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The Video Essay: Writing with Images and Sound

Like its print counterpart, the Video Essay is an attempt to see what one thinks about something. The video essay may engage with fact, thought it tends to be less self-assured than documentary. Agnes Varda, the poetic French filmmaker who coined the term cinécriture, or film-writing, best described the promise of the video essay when noting that, for her, writing meant more than simply wording a script. Choosing images, designing sound — these, too, were part of that process. At its best, the video essay leverages the visceral power of sound and image, builds a sympathetic resonance with language, and enlivens the senses. A relatively new form of creative nonfiction, the video essay is, by its very nature, open to invention, personal, poetic.

This site tracks the conversations, questions, multimedia experiments and preliminary sketches of a group of Northwestern University students in John Bresland’s interdisciplinary course, The Video Essay: Writing with Images and Sound. The goal of this course is to help students understand the nature and value of images, both still and moving, and for creating and conveying meaning that extends the reach of written and spoken language.