Academic and video essayist Catherine Grant on the creative possibilities or remixing as critical practice
Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) / Rites of Passage (Catherine Grant, 2014)
On the occasion of our screening of Soda_Jerk’s TERROR NULLIUS at Close-up Film Centre we made an accompanying zine which featured several writers and artists engaging in some way with notions of collage and re-mix. We were lucky enough to speak to academic and video essayist Catherine Grant for the zine about how she came to work in video essays and the legal pitfalls of the medium - in the printed material we used a handful of extracts, below is the conversation presented more fully.
ALT/KINO: What was it that first attracted you to the video essay format?
Catherine Grant: I didn’t really know I would like working with video essays until I tried it, so in a way the question for me is ‘why did I try it?’ I guess it was timing. I started thinking about all this and really beginning to be tempted to make things about 2008 and in 2009 I started making things, and at that point YouTube had only been online for a couple of years. So before that you couldn’t really share videos very easily, people were sharing them but they weren’t necessary broadly shared and they hadn’t reached my world at that point even though I was a film scholar. I think after YouTube I began to see people like Kevin Lee, Matt Zoller Seitz, people who were film critics making, I suppose what were initially, quite rudimentary pieces that nevertheless were fun and had energy and they were re-using film. And at that point I had been writing about the emergent forms of film culture that had been going from DVD culture, so I was writing about audio commentaries and thinking about extra features and how that was expanding our cinephile universe and I guess the things are connected. I’d been really inspired by certain DVD releases, like Timecode [2000] in particular. The Timecode DVD is just an amazing artefact - you can’t even do all the things on DVD players now that you could on the DVD players that that disc was made for. So I was writing about it and seeing what was kind of a participatory culture that was fairly amateur - although Matt Zoller Seitz and Kevin were being paid of some of their work as well - being shared online and thought ’that’s really interesting’ and then, I think, I just got a Mac.
Suddenly, I had iMovie and could find out how you rip DVDs and it was literally being equipped with user-friendly technology that meant I was encouraged to try experimenting, inspired by what everyone else was doing. So I just tried it. I think I tried to do it from the beginning as much as a film scholar as a film critic, I did want to go into it with maybe more detail and more background knowledge. That’s not to put down what was online - some of it, especially Matt and Kevin was very knowledgeable - but academics are a bit of a different species. Anyway, I started doing it but when I did what attracted me were the creative possibilities. It wasn’t just those moments where you’re just talking and saying something interesting over a clip; it might be the way you make the clip move instead of just leaving it how it moves itself, or things like zooming in on details and so I started doing crazy things even in that first video essay and that’s what I really go addicted to. After that, even the next one didn’t have voiceover, it was using montage, and that really took me into the realm of the kinds of experiments that people in the artistic remix world like Soda_Jerk and so on were doing, and being inspired by people that were inspiring them, so early generations of early avant-garde artists. So I guess some of my video essays are very explanatory but most of them are compilations of some kind, often using split screens or multiple screens and I would like them to be not necessarily obvious as scholarly works or critical works, but that they might give you a new experience of something. I’m less interested in what is obviously the most popular form of video essay online, which is the voiceover and the people who maintain a YouTube channel by performing a persona in relation to the film material. I like some of that work - and there are some brilliant female video essayists doing it, and great people like The Nerd Writer and so on - but I don’t really like using my own voice very much, and I don’t really like pontificating about things verbally, I’d much rather explore things through editing.
