Max Tohline’s 2022 Video Essays

The Strange Beauty of Absurdle's Algorithm

A short gaming essay on a weird but marvelously elegant pattern I found while messing around with Absurdle, a 'knockoff' of Wordle that changes its answer as you play to avoid whatever letters you've guessed. Try it here: https://qntm.org/files/wordle/index.html. I made this one, start to finish, in a single day in January 2022.

Gaming, when done right, ought to be a form of essayism: an attempt to tinker with inputs and strategies until you find out how it works, and how to make it do stuff that its creators never intended.

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6_1uyjGE-o

Seems Like Old Times: Staging, Control, and (Mis)memory in Annie Hall

published in Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration

My second refereed video essay. I know the thumbnail says 2021, but Mise-en-scene Journal didn’t release it until February 2022. For me, a video essay doesn’t really come to life until you invent a visual rhetoric for the analysis. That’s why I’m proud of this one.

Abstract:
The refrain that viewers can (or should) ‘separate the art from the artist’ relies on the assumption that a problematic artist does not leave traces of their transgressions in their work. But the techniques of manipulation that a potential criminal might leverage to gain control over others significantly overlap filmmaking techniques designed to shape audience perception, such as framing and editing. This essay proposes to “de-edit” or “re-spatialize” some moments from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) to bring attention to the modes of gaze, address, and manipulation exerted by the director throughout the film. This method resituates the film from its popular image as the scattered chronicle of an underdog neurotic to a more critical portrait of a narcissist deploying the reflective apparatuses of memory and cinema for a project of distortion and, ultimately, self-deception.

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/480424534

The Palindrome, The Crystal Image, and Articulations of the Cinematic Code

A paper given at PCA/ACA National Conference (held virtually) on April 14, 2022

My second time presenting a conference paper as a video essay. I truly enjoyed the formal play I got to indulge in here, especially the physical cutting of film and paper to illustrate a few semiotic concepts under investigation. You can’t get town to the essence of film’s temporality without getting your hands on its materiality, and I got to do that a little here.

Abstract:
An oft-overlooked technique of cinematic temporality is the palindromic circuit: a moment when a section of film plays alternatingly forward and backward. This technique, also called “scrubbing” (after the practice of scratching a record back and forth), appears throughout cinema history: in the music video, the avant-garde, and even as a classical editing trick to extend the apparent duration of a shot. Scrubbing produces something like a temporal mirror. But by holding a section of time within a moment of palindromic oscillation, scrubbing also functions like a temporal microscope.
In Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze introduces the notion of the crystal-image to theorize the smallest possible circuit of past and present, when time splits into actual and virtual. While Deleuze offers several metaphors for this minimum circuit of becoming, such as the mirror, he overlooks scrubbing as a literal embodiment of the crystal-image’s temporal fork. But if scrubbing “zooms in” on cinema’s minimum unit of duration, it also provides a basis to re-center still-outstanding questions of the articulations of the cinematic code on temporality.
In Eco’s and Pasolini’s schemes of filmic articulations, they mistook onscreen objects as the material signified by the film language. Though many codes piggyback onto the cinematic code, elements like text, speech, and even photography do not have any bearing on cinematic articulations. Cinema, as Deleuze showed, signifies duration. Thus, I propose that even though film constructs its records of time upon a photographic substrate, the question of cinematic articulations must be answered through what cinema adds to photography: namely time.
Through analyses of Bill Brand, Martin Arnold, and Michel Gondry, I will theorize a new framework of the articulations of the cinematic code, arguing the basic unit of filmic temporality is revealed in the minimum crystalline palindromic circuit of two frames.

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/698879271

Tsar’s Top 5 Borzois in Movies

When my partner took a job as a travel nurse, she tasked me with running our dog’s Instagram account. His name is Tsar, and naturally he’s a borzoi (Russian wolfhound). Somewhere along the line, I decided it would be funny to do a video essay “in character” as Tsar. It’s certainly not the first time someone ever made an essay in character, but it’s a first for me. So this is Tsar’s top 5 appearances of borzois in movies. Putting a video essay on Instagram constrains the format a bit (it can’t run longer than 90 seconds, and any music has to be added to the reel as you post it, rather than during the editing process). Still, I enjoy how it turned out.

Watch on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cjh5jcugeIf/

Video Postcard 4: The Game You Don’t Have to Play

When I heard that fellow video essayist Sam was working on a project that involved games where you do nothing, I had to write this video postcard. I'd toyed with some possibly overlapping ideas for a while but never had any idea what to do with them, so this one came together quickly, and I still enjoy it. Full credits and such over on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAeaBhdFiD4

My thanks to FilmScalpel for including this in their collection of essays on video games.