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The Personal Mediascape in the Age of Videographic Heterotopias:
An Introduction
Joel Burges1
What does it mean for a scholar of media to get personal? What happens when they understand their spectatorship as deeply intimate in nature after approaching that practice at an academic distance for years? How can we enter into the psychically charged and embodied experiences of being personal spectators without disavowing the expertise we have developed as academic ones? How does videographic criticism answer a scholarly desire for a more personal—and thus more uncomfortably vulnerable in academia—reconfiguration of media that the critic actively recalls, half-recollects, or resists remembering, perhaps because they have intellectually sublimated how media mapped them as subject and self once upon a screen?2 These questions animate this cluster. In it, we propose three concepts: the mode of experience we call a “personal mediascape,” the associated notion of the “personal spectator,” and an audiovisual genre of writing we refer to as a “videographic heterotopia.” We hope readers-cum-viewers of the cluster will evolve and adapt these concepts after encountering the prologue, ten video essays, and the epilogue gathered here.
Across the video essays, practices of spectatorship such as memory, nostalgia, and eulogy; archives, aging, and unremembering; coping, commemoration, and decolonization; and bodies, shadows, and erasures become the contributors’ means of giving individuated and intimate form to the films, television shows, songs, YouTube videos, GPS maps, software programs, home videos, dance numbers, drawings, and magazines that have mediated them personally over the years. These video essays are bookended by a prologue and an epilogue. Embedded above is the prologue from Catherine Grant, who is a force in the field of videographic criticism. There she beautifully opens up a meditative point of entry into both this introduction and the cluster by constellating all the contributors’ video essays in relation to their own reflections on the act of getting personal about media. At the end of the cluster, Alan O’Leary, also a force in the field, responds to the personal mediascapes and videographic heterotopias with an epilogue. In it, he uses a performative and parametric approach that turns on the phrase “I remember” to engage what it might mean to claim memory instead of mastery as the method of videographic criticism.3
A significant inspiration for “The Personal Mediascape in the Age of Videographic Heterotopias” is Cormac Donnelly’s remarkable 2022 video essay “Can I Remember It Differently?”4 It begins with a split screen. On the right side is a DVD container of Minority Report, star Tom Cruise’s face in profile with scenes from the film superimposed on it. On the left side is film theorist Victor Burgin, speaking about “the time of the human subject” and especially “the après-coup, as the French put it, something that hits you hard, long after the event, something that didn’t mean very much at the time but later in retrospect becomes very influential, even traumatic.” At the moment that Burgin says the après-coup is “something that hits you,” he claps his hands, and Donnelly freezes the image of Burgin on the left and replaces the one of the DVD container on the right with the same image of Burgin still in motion, still talking. He continues in double as the video essay sets up a theoretical lens for what will turn out to be a personally felt and physically mediated account of how Minority Report stirs up the meaning of being a father for Donnelly.
Donnelly’s voice takes over after the fascinating concept of the après-coup is introduced, reminding us that, as John Rajchman puts it, “our unconscious is the memory of what we have forgotten.”5 Donnelly recounts how in 2002 he wrote a review of Minority Report for an online magazine, an unpaid gig he hoped would lead to full-time work at a magazine as a professional critic. This plan didn’t work out, and Donnelly largely forgot the film until he was hit hard by an après-coup embodied by four words from the review, “loss of his son.” In returning to Minority Report, Donnelly turns from the professional work of reviewing the film at the start of his video essay to the personal labor of remembering the film, especially one scene about a dead son that, along with another from the film, evokes a memory for Donnelly of when he lost track of his own son at the zoo. In the former scene, the protagonist John Anderton, played by Cruise, recalls his dead son Sean with a holographic video he made of him running towards him, now stuck in time, stuck in a motion he will never complete. Donnelly explains that John replays this video ritualistically again and again.
After years of having not thought about—much less actively remembered—Minority Report, Donnelly finds himself compulsively and repeatedly returning to this scene of John compulsively and repeatedly watching his dead son running. In “Can I Remember It Differently?” that which Donnelly thought he had forgotten, that which seemed to have no meaning at all when he initially encountered the whole film, returns in part, a remainder that recurs as a fragment and a flash. Although he had “no specific memories” of the film, he now cannot separate it from his life as a parent. In fact—or rather, in fantasy—Donnelly goes so far as to re-shoot the holographic video “with the help of my son, [liberating] Sean Anderton from the closed loop of the film’s narrative, and re-project[ing] him into our own new experience of this cinematic moment. In truth then, for me, it is in the making of this moment, this short walk down a quiet lane with my son, which is both the challenge and reward of making this video essay.”
