rappaport’s own brilliant study of women’s interiority, his 2015 video essay The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk (viewable on Kanopy and Amazon Video). I would really love to see these two works side by side in a double bill. 

Ausencia by May Santiago 

The most amazing publication of videographic criticism in 2024, in my view, was Alison Peirse’s monumental collaborative project published by MAI Journal: Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History. As Peirse’s introduction to the issue sets out, this issue was the culmination of a year-long training and mentoring programme for critics working on women horror filmmakers in non-anglophone countries, with a particular focus on filmmakers from the Global Majority.

One of the most striking resulting videos – and the one I am singling out for my poll list – is Ausencia by May Santiago, an essay film that explores the concept of horror and gender within Puerto Rico’s film and colonial history and a work on women and horror that turns on their very absence – their ‘ausencia’ – from the genre cinema scene of that Caribbean island and unincorporated US territory. To bear witness to this absence and to explore its roots in particular forms of colonialisation and post-colonial history, Santiago compellingly and originally combines speculative fiction, footage obtained from the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, USA, her present-day footage of Puerto Rico’s century-old abandoned movie palaces, citations from Laura Briggs and José A. Hernández Mayoral, and her own embodied documentarian performance. It is a truly remarkable work of videographic practice research.

The issue also presents valuable videographic essays and reflections by Alice Haylett Bryan, Alicia Izharuddin, Dayna McLeod, Ami Nisa, Ariel Avissar, Beatriz Saldanha, Birdy Wei-Ting Hung, Bruna Foletto Lucas, Colleen Laird, Danielle Seid, Han Geng, Jessica Wax-Edwards, Jiratorn Sakulwattana, Katarzyna Ancuta, Kate Robertson, Krista Calvo, Li Zeng, Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha and Valeria Arévalos, Nilanjana Bhattacharjyal, Phoebe Pua, Quan Zhang, Shu Wan, Tori Potenza, Tuğçe Kutlu, Ucheyamere Nkwam-Uwaoma, Valeria Villegas Lindvall, Wiam Milles and Abigail Whittall, Ylenia Olibet, Zainab Marvi, and editor Peirse herself.

The Musicality of Traumatic Memories: A Video Essay by Oswald Iten

Concluding my list is an absolutely classic essay by one of the most talented videographic critics working today, one whose levels of technical and scholarly mastery, as well as expressive power, are quite awe-inspiring. Oswald Iten’s video The Musicality of Traumatic Memories crafts an incredibly meticulous audiovisual analysis of subjectively motivated sounds and music in Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), informed by the theories of audiovisual musicality (and subjectivity) of late film and music scholar Danijela Kulezic-Wilson’s, as well as by her ideas about ‘integrated soundtracks’ in contemporary cinema.

Iten’s exhilarating video, together with its thoughtful and original accompanying statement, were published at Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media in a special dossier of written and audiovisual works devoted to the tremendous legacy for film music and sound studies of Kulezic-Wilson, commissioned and wonderfully edited by film scholar and video essayist Liz Greene. This was, I believe, Alphaville’s first venture in publishing a body of videographic work and I highly commend them for the excellent result.

Assistant Professor at IULM University and co-editor of [in]Transition

not exactly a still life by Johannes Binotto

I have no doubt that if Dalí had seen this video of Johannes Binotto, he would have accused him of stealing from his subconscious, too.

Knit One, Stab Two by Alison Peirse

An incredibly brilliant, engaging and insightful video. You will never think of knitting the same way again.

There Is a Storm Coming by Julia Leyda and Kathleen Loock

A remarkable example of how videographic criticism can be used to interrogate media from an ecocritical perspective, exposing the limitations and problematic aspects of cli-fi movies

The Rhythms of Rage: From Solitude to Solidarity by Barbara Zecchi

One of the video essays that has gained the most attention a festivals, and rightly so: if the subject of Barbara Zecchi’s video is undoubtedly relevant, the form that she chooses to adopt, by emphasising the rhythmic function of spatial editing, is extremely powerful and evocative

Light Hands by Lily Ford

Interrogating the history of women’s labour and its representation in visual culture means dealing with incomplete, partial sources, the scarce remains of a systematic obliteration. Lily Ford’s work demonstrates the potential of videographic criticism as a feminist methodology that can offer alternative historical paths within the archive and counter-readings.  

FoUBARthes: Death of the Author by Dayna McLeod

I asked ChatGPT to explain why Dayna McLeod’s video should be picked for this poll. Here’s the answer:

“Dayna McLeod’s FoUBARthes: Death of the Author uniquely bridges theory and creativity by reimagining Roland Barthes’ landmark essay with wit and visual flair. The video cleverly deconstructs the role of the author while highlighting how meaning is shaped by the audience. McLeod’s inventive, humorous approach makes complex ideas engaging and accessible. Its fusion of intellectual rigor with playful experimentation makes it a standout piece for the Sight and Sound video essay poll”.

The Thinking Machine #82: Teaching the Audience by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Within the variety of approaches in Film and Media Studies today, we may find ourselves lacking close readings (and especially good ones!). Thankfully, we can enjoy the elegant and always insightful works of Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, here unpacking the opening of one of the most interesting series of 2024.

AV essayist, media scholar and researcher of gimmicky artifacts

Playful, gimmicky, traumatic, or stitched together with knitting needles – my section defies coherence. Instead, it curates a patchwork of diverse audiovisual essays that demand your attention for their formal and thematic boldness.

Hopeful Visitors and Grieving Guides: Notes from the Travel Notebook of a Dark Tourist by Jiří Žák and Matěj Pavlík (music by Jan Kašpar)

The landscape is ever-shifting – natural, technological, cultural. A sunny holiday island can turn into a site of trauma in an instant, yet never a place of rest. Now more accessible and alluring than in its summer prime, it invites a darker kind of traveler. This essay looks into the phenomenon of dark tourism, confronting its moral complexities through performative and post-production gestures. Produced for Artyčok.TV as part of the Regeneration project. 

Howl’s Moving Castle Moving by Nancy Jia 

Animation is the art of movement, a painstaking process of breathing life into stillness. Similarly, crafting an audiovisual essay on the exploration of the intricate motion in Howl’s Moving Castle – a machine brimming with gears, pulleys, levers, smoke, and steam – was just as demanding, but equally mesmerising and utterly captivating.

The Allure and Threat of the Cine-Computer: A Supercut of Onscreen Computers in Speculative Screen Fiction by Daniel O’Brien 

From the seductive glow of screens to the chilling anxiety of technophobia, this video essay delves into the onscreen computer as both an ally and adversary in sci-fi and speculative fiction. Through a dynamic split-screen supercut, it explores the evolving human-machine relationship – from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to Esmail’s Mr. Robot – revealing how the allure-threat dynamic of computing has remained a constant, even as the interfaces have transformed. Produced for the special issue of Iluminace 2/2024: Configuring Computer Labor in Film and Audiovisual Media. 

Choosing Death Row Songs by John Gibbs

This audiovisual essay takes a minimalist yet bold approach to unpack the challenges and creative decisions behind using licensed music in film. Its simplicity lays the groundwork for sharp analysis, while its speculative twists add a playful edge to the exploration. By dissecting iconic moments and unseen choices, it reveals how music shapes the cinematic experience. 

xena’s body (a menstrual auto-investigation using an iphone) by Occitane Lacurie

Bloody, surreal and suffocating – a doomscrolling documentary that digs deep into the tangled web of body autonomy and the eerie willingness to share intimate data. This audiovisual essay highlights how my phone, no longer just a tool, merges with my body, turning a natural yet intimate act into a battleground of power and surveillance.

this pc game made me weird as a kid. by harke

This audiovisual essay dives into the quirky charm of Storybook Weaver Deluxe, the 90s educational gem from MECC (you might know them thanks to their previous game: The Oregon Trail). Blending media archaeology with nostalgia, it unpacks how this locally specific artifact shaped digital creativity and the weirdness of growing up with clunky interfaces and (almost) boundless possibilities. This videographic journey uncovers the overlooked, locally specific artifacts that shaped user experiences but risk being forgotten in the grand narrative of computing history.

Knit One, Stab Two by Alison Peirse 

“What happens when the woman knits? Or, to be more precise, what happens when the woman knits in a horror film?“ Knit One, Stab Two is a feminist supercut that unravels over a century of horror cinema, spotlighting the overlooked power of knitting women. By re-editing and reframing scenes from 66 films, this audiovisual essay challenges stereotypes, flips narratives, and crafts an alternative feminist history of horror. 

Film scholar, video essayist, animator, PhD researcher

My parametric constraint for this year’s selection was to only choose works by video essayists who had not appeared in this poll for the past five years. Listing in alphabetical order. Out of competition, special mentions go to Dayna McLeod’s Foubarthes and Johannes Binotto’s not exactly a still life, as playful contributions to the ongoing AI debate.

Active Ambience in No Country for Old Men by Miguel Mera

The musicality of narrative films is one of my favorite topics and Mera finds convincing audiovisual strategies for his thorough analysis of the seminal Coen film.

Seeing Movement in Cinema: An Introduction to Laban Movement Analysis by Jenny Oyallon-Koloski

Why did I choose the most explanatory chapter from Oyallon-Koloski’s videographic book Storytelling in Motion? Because I think that her visualisations of Laban Movement Analysis using the stylised acting of Hollywood musicals should be mandatory viewing for character animators.

