Research Statement

Research questions

In the summer of 2024, I participated in a workshop organized and led by Ariel Avissar. It explored constraint-driven approaches to videographic research practice through a series of exercises he created. ‘Laird’s Constraint,’ an exercise based on Colleen Laird’s video essay ‘Eye-Camera-Ninagawa’ (2022), gave rise to my response, Women at Work. Laird performs a visual analysis of the opening montage sequence of Ninagawa Mika’s film Helter Skelter (2012) by sorting it into categories and making thematic grids accordingly. Following the virtuoso analysis, Laird juxtaposes via split-screen the images from Ninagawa’s film with the opening credits of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), a formal move that raises questions, the scholar writes, about 'the politics and theories of the gendered gaze, of who looks, who directs, who is looked at, and who does the looking' (2022). 

My audiovisual essay focuses on the depiction of labor, particularly women at work, and women’s solidarity. I engage with Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a film that famously lionizes the powers of montage: its associative abilities, production of affect, encouragement of experimentation, and even the potential to transform consciousness, as Dziga Vertov, its key architect, reportedly believed (Vertov & Michelson 1984: xxv). A constructivist panegyric to the power of the machine – above all, the camera eye and the editing table – the Soviet film pursues the 'sensory exploration of the world' and captures 'life as it is,' as Vertov and his partners in crime, Elizaveta Svilova and Vertov’s brother and principal cameraman Mikhail Kaufman, declared in their 1923 manifesto 'The Council of Three' (Vertov 1984: 14-21). While my video essay illuminates these pursuits, it also centers women workers who might fall through the cracks of formal and ideological analyses. Women at Work is also concerned to some extent with the politics of looking, a theme that emerges in relation to another canonical film I include in my piece, Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983), which met the exercise’s perhaps most arbitrary parameter of being 54 years apart from the principal media object analyzed.[1] 

Annette Michelson has noted that Man with a Movie Camera foregrounds the process of making a film, placing it, through various cinematic strategies, among other forms of industrial production (Vertov & Michelson 1984: xxxvii). I selected this particular segment to highlight filmmaking, and especially editing, as labor, but I was most interested in the presence of women workers and the dynamism with which their actions, hands and bodies are portrayed. By ordering the frenetic montage phrase into four categories – apparatus, hands, faces/bodies, and finally, operations of editing – the audiovisual essay foregrounds the labor of editing and the one who performs it, Elizaveta Svilova. In this sequence, we observe Svilova, to whom Vertov was married and who edited most of his cinematic oeuvre, in action: sorting, classifying, cutting, and splicing the footage. She is in charge of the material, making crucial decisions, devising innovative editing strategies. Not only is her job emphasized, editing is marked as embodied, gendered manual labor, alongside sewing, painting nails, cutting hair, filling cigarette boxes. Svilova is among many other kinds of workers the film depicts, participating in the building of a new society – but also in film history. 

Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983) proved a generative and relevant companion to Man with a Movie Camera for several reasons. Marker’s is an experimental essay film that relies on the affective, intellectual, associative and other capacities of montage to coax us into a complicated matrix of impressions and memories presented by the fictional travelling cameraman Sandor Krasna, one of Marker’s alter egos. Consistently aligned with Leftist causes, the French cineast during the 1970s belonged to SLON, a military filmmaking collective that, according to Min Lee, reintroduced 'something that goes back to the provenance of the classical political cinema of Eisenstein and Vertov: the presence of the people' (Lee 2003: 41, emphasis in the original). Both films capture ordinary people, caught unawares or interacting with the camera. Particularly relevant to my research questions are the images of the women at a fish market in the Okinawa Islands, who become companions to the women workers in postrevolutionary Soviet society. In addition to female solidarity, the interplay between the two films invites the viewer to reflect on the looking relations, particularly in Sans soleil, between the camera gaze and the women who return it. Lastly, Sans soleil references Vertigo, which might be the most delightful surprise, bringing it all full circle in connecting my video essay with Laird’s. I confess I had forgotten about the Vertigo dimension until it revealed itself in an editing program. 

