Reframing Screen Studies: Videographic Criticism and Collaborative Scholarship

By Samuel Santiago, Jacob Reese, and Meg Healy

As a burgeoning field of audiovisual analysis, videographic criticism allows film and screen studies scholars to analyze, dissect, and reimagine screen media in ways that promote insights previously limited by traditional modes of scholarship. Just as literary scholars produce written scholarship, film and screen studies scholars have begun producing scholarship in the same medium as their primary sources, through the use of editing software. As English PhD candidates with research interests in film and game studies, we (Samuel Santiago, Jacob Reese, and Meg Healy), formed a videographic working group to familiarize ourselves with the tools and techniques of video editing with the goal of uncovering the potential of this quickly growing mode of scholarly inquiry.

An obvious starting point was the Scholarship in Sound & Image workshop. Held annually at Middlebury College in Vermont, this renowned workshop promises to introduce scholars to the tools necessary to produce videographic work. Our working group sought to emulate the exercises and collaborative process of the Middlebury workshop, albeit closer to home. Using essays and examples available through the online text The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy by Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant, we worked through various constraint-based exercises that honed our editing skills, deepened our understanding of videographic techniques, and provided new insights into films we felt that we already knew well. 

Below, we include the results of our “multiscreen composition” exercises. This exercise tasks participants with pairing their own text with that of another group member, prompting the films to “speak” to one another by placing their imagery side by side within one frame. In effect, this exercise asked us to look “for ways in which the movies might show their potential for positive valence, echoing one another through visuals, sound, or dramatic intensity” (Keathley, et. al.). Incidentally, we all chose sci-fi films: Santiago working with Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), Reese working with Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1982), and Healy working with 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). As a result, there were a myriad of opportunities for potential overlap and valence, and, as we would find upon viewing each other’s works, plenty of opportunity for originality despite the use of the same texts.

Sam Santiago – Blade Runner 2049 and 2001: A Space Odyssey

I’ve been obsessed with the “baseline test” sequences of Blade Runner 2049 since I first saw the movie. They’re a fascinating escalation in tone from the first (1982) film’s more subdued Voight-Kampff tests. Where the first film’s Voigt-Kampff tests framed interrogation as an interview, 2049’s baseline test is loud and demanding. With this multiscreen composition, I wanted to compare the baseline test device and HAL 9000, from Healy’s text, 2001. The juxtaposition of the scenes’ light and dark colors was a serendipitous bonus, providing stark visual contrast between the films while I otherwise explored their similarities—namely their depictions of callous and intense machinelike voices projecting from wall-mounted devices with watchful lenses. Both films use slow moving and static cameras to keep the devices centered while they uncannily project human speech. What I found most interesting was both films’ tendency to present these devices in extremely flat, head-on shots that kind of phase them into the walls; the lack of depth in the shots compliments the machines’ shallow views of their human counterparts—HAL conceives of Dave as an obstacle to be rid of, and the baseline test aims to maintain the suppression of Agent K’s emotions.

These observations arose from chopping up and reorganizing bits of the films, finding visuals that paired interestingly and fiddling with timing to synchronize or juxtapose them in ways that felt interesting and meaningful. Although Meg, Jacob, and I all worked with 2049, our three multiscreen compositions elicit divergent tones and focus on different details despite our overlapping subject matter. I found it interesting that all three of our videos, despite the differences of scene selection and accompanying background music, are paced with a kind of lurching motion. The burst of violence at the midpoint of Healy’s video gets bookended by slower shots that more slowly emphasize the direction actors’ gazes. Meanwhile, Reese’s video focuses on the combined cinematic motion of human bodies and of water. These videos are more exercise than essay, allowing us to experiment with editing tools more so than to offer specific filmic critique. Nevertheless, it’s clear that thinking through film(s) with editing tools unlocks a great deal of perspective on how we can engage with them not only by discussing their contents, but by interacting with the way that film captures time, space, and sound.