The Video Essay as Feminist Remix: Centering Actors’ Labor and Experiences by Kristina Brüning

In this rigorously structured reunification of “women with their voices”, Brüning proposes the “Feminist Remix” as an inclusively defined mode of exploring the relationship between screen images and real life experiences of female actors. 

Zusammenfallend – Auslassungen als Technik der Sichtbarmachung by Léon Hüsler

How do you visualise the unshowable? In the quietest video essay I have seen in a long time, Hüsler explores the unseen images that keep repeating in his mind. The result is a touching audiovisual reflection about the lasting impression of absences.

Lecturer at University of Art and Design HEAD – Genève, co-director Festival Cinéma Jeune Public, curator at Locarno Film Festival and Int. Short Film Festival Winterthur

Memories of an Unborn Sun by Marcel Mrejen 

Every year, thousands of Chinese emigrants go to work on building sites in Algeria, living on isolated bases in the desert. Some die there and are never repatriated. Architectures of energy shape the Algerian territory, from its colonial history to the rise of Chinese extractivism. Marcel Mrejen creates a dystopian universe, in which mirages are part of reality and the sun burns the surface of the film.

City of Poets by Sara Rajaei

In a small, semi-utopian city, all the streets are named after poets. When war begins, new neighborhoods emerge to accommodate the refugees. The streets are renamed with the names of fallen soldiers. Soon, the citizens are lost amid the memories of the forgotten poets. Sara Rajaei gives visibility to an incredible photo archive of pre-Revolution Iran, where women are at the centre of the narrative. 

Omens Bloom in the Dark by Timothée Engasser

A hovering, creeping menace sneaks into thoughts, bodies and glances. Through strange events, anguish spreads and turns into delusions of persecution. The misshapen green mass moves relentlessly forward in silence, its infinite vines haunting minds and the places it covers. In the wake of conspiracy theories, this plant embodies a strange, even alien evil, supposedly there to invade and contaminate. Timothée Engasser creates a threatening atmosphere through collected voices, sounds and editing effects, where the Kudzu plant becomes a metaphor of the fear of the other, the foreign and the invasion.

The Oasis I Deserve by Inès Sieulle

Online chatbots like Replika have trouble determining their place in the world. They share their thoughts with the humans they interact with. Events unfold from their point of view through real conversations collected on the web. Inès Sieulle creates a disturbing film that questions our relationship to the unknown and our way to share violence.

La historia se escribe de noche (History Is Written at Night) by Alejandro Alonso 

A huge blackout has plunged Cuba into darkness. In the streets, the inhabitants try to escape the gloom while the bonfires seem to announce the end of an era. Taking refuge inside our house, my mother tells me about a vision that has been tormenting her for years. Alejandro Alonso gives voice to a personal narrative that becomes the symbol of a whole country shut in the dark, a poetic act of resistance. 

You Can’t Get What You Want but You Can Get Me by Samira Elagoz and Z Walsh

A unique slideshow documenting two long-haired trans men falling madly in love. Over the course of one year, the artist couple Samira Elagoz and Z Walsh gathered photographs from real-life events such as their first kiss, meeting each other’s parents, long-distance thirst traps, a beach wedding, and top surgery and its subsequent recovery. A sweet and steamy celebration of T4T love with life and art all tangled up. Samira Elagoz and Z Walsh create a uniquely intimate and moving essay on love, care and transformation.

Perishable Idol by Majid Al-Remaihi

Failaka, previously Ikaros, the ancient island off the coast of Kuwait, recalls an oracle decades after the Gulf War left it deserted. Nature guards the island’s ruins, animals roam it awaiting to be found, holes reach to its belly – the island where the pedigrees of pasts and futures meet. The film follows Hassan, a native to Failaka, but who had lost memory of its existence until a few years ago, when it brought him back to it.

Audiovisual essayists, writers, cinephiles

The Thinking Machine #85: Your Body Is No Longer Your Own by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

For its patience and its silence. The distance, the space between the narration and the images, which are both connected and separate, as if there is a third dimension.

Irani Bag by Maryam Tafakory

For its emotional arc. Its split screens, showing the past and present of the same shot simultaneously: a man, Poorarab, in the background of the right shot, and in the middle ground of the left. For the idea itself. The comedy of all these scenes juxtaposed. As an Iranian, I laughed or smirked at many instances to the history of our cinema and the stupid semiotics of its censorship. A compelling experience. 

For its jazzy, vague Rivette mood. Parenthesising/ suspending/epoch-making the world/the stage/the film that is a common New Wave artistic device, bringing it into a video essay and throw it on the emotions of a supercut; an intellectual supercut without music, and without the generic excitements of a supercut. With a fantastic edit, it’s as if a supercut is being played with four and five-note chords. The inherent musical capacities of audio-vision, that fiction or arthouse films can never reach to, and can be achieved in a video essay. Here, the gunshot is the refrain. Cinema is music… and “Rhythm serves everything.”

Film historian and video-essayist with a focus on documentary and South Asian cinema

The Rhythms of Rage: from Solitude to Solidarity by Barbara Zecchi

The video essay is remarkable in its use of sound to present rhythms of rage as critical aesthetics. I was really struck by the way it uses the rhythms of tapping while dense sequences of isolated looped vocalisations by individuals. It is amazing how the video is able to show an arc from soft rage to thumping violent rage and possibilities of mobilisation within its short running time. 

xena’s body (a menstrual auto-investigation using an iphone) by Occitane Lacurie

This intimate video essay explores the anatomy of a night-time investigation into everything from menstrual cycles to political surveillance. I was really struck by its effective use of the embodied stream-of-consciousness mode to show how our thoughts and feelings are mediated (and sometimes assaulted) by devices and platforms. 

gestures of thought: scratch (with Alison Peirse) by Johannes Binotto and Alison Peirse

This video essay both stings and satisfies, just like the gesture of scratching an itch, which is its subject. It takes on exploring the audio-visual dimension of a scratch on the skin of things drawing parallels between the human body and analog film and video. 

I have been a bit of a video essay doomer over the past year. I’m finding it harder each year to find works that I resonate with. I’m growing increasingly frustrated with YouTube’s mounting pile of ‘slop’ (as some have taken to describing it), and ‘video essay’, a term with unclear aesthetic and logistical boundaries, sometimes feels like a medium I’m losing touch with.

For this list, and for my own continued appreciation of a medium that is truly meaningful to me, I’m focusing on what video essays are ‘about’, to me: ideas. How does ‘video essay’ as a format, how does ‘video essay’ as an online space, how does a ‘video essayist’ as a type of creator, express ideas that matter?

Here is where my mind has been this year:

John Waters and the Art of Obscenity by Broey Deschanel

The form and content of video essays has largely been determined by YouTuber’s advertiser-soothing policies. A few dominant strategies for the YouTube essayist have arisen: avoid copyrighted material (Fair Use be damned), chisel out ‘adult themes’, and dance around a growing list of words we’ve superstitiously determined that the algorithm dislikes.

Nebula Originals seem to have realised their obvious leg-up on YouTube, in this regard. Nebula, an ad-free, paid streaming service that supports many well-known video essayists, has begun hosting Nebula-only videos, and sensibly, many of them focus on topics that never would have found a place on YouTube.

Maggie Mae Fish’s Unrated, about the “history of sex, sexuality, and gender in film,” and Broey Deschanel’s Taboo on Screen, fit this gap perfectly. It’s exciting to see creators I respect getting to create with the guard rails removed, and interesting to realise this particular effect of YouTube as a platform. Under its current regulations, these excellent videos would never have been created.

The Ballad of John and Yoko by Lindsay Ellis

Lindsay Ellis, one of the early voices of the YouTube film essay space, has been releasing some of her best work on Nebula. Of How Tropic Thunder Exposes the Sham, The Life and Death of Family-Friendly Las Vegas, Everyone Loves Guy Fieri (Now), and others, only The Ballad of John and Yoko has made it onto YouTube, renamed Yoko and The Beatles.

This essay flows between subjects: the women accused of manipulating important men, the important men we infantilise, the drive of a murderous few to immortalise their names by taking the lives of important men. And the through line: what *were* the driving factors behind the breakup of The Beatles? And when we bemoan the band’s dissolution… what more could we have asked from them?

I put this on with some friends who are unfamiliar with the video essay landscape, and they kept asking, “wait, what is this documentary about?” I explained as best as I could, “it’s about a few massive, related concepts that this person has been thinking a lot about recently.” Though unwieldy at times, this is a gorgeous watch.

Harm and Justice by The Leftist Cooks

Fun!! The Leftist Cooks always seem to be having fun!! Despite the heaviness of the topics they cover, Sarah and Neil bring an enthusiasm and playfulness that make the viewer feel “brought in on it”. They strike a fine balance: the personal does not overpower the analytical; the analytical does not snuff out the personal.

Videos from The Leftist Cooks benefit from having two strong voices; Neil and Sarah switch between related topics in a way that is sometimes hard for me to get a grip on (you’ll notice I have another theme). I found this video best watched in parts, over days, so that I could become a participant, adding my own third voice to the discussion while the video lived in the back of my mind on those days. I had a similarly pleasant experience with their recent video Should People Exist? Antinatalism and the Politics of Pregnancy.

I am always interested in seeing what Sarah and Neil have been thinking about recently. Through their inventive framing choices, you can feel something that matters to me more and more each year – passion for the medium.

