Research Statement

Research Questions

This video emerged from a constraint-based videographic exercise. The central question guiding its making was thus neither thematic nor theoretical in the traditional sense, but methodological: What forms of analysis and insight can emerge from following strict formal parameters?

Specifically, how might 'Laird’s Constraint' — which dictates a method of visual dissection and regrouping of a montage sequence, followed by a temporally-determined audiovisual 'dialogue' — offer new ways of engaging with a film’s construction and meaning? The aim was not to make an argument about a media object, but to engage with its visual logic through process, structure, and juxtaposition.

Context

This work was produced as part of the 'Parametric Summer Series' (Avissar, 2024), an online workshop I organized to explore constraint-based videographic scholarship. The series took inspiration from Alan O’Leary, who identified Matthew Payne’s video essay 'Who Ever Heard…?' (Payne, 2020) as an example of scholarship that offers itself as a form to be adopted by other practitioners. O’Leary developed 'Payne’s Constraint' – a set of formal parameters he explicated from Payne’s work – and invited others to experiment with and build on it (O’Leary, 2020). Following O'Leary, I developed three additional constraint-based exercises for the workshop, all derived from existing videographic scholarship. 

One of those was 'Laird’s Constraint,' modelled after Colleen Laird’s video, 'Eye-Camera-Ninagawa' (Laird, 2023), in which she dissects the opening montage of Helter Skelter (Ninagawa, 2012) and places it in dialogue with the opening title sequence of Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958). My own video is an application of 'Laird’s Constraint' to the famous 'testing room' montage from The Parallax View (Pakula, 1974) – a sequence so dense, so fast-paced, and so semantically overloaded that it practically begs to be taken apart – followed by a concluding gesture toward The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1920).

Methods

Following the method of visual analysis employed by Laird, ‘Laird’s Constraint’ invites participants to isolate, categorize, and reconfigure a montage sequence, thereby treating it not as ‘a bound object that asserts its own coherence,’ but as ‘an archive of sounds and moving images’ (Mittell, 2019), a dynamic system of motifs, rhythms, and repetitions that can be reedited and reconfigured. This analysis is followed by the introduction of a second media object juxtaposed with the chosen montage sequence. The stipulation that these two media objects must be 54 years apart, like the films featured in Laird’s video, is intentionally arbitrary, and yet generative; it is designed to provoke surprising formal, thematic, structural, and historical resonances.

For the first part of my video, I followed the stipulations of 'Laird’s Constraint' rigorously:

First, I broke down the Parallax montage into individual shots (343 in total, comprised of still images and words), extracted a frame from each one, and organized them all into a grid.

Next, these images had to be sorted into distinct groups, each group in turn presented then removed from the grid. As I began breaking the sequence down, categorization proved more difficult than anticipated. Many of the images in the sequence are problematic and provocative. They are ambiguous, and the montage itself plays with this semantic instability by repeating the same images each time accompanied by different words and pitted against other images, playing fast and loose with juxtapositions and associations. The images are intentionally open to interpretation, and thus defy simple categorization.

And so, searching for an anchor of objective stability within this whirlpool of semiotic excess, I eventually opted to sort by the frequency of the images, rather than their content. I started with all of the words that appeared in the sequence (nine distinct words, making a total of 42 appearances), then proceeded to the images, moving from those that appeared only once to those that recurred most often (with the final image featured 19 times, in various cropped, flipped, or scaled iterations). What emerged was a diagram of prevalence and emphasis, where frequency stands in for significance, or at least for attention. 

In the next part of my video, I introduced The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. While the choice of film was dictated by the 54-year gap, the two films rhymed in unexpected ways in both subject and style. Both films stage encounters with unstable, paranoid subjectivities, and portray the slippery boundaries between perception and reality. Both conjure shadowy forces that control or compel an individual to commit acts of violence and murder. And both reflect a moment of social trauma: Caligari in the wake of World War I, and Parallax in the long shadow of 1960s assassinations, surveillance, and institutional breakdown. Indeed, a lineage of filmic paranoia can be traced from Caligari and other German Expressionist films of the early 20th century, all the way to Parallax and the wave of paranoid thrillers of the 1970s (Wead, 1974). 

