Tag: Sight & Sound

Bride of Frankenstein [film|minutes] interactive version named in BFI/Sight & Sound “Best Video Essays of 2025”

Each year critics are asked to name their top choices for best video essay of the year, and the results are published by Sight & Sound magazine. I missed it when the results came out back in December, but among those named for 2025 was the interactive version of my latest book on James Whale’s 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein, which was selected by Kevin L. Ferguson.

The book is a minute-by-minute engagement with the film, and the interactive adaptation plays the film in 60-second loops that can be inspected alongside the text for the corresponding minute. The software (for Windows and Mac) can be downloaded for free here.

While not technically a video essay, I do conceive of the book (both in print and interactive versions) as engaging in what can be called “videographic methods” that are closely aligned, both materially-technologically and intellectually, with videographic works in the stricter sense. I am both pleased and honored that Kevin Ferguson recognized this!

Also available is a more all-purpose app, the film|minutes video|graphic workstation, which can be used for both reading and writing such close analyses of films and other moving-image media. The workstation is available, also for both Windows and Mac, here.

The Algorithmic Nickelodeon featured in Sight & Sound’s Best Video Essays of 2019

The Algorithmic Nickelodeon from Shane Denson on Vimeo.

 

Several weeks ago, Sight & Sound Magazine’s “Best Video Essays of 2019” came out, featuring 134 videos nominated by 39 contributors — including my “Algorithmic Nickelodeon” piece, picked by Jiří Anger from Charles University in Prague. He writes:

Despite its formal shortcomings, this must be one of the most thought-provoking videographic works I have seen. Denson’s theoretical manifesto imagines a form of audiovisual criticism that would not be merely expressive but transformative, reinventing our notion of subject-object relations. For this to happen, deformations of the image/object and displacements of the analyst/subject must take place simultaneously. Creative thinking joins forces with EEG headsets and editing programmes to create a media-theoretical ‘perpetuum mobile’, designed for constant questioning of what cinema means in the age of algorithms.

I am honored to have my work featured alongside many fascinating videos, many of which were made by friends and colleagues of mine (including especially noteworthy pieces by Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Kathleen Loock, Jason Mittell, Tracy Cox-Stanton, as well as Allison de Fren’s piece “Mad Science/Mad Love and the Female Body in Pieces,” which I commissioned for the Videographic Frankenstein exhibition at Stanford and published last year in Hyperrhiz).

By the way, I agree completely with Anger’s assessments of my video’s “formal shortcomings,” which stand out all the more against the background of all the excellent and polished work featured in the poll. In fact, my video was conceived and produced as a very rough proof-of-concept for a symposium organized by Kathleen Loock in Berlin last year (where I had hoped to do a live demo of the setup but was unable to due to technical limitations in the venue). A more polished video for the project is currently being planned, but in the meantime I’m quite happy with Anger’s assessment of it as “one of the most thought-provoking videographic works”!