This week I chose a videographic essay that focuses on the video-clip of Daydreaming, a track from the 9th studio-album of the band Radiohead. This video-essay does an amazing job at deconstructing the video of the song and elevating it revealing the poetry behind it. Rishi Kaneria, the author of the essay, uses various techniques to do so:

  1. The manipulation and reorganization of the footage to reveal patterns,
  2. The manipulation and reorganization of sound to reveal hidden messages,
  3. The citation (and insertion) of lyrics, sound, and footage from other Radiohead songs to generate meaning that only people that listen to Radiohead on a regular-basis can access,
  4. Video markup and pausing to highlight the points made during voice over

This video is a good example of these elements coming together in a graceful and constructive way to allow the audience to gain a better understanding of the amount of work and thought that has gone into a work of art.

One of the main takeaways from both this video and the one that I commented on last week is that the video-essay is a great tool for accessibility and a way of sharing knowledge. We all watch great movies and watch great music videos, but we seldom all have the tools to make the most of them, be it knowledge of other works by the same author, analysis tools and analytical sensibility, the time to watch a material more than once, amongst others. The video essay makes meaning available for people who are not well equipped to find it in texts as well as give its audience the tools with which to tackle other texts. Now that we live in the youtube age, the video essay is an amazing tool to take the film out of the realm of academia into that of people’s lives. Isn’t that the goal of every art-form? To be seen, understood and to move as many as possible?