Is there a video essay canon?

I was looking over the latest Sight and Sound "greatest films of all time" list earlier today. I haven't really seen a lot of them. I saw "The Color of Pomegranates" the other day, and I thought it was pretty compelling. It's one of those...

The list describes "Tropical Malady" by calling it "A work that defies straightforward understanding and suggests understandability may be overrated". That may well be a meaningful description of that film, which I haven't seen. Or it might be a more nuanced version of how I'd describe "The Color of Pomegranates": "Fuck, I don't know, but it's COOL!"

Anyway, it describes Godard's "Histoire(s) du Cinema" as an "essay film". Haven't seen that one, either. I've seen a lot of more contemporary video essays, though. I don't know if any of them are in the same league as Godard, and...

I'm looking at this list and from what I can tell there are three animated films: Isao Takahata's "Grave of the Fireflies" tied for 225, Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" tied for 75, and Hayao Miyazaki's "My Neighbour Totoro" tied for 72. If you go by this list, the entire history and range of film animation is encapsulated in three Studio Ghibli films released between 1988 and 2001. That's less a complaint about the list, which after all did have the uncommon good grace of putting Jeanne Dielman (another film I haven't seen, a film I hadn't actually heard of until a couple years after the list came out) at #1, and more an observation of the limits of a list like this.

I do watch more video essays than movies at this point. If I was to put together a personal canon, I would include...

Well, hell, I'll say Jacob Geller, "The Single Best Gaming Moment of 2022". They all have titles like that, for clickbait. And the version on Youtube is hacked to bits, because we live in a dystopia. I've started to enjoy the blatant censorship, in the same way I have a rip of Comedy Central's broadcast of The Big Lebowski, finding a stranger in the Alps and everything. There's this lady on Youtube, Amelie Doree, and her thing is she does deep dives into visual novels, very often eroge (uh, "hentai", i think is the reductive umbrella term people might recognize?). They're good, insightful videos. Her latest is called "To Love-Ru is a Boobiful Masterpiece". There are, of course, no boobs in the Youtube version. I could pretend like I'm angry about this, but honestly, if I want to look at boobs, I could just take my shirt off and look in the mirror. The jiggle physics are pretty amazing.

I kind of don't _want_ there to be a video essay canon - like, in 20 years will we wind up with a list like the Sight and Sound list, with five (genuinely great, I have no doubt) Super Eyepatch Wolf videos and none of the weird little detours I watch a lot of the time, and people will look at that and say "Oh yes, those are The Video Essays I Should Watch"?

At the same time, I get halfway through the latest Super Eyepatch Wolf video, "The Most Disturbing Fake Video Game", and I've seen enough of these that I'm thinking, god, you really could have some kind of canon... and yeah, like I said, they all have clickbait titles. That's The Trope.

A lot of these things are good, and a lot of them are weird videos made by people working under horrible conditions who take enormous amounts of psychic damage from it. I kinda don't want to perpetuate that. And I don't think it makes sense to rank Super Eyepatch Wolf alongside films like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (=122) and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (=118). I think you could make a decent list, at this point, of just video essays, tho.

And most of what I'd put on the list probably be videos about queer people, video games, and queer people in video games. There are probably some great video essays out there byond that purview, though. I've seen people recommend channels. Are there specific videos, though, that people think stand out? Like, for instance, I'd suggest "action button reviews boku no natsuyasumi".

Thoughts?

I really, truly, hate the form of video essays. Most especially the one where some dude with an elastic face reads a Wikipedia page to you.

HOWEVER, I will unequivocally ride for

1. The “Number goes up” one about Bitcoin that was floating around for a while

2. That one girl’s four hour breakdown of the Star Wars hotel

3. Chris Ott’s amazing take down of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops

I really, truly, hate the form of video essays. Most especially the one where some dude with an elastic face reads a Wikipedia page to you.

HOWEVER, I will unequivocally ride for

― *pies flung everywhere* -- Pill's Trap Goin' Ham (Whiney G. Weingarten)

Whiney your perspective is exactly the sort of perspective I want to hear. Like yeah I'm a fucking critical essayist, nowadays to get my stuff heard I gotta fucking put on makeup and worry about set dressing and deal with my severe speech impediment? And I guess now one has to compete with AI grifter bullshit alongside everything? Old lady yells at cloud, sure, but things were better before capitalism killed blogs. God damn do I hate Youtube, God damn do I want Youtube to die. Mostly I don't hate the players, though. Mostly I hate the fuckin' game.