I have lingered at ekphrastic length on Donnelly’s essay not only to mark the insights that the simultaneously academic and aesthetic work of videographic criticism can yield for those less familiar with it, but also because the form and feeling of this essay hit both Allison Cooper and me hard enough for it to become a major point of departure for “The Personal Mediascape in the Age of Videographic Heterotopias.” What first hit us hard about “Can I Remember This Differently?” is how Donnelly navigates a personal mediascape as a mode of experience. While Donnelly’s video essay does not disavow the academic, the theoretical, and the intellectual in its deft use of Burgin and, later, a lecture by philosopher Shelley Kagain about death, it nonetheless revels in the stuff of personal life that has historically been gendered as feminine–feeling, emotion, and affect; physicality, embodiment, and materiality; parenthood, intimacy, and relationality.6 In so doing, it traverses a personal mediascape by delving less into an argument about Minority Report as a singular film than, as he also writes in the accompanying statement, an exploration of “[his] feelings about Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report.” This exploration includes Donnelly “immersing [himself] in the physical archive of the film, seeking out some of the para-textual material which accompanied the film’s release” so he could “physically engage with the prompt text” he’d been given, all of which led to the collaboration with his son. Clearly a mode of research familiar to many academics, Donnelly’s immersion becomes something other than academic research in his video essay: the intimate labor of remembering a forgotten and perhaps forgettable film in textual bits and paratextual pieces.
A mode of experience made up of complexes of images, sounds, words, and stories, personal mediascapes can become occasions for what we call a “videographic heterotopia,” as when Donnelly immerses himself in the bits and pieces of Minority Report to imagine a different script for Anderton’s dead son with Donnelly’s own son.7 This is the second way in which “Can I Remember It Differently?” hit both of us hard enough to edit this cluster. The idea of heterotopian forms extends back to Michel Foucault’s famous essay “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Invoking spaces such as cemeteries, gardens, fairgrounds, museums, libraries, archives, and movie theaters, Foucault speculates that heterotopias “are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.” “The heterotopia,” he continues, “is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible,” not to mention several times. Heterotopias, in short, are also often heterochronies.8
Following Foucault, the personal mediascape may, as we used to say, always already be heterotopian and heterochronic in that it brings together textual bits and paratextual pieces of media from across time in taking shape. But it does so with an important difference from the physical places Foucault lists in “Of Other Spaces.” Instead of being an outside of everyday life and external to functioning society, the personal mediascape is inside of each of us. In this mode of experience, we draw from the sounds, images, words, and stories we encounter in reality as so many remainders that mix and remix an internal counter-site where we are both subject and self (where we are, as Rachel Haidu might remind us, each our own and each one another beyond the condition of being “perpetually inside [the] reproductive structures” of subjecthood).9 This counter-site is what the videographic heterotopia makes visible and audible by interfacing with the internalized bits and pieces of our personal mediascapes using the tools of non-linear editing. Those tools help to materialize those mediascapes in the world at large.
“Can I Remember It Differently?” not only makes such a counter-site visible and audible in this way but also explicitly understands the videographic work it does in heterotopian terms in briefly alluding to Burgin’s discussion of Foucault’s concept in The Remembered Film: “what we may call the ‘cinematic heterotopia’ is constituted across the variously virtual spaces in which we encounter displaced pieces of films: the Internet, the media, and so on, but also the psychical space of a spectating subject that Baudelaire first identified as ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness.’”10 But what is this “spectating subject”? We offer the “personal spectator” as a supplement to the “possessive spectator” and the “pensive spectator” Laura Mulvey identifies in Death 24x a Second. Obsessed with details, the possessive spectator “feminizes” the film “with the weakening of narrative and its effects,” whereas the pensive spectator’s fixation on the cinematic fragment makes time and history appear, or rather, makes the multiple temporalities of film decipherable in the fragment that is the wellspring of curiosity for them.11 The personal spectator often traffics in an obsession with details akin to that of the possessive spectator, resuming moments from media that have afterlives within them. But what differentiates the personal spectator, especially when they turn to the videographic heterotopia as their genre of audiovisual writing, is the direction in which they take what it means to be pensive. The direction is internal and interior, a movement into the mediascape within that aims to give videographic form to subjectivity and self in a heteropian way.