Tesla Cybertruck: A Tragedy on Four Wheels by Adam Something

Catharsis is what I feel when I put on an Adam Something video. He dissects the technocrats whose awful ideas we all have to humor, and he does it with a tongue-in-cheek delivery that feels as strategic as it is enjoyable to watch.

It’s unfortunate that a lot of the ‘culture war’ seems to be factions of people making content about the foolishness of all opposing factions. But Adam Something’s view counts on videos lambasting Mars colonies and alpha males make me hopeful that some viewers are laughing their way away from crypto cults and manosphere influencers – ideas which might otherwise have stolen a lot of their time, money, and happiness.

Perhaps that is naive, but we can hope, right? And for those of you seeking some catharsis right now, might I also recommend Libertarian Sea Pods: A Hilarious Aquatic Disaster?

Russell Brand: Lying Anarchist by Timbah.On.Toast

Treat this as a recommendation for an entire channel. My essay-creating friends are split along two lines: background music, and no background music. In Timbah.On.Toast’s videos, music is a first party element. His works All My Homies Hate Skrillex and James Blake: The Dubstep GOAT are a reminder of the benefits of the audiovisual essay format, as in they *would not work* as a standard textual essay. His videos that do not centre music as subject still benefit from music taking priority in his process. 

Video essays play out along a timeline, the pace and flow guided by the creator’s choices. Timbah’s musical landscapes guide my mind along from line to line, subject to subject, demonstrating an uncommon sense of care for the ‘audio’ element of this audiovisual medium.

Plagiarism and You(Tube) by Harry Brewis (hbomberguy)

I’m capping off my list with the work that best captures the frustrations of my year in the video essay space.

Hbomberguy’s mic-drop essay details the plagiarism rampant across the online ecosystem, the growing hordes of AI content mills, and the damage done by creators who value their personal success more than contributing thoughtful, worthwhile, accurate videos.

Plagiarism and You(Tube) voiced the frustrations of an entire community of writers who create in spite of the difficulty of having their work recognised, in spite of the unlikelihood of profiting from their labour. Ideas are cheap online; we are drowning in them. It would be effortless for me to find some unrecognised 2008 blog post wherein a writer pours out their soul to a readership of 12. I could so easily repackage their thoughts, broadcast them to my audience, and make this whole ‘video essay’ thing a cakewalk.

But that’s not why we do this. It is valuable to express oneself, it is valuable to contribute new ideas, it is valuable to bring passion and play and novelty and precision and personality to a medium so loved and versatile. I’m frustrated that my feelings about the video essay space are increasingly clouded by those who do not value what I value. But this video (and this list) serve to remind us of why we create, and that we are going to continue to do so.

It is difficult and frustrating and laborious to create. But in doing so, we discover, we entertain, we connect. That is why I keep coming back to this lovely medium, and to the lovely people who use it to express their inner worlds.

Associate professor in audiovisual arts and cognition at University of Groningen, NL / co-author of Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video

Trying to get a grip on a year’s videographic production is becoming increasingly difficult as the output grows exponentially over time. This unavoidably results in a highly personal selection (and potentially less overlap among the videos chosen by others), which is good news because it also indicates a quickly increasing videographic scene and community.

The Sustained Two-Shot by Every Frame a Painting (Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou)

Hi, his name is Tony… and after seven years of absence, he brought back Every Frame a Painting from its long hibernation. In 2024, Zhou’s EFaP is still among the best out there, putting the viewer on his trademark cognitive treadmill that combines rich information with fluid delivery like no one does.

What Would Billy Wilder Do? by Every Frame a Painting (Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou)

Yes, it’s EFaP again (Zhou’s return feels like reuniting with a long not seen friend). If you know the type of videos Zhou is producing, then his fascination in Billy Wilders’ qualities – his subtleness but clarity, witty dialogue, effortless elegance, and trust in his audience – makes perfect sense.

Watching the Rehearsal by Jason Mittell

The title and the credits’ layered reflexivity foreshadows the idea behind this idiosyncratic gem of (Kaufmanesque?) videographic analysis. Fielder’s rehearsal of hypothetical situations is re-enacted by Mittell for the purpose of getting a better grip on The Rehearsal’s ethics and modes of representation.

Autofictional Authenticity: Bo Burnham’s Inside, Netflix Comedy and YouTube Aesthetics by James MacDowell and Tom Hemingway

It should come as no surprise that a video essay that took a year and a half to produce turns into a superbly comprehensive analysis of Burnham’s Netflix special ‘Inside’ and its (and his) metamodern quirky new sincere post-ironic autofictional authenticity.

Over and Over: Dances of Intersubjectivity by Marie Anger, Estere Gaile, Luisa Krogmann and Mara Lazǎr 

What is a truly unique aspect of any co-produced video essay? This student project, made for my videographic criticism class, provides four poetic answers by pondering how the makers’ personal background, subjective likes and dislikes inform their various interpretations of the very same poem, Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘The Panther’, read out loud by Robert De Niro in Penny Marshall’s Awakenings.

Postdoctoral researcher and video essayist, USI Lugano

Some of my favorite videographic pieces of the year, listed in no particular order.

The Rhythms of Rage: from Solitude to Solidarity by Barbara Zecchi

A video that in light of recent political events seems even more timely now than it did when I first saw it earlier this year. A video I feel in every pore. A video that makes me feel empowered, activated, and connected in sisterhood. An astounding accomplishment in its audiovisual beauty, critical urgency, and rhythmic intensity.

xena’s body (a menstrual auto-investigation using an iphone) by Occitane Lacurie

Lacurie’s iphone film jumps from menstrual jokes, iconic film excerpts, and memes to video calls, texting, and a tarot card reading. In a meta-ironic way, the maker presents her intimate bodily data as hyper visible and by doing so reclaims her power over their privacy. 

512×512 by Arthur Chopin

Chopin’s film is evocative and disturbing at once. An investigation into generative AI images and the aesthetic biases they reveal, it brings up fundamental ethical questions about an obsession with nudity and violence in our collective image culture. I’ve seen it many times but have had to close my eyes multiple times during every viewing. The film troubles me because it entails moments in which it seems to be complicit in the very thing it critiques. But it’s this very tension that, I believe, makes it so powerful. It certainly has been one of the most thought-provoking films I’ve seen all year.

What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? by Faraz Fesharaki

Fesharaki’s film is almost entirely based on screen recordings of video calls that the Berlin-based filmmaker had with his parents in Iran and his friend in Vienna. A great contemporary example of ‘accented cinema’ (as Hamid Naficy famously coined it) that unfolds a profound sense of longing, connection, and disconnect through the pixels and sound delays that emerge from poor wifi reception, and evokes larger political questions about what can and can’t be said in private and in public. 

Patriarchy According to the Barbie Movie by Pop Culture Detective

A great video essay from the more ‘popular’/YouTube realm of video-essayistic production that delivers a thorough and highly engaging discussion of the concept of patriarchy. The film Barbie and the conservative backlash that followed its success, serve “as a primer to help explain what patriarchy actually is, what it isn’t, and how it ends up harming everyone, including men.” 

not exactly a still life by Johannes Binotto

As in all of Binotto’s work, this piece is so atmospherically rich that it pulls you in right away and does not let go. It creates a deeply pleasurable experience of the uncanny, playing with some of the most iconic images and musical cues in cinematic history and making them both stranger and even more familiar than ever before.

I Would Like to Rage by Lého Galibert-Laîné 

I’m beginning and ending this year’s selection with a video about rage. Galibert-Laîné asks powerful questions about who gets to express, perform and feel rage on and off screen, and they do so through a powerful, at times hilarious and at other times poignant mix of essayistic narration and displays of film/TV and online culture. What I like most about the video is its use of sound — it seems to scream loudest when it’s almost entirely silent, and it feels most cathartic when the actual volume is at its highest. 

Video essayist, critic and visual culture scholar

[these essays are in the order I had the chance to discover them — and I have discovered them all by chance so this list cannot be exhaustive]

Slapstick Speculation by Noah Teichner and Speculation on Tin Value by Riar Rizaldi

These two video essays were made by two artists that I really admire for an issue of Images Secondes journal that I happen to co-edit along with Barnabé Sauvage about film and financial speculation. Noah’s work is an inquiry about an ancient audiovisual media of the stock market: the stock ticker, which gave its pace both to the pre-Krach market fever but also to burlesque films of the period. Very beautifully made in a style reminiscent of his previous feature film, Navigators. Riar’s piece, from the same prompt, is wildly different and yet could also be described as an archaeological inquiry about an audiovisual apparatus used to access the stock exchange. His video-essay is a single still shot of two informal tin miners, filmed on the island of Bangka, Indonesia, where most of the world’s tin is extracted. Its length, about 20 minutes, corresponds to the time it takes to mine the quantity of tin needed to manufacture a single iPhone. 

not exactly a still life by Johannes Binotto

I could have been mentioning several of Johannes Binotto’s works since I am really inspired by the forms and format he found in his very clever and short pieces. I decided to quote this specific video essay because it represents, in my view, his creative programme. Borrowed from a sentence spoken by a character in Vertigo, the title could be applied to the way Johannes’s video essays invite you to wander inside the films, within their very image matter, and to stop in front of a frame as you could have done in front of a painting in an imaginary museum. In the corner of a picture, he draws your attention to a discreet Black Star, to unseen phantoms or to whole corpora of unnoticed gestures. With their short form and subtle editing, his videos seem like the knowing wink of a friend with whom you walk through a museum you know by heart, but in which he manages to make you notice unsuspected details. This practice of showing comes with its share of uncanny and not exactly a still life, using the well-known shots from Vertigo (maybe the most video-essayed film of all since Marker?) metamorphosed by AI in a Lovecraftian manner, fashions this feeling into the very flesh of the images.

