The best video essays of 2025
Now in its ninth year, our annual poll showcases 255 vital video essays, nominated by 72 international voters.
The ninth instalment of Sight and Sound’s dedicated poll has brought a record number of participants (72) and video essays (255) mentioned. While the video essay form still escapes definition, and is no longer new or ‘the next big thing’, this data attests that the number and diversity of stakeholders willing to engage with it – creators, critics, scholars, curators, programmers, fans – continues to grow.
This year’s poll has moved somewhat closer to parity between three major ecosystems of video essays: (1) academia and film/media criticism (34 voters, 94 distinct video essays mentioned), (2) festivals, museums, and galleries (17 voters, 65 essays mentioned), and (3) social media and YouTube (21 voters, 96 essays mentioned). Perhaps not surprisingly, there is little overlap in what each ecosystem mentions, except among contributors working across more than one sphere. A more interesting question raised by the poll is: which essays get seen and awarded prestige within these circles, by whom, and in what contexts?
One of the key concerns resonating across the fields is accessibility. Many contributors emphasised that it was simply impossible to keep up with the gargantuan number of essays screened or published throughout the year. Others argued that seven choices were too few and applied selective parameters, such as not voting for video essays that weren’t published or available online. Such rules, while perfectly justifiable for academia, would make little sense for the art world, since online availability is a no-go for most major festival committees. Moreover, being published online in a respected peer-reviewed journal doesn’t guarantee visibility. Even the most successful scholarly video essays in this poll have relatively low view numbers. We may attribute this to increasing specialisation and fragmentation, the decline of Vimeo (still the main platform for videographic criticism), and a general lack of time and energy amid today’s precarious ‘dark academia’. Yet in the world of YouTube, these numbers would likely prevent voters from even considering such works.
In this environment of overabundance, uneven availability, and dispersed notions of quality, we naturally gravitate towards what is closest: an essay encountered at a workshop or festival, one tied to a project we follow, or one that surfaces in our personalised feeds. This approach is, given the circumstances, perfectly understandable – some may even call it a survival strategy. But we should also consider whether this economy of personal connections, chance encounters, and algorithmic offerings sacrifices something essential: debate within a shared context.
Within each of the three ecosystems, several trends emerge. In the academic/critical sphere, interest in archival and historiographic approaches continues to grow, building on 2024. As voter Alison Peirse notes, ‘videographic criticism is feeling its archival fantasy’. Definitions of what qualifies as archival may vary, but such works were among this year’s most frequently cited. These include the poll’s most-voted essay, The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková (12 votes), and the special issue ‘Audiovisual Approaches and the Archive’ edited by John Gibbs for the journal Movie (11 votes across three essays). One might also argue that another popular special issue, ‘The Personal Mediascape in the Age of Videographic Heterotopias’ edited by Joel Burges and Allison Cooper (11 votes across five essays), carries certain archival inflections. Horror remains a favoured genre, with Peirse herself functioning almost as an archivist of horror tropes (gaining 7 votes across her works), and Lucy Fife Donaldson’s (dis)Orientating Horror: Feeling Queerly, published in the Monstrum special issue ‘Queer/ing Horror’ (ed. Dayna McLeod), receiving 6 votes.
Within the art circuit, several voters stressed the importance of where video essays are watched. Dmitry Frolov, echoing Julian Ross’s categorisation ‘essay films = video essays’, argues that cinemas and contemporary art spaces offer ‘a more immersive encounter with essayistic thought’ – an encounter he sees as increasingly difficult, and thus ‘all the more precious’, in a world ‘whose condition increasingly resembles a catastrophe’. The most-voted work in this ecosystem, Daria’s Night Flowers by Maryam Tafakory (6 votes), exemplifies this immersive experience, and speaks to Tafakory’s enduring cross-sector appeal despite her films often remaining offline years after their premieres. Frolov’s sense of catastrophe also resonates with the prominence of works focusing on Palestine, notably happiness by Fırat Yücel and The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing by Theo Panagopoulos.
On YouTube, the works receiving the most recognition were those tackling pressing contemporary issues in a critical yet highly personal mode. Greater self-reflexivity may echo what Jacob Geller calls a generational shift from earlier YouTubers ‘inspired by film, television, and/or written essays’ to a younger cohort that ‘grew up alongside the video essay’ and now pushes its boundaries. Nonetheless, among the poll’s selections, this self-awareness clearly spans generations. A shared focus on the politics of visibility links works as varied as Lily Alexandre’s Trans Day of Vanishing (6 votes), josh (with parentheses)’s You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.) (6 votes), and Big Joel’s You Are into Mousetrap YouTube (5 votes). Josh’s piece in particular illustrates a wider YouTube trend of scrutinising AI models, especially ChatGPT, and their growing presence in daily life. Despite such weighty subjects, Denis Kefallinos notes a concurrent wave of ‘borderline comedy essays,’ which ‘mess with tone’ and toy with ‘absurd subject matter and harsh delivery’ – showing that this self-awareness trend takes many forms.
Finally, some quick notes about the distribution of the voters themselves. Of the 72 contributors, 46 were male, 22 female, and 4 non-binary. This imbalance occurred despite our best intentions, yet it doesn’t deviate from the patterns of previous years. The results suggest that it didn’t carry over into any dramatic bias: among the nine most-voted video essays, six were created or co-created by women, many of which feature explicitly feminist, queer, or trans perspectives.
As for demographics, the overwhelming majority of voters still come from the global centre, particularly the Anglo-American sphere (the United States leading with 24, followed by the UK with 13 and Canada with 5). Unfortunately, this reflects both the distribution of videographic practice across the world and its capacity to be disseminated in English and presented on prestigious platforms. The participation of experts from semi-peripheral regions (the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Romania) and countries outside the Euro-American sphere (Iran, Mexico) offers a glimmer of hope, as does the presence of numerous non-English video essays in the poll.
Given the breadth of the poll, any selection is inevitably just a cross-section, and in this spirit we’ve selected some notable entries before granting readers the opportunity to dive into the full list and accompanying commentary from our voters. The final results are based on confidentially submitted ballots, all of which are available below.
2025 at a glance
The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková
Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková, as a duo, are often mentioned in the poll and contribute greatly to the videographic community, both as creators and archaeologists of the practice. Once again, they seized a popular (and ephemeral) feature of our shared videographic histories to ask “What kind of artefact, if any, is the star wipe?” (Byron Davies), with the whimsical style and acute analysis that characterise their work.
(dis)Orientating Horror: Feeling Queerly by Lucy Fife Donaldson
Co-winner of the 2025 Marienbad Film Festival’s Audiovisual Essay Competition, this video essay establishes “videographic form as a queer methodology” (Catherine Grant). Formally and discursively, this work succeeds in conveying a “disorienting sense of foreboding made eerie and uncanny through repetition of sound and image” (Dayna McLeod).
Shadow Self: On Agnès Varda’s Documenteur by Sadia Quraeshi Shepard
“Films are carried by the hands of their lovers [through history]; by their shadows” (Amin Komijani and Kasra Karbasi). Awarded as one of the two winners at Marienbad this year, this video essay prolongs Varda’s gesture with finesse and an intimate understanding of the filmmaker’s work. This subtlety takes the form of a voice, that of the videast’s child, and their affectionate dialogue resonating from within the images, inside the images.
Trans Day of Vanishing by Lily Alexandre
The impressive Trans Day of Vanishing produces “a raw examination of visibility, vulnerability, and safety” (Denis Kefallinos) as a trans person in public space. Filming outdoors, dissecting surveillance apparatuses, vlogging in the dark, the videast subverts YouTube’s usual codes in favour of an uncanniness that turns our gaze back on us – and makes us anxiously look over our shoulder.
You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.) by josh (with parentheses)
Addressing a contemporary concern, this video proposes a way to move beyond moral, cognitive or even political positions criticising the use of LLMs. The argument is simple but deeply potent: “the purpose of writing is to meet with another person” (OutOfCharacters), to communicate. And the way of formulating it, using desktop narration, a format that YouTube’s algorithm doesn’t really like (Queline Meadows), is in line with the principle set out in the video: why not just give it a try, someone might be watching.
Daria’s Night Flowers by Maryam Tafakory
In Tafakory’s new essay, “we are simultaneously seeing the prison bars and the freedom that the palimpsest points to” (Carlos Natálio). This videographic palimpsest superimposes flowers immortalised by cinema, collected in post-revolution Iranian films she features in all of her works, with ancient manuscripts and their flourishing illuminations.
happiness by Fırat Yücel
This desktop diary observes “the mediality of the Palestinian genocide, [and proposes] a meditation on what it truly means to witness a live-streamed genocide” (Flavia Dima), questioning the circulation of these images between networks, screens and bodies. How does one incorporate a constant flux of violence and impotence?
Full list of voters
All the votes
Aaraf Afzal
Fiction writer, video essayist (as SolidArf) & English Professor at Quinnipiac University
I revisit Ander Monson’s Essay as Hack often: “I fear for the essay, friends, and its bad reputation.” To me, video essays represent the best of what he considers ‘hacks’ – quirky, audiovisual experiments we keep Frankensteining together to revitalise a genre of writing that students have been taught to fear.
What students forget is that essays aren’t just a genre of writing. They’re a genre of thought. The video essay is a flexible medium, one that grants a creator the chance to collage home video, guerrilla filmmaking, docupoetics, play, and personal narrative to land at a thesis that is both deeply specific and widely enlightening. What feels particularly urgent about the medium in 2025 is how it continues to put the human front-and-centre in the essay.
My favourites of the year leaned into the idiosyncrasies of human thought.
You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.) by josh (with parentheses)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that every institution of higher ed in 2025 must be in want of an AI policy. Geist, an educator, has clearly been in dozens of mandatory meetings about this. But he’s interested in something beyond the policy level: Here, he talks to (and about) students in the language of students.
The entire essay is a recording of a screen where new popups and windows push and overlap, talking to each other and singing over each other; harmonising into an impassioned defence of recombinant writing. But that remixing, he shows us, is most interesting when it’s deliberate and from the heart. Every meme, reference, and literary allusion he uses has a point. Throughout, he is also talking to ChatGPT. Can Gen-AI have a point? When? When not? Equal parts sincere, thoughtful, and inspiring, Geist’s video is a masterclass in play as pedagogy.
The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel by Lindsay Ellis
Lindsay Ellis’s latest – which appropriately doubles as a fundraiser for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund – is the most cohesive multi-hour video essay epic I’ve seen. She uses the story of children’s YouTuber and educator Ms. Rachel as a starting point: to discuss history, religion, geopolitics, film and entertainment, language, and the current US administration’s ‘war on empathy’. What do we do in the face of all that? What do we do in the face of death tolls measured in almost-incomprehensible numbers?
Ellis has always been a forerunner in the space, but what is so exceptional about the piece is that she never loses sight of what Ms. Rachel (and other prominent children’s entertainment pioneers throughout history) represent in this context. Social and emotional learning begins at home, after all. What lessons have we taken away? What do we impart to our kids?
Fantasies of Nuremberg by Jacob Geller
What happens when we reduce an entire history – conflicts, controversies, contradictions, context – into a singular historical ‘event?’ This is where Jacob Geller begins with his research on the Nuremberg trials.
What follows is one of his most comprehensive, well-written, and well-researched essays to date. But hanging over that research, and over his litany of primary sources, is a deep vulnerability. Geller demonstrates – both through his writing and through some visceral editing choices – that it is tempting to fantasise about justice and consequence. He wrestles with that temptation as he speaks. He tempts us too. But in our present moment, do those fantasies mean anything?
The answer he lands on is not surprising. But it is necessary, and framed with the gravitas and call to further introspection that Geller always inspires.
Bluey Is Perfect, And That Terrifies Me by MML’s Commentaries
Prior to watching this, I had a passing understanding of the cultural phenomenon that is Bluey. I knew some younger relatives who watched it, I knew I had friends in their 30s who were (for whatever reason) mesmerised by it, and I knew my spouse – a developmental psychologist – really appreciated what it was doing in the children’s entertainment space. I watched this over a long evening with her.
MML’s Commentaries illuminated many of the ‘whys’ for me. But I didn’t just learn about the creative choices that make up Bluey or why it has such a refreshing level of trust in the kids who tune in. I saw, with fresh eyes, how kids’ media looks differently to us in our 30s and up. I saw the anxieties that can arise from that. I saw MML’s Commentaries put a refreshing level of trust into us, as viewers, too. Etched into this video is a family saga, a love story, and a heartfelt dialogue between the real and the imagined.
Solarpunk: When Your Ideology Is Pictures by Sam Kern (Afterthoughts)
I first encountered Sam Kern’s work through videos on gaming UX / UI. More recently, she’s been working on the Change-Makers series on activism and organising. All in all, there are few essayists better equipped to analyse the various rifts between aesthetics and practice. The solarpunk movement – or rather, aesthetic – seems ripe for exactly that analysis.
Kern picks out and examines an astonishing repository of solarpunk illustrations, videos, and (arguably) photographs. These images look good; idyllic even. But do they sound good? Are they saying enough to ‘sound’ at all? It would be easy to critique the genre and land on a conclusion that gives way to doomerism, but that’s not what Kern does here. Her video is a new solarpunk: one that doesn’t just imagine a brighter future, but is honest about what it’ll take to get there.
The Space Truck Sim Where You’re Doomed to Fail by LambHoot
There is a moment in LambHoot’s video that made me feel physically ill – and it’s not just because the subject matter is Star Trucker, a truck simulator in space (a video game premise that sounds like my personal hell). It’s because LambHoot describes his gameplay experience in such sharp, vivid terms. The world of Star Trucker is a capitalist hell where every minute you do not spend working – even if it’s to take care of your own wellbeing – is a minute wasted. There is a price tag on everything. There is a price tag on air.
As with any other LambHoot piece, this is of course not just about Star Trucker. It is about how we synonymise self-worth with work. It is about the anxiety of opportunity cost. It is about the economy of how we spend our free time – and who gets to enjoy free time with dignity.
Steve Anderson
Professor of Film, Television & Digital Media and Design Media Arts at UCLA
As a creator and scholar who has been teaching and advocating for evolved modes of scholarly expression for many years, I embrace a broader range of videographic and multimodal scholarship than is reflected in the nominations included here. However, each of the works I have selected shares a reflective relationship to its chosen medium, often including formal experimentation but always making explicit and distinctive use of affordances that are specific to the videographic medium.
Animation in London/Matchmove in Bangalore: Territorial Profiles of Visual Effects (VFX) Workforces in the Global Media Industries by Suryansu Guha
Richly illustrated and densely narrated, this video is based on deep, original field research that makes a convincing argument in opposition to conventional wisdom about the (lack of) ‘creativity’ associated with visual effects that are commonly outsourced to the Global South.
Mapping Roma by Jessica Wax-Edwards
A sometimes playful and often idiosyncratic exploration of space and memory using marketing materials from Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), overlaying footage from the film with vernacular video captured by the creator, revisiting and reflecting on the construction of memory spaces both within and outside the diegesis of Cuarón’s film.
(dis)Orientating Horror: Feeling Queerly by Lucy Fife Donaldson
Experimental use of videographic effects interwoven with text-based analysis that re-envisions cinematic landscapes and aerial scenery; a highly effective use of videographic affordances for engaging the concept of queering cinematic form.
The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad by Jason Mittell
A first-of-its-kind videographic book that offers a groundbreaking intervention in the field of videographic criticism, demonstrating the author’s virtuosic range of critical styles, modes and voices in conjunction with incisive commentary analysing the complexity of long-form, serial character development on an iconic TV series.
Jiří Anger
Media scholar, video essayist, and archivist (Queen Mary University of London & Národní filmový archiv)
The Holes We Left Behind by Jacob Smith
This video essay, published in the archive-oriented dossier of Movie (edited by John Gibbs), is exemplary in its revelation of intricate economic and environmental issues within a single film. Its focal point is Breaking Away (1979), a coming-of-age movie set in Indianapolis that, in the part where I come from, is almost unknown. Combining scenes from the film with archival footage and a skillful argumentative voice-over, Smith reframes the movie through the lens of real-life workers in the limestone industry. The film’s rumination on generational conflict and shifting economic realities is minimalistically yet powerfully confronted with the archive effect of slowly disappearing historical images and the deep time of geology.
Bomba Bernal by Khavn de la Cruz
Thanks to César Ustarroz from Found Footage Magazine, I finally saw a film by this extravagant genius of Filipino avant-garde cinema. Bomba Bernal is a sarcastic, often uncompromising look at the bomba genre – a wave of lowbrow Filipino erotic films that experienced its heyday from the late 1960s to the 1980s – yet at the same time it summons its ghosts to reveal, in its deteriorating hints of a potential social liberation, a distinctive charm. Rarely is this ambivalence expressed so cleverly and amusingly, owing to inspiration from Filipino film critic Ishmael Bernal as well as collage-like editing and sound design based on cheap-sounding local appropriations of popular music mainstays.
Move on Down: Precarity in Contemporary Hungarian Cinema by László Strausz
It is a real shame that there are still so few video essays about East-Central European cinema, especially about contemporary work. That is why I was so pleased that this remarkably detailed and well-researched 20-minute piece was published in Iluminace. Strausz’s work foregrounds the depiction of precarity in Hungarian cinema after the fall of the Communist regime, which triggered tectonic social transformations and widespread instability. Narrated and formally structured in a deliberately non-flamboyant manner, it very effectively argues for the role of class in shaping patterns of representation. It also offers thought-provoking reflections on embodied and accented modes of scholarship.
Crochet is Sick! by Alison Peirse
Even though I have recently preferred ambitious, sprawling video essays, that doesn’t mean I underestimate the value of simplicity done right. Peirse’s rhythmic, briskly cut video on the ambiguous function of crochets in horror movies neatly wraps up everything it wants to say in under four minutes, testifying to the ability to express central genre tensions through such a simple, workaday object: a source of comfort becoming a source of dread. For what is essentially a supercut, the essay includes self-reflexive moments that not only situate Peirse’s fascination but also, in a particularly infectious way, invite us to share the world of horror crochets with her.
Baby It’s You (Lucy Dacus Edit) by Ian Garwood
Much like Jacob Smith’s video essay mentioned earlier, Garwood’s work was an invitation for me to watch a forgotten film I hadn’t known – and again it was a coming-of-age story. Baby It’s You (1983) may resemble the 1950s-nostalgia films typical of its era, yet it is also suffused with sadness and unresolved class conflict. Garwood explores this mixture paradoxically by retelling the film – especially the arc of its lead female character – through the sensibility of vidding and fan-made music videos. Although I have never been drawn to Lucy Dacus’s music, within this jukebox-like collage everything suddenly made sense.
Afterlives by Kevin B. Lee
Despite finding myself in the position of co-coordinating this poll with the essay’s author, I didn’t want to lose the opportunity to mention Lee’s long-awaited feature-length desktop documentary. Having engaged with this mode of video essay–making both theoretically and practically for quite a few years, I was still struck by how meticulously Lee weaves together the multifarious images of unspeakable violence we encounter in the online world and beyond. The documentary reminds us that the desktop experience isn’t just about wonder and gratification but, nowadays perhaps more often, about fatigue, numbness, even horror. Best viewed in tandem with Neta Alexander’s newest book Interface Frictions.
Making Fiction Flow by Melanie Bell & Catherine Grant
Also published in the archival dossier of Movie, Bell and Grant’s work on the not-always-visible art of script supervising reminded me of the value of rewatching video essays in different contexts. Clocking in at almost 33 minutes, I initially found it difficult to watch because of its repetitive style. Yet after seeing it on a big screen (twice!), I got it. It takes a deliberate mode of attention to let the almost parametric multi-screen structure sink in and to appreciate the storytelling of script supervisor Penny Eyles. The video is highly recommended for anyone interested in how oral history can be translated into a videographic form.
Ariel Avissar
Video maker and media scholar at Tel Aviv University
In alphabetical order:
100 Years of History in 100 Films by kaptainkristian
A skillfully-edited journey across a hundred years of history – both real and fictional – through the eyes of cinema. Images of the past, depicted mostly by later films, eventually give way to futuristic visions of the present as imagined by the cinema of the past. It does not end well.
F. W. Murnau’s ‘Sunrise’: A Mystic Writing Pad by Cristina Álvarez López
Incredible. Insightful. Inspired. I couldn’t do it justice by describing what it does in words. Just watch it. And read Cristina’s own words.
I Can Hear Someone Coming by Alison Peirse
Published as part of Queer/ing Horror: Video Essays at the Intersection of Horror and Queerness, edited by Dayna McLeod for Monstrum, this video offers a hilariously subversive take on the queer potentialities of 1930s horror. Fabulous.
Miradas by Pablo Serrano Torres
Produced for the 2023 Embodying the Video Essay workshop at Bowdoin College and later published at [in]Transition, this is a playful, touching, and beautifully vulnerable reflection on queerness, identity, embodiment, and collaboration. Call me a sucker for any video essay that features footage of video essayists doing karaoke.
Panorama of Western State Penitentiary by Eli Boonin-Vail
And I’m equally a sucker for any video essay that opens with dictionary definitions. Drawing on footage from a diverse range of sources – archival and contemporary, documentary and fiction, found and original – this video reflects on and problematises our voyeuristic fascination with prisons as sites of surveillance, spectacle, and tourism.
Sebastián Leilo’s Two Glorias – Aging in Translation by Barbara Zecchi
A comparative analysis of a Chilean film and its English-language remake, this highly affective piece makes brilliant use of the multiscreen format to explore issues of age, gender, and transcultural adaptation. Terrific.
The Disturbing Current: Three-Shots in The Awful Truth by Joel Blackledge
A wonderful examination of how staging, blocking, and framing are used to great dramatic and comedic effect in Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth. The video employs an ideally suited, frustratingly simple formal device of the ‘I wish I’d thought of that!’ variety. Spot on.
Cameron Benson-Davis
Video essayist, editor, and semiotician; Intermediality MSc student at the University of Edinburgh
Grand Theft Auto Is Killing Everything by chriswaves
A meta take on the talking-head style of video essays and commentary videos, chriswaves applies a frenetic analysis with hyper-intentional editing. Clips are sequenced and overlayed in a way that supplement and supersede the spoken points he makes about the meaning of mediums and the state of the creator economy in the middle of this decade.
HOT TO GO! by Cǎlin Husar
There is no shortage of studies queering David Lynch’s body of work, and Cǎlin Husar’s analysis of Eraserhead is solid. Husar contrasts Lynch’s debut with one of the most iconic, joyous queer anthems of recent memory to elucidate Eraserhead’s themes of heteronormative pressures to perform, parent, plus resultant anxiety.
“Interpretation” (or “Me (or, “Me (or, Me”)”)”) by JerryTerry
The final boss of meta-interpretation, this video is a rat king of essays in 2025. It starts out (as an introspection of) analysing video game Signalis and its fan discourse, exploring the notion of generative interpretation as its own artistic expression. Kaleidoscopically tumbling outward into meta-layers of meta-layers, it can get a bit hard to parse, but is ultimately a meditation on creating online, interpreting online, the self-observation that comes in both activities, and their interweaving.
red dead redemption 2 is still a vibe by orangewall
An anthology of three mini-essays about videogame aesthetics and the sequel to rockstar’s epic western. orangewall’s own visual style is striking, directly filming old monitors displaying relevant gameplay and video sources to create comforting, retro feel. It continues into the writing, too, with a general similarity to mainstream video essays of the late 2010s, just sharper.
There Are No More Normal Guys by Jack Saint
Ah, the infamous t-word. or x-word. That site everyone used to use. Jack Saint observes, from afar, a viral spat over misunderstandings of masculine norms, before an extrapolation. Normal guys no longer become normal online: if they aren’t subject to outrage, they’re deified. Jack overlays news coverage in audio and video forms deftly, in between spoken commentary. His synthesis of modes examine these two extremes with case studies in respect to minor online spectacles and major news events.