Context

In 2018, the journal Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe published two special issues dedicated to women editors, titled Women at the Editing Table: Revising Soviet Film History of the 1920s and 1930s (ed. by Adelheid Heftberger and Karen Pearlman) and Women Cutting Movies: Editors from East and Central Europe (ed. by Adelheid Heftberger and Ana Grgic). The contributions comprise written scholarship and artistic research, addressing the invisibility of women editors and collaborators in much of film history. Among the articles is an examination of Svilova’s actions in Man with a Movie Camera, contending that, 'although her thoughts are not recorded in written documents, it is possible to see that her editing is her thinking and to evaluate the edits as her creative thoughts' (Pearlman and Heftberger 2018). Karen Pearlman’s video essay ‘After the Facts’ (2018), at the center of which are Svilova and another Soviet filmmaker and consummate editor, Esfir Shub, also foregrounds the idea that editing is a form of embodied cognition, where thought, fact, and the cut constitute a process of producing knowledge, something that I have reflected upon in relation to my own videographic research. In her experimental short film Woman with an Editing Bench (2016), Pearlman, by intercutting reenactment, other original footage, and archival materials, imagines Svilova’s artistic partnership with Vertov and thus a different version of cinematic history, celebrating, as the text at the film’s end says, Man with a Movie Camera’s 'other creator.' My piece is in dialogue with and contributes to this body of creative feminist scholarship. On balance, my audiovisual and written work has attended to feminist film histories, and thus Women at Work extends these pursuits in the context of constraint-based videographic research practice. 

Methods

My methods derive from cinema and media theory, film historiography, and parametric audiovisual scholarship. My video essays tend towards poetic mode, and this piece is no exception. Having emerged from a set of constraints – in this case, externally imposed – Women at Work embraces chance, surprise and play in the creation of knowledge. As a methodology, a parametric approach lets go off the mandate to move along a linear path to an argument and instead opens to more fluid ways of engaging with and conducting research on screen objects. Such methods may not always resolve in a precise concept but they value experimentation, openness, revelation and process. There is a connection between poetic videographic criticism and parametric procedures, for both, as Alan O’Leary asserts, deal 'in texture, pattern, and world-building rather than explanation, meaning, and argument' (O’Leary 2021). 

Outcomes

Like many cinema scholars, I know Man with a Movie Camera well and teach it often, but the video essayist in me was eager to import the footage into an editing program, hoping for the unexpected. In dialogue with Pearlman’s work, my video essay illuminates the presence and embodied dynamism of women workers as well as solidarity between them. Additionally, the juxtaposition of Man with a Movie Camera and Sans soleil prompts consideration of the relationship between cinema and reality, which is as old as the medium itself and which continues to occupy the minds of media theorists. Vertov, Svilova, and Kaufman championed a cinema that would capture 'the world of naked truth.' But, as Michelson points out, the reflexive presentation of the filmmaking processes and techniques amounts to 'an exposure of the terms and dynamics of cinematic illusionism' (Michelson 1972). As for Sans soleil’s vertiginous layers of mediation, Marker’s essay film abounds in reflexive notes, pointing to 'the fictional apparatus' that 'sings to us about the differences between past and present…witness and participant, reporter and friend' (Rosenbaum 2007).

Impact

Women at Work shows that even the most arbitrary constraints can create unanticipated resonances, such as, for example, a dialogic relationship that emerges between the laughing Soviet women workers who try hard not to look at the camera and the smiling women working at a Japanese fish market whose gazes seem to address us – and the cameraperson – directly. A constraint-based method in videographic research practice celebrates the value of surprise and in the case of this exercise, illuminates a world of interconnection and not isolation. It urges us to pay attention and not to assume to know before we begin. I plan to enter Women at Work in film festivals that accept video essays and teach it in my video essay undergraduate seminar.