A/K: So that kind of brings me on to your video essay Rites of Passage which eschews voiceover in an exploration of all the moments that Joan Fontaine goes through doorways, or crosses thresholds, in Hitchcock’s Rebecca [1940]. It’s fascinating in the way it highlights something which arguably isn’t really noticeable in the text as typically consumed - and isn’t necessarily part of the filmmaker’s intention. It’s an amazing piece and I wondered whether you think these kind of deeper readings are common in academic practice like yours, and is that something you enjoy exploring? That’s something of a loading question…
CG: [Laughs] It is, but yes. I think I got other jobs after that moment that I was experimenting like this and I think those other jobs were all interested in me because I was doing these other things - which was great and meant it wasn’t like I had to not do them as part of my academic job. Pretty quickly other people could see, maybe not as much as I could, how related it was to what film studies had been. I mean, people like Laura Mulvey have been doing this for years, making films with film crews in the 70s but since then working with editors including doing remixes, so I didn’t see it as being histoircally separate anyway but I could also see that students who were messing around on their phones and doing things with editing were also going to be interested in this. Not everyone is but many people are, especially when you introduce them to it, the levels of enthusiasm that I’ve seen have matched my own quite a lot. And there’s something about the institutional context which is making it possible.
I think with Rites of Passage, that one in particular was one that was really born - and the accompanying essay makes it clear - of earlier work that I’d done. The difference was that you did all that early work, you had all that enthusiasm, you noticed all things things, you enjoyed reading the books, and then you put all of those positive emotional things out of the way and you sat down and got serious and wrote your essay - they were kept very separate. But everybody went through the things you used to keep out of it and I suppose for me the biggest attraction, apart from being drawn to film editing, and audiovisual editing generally, is that I just stopped shutting that stuff out, instead allowing it more into my work. I just found that doing my work was easier, I think even writing was easier after I started to make things - because I was, with that essay, really interested in telling the story of how I make these crazy things.
Rites of Passage was absolutely about seeing something that may not have been in the foreground of the individual filmmaker’s intention, but certainly may have been there in the subconscious of that genre and so people have written a lot about the gothic romance and how it’s attached to buildings and spaces and as I say in the essay, I wasn’t the first person to notice the number of times the heroine - well, maybe the *exact* number of times, I was the first person to notice - but the fact that the heroine is constantly exploring this house people had written about a lot. But for me the way that when you really start taking that seriously… I did the same with a video essay on Brief Encounter [1945], Dissolves of Passion, which collects all of the dissolves in Brief Encounter. Again, something you might vaguely notice, that there are a lot more dissolves in that film, but what does it mean when you add them all together? And you kind of create these mini movies that tell the story the film just in those bits, and I think I’ve been really interested in that. And there’s no way on earth you could really experience what it feels like to join them all up other than by doing it. And then when you start doing it you start making all these aesthetic choices about how to make that a meaningful experience, so it’s far from just a scientific study of just collecting something - although I think a lot of supercuts online are just a boring collection of stuff.
A/K: Yes, there are many that are nice to watch but it can be hard to see whether there’s something deeper happening or not.
CG: Yes. And I don’t know if I hadn’t written that accompanying essay whether you would have found as much in Rites of Passage, but in a way that’s also what I allow myself. For me it’s not a question of either or. I definitely am primarily an audiovisual essayist but for me that also means writing about my work, reflecting on it, and maybe making some verbal claims about it that I don’t need to have in the work. In a way, because I give myself the freedom not to have voiceover, I give myself the freedom to write or not to write about it. Sometimes for me it’s a piece of multimedia work that might have different components - I’m just about to publish something that has three videos that are all connected, and then a piece of writing that makes sense of them and hopefully connects them up even more, so for me the writing can often be quite important as well.
A/K: Yes, it’s interesting thinking of Rites of Passage without the essay, because it really makes it.
CG: Exactly, it does make it. And I view myself as an online video essayist and in the online environment you can create that constellation of different elements that can be meaningful together. I certainly imagine that many of my peers as academics, when they’re confronted by a page with a video at the top then writing below are probably going to go to the writing first, I actually want people to watch the video first, and maybe video essayists aren’t interested in the writing. So there are lots of different entry points.
A/K: On that note, I was interested to hear about the legal side of this kind of work and your relationship to that. I’m very conscious of Soda_Jerk’s practice aligning quite directly with a challenge to stringent copyright laws.