An increasingly widespread art of the present, videographic criticism often appeals to media scholars because it releases them to be personal spectators at least as much as disinterested experts, to interrupt academic regimes in which the personal is aggressively sublimated because it allows them to “write” with the sounds and images that they study—and that move them as subjects and selves. The verdict is still out on what, in his recent conversation on the relationship between prose and videographic media with Evelyn Kreutzer at The Video Essay Podcast, Alan O’Leary speculates is a “metasocial moment” in which the norms of academic writing are becoming less normalized and the normal science of publication as we’ve known it is opening up to other aesthetic modes and new media aesthetics.12 To build on O’Leary’s speculation, it may be that the art of videographic criticism, especially when it turns to the personal, allows for the creation of intellectual publics of a paradoxically more intimate and more general nature beyond the sometimes hermetic sphere of academic debate. The video essay may simply be more likely to be “read” than a peer-reviewed article by non-academic audiences, perhaps especially when it lays claim to personal experience. Whether this is a good or bad thing awaits judgment. Regardless of which, however, this is a compelling possibility for many of us putting up with a system of higher education that is, much like the wider world, increasingly hostile to the arts and the humanities as important fields of practice and study, not to mention fields in which current graduate students might find a sustainable career. Why pursue forms of publishing such as the peer-reviewed article or the monograph-oriented dissertation when the jobs for which these forms were designed are vanishing left and right?13
This pursuit of such possibilities is not only in the ten video essays and the prologue and epilogue gathered here, but also in work published in journals devoted to or making room for new modes of writing, such as videographic criticism, for scholars wanting to pursue them. In 2020, 2022, and 2023 respectively, the journals The Cine-Files and [in]Transition, published “Once Upon a Screen,” a series of individually and collaboratively made video essays that, as co-editors Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer explain, “emerged from a spontaneous idea: what if we put our academic preoccupations aside for a moment and used videographic practices to confront the most personal, intimidating, and visceral encounters with film during our childhoods?” In a 2023 issue of Feminist Media Studies entitled “Feeling Videographic Criticism,” Jennifer M. Bean curates a group of video essays that, on the one hand, engage “emotional states [as] a means of moving forward, of figuring out what to do next” and, on the other, evoke “the physical act of touching” and proprioception “as a means of orienting the body in space.” What interests Bean about the often emotional and embodied quality of works of videographic criticism is how it allows “us to feel their knowledge effects.”14 A related impulse is at work in “Sitting, Standing, Dancing with our Screens,” the audiovisual section of the Spring 2024 issue of NECSUS edited by Lého Galibert-Laîné. Inspired in part by the “Embodying the Video Essay” workshop held at Bowdoin College (of which both of us were co-organizers and almost all of our contributors and respondents were participants), Galibert-Laîné writes of “Sitting, Standing, Dancing with our Screens”: “By gathering five video essays that explore the bodily experiences and the various ‘carnal thoughts’ that our everyday screens elicit in us, this audiovisual essay section hopes to contribute to contemporary debates about desktop cinema’s capacity to translate in cinematic terms the tangible, material, and affective reality of our encounters with digitality.”15 All of these efforts are of a piece with the call for more personal vulnerability and less scholarly mastery that Johannes Binotto and Evelyn Kreutzer make in “A Manifesto for Videographic Vulnerability,” where they exclaim: “Let’s not make video essays to master anything!”