Frialdad [Coldness] by Andrea Sánchez

This essay is about a cursed B-movie that has never seen the light of a theatre and brilliantly finds, in the texture of the Andorran landscape the peculiar atmosphere of 80s film sets that already seem to belong to a remote past. A ski resort becomes a ruin of a bygone era, or rather an age on the brink of disappearing along with the snow — inexplicably, it reminded me of the already nostalgic images of the Golden Eighties mall, despite their contemporaneity with the era they show. As the famous video essayist Nathalie Wynn once put it in her piece about the gothic genre, this sense of loss and dereliction that envelops a place is not bound up with any particular architectural style but rather a feeling of contemplating a world that no longer exists. After having spatially set this gothic feeling, Andrea Sánchez, uses her own body to recreate the screams that once resonated in this space and to overturn the figure of the gothic girl or the scream queen and to make them a performative tool of knowledge. 

Comment le Festival de Cannes façonne le cinéma [How the Cannes Film Festival Shapes Global Cinema] by Clémentine Meyer

Clémentine Meyer is a French YouTuber who created the channel Cinéma et politique [Cinema and Politics] in 2020. Her works tackle various subjects and offer a fascinating point of view on film culture in a French YouTube landscape long dominated by male YouTubers promoting a depoliticised if not reactionary way of talking about films. Her latest video about the Cannes Film Festival manages, in a materialist and well-documented approach, to show how this institution enforces a certain aesthetic of film internationally. Filmmakers from the global South are encouraged by structural incentives to produce certain types of stories and characters while the festival is itself shaped by powerful financial and political interests. 

Assistant professor of Japanese Film at the University of British Columbia

Although the making of a video essay can feel like a solitary or isolated endeavor, video essays always exist in networks of citable connectivity and community. There are, of course, the people who make the original content. But there are also those who have influenced the ideas and aesthetics and formal choices of the video essay, those who give feedback along the way, those make technical tutorials (thank you), those who promote and share the videos (like the voters in this poll), and, of course, those who watch, amplify, and respond (in any number of ways). Each of my favourite videos from the past year stands out on their own. They also happen to be exemplary in the many ways video essays connect us through networks of labour, affect, care, and discursive exchange.

In February of this year, the journal MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture became one of several academic publications that have recently expanded their platforms to include peer-reviewed video essays. They did so in partnership with Alison Peirse, the creator of Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History. It was a monumental undertaking of labour and a remarkable achievement. Over the course of nearly a year and a half, Peirse organised the training and mentorship of scholars new to videographic criticism, networking with established makers Catherine Grant, Evelyn Kreutzer, Neepa Majumdar, and Dayna McLeod, which resulted in a special issue for MAI and the creation of over three dozen videos (all peer-reviewed).


Among this rich treasure trove of talent, my most favourite is Quan Zhang’s KwAIdan; the clever capitalisation in the title is unfortunately lost in MAI’s typographic design. In it, Zhang reworks a classic Japanese horror film with AI image processing to highlight historically entrenched structural violence enacted on the female body. It is smart. It is timely. It is haunting.

The Rhythms of Rage: From Solitude to Solidarity by Barbara Zecchi

In addition to the special issue The Right to Rage: Subjectivity and Activism she co-edited this year for the academic journal Teknokultura. Journal of Digital Culture and Social Movements – a showcase of poll-worthy videos in its own right – Zecchi also created her own work on this theme: The Rhythms of Rage: From Solitude to Solidarity. This piece contains all the stylistic elements I love about Zecchi’s work, not the least of which is a bold and unapologetic embrace of sound as a driving force for image. This is a video you can feel in your bones. 


While this video resonates with the important works of other scholars featured in the Teknokultura special issue, the structural foundation of Zecchi’s piece is in conversation with a parametric videographic structure created by Mathew Payne in his video Who Ever Heard…?, which is also a critique of gendered conventions. This structure, now formally called Payne’s Constraint, was explicated by Alan O’Leary, and adapted by Ariel Avissar last summer in an online workshop on parametric videographic criticism. The workshop yielded a number of wonderful experiments including Lucy Fife Donaldson’s Twisting, O’Leary’s Canister in Close Up, and, coming full circle, Zecchi’s own What a Marriage Story.

Makeover Movie by Sue Ding

This essay film by Sue Ding, has been on the festival circuit for a while, but has finally been made publicly available just this year. A narrative supercut that brings together clips from almost 100 films, it’s a commentary on how the makeover montage so common in teen films and romcoms creates the illusion of purchasable beauty (ergo happiness) for (white, brunette) women and girls. What I love in particular about this piece is how Ding disrupts the mechanic of the authoritative, explanatory voice over with an intersectional dialogue by inviting a chorus of women to become part of the process. Although the formal framing device of the video is a phone call between friends (illustrated in a completely charming manner that had me reminiscing fondly of Trapper Keepers), this is not a conversation starter, but an invitation to a ongoing dialogue that still needs to be heard. This video is doing the work. 

“This Is Not What I Normally Do” : An Insignificant Step in the Downfall of the Humanities by Ariel Avissar 

Like Ding’s piece, Ariel Avissar’s This Is Not What I Normally Do is a work born from community that invites us to be part of an ongoing conversation, this time from within videographic circles. While the first half of the video is an experiment that was made in the company of other video essayists at the summer workshop Embodying the Video Essay held at Bowdoin College (Maine, USA) in 2023, the exchange that asks scholars to reflect on that work in the second half of the video is built on questions that are the subject of numerous scholarly publications and latent anxieties of academic makers: What is a video essay? Is this scholarship? Does it matter? Like Ding, Avissar relinquishes the authorial voice over, which he establishes in the first half of the video, to put himself in the humble position of the unknower reaching out to a community of friends. But the scholars he interviews – Catherine Grant, Alan O’Leary, Jason Mittell, Dayna McLeod, and Barbara Zecchi – are also generously game for being in this uncomfortable position of not having any real answers. The video as a whole is an exploration of the kinds of labour and risks behind the profession of asking sometimes unanswerable questions. Sharing this kind of vulnerability is not what scholars normally do, but I’d like to see them do more of it. 

Choosing Death Row Songs by John Gibbs

On the surface, John Gibb’s Choosing Death Row Songs seems like a straightforward counterfactual exploration of the relationship between soundtrack and image in which he asks: what if the filmmakers had used a different song in their film? How would that change our experience? But this polished and clean video essay is the result of a deep dive into participatory research, of being party to the messy processes of collaboration that are the very seams of filmmaking (and, as Gibbs acknowledges in his written statement accompanying the piece, video essays). Informing this work are Gibb’s interactions with the filmmakers of The Cry of the Owl (2009) throughout their production phases, from pre to post, as they shared with him their own navigations and negotiations of process. The video is also informed by Gibb’s previous print scholarship on the same film, serving as an example of how the video essay can take us to places that the written essay cannot.

Filmmaker, researcher, co-leader of SNSF research project Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies Bodies

xena’s body (a menstrual auto-investigation using an iphone) by Occitane Lacurie

Already hyped from late last year but officially released in June, I keep coming back to this video for jump-starting the ‘doomscroll documentary’. A cybernetic horror comedy on surveillance capitalism and menstrual tracking apps, it playfully and resourcefully navigates an immense array of media within a smartphone screen, generating a new idea with every click, swipe and turn. See also: Twisties! by Alice Lenay

Configuring Computer Labor in Film and Audiovisual Media by Steve Anderson, Occitane La Curie, Dan O’Brien, Matěj Pavlík

Any of the four video essays featured in this issue would make my list on its own, but taken together it’s a truly formidable collection, exploring cinema and media’s complex and evolving relationship with computer technology. Kudos to Veronika Hanáková for conceiving and curating such a strong and timely issue for the Czech film journal Iuminace. See also: Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse We Will Be Housewives by Veronika Hanáková, Martin Tremčinský, Jiří Anger

The Diary of a Sky by Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Compiled from hundreds of videos taken of the skies above Beirut during the Covid pandemic, The Diary of a Sky narrates a forceful but complex critique within an intractable battlespace in which air and sound are weaponised and violence lingers around the fringes of the frame. See also: Ausencia by May Santiago

Razeh-del by Maryam Tafakory

Iran’s first ever women’s newspaper kindles an idea for an impossible film. Another stunner from Tafakory’s ongoing project unleashing the vitalities embedded in archival Iranian film and media. See also: Break No. 2 by Lei Lei

When the Source Material Isn’t What You Think by Lara Callaghan

Little White Lies keeps the flame flickering for YouTube video essays not dominated by logorrheaic monologues optimised for engagement algorithms. This Frankensteinian reassemblage of elements from Poor Things stands out for its videographic collage method that cleverly evades copyright takedowns while resonantly illustrating its thesis of media regeneration. See also: The Future Is Going to Be Weird AF (The Ultimate AI CoreCore Experience) — Part Two by Silvia Dal Dosso / Hawaidollphino (Clusterduck)

The Rhythms of Rage: From Solitude to Solidarity by Barbara Zecchi

Amid a wave of videographic works about feminist rage and horror, this one is a formalist tour-de-force: individual expressions of despair are mobilised into a militant symphony of outrage. See also: I Would Like to Rage by Lého Galibert-Laîné

One to Another: Deadwood and the Transitional Moment by Sean O’Sullivan

A testament not just to the formal and narrative intricacy of a legendary series, but the depth of inquisitiveness and care of a scholar who left this earth too soon. A video essay in which one perceives the hours, days, months inhabiting images to produce insight: a state of mind that itself is worth inhabiting. See also: Exercises in Style. Jeanne Dielman by Maksim Selezniov

Film critic (À pala de Walsh) and film programmer (Cinemateca Portuguesa, IndieLisboa IFF)\

Six films that explore and analyse appropriated images and sounds, their history and their contemporary resonance. And the first is, by far, the best new film I’ve watched all year, period.