In this part of the video, I do not illustrate or explain these themes so much as allow them to echo, at times replacing the images from Parallax with those of Caligari, other times splicing them together, as if Caligari were surfacing from the visual DNA of Parallax. This process felt less like comparative analysis than the staging of a cinematic haunting, where one film infiltrates the structure of another, engaging in a mutual act of defamiliarization and intertextual contamination.

Outcomes

Rather than arriving at a singular analytical claim, this videographic experiment produced a set of formal and affective insights that emerged through parametric method and structure. 'Laird’s Constraint' appeals to me because it avoids the trap of closed, argumentative didacticism. I think of it less as a reading than as a staging of possible readings; a process of putting things next to each other, under new conditions, and seeing what emerges. Rather than making an argument about the sequence, the video uses considerations of form and formal analysis to interrogate it from within. 

Sorting the shots by frequency rather than content allows latent patterns of emphasis, recursion, and rhythm to rise to the surface, revealing the underlying structures and mechanics of the sequence, patterns that are difficult to parse at regular viewing speed. It lays the sequence bare and, in doing so, reveals manipulations of structure and association. While the montage remains ambiguous, its internal logic becomes more visible. In this way, rather than offering a conventional reading of The Parallax View, the video stages a performative engagement, inviting viewers to linger within the operations of montage.

Likewise, the juxtaposition with Caligari does not clarify meaning but reinforces ambiguous possibilities by introducing a generative encounter: a space where the histories, aesthetics, and politics of two films become entangled through proximity and repetition. The original montage overwhelms through speed and excess. By slowing it down, reorganizing its components, and placing it in dialogue with images from another moment in cinema history, the video enables a different kind of encounter. What others might take from it, I hope, is not an answer, but a method, or better yet, an impulse: to forgo interpretive mastery, and to approach moving images with constraint, curiosity, and a willingness to follow arbitrary rules toward unexpected discoveries.

Bibliography

Avissar, A. (2024) ‘The Parametric Summer Series.’ Ariel Avissar (online). Available from: https://www.arielavissar.work/the-parametric-summer-series [Accessed 22 July 2025]

Laird, C. (2023) ‘Eye-Camera-Ninagawa.’ [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 10.2 (online). Available from: https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/11328/ [Accessed 22 July 2025]

Mittell, J. (2019) ‘Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method.’ Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (online). Available from: https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/b6dea70a-9940-497e-b7c5-930126fbd180 [Accessed 22 July 2025]

O’Leary, A. (2020) ‘Payne’s Constraint.’ Notes on Videographic Criticism, 1.11 (online). Available from: https://thevideoessay.substack.com/p/volume-1-issue-11-paynes-constraint [Accessed 22 July 2025]

Payne, M. (2020) ‘Who Ever Heard…?’ [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 7.1 (online). Available from: https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/11344/ [Accessed 22 July 2025]

Wead, G. (1974) ‘Toward a Definition of Filmnoia.’ The Velvet Light Trap, 13 (Fall), pp. 2-6.‏

Filmography

Helter Skelter (Ninagawa Mika, 2012, Japan) 

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920, Germany) 

The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974, USA)

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, 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.

Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterbery crafted the Dogme 95 manifesto and its 10 'Vow of Chastity' rules that while straight-jacketing filmmaking also inspired a surge of creativity by truncating the exhaustion caused by endless possibilities. Faced with limited options, the human mind maximizes its play within the constraints provided, counterintuitively producing creative freedom not unlike the creative play in soccer with its litany of rules.