You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.) by josh (with parentheses)
A fantastic screen-trawling odyssey across the perforations of AI across contemporary culture. josh (with parentheses) uniquely compares and contrasts video and audio sources within the diegetic space of a mac desktop. It’s reminiscent of Occitane Lacurie’s doc from last year’s poll, xena’s body (a menstrual auto-investigation using an iPhone). What is the state of writing, and writing online, now? Especially in a time of post-plagiarism super-awareness, of large-language model dupes, and dupes of dupes, of concern, of hyperreality. Josh answers the call.
Johannes Binotto
It was a very difficult year and it seems that my picks seem to reflect some of the pain and loss it held. Once again, I become aware of how video essays for me are not just a way to think, but a way to exist. These video essays and the people who made them (and so many more I couldn’t mention here) make me want to go on.
Sticky by Maria Hofmann
What does it mean to witness? How do we watch the unwatchable?
The Anthropocene Will Eat Itself by Cormac Donnelly
The apocalypse is coming to a screen near you.
The Video Essay About The Show by Jason Mittell
A scholar is analysing a series by playing a scholar who analyses a series and makes a video essay series about it. Mise-en-abyme is Jason Mittell’s middle name.
Age Perfect by Dayna McLeod
Once again, Dayna is hitting you like a splash of cold water. Right in the face of a consumer society so obsessed with policing the aging female body. I am wide awake again.
Look at Me by Alison Peirse
These piercing gazes. They hit me in the blink of an eye.
Caught in the Dream of the Other by Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin
The mirror is a trap. And a portal. You won’t come out of it unchanged.
Line Drawings by Joseph Popper
The dotted line – a fragile, fractured umbilical cord connecting us to the outer space. There is something strangely relieving in knowing how easily we can become untethered.
Lukas Brasiskis
Curator of Film and Video for e-flux
Narrative by Anocha Suwichakornpong
The self-reflective work reveals how political trauma moves like a spirit through people’s lives, unsettling what one sees, hears, and remembers, and how film can become a tool for seeking justice and healing.
You Won’t Feel a Thing by Hiwa K.
Emotionally impactful film calls into question the marginalization of Indigenous forms of knowledge and healthcare by the corporate interests of Western medicine through the masterful use of film essay style.
Slet 1988 by Marta Popivoda
A masterful combination of the archival footage and documentary to reflect on the specters of history.
Philip Józef Brubaker
Experimental / Essay Filmmaker, Poet, Exceptional Man / Average Pisces
I am attracted to poetic video essays; non-traditional, humorous, experimental videographic works. My choices tend to bend the definition of what a video essay is… but I believe in the inclusive nature of the form. So, here goes:
Frontier by Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco
An elegant meditation on the culture of cowboys and cinema, with a hand-lettered feel. Transformed clips of relevant movies enrich the understanding of the author’s thesis. The whole video has a slowness about it and a lulling sound design that I found refreshing.
Paul Schrader on The Florida Project by James Whale Bake Sale
Wise old sage Paul Schrader appraises the anecdotal nature of Sean Baker’s film in a nicely cut together videographic piece by stalwart YouTuber James Whale Bake Sale. As a Floridian myself, I appreciated the embodied representation of colours that define my state and a revisit to a film I saw before I ever found myself living there.
The Thinking Machine #94: Shot Missing by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
This is the most ‘Los Angeles’ video essay this side of Thom Andersen. I have been an admirer of the trope where you juxtapose two similar films in one videographic work. I’ve done it in my own art practice and I admire how it was done here. I had never heard of the film by Abel Ferrara, but sure enough it deserves a comparison to Lynch’s Lost Highway. Clever associations abound, but there is also a sustained and unified mood that makes the two films seem as one; surely the ultimate purpose behind such an exploration.
Enrico Camporesi
Writer; overseeing the research and documentation at the Centre Pompidou film collection
Three encounters in three different contexts: a cinema; an exhibition; my phone.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat by Johan Grimonprez
A reused footage fresco on the geopolitical (and musical) context that led to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961. This montage of archival material is devoid of accompanying voiceover, instead its textual elements are either to be read on screen (provided with bibliographical footnotes) or heard as direct quotations read aloud on the soundtrack. Distributed theatrically in France in the fall of 2025, I was able to watch it on a monumental-sized screen. The magnifying effect on many of the low-resolution transfers is one of the work’s compelling aspects.
Mais perto de você [Closer to You] by Isadora Soares Belletti
Saw it as an installation in the collective exhibition L’art et la vie et inversement at Beaux-Arts de Paris in March 2025. The young Brazilian artist, based in France, made this video portrait of her watching the sunset in Belo Horizonte, her hometown in Brasil, next to her grandmother, Teresinha Soares. Journal or essay? It is an attempt to record a casual moment – a fleeting conversation, ordering take-out food – with a studied insistence on the first-person account (via the hand-held camera capturing the sun from the balcony).
Secret des stars: Bella Hadid by Dr Chloé Mathez-Loïc
Chloé Mathez-Loïc appeared in my Instagram feed with one reel about the surgical secrets behind Bella Hadid’s face. This one video was posted on her account, in collaboration with Forever Institut (apparently the first centre of cosmetic medicine in Switzerland), and openly inscribed itself in the vein of the ‘Secret de stars’ content, popular on TikTok. It appears she published only three reels so far: a similar one on Kylie Jenner, and an interview in which she answers some questions about her work and personal hobbies. The format is canonical in its kind: Dr Mathez-Loïc looks at a photo on her phone and comments on surgical techniques used to achieve certain effects on the given public persona, while the viewer sees a picture in the foreground. The content is informative, but it is her calmness, off-pace in the realm of reels, as if oblivious of its destination, and a bordering-humour detachment, that makes her reel more intriguing than the ones by her online peers.
Nelson Carvajal
Webby Award-winning video essayist, writer, and producer
I’ve been making video essays for over 14 years.
Work-Life Balance • A Podcastèsque Video Essay by Melis Altınso and Ceyda Ece Akköse
This is what the sociology of cinema should aim at; challenging the everyday norms with curiosity and acidic wit.
Nebulous Encounters by Catherine Grant
Anytime a creator can effectively juxtapose two moving images to the point where it captivates me, it is a success. Grant understands how our eyes and hearts talk to the screen.
The Pulse by Catherine Salnikova
If These Walls Could Talk: The Shining Video Essay
Clipse have possibly made the best music album of 2025, and in their promotion leading up to its release, have given the world the year’s best video mashup.
Tracy Cox-Stanton
Professor of Cinema Studies, Savannah College of Art and Design
My video essay viewing this year has been shaped by my preparation for teaching a course on the subject. I’ve been drawn to videos that exemplify successful audiovisual applications of cinema studies methods and arguments, and I think these three will provide great examples and fodder for discussion.
The Hand That Touches the Arm by Calac Nogueira
This video assembles an impressive number and variety of film clips that convey a very specific gesture – the assistive touch (usually by a man) of another person (usually a woman) on the arm or elbow. This common action is wonderfully defamiliarised via the supercut, revealing a hidden lexicon that is open to interpretation.
The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková
This video essay is both delightful and substantive. It manages to offer a history and theory of the star wipe as a cultural artefact (you never knew you needed this, but you do!), exploring and embodying the star wipe’s playful impudence that resonates well beyond nostalgia. This video essay beautifully exemplifies the audiovisual and essayistic potentials of a media archaeology methodology.
The Water Diaries, or My Letter to Jane by Chiara Grizzaffi
Chiara Grizzaffi’s decision to frame this video as a letter to Jane [Campion] is an inspired appropriation, resulting in a work that is both playful and sincere. Her voice-over is so engaging – rich in essayistic potential as it weaves together personal narrative with pressing questions about the larger world, anchored in the possibilities of feminist theory. I would love to see a version of this video that actually uses footage from Campion’s films, but I realise that wasn’t within the constraints of the assignment.
Jesse Cumming
Curator, writer
Zifzafa by Lawrence Abu Hamdan
At once imaginative, beautiful, and incensed.
Daria’s Night Flowers by Maryam Tafakory
The essay form as dissolved into narrative.
Partition by Diana Allan
Smart, righteous, and lucid work.
Isabel Custodio
Creator of Be Kind Rewind, a YouTube channel that explores film history.
A Man Like My Aunt: Community and Desire in Working Girls by Kallan Benjamin
Benjamin thoroughly analyses the opening sequences of Dorothy Arzner’s Working Girls to explore how a working class women’s boarding house functions as a communal space that exists outside of patriarchy, heterosexuality, and the workplace. It’s a true pleasure to see Arzner’s work receive such detailed attention.
Technology Isn’t Fun Anymore by Drew Gooden
In this video, Drew Gooden articulates the casual frustrations foisted upon consumers by endless mergers, acquisitions, and content wars waged by major corporations. Seemingly no one, he points out, seeks to materially improve the collective user experience. Why can’t you watch your local basketball team on television? Why does an app that turns lights on and off have a social media component? Everything is a nightmare; at least Gooden can help us laugh about it.
HELLO? by Alison Peirse
Landline phones play a significant role in slasher films. Women answer in fear, hang up in haste, and shudder in anticipation of violence. Peirse imagines alternative (better) futures for these characters. Solidarity finds the final girls.
Byron Davies
Researcher in film and philosophy. Member of the film exhibition and programming collective Salón de Cines Múltiples (SACIMU) in Oaxaca, Mexico
Piel de toro muerto by Aroldo Murguia
It’s fitting to begin with a bold statement about the origin and nature of cinema, emerging from the South. In an overpowering mixture of Super 8 footage and digital photogrammetry, flickers and rotations, as well as cyanotypes, rotoscoping, and frottage, Peruvian filmmaker and programmer Aroldo Murguia declares the ancient Toro Muerto petroglyphs in the Arequipa region of Peru, marked by continuous sequences of animals in movement, to be the site where cinema was invented thousands of years ago. The claim rests somewhat less on the petroglyphs’ age in comparison with European sites that have invited similar speculations (such as the Copper Age rock carvings at Valcamonica with which Jonathan Walley begins his book Cinema Expanded) than on the tangible passage of time constituting Murguia’s audiovisual argument: incarnating, rather than simply hypothesising, the place of cinema’s invention. This is an argument backed by a firm command of metaphors – “El cine es una serpiente que constantemente cambia de piel” (“Cinema is a snake that constantly sheds its skin”), he says in an opening title – and Murguia is indeed demonstrating a protocinema (an ‘ancestor’ of cinema, in Juan Camilo Martínez’s description) apt to be recognised as such under present mutations in the digital age. Accompanying the film’s premiere this year in the ‘Umbrales’ experimental section of the FICUNAM festival in Mexico City was a brilliant catalogue statement by Murguia locating the matter of cinema, and not just its idea, in early 20th-century ‘sololoy’ (celluloid) dolls in Mexico, thus placing Piel de toro muerto, for all that it sensorily inherits from the wider cosmos, at the level of fragile toys – as he says, in a cinema of “sololoy”.
Mahmoud Darwish: In the Presence of Absence by Maryam Tafakory
“Time was less defiant than now”, reads Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in his 2005 poem ‘Tabāq’ (‘Antithesis’), memorialising Edward Said and recalling their first meeting in New York 30 years earlier. Tafakory’s uncanny work conjoins a video from that same year of Darwish reading ‘Antithesis’ in Ramallah – a recording that continues its errant passage around the internet (as of this writing it appears to have been removed from YouTube) – with a letter from Mohamad Golabi explaining the unguent that the same poem provided him while recovering in a hospital in New York. I saw this work in another Western capital, Lisbon, in the excellent two-part film programme curated by Cristina Hadwa and Raquel Schefer, Trojan Cinema: Spectral Archives of Palestine, which foregrounded Darwish’s self-definition as a ‘Trojan poet’, in search of the voices of the defeated (in ‘Antithesis’ identified with Said: “the last epic hero / defending the right of Troy / to share the narrative”). Video essay conventions of blackness surrounding a split screen offer something like the enveloping comfort that Golabi ascribes to Darwish’s words, which for him helped to render the impossible less ‘distant’. The poem’s title of ‘Antithesis’ then covers not only the split screen, or the epistolary connection between Golabi and Tafakory, or the friendship between Darwish and Said, but also Darwish’s expression of the vanities of pleading for an oppressor’s understanding, even under fantasies of parity: “Had my sword / been larger than my rose, would you / have asked if I would have acted like you?”
The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková
The gentle, welcoming touches of this sparkling, deeply researched video only serve to accentuate its central philosophical question, one few would have thought to ask: What kind of artefact, if any, is the star wipe? Indeed, what kinds of objects are editing transitions, and how do they feature in our memory? These questions turn out to depend on classical aesthetic debates about theatricality, ostentation, and taste – permeating the video’s unironic embrace of corn and personal address – as well as the commodity status of the gimmick (as formulated by Sianne Ngai). But then, what does it mean for an editing device to symbolise doing too little (and thus ostentatiously revealing a readiness to do anything at all) to please another? Did we always know that there was such pathos in the star wipe? The question more directly addressed in this video is what would it be to touch the star wipe, something that Anger and Hanáková undertake in a didactic method of printing, cutting, and touching also used in another important video from this year, A Tale of Two Desktops: The First Czech Films in Parallel Worlds. They thus in effect raise the question of how to locate the star wipe’s seemingly perfect geometry among the ‘weird shapes’ in early Czech archival footage analysed in the latter and in Anger’s book Towards a Film Theory from Below. Anger and Hanáková say that the star wipe points to paradoxes of simultaneous bewitchment and disenchantment, though in taking another look at one of their examples – George Kuchar’s Secrets of the Shadow World (1999) – and hearing Kuchar’s friend Andy Martinez sincerely describe his encounters with fairies in the mountains of Taos, New Mexico, I find myself inspired by the video to prefer to think that a world, whether diegetic or extra-diegetic, that makes space for star wipes is a significantly re-enchanted one.
The Holes We Left Behind by Jacob Smith
While The Return of the Star Wipe is an archaeology of media ephemerality, The Holes We Left Behind is an assertion of permanence. Together with Piel de Toro Muerto, this video is a landmark of petrocinematic criticism. Making a beautiful case for how the Hollywood coming-of-age film Breaking Away (Peter Yates, 1979) is an archive of Indiana limestone, Smith draws on eye-opening material from Bloomington Community Access Television (BCAT) and the Indiana Limestone Company. This most importantly features an interview with Harold Dugan Elgar, the real-life master stone carver who briefly appears in the original film as a former colleague of the protagonist’s father, played by Paul Dooley, who has gone from cutting stone to selling used cars (from one petro-economy to another, as Smith says). In an especially affecting moment, a cropped shot from the film of Dooley’s hand touching limestone on the Indiana University campus gives way to archival audio from BCAT narrating the formation of Indiana Limestone in the Mississippian period. Without Smith making this explicit, there is something familiar here: it might be the petro equivalent of the ‘man existing alone’ observatory speech in that other coming-of-age film invoking a planetary timescale, Rebel Without a Cause. This is an essay that – including in its use of, in its author’s words, ‘fragile’ archival video from community access TV – absolutely transmits weight.
Animation in London/Matchmove in Bangalore: Territorial Profiles of Visual Effects (VFX) Workforces in the Global Media Industries by Suryansu Guha
This vital and richly documented essay busts persistent myths about the geopolitics of labor in the visual effects (VFX) industry, drawing on interviews with workers in studios in India. Guha demonstrates that the proliferation of VFX in Hollywood blockbusters in the last two decades is not just the result of technology, but also of the emergence of a racialised global infrastructure, where offshore VFX studios supply a ‘standing reserve’ of labour to the Global North. But while the division of labor captured in the video’s title (Animation in London/Matchmove in Bangalore) is real, Guha argues that the myth underlying it, of matchmove and other outsourced VFX work as uncreative ‘lower-level’, ‘grunt work’ is manifestly not: precarity and racialization also mask where and among whom a great deal of the creative VFX work in fact takes place. A remarkable example of obfuscation of labor elaborated on by Guha is how the false marketing of Oppenheimer (2023) as free of CGI necessitated a sparse – and, in the end, racialised – list of end credits of only 77 VFX workers. We learn that when the British-Indian VFX studio released its own, much longer, supplementary credits for Oppenheimer, 90% named were Indian. I would like to see this research widened in order to account for the longer history of outsourcing in Hollywood, including ‘runaway’ animation and maquila animation practices in Latin America, beginning in the late 1950s. As Juan Manuel Aurrecoechea explains in his history of Mexican animation, El episodio perdido, when Rocky and Bullwinkle first aired, its principal animators in Mexico City were appalled to see their names absent from the credits, taken up only by Anglo ones.
Prophets and Propaganda, or, If Faces Tire You, What Will Movies Do? by Stephen Broomer
This intriguingly measured study of Ron Ormond’s 1970s Evangelical sermon films featuring Baptist preacher Estus Pirkle goes far beyond indulging in the films’ camp and anti-communist hysterics, and instead focuses on the functioning of Ormond’s closeups on Pirkle’s face. Drawing on Slavko Vorkapich’s poetics and the idea that the closeup “could disrupt the uncanny of the photoplay to serve a greater truth”, Broomer argues that Ormond uses these closeups on the preacher to “much the same end” as Vorkapich: distancing cinema from theatre. Ormond thus renders film and sermon as one, to amplifying effect: according to Broomer, repetition of the patriarch’s face becomes an effective (not just camp) vehicle of brainwashing. Viewing Prophets and Propaganda in light of The Return of the Star Wipe, I am led to ask: Is there something gimmicky about the closeup of the face that august theorising about it since the early 20th century has obscured – or perhaps sublimated? Have we learned to ignore the gimmickry of the closeup? The present-day heirs of Ormond and Pirkle in the US teach us that gimmickry and brainwashing are hardly antithetical.
Marco De Mutiis
Digital curator, Fotomuseum Winterthur
I have selected works from the field of media arts and digital cultures that connect with the genre of video essay yet experiment with its form through networked and digital properties, or where the video essay is part of a larger project – extending installations and performances usually hosted in art galleries and museums. I am interested in how the format of the video essay can extend its technical definitions and extend to a larger way of thinking, embedded in artistic projects which would not normally enter the circulation networks of video essays.
A Life of Its Own: American Psycho by Sara Bezovšek
A Life of Its Own is a series of experimental web-based works, large-scale wallpapers and installations by Sara Bezovšek, exploring how popular movies transform online into memes, GIFs and remixes. Focusing on culturally significant films like The Matrix, American Psycho and The Lord of the Rings, Bezovšek tracks how scenes are transformed into memetic fragments that gain a life of their own as they leave their source context and circulate online. Driven by free creative labour and network dynamics, images not only take on new meanings, but are easily repurposed for various social and political agendas. While memes from American Psycho equally critique and celebrate toxic masculinity, The Lord of the Rings is appropriated to support both right-wing and left-wing ideologies, for example. By organising the material collected from social media platforms and obscure online forums according to the films’ original plot, Bezovšek accentuates the spread of memetic content and its ability to seamlessly blend entertainment, ideologies and politics.
Image Syncers by Nina Davies
Nina Davies uses speculative fiction to examine the consequences of today’s ‘perception collapse’, taking as a starting point TikTok trends in which people mimic AI-generated videos. Her project Image Syncers imagines futures where AI-driven choreographies disrupt visual economies, generate alternative modes of meaning, and gesture toward communication with emerging algorithmic dimensions.
The central video blends the narrative strategies of podcasts and video essays with imagery that merges AI-generated footage and performances choreographed by the artist. The world of Image Syncers extends across installations, photographic works, and live performances, forming a coherent universe in which language, images, and bodies evolve under the pervasive influence of synthetic media.
Anatomy of a Non-Fact, Chapter 2: Tick Tick Tick… Boom by Martyna Marciniak
Anatomy of Non-Fact is an artistic research project investigating how misinformation and information overload take shape in an era increasingly defined by post-optical imagery. The project spans different chapters and media, including a full recreation of the puffy coat generated in the now iconic AI image of the so-called ‘Balenciaga Pope’.
In 2025, the second chapter of Anatomy of a Non-Fact continues the investigation started the year before, extending the study of the image of the pope to other symbols of broader visual cultures and economies. Anatomy of Non-Fact, Chapter 2: Tick Tick Tick… Boom sketches out possible futures for how visual truth might be constructed, and the effects of virality on political violence, and market instability.
The video moves from a traditional essayistic form to a promotional narrative, introducing a system to generate effective ‘panic images’ to conveniently manipulate the market. Combining a critical reflection with a parodic advertisement, the project builds another layer on top of the world of manipulated images that the artist simultaneously constructs and critiques.
Will DiGravio
Agencia by May Santiago
A deeply personal essay film that charts a new way forward for videographic criticism as it relates to not only activating the archive but working towards building new ones.
The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková
A ground-breaking work that showcases the video essay’s potential for media archaeology, and one that charts a path forward for rediscovering and celebrating ephemera of the moving image.
Air Bud Pt. II: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (Web Exclusive) by Last Week Tonight
A bit of media analysis from a man and team who understand our time like no other.
The World Doesn’t End When You Do by marlow magdalene
A remarkable, personal work that expands our sense of what is possible with the archive.
Mutineer by Scout Tafoya
“By then, I’d seen a lot on TV…” Another astonishing work from a master.
Cinephilia and History, or The Mystery of William Keighley by Christian Keathley
An epic project, beautifully realised over many years by a scholar without whom much videographic criticism would not be made.
Flavia Dima
Film critic, programmer, researcher, and translator
I must confess that I’ve lagged behind a bit, this year, in terms of video essays, so this list is quite clearly open-ended (and should be taken as such). Even so – there are some gems that’ve caught my eye. Here they are:
Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued by Julian Castronovo
Equal parts essay-film and (faux?) video essay, Castronovo’s polemic approach to the form and ingeniousness simply left me in awe upon my first viewing of it. A deeply rich text.
happiness by Fırat Yücel
What an effective, amazing work about the mediality of the Palestinian genocide, a meditation on what it truly means to witness a live-streamed genocide, amongst other apps and enormous quantities of digital debris – both grave and, at times, incredibly funny in its use of (self-effacing) dark humour.
Being John Smith by John Smith
Finally caught up with it this year. John Smith is like none other (pun intended?).
Slet 1988 by Marta Popivoda
Expanding upon her previous work, Popivoda does something quite incredible with the format here: she frames a video essay with auto-fictional insertions that emulate the perspective of a teenaged self. What a beautiful, playful innovation.
Their Eyes by Nicolas Gourault
The perspective of tech-colonialism – of outsourced labor, its gaze/regard, of the human cost that AI is constructed upon, of the new nightmarish ways that the contemporary panopticon keeps on finding to transform moving images into surveillance.
Lloyd Wong, unfinished by Lesley Loksi Chan
James Docherty
Video creator and visual content designer for YouTube
How We’re Redesigning Audacity for the Future by Tantacrul
Bit of a controversial choice, as this video is more of an advertisement for software the creator is promoting than a traditional video essay. Still, Tantacrul’s rhythm in editing and storytelling is something other creators can and should learn from.
One of my favourite recent short-form essays. Josie is well-versed in tackling a timely topic; challenging the kitsch nostalgia for a bygone era by revealing Norman Rockwell’s more progressive side.
Another experimental video essay, from a creator whose work I’ve grown really fond of the past year. Tom from Static Canvas explores the summertime adventures of Boku no Natsuyasumi by writing diary entries after each play session. I love its approach to roleplaying as a form of analysis.
Making Sense of ‘Dad Movies’ by In/Frame/Out
I’ve been a fan of In/Frame/Out’s accessible approach to film analysis for years, and this topic is a great entry point for newcomers. It explores ‘Dadcore’ movies; what defines them and what they reveal about the audiences who love them. Delivered, as usual, in IFO’s smart writing and stylish editing.
Mario Kart World’s real winner… is graphic design by elliotisacoolguy
Elliot’s videos showcase many aspects of his graphic design expertise; how to create visuals across a range of unusual programs, viral design challenges, and, more importantly for this list, essays on what design communicates. In this case, he focuses on this year’s Mario Kart World and its overlooked fictional brands.
blue prince is at odds with itself by Video Games Are Bad
Don’t let the channel’s branding fool you; Harry’s writing cuts to the heart of what makes games great, blending genuine enthusiasm with a deep knowledge for the medium, while keeping things concise and approachable. His look at this year’s indie cult hit Blue Prince captures what his channel does best: making thoughtful arguments and exploring every interesting thread, all presented with the tone of a friendly chit-chat.