Notes

1. Some sources list 1982 as the year for Sans Soleil, but I go with the year cited by the Criterion Collection as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Bibliography

Avissar, Ariel. (2024) Parametric Summer Series. https://www.arielavissar.work/the-parametric-summer-series

Heftberger, Adelheid and Ana Grgic. (2018) ‘Editorial: On Making the Work of Women Editors Visible.’ Women Cutting Movies: Editors from East and Central Europe. Special Issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 7. https://doi.org/10.17892/app.2019.0002.154

Laird, Colleen. (2023) ‘Eye-Camera-Ninagawa.’ [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 10.2 https://doi.org/10.16995/intransition.11328

Lee, Min. (2003) ‘Red Skies: Joining Forces with the Militant Collective Slon.’ Film Comment (July-August): 31-41.

Michelson, Annette. (1972) ‘'The Man with the Movie Camera': From Magician to Epistemologist.’ Artforum 10.7.

Pearlman, Karen and Adelheid Heftberger. (2018) ‘Editorial: Recognising Women’s Work as Creative Work.’ Women at the Editing Table: Revising Soviet Film History of the 1920s and 1930s. Special Issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 6. 

https://doi.org/10.17892/app.2018.0006.124

Pearlman, Karen. (2019) ‘After the Facts.’ Special Issue: Montage Reloaded. [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 6.4

https://doi.org/10.16995/intransition.11365

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. (2007) ‘Personal Effects: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans soleil’. https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2023/10/the-guarded-intimacy-of-sans-soleil/

Vertov, Dziga, Annette Michelson, and Kevin O’Brien (trans.). (1984) Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press.

Filmography

Man with a Movie Camera/Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, Mikhail Kaufman, 1929, USSR)

Sunless/Sans soleil (Chris Marker, 1983, France)

Women with an Editing Bench (Karen Pearlman, 2016, Australia)

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.

1. What are the main claims and purposes of the work?

Women at Work is a constraint-based video essay that explores the depiction of women’s labour particularly editing as both a cinematic and historical practice. Drawing on Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, the work foregrounds the often-overlooked contributions of women editors, especially Elizaveta Svilova, and situates their labour alongside other feminised forms of manual work such as sewing and hairdressing. The filmmaker aims to highlight the gendered dimensions of cinematic production and to contribute to feminist film historiography through poetic and parametric videographic methods.

2. Does it make a genuine new contribution to knowledge or understanding of practice-research?

Yes. The work makes a contribution by combining feminist historiography with constraint-based videographic practice. It extends the discourse on women’s invisible labour in cinema, particularly through its focus on editing as a gendered and embodied practice. The juxtaposition of Vertov’s and Marker’s films, and the serendipitous discovery of intertextual links (e.g., Vertigo), adds a layer of reflexivity that is both formally and conceptually rich. The project also contributes to the growing field of poetic videographic criticism, offering a compelling example of how constraint can generate new insights.

3. Is there any important relevant work that the submission does not acknowledge?

The filmmaker references key feminist scholarship, including the Apparatus journal’s special issues on women editors, and engages with the work of Michelson, Pearlman, and Heftberger. However, the review notes a missed opportunity to more critically interrogate Marker’s Sans Soleil, particularly in contrast to Vertov’s more overtly collectivist and industrial framing. While Marker’s leftist affiliations are acknowledged, the absence of a feminist critique of his work especially in relation to the gendered gaze leaves a gap in the analysis. A more explicit comparison of the ideological and aesthetic differences between the two films would strengthen the submission. Annabel Nicholson’s work could also be a reference. 

4. How strong is the research and theoretical context of the accompanying written statement?

The written statement is well-researched and clearly articulates the filmmaker’s methods and conceptual framework. It draws on cinema and media theory, feminist historiography, and parametric videographic scholarship. The discussion of poetic form and constraint-based methodology is particularly strong. However, the theoretical framing could be deepened by more sustained engagement with feminist film theory, especially around the politics of visibility, authorship, and the gaze. The statement would also benefit from a brief reflection on the filmmaker’s own positionality in relation to the material.

