Research Statement

Research Questions

To what extent can videographic criticism create alternative forms of film history?

Context

When Censor (Bailey-Bond) was released in 2021, I was keen to see it for three reasons. It was a British horror film, co-written and directed by Prano Bailey-Bond who has an excellent track record in short horror filmmaking, and it was set in the 1980s, the time period in which I grew up, and the time period of the video nasties debate (Egan, 2007). Given that the film centres on Enid, the titular censor who spends her time reviewing and classifying horror films for censorship board in London (never named as the BBFC), it was inevitable that the video nasty angle dictated how the film was received. The publicity and reception focus primarily on the social and cultural context for the 1980s setting: reviews and interviews are littered with moral panics, discussions of police storming video shops to seize bootlegged VHS tapes, and reflections on conservative indictments of horror film (see Connell, 2021; Kermode, 2021; Woodward, 2021). 

Yet, when I watched Censor, I saw something else. And when I was asked to write an essay on Censor for the Second Sight Films home release, I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about. When I watch Censor, I see an older lineage in British horror film history that doesn’t stop in the 1980s. In Censor’s aesthetics and narrative, I see resonances of the 1960s and 1970s, in nervy, anxious films that loop, obsessively, around looking and around grief. In other words, when I watch Censor, I see Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960) and Don’t Look Now (Roeg, 1973). In my Second Sight essay, I acknowledge that Peeping Tom’s terrible critical reception (and subsequent deterioration of director Michael Powell’s career) was “arguably the primum genus of video nasty hysteria” (Peirse, 2021: 9), but I also argue that Peeping Tom’s twinning with Censor is less interesting in terms of reception, and more interesting in terms of how they both create the experience of horror for the audience. I argue that all three films prefer to keep their horrors primarily in the off-screen, “blind” space (Bonitzer, 1981), as they recognise, mutually, that true, deep horror emerges when a person refuses to acknowledge the extent of their crippling grief, when they cannot face the reality of a devastating loss in their life.

In Spring 2023, I was invited to Oslo to screen Censor for the Norwegian National Federation of Film Critics and to give an accompanying public lecture. I began work on this lecture using my Second Sight essay, but very quickly discovered that it was not enough. Prose words, spoken out loud, with a film clip or two, or comparative images, did not satisfy the urge I had to get my hands into the films, to pull at them, merge them, muddy them, to demonstrate, concretely, what I saw in my mind. As I had already written on the film, I had no desire to do a voice–over video essay, where I explained connections between the three texts. I didn’t want to explain anything at all. I wanted to create something allusive, experimental.

At the time I was teaching documentary, and in one session screened Araya (Benacerraf, 1959), The House is Black (Farrokhzad, 1962) and Reassemblage (Trinh, 1982) as examples of poetic filmmaking. It became apparent that the poetic mode was ideal for thinking through what I wanted to do with Censor. Poetic filmmaking is subjective, fragmented and impressionistic, it “uses images that build mood or pattern without full regard for their original proximity”, and - most importantly - it is “particularly adept at opening up the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge” that stand in contrast to “the straightforward transfer of information, the pursuit of a particular argument or point of view, or the presentation of reasoned propositions about problems in need of solution” (Nichols, 2017: 116, my emphasis).

Inspired by this definition, I made a quick–and–dirty version of LOOK AT ME during my travel time between Leeds and Oslo. My aim was to reassemble and recombine fragments of the three films in a way that articulated how I felt when I thought about them, together. Methodologically, I was attempting what Catherine Grant calls “revisionary re-assemblage”, a process that prioritizes “the sensuous and affective methodologies” of material thinking (2019). I dropped random audio and visual sections from all three films into my Premiere Pro timeline and played with them until I found audiovisual connections that pleased me. Then, knowing the films as well as I did, I would play through them in my head looking for images or sound that could accompany this moment, and when that didn’t elicit anything, I would randomly scroll up and down the timeline, dropping in to random scenes to see what sounds and images they might offer. A shape soon began to emerge. The audio excerpts came from Don’t Look Now (except for a single image at the video essay’s end), which is somewhat inevitable given its powerful sound design, while the visual elements came from Censor and Peeping Tom, given their mutual interest in depicting the assaultive gaze of the camera and screening equipment.

