Research Statement

Research Questions

The piece was motivated by the filmmakers' interest in exploring the audiovisual epistolary genre as an aesthetic form and as a means of reconnecting subjectivities, memories, and affects, beyond the conventions of ordinary communication and narrative. From:/To: seeks to offer a creative and original exploration of the letter form in audiovisual practice, delving into relational thinking as a process of dialogical exchange and critical reflection. It is self-reflexive in its assimilation of the essay form, revealing how the work thinks, not only what it thinks. Each correspondence emerges from what resonates across the letters and between the correspondents, unfolding through anticipation, temporal delay, interpellation, and response. As a result, subjectivity is constituted through the act of responding to the other, while self-documentation opens intimacy to the external world and the unpredictability of alterity. 

A letter establishes a bridge between addresser and addressee. At the same time, it produces a constitutive distance that is not resolved through presence or immediacy, subsisting as the trace of an affect (Rascaroli 2024). There is a paradoxical and disjuntive quality to the epistolar format, as "the position from which the narrative emanates in epistolary cinema is one of distance, which is at once emphasized and overcome by the intimate address (Rascaroli 2017, 146). By presenting themselves as affective bodies "made up of impregnated pieces of reality" (Català 2014, 67), the filmmakers dissolve the traditional model of documentary into a subjective restructuring of reality. The visual phenomenology associated with small, portable digital cameras is closely related to the affective body, producing tactile and corporeal assemblages of images rather than exclusively visual ones (Català 2014, 66). These emerge through acts of walking and mobile awareness, as well as through the visual annotation and reworking of fleeting perceptions by the technologically mediated, hypersensitive “paradoxical body” (Gil 1996), opening the videographic practice to biocentric experience and the inventive interplay between the written word and visual forms of thought.

From:/To: privileges the expressive freedom of each correspondent. Every letter constitutes both a response and a new proposition, introducing anticipation and uncertainty into the dialogue, as neither participant knows in advance what form the next reply will take or what responses their own letter may elicit. By foregrounding friendship as a constitutive principle of epistolary exchange, the piece examines how the letter form opens a space for surprise, difference, and mutual transformation. Ultimately, in From:/To: friendship extends beyond companionship grounded in a shared biography, becoming an encounter with alterity and the unforeseen.

Context and Methods

From:/To: is a hybrid that dissolves the boundaries between first-person documentary, video art, and the letter form, contributing an original piece of research-based practice to the field of videographic epistolarity.

Previous examples include Shuji Terayama's and Shuntaro Tanikawa's Video Letter (1983), Mark Cousins' and Mania Akbari's Life May Be (2014), Nguyễn Trinh Thi's Letters from Panduranga (2015), Víctor Erice's and Abbas Kiarostami's Correspondence (2007), and the filmed correspondences brought together in the exhibition Todas las cartas. Correspondencias fílmicas / Complete Letters: Filmed Correspondences (2011-2012), featuring exchanges between José Luis Guerin and Jonas Mekas, Albert Serra and Lisandro Alonso, Isaki Lacuesta and Naomi Kawase, Jaime Rosalesa and Wang Bing and Fernando Eimbcke and So Yong Kim. The filmmakers build on these examples and seek to offer new perspectives and original ways of experimenting with the format, blending analytical thinking and audiovisual poetics through paradox, affect, and irony. Although it shares certain characteristics with the correspondence film, epistolary exchange has its own specificities, since it moves beyond the monologue and an imagined addressee to involve the actual exchange of visual letters between two or more interlocutors.

By experimenting with the letter form as a mode of self-expression and a narrative vehicle (Altman 1992), the two interlocutors creatively explore the epistolary genre, proposing a kind of peculiar travelogue based on the experimentation and experimentalism of a marginal and relatively underexplored documentary form. 

Constructed without a predetermined script, the correspondence remains open to unforeseen developments, allowing each exchange to shape the next. As the dialogue unfolds, words gradually recede in favour of images and sounds, foregrounding the capacity of audiovisual expression to think and communicate beyond language. Nonetheless, the work affirms the constitutive relation between words and images as a fluctuating interplay in which each expressive mode continually redefines the other.

In From:/To: the textures and variations of the voice-over function as an embodied gesture, introducing tactility and self-reflexivity to the screen while subverting the often-disembodied voice of authority and its well-substantiated judgements in traditional documentary. The voice ceases to claim an all-encompassing position of knowledge and instead becomes questioning and doubtful. Following the reviewers’s observations, one could consider Kim Munro’s useful examination of the effects of voice and voices in the epistolary essay film. By interrogating “the construction of knowledge and claiming to be only an expert in what it knows through its own experience”, the authors of the epistle present themselves as “fluid speaking subject[s]” (Munro 2017, 83), occupying shifting positions between speaking and listening, addressing and being addressed, and affecting and being affected.