5. Are there particular changes that you would deem either necessary or helpful for the work to be published?

Critically engage with Marker’s work: A more nuanced feminist reading of Sans Soleil would enhance the comparative dimension of the project.

6. How well organised and written is the accompanying statement?

The statement is well-organised, clearly written, and intellectually engaging. It effectively communicates the filmmaker’s intentions, methods, and outcomes. The tone is reflective and accessible, and the structure logically progresses from context to methods to outcomes. Minor improvements could be made by foregrounding the research questions earlier and tightening the discussion of intertextual discoveries.

7. Are there particular changes that you would recommend to its presentation?

Reorganise the statement slightly to foreground research questions and theoretical framing before discussing methods and outcomes.

Conclusion

Women at Work is a thoughtful, formally inventive, and politically resonant video essay that makes a valuable contribution to feminist videographic criticism and film historiography. Its use of constraint and archival footage is both methodologically rigorous and affectively powerful. With minor revisions to deepen its theoretical engagement and clarify its critical positioning, the work would be well-suited for publication.

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

Women at Work is a sophisticated and evocative video essay that makes a significant contribution to feminist videographic criticism and film historiography. Emerging from Ariel Avissar’s constraint-based workshop and responding to Colleen Laird’s Eye-Camera-Ninagawa, the essay demonstrates a deep engagement with the affordances of parametric, constraint-driven videographic methods. It exemplifies how such approaches can yield rich, unexpected insights through formal play, thematic categorisation, and associative montage.

The video essay’s core strength lies in its analytical focus on Elizaveta Svilova’s editorial labour in Man with a Movie Camera (1929). By breaking down a frenetic montage sequence into four categories—apparatus, hands, faces/bodies, and editing operations—the work foregrounds the material and gendered dimensions of editing. Svilova’s presence is not only made visible but is framed as central to the film’s construction and ideological project. The essay’s poetic mode allows for a nuanced exploration of women’s labour, solidarity, and cinematic authorship, situating editing alongside other feminised forms of manual work such as sewing and packing.

The juxtaposition with Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983) adds a compelling layer of intertextuality. Marker’s essay film, with its reflexive narration and associative montage, resonates with Vertov’s ambitions while introducing new questions about mediation, memory, and political cinema. The serendipitous rediscovery of Vertigo within Sans soleil creates a satisfying circularity, linking the piece back to Laird’s original exercise and reinforcing the thematic coherence of the project.

The accompanying research statement is well-written and provides a clear account of the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the work. It situates the video essay within relevant scholarly contexts, including the Apparatus journal’s special issues on women editors and the broader discourse on feminist film historiography. The statement effectively articulates the value of parametric videographic methods, particularly their openness to chance, surprise, and non-linear inquiry. The connection to Alan O’Leary’s writing on poetic videographic criticism is especially apt, underscoring the essay’s commitment to texture, pattern, and world-building over conventional argumentation.

However, before publication can proceed, the statement would benefit from minor revisions to more fully engage with existing videographic scholarship. Specifically:

• While the statement acknowledges Karen Pearlman’s broader project on women editors, it would be strengthened by a more detailed engagement with Pearlman’s video practice, particularly Woman with an Editing Bench, which intercuts reenactment with archival footage of Svilova. This work offers a layered portrayal of Svilova’s editorial labour and would provide a useful comparative point, situating Women at Work within a growing body of creative research that visualises women editors’ contributions to film history.

• The statement should also reference Pearlman’s the essay After the Facts, which argues that editing is a form of embodied thinking and uses videographic form to visualise editorial cognition. This would deepen the methodological framing and align Women at Work more explicitly with videographic traditions that foreground process and embodiment.

These additions would not require substantial restructuring but would enhance the scholarly context and intertextual resonance of the statement. The video essay itself is ready for publication without amendment.

In sum, Women at Work is a compelling and original contribution to videographic criticism. It demonstrates the power of constraint-based methods to generate new knowledge and offers a feminist re-reading of a canonical film through poetic and parametric means. With minor revisions to the supporting statement, this submission will make a valuable addition to the journal’s videographic scholarship.

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