Avissar takes this same freedom-within-constraints approach to the analysis of the infamous psychological assessment scene in The Parallax View and asks what we could make of it if our analysis were constrained. The suggested constrained analysis seems to have two parts: 1) a dissection of the film imagery with a clinical sorting based on repetition not unlike the word counting common in the analysis of a book using digital humanities techniques, and 2) a meta montage of the scene with a mimetic recreation of still imagery from a film exactly 54 years older (54 is a random number). Where Sergei Eisenstein claims a new conception comes from the montage of two images, Avissar asks us what new conception could come from the montage of two montages, one from the original Parallax View scene and another created following the same implied 'rules' (e.g., only still images, only single words allowed on the intertitles, only zooming allowed to create new images from the original, no recoloring, etc.) but applied to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Could this new montage of montages inspire a 'fresh eyes' analytic assessment perhaps linking the films in unexpected ways?

For the first constrained analysis, Avissar confronts us with the component images of the filmic system showing us their importance by way of their repetition bins. If we were initially family doctors taking a holistic view of the scene and appreciating its development with 'ME' as a comic book hero restoring ordering following chaos, Avissar wants us to become pathologists evaluating each image for significance. It’s not so much that there’s a specific meaning (although that would be a fortuitous outcome), it’s more important to appreciate the artistry, the human effort, that went into creating the torrent of montages resulting in a scene so powerful we have trouble processing it all. Avissar shows us there were 343 stills meaning 342 montage couples, roughly 75 per minute, with 342 Eisensteinian 'new conceptions' to process in under 5 minutes – an impossibility. With this constrained analysis, Avissar highlights our human limitations in a world of infinite meanings.

For the second constrained analysis, Avissar doesn’t need to put the two montage sequences together - when we see the Caligari version, the mimesis is clear; however, we’re now Warren Beatty and Avissar is the Voice of Authority speaking only in text. It’s a disturbing twist with Foucauldian implications for the audience.

Avissar asks the question if constraining film analysis (in a way similar to the filmmaking constraints of Dogme 95) would produce any new creative insights for film scholars. I think the answer is a resounding, 'Score!'

Review 2: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

It’s very difficult to write a review about a work that makes up its own partially arbitrary method of analysis, or – to be more precise – a work that adapts a partially arbitrary method of analysis used in another video and makes it even more arbitrary. There is a strong sense here of commitment and engagement to the video’s chosen process, and to the principles of parametric video essay production, that I respect; but it’s also very hard to engage with this work as a viewer. I’m sure it generated new knowledge for the maker, which is sufficient for it to qualify as artistic research in various countries. But I can’t really pinpoint what new knowledge it generated for me. There is of course the basic idea of slowing down and classifying the shots in a high-speed montage, but that doesn’t really get us beyond explicating the film-maker’s intention. There’s also the strong kinaesthetic effect achieved through the expert editing. But despite this strong filmmaking technique, I get a repeated sense of not quite knowing why I’m seeing what I’m seeing, which of course is a part of the point of the Oulipan parameters. However, asserting the value of arbitrary parameters isn’t enough to justify their use, and ultimately, watching this felt like witnessing a process in which my presence as the audience was incidental. 

However, despite this doubt, I think the sheer visual intelligence and editing technique of the video makes it worth publishing. At the same time, this essay – by an extremely talented (and often very entertaining) video essayist – seems to me to act as a kind of warning against regarding constraints as interesting in themselves. There’s got to be some kind of point to a constraint for the product to be meaningful. This is probably not a criticism that the creator, like all Oulipans before him, would accept – the point of Oulipo was precisely that the constraints were arbitrary. And yet… Oulipan literature was at its best when there was an aesthetic logic to it underneath its parametric surface: the absence of an e in Perec’s A Void is so brilliant because it is explainable both as an Oulipan experiment and also as the premise of the story; so too, the stories told based on the turn of a card in Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies (stories that themselves play with the theme of chance), and of course Queneau’s exercises in style which is also a coherent and rigorous critique of the tropes of bad art. But ultimately the arbitrary constraint in this video essay never transcends its arbitrariness, and that, I think, is ultimately a limitation for published video essay. Perhaps parametric techniques are better suited to classrooms and workshops (as stimuli for discussion) than they are to academic publications.  

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