Research Statement

Research Questions

How can constraint-based videographic methods expose or unsettle the scholar’s own habits of meaning-making? What political and historiographic insights surface when parametric methods collide with the analyst’s own intuitive, narrative-driven impulses during videographic re-assemblage? How might videographic criticism illuminate the role of the researcher’s ego, intuition, and autobiographical positioning in the formation of audiovisual arguments?

Context

I made this video as part of Ariel Avissar’s 2024 parametric videographic workshop on constraint-based methods, specifically the exercise derived from my own earlier work, Eye-Camera-Ninagawa (Laird 2022). Interacting with 'Laird’s Constraint' (Avissar 2024), a parametric exercise modeled on my own prior video, was a strange experience: not only was I remaking something in a sense already 'made,' but I was also confronting my own methodological past with a different sense of perspective, purpose, and technical skill than I had when first constructing it. Whereas I had made Eye-Camera-Ninagawa with the goal of illustrating a specific argument I have about both the film featured in the video (Helter Skelter 2012) and its director (Ninagawa Mika) based on my specific research background and expertise, Avissar’s exercise is designed as a potential methodology of how to visually analyze a non-specific montage sequence. 

In working with 'Laird’s Constraint,' I encountered the constraints of my own previous thoughts restructured in this way, as well as my ongoing relationship to rules and parameters, which is ever tenuous at best. In the course of making the exercise and during feedback sessions, some participants in the series remarked that 'Laird’s Constraint' was an exercise in encountering how my brain works, perhaps as seeing a way of looking at media through my eyes. But for me it was an exercise in working through how Avissar’s brain works in his reconfiguration of my creative and analytical process. I admit that my response to this started out a bit cheeky, at least in terms of formal performance. Instead of one montage sequence, why not four? Instead of 144 shots in the on-screen grid (as in my original video), why not 342? Instead of a media text that has been central to my larger research trajectory over the past 15 years, why not something I know almost nothing about? Instead of self-constraint, how about self-indulgence (a reversal of the trajectory of my original video)? At a certain point, perhaps even from the outset, it is worth questioning who I was even talking to. Was I working through limitations of the exercise, or working through limitations of myself? In encountering 'Laird’s Constraint' it eventually became clear to me, toiling over an 18x19 grid and hundreds of key frames, that I was ultimately having a performative, metatextual conversation with my own ego, also ever tenuous at best.

For 'The Most unCertain Hour' I chose four versions of the Marvel Studios intro logo sequence: Spider-Man (Raimi 2002), Fantastic Four (Story 2007), Thor (Branagh 2013), and Logan (Mangold 2017). The company’s credit sequence is a recognizable montage that has served as both a branding tool and a metatextual gesture that links these blockbuster adaptation films back to their subculture comic book sources. Following the exercise’s parameters, I dissected the montage into still frames and categorized the images not simply for visual similarity but for the ways they register this relationship and the transition between page and screen. Deconstructed into constituent still images arranged on a (all too familiar) grid, categories emerged from the material itself: the presence of comic book gutters and panels, textual elements like speech bubbles or sound effects, depictions of technology and machinery, isolated human body parts (eyes, mouths, hands), and the specific functions of those parts when linked to superhuman abilities. These groupings led me to note patterns not just in form but in cultural meaning: the blatantly obvious recurring presence of women as sexualized or victimized figures, the lingering emphasis on violence as an expression of identity, emotion and problem solving, and the movement from individual to collective (romantic pairs, families, teams). 

As I arranged these images into thematic groupings, rather arbitrarily as was experienced and made explicit by Alan O’Leary in his 'Classif. & Me (Laird’s Constraint)' (2025), what these fragments coalesced into, across iterations of the logo montage over two decades, is not a celebration of fandom or fidelity to source material but an insistent rehearsal of crisis. The crises depicted across images (villains, battles, threats) mirrors a broader sociological need for (and commercial creation of) saviors, heroes, and superhuman figures during historical moments that feel, perpetually, like 'the end of times.' They reveal that 'earth-shattering crisis events…are now the primary storytelling mode of superhero comics' and that they 'embody in fantasy form the actual temporal rhythms of the neoliberal security state, which unfolds historically as a series of seemingly never-ending political crises, economic shocks, acts of local and state violence, and mass death in the name of corporate profit and upward mobility for the privileged few at the expense of the world' (Fawaz 2016, 272). As such, the apocalyptic tenor of these images and montage sequences echoes a long cultural history of imagining ourselves at the brink, so much so that I abandoned the exercise’s rules of sorting by the end of the deconstruction and jumped straight to the point. This, too, is a function of narrative practice, with connections to the formation of cultural memory and recollection (Straub 2010, 222): in trying to make sense of the world, we reshape the fragments of experience into familiar forms like large-scale plots of crisis and decline, stories of all-encompassing catastrophe and social decay, all with their own casts of villains and heroes. As I reorganized images into patterns that made sense to me as a form of videographic, narratological logic, I engaged with the iterative nature of the media texts I chose. I juxtaposed this act of sorting to two songs from the soundtrack, composed by Gustavo Santaolalla, of the 2013 videogame The Last of Us, itself a story about post-apocalyptic crisis and the fall of humanity that plays with our attachments to and desires for heroic protagonists. But, again, I was having a metatextual conversation with myself. It is not a coincidence that my reading of these montage sequences is contextualized by the historical moment in which I was orchestrating both the unmaking and making of them: the summer of 2024 with its heightened and, it seemed, unprecedented global crises. Yet, also to my point as I write this statement in the summer of 2025, there seems to be a consensus, even if the details may differ in specificities according to perspective, that things have only become, somehow, even worse.

