Research Statement

Research Questions

This past June, I was selected to attend the internationally-renowned Workshop on Videographic Criticism at Middlebury College (Vermont, USA). I was inspired to participate in this workshop because I believe that video essays can be unusually accessible and immediately impactful forms of film analysis for a broad audience. Through this experience, I learned how working with a film to create a video essay makes it come alive differently. Along with having new respect for and excitement about the creative possibilities of making video essays, I have a deeper understanding of how reorganizing materials from a film can make everything latent within it become more manifest. 

The final assignment for the Middlebury workshop was a project about any film/s using the videographic skills I had learned. The complete openness of the assignment prompted me to visit the Middlebury College library to browse its film collection. On the spur of the moment, I picked up A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood (Heller, 2016), and then I turned around and saw The Tree of Life (Malick, 2011). I suddenly realised that the two films were coexisting in my head in a mutually illuminating way. I then decided to create a video essay driven by the following questions: What would happen if I explored how these films coexist and virtually inform each other in my mind? How could I audiovisually actualize what that feels like? What specific audiovisual strategies would make most sense for this? How would this process of videographic creation change the films for me? How would the films, in turn, change me? These questions drive the video essay submission I now send you, titled “A Beautiful Day in the Tree of Life.” This entire video essay grew from my spontaneous decision to work with the two films, and the organic process of my revisiting them in relation to each other to make new discoveries. Since I feel the unique perspectives of both films very strongly, I draw directly from Daniel Frampton’s manifesto Filmosophy, a philosophical exploration of how cinema can relay levels of consciousness that mesh with human consciousness in transformative ways. 

Frampton writes of cinema in terms of its wilful aliveness, as being much greater than anything reducible to technology or aesthetics alone: just as we “transcend our physiology,” he says a film “transcends its machinery” (44). Frampton believes in a film’s “constant, never-ending ‘intent’ and attitude to its characters,” which he conceptualizes as a kind of “thinking” (7). If we allow ourselves to adapt to the thinking of a film, we must “adjust ourselves” (151). In short, the film’s thinking can lead to changes in our own thinking. This is not a straightforward matter of simply projecting ourselves on to the film or imbibing its worldview: it’s about positioning ourselves to be open-mindedly curious about where a film might lead us. Frampton explains that “the film’s thinking does not create an identification so much as an allegiance, a being-with. Through this closeness [many] films also enact a questioning thinking” (147, original emphasis). What he repeatedly refers to as “the fimind” can therefore expand the audioviewer’s mind. For Frampton, the relationship between film and filmgoer is one of reciprocity and dynamic reconfiguration, one that yields great “energy, a vital mix of thinkings” (163). 

I embrace the vitality of Frampton’s comprehension of cinematic encounters that are life-changing. I have used his manifesto as the motivation for “being-with” my two chosen films and trusting that their thinking would take me on a uniquely meaningful journey. In order to take this journey, I could not start with my own words but with a tactile exploration of the films themselves. I began by making brief scene selections for editing purposes, but I become more freely adventurous by blending the two films via visual superimpositions and soundtrack mixing: I wanted to see what would happen when I combined scenes and details that, for me, are representative of the films’ respective wills. I wanted to know how the blended films might interact, conflict, and offset each other so that I could understand them both better, from a creative as well as a scholarly standpoint. In giving myself over to a dynamic interaction with the films through videographic playfulness, I not only came to understand the filminds but also my own mind better. Echoing Frampton’s teachings, I could not have anticipated what the films’ wills would show me and do for me in these ways. I quote liberally from Frampton’s manifesto in the video essay itself[1],  but here I place particular emphasis on one quotation that I believe encapsulates what my work demonstrates: “the film and filmgoer join in thought, and the process of that encounter provides immediate meaning and knowledge” (149). 

As idiosyncratic as Frampton’s work may seem, I have instinctively responded to his arguments along the lines of reception theory: I consider how the filminds and my mind meaningfully interact with each other, always aware of my own subjectivity as I engage with any cinematic moment, and with a level of intensity akin to deepening interpersonal relationships. As I have altered both films in the process of editing clips, superimposing sequences, and remixing soundtracks, the films themselves have altered my own sense of self and especially how I am in relation to my father. This video essay is my expression of gratitude for that generative reciprocity, the life-changing meeting of the filminds with my own. 

