Evaluaciones externas y valoraciones Vol. 23 Núm. 2 (2026)

External Review Report – Vol. 23, No. 2 (2026) | Article #104353

Kiss off

Lucy Fife Donaldson, Colleen Laird, Dayna McLeod, Viktoria Paranyuk, Daniel Pope

Section: Video essays

EDITORIAL REPORT

The reviewers enthusiastically support this video for publication. They offer three minor suggestions, all intended to improve clarity and none of which preclude publication. Additionally, the attached statement includes a few comments with minor modifications to align with the journal’s citation style.

First, the order of credits is once swapped: McLeod’s sources should appear before Pope’s. Related, film/videography in order of appearance is very useful for the viewer here. The reviewer was initially stumped why Private Life of a Cat appears before Rocket Science in Paranyuk’s credits, before noticing the film-material opening (presumably from Hammid and Deren’s film?)—after the logo and before Rocket Science. If this is a little “cheat” it is also an intriguing prelude to “bad behavior” to come.... Lastly, in the final segment, the abrupt change in brightness from authors’ names on notecards to the evidence board is somewhat jarring, as is the shift back to brightness when Colleen places "Colleen" in the web. 

 

Peer Review Reports

Reviewer A

 Is the work deserving of publication without revision or amendment?

No

If you think that the video essay addresses relevant issues to the Journal (and/or to a monograph in question), Do you consider that the treatment and visual style contribute to the subject matter and provide an innovative perspective?

Yes

If you consider that the video and/or the written statement need corrections, would minor amendment to video or to the written statement make the submission worthy of publication? Please indicate what corrections would be appropriate in your opinion.

This videoessay represents a highly valuable contribution to Ian Garwood’s freewheeling series “Indy Vinyl for the Masses,” which sets out to explore the dynamic interrelationship between film and popular music through collaborative videographic projects comprised of dozens of thematically arranged scenes curated by several videoessayists. The thematic conceit of this particular videoessay, “behaving badly in the archive,” is sonically crystallized by The Violent Femmes’s 1992 song “Kiss Off.” Through their eclectic assemblage of scenes tracing the archival grain from silent cinema to the ever-expanding archive of videographic criticism itself, the creators foreground the problematics of the archive’s unseen violence as so many overdetermined sites of knowledge production while also evoking the radical potentialities (and even an erotics) of the archive as an affective locus of desire, ecstasy, resistance, memory, and consumption. In this connection, one must mention that the Femmes’s “Kiss Off” perfectly paces the videoessay throughout, such as the first chorus
when frontman Gordon Gano belts out the refrain “They’ll hurt me bad, but I don’t care/They’ll hurt me bad, they do it all the time (yeah, yeah)/They do it all the time (yeah yeah)” while Candyman’s Helen Lyle and The Silence of the Lambs’ Clarice Sterling each search through the microfiche—the analog archival medium par excellence—in split screen, thus foreshadowing their own respective imminent confrontations with archival horrors.

At the same time, one cannot help but feel that this videoessay suffers from a blind spot in as much as, while it does gesture towards ironically problematizing the (false) promise of the digital archive through the ensuing scene of bathetic jouissance in the chimerical fantasy of digitalization from Desk Set, the cultural (necro)politics of the digital archive—which bespeaks its very own “archive fever” of homogenizing difference and forgetting the harrowing lived realities of subjection—are essentially elided. What’s more, the pressing aesthetic and epistemic implications of the digital archive for the practice of videographic criticism as a whole could certainly have been explored further through the inclusion of additional works. Nevertheless, from the echoless void of Fitzcarraldo’s Kurtz-like journey down the Amazon to the Expressionist unravelling of archival surreality, this videoessay powerfully interrogates the function of this “they” in relation to the archive, first calling to mind the archive’s origins in repressive surveillance, carceral discipline, and (neo)colonialist exploitation before radically reworking the archive as a phantasmagoric texture of anarchic visual and aural associations. The videoessay’s playful and subversive emphasis on “behaving badly in the archive” reaches an almost Borgesian crescendo in its closing credits, which invoke the videographic archive itself as a haptic synaesthesia of memory-sites whose intertextual networks form, like Borges’s Aleph, an “inconceivable universe” of possible linkages. Indeed, the most salient and thought-provoking feature of this video essay is the primacy that it gives to the videographic medium itself as an embodied archival practice whose metafictive energies can give rise to shared participatory spaces of creation and undoing. Thus each videoessayist operates as a kind of archival node, fashioning an interlinking affective grid of memory and feeling that opens outwards to englobe viewers’ own pasts and futures, stories told and untold.