How Many Times Can You Pee in Heavy Rain? by Allie Meowy
My video essay of the year. Allie Meowy deserves credit for asking the question no one else would – and uncovering some fascinating insights along the way.
Lucy Fife Donaldson
Audiovisual essayist and Professor of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews
Looking at my choices, I see that I have particularly valued work thinking through and about history, whether that is presenting marginalised histories through stories of digitisation or labour, or re-imagining personal histories and relationships to media, or speculative/revisionist approaches. Many of these pieces have made me consider the project of historical work in different ways, offering inspiration for how we might approach an archive, an institution, a role, a genre. On the formal side, I’ve chosen work that has impressed me in its audiovisual choices, and in particular, videos that have demonstrated how affective videographic form can be. All of these pieces have moved or entranced me, some have blown my mind with their skill, elegance and distinctiveness. (It turns out, multiscreens really speak to me!) As always there are simply too many pieces to choose from, so I’ve given some further recommendations in my comments.
A Tale of Two Desktops: The First Czech Films in Parallel Worlds by Jiří Anger, Veronika Hanáková and Jiří Žák
Compositionally and analytically rich, A Tale of Two Desktops offers an insight into early cinema which brings novel ways of thinking about how to address aesthetic specificity, especially aesthetic qualities that might be overlooked as mistakes or limitations of technology. This work does a great deal to expand and spatialise videographic approaches to the archive, as does John Gibbs’ highly enjoyable Backlot Connections.
Post-Cinema: The Hall of Mirrors by Joel Blackledge
I saw Post-Cinema: The Hall of Mirrors at the Marienbad Film Festival in June, and was really swept away by the power of its central formal conceit – a moving reel of images – which delivers and builds on engagement with theory. Though very different in pace and tone, the powerful force of the compositional choice reminded me of Catherine Grant’s use of a reel of images in Making Fiction Flow (in collaboration with Melanie Bell), which presents a masterful form for engaging with archival materials (in this case oral histories).
See Under: Orient by Colleen Laird
Striking, insightful, playful and incisive. This is at once dazzling and sharp, combining the intense sensory pleasures of the audiovisual essay with its capacity for critical insight. As with work I most admire, it makes me see, think and feel new things every time I watch.
The Hand That Touches the Arm by Calac Nogueira
Palpably demonstrating the power of accumulation, this piece illuminates the critical force of selection and editing. Quietly troubling, the audience’s attention is demanded. While Nogueira gradually calls our attention to look and feel for small gestures, Barbara Zecchi commands our attention to violence against women, making her own declarative and interventionist gestures in Overturning Carmen’s feminicide: Materialising women’s agency through the musical.
Meet Part | Mothers Daughters by Viktoria Paranyuk
Illusive and suggestive, while being somehow dense and stark simultaneously, Paranyuk’s compositional approach repays multiple viewings. Although the piece as a whole is formally very different, the tactility and care of the editing reminds me of Johannes Binotto’s work, especially his gestures of thought – inscription, which was my favourite this year.
Shadow Self: On Agnès Varda’s Documenteur by Sadia Quraeshi Shepard
Shepard’s work is beautifully poised; compelling formal decisions are married with stirring personal reflection. The quality of the personal with such arresting image-making connects to Dayna McLeod’s Pot Belly, a much cheekier work, which brings with it no less force for thinking through the specificity of the maker’s relationship to a particular film.
On Listening by Pavitra Sundar
Sundar’s audiovisual essay stages an encounter between a scene and film history, carried through sound but masterfully conceptualised through layering and text. The power of sound, and capacity to communicate narrative and affective experience through remixing of images achieved so brilliantly here is carried further by Alison Peirse’s HELLO?, in which new generic possibilities are built.
Cormac Donnelly
Film lecturer and researcher at Liverpool John Moores University
These video essays all lingered well beyond the brief period I spent watching them.
Epitaph for Sonja 1: Body/Archive/Movement by Amanda Doxtater
“It was devastating and beautiful at once” which appears in this video essay and eloquently sums up how I feel about it.
Age Perfect by Dayna McLeod
The unlikely yet pitch perfect meeting of video essayist and waterfall. A reminder that form and method may not be found at my desk in front of my computer.
The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková
The absolute joy of this piece belies the clarity of its argument and the amount of research which has gone into it. And I am definitely staying tuned for the ‘Home Improvement’ instalment in the series.
ON BEING ’WITH’ NORMAL PEOPLE by Catherine Fowler
This video essay plays so beautifully with the tension of proximity, of closeness, of being ‘with’, and then of course of being without.
On Listening by Pavitra Sundar
Fascinating to listen to (and watch) and consider the mediating nature of the listening experience; listening on listening on listening, and indeed listening to listening to listening.
Kevin L. Ferguson
Associate Professor, Queens College/CUNY and co-editor of [in]Transition
The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková
This is exemplary media archaeology and a reminder of the whimsy of programming decisions.
Bride of Frankenstein [film|minutes] — interactive version by Shane Denson
Slowness is the antidote to a constructed life; a tool to reorganise the parts.
Another Delicious Story by Karin Shankar
We make images from images made by others. And sometimes they’re your kids.
Giallo by Matt Miller
AI bad. Code good. Sharing tools and methods is the way.
The Video Essay About The Show by Jason Mittell
Form runs through the wringer.
Dmitry Frolov
In assembling this list, I was guided by a principle articulated last year by my esteemed colleague Julian Ross: “Essay films = video essays.” Without denying the heuristic or aesthetic value of online videographic criticism, I chose to focus on a more immersive encounter with essayistic thought – namely, in cinemas and contemporary art spaces. In a world whose condition increasingly resembles a catastrophe, gaining access to such experiences is becoming ever more difficult (at least for me, an unemployed immigrant), and thus all the more precious. Perhaps a reaction to this same world-condition underlies the mixture of melancholy and incisive critical thinking that permeates most of the films I selected. As the literary scholar Mikhail Epstein once wrote, the essay form is marked by “uncertainty and brazenness, the sadness of an exile and the audacity of a wanderer.” Each of the five films follows this fluctuating artistic strategy in its own way, reflecting on the maladies and peculiarities of our time. Each resonates deeply with my current state of mind.
Evidence by Lee Anne Schmitt
If the essay’s key strength is its critical potential, then questioning contemporary power structures becomes one of its essential tasks. This film embodies that brilliantly: a brilliant, penetrating investigation of American neoconservatism.
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions by Kahlil Joseph
One of the most spectacular films of 2025, together with an inventive and multifaceted reflection on contemporary Black culture.
Family Constellation with a Fox by Gernot Wieland
Combining a Benjaminian poetic tone, intellectual clarity, personal mythologies and wonderful ceramic figures, this work struck me as both piercing and uplifting.
New Old Homeland by Taniguchi Akihiko
One of the year’s best machinima essay films, offering a deep and humorous reflection on the increasingly prominent virtual worlds shaped by game engines.
Hostile Landscapes by Zhang Hanwen
This is a wonderful example of a slow-paced, dual-channel essay film that subtly enhances the viewer’s sense of agency. I especially appreciate the attunement between my gaze and the filmmaker’s calm exploration of a landscape beneath which lie layers of colonial history and mechanisms of power.
Behrang Garakani
Technologist and creator of cinematic essays who teaches coding for media studies at Columbia University and works in Technology at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Many of my nominations emerged from a course I designed and still teach at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Nearly all of last year’s cohort had no prior knowledge of video essays or even nonlinear editing, yet they produced exceptional work that earned recognition beyond the classroom. Two of them spoke and screened their films at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and two video essays are forthcoming in an upcoming issue of In Media Res. Their work demonstrates the medium’s capacity to function as scholarship, criticism, and art.
Trapped on a Pedestal by Sam Gordon
Gordon’s close visual reading of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence is simultaneously sublime and evocative. While the ultra-widescreen is a treat for the eyes, its clever sound design shouldn’t be missed: listen with headphones.
Cummings’ close examination of Todd Haynes’ 2015 film Carol with Epstein’s enigmatic Photogénie blends a cinematic style through an academic lens.
Agnes’ Song by Chengkangjie (Eric) Huang
How can you portray the difficult subject of ‘comfort women’ in audiovisual form? Huang succeeded in this film that is haunting, yet respectful to the survivors and their stories.
Gleaning Reflection by Gracie Hecht
Hecht uses both literal and metaphorical mirrors and lenses in her meditation on the reflexive mode of filmmaking employed by Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000). Hecht was one of my students who was granted access to Varda’s archives, and invited to accompany the screening of her video essay at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
(Untitled) by Committee of Affairs (CoA)
The anonymous artist Committee of Affairs (CoA) produces for both TikTok and Instagram. Their reels tend to have a style, which are all acquired content from other sources, mostly other users and films. The clips usually begin with an opening clip of a user speaking directly to us, then a wave of music and moving images, ending with an image of text that often speeds by too quickly to read. The genre is either hopecore or corecore, depending on the video and your mood.
This reel feels like corecore as it pierces through layers of the human condition on the rhythm of Radiohead’s Exit Music. What’s also worth further examination is how the same reel is received differently amongst users on different platforms. Effect becomes affect … depending on the audience affected. This work reveals that algorithmically-circulated montage doesn’t have a stable affect. It becomes a different object through the sorting algorithms, comment culture, and the base of users. Instagram users skew towards a phenomenological intensity, while TikTok users articulate melancholia for the same video. By making algorithmic mediation visible through cross-platform distribution, CoA transforms the montage into an analytical argument about how digital infrastructure shapes feeling.
Database Gleaning by Andrea De Bedout
De Bedout’s moving cinematic video essay is a blend of poetic and desktop documentary modes. We watch her mine The Gleaners and I (2000) dailies database revealing details of the filmmaking process. She shows us connections between the footage, archive, and interface, bringing in Lev Manovich as an interlocutor. Interface icons become moving images, buttons become prompts, themes become filenames. We see the act of gleaning of a gleaner. Like Hecht, De Bedout was invited to speak and screen her film at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.
J. Nicholas Geist
josh (with parentheses) is a video essayist who attempts to make complex, compelling arguments in the stupidest possible ways. He sometimes succeeds at the first part, but is pretty reliable for the second.
The Real Story Behind the Backrooms by Kendra Gaylord
I do not care even a tiny bit about architecture, the focus of Kendra Gaylord’s work, but I will never miss a single one of her videos. The Real Story Behind the Backrooms is a perfect example of why: architecture is, to her, something humans do that can help us understand humans. It is a story about the architectural history of a building, and also the emergence of a meme, and also about how a very generous man gave a lot to the internet and the least we can do is help him fix his roof.
Afrodizjha’s close appreciation of Tramell Tillman’s bravura performance as Mr. Milchick on Severance helped me understand Milchick as illustrative of the ways in which Blackness is controlled and repressed in white-dominated corporate spaces.
Being a YouTuber Bankrupted Me by Innuendo Studios
The first thing to say about this choice is that Ian Danskin’s work as Innuendo Studios is consistently phenomenal, from top to bottom and without exception. On Nebula, he is currently working on a series of short game reviews that construct a historical framework for the genre; I would find it shocking if others did not include this year’s The South Bank of the Rubicon among their poll responses; and his The Alt-Right Playbook series represents some of the most powerful and instructive analysis of the rhetorical manipulations that have enabled the rise of fascism over the last few decades. When Danskin published this video, he had nearly half a million subscribers and a well-earned reputation as one of the best and most thoughtful essayists on YouTube. He was, by most metrics of the platform, extremely successful.
And yet, the title.
I choose this essay for two reasons. First, I think Danskin’s experience highlights some of the major systemic problems facing working essayists on YouTube. There are plenty of essayists in similar positions, essayists who are doing remarkable work that is engaging their audience and drawing traffic to YouTube, and who are yet unable to sustain that work financially.
Second, because Danskin’s GoFundMe hit *double* its goal within two days. Reading the comments both on the video and on the GFM shows how deeply and how well Danskin is loved and appreciated by his community, and how ready his audience was to step up and support him.
It is easy to feel bleak, as a video essayist on YouTube in 2025, about the prospects of making a channel sustainable. This video showcases the difficult truth of that situation. The creators are showing up and doing phenomenal work. The audience is there ready and willing to support those creators. But the systems that creators need to enable their labor are not doing enough to keep them going.
I get made fun of a lot as having a somewhat chaotic definition of essay, but I’m sticking to my guns on this one: this roller coaster is a video essay. A lot of video essays come from a film background, and use the tools of filmmaking to develop their ideas. But those aren’t the only tools available to us! Sometimes we can make meaning through roller coaster design. And if you’re not convinced, listen to him talk about how and why he made the choices that he did.
Jacob Geller
Video essayist on YouTube and Nebula who often uses video games as a springboard to speak about larger topics of art, philosophy, and politics. His first book, How a Game Lives, is available now from all major booksellers.
This year, I’ve been thinking about the different generations of mainstream YouTube video essayists. While the first wave of YouTube essayists may have been inspired by film, television, and/or written essays, many popular 2025 creators are young enough that they grew up alongside the video essay. This younger cohort has been presented a goal that didn’t previously exist!
While the first generation of essayists may have turned to YouTube in an attempt to ‘do something’ with their film and philosophy degrees, younger creators may indeed pursue certain fields of study with the goal of disseminating this knowledge as a video essayist. While the goal of becoming a YouTuber can result in a passion for algorithmic success over academic rigor, this new generation is also willing to push the boundaries of the familiar form, creating more ambitious and stylistically striking projects.
Trans Day of Vanishing by Lily Alexandre
The best video essay of the year, Alexandre’s work melds text and form in a dizzyingly ambitious trip through an unspeakably awful question: should trans people reduce their social visibility in an act of self-preservation?
The essay itself, shot in extreme widescreen, builds a sense of paranoia – Alexandre herself only takes up a fraction of the scene and the urban landscape, cold and artificially lit, stretches out beyond her. It’s a testament to the video’s magnitude that Alexandre literally being tear gassed on the streets of Montreal is only its second most striking scene. The most striking is when she taps into the feed of a public surveillance camera, finding production quality in the constant, unwilling scrutiny she lives under.
The 25 Best Films of 2024: A Video Countdown by David Ehrlich
A countdown of the best films of 2024, sans traditional script or voiceover, seems outside the realm of typical video essay. And yet, Ehrlich’s 23-minute montage isn’t just a countdown but a conversation made through editing, a weaving together of hundreds of cinematic motifs from an entire year.
The montage finds constant moments of delight in juxtaposition: the overture features scenes of Anora, Megalopolis, Dune, Challengers, and dozens more all choreographed together to a song from The Greatest Showman. I Saw the TV Glow functions as a meta-framing device throughout the montage – Justice Smith looks directly into the camera and intones “I watched these tapes over and over again, but they never got old.” The choice of musical accompaniment is, also, revelatory. In one standout sequence, Ehrlich introduces Nosferatu alongside Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’, only to continue the song through his next pick, The Beast, finally climaxing alongside Dion with Challengers. The track is hilarious, yes, but also exactly captures the thematic core of each film.
However, it’s the finale of the piece that cements it as Ehrlich’s best work so far. The crescendo seems to come early; after Anora (his #3 pick), the montage escalates into an ecstasy of scenes and sounds and emotion set to an epic rework of Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’. And when it seems the montage can rise no higher… it doesn’t. It crashes back down to Earth with the sparse harmonica of Springsteen’s The Promised Land and Ehrlich’s final two picks, No Other Land and Nickel Boys. An impossible level of craft throughout.
Death of the Author: An Alan Wake Series Retrospective by Noah Caldwell-Gervais
Much as series protagonist Alan Wake can’t help but spiral around his own universe of autofiction, Noah Caldwell-Gervais is helplessly drawn back to developer Remedy’s series of games. Having previously covered Alan Wake, Max Payne, and Control on his channel, Gervais now revisits each along a gargantuan journey to understand the layers of meaning woven throughout Alan Wake 2. Although the runtimes of many video essays have ballooned over the years, only Gervais is capable of keeping his writing on-target and engaging for nearly 200 minutes straight.
And as Alan Wake 2 snakes through the themes of nearly every Remedy game, longtime fans of Gervais’ channel will see how this retrospective engages with many of his defining interests: Horror and noir, self-loathing writers, King’s Dark Tower series, goofy Rock and Roll stars. Gervais’ channel seemed incomplete without an essay on Alan Wake – and Alan Wake 2 itself seemed incomplete without an analysis by Gervais. Finally, both are settled.
Tomas Genevičius
Backlot Connections by John Gibbs
By juxtaposing filming locations and set designs, this video essay reveals the unseen ties between characters from different films and the unexpected thematic connections among them. It becomes a special cinematic space where these characters live, pass by one another, and perhaps even meet.
The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková
By exploring the extinct star wipe film transition and its notorious history, the video essay transforms into a study in experimental media archaeology, revealing how this anachronistic artefact can still be relevant and useful today.
Painful Cinephilia: Daney, Rivette, Video and Kapó by Alan O’Leary (OuScholPo)
This video essay enters the ethical realm of Holocaust representation in cinema and creatively addresses the problem of unrepresentability: how to talk about a film that “no one has seen” and yet “no one has forgotten”?
The Anthropocene Will Eat Itself by Cormac Donnelly
We are living closer to the outbreak of a global/nuclear war than at any time since the Cold War. Yet, video essays reflecting on this are scarce. Cormac Donnelly, exploring the theme of the Anthropocene, conveys a similar sense of threat and destruction by applying the metaphor of cannibalism, media emulations, archives, and the form of an immersive trailer.
This video essay reimagines the myth of Carmen from a feminist perspective. It stands out for its distinctive structure and form. Its tactile treatment of the material underscores its subversion of patriarchal traditions and narratives, while the ticking clock serves as a constant reminder that, in the real world, a woman is killed every ten minutes as a result of gender-based violence.
gestures of thought: glance by Johannes Binotto
Jean Epstein’s shimmering close-ups are boldly combined with the video essayist’s own personal archive and his wonderful music, lending the work additional sensitivity as it reflects on the elusive cinematic poetics of “shimmering images”.
The Thinking Machine #95: Boro(que) Aesthetics by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
Guided by Malcolm de Chazal’s Plastic-Sense aphorisms, this video essay allows us to see Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Women (1979) as one might contemplate a painter’s work. And it effectively conveys Chazal’s idea that “everything on earth is sensuously connected to everything else.”
Libertad Gills
Filmmaker, researcher, and lecturer in Videographic Criticism at the University of Leeds
Making Fiction Flow by Melanie Bell & Catherine Grant
Sirens by Nan Goldin
(dis)Orientating Horror: Feeling Queerly by Lucy Fife Donaldson
Shadow Self: On Agnès Varda’s Documenteur by Sadia Quraeshi Shepard
Ordinatrices: About the Negative Spaces of Early Computing by Occitane Lacurie
Black & Arab Encounters on Screen by Abiba Coulibaly
Catherine Grant
Freelance film scholar and video essayist. Newly elected Fellow of the British Academy
As it gets harder and harder to select only seven videos for this poll, as in the last years, I have used three parameters in the composition of my list: I had to choose works by different essayists from those for whom I voted in 2024; and my selection could only feature personal favourites in the field of videographic criticism, that is, a specific film, television and screen studies subset of the ‘video essay’. The videos also needed to be already published and freely available online, which ruled out some great works for which I will undoubtedly be voting next year.
Epilogue: Remembered Video by Alan O’Leary
Alan’s characteristically brilliant, generous and superbly performed, filmed and edited audiovisual work (published in December 2024) was a commissioned response to The Personal Mediascape in the Age of Videographic Heterotopias, a cluster of ten videos and statements published in ASAP/J (the journal of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present) and curated by Joel Burges and Allison Cooper. The prompt for the cluster was Victor Burgin’s understanding of cinema as a kind of personal heterotopia (a fragmentary internal playlist or mediascape) constituted by the physical, virtual, and psychical ways in which we encounter it. As well as responding to this prompt and the videos which explored it in the main body of the issue, Epilogue: Remembered Video wonderfully articulates and exemplifies a method for videographic criticism and for humanistic criticism as such. Everyone interested in Videographic Criticism for scholarly purposes should watch it and the ten amazing videographic works with which it entered into conversation: Preliminary Notes for Thinking About a Place by Catalina Segú; Potbelly by Dayna McLeod; Fred Astaire’s Cane Hits My Brain by Will DiGravio; The Bijou Room by Desirée J. Garcia; The Uneasiness of Being a Subject: Queriendo sin querer by Jeffrey Romero Middents; Atmospheres of History in Larisa Shepitko’s Films by Viktoria Paranyuk; Epitaph for Sonja 1: Body/Archive/Movement by Amanda Doxtater; Shadow Self: On Agnès Varda’s Documenteur by Sadia Quraeshi Shepard; Desidentificación by Maillim Santiago; and Alterity Onscreen: A Gen-X Mediascape by Allison Cooper.
Uncontaining Horror: 20th Century Spanish Women’s Meshes of Fear by Barbara Zecchi
Published in December 2024 in the Spanish audiovisual essay journal Tecmerin. Revista de Ensayos Audiovisuales, Barbara’s video is one of the most original and powerful scholarly video essays I have watched, making an argument about women’s film authorship that really counts. Using two concepts from horror cinema as a theoretical framework – Eugenie Brinkema’s “genrelessness” and Jane Gaines’s “uncontainment” – Uncontaining Horror reinterprets films by 20th-century Spanish women directors that have not traditionally been classified as horror, offering a broader and certainly much less androcentric understanding of the genre.
Not at Home by Deborah Martin
Debbie’s video is a short but fabulously assembled split screen video essay that compares sequences from two films, The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1951) and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019), emphasising correspondences in the dynamics of space, gender, and movement in the films, and in their use of gothic conventions. It was published by [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, alongside brilliantly insightful reviews by Alison Peirse and Benjamin Sampson, in a double issue overflowing with remarkable works. I have singled it out as for me it is the perfect study of two of my all-time favourite films and is very much a video I will watch again and again, and would have loved to have made myself. I can’t wait for more of Debbie’s highly original videographic studies of space, uncanniness, queerness and horror to be published.
(dis)Orientating Horror: Feeling Queerly by Lucy Fife Donaldson
Lucy’s work is always brilliant and this video (deserved winner of the audiovisual essay competition at the Marienbad Film Festival in 2025) is both strikingly and uncannily so. Importantly, it succeeds in its aim of exploring the videographic form as a queer methodology. Departing from some of Lucy’s observations about space in Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019), and using a variety of videographic editing techniques (multiscreen, image flipping, and mirroring, repetition, looping, reversing direction) as well as filming new material, her work takes up Sara Ahmed’s spatial understanding of queerness from her book, Queer Phenomenology, as she explains to great effect in her remarkable accompanying maker’s statement. Published in December 2024, ‘(dis)Orienting horror: feeling queerly’ is part of an extremely rich (first ever videographic) special issue on ‘Queer/ing Horror’, published by the Canadian horror journal Monstrum, guest edited by artist and video essayist extraordinaire Dayna McLeod, which also features amazing videographic work by Felicia Cosey (Jouissance at the Margins: Revisiting Bersani’s Is the Rectum a Grave? Through the Lens of Swallowed), Alex Hall (Lick the Blade: Locating a Queer Archive of Debris in Roberta Findlay’s The Oracle), Max Ranieri (We’re All Scrolling Through the World’s Fair: Online Horror Fiction as a Site of Queer Identity Formation), Heather O. Petrocelli and May Santiago (Queer + Horror), Ada Rosen (Inside(s) Out), Julia Erhart and Susan Bruce (Decentering Monstrosity in The Children’s Hour (1961)), Darren Elliott-Smith (Every creak, every groan, every tap in the wall, you’ll think of me: Spinning the Web of Trans*-Horror Metaphors in Cobweb (2023)), and Alison Peirse (I Can Hear Someone Coming).
The Video Essay About The Show by Jason Mittell
For me, 2024–25 saw a surge in what might be regarded as ‘feature film length’ audiovisual essay projects, or certainly ones which, in their length, production ambitions and sometimes budgets, far exceeded the scope of most scholarly videographic work. Several examples of this trend are Christian Keathley’s hugely compelling 2024 work Cinephilia and History, or The Mystery of William Keighley, and Kevin B. Lee’s recently premiered urgent and fascinating desktop documentary Afterlives (Germany-Belgium-France 2025), Lúcia Nagib’s fabulously hybrid essay film/audiovisual essay Films to Die For (2025), as well as Steve Anderson’s recent film Reality Frictions. None of these are yet publicly viewable online, so remain beyond the scope of my selection. By far my favourite publicly available online work of extended scope is Jason Mittell’s amazing videographic serial project, a brilliant follow up to his recent reflexive study of Nathan Fielder’s TV show The Rehearsal. This time, he focuses on The Show About The Show, a webseries by filmmaker Caveh Zahedi that documents his life and the process of making the series. Jason’s project is at the cutting edge, both of video-essaying and academic research by practice, here, the practice of reflexive imitation of media works. It’s also extremely funny, highly ambitious, and very thought-provoking and original on the politics and ethics of contemporary nonfiction ‘film’making. Jason’s essential and informative introduction to the work is online here.
A Tale of Two Desktops: The First Czech Films in Parallel Worlds by Jiří Anger, Veronika Hanáková, and Jiří Žák
It’s been another great year for the dynamic videographic duo Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková, who also published the remarkable and hilarious work The Return of the Star Wipe at [in]Transition in June 2025. I also love their important and formally innovative collaboration with Jiří Žák on Czech cinema made for the Audiovisual Approaches and the Archive Dossier published by MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism. Focusing on three films, 26 frames, and a single GIF, A Tale of Two Desktops proposes a new vision of archival film, one that builds on and departs from Jiří Anger’s award-winning 2024 book Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up. Like the earlier video essays I have selected for this year’s poll, this work is a model of creative scholarship, in other words, it is the result of a disciplined process, using artistic as well as intellectual methods, for creating credible knowledge that can receive and withstand critical scrutiny, and which is able to be built upon by others as it itself has built on earlier studies.
The Thinking Machine #93: Longing by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin
Last but far from least, I have selected Longing, one of the many dozens of amazing works by the longstanding masters of film criticism in audiovisual essay form, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, in their ongoing collaboration for the online Dutch film magazine Filmkrant. It was hard to single out just one work by them from 2025, but I really loved this one about the striking similarities between two films starring Tilda Swinton, 35 years apart: Friendship’s Death (Peter Wollen, 1987) and Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller, 2022). Like those two films, Longing is a beautiful, powerful and insightful work.
Chiara Grizzaffi
Assistant Professor at IULM University and co-editor of [in]Transition
Every year it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with the many fascinating works that are published online, presented at public events such as festivals and showcases, and so on. Choosing personal favourites is even harder. This list includes some of the works that have most prompted me to reflect, inspired me, and opened up new research possibilities for me.
Making Fiction Flow by Melanie Bell & Catherine Grant
As someone interested in women’s labour in film production, I was truly struck by the inventive and surprising ways Grant and Bell find to explore and visually convey the work of script supervisor Penny Eyles.
The Video Essay About The Show by Jason Mittell
In this series, Jason Mittell experiments by adopting certain formal traits of the object he analyses – seriality and self-reflexivity – in clever and original ways, thus devising a complex and innovative methodological approach
Afterlives by Kevin B. Lee
Afterlives is a feature film and, given its production value, perhaps shouldn’t be on this list. Still, it represents the most accomplished outcome of an aesthetic and methodology Lee has developed in his practice as a video essayist. It is both a theoretical reflection on the image and a moving, profound meditation on the limits of the visible.
The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková
The research Jiří and Veronika are conducting on the archaeology of video technology and the early years of digital media is truly compelling. By focusing on marginal and eccentric forms within the history of audiovisual technology, they reveal the intricate ties between aesthetics, technology, and the economics of the moving image.
Backlot Connections by John Gibbs
Some years ago, the work of Mark Rappaport and his book The Secret Life of Moving Shadows sparked in me a fascination not only for studio backlots and props histories, but also for the video essay as a tool capable of making invisible connections visible and accessible. This is precisely what John Gibbs achieves, with precision and elegance, in Backlot Connections.
Locarno parla italiano – 404!: Glitching Locarno Film Festival by Silvia Cipelletti and Evelyn Kreutzer
The video essay speaks Italian! I watched Silvia and Evelyn develop this project brilliantly during a workshop in Locarno, and the way they turned obstacles into creative opportunities is incredibly clever.
Veronika Hanáková
AV essayist and media scholar, and researcher of gimmicky artefacts
Potential of sketches, playfulness of research questions, unexpected conclusions from close readings, ephemeral phenomena, as well as work that enters the territory of violent imagery. Research in videographic scholarship and the essay film form does not operate within fixed or predetermined boundaries. My picks reflect this, in no particular order.
Vampire Optics by Allan Cameron
From Kittler’s reading of vampires in relation to recording and copying technologies such as the typewriter and the phonograph, to Shane Denson’s analysis of Frankenstein and the advent of sound in moving pictures, or Jiří Anger’s reading of early films in which a spliced and re-glued frame in an analogue strip produces a Frankensteinian moment at the levels of both materiality and perception, I have developed a deep appreciation for understanding monsters (their bodies, powers, and vulnerabilities) as inseparable from the media that shape them. Cameron’s audiovisual essay traces vampires along a similar path, yet refuses to stop at the boundaries of medium specificity. Instead, it follows the screen vampire’s unique relationship with light, thus revealing an interconnected network of ‘vampire optics’: mirrors, shadows, shimmer, focus, flicker, and more. The video essay is connected to Cameron’s Visceral Screens: Mediation and Matter in Horror Cinema; you can watch the essay first and then read the book, or reverse the order.
Afterlives by Kevin B. Lee
The Medusa of Hatra becomes a single image that opens up an entire network of interconnected questions about who has the right to know, to protect, and to use cultural heritage. It sits at the crossroads of ISIS propaganda, violent imagery, the politics of digital archives, and the ethics of remembering. It forces us to ask: Who is being remembered, by whom, and by what means? Who shapes the narrative, and who is shaped by it? Underlying these questions is a deeper one: where does agency reside, and where does it dissolve into forms of being interpreted, mediated, or spoken for by others? For Kevin, vulnerability does not arise merely from viewing a brutal or violent image. It comes from navigating the tensions and voices that gather around these questions, existing within an ever-evolving discourse of power… The film stands as the culmination of years of filmmaking and research, and it is a film well worth seeing. Also read Seeing without Seeing – Towards a Generative Archival Practice.
Toute la data du monde by Evelyn Kreutzer
A connection emerges with the voice-over from Chris Marker’s Toute la mémoire du monde, which reflects on the library as a system of memory. Evelyn extends this parallel by proposing a way of approaching AI as a system that not only structures memory but actively produces it. This idea resonates with Kevin’s Afterlives, especially in the section where AI appears as the only remaining archive of certain (here, extremist) images. The audiovisual essay therefore positions AI not merely as a tool of image production but as a system of knowledge, power, and memory that demands investigation. It suggests that we should not be intimidated by these black-box, seemingly shiny tools, but instead look closely at what lies within them. Good to pair with Silvia Cipelletti’s piece Memoria Algoritmica. For a broader context, one might go to see Alan Warburton’s Wizard of AI.
Imaging Orphée / Orphée imaginé by Jenny Oyallon-Koloski
What if Jacques Demy had made Parking differently? Imaging Orphée plays with this alternative past, through editing, remixing, and counterfactual speculation, it explores how his 1985 queer musical might have taken another form. In dialogue with Demy’s style and contemporary media, a new Orpheus emerges, singing across time and cultures. Drawing on an eclectic corpus and on what we know of Demy’s craft, Imaging Orphée uses videographic means to envision how the past itself might have unfolded otherwise, a mode of analysis that becomes an act of playful reinvention. If the piece invites us to re-imagine other films, then it is an invitation worth accepting.
A Life of Its Own: American Psycho by Sara Bezovšek
A reconfiguration of a film and its afterlife (through memes, videos, ads, and other artefacts) into the single frame of a web browser, forming one associative stream, a never-ending analysis. I would love to see more similar analytical work that unfolds within the scope of a single virtual window or a single frame, much like how TikTok or an Instagram Reel can operate, as Hysterical Melancholy / Cyber Trash does for digital nostalgia.
Comedy Objects #1: Slapstick Speculation by Noah Teichner
When you are watching film comedies, what do you focus on? The predicaments of the main character, the misbehaviour of everything around them, the jokes? Noah focuses on Hollywood film comedies from the 1930s. To do so, he is able to connect the humour and the language (the delivery of the jokes) to the omnipresence of the financial crisis. A close reading of figures of speech, gesture, and music places film comedies less in the realm of frivolous slips of the tongue and more within the logic of the system, financial system. In researching the history and phenomenon of slapstick comedies, this essay pairs nicely with Petr Král’s Le Burlesque ou Morale de la tarte à la crème, even though they approach the subject from slightly different perspectives. Published as part of a special issue of the journal Images secondes on Cinema and Financial Speculation (edited by Occitane Lacurie and Barnabé Sauvage).
Television Still Delivers People: Re-Creating the 1973 Video Manifesto by Richard Serra and Carlotta Fay Schoolman through Multiple Screens and Various Media by Jaap Kooijman
About our relationship to the screen, about our subjectivity and agency, and about the very idea of a mass medium; about the fact that there is not just one television screen but many, and whether ‘mass’ even remains a meaningful category. A playful media-archaeological sketch, not yet published. Presented as a work-in-progress at NECS 2025.
Hizzy Hay
Part Time Video Essayist Full Time Video Essay Enjoyer
You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.) by josh (with parentheses)
With the rise of AI in the past few years, I have seen many coworkers, friends and family members all sort of ‘give up’ when it comes to the small amount of writing they are challenged with. This video really tackles this trend and comes from a unique position of a teacher who still believes in his students. Also there’s a part which mentions Baby Gronk that made me cry, which is definitely the only time that will happen (I hope).
You Are into Mousetrap YouTube by Big Joel
“And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’” These words really struck me in David Byrne’s True Stories, Big Joel’s You are into Mousetrap Youtube struck me in a very similar way. The internet is a wide and weird place and we all find ourselves in unique and specific rabbit holes. You are likely not into Mousetrap Youtube but there’s something in its place that fascinates you.
You Seem Like You Wouldn’t Clap for Tinkerbell by Afterthoughts
A very raw essay about someone’s own struggle wrestling with their belief that I would imagine everyone with a loved one they’ve lost can relate to. Impressively it was all written, filmed and edited for a 48 hour collab.
What’s Stopping You? (Spoiler: It’s You) by Nathan Zed
Brilliant editing, tight writing, and a warm reminder to nourish that same child-like passion you had for something in the first place. Another classic.
A Video Essay About Efficiency by Pillar of Garbage
A clever video essay metaphor used to tackle what is lost in shortcuts made in our everyday lives.
This unlocked a connection I completely missed on my first watch of Close Encounters, it helped me further understand what Spielberg and company were going for in this film and I’m a little excited to give it a rewatch from that lens.
Camp Rock Is About Food Poisoning by Indietrix
A thorough analysis of Camp Rock’s haphazard portrayal of food safety done with tons of comedy and an appreciation for the profession.
Maria Hofmann
Media scholar and video essayist; University of Minnesota
a rumble from the core of the earth by Laura Del Vecchio and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz
I am beyond impressed how this video essay achieves the core mission of videographic scholarship – making a compelling, theoretically sophisticated, and novel argument both in the written statement as well as the audiovisual material. Challenging the notions of Western-centric knowledge production and perception is easier said than done; yet, the exquisite editing offers the viewer not only the space to critically reflect on but to experience what it means to “listen otherwise”.
The Anthropocene Will Eat Itself by Cormac Donnelly
Like in some of his other works, Donnelly’s layering of tactility – from the visual framing and the materiality of the visual and audio clips to the body horror of the depicted cannibalism – manages to create a horrifying visceral aftereffect that is simultaneously highly entertaining and deeply disturbing.
Cheezit Timeline by Benedetta Andreasi
I love how Andreasi’s response to technical issues creates a meditation on the intimacy and precarity of sharing one’s own creative process in the form of the editing timeline. Instead of minimising proximity, the physical embodiment of both the creator and their surroundings introduces an unexpected distance to the work – the anxiety I feel over the filled cup at the centre reflecting the refusal to let me get too close.
Classif & Me (Laird’s Constraint) by Alan O’Leary
A perfect example of the productive energy of constraints that invite and ultimately necessitate subversion. I have a deep appreciation for how O’Leary makes room for what he calls errors in his work that prove themselves as rich points of engagement. The video is playful yet contemplative and intellectually thought-provoking.
Mathieu Janssen
Short film programmer, artistic leader at Go Short
My picks are drawn primarily from the film festival circuit. In no particular order:
Zodiac Killer Project by Charlie Shackleton
Deconstructing true crime tropes with much humour, and somehow still making it a thrilling true crime watch.
The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing by Theo Panagopoulos
Very powerful archive essay; by recontextualising images creating a space to reflect on the oppression of Palestinian people.
Daria’s Night Flowers by Maryam Tafakory
Maryam Tafakory delivering her annual banger; this time with some breathtaking colours.
happiness by Fırat Yücel
How to carry the weight of the world’s pain when it’s constantly live-broadcast to our screens; no one can sleep until everyone is free.
A Reconnaissance by Stefan Kruse
With each film Stefan Kruse is diving deeper into the world of surveillance. This time he’s so invested he even steps away from his computer, finding himself at a Maltese airport standing alongside plane spotters to capture images of a covert drone.
Abortion Party by Julia Mellen
More like a video column maybe?
Delphine Jeanneret
Film curator and lecturer at Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD), where she gives a course on the power of representation in contemporary cinema with a focus on gender, decolonial and ecological studies.
These works expand the territory of the essay film, one in which individual subjectivities operate as critical lenses onto broader socio-political structures. Mobilising strategies drawn from archival material, autofiction, forensic aesthetics, and postcolonial critique, the films interrogate the conditions under which memory, identity, and power are created. The works foreground the essay film as a site of epistemological resistance: a cinematic practice that both questions dominant narratives and experiments with the forms through which knowledge itself can be constructed, destabilised, and reclaimed.
Daria’s Night Flowers by Maryam Tafakory
This film is a lyrical, politically charged meditation in which a young woman’s first love story with a woman blooms amid the shadows of state violence, weaving intimate confession with the unspoken traumas of Iran’s night-gardens. The film beautifully and powerfully weaves flowers, manuscript illuminations and film excerpts that create a film of love and desire that transcends the power structures.
Cold Call by Stefanie Schroeder
In a personal essay on the very act of writing, the filmmaker meets digital scam culture, transforming an intrusive phone call into an unexpected portrait of vulnerability, creative paralysis, and accidental resistance. Stefanie Schroeder’s film questions the intimate through cyber vigilantism, racism and power relationships. The rhythm of her film is particularly interesting as her personal story develops in parallel to the person on the other side of the line.
Sixty-Seven Milliseconds by Fleuryfontaine
This forensic, hybrid investigation traces the path of a single bullet through motion capture and CGI, exposing the distortions of policing and the politics embedded in every frame of surveillance. Fleuryfontaine’s (Antoine Fontaine and Galdric Fleury) film resonates a lot with recent violent events that happened in Switzerland.
Nsala by Mickael-Sltan Mbanza
The film is a haunting use of colonial archives that merges silence, fiction, and contemporary imagery to reclaim erased histories and rehumanise those frozen in exploitative imagery. Mickael-Sltan Mbanza plays with colonial archives and contemporary footage to fictionally recount the story of a couple recruited to work in a mine under colonial rule.
I Can’t Think of Anything Right Now by Hussen Ibraheem
A rain-soaked, metaphysical road film where a simple ride slips into a dreamlike detour through memory, exile, and the fragile boundaries between forgetting and survival. In Hussen Ibraheem’s film, water carries the past and the future of those who are trapped in between memories and exile.
Abortion Party by Julia Mellen
Abortion Party is a chaotic, irreverent autobiographical film that turns a fraught reproductive decision into an absurd, messy celebration of chosen family, bad timing, and the dark comedy of youth. Julia Mellen’s film is witty and opens up to new ways of celebrating dark times.
Lost Songs of Sundari by Sudarshan Sawant
The film proposes a gentle, elegiac triptych of voices reflecting on Mumbai’s shifting shorelines, capturing the quiet vanishing of coastal worlds reshaped, almost erased, by relentless urban expansion. Sudarshan Sawant creates an essay where the living and the non-living find a common space in an ever reshaping landscape.
Kai After Kai
Video essayist and music producer under the name Kai After Kai. Also producer, co-writer, and composer for the horror fiction podcast Kingscreek
The Most Boring Place in Tears of the Kingdom? by Any Austin
Video games, perhaps by nature, tend to be pretty goal/purpose oriented. One of the first things you might ask about that game is “what do you DO in it?” But recently I’ve found myself developing a sort of fondness for moments in games that give me the opportunity to simply do ‘nothing’ – games that have things with no ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’, but simply ‘are’. This video by Any Austin echoes that growing fascination – a video that explores areas in the Zelda game Tears of the Kingdom that objectively have no practical gameplay purpose, but nonetheless have their own value in spite of that due to simply being there. From helping enhance an adventure game’s roleplaying elements to helping to curate a sense of player expectation and anticipation, it’s clear that moments like these have merit in gaming, and I’m glad to see it explained so well.
The Opposite of Cosmic Horror by Tale Foundry
It’s a real mark of quality and impact when a work changes the way I think about and process the world, even if in the most minute way. As a massive fan and now creator of cosmic horror, I’m used to dreaming up concepts and monsters far larger than any one person could ever imagine or even process, but this video exposed to me how that feeling can, ironically, still lead to a form of anthropocentrism. Rarely do we give much thought to those smaller than us — much smaller — who might look up at us and feel their sense of scale and understanding of the universe fall out from under them. The pests that scurry between our walls, the vermin that hide in our corners, the objects of so much fear and hate from ourselves, but have we ever really considered how they feel? Have *I* ever considered how they feel when I cast my shadow over them and, without a second thought, end their existence and continue like they were simply nothing? I can say that I do. Now.
When Death Note Broke Its Own Rules by Sloan Stowe
Part of why I make videos could be said to be ‘obsession’. That is to say, my videos are born from feelings when something, no matter how big or small, crawls over my brain, leaving its impact all over as it grasps my mind and refuses to let go. In that sense, I think I may have found a kindred spirit. Sloan spends half an hour examining a scene less than a fifth of that length, but not a single second is wasted. Every one is filled with some kind of analysis of cinematography, localisation, animation, acting, sound design, all in service of unpacking everything buried underneath these four minutes of anime characters talking in the rain. It is the kind of video born when something truly takes root in you and demands to be acknowledged, demands to be explored. It’s something I truly love to see, in myself yes, but especially in others.
Denis Kefallinos
Video essayist (as LambHoot) and solutions architect
So many video essayists leaned into irreverence this year. If you’re like me, a wave of borderline comedy essays flew through your sub feed. Many messed with tone, interlacing absurd subject matter and harsh delivery into the usual structure. In nonchalant voices, authors spread messages, opined inconclusively on difficult topics, and counted how many functional urinals there were in video games. Many of my picks showed rather than told. The medium felt so much more self-aware. I had a blast watching all of these.
I’ve watched enough YouTube to know to always click any Assassin’s Creed 3 video essays that bless your timeline. SolidArf’s timely piece examines how many of the US citizenship test’s questions are answered accurately by the game’s content, and ultimately evolves into a critique of both.
How Many Times Can You Pee in Heavy Rain? by Allie Meowy
Genuinely the most ‘laugh out loud’ video essay this year (maybe ever). An absolutely absurd premise leads to an examination of granularity and detail in virtual worlds. Like if AVGN made video essays (I swear this is a compliment).
Bluey Is Perfect, and That Terrifies Me by MML’s Commentaries
Matt examines his biases as a child of separated parents, confronting his anxieties about potential parenthood. I wasn’t familiar with Bluey before this, but the video helped me understand why so many parent friends praise the show.
Trans Day of Vanishing by Lily Alexandre
The most ‘show, don’t tell’ video essay of the year, so much so that it literally takes your peripheral vision to watch. No other video essayist put themselves on the front line as much as Lily did this year (again, literally). A raw examination of visibility, vulnerability, and safety. Recommended post-watch read: Unlearning Shame (Devon Price, 2024).
A Narrative Analysis of Space Invaders by Chariot Rider
Some of my favourite videos are Chariot Rider’s. I can’t discuss this one’s subject matter without spoiling a twist that made me laugh out loud… but I can say that Chariot is the master of extracting a mile from an inch.
My Quest to Uncover the Mystery of Death Stranding 2’s Porters by Writing on Games
My favourite Writing on Games videos are those where he points a camera at something benign long enough for a meaningful narrative to emerge from it. By following random NPCs long after they would naturally de-spawn, Hamish highlights aspects of the world’s design he’d otherwise miss. Like watching a leaf under a microscope and remembering how alive it really is.
The Real Story Behind the Backrooms by Kendra Gaylord
Another terrific video I can’t possibly spoil. I didn’t know the Backrooms were real photographs until watching this, but I’m gladly less unsettled by them now. Kendra digs through blueprints and renovation documents to trace a cause-and-effect chain from a 1910s department store to the modern-day meme.
Miklós Kiss
Associate Professor in Audiovisual Arts and Cognition at the University of Groningen, NL / co-author of Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video
Trying to get a grip on a year’s videographic production is becoming increasingly difficult as the output grows exponentially over time. This unavoidably results in a highly personal selection (and potentially less overlap among the videos chosen by others), which is good news because it also indicates a quickly increasing videographic scene and community.
Where Do You Put the Camera? by Every Frame a Painting (Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou)
Every Frame a Painting has only released a single video in 2025, which is bad news for all cinephiles who appreciate Tony Zhou’s meticulous research, clarity in argumentation, and seamless delivery, but good news for all other video essayists who will now have a chance to make it to our best-of-the-year lists.
Crochet Is Sick! by Alison Peirse
Delicately balancing between the subjective-personal (“when I watch horror films, I wrap myself in crochet blankets”) and the objective-scholarly (“crochet is … a portent, a warning of impending horror”), this simple but superbly edited and soundtracked supercut video makes mediated crochet almost tangible.
Cineradiographic Vision by Onur Turgut
The term cineradiography, which gives the project its title, underscores the capacity of imaging technologies to reveal the anatomy of cinematic space, both metaphorically, by unraveling spatial meaning, and perceptually, by disrupting visual norms.
A Tale of Two Desktops: The First Czech Films in Parallel Worlds by Jiří Anger, Veronika Hanáková, Jiří Žák
Do you, as a teacher of early cinema, struggle to make the audiovisual past relevant to the current generation of your students? By examining “how nitrate film materials from the beginnings of cinema – with all their weird shapes, textures, and visual quirks – survive and circulate in the digital age,” this well-researched and excellently produced hands-on film archaeological experiment offers a brilliant solution.
Google Mapping Blow-Up: A Desktop Remediation by Cáit Murphy
This video, which combines one of my favourite films (Blowup), activities (film-induced tourism), and videographic methods (desktop documentary), checks off many of my cinephile boxes.
The ParAIax View by Ariel Avissar
A shot-to-shot AI remake of the montage sequence from Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 The Parallax View is my favourite conceptual video essay of the year.
Amin Komijani and Kasra Karbasi
100 Years of History in 100 Films by kaptainkristian
Reaching the year 2001 / Reaching the film 2001. From there, the timeline collapsed. Another timeline was added. And what ‘it’ showed was parallel to what we saw, or perhaps its inner face/essence. Is the inner face of 2019 Blade Runner (1982)? Is Steve Jobs 2015 or 1998… and The Matrix, which is its very, very own year itself. Reaching 2002 and 2005, following the passage through the inter-dimensional gates of Kubrick’s 2001, and Patlabor 2 followed – the iron mecha hands; the iron hands of Zuckerberg/Eisenberg that wrote our destiny – where you understand-don’t-understand where we are anymore. The transcendence of a seemingly simple idea, a seemingly simple[minded] understanding. The nervousness of the discrepancy between that year in history and the film’s production year. How masculine and phallic the century we have passed through is (if not the entire last millennium!); even Freddie Mercury in concert is along the same lines. 1979 must be Iran, right: The Masculine-Barbaline revolution. In your mind, you have the films’ production years in parallel, and aside from the simple fact that the story of many films takes place in a year different from their production year, this tells us something about ‘time’; is Blade Runner just arriving in 2019? We’ve gone way past that! Reaching the ticking seconds of the doomsday clock: The outer/inner face of these final years. All the films are beautiful here. Even all the ones you hate are redeemed here. The Matrix, Blade Runner, 2001: The electricity of these three dispersed panels. And opening with Ordet, with creator’s own signature on the image.