I believe that my video essay could positively influence the fields of cinema studies and film philosophy, opening the door for other scholars to explore their own relationships with films in the same spirit of generative creativity. My work grew from my experience of surrendering to where my exploration of the films would take me, without fear about moving beyond the usual strictures of formal writing and without any predetermined goals. As I took many subclips from the films for editing purposes (using Premiere Pro) I started making surprising cross-connections and precise contrasts between them that I could not have predicted at the outset. I deliberately employed Jason Mittell and Christian Keathley’s mantra of “Make First, Think Later” (2019), a core principle of their pedagogical approach to teaching video essays. This is, as they point out, a “distinct challenge” for an academic, but I trusted this approach might unearth something valuable. Put simply: I had the glimmer of some knowledge when I began, that the two films were mysteriously ‘in conversation’ in my mind, but I could not anticipate where that knowledge might lead me nor make new discoveries as I did without surrendering to a relatively unguarded creative process. I had no formal structure to start with, and instead a mentality of searching for what resonated in terms of what I perceived to be the essential wills of both films. Frampton’s conceptual approach gave me confidence about how to proceed without certainty of where I would end. I hope the audioviewer will appreciate going on the unforeseen, sometimes gut-wrenching but ultimately uplifting journey I took, and which I have strived to give a strong shape.

Context / Significance

Frampton’s work resonates with the entire realm of film philosophy, but there is comparatively little application of Filmosophy in film studies. One notable exception is the work of the late Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, who presented on The Lighthouse (2019) in relation to Frampton’s concept of the filmind at the Music and the Moving Image conference at New York University in 2020. In this presentation, Kulezic-Wilson was developing some of her own work about film-to-person relationships that can deepen over time and become life-altering as a consequence. In Sound Design Is the New Score, she writes that “the more times we watch a film, the more equipped we become to understand its secrets and hidden depths” (55). This is precisely my experience through video essay creation: it has made me clearly see that which I had dimly perceived in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood and The Tree of Life. At the start of my video essay, I quote from Frampton’s book to pave the way for audioviewers to understand my process conceptually. Through the whole video essay, I am also demonstrating an original way to represent the kind of film-to-person encounter Kulezic-Wilson wrote about. I know of no other video essay that draws from and literalizes Frampton’s and Kulezic-Wilson’s writing about film-to-person relationships. 

The way I explore my relationships with the films of my video essay fits with my commitment to exploring the lastingly life-changing and personal impact that cinema can have, as I explore most directly in my latest book for Oxford University Press: Life 24x a Second: cinema, selfhood, and society. In this book, I analyse cinema that is powerful in relation to engaging with the Black Lives Matter movement, rethinking feminist theories in terms of parenthood, surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, coping with the loss of loved ones, and working out ways to live through personal grief. This book reflects my long-standing commitment to cinematic scholarship that has a close relationship to real-life situations and experiences. 

I have always believed that cinema matters in real-world ways, even in the most challenging of times. In keeping with this vision, “A Beautiful Day in the Tree of Life” is about how two films have changed the way I understand the complex relationship I have with my late father. The video essay is a logical extension of my many arguments about the personally transformative power of cinema in Life 24x a Second. It also grows from my most recent article about two films, Soul (2020) and Nomadland (2020), both of which have helped me come to terms with the death of my best friend (Danijela Kulezic-Wilson): “Remembering My Friend and Rehearing Two Films.” This article draws from contemporary psychology, particularly the work of Sarah Penwarden, a therapist, priest, and professor who focuses on how creating and interpreting art can have healing impact. While I do not cite Penwarden in my video essay, she is an important “offscreen” influence, especially as I am rethinking the possibilities of cinema therapy (a fairly underdeveloped though burgeoning field).

Methods 

My methods draw from other works of videographic criticism, cinema studies, psychology, soundtrack studies, reception theory, and cinema therapy.

Outcomes

I hope to inspire others to explore their own unique film-to-person relationships, along with shedding light on how video essay creation can have personally and professionally transformative impact. 