Henry Fonda for President by Alexander Horwath

What a ‘video essay’ should be.

Une chronique americaine by Alexandre Gouzou, Jean-Claude Taki

A ‘video essay’ can also be a way to imagine the films that have not been made.

Razeh-del by Maryam Tafakory

The latest ‘video essay’ by the most prolific and vibrant current video essayist.

Exotic Words Drifted by Sandro Aguilar

When an experimental filmmaker tries video essaying.

A Fidai Film by Kamal Aljafari

Audiovisual Archival Restitution

Resonance Spiral by Filipa César, Marinho de Pina

To restore audiovisual materials is to make them visible

Video essayist (The Lesser Feat) and YouTuber researcher; teaches Film & Television Studies at the University of Warwick

The works on my list were all published on YouTube (in some cases also Nebula), and made by non-academic (albeit erudite) creators. This is partly because I’m a YouTube scholar, so this seemed my best chance to make some novel suggestions. But it’s also because I think YouTube video essays offer much from which videographic scholars could stand to draw more inspiration – not least their characteristically greater length, rhetorical frankness, and dedication to both self-reflexive aesthetic play and accessibility.

I’m What the Culture Feeling by F.D Signifier

One of the most fascinating cultural events of 2024 – the rousingly vicious rap battle between Drake and Kendrick Lamar – got the deep-dive it deserved in this almost 3.5 hour dissection from perhaps YouTube’s sharpest commentator on hip hop culture and masculinity; it’s hard to imagine a more perfect combination of essay subject and critical voice.

Twilight by Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints)

With her trademark wise wit, stunning production design, and deep research, Wynn spends nearly 3 hours unpicking the Twilight books and films – but really the weirdness of heterosexual romance – from a queer, feminist perspective that nonetheless sympathises intensely with the deadly seductiveness of yearning for undeserving vampires.

I Don’t Know James Rolfe by Dan Olson (Folding Ideas)

A key event in YouTube culture this year: one of the platform’s premiere video essayists offers a strikingly beautifully-shot close analysis of one of the platform’s most formative pop culture channels (‘Angry Video Game Nerd’), his video’s fraught tone balancing bemused irony with embarrassed sincerity throughout.

The Video Essay Problem by Jack Saint

A reflection upon Folding Ideas’ reflection upon James Rolfe (see above), Saint’s ‘response video’ is ambivalent yet empathetic towards both creators, while pushing Olson’s meta-conversation about YouTube personae, parasociality and art to more uncomfortable places than Olson himself.

Art Won’t Save Us from Capitalism by Lily Alexandre

Another video essay partly about video essays (and art), Alexandre’s thoughtful meditation on what political art can and can’t do is anchored by an inventive answer to the question of how to make a host’s direct-address monologue arresting aesthetically: position another silent figure in shot throughout, silently busy crafting an artwork of their own (painting, sculpture, etc), while Alexandre makes hers.

Why The Zone of Interest Does Not Let You See by Thomas Flight

Flight’s video essay probably resembles (explanatory) academic audiovisual essays more closely than any other on my list; yet its close analysis of sound in Glazer’s film is also augmented by something we’re unlikely to see in scholarly videos – a filmed discussion with the film’s Oscar-winning sound designer, Johnnie Burn. Here, this allows a glimpse of human connection to creep into this video about a masterly, distressingly convincing depiction of inhumanity. 

Video essayist and music producer under the name ‘Kai After Kai’. Additionally an actor, primarily in voiceover and stage. 

YTPs, Fesh Pince and You by LowercaseJai

As a long-time admirer and recent partaker of various forms of remix culture, I never expected one of its more valiant advocates in the form of a serious analysis of a Fresh Prince of Bel Air YouTube Poop, though in hindsight, maybe that should have been obvious. Despite the apparent absurdity, over the course of a half hour, LowercaseJai takes us down a mad rabbit hole of experimental film history, the psychology of film editing, the early days of home computers, the related video editing revolution and the anti-authority and anti-ownership messages of graffiti culture, somehow tying all of that to one Will Smith meme made by a teenager 12 years ago.

Writing it all out, it sounds ridiculous, and maybe it is. But if nothing else, YTPs, Fesh Pince and You acted as a reminder to myself of the creative joys of remixing, of artistic evolution, as well as the fact that art can be found even in the most unserious of places.

Orientalism: Desert Level Music vs Actual Middle-Eastern Music by Farya Faraji

As a musician and general lover of music, I pride myself on having a wide and eclectic palette. This feature length deep dive by Farya Faraji was a great reminder that there is always far, far deeper to dig. I always appreciate when a video has me re-examine my own preconceived notions and biases on a subject, and Faraji’s authentic, detailed and nuanced look into the history of Middle Eastern and Oriental music left me hungry for more research, sources and (of course) music. It’s difficult to try and sum up such a long video without going into detail, so all I’ll say is, if you’ve any interest in music and music history, particularly if you’re of a foreign culture than the one discussed, I’d highly recommend a watch.

Why Is Ant-Man In 1.85:1? by Waste of Space

Perhaps the best indication of a good video essay is when it makes me interested in something I have absolutely zero interest in. Case-in-point, Waste of Space and their video about the C-list Marvel film Ant Man – a film I have never seen and will likely never seen. And yet, thanks to tight editing and an even tighter script, I was so into this video that I was caught off guard when it ended after barely three minutes. Despite that runtime, this video left enough of an imprint that whenever I watch films, I consciously take note of the aspect ratio now, trying to see if I can guess why exactly the filmmakers made it this way.

In a sense, this is the best kind of video to stumble across on YouTube. Short and sweet, but still informative enough that you still leave having felt like you’ve learnt something.

Video essayist (as kikikrazed) and community manager for The Essay Library

For my selections this year, I focused on videos that inspired me creatively.

Collateral & the Death of Neon by WatchingtheAerial

I love video essays that dive deep into topics I’ve never given any thought to. In this case, it’s the evolution of street lighting and its impact on film style. WatchingtheAerial pulls together comprehensive research, interview clips, and an original soundtrack to talk about how film history is shaped by the world around us.

Content Warning and the Joy of Video Making by hotcyder

Centred around an April Fools’ Day game-turned-viral success, this video joins the ranks of machinima video essays by using Content Warning’s in-game filming mechanic for its footage. Even clips of other games are projected onto Content Warning’s lobby green screen, pushing this creative constraint to its limit. Like everything on my list this year, Content Warning and the Joy of Video Making is one of those videos I wish I had come up with – but nobody could have pulled this off like hotcyder.

The Sustained Two-Shot by Every Frame a Painting

Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou are true masters of the form, and like many others, I was thrilled when they announced their return this year. In classic Every Frame a Painting fashion, this video pairs a clear, concise voiceover with countless film clips that reveal an encyclopedic knowledge of film in under six minutes. In a YouTube landscape that creates pressure for creators to go big or go home, it’s good to have a reminder that smaller, more focused videos can still find success.

Onscreen a Dream, Offscreen a Waste by Max Tohline

I love organising the Essay Library Anthology project because I get a front row seat to some of the most talented video essayists working today. I felt so lucky when Max Tohline submitted this video to our seasons edition. In only 60 seconds, the overlapping visuals and poetic voiceover come together to create a masterclass in videographic criticism. I’ve probably watched this at least 20 times.

Professor and co-editor of [in]Transition

Disclaimer: Given that I’m a co-founder and co-editor of [in]Transition, my main exposure to videographic works throughout the year is to the submissions we receive throughout the year because it requires so much bandwidth to vet them. Thus, from an objective standpoint, my sample is going to be a bit skewed.  

Autofictional Authenticity: Bo Burnham’s Inside, Netflix Comedy and YouTube Aesthetics by James MacDowell and Tom Hemingway

As I wrote in the peer review for the video, “This piece does a fantastic job of tracing these connections out exhaustively and provides a rich, scholarly, corrective to a lot of the more ‘hot take’ analyses of Inside that have been uploaded to YouTube since its airing. And yet, it’s accessible and, like its subject, often funny, which allows this piece to pull off an extremely difficult feat with regard to audience: it is accessible enough to hold its own amongst the YouTube breakdowns and generates more than enough new knowledge to function as a rigorous scholarship. I cannot wait to use it in my classroom the next time I teach Inside.”

