Learning from popular genres – with help from the audiovisual essay

Abstract

It is sometimes observed that the burgeoning form of the audiovisual essay (of the analytic kind that has been featured in recent issues of NECSUS) is good for close, detailed work on individual films, television episodes, or digital art works, but less suitable for the type of broader contextual, historical, or industrial investigations that frequently characterise the screen studies field today. While not necessarily agreeing with that summation, we do feel that once audiovisual essays broach these wider contexts they inevitably cross over into a much vaster field: documentary. Indeed, experiments in the audiovisual essay (which frequently return us to the theory and practice of montage in its most essential and dynamic form) have much to teach makers of documentary. That, however, is a debate for another time and place. In this issue the audiovisual essays we have assembled point to another kind of expansion beyond the analytic focus on a single film. Audiovisual essays can raise issues and explore methods of screen genre analysis that the often clunky form of the linear, written treatise (proposing a generic model and then trudging through dozens or hundreds of examples) cannot easily achieve. Our specific focus here is on aspects of popular genres. One of the chosen audiovisual essays looks at the mechanics, or poetics, of a typical genre scene; the other inspects the often undervalued and underresearched realm of performance through the example of a highly-skilled Audiovisual essays edited by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin