Critical Reception & Press

The Spielberg Face

Featured on MUBI.

“A brilliant video essay.”
— A.O. Scott, The New York Times, December 26, 2012

Featured in The New York Times — 2011, 2012, 2020.

“The master of the desktop video essay, Lee samples and annotates close-ups from at least a dozen films by Steven Spielberg. His point: Spielberg’s trademark, typically emphasized by a slow dolly-in, is a distinctive reaction shot. It shows what Lee describes as an expression of wide-eyed, wordless wonder — a ‘childlike surrender to the act of watching,’ as though seeing a movie for the first time.”
— J. Hoberman, The New York Times, April 2, 2020

Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox

“One of the reasons why Kevin B. Lee’s work is ground-breaking in video essays because his imagination is always one step ahead. He is constantly reminding us that working with the body of cinema is working with your memories and affections, and circumventing material limitations. Here, childhood cinema is projected on a shadowy wall of a former movie theatre, Platoon is remembered between leaves and trees’ reflections. Violence of the past, violence of the present. An essay about memory and the permanence of racism. Video essays are tools to reedit the present.”
— Carlos Natálio

“One of my all-time favourite videographic works by foundational artist and essayist Lee, or indeed by anyone.”
— Catherine Grant

“This video is a shock to the system of film analysis.”
— V Renée

”With his entry in the Once Upon a Screen collection, Kevin B. Lee confirms that he is an incredible storyteller.”
— Johannes Binotto

“This audiovisual essay marries form and content in such an affecting manner that I was completely drawn into the essayist’s world. The universality of the space that Lee re-enacts/re-presents urged me to think back to the complexity of early childhood memories.”
— Liz Greene

“Explosive Paradox undoubtedly is one of the most personal and moving audiovisual essays that I have after watched, and at the same time presents a convincing criticism of the way Hollywood glorifies violence, not only in films themselves, but also in the way these films are celebrated by film critics and Academy Awards. A wonderful piece of videographic criticism and art.”
— Jaap Kooijman

The Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist

See the full playlist

co-curated with Will DiGravio and Cydnii Wilde Harris
Summer 2020


"Analogue, Digital, Computational. Politicized moving images’ reincarnation" by Irina Trocan in Close Up (Vol. 4, No. 1), 2020. Essay begins on page 59

To make this potential more visible, we are gathering video essays on these and other topics related to the Black Lives Matter movement, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and subsequent protests. Suggestions for additions to the list are strongly encouraged. The easiest way to send them is to use this form. Alternatively you may email BLMVEPlaylist@gmail.com or DM The Video Essay Podcast on Twitter/Facebook with links to be added to this webpage. 

For the purposes of this project, the basic criteria for “video essay” is an audiovisual work that critically reappropriates existing works of film and media. These works can be found in many forms and contexts, such as academic scholarship, journalism, YouTube explainers, video art and social media. We have organized titles within categories to reflect these contexts, while acknowledging that they are non-exclusive to each other. Our call for videos have yielded a wide range of submissions, which we have tried to list comprehensively below. At the same time, we retain an emphasis on video essays as videographic criticism: works that use media to think critically about media. 

Through its resourceful use of existing materials to reveal, reframe and redirect their meanings and purposes, videographic criticism offers a powerful mode of media production for those historically excluded from access to dominant media institutions due to racial or economic injustice. This has been especially evident during the Black Lives Matter movement through the use of social media as videographic criticism, as seen in the TikTok, Twitter and Instagram videos listed below. These are just a few examples of how this historical moment has produced exciting new forms of media criticism, which this list endeavors to document.

— Cydnii Wilde Harris. Kevin B. Lee and Will DiGravio, list co-organizer

Viewing Between the Lines: Hong Sang-Soo’s The Day He Arrives

Produced for the DVD of The Day He Arrives, distributed by Cinema Guild.

“ In his video essay Viewing between the Lines: Hong Sang-soo’s The Day He Arrives, Kevin B. Lee uses his Final Cut Pro interface to analyze the narrative structure of the film, grouping scenes by location and chronology.”

- Matthew K. Gold, Lauren F Klein, Debates in the Digital Humanities

#movieofmylife

“The Locarno Film Festival has a series called #movieofmylife in which fans and friends of the festival pay tribute to a movie they love. Lee used his video to not only profess his love for Ozu, but also for his recently deceased grandfather – and to ponder how those two loves intersected and enriched each other. The result is a short but bittersweet video essay that is a testament to the connective power of cinema. A small gem about the cinematic art that is life.”

The Career of Paul Thomas Anderson in Five Shots

“I celebrate DIY as an aesthetic identity for those who work from the position of disadvantage, and who must rely on what limited tool set he or she has at their disposal. In this sense, the Anderson video isn’t just a reverential appraisal of an auteur (as so many video essays are, perhaps too many), but an articulation of one viewer’s conflicted relationship to that auteur’s work (and the industrialized filmmaking apparatus he has at his disposal) and in doing so establishes its own aesthetic ethos. This aesthetic position is directly linked to one’s position within film culture, informed by specific economic, social and even political relations (in regards to the film industry’s power over cinephiles as a kind of political power).

- From The Audiovisual Essay

The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent

“A video essay manifesto for the video essay.” – Peter Monaghan, Moving Image Archive News

Discussed at length in Film Studies in Motion: From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video by Thomas van den Berg and Miklós Kiss

The essay film might realise a greater purpose than existing as a trendy label, or as cinema’s submission to high-toned and half-defined literary concepts. Instead, the essay film may serve as a springboard to launch into a vital investigation of knowledge, art and culture in the 21st century, including the question of what role cinema itself might play in this critical project: articulating discontent with its own place in the world.”
- From accompanying essay in Sight and Sound