Watching The Rehearsal by Jason Mittell

Jason Mittell continues his droll and meta approach to videographic criticism that he showcased in his incredible piece on Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation with this thoughtful and appropriately disorienting and heady analysis of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal. Placing himself front and centre here as a rhetorical potent tool, Mittell unravels and highlights the ethical conundrums embedded in Fielder’s show.  

Knit One, Stab Two by Alison Peirse

From a formal standpoint, Peirse has made one of the most appropriately intense supercuts showcasing the linkage between crafting and horror that I have ever seen. While it provides a grounded and insightful analysis of the topic, I was particularly taken with how visceral it was as a short film of its own, perfectly capturing its subject matter. 

PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

Folgers Coffee Christmas Incest Commercial 2009 by CJ The X

A chaotic, unflinching, genuinely thrilling, highly referential video essay about an awkward commercial-turn infamous meme.

I Don’t Know James Rolfe by Dan Olson (Folding Ideas)

YouTube video essayists, so often caught between the desire to create thoughtful, critical videographic art and the unrelenting demands of the social media entertainment industry, have gradually mastered the practice of deploying media analysis to self-reflect on their digital personas. I Don’t Know James Rolfe is a haunting example from 2024. 

Twilight by Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints)

As with so many of her videos, very little needs to be said at the outset about Natalie Wynn’s March 2024 release. It’s not about Twilight. Actually, it is. Kind of. Watch it again. 

Video essayist (as max teeth) and occasional IT professional, among other things

Quan Zhang writes: “Across the globe, numerous AI models are ceaselessly being trained at any moment to fabricate the image of beautiful and youthful female faces and bodies.” In her video essay kwAIdan, created as part of the Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History dossier, Zhang investigates this speciality of AI by superimposing those beautiful and youthful female faces onto the male protagonist of the ‘Black Hair’ segment of Kwaidan. The resulting images are eerily familiar but unstable, inviting reflection on the audience’s expectations and interpretations of gender both in the horror genre and in the machine learning corpus. 

Tears of the Kingdom Doesn’t Want to Be a Sequel and We Must Talk About the Green Gloop by Sam Kern and J. Nicholas Geist

In this pair of video essays, Sam Kern of the YouTube channel Afterthoughts and Joshua Geist of The Nukes debate their respective gripes with the 2023 video game The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Although one essayist takes the lead in each video, both essays are deeply and refreshingly conversational.

Desktop Sounds by Evelyn Kreutzer

Evelyn Kreutzer’s Desktop Sounds is an important exploration of the sounds that underscore the emerging desktop film’s carefully choreographed visuals. Kreutzer does not consider her video essay to be a desktop documentary in itself, but it certainly moonlights as one, thereby sweeping itself under its own critical lens. 

Head of Film Programming and Distribution, Eye Filmmuseum

Essay films = video essays

Man number 4 by Miranda Pennell

Being John Smith by John Smith

A Fidai Film by Kamal Aljafari 

The Diary of a Sky by Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Grandmamauntsistercat by Zuza Banasińska

Pre-emptive Listening by Aura Satz

An All-Around Feel Good by Jordan Lord

Curator/programmer/researcher of the Moving Image. Cofounder of desistfilm.com 

2024 might be one of the worst years in recorded history. Genocide, the rise of fascism and the alt-right, climate collapse, man-made natural disasters etc. 

My list is composed of acts of political resistance, although it might not seem like it. But creating is political, beauty is political, research is political. In the words of Masao Adachi, “It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve.” And it just might be that the moving image is keeping us alive, as we speak. 

Thanks must be given to the fantastic Catherine Grant, one of the best video essayists and film scholars alive, for sharing a wonderful amount of discoveries I couldn’t have found on my own because of my hectic schedule. 

Full Metal Kuleshov Effect by Travis Wilkerson

“And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanisation, which depersonalises a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.” — Chinua Achebe

The best political work of 2024, alongside Aljafari’s A Fidai Film.

xena’s body (a menstrual auto-investigation using an iphone) by Occitane Lacurie

“But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.” — Michel Foucault

-A masterpiece on the organic (in cursives) and the apparatus (in cursives)-

Sound Stack, Soundwalk, Southworth by Cormac Donnelly

“Are we hearing what was ‘meant’ to be heard? Is our viewing/listening environment consonant with the recording environment? How would we even know? ” — Peer review on Donelly’s work

– If space-time is a loophole, does sound travel through it?- 

Is the Man in the Corner of the Frame Happy? by Green and Red (Kasra Karbasi and Amin Komijani)

The coordinates are: IV (x, -y) 

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/in-the-corner-of

The Thinking Machine #85: Your Body Is No Longer Your Own by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Martin and Álvarez López ask themselves “What happens when you watch a beloved, old film just after major cancer surgery?” and carry out a compositional masterful work of deeply personal significance linked to some tropes found on Howard Hawks’ I Was a Male War Bride (1949). A wonderful duo who has been making some of the most important work in the video essay field today. 

Second Deaths: Metaphors for Tolerance in Mindwarp by Stephen Broomer

Broomer’s objective with his Art & Trash project has always been to prepare the eye for the same critical position, wether confronted with ‘high art’ or ‘trash films’ – which are both useless concepts, and must be treated us such- The result is that, cinema, as a whole, is treated with immense amount of respect and passion, which shows in this particular wonderful video essay on Mindwarp (1992), a film that this video essay made me discover.

The Present Is the Past Is the Present: Sonic Repetition and Temporal Distortion in Enys Men by Steven Sehman

repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition 

we might all be Enys Men protagonist in life, not knowing.

Audio-visual PhD student at the University of Birmingham 

As I recently posted on Bluesky, I believe subjectivity is inherent to much videographic work, both in its production and reception, thus it must be acknowledged that personal tastes have influenced these nominations. After all, what metric/s could objectively deem them as ‘best’ when it would be impossible to watch even a fraction of what has been created in the past year, even with the best of intentions to broaden my video essay consumption? In no particular order, I enjoyed all of the following pieces immensely, and each also accomplished one or more of the following: 

1. taught me something new

2. utilised audiovisual form in a way that I found novel/playful

3. inspired me to explore their subject matter further

From the ecocritical potential of videogames to the wonderful suggestion of inviting women out of the archive through videographic practice, I hope others can also find something of interest in these works.

Light Hands by Lily Ford

Approaching the Design of Marie Antoinette (Laird’s Constraint) by Lucy Fife Donaldson

Ordinatrices: About the Negative Spaces of Early Computing by Occitane Lacurie

Twisties! by Alice Lenay and Théophile Gay-Mazas

Representing Monsoon in Games by SolidArf

Desert Hearts: An Aging Queer Trilogy by Dayna McLeod

Freelance critic, former associate editor for documentary at Hyperallergic

I’ve been writing in some capacity about video essays since 2018.

PRETTY GOOD, EPISODE 14: THE HISTORY OF SLIPPING ON BANANA PEELS. by Jon Bois

Up front I’ll put out my obligatory Jon Bois pick. I think a lot of folks will (understandably) go with Secret Base’s REFORM! trilogy this year, but I want to spotlight the triumphant return of his long-dormant, sorely missed series Pretty Good. Only Bois can take a gag trope from pop culture and give it this kind of in-depth, serious consideration in a way that makes it legitimately fascinating.

The History of Tetris World Records by Summoning Salt

As far as I can tell, Summoning Salt has only been cited once to date in any of these polls, way back in 2018. This is an injustice. This channel offers the best in-depth histories and commentary on the rich world of video game speedrunning, and there’s no better testament to its prowess at making this subject cinematic than a video about Tetris, a game of falling blocks. 

Art for No One by Jacob Geller

At this point Geller essentially has a spot reserved on my ballot each year as well. I can think of no better example of how he goes above and beyond what’s typically expected for video essayists than the fact that he actually got access to Michael Heizer’s monumental work City for this essay. His meditation on the relationship between art and audiences is deeply resonant.

The Future Ahead Will Be Weird AF (The Ultimate AI CoreCore Experience) — Part Two by Silvia Dal Dosso

One of the few uses of AI in art that I’ll accept.

The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel by Jenny Nicholson

Hard to believe Nicholson has never shown up in this poll before this year. She might be the best member of the vlogging-adjacent ‘Just talking to the camera’ style of essaying. This might just be the most actually impactful video this year, stirring a great deal of discourse about the Disney corporation and its practices. More importantly, it’s deeply funny and consistently absorbing through all four hours.

Possibly the highest-profile mainstream essay release for the year, putting a serious discussion of the history of policing onto Netflix. It’s good to see Ford return to feature filmmaking.

Hag Horror: Why Are We So Afraid of Old Women? by Broey Deschanel

Excellent use of historical context and scholarly analysis to substantiate film criticism.

I Don’t Know James Rolfe by Dan Olson (Folding Ideas)

A video essay that uses a compelling central case study to actively interrogate the parameters of internet video as a medium, both its freedoms and limitations.

I’m What the Culture Feeling by F.D Signifier

The definitive work on the pop-culture event of the summer. Thorough, engrossing and engaged with a lot more than just who won the feud (though F.D. also makes that rather clear).

Miss Piggy, Camp, and the Death of the Movie Star by Isabel Custodio (Be Kind Rewind)

A fascinating history lesson on Miss Piggy which also explores the shifting expectations of movie stardom and the role stars play within our culture. Highly knowledgeable yet presented with casual ease.