This video essay is not accompanied by a full-fledged statement. The provided abstract is itself notably open-ended and allusive. While this is productive in the sense that it grants the viewer no small degree of interpretive leeway in parsing out the videoessay's associative meanings, a statement would be very useful in terms of affording a clearer intended theoretical framework. Indeed, this is all the more true given that the abstract ends with a heady--but undeveloped-- claim about the promise of videographic criticism as an embodied archival experience that is singularly capable of creating communities of resistance and contestation across differences that calls for elaboration.

Would you suggest any changes or make any recommendations to improve the quality of the video essay? (300 words maximum) (Your comments will be published if the video essay is accepted)

See above

 

Reviewer B

ANONYMIZATION

Is the video essay properly anonymized?

No

In the event that it is not properly anonymised, indicate in which parts of the video essay the anonymity of the author(s) may be compromised.

Vimeo page is linked to author; each author is listed in credits in order of their "part" of the video; authors names are also listed in the "authors' contribution statement." However, it is also clear that full anonymization of a performative/embodied video like this would be very difficult.

FORMAL QUESTIONS

Indicate whether the submission is missing any of the following formal requirements:

Title of the video essay (in Spanish and English or English and another language):

No, the title is missing in one of the two languages

Is video URL and video password included?

Video essay URL and video password are included

 

Abstract (Max 150 words) (indicate whether it includes a summary in Spanish and English, or English and another language).

Yes, it includes an abstract in both languages

Keywords (in the two selected languages):

Yes, includes keywords in the two selected languages

Is a bibliography and/or filmography included?

Yes

Is the journal's citation style followed in the written statement of the video essay?

Yes, it is followed

Is the journal's reference style followed?

Yes, it is followed

ORGANIZATION, READABILITY AND RELEVANCE

Is the title, as well as the abstract and keywords, adequate and related to the content?

Yes

Is the written statement well written and organized?

Yes

Is the written statement easy to read?

Yes

Is the video essay relevant to the focus and scope of Teknokultura  and/or to the topics and issues approached by ongoing monographic issues?

Yes

Is the work deserving of publication without revision or amendment?

Yes

If you think that the video essay addresses relevant issues to the Journal (and/or to a monograph in question), Do you consider that the treatment and visual style contribute to the subject matter and provide an innovative perspective?

Yes

If you consider that the video and/or the written statement need corrections, would minor amendment to video or to the written statement make the submission worthy of publication? Please indicate what corrections would be appropriate in your opinion.

 

AI POLICY

In your opinion, does the submitted manuscript comply with Teknokultura’s AI policy?

Yes, it complies

COMMENTARIES AND GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

Please, comment on the most relevant aspects (positive points and areas to improve) of the video essay. (300 words maximum)
(Your comments will be published if the video essay is accepted)

This videographic piece is an excellent contribution to Ian Garwood's "Indy Vinyl Project" and also a worthy stand-alone contribution to Teknokultura. With the theme "gesture" and the keyword "archive," the five authors follow the parameters Garwood's project diligently—short, interrelated sequences by each author, held together by an entire pop song, starting with the film scene that features said song—and pose the provocative question, "What does it mean to behave badly in the archive?" The video therefore models the merits of “playful experimentation as rigorous scholarly critique.”