Jacob Reese – Stalker and Blade Runner 2049

I often approach scholarship by working with texts individually, so putting two films in direct conversation with one another was a novel challenge—particularly with the constraint of using only their audiovisual components. Comparative viewings of Stalker and Blade Runner 2049, however, led me to discover unexpected resonances between not only the films’ visual qualities and kinetic movements, but also their thematic harmonies. Water, light, and movement became the framing elements that led me to think about life, death, and the inter-personal moments between. As I began assembling my project, the editing timeline enabled me to construct a dialogue between concurrent clips in ways that made visible these thematic harmonies and helped me think about comparative critical analysis in a new way. Using only the films’ audiovisual language required that I let go of my reliance on words to provide a clear argument about the project—and that I learn to trust the films to speak for themselves. 

This new understanding was reaffirmed as I watched the others’ projects. Healy’s composition highlighted, for me, the intersection between the technological and the biological in both films, and the resulting tensions between knowledge and violence. In dealing with the same films, Santiago calls similar clips into question, but with an entirely different effect, aligning moments of interrogation and fear between the autonomous and the rational, blurring the lines between the two. In both creating and viewing works of videographic criticism, I’ve come to appreciate how this novel approach to screen and media scholarship can be used not only to communicate one’s ideas through the language of the films themselves, but also to facilitate modes of viewing and thinking that are generative and potent for new observations.

Meg Healy – 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner 2049

When first approaching this exercise, my initial idea was to focus on shots and sequences that stood out as visually similar between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner 2049. Upon reviewing scenes from the latter, however, I was struck by both the visual and thematic symmetry of the monolith from 2001 and the tree from Blade Runner 2049. Both the monolith and the tree act not only as points of revelation for key characters, but also as precursors to violence. As a result, my multiscreen composition explores these themes of revelation and violence as they appear across both films by pairing similar shots, sequences, and dialogue. 

In viewing Santiago’s and Reese’s multiscreen compositions, I was pleased to find that despite using the same films, we each produced quite different work. Reese’s video, with its emphasis on overlapping moments of community, care, and weather, paired with melancholic music, highlighted the somber and atmospheric elements that pervade both Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Villeneuve’s Blade Runner. Although we used the same two films, Santiago’s use of dialogue to cue shifts to new sequences in both fullscreen and multiscreen moments evoked a sense of anxiety present in both 2001 and Blade Runner 2049, especially anxieties around the boundaries being crossed between humans and technology. Together, all three videos highlight the potential of videographic work to convey complex and original ideas about audiovisual texts without sacrificing the medium itself. Through a literal reframing of media objects, videographic criticism opens up space for reconsidering how screen studies scholars watch, read, interact, and think through our work.

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Author Bios:

Samuel Santiago currently studies visual rhetoric and performance in video games, with a particular focus upon how interactive experiences of cyberpunk science fiction provide avenues to reevaluate and reimagine conceptions of consciousness and personhood. He often studies texts prominent within gaming popular culture, and aims to form a critical understanding of digital play as a transformative experience wherein diegetic and nondiegetic identities converge. Other interests include Early Modern literature and theater, adaptation studies, media studies, and film studies.

Jacob Reese is a PhD candidate in English at Syracuse University whose research focuses on the intersections between slow media and the environmental humanities, with a particular emphasis on how “slow” video games function in conversation with broader cultural sustainability movements. He has taught courses on American literature, popular culture, and environmental rhetoric, and has served as a teaching assistant for courses on the Western humanities, video games, and film.

Meg Healy is an English PhD candidate whose work explores the relationship between cinematic and literary science fiction. She seeks to understand how science fiction became a cultural dominant by focusing on how the genre is discussed, defined, and redefined among contingents from varied sectors of the social world that produce, distribute, and consume science fiction.

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References:

Keathley, Christian, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant. The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy. 2019, videographicessay.org. Accessed on 16 September 2025.

Kubrick, Stanley, director. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.

Scholarship in Sound & Image. Middlebury U, sites.middlebury.edu/videoworkshop/. Accessed on 16 September 2025.

Tarkovsky, Andrei, director. Stalker, Goskino, 1979.

Villeneuve, Denis, director. Blade Runner 2049. Warner Brothers Pictures, 2017.