I finished a first, five-minute cut about fifteen minutes before my public lecture, and screened it to a positive reception. I then spent the next year tinkering with it, refining the audio mix, cutting it down to improve the pacing, adding an original, minimal soundtrack as a bed to unite the extensive audio excerpts, and adding text to emphasise the spoken words that meant the most to me. Once I had finished technically what I wanted to achieve though, I became a little stymied. I had created this re/assemblage where my original impetus was to express audiovisually how these films interacted, yet, to take the work further, I wanted the piece to do something that spoke to my research on feminist histories of horror film (Peirse 2020; 2022). Then, one Friday night, I went The Beehive pub in Shipley, with videographic critic Colleen Laird, to celebrate my friend Hazel’s 40th birthday. I was moaning about my work to Colleen, who pointed out that what I already had the “more” element. I just wasn’t aware of it.  

Colleen explained that for her, in Censor, the woman watching horror films becomes increasingly enraged by the patriarchal regimes that control her. Then, in much the same way, my video essay manipulates extant film material of women watching films and being filmed, to depict the anger we feel at existing in a world predicated upon gendered structural inequalities. Once Colleen had explained the theme and tone to me (thanks Colleen), I realized this also made sense in terms of looking and emotional pain, ideas which were my original entry point into this project. LOOK AT ME explores the rage of a woman who lives within a patriarchal scopophilic regime. This woman is the women depicted in the video essay. This woman is also me.

Methods

Practice Research; Film Studies; Feminist Film Historiography; Videographic Criticism

Outcomes

Scholars, researchers and practitioners in the field may gain new insights from how to write about the process of practice; how to think through the poetic mode of documentary filmmaking in terms of videographic criticism; and how to create an audiovisual “found footage” piece of work that can still create meaning for viewers unfamiliar with the source material.

Bibliography

Bonitzer, P. (1981). “Partial vision: Film and the labyrinth”. Trans. Fabrice Ziolkowski. Wide Angle. 4 (4), pp. 56–63.

Connell, K. (2021). “Pass this on: Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor”. Another Gaze [online]. 31st October. Available from: https://www.anothergaze.com/pass-prano-bailey-bonds-censor-2021/ [Accessed 31st October 2024].

Egan, K. (2007) Trash or treasure: Censorship and the changing meanings of the video nasties. Manchester University Press.

Grant, C. (2019). “Dissolves of passion: Materially thinking through editing in videographic compilation”. In: C. Keathley, J, Mittell and C. Grant, eds, The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy [online]. Available from: http://videographicessay.org/works/videographic-essay/index [Accessed 31st October 2024].

Kermode, M. (2021). “In the realm of Censor”. Sight & Sound. 31 (5), pp.26-32.

Nichols, B. (2017). Introduction to documentary. 3rd ed. Indiana University Press. 

Peirse, A. (2021). “Beyond nasty: Censor’s British origins.” In: Censor soft cover book, available with limited edition Blu-Ray. Second Sight Films, pp.5-22.

Peirse, A. (2022) “Towards a feminist historiography of horror cinema”. Horror Studies 13 (2), pp.231-249.

Peirse, A. ed. (2020) Women make horror: Filmmaking, feminism, genre. Rutgers University Press.

Woodward, A. (2021). “Censor.” Little White Lies [online]. Available from: https://lwlies.com/reviews/censor/ [Accessed 31st October 2024].