The senses of The Silence of the Lambs by Lara Callaghan, Adam Woodward (Little White Lies)
Sometimes you need a little silence to be touched.
Shadow Self: On Agnès Varda’s Documenteur by Sadia Quraeshi Shepard
Films are carried by the hands of their lovers [through history]; by their shadows.
Jaap Kooijman
Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam
Fading Echoes: Remembering and Forgetting through Videotapes by Vladimir Rosas-Salazar
This audiovisual essay shows that videographic criticism can be an effective form to address media archaeology. Composed of home-made footage, Fading Echoes demonstrates how video can serve as a tool for remembering while simultaneously revealing how memories fade through the medium’s own material degradation. By foregrounding glitches, deterioration, and other traces of wear, the piece connects these visual ruptures to José van Dijck’s concept of mediated memories, emphasising not only how media shape remembrance but also how they contribute to forgetting. The result is a moving, personal, and poetic visualization of the intertwined processes through which memories are both captured and lost.
Not at Home by Deborah Alexandra Martin
The dual split screen, placing a sequence from one film alongside a sequence from another, is a well-established technique in videographic criticism. Consider, for example, Kogonada’s What is Neorealism? or Liz Greene’s Velvet Elephant. Not at Home fits seamlessly into this tradition, inviting a compare-and-contrast between the films The Innocents (Clayton, 1951) and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma, 2019). By juxtaposing these (seemingly unedited) sequences with a focus on the candle as a prop, the audiovisual essay raises relevant questions about femininity and space, bringing the films into a rich dialogue that goes beyond just compare-and-contrast. Not at Home demonstrates how effective this relatively simple split-screen technique is.
The History of Music Video in 169 Seconds by Mathias Bonde Korsgaard
The History of Music Video in 169 Seconds is a supercut of 61 ‘canonical’ music videos, one from every year between 1964 and 2024, together presenting a history of music video in an eclectic and rapidly edited style reminiscent of the so-called MTV aesthetic – with a sidenote that the supercut is in chronological order. That these music videos are indeed canonical becomes clear, at least to me, as it takes only a snippet (both visually and audibly) to recognise them. Although the supercut itself is quite short (in fact 135 seconds rather than the stated 169 seconds), it is accompanied by a relatively extensive written text that not only clarifies the criteria for selecting the featured videos but also reflects on the scholarly need to establish a canon.
The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková
One can easily be deceived by the playful presentation of The Return of the Star Wipe, as the voice-over and the editing adopt a tongue-in-cheek tone that mirrors the kitschy nature of the star-wipe transition itself. Yet this funny and even nostalgic presentation proves highly effective in delivering a well-researched and convincing argument in media archeology. The audiovisual essay demonstrates the added value of videographic criticism, as no written article could so effectively and vividly discuss the mechanics and cultural relevance of this admittedly tacky technique. The Return of the Star Wipe is not only a delight to watch but an illuminating and informative exploration of an often-overlooked element in media history.
Evelyn Kreutzer
Postdoctoral researcher, video essayist, curator, Università della Svizzera italiana
I want to make one important disclaimer: In past years, to avoid any conflict of interest, I usually abstained from nominating any pieces in which I was directly involved (as editor or consultant, for example) or by video essayists with whom I have a particularly close and current working relationship. This year, two of my nominations (by Lee and by Cipelletti) are exceptions to this rule but I believe they are warranted because they present important milestones in the larger video essay landscape with regards to videographic output’s migration into other fields of media production and consumption.
Cinephilia and History, or The Mystery of William Keighley by Christian Keathley
Chris Keathley’s long-form video essay/film presents three seemingly totally disparate starting points (a personal, autobiographical reflection; a local history; and a film- and industry-historical investigation) and then beautifully and affectively integrates them with each other. The film is touching, whimsical, highly informative and tonally precise, and a real template for videographic engagements with audiovisual history, memory, and lived experience.
The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková
One of the most entertaining and original video essays of the recent past. I applaud the makers for their originality — in terms of topic (who else would think to make a video essay about a particular, largely forgotten editing transition?) and in terms of their own videographic style that is both very true to the history they lay out, and yet very recognizable in its authorial signature. It’s a great example of how the video essay can emulate, play with, and indulge in the tonal registers of its object of analysis.
The Water Diaries, or My Letter to Jane by Chiara Grizzaffi
A beautiful, poetic, and pensive meditation on water and film as they both move us and connect us to the world and our imaginations. Beginning with the maker’s reflections on what it means for her to be present in a specific film-institutional site (Locarno Film Festival) and connecting it (via water images and metaphors) to the oeuvre of a specific film auteur (Jane Campion), the video moves from the personal to the analytical and from the local to the global in a seamless, rhythmic flow.
Why Do I Love These VICIOUS Queens? by Matt Baume
Matt Baume’s videos are generally thoroughly researched, highly entertaining, and great documentaries of the (often hidden, often tumultuous) queer stories in Hollywood and mainstream media history. I like this one in particular because it picks up a personal question of taste (in the title) to go into a much larger investigation into TV history, the history of queer representation, and transatlantic media comparisons.
the decline in literacy & rise in ai by silver fox
A very DIY and formally simple investigation into a huge and pressing societal concern: literacy and media consumption among young people in the age of AI. Made by a gen-Z youtuber about a primarily gen-alpha phenomenon and building on the maker’s commentary and numerous social media videos and testimonials, it is an acute call for awareness that I take seriously and appreciate.
Afterlives by Kevin B. Lee
As I mentioned in my disclaimer, I closely work with Kevin B. Lee and have witnessed him work on this project tirelessly for several years, so I am admittedly biased. I want to stress, however, that this is a major step in video essay history – after many years of developing the desktop documentary format in the larger realm of video essay culture, Lee has now produced a feature-length documentary film that develops this methodology into a large-scale archival, media-reflexive, and politically acute investigation that is screening at major film festivals at the moment.
Memoria Algoritmica by Silvia Cipelletti
Here’s my second highly biased nomination – for a video essay by my colleague Silvia Cipelletti, which presents another major milestone in video essay development. Produced first for a public screening event at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, an alternative, new version of the video essay was then commissioned by Arte.tv (one of the most important and prestigious European TV channels and producers of cultural innovation). I like both versions a lot (the original video essay and the TV version) and believe they serve as great case studies to compare how the same argumentation might be adapted to different media ecologies. I applaud both Cipelletti and Arte for this transition of videographic content as it migrates from digital platforms to museum spaces to television.
Occitane Lacurie
Video-essayist, film critic and researcher
Once again, I am taking part in this list by sharing a few works which interested me – and once again, chance (and curators) played a huge role in the way I got to see them. Also, my list is less a top than an homage to videos and videasts I love.
Daria’s Night Flowers by Maryam Tafakory
I saw this film at FIDMarseille, in July 2025, a few months after Maryam Tafakory was given a ‘carte blanche’ retrospective dedicated to her work at Cinéma du Réel. The artist continues her patient mosaic work of reassembling Iranian cinema. The images are superimposed, altered and recoloured using a method that creates what can only be described as a style. Daria’s Night Flowers radicalises a return to onscreen text present in her previous works. The artist composes an herbarium of flowers immortalised by cinema, admired, displayed or picked by the female characters that her films habitually observe. On the editing table, these images encounter the illuminated flowers of the Kitab-e hashayish (کتاب حشايش), a pharmacological codex from 1595 with multicoloured illustrations.
Abortion Party by Julia Mellen
I saw this work, which pretends to be a videographic application to an artist grant at FIDMarseille too. Julia Mellen explains that she was inspired by a specific aesthetic associated with boomers’ social media habits – or rather, their Facebook habits – and their taste for dubious 3D modelling. At the edge of the frame, the director launches into a 13-minute uninterrupted story time – the length of the film – facing the camera, during which she recounts the organisation of a party to celebrate her abortion. This format of self-narrative, which originated with the video hosting platform YouTube before migrating and enjoying even greater success on TikTok, is more indicative of generations whose adolescence and young adulthood have been intertwined with digital technology. However, the setting for this performance, filmed in a single sequence shot, constantly bounces from one segment to another within a larger frame, reproducing the artist’s memories in 3D. It is difficult not to recognise, in this mechanical ballet, a screensaver from yesteryear, whose media archaeology takes us back to the DVD players of old. Thus, Julia Mellen’s stream of consciousness, which echoes the flow of her words, seems to be shaped by different layers of the artist’s technological and personal history. The personal is media, one thinks when seeing Abortion Party – since it demonstrates from the outset, through its very subject matter, how political the personal can be.
Man Number 4 by Miranda Pennell
I am really interested in Miranda Pennell’s filmic and videographic essays and I had the chance to see her latest piece at the Go Short Film Festival in Nijmegen. This work takes place in a single picture from which the film slowly zooms out, from a mosaic of pixels to faces, to surroundings, to context, to realisation. The process somehow reminded me of other videographic works: Capricorn Sunset by Johannes Binotto, or what remains by belit sağ, in which the constitutive particle of the image becomes the measuring unit of an invisible violence, contained within the representation. The picture was taken in December 2023 in Gaza, and shows mass deportation by the IDF of Palestinians, blindfolded, handcuffed, half-naked, almost as numerous as the pixels that concealed them. Very composed, the photograph evokes Goya’s painting, the digital encoding of visual information replacing the brushstroke, carrying the same ineffable violence.
The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing by Theo Panagopoulos
I also saw this archival essay at Go Short. This piece is also part of a growing corpus of videographic works which try to resist the visual annihilation of Palestinian history. For this film, Panagopoulos collects a 16mm botanical diary, shot by an English scientist who was commissioned to document the flora of Mandatory Palestine in the late 1930s. Accidentally – a bit like in Kamal Al Jafari’s films – Palestinians appear among the colourful fields of flowers, working, passing by, living at the edges of the frame. At the centre of the image, often, a smiling Englishman, uprooting plants with a joyful violence, which seems to contain in germ more than a century of forthcoming history.
The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková
They already know it: I am a huge fan of Veronika and Jiří’s work, their playful and unique approach to video essay and videographic history. They represent an essential current in our community: the archaeology of videographic creation itself. This is truly a necessary and courageous work to engage with the very history of what we take for granted (or what the design thinking made us see as natural) either software-wise or hardware-wise. To engage with these crucial questions, they always find an original path, an unexpected motif, a fascinating idea: in this case, the favourite transition of every kid that once got to play with Windows Movie Maker.
Afterlives by Kevin B. Lee
Once again, the proof is masterfully made that video essay can exist as a feature film. I do not want to say too much about this documentary which is continuing its journey in festivals – I myself have not yet had the chance to see it on a big screen. Both through its theme, its material and its method, Afterlives manages to uncover the forensic potential of video essay and to show how this form is able to reflect upon the constant reconfiguration of the contemporary visual culture, especially in the age of AI.
L’Histoire politique du festival de Locarno by Cinéma et politique
I had the chance to watch Clémentine Meyer’s video essay about the Locarno Film Festival… in Locarno. Working with archival material and scale models representing the actors in this extraordinary story, the videast retraces the political, economic and cinephilic layers that form the foundation of this festival, unique in Europe. From ostpolitik to erotica, this video uncovers the strong (and unexpected) tendencies that shaped the moving identity of Locarno.
Colleen Laird
Assistant Professor of Japanese Film at the University of British Columbia and video essayist
This year, I was drawn to works that foreground process, of making-as-thinking, of media as something that is made. The works that inspired me invite viewers, in a variety of ways, to consider how ideas take shape. They encourage us to think about the drafts behind the draft, the gestures of selection and omission, and the rhythmic negotiations between intention and accident. Each of these works feature how video essayists can think through the act of mixing and ‘meddling’, as media scholar Ritika Kaushik puts it, and they invite us to witness and feel the stages of research and experimentation that shape them.
phenomenology of marco damilano by Benedetta Andreasi
Developed during the Reframing the Argument videographic workshop held at Notre Dame University (summer, 2025), the piece turns its own process into an analytic method: a deliberately off-kilter voiceover unsettles the polished aesthetic of Damilano’s Il Cavallo e la Torre, exposing how broadcast news creates a comfortable distance between viewer and ‘displaced other’. The final minute of shared silence, stripped of commentary, lands with an imperative quiet force. It is a videographic gesture that reframes spectatorship itself, inviting us to sit with what mediated discourse so often smooths over. For an even more open embrace of process, and rising to the challenge of facing disruptive difficulties, I also love Benedetta’s Cheezit Timeline, hosted on the new-this-year platform Fragments: A Journal of videographic form and method developed by Cormac Donnelly, Jemma Saunders, and Will DiGravio.
Age Perfect by Dayna McLeod
Age Perfect emerges directly from a community of practice that treats process as the argument itself. It is bold and brave and smart and everything I love about McLeod’s work. By entering the glossy world of anti-aging ads through performance and tactile re-creation, McLeod exposes the artifice behind beauty culture(s) and treats process not as something to be hidden but as the very site of discovery. In the spirit of Johannes Binotto’s Practices of Viewing via the Ways of Doing videographic exercise Making Materiality Matter, the maker lets the seams show, inviting us to witness how meaning emerges through trying things out on the timeline.
(dis)Orientating Horror: Feeling Queerly by Lucy Fife Donaldson
(dis)Orientating Horror turns videographic process into a queer methodology. Also emerging from the Ways of Doing Making Materiality Matter exercise, the piece begins with a single disorienting moment from Midsommar and uses it as a generative prompt to think through horror’s habitual orientations. On the timeline, Donaldson works through this problem materially: flipping, mirroring, looping, and multiplying the image until the refusal of the ‘straight line’ becomes something you feel in your own body. The video lets us witness that process of trying, testing the film’s gestures against an idea of embodied cinema and experimenting toward a form that inhabits disorientation rather than resolving it.
(dis)Orientating Horror is part of a fantastic special issue of Monstrum on Queer/ing Horror, among them Alison Peirse’s brilliant I Can Hear Someone Coming, a counterfactual, coital collection of women’s voices from 1930s horror films.
Shadow Self: On Agnès Varda’s Documenteur by Sadia Quraeshi Shepard
Shadow Self treats videographic criticism as an evolving process of attachment, tracing how certain films take hold of us and accompany us through our own lived rhythms. The seeds of this project were planted at the Embodying the Video Essay workshop held at Bowdoin College in 2023, and that lineage shows: the piece embraces embodiment as a mode of inquiry through voice, gesture, memory, and caregiving. Quraeshi Shepard weaves Varda’s Documenteur together with her own personal footage and audio of parent–child conversations, allowing the interruptions and digressions of connectivity to become structural rather than something to edit out. This is a work that lets process remain visible while asking what happens when scholarship, spectatorship, and parenthood meet on the timeline.
Miradas by Pablo Serrano Torres
Like Donaldson’s (dis)Orientating Horror, Serrano Torres’ Miradas embodies process not as a preliminary stage but as the very substance of queer videographic thinking. A peer of Quraeshi Shepard’s Shadow Self, Miradas is a work first conceived at the 2023 Embodying the Video Essay workshop and as a project of that context we can see that the piece moves deliberately from solitary introspection to collaborative creation, making the maker’s body, voice, and relationships integral to its argument. While engaging deeply with scholarly theory, Miradas refuses the straight line of academic seriousness; its process is the product. It is messy. It is embodied. It is communal. And it is joyful.
AI and ‘Being Human’ by Mariam Khaled and Mahima Jain
There is, perhaps correctly, a proliferation of pieces engaging with AI. I find works that engage with the process of using AI (e.g., a transparency of prompts or a reflection of interaction) to be far more interesting than displays of results. AI and ‘Being Human’ is such an endeavour, and a stake-holding one at that. It treats the desktop documentary not simply as a mode of presentation but as a process of decolonial unlearning. It highlights a way of making visible how AI technologies discipline and racialise our definitions of ‘the human’ by working through autoethnographic encounters with multiple AI platforms. Here we have the friction and ambivalence that occurs when AI flattens cultural complexity into sanitised universals. This is videographic criticism that does its thinking out loud.
Comedy Objects #1: Slapstick Speculation by Noah Teichner
Slapstick Speculation shows how videographic methodology can treat archival research not as raw material but as an imaginative, processual space for reanimating history. By blending 1930s comedy shorts, novelty songs, and monologues with speculative fiction, the piece reconstructs Hollywood’s shift to sound through the eyes and labor of comedy workers navigating the shocks of the 1929 Crash. While that is the conceptual background of the piece, for me I can feel how video thinks across media, revealing liveness as an intermedial effect shared by vaudeville, radio, early sound film, the stock ticker, and the choice of font and text-on-screen placement.
Kevin B. Lee
Co-head of videoessays.org and director of Afterlives
This year I was fortunate to be involved in some terrific videographic projects such as the NECSUS issue of video essays on the Locarno Film Festival and a programme of video essays on AI for the Jeu de Paume. Among the exceptional works from these projects, I want to celebrate The Water Diaries: A Letter to Jane by Chiara Grizzaffi, Algorithmic Borders by Silvia Cipelletti, Toute la data du monde by Evelyn Kreutzer, and not exactly a still life by Johannes Binotto.
BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions by Khalil Joseph
Like watching a videographic supernova, reaching for all the stars. Enjoy utopia whenever you find it.
See Also: Slet 1988 by Marta Popidova
happiness by Fırat Yücel
A quintessentially 2025 video essay.
See Also: Ask Me for Those Unborn Promises that May Seem Unlikely to Happen in the Natural by Donatella Della Ratta and The Void
Making Fiction Flow by Melanie Bell & Catherine Grant
A quietly radical mobilization of archival materials, creating fascinating associations between a life in film and with films.
See Also: Animation in London/ Matchmove in Bangalore by Suryansu Guha
Mechanical Kurds by Hito Steyerl
AI cinema makes its strongest impact when it collides with its real life context, like a drone missile aimed at someone who programmed it.
See Also: Their Eyes by Nicolas Gourault
A Tale of Two Desktops: The First Czech Films in Parallel Worlds by Jiří Anger, Veronika Hanáková, and Jiří Žák
From the team that seems to be having the most fun making videographic scholarship these days. A toss-up with The Return of the Star Wipe but I went with this in solidarity with non-English-language video essays.
See Also: Latencies of the Statistical Image by Roc Albalat
Trans Day of Vanishing by Lily Alexandre
Most of the choices on my list demonstrate the possibilities of video essays exposed to realities beyond screens. This edu-activist YouTube video champions new possibilities for visibility, while also arguing for the virtues of staying unseen.
See Also: Before the Drop by Rosa Wernecke
A Life of Its Own: American Psycho by Sara Bezovšek
It’s a self-contained rabbit hole. It’s a mock-fan website that holds a funhouse mirror to fan obsession. It’s a compilation of every meme that exists of a certain movie. It’s a critical retelling of that film through those memes. It’s also an installation that turns gallery spaces into sculptural doomscrolls. But… is it a video essay? There is an idea of a video essay. Some kind of abstraction. But there is no real video essay.
See Also: You Are Into Mousetrap Youtube by Big Joel
Ricardo Vieira Lisboa
Film critic and programmer – Cinemateca Portuguesa, IndieLisboa IFF
Here are five films/videos, seen over the last year, that question our relationship with the ‘audiovisual’, with its simultaneous ability to reveal the nature of things and obscure their meaning.
Soixante-sept millisecondes by Fleuryfontaine (Galdric Fleury and Antoine Fontaine)
A film about trajectories, about bodies and projectiles in motion; it’s a film-denouncement, but it’s also a short treatise on the documental validity of moving images.
Green Grey Black Brown by Yuyan Wang
Meet Yuyan Wang, today’s most exciting video essayist. Each of her supercuts is a demonstration of the astonishing power of editing and the hypnotic potential of the ‘raccord’.
Camera Test (King Cadbury) by Charlie Shackleton
This year Charlie Shackleton made his new feature film, the intricate Zodiac Killer Project, but this short film is possibly his best film to date. Film archives and family memories merge with disarming simplicity.
Being John Smith by John Smith
The culmination of a body of work, the film that gives meaning and offers a retrospective review of a life (and a career). And it does so with the grace and self-deprecating humour that only a master is capable of mastering.
13 Alfinetes by João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata
Presented (still in a work-in-progress version) at the end of a retrospective that took place in Lisbon and Madrid, 13 Pins is, to a certain extent, the 8 ½ of João Pedro Rodrigues’s filmography. A film obsessed with circularity which, as a result, revolves simultaneously in a centripetal and centrifugal direction, closing the past and opening up the future.
A Vida dos Espelhos by Saguenail and Regina Guimarães
Created for the exhibition organised by the museum Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira around the figure of Luis Miguel Cintra, A Vida dos Espelhos is based on a ten-hour interview between the actor and curator António Preto. It revisits the more than 20 films Cintra made with Manoel de Oliveira (plus some with Paulo Rocha), unfolding as an intricate interplay between what is spoken in voice-over and what the film excerpts reveal on screen. A meticulous revisiting of a stage-like oeuvre through the eyes of an actor formed equally by theatre and cinema – a journey of both confirmation and contradiction.
James MacDowell
Video essayist (as The Lesser Feat) and YouTube researcher who teaches Film & Television Studies at the University of Warwick
All my chosen videos were published on YouTube (in some cases also Nebula), and made by non-academics. As a scholar of YouTube video essays, this seems my best chance to highlight a few different creators than some of my academic colleagues. While YouTube video essays can be about virtually any topic, I restrict myself to examples in which creators analyse at least one piece of screen media.
Trans Day of Vanishing by Lily Alexandre
Thrillingly experimental but accessible, deeply anxious but defiantly poised, this is a fascinating meditation on the politics of trans visibility in the second Trump era. Alexandre’s video probes this subject partly via film analyses (e.g.: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair), but more affectingly through its formal variety: an extreme-widescreen aspect ratio clashes with perversely restricted framings, handheld self-recordings of Alexandre fleeing riot police contrast steely surveillance-camera footage, guerilla street projection and more. All navigate in different ways the political potentials, dangers, and power of the camera’s gaze. My favourite YouTube video essay of the year by some margin; in fact, one of my screen media highlights of 2025, period.
When Your Hero Is a Monster by The Leftist Cooks
The Leftist Cooks are the Ireland-based married couple Sarah Oeffler and Neil Farrell, and they make some of the most consistently aesthetically ambitious and intellectually thoughtful work in the field of what used to be called BreadTube (the loose collective of further-Left-than-liberal YouTube video essayists that flourished especially during the previous Trump presidency). Here they wrestle disarmingly honestly with the problem of beloved artists who reveal themselves as undeserving of their fans’ love (in this case, primarily Neil Gaiman), with characteristic humour, earnestness, insight, and creativity.
You Are into Mousetrap YouTube by Big Joel
Illustrated with charming drawings by another underrated YouTuber, Mothcub, this short work about YouTube viewing habits might be considered more of an animated short story than a video essay. I’d put it differently: like (say) David Foster Wallace’s writing, which can dance between the modes of critical essay and literature, Big Joel here pushes the YouTube analytic-essayistic mode to its most literary and lyrical.
Fear of Dark by Jacob Geller
This is the latest in Geller’s Fear of… series, which explores the eerie fascination of environments associated with the limits of human sensory experience (it follows Fear of Cold, …of Depths, and …of Big Things Underwater). Drawing on a dizzying multitude of expressive uses of darkness in videogames, films and visual art, Geller’s atmospheric video also embodies its theme through its own photography: evocative experiments with unnervingly low light levels help conjure feelings of dread by testing his camera’s capacity to capture true darkness.
