Countdown to FILMADRID: Stranger/Things
(not that one)
Hello ~
I’m a filmmaker, writer and instructor. What have you done lately? I will use this platform to blog about my experiences in Spain at FILMADRID, one of the premiere international film festival events for video essays. It’s fancy.
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Starting in 2019, I had four video essays selected by FILMADRID and MUBI spread out over a period of four years. As I anticipate my experience at the fest next month, I’m going to repost those four video essays here.
Here’s the first one:
Wenders' THE STATE OF THINGS and Jarmusch's STRANGER THAN PARADISE are films that "shared the same bath water". This pleasantly roving video essay connects them - sometimes by free association, sometimes by mining their production histories: WINNER: 2nd Place, Adelio Ferrero Festival OFFICIAL SELECTION: Orlando Film Festival, Filmadrid International Film Festival, Ethnografilm Festival.
If you are unfamiliar with video essays, they generally fall into two camps: poetic or explanatory/academic. The academic ones are mostly created by teachers in academia and rely on rigorous ethics, citations and intertexuality. Poetic ones can be more personal, elliptical, less objective.
I find I am often making poetic video essays, but that could change. There is an abundance of video essays all over the Internet. You got to separate the wheat from the chaff a lot of the time, but keep it here and I will point you to some excellent work.