In the second half of the video, I took up the exercise’s requirement to create a dialogue with another media object separated by precisely 54 years, as per the exercise instructions. I chose the 1963 opening sequence to Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu, Tezuka), a Japanese television series whose on-page 'comic book' origins trace to the immediate post-occupation era of Japan and whose titular hero functions as a cultural counterpoint to American superheroes. While the Marvel montage roots its identity in the celebration of American exceptionalism and cinematic spectacle, Astro Boy emerges from a different nexus of crisis, one shaped by national guilt and shame, nuclear trauma, ongoing U.S. military presence, and the ambivalent adoption of North American and Western European modernity. I paired these sequences through a split-screen montage and overlaid them with Paul Simon’s 1973 'American Tune,' a song steeped not only in disillusionment with U.S. militarism but also with the fraying promises of the American Dream: the erosion of hope for immigrants and refugees as they seek safe haven, the exhaustion of idealism, and the quiet resignation to endurance over transcendence. I hoped to stage not just a historical juxtaposition as a timely reminder of suppressed complexities, but an echo of an unsubtle shout: the persistence of images of crisis, the recurrence of imagined saviors, and the uneasy resonance between globally distributed imagery and the complex, not-as-easily legible local histories with which they intersect.

Methods

This project employs a practice-based, constraint-driven videographic methodology that combines parametric re-assemblage with self-reflexive material analysis. Working within the formal parameters of 'Laird’s Constraint,' developed by Ariel Avissar, I first deconstructed pre-existing montage sequences into constituent still frames and reorganized them through iterative processes of categorization and recomposition. In accordance with the exercise’s instructions, I then juxtaposed one of these sequences with a historically displaced media object in order to stage a comparative analysis attentive to both formal repetition and cultural divergence. While the exercise is structured around strict procedural rules, its application in practice foregrounds the researcher’s intuitive and narrative impulses as active components of analysis. Meaning emerges not only through systematic sorting but through moments of friction between constraint and interpretation, where deviations from the prescribed method become analytically productive. Throughout, the videographic workflow operates as a mode of 'thinking with' images, making visible how habits of classification reveal underlying impulses toward narrative closure and personal meaning making.

Outcomes

This project contributes a practice-based framework for understanding how constraint-driven videographic methods inevitably intersect with the critic’s own interpretive impulses. Its demonstration of parametric sorting, intuitive reordering, and metatextual self-dialogue may offer researchers a replicable approach to studying their own analytical habits within videographic practice. Through its parametric analysis and re-assemblage of frames across two decades of Marvel branding, the work illuminates recurring visual grammars of crisis and national myth-making. Juxtaposed with the 1963 Astro Boy opening, the project foregrounds how global media circulate, distort, and repurpose images of crisis across disparate historical contexts. These outcomes may inform future scholarship on transnational popular culture, historiographic montage, and the potential political work of parametric exercises.

Impact

This project provides a replicable methodological template for educators and researchers seeking to incorporate parametric exercises into videographic pedagogy. By modeling how constraint-based tasks can be productively disrupted, reinterpreted, or transformed, the work invites practitioners to rethink assumptions about neutrality, authorship, and analytic distance in audiovisual criticism. Its demonstration of self-reflexive montage offers a new approach to training students in interpretive awareness, encouraging them to recognize their own habits of categorization and narrative construction. In doing so, the project contributes to ongoing disciplinary conversations about the value of videographic research-creation as a legitimate and rigorous mode of scholarly inquiry.

Bibliography

Avissar, Ariel. 2024. Parametric Summer Series – Exercise Prompts. Summer 2024. https://www.arielavissar.work/the-parametric-summer-series.

Branagh, Kenneth. 2013. Thor. USA: Marvel Studios.

Fawaz, Ramzi. 2016. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York: New York University Press.

Laird, Colleen. 2023. 'Eye‑Camera‑Ninagawa.' [in]Transition 10 (2) (June 17). https://doi.org/10.16995/intransition.11328.

Mangold, James. 2017. Logan. USA: 20th Century Fox.

Ninagawa, Mika. 2012. Helter Skelter. Japan: Asmik Ace Entertainment.

O’Leary, Alan. 2025. '‘Classif. & Me (Laird’s Constraint).’' 16:9 Filmtidsskrift. May 26, 2025. https://www.16-9.dk/2025/05/classif-and-me-lairds-constraint/.

Raimi, Sam. 2002. Spider-Man. USA: Columbia Pictures.