Equally important, while the voice-over facilitates the deeper cognitive apprehension of the image, it also disturbs the linearity of the narration by providing a sort of complementary frame to the images. Images and voice-over are reassembled into a hybrid structure capable of creating networked patterns that merge with the flow of thought, considered in its arrests, aporias, and uncertainties (Alter 2018). By playing across the verbal and the visual, the filmmakers deframe, re-frame and expand the meanings and relational potentialities of the images, stressing their ambivalence and affirming the instability of subjective positions shaped by multiple frames of reference and modes of address.  

Consequently, in From:/To: audiovisual epistolarity emerges not only as a knowledge-producing practice, but also as an ethical, imaginal investigation of the self through its encounter with the other (Foucault 1998; Agamben 2009). In this work epistolary exchange resonates with a broader conception of friendship as an ethical and political openness to the other, unfolding through time, exposure, imperfection, and vulnerability. The other becomes “a singularity on the basis of which a world is opened” - that is, a world understood as an infinite field of experiences, an “opening” that one cannot fully appropriate or anticipate, marking the emergence of another gaze as irreducible singularity (Derrida and Stiegler 2002: 123). As a result, in From:/To: friendship is enacted as a sustained commitment to the desire for and possibility of an encounter between differences. There is a “desire for an interlocutor” (Balló quoted by Munro 2017, 87), and this search unfolds through shifting relations of proximity and distance, absence(s) and the evocation of presence(s), involving the viewer in a tripartite relation of address.

Outcomes and Impact 

The piece contributes to the audiovisual epistolary genre through a creative and original exchange of filmed letters, investigating issues of subjectivity, dialogical relationality, and friendship by enacting these very processes. The work demonstrates how audiovisual correspondence can operate as a dialogical mode of inquiry rather than merely as a vehicle for personal expression. It shows how thinking emerges through the reciprocal exchange of images, sounds, and words, opening new perspectives on the unstable relation between words and images, memory and forgetting. By foregrounding the processual and relational nature of the epistle, the piece proposes the video letter as a form of artistic research in which knowledge is generated through exchange, openness, and mutual transformation. It also suggests that collaborative videographic practice can cultivate new forms of reflection and dialogue beyond conventional narrative structures. 

Additionally, the work potentially impacts audiovisual practice beyond academia through the exploration of everyday technologies, such as camcorders and smartphone cameras. By drawing on the aesthetic and analytical investigation of “poor images” (Steyerl 2009), the work offers inventive ways of imagining new uses and ethical approaches to available media and technologies within contemporary media landscapes, defined by the pervasive (and sometimes obsolete) presence of computers, smartphones, screens, and social networks.

Within the audiovisual epistolary structure, technological mediation and the forms through which communication takes place can be understood as a broader framework for encountering the other and discovering singularities that, through their difference, continuously constitute and reconstitute themselves as relational and projected identities. In this sense, the work suggests that the political dimension of individual and collective action - starting from the premise that two already constitute a collective - also encompasses an analytical and poetic space of affect, intimacy and (inter)subjective imagination, wherein the mediated practices of the self and other are continuously invented and negotiated.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. “The Problem of Subjectivity.” Video lecture, European Graduate School. YouTube. Accessed January 26, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXxhO6jIlR4.

Alter, Nora M. 2018. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press.

Altman, Janet Gurkin. 1982. Epistolarity. Approaches to a Form. Ohio: Ohio State University Press. 

Balló, Jordi. 2011. "Filmed letters’. In Todas Las Cartas: Correspondencias Fílmicas, edited by J. Balló, 256–59, exhibition catalogue, Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània.

Catalá, Josep M. 2014. “Melodramatic Thought in Contemporary Spanish Documentaries.” Hispanic Research Journal 15 (1): 61–74. https://doi.org/10.1179/1468273713Z.00000000074

Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. 2002. Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, translated by Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge: Polity.

Foucault, Michel. 1998. “Self-Writing.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley et al., 207–222. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1. New York: The New Press.

Gil, José. 1996. A Imagem Nua e as Pequenas Percepções. Lisboa: Relógio D’Água.

Munro, Kim. 2017. "The essay film as address: The epistle as relational act". New Cinemas 15(1): 81–95. https://doi.org/10.1386/ncin.15.1.81_1

Rascaroli, Laura. 2017. "Narration: Epistolarity and Lyricism as Argumentation". In How the Essay Film Thinks, 143-164. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Rascaroli, Laura. 2024. “Review of Three Short Letters to Godard.” [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies 11 (4). https://doi.org/10.16995/intransition.15793.