The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel by Lindsay Ellis
One of the foundational voices of the YouTube video essay returned to the platform this year after a period during which she’s largely been making work for the creator-owned platform Nebula. The result was a classic, thoughtful Ellis breakdown of a cultural controversy, now applied to a weightier topic than usual: the backlash faced by children’s YouTuber Ms Rachel for her forthright support of Gaza. Her decision to publish it on YouTube has allowed the fundraiser Ellis attached to the video to raise over $800,000 for The Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.
Adrian Martin
The Body Hysteric by Cristina Álvarez López
This, the best video essay of the year, was rejected by the Marienbad Festival selection committee. Their – and their audience’s – loss.
Male Gazing by David Verdeure
A remarkable, thoroughgoing and very intricate treatment of a classic film, Hitchcock’s Rear Window. See and hear things you never knew were there!
Nebulous Encounters by Catherine Grant
Two mighty scenes in fog, from Murnau’s Sunrise and Amenábar’s The Others. Arranged simply but eloquently across two screens. All cinema is here.
Dayna McLeod
Queer performance-based media artist, Montreal
My picks reflect what excited me about video essay making this year and are by no means exhaustive. I look forward to watching works that others will share on this list that I don’t know.
Trans Day of Vanishing by Lily Alexandre
A thorough 48-minute rumination about the stakes of trans visibility for trans people, this longform work by YouTube essayist Lily Alexandre was warmly received when I saw it on the big screen at Montreal’s Exposures, Canada’s only trans film festival. At the centre of this piece is a question about trans visibility and whom it is for. Alexandre dives in deeply to offer insightful critique of trans film and media objects complemented and complicated by protest footage, surveillance, and nighttime monologues staged in quiet outdoor locations, all invoking concerns about public spaces, safety, and risk. Do yourself a favour: close your open tabs and apps, go full-screen, and give this remarkable work your full attention.
See Under: Orient by Colleen Laird
What an incredible video essay! Simply one of Colleen Laird’s best, See Under: Orient was made as part of One Hundred Movies Walk into a Bar… a summer 2025 collaborative videographic workshop organised by Ariel Avissar and Laird that responded to The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century list published by The New York Times. Laird structures her video essay around definitions of ‘orient’ (with reference to Ariel Avissar’s TV Dictionary format) and explodes our screen and speakers with a captivating soundtrack, stunning multiscreens (the vertical slices in the middle of the piece are particularly enthralling), heady Google Map zooms, and a brilliant use of text that selects and directs us to just how embedded Orientalist frameworks and biases are in film culture.
Making Fiction Flow by Melanie Bell & Catherine Grant
I learn so much from Catherine Grant every time I watch her work, and this piece co-created with film historian Melanie Bell about film continuity and the life and work of script supervisor Penny Eyles is no exception. A masterclass in video essay making, this video essay uses an intricate layout reminiscent of a video editing interface where we are challenged to decode Grant’s arrangement of scenes and sources as they play out, exemplifying Grant’s renowned engagement with material thinking. Centred around Sally Potter’s Orlando, Grant expertly takes us through the unseen labour of Eyles through archive, documentary, and extracted scenes from British films produced between 1943 and 2012. What a treat!
(dis)Orientating Horror: Feeling Queerly by Lucy Fife Donaldson
This award-winning video essay (Marienbad Film Festival, 2025) is a pleasure to watch. Fife Donaldson mirrors, flips, and layers landscape shots from horror films that fill the frame with a disorienting sense of foreboding made eerie and uncanny through repetition of sound and image. Fully interrogating Sara Ahmed’s work on queer orientation from her book Queer Phenomenology, Fife Donaldson artfully uses text on screen with a delicious colour palette that exemplifies its content. Full disclosure: this video essay appears in a special issue of Monstrum entitled Queer/ing Horror: Video Essays at the Intersection of Horror and Queerness, which I edited.
I Can Hear Someone Coming by Alison Peirse
Alison Pierse’s videographic work is always so meticulous, and this playful, provocative, joyful, queer video essay is no exception. She invites us to imagine if all women in 1930s horror were queer and proceeds to deliver this fantasy of their sexual arousal. Circular cut-outs act like peepholes into scenes that focus our attention onto key characters and their (now) queer actions. With scalpel-like precision, she extracts individual words, sentences, gasps, and exclamations to construct sexy sound bites of female desire in the body of the piece. Lavender text spells out this dialogue over lush vintage wallpaper. Such a delight! Full disclosure: this video essay also appears in a special issue of Monstrum entitled Queer/ing Horror: Video Essays at the Intersection of Horror and Queerness, which I edited.
Backlot Connections by John Gibbs
With an Easter egg tucked behind every turn, this video essay links an array of (mainly) 1950s films through their shared use of the Universal backlot, connecting seemingly disparate characters, scenarios, and plots to ultimately reveal their similarities. Gibbs unobtrusively uses an onscreen subtitle track to narrate his observations and guide us through the same American town square again and again. He maps fictional spaces onto real, reused set pieces that live just beyond the Los Angeles River, weaving together stories that happened across fictions and temporalities to invite us into this endlessly recycled town.
Meet Part | Mothers Daughters by Viktoria Paranyuk
Moments of longing, intimacy, trauma, and loss are connected in this moving video essay by Viktoria Paranyuk. She puts Chantal Akerman’s Meetings with Anna in onscreen conversation with Lana Gogoberidze’s Some Interviews on Personal Matters, foregrounding the filmmakers’ personal lives, histories, and relationships with their mothers and how this has shaped their films. Paranyuk uses grids and feminist diptychs to engage both films and their makers, what Paranyuk calls “empathetic engagement” with incredible success.
Queline Meadows
Video essayist (as kikikrazed) and community manager for The Essay Library
For my selections, I chose to highlight videos that inspired me as both a creator and viewer of video essays.
A Video About Everything Except This Monument Hidden in the Bushes by Dime Store Adventures
Dime Store Adventures is, to me, the best storyteller on YouTube right now. This video sets out to document the process of researching a monument in Rhode Island, but it evolves several times. I appreciate how much he shares about his thought process as both a researcher and video creator. Each new discovery makes the video better because he welcomes them instead of trying to bend his sources to fit a certain conclusion. There’s a reveal at the 19 minute mark that made me pause the video and immediately save it to my list for this poll.
SE7EN & How 35mm Scans Lie to You by WatchingtheAerial
I love how WatchingtheAerial often includes an activity related to the topic of each video essay. In this case, for a video about fan-made film scans and remasters, he makes some scans of his own to get a personal look at the process. This essay does a great job of explaining technical information in a clear and concise way. He provides a nuanced take on the ongoing debate surrounding the accuracy of different scans and releases, with a fun twist at the end.
The Real Story Behind the Backrooms by Kendra Gaylord
There’s no shortage of online discussion about the Backrooms, but Kendra Gaylord still manages to find something new to say. It’s a surprisingly funny exploration of the real building behind the famous Backrooms photo, packed with tons of information about the architectural developments that have occurred over the room’s lifetime. Every time I rewatch this video I learn something new thanks to Kendra’s genuine interest in digging up niche information and sharing it with the world. With the release of the upcoming A24 film The Backrooms, the concept is evolving from a collaborative storytelling exercise to a profitable venture. The Backrooms are about to change forever, so I appreciate how Kendra takes the opportunity to highlight the real building and memories that started it all.
Why You Should WANT To Cite Your Sources by Dime Store Adventures
I’m mentioning Dime Store Adventures again because I think this video does a great job of highlighting what’s wrong with the way many people talk about plagiarism on YouTube. He argues that many creators cite their sources primarily to avoid being accused of plagiarism (a reoccurring scandal on the platform) instead of recognising the actual benefit that good citation practices have. This video should be required viewing for anyone incorporating research in their videos.
You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.) by josh (with parentheses)
“Humans call, and humans answer.” This essay itself is endlessly inspiring, but what I find especially motivating is the response it received. In the comments section I noticed that it was many viewers’ first introduction to the world of desktop documentaries – and they were so excited to discover the format! If you spend a lot of time releasing videos on YouTube, you start to feel weighed down by the pressure to ‘play it safe’ or risk losing favour in the eyes of the indecipherable algorithm. The response to this video essay proves that YouTube audiences have an appetite for more creativity and experimentation on the platform.
Drew Morton
Co-editor and co-founder, [in]Transition
This list will largely consist of works published in [in]Transition given how much time and bandwidth viewing and reviewing submissions takes. Needless to say, I’m excited to see the selections of my colleagues and peers that will introduce me to pieces I missed given that blindspot.
On Listening by Pavitra Sundar
I had always imagined that it would be difficult to make a video essay analysing how sound functions in film given the medium’s skew towards visual information. Pavitra Sundar’s video On Listening challenged my own lack of imagination with its poetic exploration.
The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková
There’s a running concern I tend to have about our field – that the texts videographic critics tend to privilege are canonical works by esteemed auteurs (I’m guilty of it too). In this context, Anger and Hanáková’s insightful exploration of the star wipe reminds us that serious analysis can account for the derided as well… sometimes even playfully.
Crochet Is Sick! by Alison Peirse
Alison Peirse showcases such an intuitive sense of rhythm and clip selection in her supercuts that it sometimes takes me multiple screenings to fully appreciate the argument they present because I’m so transfixed by their aesthetics. Crochet Is Sick!, like her previous work Knit One, Stab Two, continues her exploration of gender and the horror genre, but she finds significant deviations and fresh terrain here. Plus I always end up with a list of more horror flicks to check out by the end of her pieces, which is always a win.
Carlos Natálio
Film teacher and researcher at Escola das Artes in Católica University (O Porto); film programmer; film critic at À pala de Walsh website
Daria’s Night Flowers by Maryam Tafakory
Maryam Tafakory’s essayistic cinema germinates from observation, a meticulous look at the past of her art, detecting images that remain to be made, imagined. However, it would be simpler to fill these gaps with parallel fictions. This is not her method: counter-imagination is filmed on the back of these very painful images, as if inviting the viewer to turn the past of Iranian cinema inside out and see new possibilities. In Daria’s Night Flowers, Tafakory ‘demands’ the images of oppressed and desperate women from post-revolution Iranian cinema to tell us about the possibility of an impossible queer love, and in this colourful, blossoming gesture, we are simultaneously seeing the prison bars and the freedom that the palimpsest points to.
Kelly Reichardt’s Bestiario by Celia Sainz
Celia Sainz is interested in exploring the notion of videographic ecocriticism, not only as thematic exploration but as an ontological gesture. Is the critical operation that acts directly on the structure of a film a way of revealing the fragility of the boundaries that insist on dividing things? Kelly Reichardt’s Bestiary is a three-part essay that operates this fragmentation within the American director’s body of work, but does so from a directional logic. To where do our eyes turn to? In the first segment, Birds Eye Views, we look up, where the life of birds challenges us in movement and sound. In the last segment, Ground Dog Day, we remain horizontal, close to the ground, in this communion on soil between humans (other beings) and dogs. In the middle of this gesture, No(Hu)Man’s Land, Sainz positions humans among other existences, revealing themselves among shots of segmented bodies that are becoming across the technological, the synthetic and the biological. In this case, videographic ecocriticism is a way to pierce through and connect the unconnected.
Om Shanti Omnibus by International Video Essay Research Network (IVERN)
In video essays, there is a ‘profane’ gesture towards the uniqueness and integrity of the work. Perhaps this premise makes videographic criticism an appropriate method for thinking about the decentering of authorial unity and the collaborative approach. Twelve members of the International Video Essay Research Network (IVERN) divided up a film they were unfamiliar with – Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan, 2007) – and, working on a specific segment, they had to obey specific parameters. The use of text on screen, voiceover, epigraph, multiscreen, superimposition, music/sound only from film, music/sound from external source, self-filmed footage (including desktop), footage from another source, repetition, unusual transitions and speed. The end result is fascinating: a cadavre exquis that is not just a compilation but a suggestion for mapping pedagogical possibilities in the teaching and practice of audiovisual essayism. The dissemination of perspectives on Khan’s film and the multiplication of digital impressions placed over the original give this exercise a true sense of decentralised criticism, of perspectives signed simultaneously from places of proximity, distance and collaboration.
Hands Off, Eyes On by Donatella Della Ratta, R. Alessandro Turchioe, and Sofia Busquets
Hands Off, Eyes On, by Donatella Della Ratta, R. Alessandro Turchioe and Sofia Busquets, is an intelligent video essay that exposes the tensions inherent in activism, in the distinction between the eye and the hand. Between visibility with transformative potential and the hypothetical limitations of that hand and the (im)possibility of art to have an immediately transformative impact. Hands Off, Eyes On takes a critical look at media, its reception, and the visibility market of festivals. Behind the screens, in their shadows, the films and words printed on the wall continue (contradict) the privileged space of cinema.
Abbas Kiarostami: A Transversal Filmography by Cristian Tormo
Cristian Tormo’s, Abbas Kiarostami: A Transversal Filmography brilliantly shows how a filmmaker can advance in his themes from film to film. The work expands, becomes more complex, branches out. The work grows up, like the characters in these films. Kiarostami is a key author for understanding the relationship between cinema and growing up, especially in the transition from childhood to adolescence. This video essay shows how, although the theme remains the same, the strategies for filming the problems of growing up change as the dilemmas transform and the world expands.
Fading Echoes: Remembering and Forgetting through Videotapes by Vladimir Rosas-Salazar
Nothing escapes deterioration. At the same time, everyone tries to resist it. Vladimir Rosas-Salazar uses home videos that his family recorded in the 1990s and 2000s in this video essay. Personal videos promised to build an archive as resistance to the loss of organic memory. Like with film. And as will probably happen with digital data. Rosas-Salazar uses the marks of the media, of its decay, its palimpsest, not only to suggest this fragility to us, but to reflect on the fallibility of memory. The imperfection of the media is perhaps the best match for the imperfection of memory: both recover, create and slowly fade away.
The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning by João Araújo
A brief editing exercise: hypnotic, simple, about to be lost. Of all the techniques that audiovisual essays can use, editing, as the beginning of a conversation with cinema, retains a mysterious form. In Araújo’s The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning, we glide through the fragility of the end of something that always restarts. The moving image of cinema symbolises this life, this fluidity, which lies between the elements, between the liquid and the weight of the fruit. In the midst of our gaze, everything falls, gravity is complete. But soon, everything rises again. It is the brilliance of cinema, which links causes, that makes death impermanent. As Marcus Aurelius wrote: “All things are implicated in one another and in sympathy with each other. This event is the consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one.”
Harry Negus
Why Did UK Crisp Packets Swap Colours? by Chris Spargo
While many people attribute Spargo’s meteoric rise in 2025 to the absence of household name Tom Scott, I think that’s doing him a bit of a disservice. He’s his own creator, in both personality and subject matter. Answering the question that you’ve always wondered, but been too afraid to ask, Why Did UK Crisp Packets Swap Colours? weaves a five-minute tale of corporate battles and tragedy, while also overlapping with the “Maths is blue instead of yellow” niche. There really is something for everyone here.
Wacky History of Computer Scrabble by Junferno
It’s easy to get distracted by Junferno from the Junferno YouTube Channel’s fast paced editing and deadpan humour without realising that you’re actually learning University-level Computer Science. Wacky History of Computer Scrabble is a dense dive into something that, on the surface, should be quite simple. It’s Scrabble, after all — you’ve played Scrabble, right? Yet, in between quips and jokes that you can only make sense of five seconds after he’s told them, you’ll learn that computers are really weird and Scrabble is really complicated and they also called one of the models for playing a word a “dawg”. That’s pretty funny.
Games About Concrete by Puddle
If we subscribe to the popular 2007 animated film Ratatouille’s idea of “a great chef can come from anywhere”, then Puddle’s Games About Concrete is proof that it can apply to the world of Video Essays as well. Sitting at a YouTube subscriber count of double digits, Puddle’s video is a both bleak and uplifting dive into a series of games about concrete and the sublime, harrowing, fantastical feelings they evoke. While many creators leave no stone unturned in their coverage, Puddle is not afraid to let the video breathe and to let the games speak for themselves, leaving the interpretation up to the viewer.
Clare O’Gara
PhD student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
Trans Day of Vanishing by Lily Alexandre
Lily Alexandre’s work has maintained a reliable spot on my list since 2023, and this year was no different. Trans Day of Vanishing is a chilling (literally, in some shots), haunting, incisive reflection on contemporary trans visibility, and it’s one of her best videos to date.
You Are into Mousetrap YouTube by Big Joel
Written and delivered by Big Joel and animated delightfully by Mothcub, this video isn’t really about mousetraps or YouTube, but it’s also about both? Or possibly neither. Either way, I found it terrifying and wonderful.
The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel by Lindsay Ellis
I suspect that I won’t be the only person to put this rare ‘Lindsay Ellis returns to YouTube’ video on my list, so I won’t belabor the point with a woefully incomplete description or justification. This video made me laugh, and cry, and cry, and cry, and it is worth watching again.
Alan O’Leary
Academic filmmaker and Associate Professor of film and media at Aarhus University
My impression is that the scholarly video essay in 2026 has achieved something like self-assurance. Perhaps institutional recognition of video essay practice has become more established; certainly, some of the innovations of the past 15 years have been integrated and even somewhat routinised. Catherine Grant’s influence seems to me pervasive, particularly the example of her epigraphic work and deployment of soft montage. Grant’s own videos made with collaborators this year – Pausas/Pauses with Rachel Randall, and Making Fiction Flow with Melanie Bell – and the response she made for a collection of video essays edited by Joel Burges and Allison Cooper (ASAP Review, December 2024), are themselves magisterial consolidation of the rhetoric Grant has evolved over a decade and a half.
I would place such works in a strand of videographic criticism that suggests the form is uniquely equipped for the reflexive activation of the archive, a strand that stretches from videos like Between Magic and Realism from Kathleen Loock’s Hollywood Memories project, through John Gibbs’ Backlot Connections, to Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková’s The Return of the Star Wipe and Mathias Bonde Korsgaard’s The History of Music Video in 169 Seconds. The ambition of such work also begins to suggest the capacity of videographic criticism to devote sustained attention to themes and phenomena. The two volumes published so far in the Lever Press videographic book series – Jason Mittell on Breaking Bad and Gregory Brophy and Shawn Malley on contemporary science fiction – are the standouts here, of course. (Interestingly, both programmatically employ a range of videographic modes, suggesting that videographic criticism per se is as core a concern as the declared topics.)
Series like Johannes Binotto’s Gestures of Thought (among them the uncanny Swallow) and Alison Peirse’s supercut treatments of horror cinema (for example, Crochet Is Sick!) also prove the cumulative power of analysis across multiple videos. Conversely, Christian Keathley’s teasing and complex one-hour Cinephilia and History is a single but monograph-equivalent video essay that demonstrates the intellectual sophistication of which videographic criticism is capable. It also represents an alternative mode of videographic work that foregrounds the body of the maker, albeit in a very different register from that of Dayna McLeod, the preeminent practitioner in this ‘somatic’ mode (see Potbelly). McLeod refers to herself as a ‘performance artist’; I think we need the term ‘performance academic’ to capture the distinctiveness of some of the work being produced. I mention all these essayists and strands they represent because the richness and quantity of work in the field makes choosing ever harder for the purpose of this poll.
My ‘official’ selection below expresses my sense of the self-assurance and consolidation in scholarly videographic criticism mentioned above. But it also appreciates the continued experimentation with the video essay form that, I’m glad to say, frustrates the synthesising impulse motivating this introductory paragraph.
Contemptuous Chess: A Moving Poem by Drew Morton
Contemptuous Chess is a contribution to Evelyn Kreutzer’s Moving Poems project, in which makers are invited to pair “a single poem or multiple poems […] with a single or multiple moving-image media text(s) […]”. Morton puts three texts into dialogue: Alberto Moravia’s novel Il disprezzo (Contempt, 1954), about a playwright who reluctantly adapts The Odyssey for the screen, Godard’s film adaptation of that novel, Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), and Rosario Castellanos’s poem Chess (1972). The result is a masterclass in pacing, on-screen text, and the orchestration of voices, other sound and music. With readings of Castellanos’s poem in four languages, it applies the lessons of Barbara Zecchi’s thinking on the ‘accented video essay’ and presents adaptation itself as an accented practice.
Preliminary Notes for Thinking About a Place by Catalina Segú
I thought Joel Burges and Allison Cooper’s cluster of video essays entitled The Personal Mediascape in the Age of Videographic Heterotopias was extremely well conceived and produced (full disclosure: I was invited – and delighted – to compose a video response). Among the uniformly superb videos in the collection, I think I have watched most often Catalina Segú’s Preliminary Notes for Thinking About a Place, which deals with the personal and cultural legacies of the Chilean dictatorship. This formally and thematically ambitious video essay reveals new connections with each viewing, and I use it regularly now in class to show how complexity and ambivalence can be managed and enacted as videographic thought.
The ParAIax View by Ariel Avissar
I think Ariel Avissar won’t mind if I describe The ParAlax View as the ugliest video essay of 2025. It’s also one of the year’s most intellectually intriguing. The video is a shot-for-shot AI remake of the ‘brainwashing montage’ from Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) in which the original images are replaced by slop approximations generated by Picsart, themselves based on prompts elicited from ChatGPT. Avissar also composes the creator statement in iterative and avowed collaboration with ChatGPT, and includes interpolations from an unnamed peer reviewer. The combination of video essay and unstably authored text self-consciously takes forward videographic criticism as a distributed and cyborg scholarly practice.
Sound Stack, Soundwalk, Southworth by Cormac Donnelly
I may be cheating by nominating Cormac Donnelly’s Sound Stack, Soundwalk, Southworth. This is not a single video essay but a portfolio of three videos containing a video analysis of a soundscape in Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007), a methodological tutorial on imaging techniques borrowed from Kevin Ferguson, and the recording of a soundwalk Donnelly took through Boston, for a total of 134 minutes. As with Ariel Avissar’s video and statement, Donnelly’s portfolio insists on videographic scholarship as a distributed and compound practice, and argues against conceptions of the video essay as an autonomous or self-contained form. I’m delighted to see Donnelly picking up the idea of ‘luxury scholarship’, in which making and method are indulged for their own sake. At the same time, Donnelly’s challenge to the ‘visual prejudice’ in film studies salutarily reprises a strand of important work by the great Liz Greene, and resonates with recent work on sound by scholar-makers like Pavitra Sundar (On Listening) and Annalisa Pellino (the forthcoming Becoming-Voice).
Object Oriented Breaking Bad by Jason Mittell
I take advantage of the publication in late 2024 of Jason Mittell’s videographic book, The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad, to nominate a video essay that has circulated for some years. I think Object Oriented Breaking Bad is a key work in the field. It shows how deformative methods can analytically grasp aspects of long-form texts hidden in plain sight, surfacing textures of world-building and the more-than-human. It suggests the potential for videographic practice to allow non-human entities to ‘speak’ in what we can imagine with Bruno Latour as a ‘Parliament of Things’ – a forum in which objects and ecologies find political representation alongside citizens and societies.
An Accented Video Way of Thinking: Becoming videoessay by Barbara Zecchi
Drawing on thinkers like Deleuze and Hamid Naficy, and on theories of the accent as a mode of thought rather than just speech, Barbara Zecchi’s meta-video contrasts the ‘videoessay’ (she insists on the single word), as an ‘accented’ form of criticism, with traditional, purportedly ‘accent-less’ scholarship. This is playful but challenging work: I may even have overheard Prof. Zecchi suggest that, on rewatching the videoessay, she found she couldn’t quite follow it, despite having made it herself. This is as it should be. Please don’t mention this to Prof. Zecchi, but I prefer this mode in her work to the more crowd-pleasing and easily legible achievement of a video like The Rhythms of Rage. The work we do should exceed and elude us.