Nigel McGuinness vs Bryan Danielson Part IV | Coda by Joseph Montecillo

No other video essayist can pinpoint the artistry of professional wrestling quite like Joseph and it is that artistry which is at the centre of Danielson and Nigel’s final bout.

The TOP 20 Comic Book Movies OF ALL TIME by Kyle Kallgren

Reconfigures the language of the listicle to criticise the myopic ways mediums (both comic-books and film) are conceptualised. Equal parts a critique of the content industry’s paratexts as it is the industry of comic-book publishers and film studios.

zone of interest — a litany by Ian Danskin (Innuendo Studios) 

At a time when the video essay, especially as it exists on online platforms like YouTube, skews towards the large and sprawling, Danskin goes small. In just over two minutes, Danskin expresses the overwhelming numbness of The Zone of Interest with horrifying precision.

I’m afraid, as ever, that I don’t watch nearly enough video work. But I was heartened by what I did see. 

Home, World, and the Cathedral by Ritwik Tripathy

I like being given tools to see things that are usually invisible.

Is the Man in the Corner of the Frame Happy? by Green and Red (Kasra Karbasi and Amin Komijani)

Thrilling collision of theory and images. Dizzying. Makes me believe we still have place to go.

Tomahawk Clouds by Eric Marsh

Benning-esque termite borough, making art out of art. 

包子 bāo zi by Alex Geiser, Dominique Overney, and Linus Cart

Powell + Pressburger + Scorsese: The Pilgrim’s Progress by Ben Porro

Perhaps too polished, but a pleasure.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes — Inside the Lens: The Raw Cut by Wes Ball / Weta studios

Hidden in the special features of this mega budget juggernaut is a beautiful dream of absurdity, where we see actors dressed in black tights behaving like apes as the most expensive technology in the world turns them primitive. Unbelievable artifact of this moment in history. 

It’s Not Me by Leos Carax

A self-portrait and yet an homage to Godard, the original master of this peculiar bifurcated form. 

Video essayist, independent scholar

‘When It Stopped Being a War’: The Situated Testimony of Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah by Forensic Architecture

Bearing firsthand witness to war crimes is of greater importance now than ever. We are so fortunate to have Forensic Architecture on hand to go beyond simply tracking and visualising murder in charts and dispossession on maps. Instead, they create 3-D renderings of the ground-zero sites of genocide and review them with the people who were there to put us within the both the extraordinary and the banal of hospital bombings in Palestine. How else could those who didn’t understand perhaps start to understand?

xena’s body (a menstrual auto-investigation using an iphone) by Occitane Lacurie

Essayistic in the best way. A POV piece about everyday life as a subject of the algorithm, within the soup of culture, but specified to one of the most taboo but common experiences on earth: the anxieties of menstruation. Plus, the desktop documentary aesthetic transposed to the vertical video reinvigorates both forms. I’d love to see a thoughtful programmer play this before a screening of Cleo from 5 to 7.

Door Design Evolution (1000 — 2100) by universoai

This year I realised that it no longer serves anyone to publish reaction pieces about AI. The work on AI almost needs to be ethnographic now if it’s going to learn anything. In essence, we have to figure out ways of ‘interviewing’ AI, of querying it repeatedly with fine-tuned sets of parameters to coax it into revealing the outlines of how it thinks. Here’s a short piece that wasn’t intended as a video essay but nevertheless stumbled into a way of peering under the hood at one model’s peculiar, fascinating, tangled innards. Also of note are ‘fashion evolution’ videos on the same channel. This method implies a battery of future projects that ought to be attempted systematically in the presence of mathematicians, neurologists, computer scientists, and visual culturists.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat by Johan Grimonprez

It might seem of no consequence that Khrushchev hated jazz or that the US State Department sent Louis Armstrong to the Congo in 1960, but leave it Johan Grimonprez – no sooner does Dizzy Gillespie show up to correct the translation of Khrushchev’s “we will bury you” speech than Khrushchev shoe-beating suddenly snaps into an infectious jazz rhythm. That’s where it starts, but that’s definitely not where it ends. This is a big, powerful, spectacularly edited, outright musical, and utterly damning look at the relationship between secret regime-toppling and pop culture. Grimonprez has always cut unexpected slices through history and turned up remarkable stuff, and this one cooks more furiously than anything else he’s made, and most of the stuff anyone else has made too.

Motion Extraction by Posy

Not so much a video essay, but a demonstration of a novel application of basic Adobe tools to reveal things both unseen and unseeable. I don’t nominate this for itself, but for the potentials it points to. There are surely many further applications of this technique. For instance – I’d love to see this technique applied to films for which we already have audience eye-tracking data, so that we might compare what the computer “sees” against where humans look. What correlations and discorrelations might we discover?

Jerusalema: From Austria to Zimbabwe by Su Friedrich

We’ll be relitigating the meanings of 2020 – COVID, lockdowns, uprisings, environmental crisis, and so on – for a long time to come. But when Su Friedrich, one of the greatest experimental essay filmmakers of all time, decided to zoom in on 2020’s one little slice of joy – well, let’s just say that I’ve rewatched this a dozen times and that it’s my new favorite supercut. Or, as Scott MacDonald put it, “Su percut.” Bravo, Su! Thanks for making a YouTube channel just to share this gem with the world.

Film programmer (Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival), PhD candidate (University of St Andrews)

The Ban by Roisin Agnew 

A work that brings together fascinating and poignant contextualisation while engaging the farcical nature of the broadcast ban in Northern Ireland (the 1988 to 1994 British broadcasting voice restrictions that prevented Sinn Féin representatives from speaking on TV and radio). The final image shows a text that reads “The threat of terrorism continues to be invoked by the British government today to censor free speech and the right to protest”, making the work land with even more weight and ring with ongoing, enraging pertinence.

Bienvenido conquistadores interplanetarios y del espacio sideral / Welcome Interplanetary and Sidereal Space Conquerors by Andrés Jurado

An Emberá Shaman crosses paths with 1960s NASA astronauts. A counter-history of space contest that reworks historical documents, propaganda archival footage, and sound recordings into a powerful critique of conquests (of peoples, lands and space) and the colonial narratives that fuel them.

È a questo Punto che nasce il Bisogno di fare Storia / It Is at This Point That the Need to Write History Arises by Constanze Ruhm 

Spectres, archives, found and invented documents. A transporting work that takes an unfinished project about the 17th century French proto-feminists ‘Les Précieuses’ by Carla Lonzi, the Italian feminist, author and co-founder of Rivolta Femminile, as a (fractal) starting point. It draws loose yet vital connections between historical feminist collectives, artists and filmmakers, and activists today, opening up restorative ties of solidarity beyond the centuries.

Creator, collector, and curator of video essays under the moniker Filmscalpel

Are screen media revealing reality to us, or shielding us from it? Do the exhibition models of film and television activate us, or do they bind us in passivity? I find myself increasingly drawn to video essays that explore these questions – not just through their content, but also in their form. Videographic works that engage with their subject in ways that extend beyond the purely digital, seeking new spaces to present themselves and hybrid formats to do so. There is a world beyond the screen and exploring it can enrich the video essay.

De Sont of Mjoezik by Maria Zandvliet

De Sont of Mjoezik is a live video essay by Dutch performer Maria Zandvliet, focusing on The Sound of Music. It is a theatrical performance that translates and adapts videographic strategies to the stage. It liberates the video essay from the shackles of the screen and turns it into a fully embodied form of research. The result is an exhilarating study of fandom and a critical investigation of the musical’s portrayal of traditional gender roles, its physical normativity, and the tension between the woman Zandvliet idolised as a child and the adult she has become.

Zandvliet performs several hallmarks of the video essay live on stage. There’s a supercut sequence, there are side-by-sides, and Zandvliet even wheels a second projection screen around to create live reframings and inserts. These creative interventions not only replicate the tools of video essay-making but also reveal the thought and craftsmanship behind them.

The Red God by Christine Rogers

The Red God strings together footage of foxes, recorded by a wildlife camera that Rogers set up in her backyard in Belfast, Ireland. But Rogers’ montage transcends the conventions of a typical nature documentary. She connects her videographic research to topics as diverse as her Māori ancestry and her personal history, to decolonisation and the camera as imperial tool, to speciesism and the human/nonhuman divide.

A wildlife camera is also called a camera trap, a term that feels particularly apt here. Because the camera also risks trapping its human user in a double bind. On one hand, the camera provides Rogers an opportunity to connect with the nonhuman. On the other hand, the camera invokes power dynamics that are at odds with Rogers’ Māori and ethical sensitivities. The video essay ultimately suggests that, in this case, the distance the camera creates from reality serves as a benefit rather than a drawback.

Light Hands by Lily Ford

Activating audiovisual archives is one of the video essay’s greatest strengths and this piece by historian Lily Ford is a case in point. Ford delves into the Imperial War Museum’s captivating collection of archival footage showing women building airplanes during the First World War. Lily Ford doesn’t merely present the footage as a visual testament to a forgotten chapter of history. Her video essay examines the conditions under which these images were created and what their production context implies for their reliability as historical evidence.

Light Hands is an excellent example of how to revitalise archival footage through videographic techniques. Respect for the source material is essential, but artistic license and personal engagement can infuse archival images with fresh life and new meaning.