Impact

Although I am well-published, I believe that my biggest impact is through the ways I teach hundreds of students every year. Indeed, a full chapter of my latest book is devoted to how many of my students have felt the lasting impact of studying cinema in my courses, even long after colleage, and particularly with regard to skills of communication, living with a moral compass, voicing what matters, explaining the value of art, and pinpointing the significance of human expression in ways that resonate for others. This video essay is a logical extension of my teaching, as I am giving an example of praxis: putting Frampton’s theory into meaningful, original practice in a way that I think others might meaningfully emulate. I believe the video essay could have a positive impact on other scholars who want to bring their personal and professional and personal experiences together, and in ways that can matter to others, but who might also hesitate since this approach to managing the work-life balance is relatively unorthodox. I also think that this video essay holds meaning as an interdisciplinary work, opening up a new dialogue across cinema studies, cinema therapy, and videographic criticism., film philosophy, and psychology in particular.

My work is grounded in my study of two specific films and how they have interacted with my particular life story. Still, I have faith that the way I show these films interacting within my consciousness will inspire other scholars to consider the films that live in their minds and that can change the way they live in lastingly constructive ways. Should this video essay lead to parallel works, I will give other scholars an opportunity to reach new audiences by sharing news of and reflections about their parallel work on my new “Films Change Lives” podcast, which I will debutlaunched this coming past winter.  as an openly accessible feature of my Substack page titled “filmschangeslives.This podcast is freely available on Apple, Spotify, as well as via Substack: https://filmschangelives.substack.com/.” (I’ll be using Will Degravio’s exemplary podcast series (https://thevideoessay.com/) as a model for my own series.) I can also foresee publishing other such works in the journal for which I am Editor-in-Chief: Literature/Film Quarterly (LFQ). As LFQ is focused on adaptation studies, and I regard every video essay as a form of adaptation (through taking already-existing materials and rethinking them), I see scope for showcasing other similar work through the journal that will is now be accepting video essay submissions: for details, see https://lfq.salisbury.edu/. lfq.salisbury.edu (and especially Oswald Iten’s video essay titled “Always Present” in the issue of spring 2025, our first peer reviewed example). In short, if I can have “A Beautiful Day in the Tree of Life” published, it will not only spur me on to create other video essays on the transformative impact of cinema: I will also pay that good fortune forward.

[1] In case this is useful for the reader, I here include all the quotations from the video essay as follows (with Frampton’s original emphases): “The film and filmgoer join in thought, and the process of that encounter provides immediate meaning and knowledge” (149). The “film attaches itself to our minds and refuses to let go. The natural link between filmgoer and film turns into a pact, a mesh of ‘minds’ (158).” “The filmind is calling out to the filmgoer directly, it is trying to talk to the filmgoer’s mind” (158). “We are the film” (160). “We forget our own being, our own habitual ways of thinking, and take part in the creation of a new being (the new third thought that is the encounter between film and filmgoer” (160).

References 

Frampton, D. (2006) Filmosophy. London: Wallflower Press.

Iten, O.  “Always Present.” Literature/Film Quarterly [online]. 53:2. Available from www.lfq.salisbury.edu [accessed 22 August 2025]

Kulezic-Wilson, D. (2020) Sound Design is the New Score: Theory, Aesthetics, and Erotics of the Integrated Soundtrack. New York: Oxford University Press.

Keathley, Christian, and Jason Mittell (2019). “Scholarship in Sound and Image: A Pedagogical Essay.” The Videography Essay: practice and pedagogy by Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant [online]. Available from

http://videographicessay.org/works/videographic-essay/scholarship-in-sound--image [accessed 19 February 2026].

Penwarden, S. (2022) ‘Crafting Order and Beauty from Loss: Using Found Poems as a Form of Grief Therapy.’ Journal of Poetry Therapy. 35: 1, pp.13–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2021.2004370.

Walker, E. (2024). Life 24x a 24 a Second: Cinema, Selfhood, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press.

Walker, E. (2024). ‘Remembering My Friend and Rehearing Two Films’ Alphaville [online]. 27 Available from www.alphavillejournal.com [accessed 22 August 2025]

Filmography

A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood (Marielle Heller, 2019, USA)

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019, USA)

Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020, USA)

Soul (Pete Docter and Kemp Powers, 2020, USA)

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011, 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.