The only one of these I actually know is Jenny Nicholson's Star Wars Hotel video, and yeah, that's exactly the kind of shit I'm talking about. For the video essay to mean something to me, it has to be distinct from the documentary or the written essay, has to say something you can't say in that format. So for instance I do rate Contrapoints' "The Hunger" very highly as a critical essay, _despite_ the fact that as a person, well, we're very different people, I'll say that. It's the kind of thing I can't be parasocial about because I don't live in a literal fucking mansion and never will (it's not just about money, I very quickly realized that trying to keep an ordinary two-bedroom house was not exactly something I was up to).

Honestly a lot of the video essay stuff I go for is _less_ epic... with Nicholson, the one I like is "Spider Reviews".

The other two... I didn't even know about. I mean I've heard _of_ Folding Ideas, and the concept of "number goes up" (which in Folding Ideas' video is called "Line Goes Up", memetic mutation) is kind of at the core of my critical worldview, but I hadn't seen the video. Because a two hour or four hour video, it's a lot. It's a more demanding format for me than a movie. The Folding Ideas video that grabs me most is their takedown of The Nostalgia Critic's take on The Wall. Cuz it does, for me, transcend niche scene politics, I don't think it's just "inside baseball" or anything like that.

Do you have a link to the third? I'm not sure I can find it.

As far as music... I like Todd in the Shadows. I think Todd in the Shadows does good stuff. I think he's more on the "documentarian" side than "video essayist" _per se_. I'm not sure I can think of a video essay about music that I rate as _a critical essay_, unless I'm gonna go with something like CheeseGX's "American Musicians in Anime - An Unsung Story". Cuz you do have to dig to find the good stuff, a lot of times.

A good video essay, I think, is one on a topic I don't really care about. Like there's this huge Sonic the Hedgehog fandom and I just do not give a shit out of any of it. I saw this one video about Ken Penders' run on Archie Comics, though, that grabbed me. The thing is I can't remember WHICH ONE. There are a lot of videos about Ken Penders and most of them are bad, it's just saying "Ken Penders is awful", which, uh, is a fairly uncontroversial and boring statement. Once I somehow got recommended a video essay about this competitive Scrabble player who is apparently a mindblowing genius. I don't know if any of those videos are all-time great video essays, but competitive Scrabble isn't a topic I care about.

Most of the video essays I watch, though, are about topics I care about.

One of the video essayists I like a whole lot is hazel. Her video about Penguin's Memory is fucking great, if I had to recommend one. Her work I think is stuff that couldn't be done in just the written word or in a podcast. It's intrinsic to the medium. I did, literally, blow an entire day watching her livestream the re-edit of the Channel Awesome movies. It's niche as hell, but it's also a _creative critical work_. I haven't even seen the Channel Awesome Movies because Jesus God why the fuck _would_ I?

I'm also really impressed by the September 21st Incident of Gigi Murin. Maybe this isn't an "essay" per se. It's certainly a fucked up niche work that would be of less than zero interest to a lot of people. I don't know if I could call it a "film" or a "livestream" or... I mean it's too fucking long to be a shitpost.

WFMU Wrestling Club's documentary "Wrestling History 1976: The War of the Worlds" is I guess technically a documentary, but something about it has the _feel_ of a video essay. I don't know how to quantify that, sorry.

Regular Car Reviews. God yes, Regular Car Reviews. It's the RCR Stories videos. Not the histories of car companies, the other things. I gotta spend some time and watch their newer RCR Stories vids. They're upping their game, and they've always had a great game. Their review of the Toyota FJ Cruiser viewed through the lens of Baudrillard from a couple years ago, that opened my eyes to them. I also think that their video about the Geo Tracker and its implications for American masculinity was brilliant and very influential on me, though again, I'm very fucking queer. I will say that I do not give a shit about cars. At all. So to me, they are absolute peak video essay.

Anyway The Queer Stuff.

Jessica Kellgren-Fozard. Really good videos about fashion and queerness and disability. "Why are there tiny bows on all our underwear?!" is a good one.

Dead Air Films/SpookyKristy. Her stuff flies way under the radar, and deserves more attention. "Fascism vs. Art: The Silencing of Ghosts Before Breakfast" is the one I'd recommend.

Kendra Gaylord's "I went to the coolest house in Maine". A lot of architecture videos, and I mean, yeah, I like this one in large part because it's gay.

Ummm I gotta go do other stuff now, I have more I could say tho.