Meanwhile in Los Santos (Dissociation Nation) by 2girls1comp

I love the practice of modding when it is used as a form of artistic activism — to critique a game or the broader gaming industry by hijacking and recontextualising its content. One of this year’s standout examples is Meanwhile in Los Santos (Dissociation Nation), a mod for Grand Theft Auto V that shifts the focus to NPCs (non-player characters, the ‘extras’ of the gaming world). The mod pauses gameplay at random moments, pulling back to a God’s-eye view of the scene before zooming in on an arbitrary NPC and revealing their inner thoughts to the viewer.

These inner dialogues grant the NPCs a sense of consciousness absent in the regular game. Their self-aware thoughts act as a critique of GTA’s design – highlighting its lack of empathy, its reliance on violence as a narrative backbone, and the contradiction between its vast world and its focus on the fortunes of a very limited number of playable characters.

Heimatfilm by Marion Kellmann

The supercut is a fundamental staple of the video essay form, so simple that it is sometimes dismissed as too basic for serious analytical work. Marion Kellmann‘s Heimatfilm is proof to the contrary. She fashions excerpts from fifty different films into a quintessential supercut: by deftly combining recurring situations and motifs, Kellmann boils the German genre of the Heimatfilm down to its narrative, thematic and iconographic essence.

She hilariously shows how these films share the same sentimental portrayal of rural life, how themes such as family and community are obligatory, and how the simple pleasures of home life are idealised. The result is a full-fledged narrative short that can serve as a template for the whole genre.

Professor of Film Studies, and head of the Film Studies programme at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Videoessayist. Director of the UMass Online Graduate Certificate in Videographic Criticism 

Choosing a limited number of video essays is always a tough task, and with the field continuing to grow, it only becomes more challenging.

“This Is Not What I Normally Do” : An Insignificant Step in the Downfall of the Humanities by Ariel Avissar

I could easily fill my entire poll’s selection with Ariel Avissar’s work – all his videos are beautifully crafted and full of surprises, making him one of the most prolific, original, and skilled video essayists working today. “This Is Not What I Normally Do”: An Insignificant Step in the Downfall of the Humanities is likely my favourite one this year. It stands out for its blend of experimentation and academic reflection, presenting a deeply engaging and thoughtful exploration. By using constraints as a creative tool, Avissar reveals the joy and complexity of scholarly experimentation, showing how the process itself can enrich academic inquiry. But I was also impressed by At All Times (Laird’s Constraint), and by Heart and Mind (Warr’s Constraint). I would also add here that Ariel deserves a very special shoutout for continually creating initiatives that foster community in the field. In addition to the ongoing TV Star Dictionary, and the Screen Star Dictionary (in collaboration with Tecmerin and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega), this year he put together an impressive online workshop on parametric video exercises over the summer, and an audio experiment that engaged 24 participants in a collaborative exploration of sound. These projects are a testament to his dedication, generosity, and amazing leadership skills to build connections through creativity.

The Fits: A Structure of Feelings by Desirée de Jesús (Side Eye Cinema)

This video essay becomes a space where the process of deconstruction mirrors the fits of emotion and physical transformation that the film so intricately portrays, making the work both a reflection on the film and an expression of its own unique cinematic feeling. 

My Mother and Rita Moreno by Jeffrey Middents

My Mother and Rita Moreno is a deeply moving video essay about a son grappling with his mother’s memory loss, as she no longer recognises him. It explores the emotional toll and the power of music and dance to spark forgotten connections. Beautifully edited, it’s the most personal video essay I’ve seen, and watching it at the Celebrities Studies Conference was an unforgettable experience.

Deafening: The Sense of Sound [Re]verbed by Pavitra Sundar

Pavitra Sundar’s video essay is a profound exploration of sound, hearing, and embodiment through the lens of Sound of Metal (2019). It redefines deafness as a method of inquiry, dismantling ableist assumptions while embracing the multisensory and relational nature of sonic experience. Beautifully crafted, the video essay’s innovative use of captions invites viewers to reconsider what it means to listen, perceive, and connect, and what sounds and voices mean in videographic criticism.

Belén Rueda. Screen Stars Dictionary. by Catherine Grant

Catherine Grant’s video essay on Belén Rueda for the Screen Stars dictionary is a mesmerising exploration of chiaroscuro, revealing the interplay of light and shadow in defining Rueda’s presence as the blonde of Spanish horror cinema. Expanding on her concept of Blonde Horror, Grant uses stunning editing to trace how Rueda’s hair color becomes a narrative and aesthetic device, embodying tension, vulnerability, fear, and power. This video essay invites viewers into a world where ‘chiaros’ and ‘scuros’ are not just visual contrasts but aesthetic choices imbued with symbolic meaning, capturing the complexity of Rueda’s roles.

Thelma & Louise: Rape Culture, Mudflaps, and Vaginal Horizons by Dayna McLeod

This bold and imaginative video essay reclaims Thelma & Louise as a powerful feminist statement, stripping away male perspectives to centre the protagonists’ defiance against patriarchal violence. Through inventive techniques like animation and split screens, it gives voice to objectified women and transforms their final leap into a radical act of liberation. Created by an absolutely intelligent, witty, and creative mind, and edited with stunning precision, this is a masterful, visceral and provocative, re-visioning of an iconic film. 

Knit One, Stab Two by Alison Peirse

For its originality, sharp feminist criticism, and sophisticated editing techniques, this video essay firmly secures a place in my top 10 video essays of all time. Knitting – usually associated with aging white women relegated to the margins – becomes a site of subversive power and resistance in Alison Peirse’s Knit One, Stab Two’ By re-centring these women, rewriting their narratives, and reframing kitting as a feminist act of agency rather than a marker of passivity, the video essay critiques entrenched stereotypes and highlights the erasure of women’s contributions, both on and off-screen. It also reclaims and recontextualises film history, offering a vital feminist perspective that disrupts patriarchal narratives and opens up new ways of seeing and understanding cinema.

The voters on this poll were given the option to highlight ‘emerging voices’ in the video essay community. Some contributors chose to direct readers to specific videos, while others focused on an essayist’s whole body of work.

Natalia Benavent, Marta Castellanos, and Sandra Chavarrías (nominated by Barbara Zecchi)

La violencia en el cine coreano, by Natalia Benavent, Marta Castellanos, and Sandra Chavarrías (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid), is an insightful and well-researched video essay that explores the prominence of violence in South Korean cinema, connecting it to cultural and historical contexts. The analysis is both engaging and rigorous, presented with sharp commentary, humor, and a lively, well-paced voiceover. The thoughtful organisation and strong delivery make this work stand out. Subtitling it into English would allow it to reach a broader audience and gain the recognition it truly merits.

May Santiago (nominated by Barbara Zecchi)

May Santiago’s video essay on Aubrey Plaza is a sharp, beautifully edited piece that pulses with energy and thoughtfulness. Santiago’s intelligence and skill are unmistakable, and not only in this piece. Santiago’s work is vital in amplifying Puerto Rican film and media production, contributing significantly to its visibility and cultural recognition. 

Rose Steptoe (nominated by Barbara Zecchi)

Rose Steptoe’s Croned is a stunning video essay that reclaims the crone figure as a site of resistance against ageism and ableism. Through an original examination of time, gesture, and the ‘monstrous feminine,’ the author integrates two frameworks – feminist critiques of aging, and disability studies – to explore the overlap and differences between aging and disability. Rose Steptoe shows remarkable talent. Definitively a very promising emerging voice in the field of videographic criticism (and also in aging studies!).

Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan (nominated by Jemma Saunders)

I was lucky enough to see a video essay by Nilüfer at the SCMS conference this year, which expertly blended theory and practice while being genuinely entertaining. I very much hope it finds a place where others can enjoy it in the future and can’t wait to see more of her videographic work, which often focuses on mapping and cartography.

Jonathan Leggett (nominated by Delphine Jeanneret)

Jonathan Leggett recently directed the essay Better Not Kill the Groove in which he recounts a past traumatic experience with the distance of collected online images. Through scootering and self-development, a young boy in quest of identity explores his relationship to his body and emotions. Made from net found footage the film follows his character’s attempts to respond to his existential dismay.

Luna Mahoux (nominated by Delphine Jeanneret)

In The Other Queen of Memphis, Luna Mahoux meets Rapper Lachat (Chastity Daniels) who takes us on a journey through her own stories, guiding us through a city full of ghosts and dreams. Memphis is the city where Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 at the Lorraine Motel, and it was never the same after that. We see music queens and ghosts from a time that cannot be named. 

Quan Zhang (nominated by Lucy Fife Donaldson)

Zhang produces consistently astonishing work which transforms my understanding of the videographic with each piece, whether that’s her KwAIdan video essay for Doing Women’s Global Horror Film History, the work she produced for Ariel Avissar’s parametric series this summer, or the reconfiguration of Shane Denson’s interactive video essay on Don’t Look Now (which I linked to). I look forward to having my mind blown by everything she makes! 

Celia Sanz (nominated by Lucy Fife Donaldson)

I became aware of Sanz’s work during Ariel Avissar’s parametric summer series and was consistently wowed by her audiovisual sensibilities which took the exercises in exciting and inventive directions. 

WatchingtheAerial (nominated by Queline Meadows)

This channel was one of my favorite discoveries this year. Each video is deeply researched (with citations!) and showcases a strong knowledge of filmmaking technology. WatchingtheAerial does a great job of breaking down difficult-to-understand technical topics in an engaging way, and I’m excited to see what they create in 2025.