There are risks to embracing videographic vulnerability, feeling videographic criticism, prioritizing carnal thoughts, and getting personal in videographic heterotopias. These include a potential capitulation to a late-capitalist focus on the self in the digital mediascapes of present-day reality. As Domietta Torlasco contends in “The Impersonal Essay, or Montage as Memory of the World,” the turn to the personal, including in audiovisual genres of writing like videographic criticism, threatens to reify “a libidinal attachment to the self as producer/consumer of knowledge, beliefs, and lifestyles; an attachment that is experienced, and promoted, as a right to what is one’s own, in the sense of property.”16 They also include, to return to the questions with which we began, forsaking academic knowledge in favor of personal business.17 These are nonetheless risks that all the videographic heterotopias in this cluster take as they delve into whatever personal mediascape is at stake for them, not only rejecting mastery in the name of mediation and meditation but also, hopefully, interrupting reification in the name of reflexivity. As Hortense Spillers once wrote, “The view from here is old-fashioned. One might even call it lame, predicated as it is on the proposition that self-knowledge has its uses.”18
The old-fashioned uses of self-knowledge are on display in “The Personal Mediascape in the Age of Videographic Heterotopias” when the contributors project Pulp Fiction onto the dancing belly of a middle-aging queer woman and video artist (Dayna McLeod) and tap into the childhood memories of Meet Me in St. Louis formative for a half Mexican American film historian (Desirée Garcia). They offer up a choreographic eulogy to a dead friend in dialogue with an archive of films of Nordic women dancing (Amanda Doxtater) and reflect on the crack of Fred Astaire’s buoyant cane as a coping mechanism for lifelong depression (Will DiGravio). They reconstruct the racialized flow of images internalized from sitcoms by a late-twentieth-century generation of spectators (Allison Cooper) and meditate on the split subjectivity of being both a critic and a spectator fluent in two languages while viewing, with nothing but love for the film, Roma (Jeff Romero Middents). They engage in a kind of mnemonic meteorology, tracking the atmospheres generated by mediascapes, in one case, “at the edges of Soviet reality” (Victoria Paranyuk) and, in another, in the (post)dictatorship geography of Chile (Catalina Segú). They discover in Agnes Varda’s Documenteur “a depiction of female interiority in midlife, an exploration of the tension between female autonomy and the demands of caretaking, and a meditation on the secondary, shadow self—the person we are when no one is looking”19 (Sadia Quareshi Shepard) and mobilize the desidentificaciónes that unfold for a queer essay filmmaker “working through a deeply colonial, racist, and violent archive of early cinema … made in and about Puerto Rico” (May Santiago). There is, too, what is absent from this cluster, including one videographic heterotopia that went too far beyond the limits of the personal for one contributor’s comfort. This led him not to publish a video essay about Cruising and Call Me by Your Name here, as he had intended, because it finally felt too vulnerable to him, too close to his struggles with the afterlives of homophobia in both his professional life as a college professor where he works and his personal life as a white gay man in the world (Joel Burges).
All these video essays and their accompanying statements, moreover, emerged out of dialogue. Embracing the collaborative ethos that defines parts of the community that has developed globally around videographic criticism, each contributor was paired with another in an open process of peer review. The order of the contributions largely reflects these pairings, embodying the personal and academic dialogues that unfolded in bringing this cluster to life. That dialogue is extended through Grant’s prologue and O’Leary’s epilogue. We hope, too, that it will be further enlarged by those who experience this cluster and, perhaps, look inward to their own personal mediascapes in the age of videographic heterotopias themselves.
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Endnotes
- This cluster emerged out of a cross-institutional project among Bowdoin College, St. Andrews University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Rochester, and the University of Leeds funded by a Connection Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The Principal Investigators on this grant, “Embodying the Video Essay: Advanced Methods in Videographic Theory through Global Communities of Practice,” included Joel Burges, Allison Cooper, Lucy Donaldson, Colleen Laird, and Alison Peirse. Dayna McLeod was also central to “Embodying the Video Essay,” for which she designed a series of exercises for the workshops she led at the week-long event Cooper hosted as part of the grant at Bowdoin College in July 2023. These exercises, along with examples, can be found at Ways of Doing, a collaboration among Donaldson, Laird, McLeod, and Peirse that aims to foster “an ethical praxis of audiovisual research.” Several of the video essays featured here were first presented in the round table “The Personal Mediascape in the Age of Videographic Heterotopias” organized by Burges and Cooper at the annual meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2024. Burges and Cooper conceptualized and co-edited the cluster for ASAP/Review, Burges was the primary author of the introduction, and the contributors all collaborated on the peer review process in the open spirit of much of the intellectual public that has formed around videographic criticism.
