A short essay about video essays and the End of History

I do enjoy a good video essay. Indeed, if I knew how to do it, this blog post would be a video essay. (You'll see what I mean.)

By "video essay", I mean an opinionated piece of criticism or commentary, in the manner of a written essay, but presented by means of video. I don't mean a videoed lecture or a TED talk, fun as those might be [CUT TO extracts from TED talk parodies], but rather an essay in which video - the moving picture itself - is an intrinsic element of the presentation of the argument.

The genre is not new. Kenneth Clark's Civilisation might be regarded as an extended video essay, and television has hosted many other personal documentaries or documentaries that try to pursue a line of argument. Perhaps I can't define the video essay, but I know it when I see it. [CUT TO Clark's "I recognise civilisation when I see it".]

However, the genre has undoubtedly been turbocharged and democratised by YouTube. The barriers to entry are now much lower and they have proliferated. Many are no good, of course, but the best are very good. [CUT TO - but you've got the picture. This would have been better with some video along the way.]

That proliferation is a good thing. However, since YouTube is not as legible to the likes of me as the old TV listings used to be, I have had to spend a bit of time looking for recommendations. I found that fun video about unicorns that I linked to in my piece about fantasy literature recently, but, overall, the effort has been a little disappointing. The unicorn video was a one-off and it turns out that the two best sources of video essay are ones with which I was already familiar, namely Every Frame a Painting (try "Vancouver Never Plays Itself", "In Praise of Chairs" or the one on Edgar Wright, which changed my mind) and Nerdwriter (try "Parasite's Perfect Montage" or "Passengers, Rearranged", if you know these films, or "The Death of Socrates" if you don't), and of these only the Nerdwriter is still producing videos, and there are not many from him recently. 

The video essay is not necessarily about films. I think it works well for the visual arts, with the camera zooming in to focus on a detail that the author is commenting on, or zooming out to show elements of composition or colours, or cutting to a contrasting artwork. Similarly, music is a good subject: we can hear the music while seeing the score, perhaps, or cut between different performances of the same song or piece. But films are well suited to the video essay format: writing about music might be like dancing about architecture, but it's hard to argue with filming about film.

That means that a lot of the not-bad-but-not-quite-first-rank video essayists are film critics. One video essayist film critic who gets quite a few recommendations is Now You See It. Have a look - you might like it. 

An essay from Now You See It that made me think was this piece about the films of 1999. The way I would summarise the thesis is that 1999 was the year between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 in which things were going well (in the US, in the West) but that in iself tended to make people a little dissatisfied. Think of The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, Being John Malkovich, The Sixth Sense, Galaxy Quest: the world itself, our current, everyday reality, seems really nice and lovely but .... something. But maybe it isn't really nice, not under the surface? Or maybe it is nice, but it's just boring and needs to be spiced up? Or maybe it's "nice" and therefore utterly absurd or futile?

This point seems obvious now that it has been pointed out. And I find it striking that it is also one of the central theses of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History: where people don't have conflict they will nonetheless try to seek it out.

The End of History came out in 1992 and indeed it seems to me that the point is not limited to the films of 1999. Other very good films from the End of History 1990s - films as different as Groundhog Day and Jurassic Park - take it for granted that life is generally good and that drama can only come from making some frankly implausible changes to the structure of society or even reality, such as the wholly unexplained repetition of one day, or dinosaurs. Toy Story, Speed, Mrs Doubtfire, the Home Alone series - I could go on - they all take the implicit premise that society and the world in general, at least in the US, are basically fine - everything works! life is good! - and a pretty big twist is required to achieve drama.

Why does this matter? Well, 1999 is generally thought to have been a very good year for films. Ideally I would show you a montage of books and articles here but instead I'll give you some Google results:

This is interesting. I think there is a theory that the societal upheavals of the 1970s (in the US) led to better, richer, conflicted films, while the sunny complacency of the 1980s produced rom-com, space opera or action adventure pap. We might think of this as the Third Man theory of art: see Orson Welles and the cuckoo clock. But perhaps the 1990s give the lie to this theory. 1999 was a pretty decent year for life in the West, and it also produced some pretty decent films.

Another theory is that art requires constraints. Censorship, the Hays Code, the Lord Chamberlain's office - think of the high quality art produced while these restrictions were in place, and compare that with the rubbish produced in the modern, anything goes, era. But again, what about 1999? Anything went in the 1990s: 9 Songs is 2004, but that's near enough, and American Pie and Eyes Wide Shut, both of which would have fallen foul of some kinds of censorship, are both 1999 films. 1999 was a pretty relaxed year for artistic constraints, and yet it produced some pretty decent films.

So, 9/11 happened, the 2008 crash happened and all the rest of it, from terrorism to Trump and from wars in the Middle East to wokeness at home. The End of History ended, and that's a shame, not only for the people of the West, but also for their most popular artform.

On the other hand, we now have the video essay.

[CUE lively music and CUT TO me in my bedroom speaking very quickly to recommend that you buy something from the kind sponsor of this essay.]

[FADE TO BLACK]