Each author “behaves badly” in a unique way by fragmenting, obscuring, and rupturing an ambitious range of audiovisual sources. The authors vividly explicate their critical frames and intentions in the statement and, in much more detail, through the analogously interwoven round table discussion. (Note: if possible, editors should absolutely publish the video essay and roundtable as a pair in the same issue.) A compelling aspect of this video is how it develops, accumulates, and complicates itself; in doing so, “Kiss Off” is exemplary of Patrick Keating’s “cumulative mode” of videography. Unlike an exquisite corpse game, each author knows exactly what precedes their segment, a retrospectivity that greatly benefits the video’s feeling of completeness, even as the song remains indispensable, cohering disparate sources. There is also an implicit narrativization to “Kiss Off” by the way each author “hands off” their segment to the next, the digital “relay” aspect of this creative process like the smooth passing of a baton. And this is a strong team of videographiles indeed.

The result is a video that becomes increasingly complex in form throughout duration: building and twisting from remix/supercut to split screen to superimposition to embodied intertextuality. The final dimension of meta-intertextuality among authors’ own videographic work is a brilliant climax and a testament to the power of vulnerable collaboration and archival potentials. Repeat viewings are essential.

Would you suggest any changes or make any recommendations to improve the quality of the video essay? (300 words maximum)
(Your comments will be published if the video essay is accepted)

I have three minor editing suggestions. First, the order of credits is once swapped: McLeod’s sources should appear before Pope’s. Related, film/videography in order of appearance is very useful for the viewer here. I was initially stumped why Private Life of a Cat appears before Rocket Science in Paranyuk’s credits, before noticing the film-material opening (presumably from Hammid and Deren’s film?)—after the logo and before Rocket Science. If this is a little “cheat” it is also an intriguing prelude to “bad behavior” to come.... Lastly, in the final segment, the abrupt change in brightness from authors’ names on notecards to the evidence board is somewhat jarring, as is the shift back to brightness when Colleen places "Colleen" in the web. None of these concerns should preclude acceptance.

 

“Kiss Off” Table of Comments and Responses (C&R Table)

Reviewer and Editor Comments

Response and Action Taken

The order of credits is once swapped: McLeod’s sources should appear before Pope’s.

This is true. The order has been arranged in this way intentionally, so that Dayna McLeod’s voiceover line—”Oh my goodness, all of my mother’s patterns”—can be heard as the music comes to a close. We anticipate that this will cause no real confusion for spectators in general, since Dayna’s section involves just one source, Red Dragon, that is not her original footage. This order is supported in Colleen’s section which positions the authors/makers in order. Viewers, if they need to cross-reference, should be familiar with the films they might cite and can reference the print bibliography as well. There is no standard citational practice (i.e., order of appearance) for credits in videographic scholarship, and so we defer to our makers’ choices in this order. Moreover, we invite this as an opportunity to think about archival process as a form of disruptive glitch.

film/videography in order of appearance is very useful for the viewer here. The reviewer was initially stumped why Private Life of a Cat appears before Rocket Science in Paranyuk’s credits, before noticing the film-material opening (presumably from Hammid and Deren’s film?)—after the logo and before Rocket Science. If this is a little “cheat” it is also an intriguing prelude to “bad behavior” to come....

Indeed, the film-material opening that precedes Rocket Science comes from Private Life of a Cat. Although we did put the order of makers in a different order in the credits, all materials do appear in each section in the order of appearance.

in the final segment, the abrupt change in brightness from authors’ names on notecards to the evidence board is somewhat jarring, as is the shift back to brightness when Colleen places “Colleen” in the web.

While we understand that for one reviewer this contrast felt “somewhat jarring,” the video is original footage that cannot be recreated or reshot. For the makers, we are untroubled by this aesthetic result and feel that there indeed could be a value to the jarring aspect as indeed the segment is meant to be disruptive.

The text was revised incorporating the suggestions of the reviewers and the editorial team.