Filmography

Araya (Margot Benacerraf, 1959, Venezuela) 

Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021, UK)

Don’t Look Now (Nicholas Roeg, 1973, UK)

خانه سیاه است / The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1962, Iran)

Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960, UK) 

Reassemblage (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982, Senegal / USA)

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows

Review 1: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

LOOK AT ME is a vivid piece of work, original in both its audiovisual and written components which combine to generate innovative historiography. The video and its accompanying statement outline new ways of forming and understanding film histories, driven by affect and feel, by responsiveness to the histories of film that live within us and our embodied memories. This is captured compellingly in the audiovisual essay through the layering of sound and image which brings out existing echoes between texts – visual, aural, thematic – and forges new resonances through rhythmic correspondence, audiovisual overlaps and expressive use of text. As a result, the critical links between Peeping Tom, Censor, and Don’t Look Now are materially intertwined to create a new text that vibrates with the demand to rethink / refeel the lines between horror films and the women that occupy them. LOOK AT ME is a demand to see and understand these women, and our responses to them in new ways. Or perhaps, as the written statement outlines so dynamically, it is an appeal to listen to what we already know and feel about film histories, to resist the linear/dominant by following knowledge in different directions. Practice is thus foregrounded as a means to discover and rebuild research through play and material thinking, which the written statement articulates through a buoyantly direct account of making and thinking which combines personal narrative and academic scholarship with deft generosity.

Most inspiring is the extent to which the audiovisual and written work together. While the statement does seek to unpack the making of the audiovisual work and its purpose, it does so in a way that parallels its experimental and affective qualities. In this way, the written statement outlines innovative historical method, not just as it pertains to this particular example, but as a way to expose the kinds of historical thinking that we embody as film scholars / film audiences, thinking through allusion and memory, through connections and understandings that can be intensely personal. The experimental form of the audiovisual work pushes this further, using repetitions of movement, text, voice and stares, to intensify the meaning of connections, pushing into the relationship between ‘looking and emotional pain’. The work communicates the power of the poetic’s subjective and impressionistic form (in

both prose and practice) to articulate the politics of film history and scholarship, joining Maryam Tafakory, Barbara Zecchi and Dayna McLeod whose practice is equally invested and skilled in advancing feminist historiographies through audiovisual rethinking.

Review 2: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

In LOOK AT ME, Peirse crafts an effective and affective exploration of the gaze in horror, through fragments from Censor (Bailey-Bond, 2021), Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960), and Don’t Look Now (Roeg, 1973) into a sensorially immersive, poetic approach to video essay-making and research. Rather than explaining the connections between these works, the video embodies them through juxtaposition, sound layering, and visual echoes, articulating a feminist criticism that revolves around scopophilia, rage, and power.

The piece demonstrates how horror cinema repeatedly negotiates the female gaze, often in conflict with the genre’s historically patriarchal visual economy. The protagonist of Censor, who scrutinises films from a position of institutional authority, emerges here as a figure that both resists and embodies the violence of the cinematic gaze. By aligning her with the women filmed and tormented in Peeping Tom and the fragmented and sorrowful imagery of Don’t Look Now, the video essay presents a dialectic of looking and being looked at, interrogating whether the gaze can be reclaimed, weaponised, or undone.

The soundtrack plays a crucial role in shaping this tension. Its sharp, claustrophobic motifs work in tandem with the layered sound design from the three films, generating a sense of disorientation that contributes to the assemblage and the deliberate “muddying” of images that Peirse aims to evoke. The decision to manipulate time through repetition or reversals further disrupts linear interpretation, making the video a site of affective  and poetic resistance rather than argumentative explanation.

Carol Clover argues in Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1993, p. 17) that one of feminism’s major contributions to popular culture has been the emergence of the angry woman in horror, a figure that disrupts traditional gender expectations and resists passive victimhood. This is key to understanding LOOK AT ME, not just as a critique of patriarchal scopophilia but as an audiovisual articulation of female rage. Peirse’s video essay does not merely analyse the anger of its female protagonists, but it actively transmits that rage to the viewer through its fractured editing, unsettling sound design, and the recurring imperative to “look.” This rage is justified, complex, and transformative: a feminist reclamation of horror’s potential to expose and challenge gendered power structures.

LOOK AT ME is a striking, valuable, and innovative contribution to videographic criticism. It successfully expands the methodological possibilities of horror historiography, while it demonstrates the potential of the poetic mode in videographic criticism essay for critical engagement.

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response.