- I allude here to three special issues I discuss in brief later in the introduction: Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer, “‘Once Upon a Screen’: Screen Traumas and Cinephilic Hauntings,” The Cine-Files 15 (Fall 2024), https://www.thecine-files.com/once-upon-a-screen-introduction/; “Once Upon a Screen, Volume 2, Part 1, Introduction,” [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic and Film and Moving Image Studies 9.3 (2022), https://mediacommons.org/intransition/once-upon-screen-vol-2-part-1-introduction-co-guest-editors; “Once Upon a Screen, Volume 2, Part 2, Introduction,” [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic and Film and Moving Image Studies 9.4 (2023), https://mediacommons.org/intransition/once-upon-screen-vol-2-part-2-introduction-co-guest-editors.
- On the parametric as a mode of videographic scholarship, see Alan O’Leary, “Workshop of Potential Scholarship: Manifesto for a Parametric Videographic Criticism,” NECSUS (Spring 2021).
- Cormac Donnelly, “Can I Remember It Differently?,” [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic and Film and Moving Image Studies9.3 (2022).
- John Rajchman, Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 39.
- On the history of personal life as a mass-mediated sphere defined by these qualities, especially in the history of capitalist modernity, see Lauren Berlant,The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) and Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). See as well the Oxford English Dictionary entry for “personal.”
- The thinking on the personal mediascape here is influenced by Arjun Appadurai’s discussion of the “mediascape” concept in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 35.
- Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité(October 1984): 3-4, 6, 6-7.
- Haidu contends that however much we have learned for decades that we are all subjects “perpetually inside reproductive structures: social and economic classes; racialized, colonial, and imperial fictions; constructs of gender and sexuality; ‘family romances,’” there are nonetheless “remainders: ideas or fantasies of uniqueness, interiority, and even the boundedness of our separate and separable selves. These remainders, or what is left ‘for us’ by our construction of ourselves, are what I refer to as the ‘self.’” These remainders, we want to add, are often left over from our memories of media; they are the half-recollected bits and vividly-recalled pieces that come together as personal mediascapes, engendering heterotopian energies within us as a place for both subjecthood and selfhood to unfold side by side. Rachel Haidu, Each One Another: The Self in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 2.
- Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 10.
- Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 165, 191-192.
- Alan O’Leary and Evelyn Kreutzer, “The Role of Writings on Video Essays,” The Video Essay Podcast, August 22, 2024.
- The formulation of this question is indebted to a conversation I had with Tracy Stuber, Digital Humanities Specialist at Harvard University, in August 2024. She is not alone in making such observations. “Speaking as someone in a more junior position than you,” Evelyn Kreutzer has rightly commented in a conversation with Johannes Binotto, “it’s something I’ve thought about a lot. Some people warned me that it might be too risky to start an academic career as a video essay scholar/maker because it is not as fully established yet as other fields and methods might be. At the same time, I often think that being in academia as a junior scholar is precarious no matter what, so I might as well go after what interests me most, even if from a more precarious position.” Johannes Binotto and Evelyn Kreutzer, “A Manifesto for Videographic Vulnerability,” Zeitschrift fur Medienwissenschaft, December 6, 2023.
- Jennifer M. Bean, “Introduction: Feeling Videographic Criticism,” Feminist Media Studies 9, no. 4 (2023), 9, 8.
- Lého Galibert-Laîné, “Sitting, Standing, Dancing with Our Screens: An Introduction,” NECSUS (Spring 2024).
- Domietta Torlasco, “The Impersonal Essay, or Montage as Memory of the World,” NECSUS (Autumn 2022), https://necsus-ejms.org/the-impersonal-essay-or-montage-as-memory-of-the-world/.
- Recounting the emotional autobiography of her family and femininity that they did not ultimately include in The Female Complaint, Berlant writes the following about a response to that omitted material: “Then a friend not from the humanities asked me, ‘Why are you airing your personal business here? Isn’t your knowledge the point?’ Right, I responded—well, in the humanities we try to foreground what motivates and shapes our knowledge, and a personal story can telegraph a perspective efficiently and humanly. I wasn’t happy with this somewhat canned response, though I also believe it. Yet the autobiographical isn’t the personal….The personal is the general. Publics presume intimacy” (vii).
- Hortense J. Spillers, “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 376.
- This quotation is taken from an earlier version of Shepard’s accompanying creator’s statement.
Catherine Grant
Joel Burges