This personal philosophical essay film explores the power of cinema to reconfigure our encounters with life, gently weaving together the tissues of lived experience and film (A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood (2019) and Tree of Life (2011)) through Daniel Frampton’s concept of the filmind: a poetic and affective form of film thinking, an objectified aesthetic perception, offered to intermingle with the filmgoer’s own mind. The work stands equally as a piece of film philosophy and as a deeply personal eulogy for the author’s father, recalling, in a different way, how Roland Barthes’s meditation on photography became a search for his lost mother.

Walker’s essay dwells in entanglements, in the palimpsestic folds of art, life, memory, and philosophy. Through a thoughtful formalised use of text on screen, fades, and blends, it presents a moving and regenerative example of what Catherine Grant terms “material thinking.” While the work clearly riffs on Frampton’s Filmosophy, I also found it insistently resonating with Stanley Cavell’s evocative reflections on film within The World Viewed (1979). Especially the passage where Cavell reflects: “We involve movies in us. They become further fragments of what happens to us, further cards in the shuffle of my memory, with no telling what place in the future. Like childhood memories whose treasure no one else appreciates, whose content is nothing compared with their unspeakable importance for me” (p.154). Walker’s philosophical essay film succeeds in making something of that unspeakable treasure palpable.

Above all, A Beautiful Day in the Tree of Life weaves a heady yet tender blend of mediated thinking about fathers, whether held in memory or reencountered through film, and reminds of the sustaining role artistic encounters can play in our lives. It critically-creatively shows how the personal shuffle between films, memory, and thought can lead to fresh insights, renewed understandings, and the creation of new Borromean filminds.

Publish as is.

Review 2: Invite resubmission with minor revisions of practical work and/or written statement.

This video essay submission is innovative, engaging and quite moving. It is genuinely refreshing to see Daniel Frampton's work engaged with so directly. His work remains canonical for many in film-philosophy, yet some of its ideas have drifted out of fashion in recent years; this submission makes a persuasive case for their continued methodological value. In particular, the concept of a film’s consciousness is applied rigorously to two contrasting texts in a way that feels both original and engaging.

The relationship between text and image is handled with care. The work makes thoughtful use of on-screen text (a kind of graphic narrational layer), which is often overlooked in audiovisual-essay practice. While this technique is not followed through consistently across the full video (which is a bit of a shame), it does not detract from the overall quality of the work.

The essay becomes especially vivid when the author uses superimposition to bring The Tree of Life and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood together, transforming and illuminating the consciousness of both films. The recognition that the film-mind of both films open up time and space in a way that affords the possibility of a convergence of these two films, or, perhaps, a meeting of minds, is a really wonderful observation. I would like to see more interrogation of how the formal elements of these two works harmonise and converge (or not) in a way that illuminates the concept of a film’s conscious mind.

When the author reverses the experiment and attempts to disrupt The Tree of Life with A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, they describe this as a failure. I don’t necessarily share that assessment. My experience of the superimposition (the puppets singing over the dining-table conflict) heightens the moment in a way that still corresponds with The Tree of Life’s consciousness, and in fact seems to confirm the central argument rather than undermine it.

Early in the video, the author equates the narrative content of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood with the film’s consciousness (caring and lenient). While I agree that narrative content is linked to a film’s consciousness, the development of a full film-mind (in Frampton’s sense) is more complex than this. I would encourage the author to clarify this distinction, perhaps with a brief framing example or articulation from Frampton, so the argument doesn’t appear to oversimplify the conceptual move being made.

The personal nature of the film is moving, and there is a productive methodological crossover here with Once Upon a Screen Project.

Written component

The written statement would benefit from modest but important strengthening. I would like a reference for the concept of “generative creativity.” The author also states an intention to produce a “desktop documentary,” but the final work reads less as a desktop doc and more as an audiovisual essay; this distinction should be acknowledged.

Most importantly, the methods section is underdeveloped and needs expansion. I would welcome clearer commentary on the formal approach to the video essay, especially the use/purpose of superimposition and the mixing of soundtracks, so that the research value and specificity of the practice can be properly secured. I would also like to see more explicit engagement with Frampton’s key concepts here (definitions, and how they were operationalised in practice). This would be really valuable to both members of the film-philosophy community and the video essay community who may want to utilize these methods in their own work. As the author rightly states: “[they] put Frampton’s theory into meaningful original practice in a way that I think others might meaningfully emulate”. A more fully developed methods section will better help future practitioners to build upon the work presented here.

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