Critics and Makers

Abstract

First paragraph: One of the most recalcitrant habits I acquired from my film studies education is the tendency to refer to films as “texts.” That structuralist abstraction has its role, but the work of arranging words and that of assembling images are very different practices. People who write about films and people who make films based on the written word know very well that they are incommensurable. The videographic work that [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies publishes allows for authors to think “in the original language,” as they say one should do with philosophy. But as this point has been made so much more eloquently before, I focus here on one observation regarding the practice of peer-reviewing videographic work.