‘Predictable Unpredictability’– Dynamic Embodied Patterns in Miklós Jancsó’s Film Style by Miklós Kiss and Maarten Coëgnarts
Miklós Kiss and Maarten Coëgnarts would certainly disagree with what I have just written. Miklós Kiss has been resolute in arguing the distinction between videographic research method and communication mode, and has insisted on the need to be ‘clear’ in scholarly video essays. Accordingly, Predictable Unpredictability is exemplary in its explanatory clarity. Kiss and Coëgnarts show how complex frame and figure movement in Miklós Jancsó, hard to grasp by traditional analytical means, can be captured and analysed by merging animated diagrams and film extracts. In working audiovisually to offer a precise account of an aspect of Jancsó’s style, Kiss and Coëgnarts have expanded the rhetoric and capacities of videographic criticism.
Sarah Oeffler and Neilly Farrell
Video essayists and political activists
We try to avoid hierarchies so this exercise was a challenge. We picked essays which each exemplified a different aspect of the artform. Doubtlessly, there are other equally beautiful essays from this year, but these are the ones that stuck with us.
The Alt-Right Playbook: The South Bank of the Rubicon by Innuendo Studios
For years now, Innuendo Studios has put out videos starting with a hypothetical, “Say, for the sake of argument”. This video, apparently the last in the series, does not start that way. Instead it starts with gentle sound design, and an unexpected introduction. This essay is a plea, and it will be a time capsule. It asks the audience to take stock in the moment they’re in, as they watch a dark history unfold. It makes salient the emotional turmoil of experiencing politics, with an eerily gentle tone.
Fascists Will Waste Your Time. by Thought Slime
Thought Slime uses comedy to be very clear, and uses clarity to be shatteringly funny. As with most of their videos, the tone is intentionally unpretentious. Thought Slime puts forth an argument about the best way to speak to unapologetic fascists, which is not to speak to them at all. Behind her humour is unimpeachable logic, and Mildred’s persona is thoroughly enjoyable company, even with what should be a grim topic.
DIY HRT: Everything I Can Legally Tell You by Lily Alexandre
This video is praxis; and not in some fuzzy sense in which art inspires revolutions, but in the simple and straightforward sense that the work itself will tangibly help people. We would not be surprised to see other works from Lily on this list, and comparatively this work may seem somewhat unassuming. But it is the work we have forwarded to people who are in desperate positions, having to manage their own healthcare. There is real bravery in using a platform like YouTube to spread information to marginalised people, and Lily does so with her usual mastery of the medium.
Brat and the Culture of Addiction by Alexander Avila
An Alexander Avila video sometimes feels like taking an interesting philosophy class, complete with pop culture references, swish lighting, perfect music and sprinkles of queer innuendo. This video in particular showcases Alex’s ability to compose a narrative with a dizzying array of elements. He takes real risks. At one point in his piece, Alex breaks all the rules of YouTube and filmmaking and addresses the audience directly in a pointed staring contest. Not just anticipating the audience’s discomfort, but triggering it intentionally, watching you with folded arms as time passes. Much of the video feels uncomfortable, and yet it’s a work we’ve watched more than once. For such a demonstration of virtuosity it also has such heart.
The ‘War’ in Gaza Is Not Really Taking Place by chriswaves
Chriswaves is the mercurial personification of internet culture; he has emerged as one of the most unique and insightful voices covering the intersection of technology, alienation, and capitalist exploitation. His work is slick, catchy, and meticulously edited. In this essay, he applies Jean Baudrillard’s and Achille Mbembe’s work to the conflict in Gaza, and highlights the throughline from small acts of capitalistic exploitation to terrifying state violence. It’s haunting without being voyeuristic, academic while still feeling urgent. And most importantly, it somehow ends on a plea for hope. Chris’s work is both innovative and familiar, a reminder of what is uniquely good about this genre.
OutOfCharacters
Video essayist, community manager for the Essay Library, Yu-Gi-Oh player
Being a manager for the Essay Library, a Discord server for up-and-coming video essayists, I tend to come into contact with a lot of video essays from… up-and-coming video essayists. It’s wonderful to see the payoff for videos when I’ve seen firsthand the amount of work that has gone into them, and the source of various artistic choices taken in their creation. My submissions include some highlights of those from this year.
You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.) by josh (with parentheses)
Rarely do you come across a video that makes you feel the kind of joy you get from just being a human. This video from Josh showcases this joy in one of its most basic forms: communication. He refutes the value of AI writing from the idea that the purpose of writing is to meet with another person, and reflects the personal side of this issue by drawing upon his experiences with his friends and as an English professor to back up his points. This essay is both deeply intimate and extremely relevant to an important issue impacting our cultural landscape.
Storytime Animation Doesn’t Feel Relatable Anymore by comma splice
This first video from comma splice explores the transformation of the YouTube genre of storytime animation. These videos usually reflect on one’s lived experience – they tend to change quite a bit in style and substance as their creators grow from hobbyists to the owners of small production companies. Though comma splice’s essay functions as a critique, it comes from a place of love for the genre, and it can easily be seen in their self-made avatar which meshes wonderfully with the style of the videos they critique. I hope to see more of their work in the future.
Change-Makers: Opposing Fascism In Daily Life by Afterthoughts
This is one of a couple of videos in a series by Afterthoughts, which seeks to showcase actionable goals people strive for when trying to resist the current political landscape. A common critique of leftist video essays is that while they often seek to inform people of issues in society, they don’t often provide a guide for solving the problem. Change-Makers has this missing information in spades, tackling tactics like civil disobedience or protesting often through the lens of three different archetypes of activist that they define. This information is something that I think many people sorely need at the moment, and Afterthoughts is doing a fantastic job at presenting it!
How to Reduce Salt by Core-A Gaming
My favourite aspect of Core-A Gaming is that while his videos are incredibly applicable to his chosen subject of fighting games, they usually extend to the general mindset approaching competition. In this video, he examines techniques used in cognitive behavioral therapy to create a healthier mindset towards approaching competition, which is an issue that many people struggle with from my own experience. I love the way he incorporates interviews he conducts with top players from various games to back up his points, easily bridging the gap from theoretical to practical.
Alison Peirse
Professor of Film Studies, University of Leeds
Videographic criticism is feeling its archival fantasy in 2025. Check out Ellen Nolan’s The Nita Harvey Archive for Screenworks, Amanda Doxtater’s Epitaph for Sonja 1: Body/Archive/Movement in ASAP-Review, Viktoria Paranyuk’s Meet Part | Mothers Daughters in Apparatus, and the wonderful Movie dossier Audiovisual Approaches and the Archive.
I remain, as ever, obsessed with archives, film history, and feelings. This (magnificent) obsession is evidenced with great beauty and clarity in the work I have selected:
Zodiac Killer Project by Charlie Shackleton
when the archive denies your desires
AGENCIA by May Santiago
when the archive cannot hold you
Okay Keskidee! Let Me See Inside by Rhea Storr
when film builds new archives
They’re Just Hands! by Dayna McLeod
when film is reimagined as an archive of love
Willow Q. Petri
You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.) by josh (with parentheses)
There are many videos dissecting the numerous problems with AI but none have inspired me to be a better human and friend like this thoughtful exploration of communication and art.
be your own algorithm by pagemelt
A rare criticism of algorithms that keeps its critique aimed where it belongs while being a love letter to humanity and art in ways that are often dismissed in other critiques of our online spaces controlled by corporations.
I Saw the TV Glow: CRT Memories and Fuzzy Genders by AdequateEmily
A masterful analysis that weaves in the personal from herself and other trans people to poignantly touch on why this film had such an impact for many of us, myself included.
WARFRAME 1999 is Absurdly Punk Rock by SocraTetris
I found myself loving a game that I knew nearly nothing about going in. A thoughtful examination of what a piece of art has to say when we consider its cultural context in a moment in time with an emphatically punk rock conclusion.
A beautiful exploration of the little details in massive AAA games through a lens of his love of photography which brings appreciation to elements of the art form often overlooked.
How Galileo Broke the Scientific Method by Dr Fatima
An ideological breakdown of how science itself is often discussed and perceived gives us much to think about how we go about acquiring knowledge. Dr Fatima’s end of video discussions are also a welcome addition that not only build on her points but something we rarely see on YouTube.
Sinners and the Death of Black Art by F.D. Signifier
Manages to take a beloved piece of media and uses it to interrogate a double consciousness that exists when creating media within systems that are antagonistic to those making the media.
Pillar of Garbage
Video essayist on YouTube
Regrettably, this selection is limited to the YouTube video essay sphere, as I’m not familiar enough with the wider landscape to be much use beyond it. That being said, I’m very happy to share some of the great video work I’ve been fortunate enough to see on that platform this year!
We’ve forgotten how to forget. by josh (with parentheses)
This one flew way under the radar. Josh’s piece goes down an elegantly presented and deeply compelling rabbit hole, starting with a few confusing frames of 1995’s A Goofy Movie, moving through questions of medium, cartography, and even Disney lore, ending on a recognition of what we’ve lost as online viewers – the ability “to love a thing and let it go”. Scratch the surface, and many of our present moment’s distressing realities feel like knock-on effects of this principle, of the way the internet lets any discussion carry on, intensify, and ferment forever. The alt-right wouldn’t have formed if they’d had to GamerGate in person. There’d be no basilisks or longtermism addling the minds in charge of our economies had LessWrong been a coffee shop. This essay isn’t about either of those things – it’s about a weird map in A Goofy Movie! – but our journey down that rabbit hole is very much situated in the concerns of 2025.
You Are into Mousetrap YouTube by Big Joel
Is this even a video essay? Is it a visual poem, instead? What’s the difference? I’m not sure. Whatever this is, Big Joel has produced an obliquely evocative video that examines cruelty, interpersonal boundaries, the intimacy of viewing, the way every surface on a platform like YouTube is, in some way, a slippery slope. This one rewards repeat viewings, and is gorgeously animated by mothcub.
Fantasies of Nuremberg by Jacob Geller
How do you make video essays while the world is falling apart? It’s a question many prominent creators in this space have wrestled with in recent times. Some answers have been better than others. From a formal perspective, Fantasies of Nuremberg is a more straightforward essay than many of Geller’s, except when it’s not. It takes the viewer along in a journey from despair, to confusion, to rage, and back again. Revenge is too much, and not enough. Justice is elusive.
This is a knotty essay. The knots remain largely intact at its end, but handling them together for 40 or so minutes does result in a sort of affirmation.
The Ten Traits of Slop Content by Ro Ramdin
This is, as one YouTube commenter puts it, “A very thorough thesis on stuff that kinda evades thoroughness.” Slop is one of those terms that came out of nowhere and shot straight into the dominant vocabulary of the internet. For the past year or so, it’s been very hard to talk online about art or content without having to contend with this word in some way. Many of us have attempted to define what people are trying to convey with the term, and most of us have failed.
Not Ro Ramdin. By avoiding direct definition and instead lasering in on the ways we talk about slop, the voices leading that conversation, and the social, cultural and technological contexts we’re doing slop ‘discourse’ within, Ramdin takes us right to its heart. It’s an uneasy, sickly sweet journey.
Are Americans Irish? by The Leftist Cooks
There are very few essayists I’ll drop whatever I’m doing to catch up on. The Leftist Cooks are among that number, and this essay is a great example of why. Honestly, all their essays are – I could have picked any of their releases from the past 12 months here. Neilly and Sarah are masters of the long-form video essay. It’s not easy to dive as deep into a question as the pair do here while keeping that exploration fresh, thought-provoking, and authentic (trust me, I’ve tried). Are Americans Irish? does all this and more, zooming through history, film, politics, philosophy, and personal experience to end up interrogating the very idea of identity.
Julian Ross
Head of Film Programming & Distribution, Eye Filmmuseum
Dracula by Radu Jude
Outrageous essay film on AI, the bloodsucker of our times.
Daria’s Night Flowers by Maryam Tafakory
Pretty sure I picked a film by Maryam Tafakory every time I participated in this poll. Masterful as always.
Remembering Otherwise by belit sağ
A performative reading in the cinema inviting the audience to analyse the same few seconds of footage in different ways, based on a broader project on a 1978 labour strike in Veghel, the Netherlands, led by Turkish migrant women.
happiness by Fırat Yücel
Ancestral Visions of the Future by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
Their Eyes by Nicolas Gourault
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions by Kahlil Joseph
Jemma Saunders
Audiovisual PhD student and Film & TV Placement Coordinator at the University of Birmingham
In no particular order, these all made it onto a handy notepad this year, under the heading ’video essays to watch again’. Enjoy!
Backlot Connections by John Gibbs
As an actor plays different parts, so the backlot portrays different places, yet fundamentally remains itself. A fascinating study of how seemingly separate narratives and characters’ lives converge on and around the Universal Backlot.
Arkiv Avis Mor (Archive Newspaper Mother) by Marie Hallager Andersen
I found this utterly captivating and original. Marie Hallager Andersen weaves together a whale, old newspaper, home videos, dance performances, projection, questions about archives and bodies, and so much more. Beautiful storytelling that ruminates on motherhood, memory and movement.
The Return of the Star Wipe by Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková
Meticulously researched, so fun to watch and a perfectly realised retro aesthetic throughout that is anything but gimmicky in its execution. <applause>
Lost in Grand Central by Joel Blackledge
Clever interplay of text and image showcases the incongruity between Hollywood superstars and a British city widely denigrated for its looks, as well as the confusion many have experienced in and around Birmingham New Street Station and Grand Central shopping centre. I wish I’d made this!
Mapping Roma by Jessica Wax-Edwards
An embodied exploration into the filming locations of Roma which uses superimposition to great effect, highlighting the complexities of representing ‘real’ places on screen, both past and present, and how film location tourists may experience them.
Filler Words by Ian Garwood
Entertaining and subtly provocative, this certainly gave me ‘pause for thought’.
Crochet Is Sick! by Alison Peirse
So well crafted (excuse the pun), I can’t look at crocheted blankets or shawls in any screen context now without wondering what impending horrors may await. Building on her previous video essay ‘Knit One, Stab Two’ – though this also works strongly as a standalone piece – Alison Peirse champions the crucial work of the Art Department and Wardrobe.
Dan Schindel
Freelance critic, former associate editor for documentary at Hyperallergic
Henry Fonda for President by Alexander Horwath
The best theatrically released essay film I’ve seen this year. Henry Fonda, it turns out, works very well as both a metonym and a contrast with America and its history.
Everyone Is Cheating at Chess (Allegedly) by Sarah Z
Extremely fun and funny video about people going to extremes to cheat, which also is a useful look at how changing technology and social mores have caused the storied strategy game’s meta, social role, and psychogeographic environment to evolve.
Why Movies Just Don’t Feel ‘Real’ Anymore by Like Stories of Old
There’s been a lot of discourse about digital sheen and changing production models and how it’s affected cinema aesthetics. This, more than any other video or single article, works perfectly as a succinct way to explain to those who might not get it just what we’re talking about.
The Wizard of Oz at Sphere Is Nightmare Fuel by Be Kind Rewind
ChatGPT Made Me Delusional by Eddy Burback
Disney’s Living Characters: A Broken Promise by Defunctland
Daniel Simpson (Eyebrow Cinema)
How to Spot a Bad Critic by Accented Cinema
The rise of independent creators on online platforms like YouTube has, for all its benefits, also led to a collapse in quality control. Virtually anyone can upload a video of insubstantial analysis or bad-faith criticism and call it a video essay. How to Spot a Bad Critic offers a useful framework for viewers to recognise poor criticism when they see it. It is also a good video for fellow essayists, a standard for us to hold ourselves to.
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Biopic You’re Not Allowed to See… by Be Kind Rewind
Be Kind Rewind’s recounting of Superstar’s production, legacy, and legal troubles would be worthy of consideration on the strength of its writing and research alone, but it’s the videomaking which makes the work transcendent. Just as Todd Haynes used Barbie dolls to re-enact the life story of Karen Carpenter, so too does Isabel Custodio use Barbie dolls to tell the story of Haynes and his film. Formally ambitious and substantial.
How David Lynch Saw the Bright Side by Broey Deschanel
Doubling as a thoughtful analysis of David Lynch’s artistry and a moving tribute to a much beloved filmmaker, Deschanel’s video essay explores familiar aspects of Lynch’s work to arrive at an unexpected and underdiscussed conclusion.
How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult by The Elephant Graveyard
Most of The Elephant Graveyard’s video work has been dedicated to critiquing the modern comedy sphere dominated by Joe Rogan and his expanded circle. This video is his magnum opus. A damning portrait of how thoroughly MAGA politics and its figureheads have infiltrated pop culture through the guise of comedy that is also far funnier than any of the so-called comedians highlighted.
Why the Terminator Uses a Phone Book by Jesse Tribble
In an era of multi-hour deep dives, it’s refreshing to see a video essayist tackle something so small and seemingly inconsequential. In just under five minutes, Jesse offers a compelling read of the phone book as plot device in The Terminator, incorporating the conventions of genre cinema and even the history of the telephone itself in his analysis.
PragerU’s Terrible Shakespeare Opinions, or Why I Stopped Talking About Shakespeare by Kyle Kallgren
Stunning. More than just a cutting retort to PragerU’s bigotry and anti-intellectualism, this video essay thoroughly dismantles the notion that any artwork or artist can truly transcend the political and material realities in which they exist. Kyle Kallgren has since announced his retirement from videomaking on YouTube and this swan song is a reminder of how vital he’s been to the medium. Witty, rigorously researched, and willing to sit within uncomfortable complexities, this is an essential video essay.
modern masculinity and The Critical Drinker by Man Carrying Thing
Videos critiquing/debunking the bad film analysis of rage-bait YouTubers like The Critical Drinker have become a popular sub-genre on Film YouTube in recent years. But Man Carrying Thing zeroes in on a less-often discussed aspect of such channels: their appallingly lazy video editing.
Shannon Strucci
Video editor and podcast host
How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult by The Elephant Graveyard
In-depth verbal evisceration of Rogan and his orbiters.
What Are ‘White People Tacos’? by Internet Shaquille
Direct, succinct, funny, and insightful video about white people tacos and how they differ from their traditional Mexican counterparts.
The Labubu Chronicles by Ro Ramdin
Cultural commentary, poem, and opulent visual art feast all in one.
ChatGPT Made Me Delusional by Eddy Burback
What better way to demonstrate ChatGPT’s corrosive mental effects than to present it with one foundational delusion that it then runs with and builds upon to an astonishing degree?
Scout Tafoya
I’ve never needed new ways of thinking than I do now. I live in hope for the next generation, that we may yet find the Godard of video essays
Spectateurs! by Arnaud Desplechin
Everything an essay should be: personal, beautiful, thoughtful, and Mathieu Amalric shows up.
Disney’s Animatronics: A Living History by Kevin Perjurer
Nothing like getting enchanted by a Defunctland piece
I Fell in Love with a Quebec Reality Dating Show by Derin Emre
Spritely and openhearted
The Queen is Dead: Trans, Queer, and Femme Image in Last Exit to Brooklyn by Willow Maclay and Kat Ellinger
A great probing look at a history still being discovered
The Purplettes: The Room Next Door by Green and Red
A lovely cubist deconstruction of a work that flows so effortlessly past its details. Making us better understand how an artist tells a story of death’s complications.
Max Tohline
Video essayist and independent scholar
Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras by Benn Jordan
I asked the question “What is Cinema?” a lot this year. The primary site of screen reception is no longer the theatre or even the television, but rather everywhere else there’s a screen – phones, ATMs, rear-facing cameras on your car. Cinema is everywhere and nowhere. But more importantly, the camera itself no longer primarily resides in Hollywood or TV studios or even in your pocket, but in the vast array of always-on surveillance systems blanketing corporate and government buildings, roadsides, and doorbells, outfitted with licence plate readers and facial recognition AI, and piping all that visual and telemetric data into the hard drives of police, ICE, and privately-owned data brokers. What is cinema? Nowadays, it’s the surveillance grid.
And so if we’re going to make meaningful video essays about seeing-knowledge-power in the world today, they’d better be interventions into that surveillance grid. And NO ONE this year has more meaningfully intervened on that apparatus than Benn Jordan, who EXPOSED the whole data collection system and BROKE the licence-plate-reading functionality on Flock Safety cameras in this video, then followed up by HACKING the entire 80,000-camera grid here. Everything else this year takes a back seat.
The Rehearsal Season 2, Episode 3 ‘Pilot’s Code’, minutes 21 through 31 by Nathan Fielder
Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal Season 2 might be the most multi-modal piece of media ever made. It’s so multi-modal that for 10 minutes in episode 3, he shifts into full-YouTuber fan-theory video-essay mode – but with two important twists. One: unlike the eisegetical crackpot nonsense that pollutes most of YouTube, I’m absolutely sold on Fielder’s Evanescence Hypothesis. Two: all of his corkboard-diagramming and cockpit-voice-recorder-timing are in the service of something beautiful: empathy for the private struggle of a public individual and the mental health epidemic hiding in plain sight behind it. All the jokes are serious, and that’s surpassingly rare and precious.
Orwell: 2+2=5 by Raoul Peck
While this film seems historically fated to not land with the urgency of Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, that’s a shame – because the breadth of research, the adroit connections it makes to the present, and its empathy for Orwell’s life story are in all ways the equal of that great earlier work. Just when you think it’s only about propaganda and social control, it becomes about surveillance, AI (“The imagination will not breed in captivity” – Orwell), revolution, love, morality, and everything else that matters. This one speaks for itself.
Panorama of Western State Penitentiary by Eli Jacob Boonin-Vail
The best video essays exist at the junction of some set of concerns you didn’t previously realise intersected. This compact and impactful academic piece sits at the crossroads of contemporary film production, carceral technologies, media archaeology, and much more. What does it mean for a jail to be ‘well designed’? Why would we ever be happy to look at one? And yet from early cinema to the present we haven’t been able to stop aestheticising them. A worthwhile study, and maybe even a wake-up call.
Why ChatGPT Can’t Draw a Full Glass of Wine by Alex O’Connor
The best rumination on AI this year was Josh Geist’s You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.), but since I recognised him for his video on Winnie the Pooh and Candide a few years ago (still incredible!), this video offers another path through AI. From a simple question, posed in the title, Alex finds a new way to examine empiricism and potentially kickstart hundreds of Philosophy 101 discussions that haven’t been interesting to students in decades.
I Solved Klotski by 2swap
As a species, we went all-in on the eye. There’s almost no way we can meaningfully understand a set of numbers or the operation of a complex system directly. We have to invent a way to visualise it. I wish more video essayists started with that fundamental task: to find a new way to visualise something. It makes my year when someone makes something this jaw-droppingly gorgeous.
What If We Made a Camera That Sees in Reverse? by Stuff Made Here
For my final slot this year, I just want to shout-out all the ‘f*ck-around-and-find-out’ YouTubers who are still finding new ways of seeing things. Like Lensevision and his geometric camera filter experiments, Patrick Gillespie repeatedly blurring and sharpening an image, or, most amazingly, this video’s spinning camera rig that sees in unwrapped? reverse? perspective? behind things? … You really just have to see for yourself. Photography began with engineering. And it can be reborn every time an engineer decides to start from scratch again. It’s beautiful.
César Ustarroz
Managing editor of Found Footage Magazine
This 2025 short-list obviously fails to capture the full scope of the video essays that make critical use of found footage or pre-existing images. And the last year has brought an exceptional number of remarkable works. The titles highlighted here represent just one attempt to recognise video essays that engage meaningfully with the world around us. They tackle with creativity and courage global concerns such as the Palestinian conflict, racism, housing affordability, cultural heritage, collective identity or the inevitable ways in which mankind and technology interact. I hope this selection is a reminder of what we cannot miss.
Another Other by Bex Oluwatoyin Thompson
In a moment marked by fierce political polarization, a film like Another Other poses a lot of thought-provoking questions about profound social crisis and the right to freedom of expression in a democratic society.
Houses We Can Own by Susana Bessa
A fascination with the way houses are depicted in the movies becomes a video essay that reflects on how the environments we occupy influence personal experiences, beliefs and achievements. Houses We Can Own is a video essay which considers how architecture and spatial environments shape our identities and the narratives we build around our lives.
The Sorrow of the Lynx by Michaela Grill
Contemporary art plays an essential role in confronting the climate emergency. Michaela Grill’s The Sorrow of the Lynx delves into the natural world of Siberia to explore how this expansive ecosystem is being transformed by the growing pressures of global warming and man-made disasters, from widespread woodland fires to other environmental disruptions.
Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm by Eryk Salvaggio
Blending glitched AI-generated imagery with archival images, Eryk Salvaggio’s work sheds light on how cognitive processes are simulated, onto how human consciousness is being emulated and imprisoned in today’s modern digital landscape.
The Force by Wilma Stone
I particularly like The Force. Wilma Stone’s video essay, while grounded in scholarship, is fully compatible with a work process that embraces a poetic approach to the archive to tell how colonial histories erase local knowledge, heritage, and identity.
Ilinca Vanau
Film curator/Film studies PhD candidate (University of St Andrews)
A mix of works I’m grateful to have discovered this year, including some unorthodox choices that share the critical and formal sensibilities at work in the liveliest and most perceptive video essays, and that perhaps hint at promising directions for the form.
Flesh & Ghost by Sky Hopinka
A transporting film of ghosts, flesh and echoes, which like many of Hopinka’s works, offers ways to feel for all that shimmers at the limits of knowing. A looped two-channel video, alive with the music of Courtney Asztalos, it approaches cycles of loss and return, grief and gratitude, through a Hočąk story, VHS tapes from Hopinka’s youth, and the shifting motions of poetry, myth, and memory.
just above the tear duct on each side by Cat and Éiméar McClay
Fragmenting texts found in the archival materials of the defunct St. Conal’s Psychiatric Hospital in Letterkenny, this singular work looks closely behind the harrowing statistic that during the 1950s, Ireland had the highest rate of psychiatric hospital use in the world. The imbrications of colonial and carceral logics with local social and religious dynamics interact with staggering force with the quiet, animated digital renditions of the dilapidated, life-crushing spaces that once housed them.
Preliminary Notes for Thinking About a Place by Catalina Segú
A vivid and affecting work about the interplay of sensing and being sensed by places, tracing the shifting limits of control when retrieving certain memories, where mechanisms of forgetting are dissolved and undone by the flesh. Through an exquisite sense of pace, the video essay gathers footage from Segú’s family video archives, military marches and parades from the Chilean dictatorship, TV shows, and a sensitive return to scenes from Lucrecia Martel’s films. Like the gesture it circles – a child jumping in a swimming pool without hesitation, Segú’s own, echoed in La cienega – the work moves between the surface and depths of personal and collective experiences, which shape the body.
အသွင်ပြောင်းလဲမှုတစ်ခု/A Metamorphosis by Lin Htet Aung
A restructuring of state television propaganda from Myanmar’s dictatorship into a formally exciting and unsettling broadcast. The work tends towards playful abstraction, where the official colours of the national flag interact with other colours that allude to new possibilities. Familiar language and images are retuned as elusive visuals and unnerving lullabies (using AI trained on the voice of the military dictator), which eschew footage of protests and state violence but retain an affective texture attuned to both the subtle and blatant workings of propaganda.
A Brief History of Chasing Storms by Curtis Miller
The tornado as destructive weather, visual icon, a thrilling and tragic event, linked to climate change, disaster capitalism, and mythologies of American film culture. A tactile and expansive work that balances memorable anecdotes with a range of archival materials. It organises stories teased from repeated journeys across the ‘Tornado Alley’ of the American Midwest into discrete episodes, while inviting sound to carry the work in open and surprising ways, engaging the iconic imagery of tornadoes and the anxieties and imaginaries they evoke with generous, critical, and moving depth.
Jiří Žák
Artist, filmmaker and PhD student at the Faculty of Fine Arts (Brno University of Technology – VUT)
Confession: This year, I haven’t seen nearly as many video essays as I used to. For this reason, my selection is eclectic and personal. It is not meant to be a selection of the so-called objectively best, but rather of what won me over the moment I encountered it.
How Not to Remember Our Bodies by Lucie Rosenfeldová
An impressive deconstruction of historical materials, supplemented by the author’s photographs, animations, and visualizations, deals with women’s reproductive rights in socialist Czechoslovakia. Unspectacular, but all the more disturbing and uncompromising. It raises fundamental questions about the autonomy of the female body in relation to bureaucracy and patriarchy. “What is ‘we’ when we say ‘ours’?”
How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult by The Elephant Graveyard
An answer to the question: Why did comedy get so shitty? Together with the creator of The Elephant Graveyard, you can dive into a deep rabbit hole where you will explore everything that the manosphere, Roganosphere, toxicity, alt-right, conspirituality, and the cult practices of charismatic but stupid leaders mean. You will see the world behind the mirror, as described by Naomi Klein in her book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
Towards Eremos: Form, Emptiness, Posthumanism by Jáchym Šidlák
The video essay attempts to describe the viewer’s experience of watching a film that seeks to adopt a posthumanist and more-than-human perspective. This is a difficult task on both levels. Judge for yourself how well it succeeds. Or rather, experience it for yourself.
Barbara Zecchi
The ParAIax View by Ariel Avissar
Ariel Avissar is one of the most inventive and transformative videoessayists working today. (I could fill my entire poll with works by Ariel Avissar.) With This Is Not What I Normally Do he had already pushed the form into territories that felt unprecedented – often with conceptual audacity. The ParAIax View marks yet another leap forward. Here, Avissar invites AI systems to reimagine the notorious brainwashing montage from The Parallax View (1974), not as a simple remake but as a probing test of what happens when machinic hallucination encounters one of cinema’s most disturbing political visions. The result is quite mesmerising, revealing new tensions, distortions, and interpretive slippages that emerge when human intention meets algorithmic generation. And of course, this comes on the heels of his spectacular earlier Parallax View Piece (Laird’s Constraint) (forthcoming in Screenworks).
See Under: Orient by Colleen Laird
Colleen Laird’s first video essay Eye–Camera–Ninagawa was an absolute virtuoso deconstruction of the opening montage of Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter – so dazzling in its precision, originality, and skill that one might have thought it her opera maestra. We were not surprised by the string of similarly commanding works following it (she is such a brilliant videoessayist), yet it was hard to believe she could surpass it. And yet her latest video essay, See Under: Orient, goes beyond everything one could have anticipated. It is a work of breathtaking beauty and brilliance: a seamless fusion of sound, rhythm, and colour, carried by a theoretical sophistication that never weighs down its sensorial force. The piece marks a new pinnacle in Laird’s already extraordinary videographic practice – and one can only imagine that even greater achievements lie ahead.
Pausas\Pauses by Rachel Randall and Catherine Grant
Pausas/Pauses is a beautiful exploration of a gesture that recurs across contemporary Latin American cinema yet often slips past critical attention: the fleeting moments in which domestic, cleaning, and care workers momentarily step out of their demands and inhabit a fragile space of inwardness. Rachel Randall and Catherine Grant gather these slivers of rest – from windowsill gazes to sunlit pauses during commutes – and let them speak to each other through videographic montage, revealing a shared emotional register that written scholarship has largely overlooked. By placing scenes from seven films into conversation, they illuminate how these works imagine the workers’ inner worlds, even as those vantage points remain partially inaccessible to the filmmakers themselves. The result is a video essay that not only uncovers a quiet but persistent visual motif, but also brilliantly reflects on classed and gendered asymmetries of leisure. Pausas becomes, in this sense, a meditation on who is afforded the luxury to pause – and who must steal it.
Painful Cinephilia: Daney, Rivette, Video and Kapó by Alan O’Leary
Alan O’Leary is one of the most remarkable figures in videographic criticism. His work consistently combines rigor and creativity, producing video essays that are as intellectually compelling as they are aesthetically captivating. Selecting a single piece of his for this poll borders on the absurd: each one feels like a fully realised achievement, and the sheer breadth and vitality of his output mean that there is always a new gem to discover. From the ethical and formal subtlety of Painful Cinephilia: Daney, Rivette, Video, and Kapó, to the analytical playfulness of Classif. & Me (Laird’s Constraint), or the exquisite formal precision of Canister in Close Up (Payne’s Constraint) (these last two produced for Avissar’s Parametric Summer Series), to the collective ingenuity of Om Shanti Omnibus, produced in collaboration with the other members of IVERN, O’Leary’s oeuvre is consistently impressive. Any one of these works could easily stand as a landmark in videographic practice, yet together they demonstrate a rare, sustained mastery that continually expands the possibilities of the form.
Potbelly by Dayna McLeod
Dayna McLeod has an extraordinary talent for using humour as a powerful critical instrument for her feminist intervention – her humour is very sharp, and theoretically rich. In Potbelly – as also in Age Perfect, another brilliant video essay she produced this year – she distills complex debates in aging and gender into short pieces that have the power of carrying the force of entire scholarly articles. What might take pages of academic prose, McLeod conveys through wit, performance, and an unflinching attention to how older women’s bodies are read, regulated, and stereotyped. Her comedy never softens the critique; instead, it opens a conceptual space where laughter becomes a form of resistance and a method of knowing. These pieces are miniature in duration but expansive in impact – proof that videographic insight can be both concise and powerfully transformative
(dis)Orientating Horror: Feeling Queerly by Lucy Fife Donaldson
In (dis)Orientating Horror: Feeling Queerly, Lucy Fife Donaldson treats brilliantly the videographic form itself as a queer methodology, exploring how horror films disrupt spatial and bodily norms to produce disorientation that can be both unsettling and generative. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s and Jennifer M. Barker’s ideas of embodied orientation, the essay traces moments – from the drone shot in Midsommar to camera movements in The Shining, The Descent, and other genre examples – that invert, twist, and destabilise the viewer’s sense of verticality and linearity. The piece demonstrates how the video essay can make theoretical insights tangible, turning the sensory intensity of horror into a reflection on queerness, embodiment, and the potential for new orientations in both film and life. Winner of the 2025 Marienbad Film Festival Audiovisual Essay Award, it exemplifies how critical practice can inhabit, rather than resolve, the pleasures and provocations of disorientation.
Shadow Self: On Agnès Varda’s Documenteur by Sadia Quraeshi Shepard
Shadow Self: On Agnès Varda’s Documenteur is a compelling investigation of the porous boundaries between academic analysis and creative practice, fiction and documentary, biography and autobiography. The video essay uses Varda’s film as a lens to explore how these categories intersect, allowing personal reflection and formal experimentation to illuminate one another. In just over seven minutes, it demonstrates how videographic work can enact the very concepts it theorises, producing insights that written scholarship alone might struggle to convey. Recognised with the Audiovisual Essay Award at the 2025 Marienbad Film Festival, this piece exemplifies how videography can blend rigor, artistry, and self-reflexivity in a seamless, evocative form.
Emerging voices
The voters on this poll were given the option to highlight ‘emerging voices’ in the video essay community. Some contributors chose to direct readers to specific videos, while others focused on an essayist’s whole body of work.
Allie Meowy (nominated by Willow Q. Petri)
Allie Meowy takes the deepest dives from angles you would never expect that are both hilarious and heartwarming in their sincerity.
Amber Flannery Field (nominated by Clare O’Gara)
I may be cheating slightly here, since Field has already created and published video essay-adjacent content on TikTok for several years. Given that she’s also been teasing a pivot to long-form YouTube video essays recently, though, I wanted to include her. Field is, in her own words, “the only good tour guide in New York City,” and her videos, which explore race, gender, popular culture, politics, community organising, the spaces and places of Washington DC and New York, and all the overlaps therein, are among the most compelling I’ve ever seen on TikTok. I’ve also never been more impressed by a person’s ability to unflinchingly deliver thought- and heart-wrenching commentary to a camera in so many different ways in so many different public places.
Aurélie Coop (nominated by Lucy Fife Donaldson)
Aurélie is in her final year at St Andrews, and produced a brilliant audiovisual essay for my course last year. Inspired by a range of sources, it draws on the range of audiovisual essay making in really inventive ways, while doing something distinctive and fresh. I’m very excited to see what she will make next!
Casey Explosion (nominated by Willow Q. Petri)
If you enjoy games and do not know who Casey Explosion is, you are missing out on some incredible recommendations. She has brought her thoughtful love of games to YouTube with some incredible videos.
Celia Sainz (nominated by Alan O’Leary)
Celia Sainz received her PhD this year from Mass Amherst, where she worked with Barbara Zecchi. Currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Williams College, she has already made herself a leading light in videographic ecocriticism (did she invent the term?). I think her non-anthropocentric approach to videographic film studies, as evidenced in video essays like KELLY REICHARDT’S BESTIARIO (published in [in]Transition), will be increasingly prominent.
Comma Splice (nominated by Hizzy Hay)
Great visual animations paired with strong analysis of a YouTube medium I had no familiarity with, yet still found really engaging.
Creative Destruction Video (nominated by J. Nicholas Geist)
The lyric essay in creative nonfiction gets a lot of pushback from all sides, because it refuses to accept a bright line between poetry and prose, or between fiction and nonfiction. But from those complicated, messy areas of overlap arise many of my favourite essays. I haven’t really seen anyone attempting to bring the lyric essay to the video space until I saw Creative Destruction’s Fugue State Waltz. He has continued to infuse the video essay with the lyric in his Jason Voorhees: Reagan’s Golem. His more experimental essays are challenging to both viewers and, unfortunately, the algorithm. I hope he continues down this path, though, because he is making some of the most interesting and exciting video essays I’ve seen.
Dex Veitch (nominated by Lucy Fife Donaldson)
Dex Veitch is a junior at UMass Amherst majoring in Comp Lit and Film Studies. His video essay The Cinematic Scar: Reconceptualizing Suture Theory won second place in the Michael S. Roif Award in Film Studies for Best Video Essay in 2025, and after seeing his embodiment exercises on Orphée, I was really impressed by their expressive density.
Elsie Walker (nominated by Catherine Grant)
Elsie is the second of two established scholars who, as a recent alumni of the Middlebury Workshop on Scholarship in Sound and Image, made a great impact as new video essayists on this year’s Adelio Ferrero Award for Video Essays. Elsie’s highly personal and moving video essay A Beautiful Day in the Tree of Life received an honourable mention.
Eva Alvarez Vazquez (nominated by Alison Peirse)
Her sound work is smart, corporeal, and effective. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
HeyItMeBen (nominated by Denis (LambHoot))
2025 marked Ben’s triumphant return after a year-long hiatus. His piece Searching for Hope in Iron Lung explores themes of desperation, illness, and hope. The piece examines a couple of examples that bridge the virtual and real worlds.
Johanna Gustin (nominated by Kevin B. Lee)
Gustin is a filmmaker and graduate student at the Stanford Documentary programme. Her desktop documentary I Think About Birds is a fascinating and ultimately breathtaking desktop documentary that draws surprising ties between manosphere/tradwife videos, nature documentaries and her own family yearnings.
josh (with parentheses) (nominated by Denis (LambHoot))
Josh’s ‘let me share my screen’ approach is such a compelling storytelling technique. It’s easy to get immersed in these videos, which is strange since there’s literally an interface sitting between audience and topic. Maybe there’s something skeuomorphic going on (watching a video on a computer of a computer’s interface). We’ve forgotten how to forget and You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.) are great demonstrations of Josh’s signature style.
Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (nominated by Alison Peirse)
I’ve long admired Katarzyna Paszkiewicz’s cutting edge work in feminist film studies, and it is tremendously exciting to see this major scholar beginning to think videographically. Her style is cool and calm, a balm for the overstimulated.
Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (nominated by Catherine Grant)
Katarzyna’s amazing video essay Environmental Time, which she began working on while learning to edit at the Middlebury Workshop, was published by the Spanish academic journal Teknokultura. Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales in 2025. It brilliantly juxtaposes selected footage from Nomadland (2020) and Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018) to explore the films’ hauntological landscapes. It’s a powerful and important work and I cannot wait for more video essays by her to enter the public sphere.
Laura Del Vecchio & Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (nominated by Maria Hofmann)
The collaboration between Laura Del Vecchio, a multidisciplinary researcher, artist, musician, editor and translator, and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Associate Professor in English and Film Studies at the University of the Balearic Islands, on a rumble from the core of the earth, that elegantly brings together scholarly rigor and creative expression, makes me excited for any future works by them.
Lilith Grasmug (nominated by Delphine Jeanneret)
Lilith Grasmug is an Austrian actress born in Paris. In 2017, she starred in Virgil Vernier’s Sophia Antipolis before working with Jean-Christophe Meurisse, Mikhaël Hers, Carmen Jaquier, and Claire Burger. After studying at the ECAL film department in Lausanne, she is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in contemporary art research at the Sorbonne, under the supervision of Elvan Zabunyan. Some of You Fucked Eva is her first short film as a director.
Linia Verde (nominated by Jiří Anger)
A group of Romanian students, mentored by Ana Szel and Liri Chapelan, created a remarkable collection of video essays on the themes of hyperobjects and ecocriticism. Published in Film a doba under the title A Small Batch of Irrepresentable Entities, this collection displays a playfulness and an engagement with topics that reach beyond strict film studies toward the environmental humanities – both of which are more than welcome.
Marine de Dardel (nominated by Kevin B. Lee)
de Dardel is a doctoral researcher working with me and Johannes Binotto, and her videographic work makes bold experiments with textual, audiovisual and verbal language. The Colour Out of Space (linked above) uses creative coding to programme a future iteration of Locarno Film Festival using a dataset derived from the festival. Her other works of this year, (DES)ASTRES.ai and Promontorium Somnii (Post Mortem) each reveal distinctly different possibilities for videographic approaches to generative AI.
Marta Cerón León (nominated by Dayna McLeod)
I had the pleasure of working with Marta and some other incredible students in the Film Studies programme at the University of Massachusetts Amherst this fall where they are making really great work. In Embodied Sound, a brittle and crunchy soundscape reframes the pharmacy scene in Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s 2023 Mutt, where the protagonist walks the aisles while on the phone. As Marta says, “the sound makes the space feel prescriptive, as if the drugs themselves speak or were making sounds while framing the body.” In two of her other videos that also work with Mutt – Supercut and OnScreen Cameo – Marta intervenes in scenes to show us how the main character is constantly framed, contained, and surveilled. Keep an eye out for Marta’s work!
Maud Ceuterick (nominated by Alan O’Leary)
Maud Ceuterick has published just two video essays so far, I think, but they are different enough, and so interesting in their individual ways, that they announce an important maker. The ferocious RAWR: Kitchen Rage Judith and I was published last year in Teknokultura. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen abjection mobilised like this in a scholarly context. Filming Out Loud, made in dialogue with the anthropologist Carola Ludovica Giannotti Mura and published in Academic Quarter, interrogates the epistemic and ethical affordances of videographic criticism with sensitivity and reflexive intelligence.
May Santiago (nominated by Alan O’Leary)
May Santiago, a performance academic based in Baltimore, has already been nominated multiple times for this poll. She describes her PhD work as archiving as activism, or as a counter to the colonial archive of Puerto Rico. Video essays such as Desidentificación (published in Burges and Cooper’s Personal Mediascapes collection) and Agencia (presented at SCMS in Chicago this year), combine archival and performative material, self-generated footage and personal revelation. They are incredibly intense and somehow intensely glamorous.
Noa Epars & Marvin Merkel (nominated by Delphine Jeanneret)
Born in 1998 in Penthalaz, he is of Swiss origin. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in French Literature and History at the University of Lausanne, he began studying cinema at the HEAD – Geneva (University of Art and Design) in 2021. In 2022, he co-directed Serafina, presented in official competition at the 75th Locarno Film Festival and at the New Directors/New Films Festival at the MoMA. The same year, he directed The Misanthrope, presented in several European festivals. Marvin Merkel is a Lausanne-based artist who combines photography with his sculptural and performative work. The nominator specifically highlighted their newest piece, Always Wanted to Be God, Never Wanted to Do Good.
Renegade Cut (nominated by Willow Q. Petri)
While he has been making videos for a long time, his recent pivot into making whatever he wants has been an incredible creative inspiration to what video essays can be.
Rotem Sudman (nominated by Colleen Laird)
Rotem Sudman is an extraordinarily promising emerging voice whose work moves with equal measures of young intellectual rigor and technical precision informed by moral courage and a palpably bursting heart. My first encounter with her videographic essay was through her entry on Terrace House in the TV Dictionary series (published in [in]Transition), which I reviewed. Sudman is a deft editor, but she is also something rarer: a maker who understands the video essay as a method of critical witnessing.
Her ongoing research demonstrates a profound commitment to rethinking film’s relationship to history, memory, political struggle, and stakes. Sudman brings a perspective that is both ethically attuned and urgently needed. Forthcoming in 2026 peer-reviewed publications, her efforts confront the violences operational in archival erasure while offering space for counter-narratives to emerge. Sudman’s work gives me hope.
Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky (nominated by Catherine Grant)
Salomé is one of two established scholars who, as recent alumna of the Middlebury Workshop on Scholarship in Sound and Image, made a great impact as new video essayists on this year’s Adelio Ferrero Award for Video Essays. Salomé’s astonishingly original work Our Morals and Theirs on the Chilean film El chacal de Nahueltoro (Miguel Littín, 1969) took first prize.
Samantha Wojcik (nominated by Jenny Oyallon-Koloski)
Samantha’s work, inspired by Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I, was in high consideration for the first annual graduate student video essay award organised through the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, judged by myself, Allison Cooper (Bowdoin College), and Andrea Comiskey (Carnegie Mellon University). She uses an expanded definition of ‘gleaning’ to take the spectator on a joyous, eclectic tour of queer and queer-adjacent imagery, concluding with an exhilarating performance in the desktop documentary form.
Sarah Davis Baker (nominated by Dan Schindel)
Baker has come out of the gate as a video essayist with some really strong stuff this year. She’s very thoughtful and has done a great job of finding novel topics and approaching them from unexpected angles. Check out The Internet Used to Be a Place.
Silvia Cipelletti (nominated by Kevin B. Lee)
Cipelletti is part of my research group and in 2025 really came into her own with several video essays, Mediterranean Border and Algorithmic Borders (later adapted into a segment for the TV series PhantasIA), which are part of her doctoral dissertation research on videographic approaches to border landscapes, and her collaboration with Evelyn Kreutzer Locarno parla italiano – 404!: Glitching Locarno Film Festival explored the divided realities under the surface of a celebratory event. All these works demonstrate an energetic and self-exposing approach to negotiating between desktop and ethnographic field research.
Therapist Plus Gamer (nominated by Denis (LambHoot))
Jared (Therapist Plus Gamer) has been doing one of my favourite things on this platform: bringing real-life professional expertise into video essays. I’m glad he finds the time to be so productive at crafting well-made, educational, and entertaining videos. Watching his latest piece during lunch is a ritual I look forward to every week.
Timothée Engasser (nominated by Delphine Jeanneret)
Born in Saint-Sébastien-sur-Loire in 1991, Timothée Engasser lives and works between Marseille and Lille. A graduate in urban sociology with a thesis in research and creation (ENSAV/Université du Mirail), he has pursued the themes of his research in cinematographic works on the edge of reality, between documentary and experimental. His films include Tenace, Il y a un endroit dans la nuit and Omens bloom in the dark, which have been screened at a number of international festivals (International Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Les Yeux ouverts, Entrevues de Belfort, FRAC Grand Large). He seeks to explore the imaginary worlds among traces, ruins and gaps. The nominator specifically highlighted their piece, Home Is Where the Heart Is.
Tingyu Chen (nominated by Jenny Oyallon-Koloski)
Tingyu’s videographic analysis of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman was highly ranked by Allison Cooper (Bowdoin College), Andrea Comiskey (Carnegie Mellon University), and myself for the first annual graduate student video essay award organised through the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. This ambitious project intensifies the film’s spatial qualities using deformative methods to expand our understanding of a film better known for its durational representation of women’s labor.
Toni’s Film Club (nominated by Queline Meadows)
While Toni has been releasing videos for a few years now, he seemed to really hit his stride in 2025. He puts a ton of effort into everything he makes (many of his recent videos include interviews) and I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Valeria Villegas Lindvall (nominated by Alison Peirse)
A major new thinker in decolonial horror criticism, Valeria Villegas Lindvall is now finding her voice in videographic criticism. And that voice is raw punk energy.
weisensei (nominated by Hizzy Hay)
A video essayist with a background as a story artist, which provides a unique perspective on what makes media excel.
Poll organised by Jiří Anger, Veronika Hanáková, Kevin B. Lee and Occitane Lacurie.