CG: One of the reasons my attention was drawn very much to this also had to do with copyright. So Kevin Lee in 2009 had his YouTube account taken down, because of one video he’d made - I don’t know if he’d made hundreds by then but he’d certainly made dozens and dozens - and it was taken down not by a commercial copyright holder but by a French archive. They didn’t necessarily own the rights for the film all over the world but they decided to take issue with the fact that he was making a video about one of their films and it was the beginning of a fightback online by video essayists because when that happened we all went “what?!” Kevin kind of publicised this on his blog and other people publicised it - I publicised it - and we kind of together got a head of steam and anger going. I don’t know if what we did directly affected YouTube in what they went on to do, but in the first instance they put Kevin’s work back online because everybody was just then educating themselves about what, in the US context, is called Fair Use. They were saying to YouTube ‘this is outrageous, it’s definitely a work of criticism, it only uses enough material from the work in order to make it’s point, and it is purely - although it doesn’t matter if it is, but it happens to be - for non-commercial purposes’ and sort of making a case.
So from the beginning for me this was connected to copyright and I recommend for anybody that it ought to be connected to thinking about that because you can’t just start doing this without thinking about the legal ramifications of sharing your work. Technically, in the UK, it is illegal to rip a DVD, but it’s only since the law was introduced to even recognise the digital that’s been the case. Before then everything was illegal but in 2014 they changed the law and originally you could rip DVDs but the next year various creative industries wrote to the government and got that bit rescinded. So its not strictly speaking true that you can do anything in the privacy of your own home, you can’t, but clearly there are things that can’t be easily policed in that domain. Obviously where people have to be especially careful in obeying the law is in what they share online. Especially now because it may have been the case that this French archive saw a verbal mention of Kevin’s video essay about this film and sought to argue for its takedown. Now, of course, algorithms do that job, it’s not about copyright holders noticing where their work is used they can create data driven tools to find it anywhere and that makes for a more hostile environment online, for sure.
In the UK, it’s not that we have more draconian law, it’s just that we have a different law - and that’s one of the problems internationally for copyright. What you do here won’t necessarily help your video if it’s illegal in another territory. So in terms of making it you have to obey the law of the country that you actually making it in, but when you share it those other jurisdictions may also come into play and you can’t know in advance about that. And that’s the central problem. With Fair Use and Fair Dealing - which have relatively similar understandings of certain purposes for which you can use copyrighted material, or certain exceptions to copyright for certain purposes - the problem is that there’s no universally understood standard of what those things look like. What does criticism look like? It’s one of the purpose for which we can do those things, but what is criticism? Is criticism a piece of copyrighted material with sombody’s voice all over it, or somebody’s captions all over it? How much is fair use and how much is unfair use? Those are all things that when you sit down to make something you have to, in a way, it’s an act of faith. You’ve got to do in knowledgeably, there are certain things that will obviously not be fair use but actually you don’t really know what they are.
A/K: Have you ever had problems with your work being available online?
CG: You know, I’ve made maybe close to 200 videos and at least 150 of them have been shared publicly over the last ten years and I’ve only had one problem in that time and it was one I was thinking I might have a problem with at the time I made it. So, basically, it’s a video that I made when David Bowie died and I wanted to make a tribute because that’s one of the things that I often do. For me it is a scholarly activity and I’ve written about the way that those special feelings that we have as fans and the way that we might make tributes about them can make a direct contribution to fields like star studies. So I’ve made a lot of academic arguments about that. But this one I made using a music video of his that was connected to his last album, which had been released a few days before he died - and it was the Lazarus music video.