Steyerl, Hito. 2009. "In Defense of the Poor Image". eflux Journal 10. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image 

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.

From/To: Video Letters works in two ways. The first is an intimate, personal and affective film that uses video letters between two friends, creating meaning through open encounters, exchanges and anticipation. The second is an exploration and contribution to the video epistolary form of creative research. It does both of these well. The film has an exciting experimental quality because it is structured around responses, allowing the discussion to unfold in unpredictable directions. At the same time, it creates a consistent through-line that presents friendship not simply as shared biography, but as an ethical openness to difference, unpredictability, and transformation. 

The main claims of the work are that videographic epistolarity can serve as a creative research method that constitutes subjectivities through dialogue, responses, memories, delays, and openness to the other. In this context, meaning emerges through each exchange, as each video responds to the previous one while proposing something new. As a result, the work and meaning develop through delays, surprises, and relational addresses. 

These claims are evident throughout the film as Hugo and Miguel exchange video letters that begin with a dialogue on memories and move into present expressions of bodily sensations, nature, injuries, X-rays, use of media technology for recording, and intellectual ideas. The videos take the form of letters with voice-overs, which continue until the final section, where the experiment is purely visual. From/To: Video Letters is full of textural, visceral images and sounds that seem to blur boundaries between the inside and outside of the body, the world and the body and images and the body. In one scene, we see Hugo’s bare feet as he walks on a variety of surfaces, including pebbles, snow, sticks, leaves, water, sand, vegetation and lawn, along with the accompanying sound of the different environments; the sensations this scene produces are tactile and visceral. 

The accompanying research statement is well researched and clearly outlines the methodology and key concepts used in the film. However, while it mentions the affective and tactile qualities of the film, it could have been grounded more in research in this area, particularly as it has been such an important part of film research and analysis in the last 20 years. Laura U. Marks stands out in this context. Also, while the film and accompanying research explore the epistolary genre through everyday technologies such as camcorders and smartphones, the film itself retains something of a pre-digital quality in its approach, overlooking the ubiquity of the epistolary mode within today’s digital phone environment. This may be intentional, but if so, it is not clearly stated. Recent research on the epistolary genre highlights how texting and emails have made communicating with someone absent and waiting for a response a daily occurrence. Creating a virtual presence to maintain friendships is now commonplace (Higgins, T., & Fowler, C., 2023). Nonetheless, the film stands up as an exploration of friendship, intimacy, and an experiment in videographic epistolary as a creative form of research and as an engaging affective experience. 

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement (these should be outlined in detail in the review).

From:/To: Video Letters, is a 53 minute epistolary essay film taking the form of an exchange of letters by the filmmakers to each other over the course of a year. Generally, the epistolary essay film emphasises the importance of voice or voices that address an imagined interlocutor. From:/To: Video Letters’ has two individuals, friends, who are the subjects and makers, and encounter each other through video letters with no sense of a hierarchy between them. They address each other. They exchange autobiographical fragments of details of their lives lived now and in the past, but who now live at a distance from each other; each explores memories of the past and reflects on their shared memories and present lives. It is clear the film is carefully edited and probably voiced after filming, but the effect obtained is one of an intentionally unrehearsed exchange. This is an original approach to the epistolary essay film in placing the spectator at a distance. Yet here the strong friendship conveyed draws the spectator into an intimate space we might consider to be like the third friend at the table. At several points when I was watching I found it unclear who was speaking since the two voices have a similar tone and language that mingle together. I found this gave me pause for reflection on the strength of their relationship rather than confusion. The voices, edited over beautifully framed images of places and animals, provides a poetic and rather dreamlike sensation of contentment even when we are following their health issues. Temporality is given through the dates and sometimes sequences undermine these dates, for example shots of feet walking through different seasons cut together to form continuity and aging as gradually the takes lengthened. Overall, the film gives a poetically elegiacal and sometimes dreamlike impression of two friends, ageing contentedly together despite distance in space and place. The images are varied in quality and their voiced discussion of digital images obtained with mobile phones and portable cameras with shots of some of these cameras, is useful and topical. The statement is strong in its discussion of how the film successfully breaks down boundaries between first-person filmmaking, video art and the essay film. Hito Steyerl’s discussion of the value of the poor image is appropriate. It also highlights the ethical approach of collaboration. There is a lack of discussion of the effect of the voices in relation to the images and the combined affect on the spectator and this requires analysis. The reference to Laura Rascaroli with a link is not helpful since she is brief on the epistolary essay film and it also relates to another work of Duarte’s. I suggest bring Rascaroli’s quote into the statement and also discuss Kim Munro’s ‘The essay film as address: The epistle as relational act’ in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film where she analyses in depth the epistolary essay film.

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