Santaolalla, Gustavo. 2013. The Last of Us (Original Score).

Simon, Paul. 1973. 'American Tune.' Single. Columbia Records, November 9, 1973.

Story, Tim. 2007. Fantastic Four. USA: 20th Century Fox.

Straub, Jürgen. 2010. 'Psychology, Narrative, and Cultural Memory: Past and Present.' In Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 215–228. Berlin / New York: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110207262.4.215.

Tezuka, Osamu. 1963-1966. Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu). Japan: Mushi Production; Tokyo 12 Channel. 193 episodes.

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.

Through perceptive and incisive breakdown of the imagery rapidly presented in the production logos of films based on Marvel comics, Colleen Laird’s video essay demonstrates how the logos construct the fictional world’s history as one maintained through constant crisis. The essay subsequently elucidates how this strategy is reflective of and implicated in U.S. ideology. The workshop’s parameters of placing in dialogue two media objects released 54 years apart are shrewdly used to map this ideology’s reinforcement over time. Astro Boy’s 1963 opening sequence provides a potent text to juxtapose against the Marvel logo in the essay’s second part, the anime channelling Japanese post-war sentiment amidst continuing U.S. military presence.

The essay’s formal strategies draw out ways in which fictional history from across the 54-year period is being reframed and mobilised to ideological effect. Significantly, the Astro Boy anime’s launch in 1963 situates it in the same era as Marvel’s most iconic comic book characters were debuting and the publisher was reinvigorating American superhero comics. In incorporating imagery from across Marvel’s comic book history, the Marvel cinema logo seeks to encompasses this history and, as Laird shows, present it as one of perpetual crisis. The logo itself is here interpreting the history in a way that could be argued as misrepresentative. In his book The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016), Ramzi Fawaz explores ways in which Marvel comics have historically engaged with radical politics but mournfully concludes that in recent decades such sociopolitical incisiveness has been lost to an ongoing bombardment of crisis narratives. Considering Fawaz’s argument in relation to Laird’s video suggests that Marvel’s film logos’ selective repurposing of the publisher’s comic book history repackages it in this contemporary crisis mode. Indeed, a rewriting of comic history is directly evident the version of the logo Laird uses for the comparison with the Astro Boy opening, since in this version Marvel comic book panels are replaced early on with imagery of the characters’ new cinematic incarnations.

While the Marvel logo looks backward, the Astro Boy opening looks forward. The sequence comprises not simply imagery of war and hatred, but also futuristic cityscapes and the smiling young robotic hero. Having the sequence comparison play out to Paul Simon’s 'American Tune' from 1973, which is situated as a response to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and the election of President Richard Nixon, adds a further temporal layer to enhance the video’s critical reflection on the maintenance of crisis in the period covered. Ultimately, through its audiovisual strategies the essay presents compelling arguments while inviting the viewer to find further resonances in the imagery being dissected, thus affirming the workshop task’s generative potential.

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

The audiovisual essay The Most unCertain Hour applies the so-called Laird’s Constraint to  four different iterations of the intro logo sequence from Marvel films, juxtaposing these with  another intro sequence to the Japanese television series, Astro Boy. It is commendable to see  an audiovisual essay engage with what can only be considered a neglected topic, that of intro (logo) sequences. The particular exercise of Laird’s Constraint works well for providing a  breakdown of these sequences, thus teasing out some of the similarities and differences  across the four Marvel intros. In that respect, the essay’s standout moment appears right  around the one-minute mark where the four sequences are spread out into the full grid of 18 x 19 thumbnails. Indeed, the main contribution of the essay is the breakdown of these different  sequences – revealing that despite their differences, their images belong to similar categories,  potentially making them somewhat interchangeable. The comparison to the Astro Boy sequence adds further nuances to the initial part of the essay, though the breakdown of the  Marvel sequences themselves is the most striking part of the essay. 

Apart from delving into a phenomenon that is too often overlooked, it is also refreshing to get  a take on the genre of superhero movies that is decidedly not from a fannish perspective. However, it would have added further weight to the analysis carried out in the audiovisual  essay if the supporting statement would have actually engaged with scholarship on superhero  movies. Not talking from a fan perspective is certainly praiseworthy, but it is no excuse to  desist from situating the essay’s contribution in relation to extant research. Does the  breakdown of the intro sequences reveal something that other analyses have failed to notice?  Or does it simply solidify perspectives already circulating within the field? 

Along these lines, the parts of the supporting statement that engage in 'metatextual  conversations' appear less immediately fruitful than those parts that reflect on the video  essay itself. Perhaps this is indicative of a certain turn within videographic criticism, where  some practices are beginning to seem quite occupied with perspectives of a more personal  kind, with a risk of steering into territory where these conversations become self-centered – as the essayist admits when describing this as conversating with her own ego. In this  particular case, though, it is of course understandable that some amount of self-reflexivity is  called for – as the essay involves the creator re-engaging with something she originally  devised herself with no intention for it to become a standardized 'method.' And with the  audiovisual essay itself being executed in a truly stylish and elegant manner, any such self absorption is easily forgotten.

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