I just noticed as soon as I watched it, which was before he died, that it really reminded me of the dream sequence in Buñuel’s Los Olvidados [1950]. That might seem like ‘really?’ but actually when you put them side-by-side it was incredible. Apart from the fact the two things lasted nearly exactly the same amount of time, there were so many motifs and setups - things under beds, over beds - movements, gestures that felt to me that there was an act of homage or an act of reworking going on in this video. So I slapped the two things side-by-side and I didn’t put any music over the top because obviously you had the Lazarus song and some of the lyrics were relevant to this idea of the comparison as well - ideas of mortality and so on. But I didn’t put it up immediately, I thought ‘no, you’re bound to have a problem with this’ and then I noticed in the period immediately after he died that people were sharing things in a way that they hadn’t before. Perhaps there was some let-up in the music publishing industry’s interest in his work immediately after, and also the music video was a piece of publicity - that’s what music videos are - so I didn’t feel I was doing anything wrong. I wasn’t stealing something that was for sale, but I guess the song was for sale so that’s always an issue for music videos. Anyway, I crossed my fingers and hoped and technically the worst thing that can happen in the first instance is that the video gets taken down and three years ago that would have just been one video taken down.
Anyway, in 2018 I did have my first takedown of that video, three years after it had been online, and basically, it was the music publishing interest that obviously operated control of, or defence of, that part of the estate and they were based in the UK and I was then privy, if you like, for the first time to what happens when you have a takedown. And at Vimeo, where this was, the new policy is ‘three strikes and you’re out.’ That was not the case when I’d put this video online, so if I’d known that, I might have thought ‘oh God, maybe it really is not worth trying to risk numerous takedowns.’ I’d never done anything in a cavalier way before but this maybe was a little more along those lines than I would normally recommend to other people. So anyway to cut a long story short I decided that I wasn’t going to fight the claim. I could have won at Vimeo because although I hadn’t published it myself and written about it, I’d put it online and lots of other people had, lots of film critical websites had embedded this video and written about it and written about what I’d said in my tiny caption about it so clearly I could demonstrate it was being used at criticism. So I could win at Vimeo but I felt that this particular copyright holder might take me elsewhere and that’s the big risk. It happened with Channel Criswell’s use of some Kubrick film music in one of his videos and eventually, that was settled out of court but it was one of the rare occasion where YouTube had put the video back online and the litigiousness had continued. I didn’t want that to happen. So I’m now in the position where I’ve got one strike against me, and two more and they take out my entire account which you can imagine is bad enough for anyone but for an academic who depends on those videos being online because they have been published everywhere, that’s going to leave lots of holes in lots of publications and I don’t know what I would do about that. So it’s difficult at the moment.
I’m very in favour of what Soda_Jerk are doing, I think there’s a very important role for artists who are - not putting their work online, they’re working in a different economy and a different institutional setting entirely - but whatever they do will help because they are at the cutting edge, the avant-garde of the battle. They’re very vocal, and they’re very provocative in their work as well, in a way that I’m very in favour of and they’re working with the concept that we don’t have in UK law and they don’t have in Australian law which is transformation. So in the UK one of the biggest areas that doesn’t correspond directly to Fair Use in relation to our Fair Dealing understanding, is that in the US transformative works are one of the purposes for which you can use copyrighted work. So then you don’t have to demonstrate that’s it’s critical because it’s a transformation, whereas here I have to demonstrate that it’s criticism or study. So they are working in the realms of transformation; they make their works their own, maybe what we don’t do so much in the video essay world - and yet it’s what I would like to be able to do and what I do do with some of my work and I would argue that the Bowie video, which was called Los Olvidados Lazarus was a transformative work because the song was no longer available in the version that was for sale, it was mixed with the soundtrack from Los Olvidados in that scene, so in a way, it couldn’t have harmed the commercial value. People wouldn’t watch that video and think ‘I’m not going to buy that song now’ because my video had a different soundtrack. So that would have been the case that I would have raised but nonetheless, these things can be very risky and because they’re based on arguability only, and if you asked 100 lawyers what they think about your case and gave them a lot of money to respond, they’d probably give you different positions, so there’s not even one accepted legal understanding of this yet.
Catherine Grant is Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the founding editor of REFRAME and the author of the Open Access scholarly website Film Studies For Free. Many of her video essays can be found on her Vimeo.