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

External Review Report – Vol. 23, No. 2 (2026) | Article #104359

Behaving badly in the archive: A videographic discussion

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

Section: Miscellany

 

EDITORIAL REPORT

Thank you so much for submitting the videographic piece and the roundtable, as they make a thoughtful and valuable contribution to the journal and to the videographer practice. The reviewers found the roundtable to be a rich and generative contribution, especially in combination with the videographer piece it accompanies, offering theoretical breadth and intriguing insights into the authors’ curatorial decisions and the collaborative structure shaping 'Kiss Off.' They especially praise the authors’ thoughtful engagement with archival practice, access/representation, and positionality, and find the self-reflexive attention to the risks of videographic curation striking and inspiring.

The reviewers offered thoughtful comments that will create a productive dialogue alongside the piece once published. The questions they raise are not requests for revision (as this is a roundtable), but rather points of conversation, extensions of the dialogue your roundtable already opens.

For example, Reviewer 1 wonders why the roundtable does not explicitly address the non-White works that appear in the video essay, such as The Handmaiden, even while acknowledging the broader discussion around the lack of non-White archival content. They also note a general risk in videographic curation: that some media objects may be foregrounded while others are deflected or overflowed. Reviewer 1 finally points out that the roundtable does not engage with Susan Harewood’s Cine-Files essay “Seeking a Cure for Cinephilia” even though they do in their video statement, despite its clear relevance in a project built around “the entertaining hook of the pop song and infective sense play and fun".

Reviewer 2 offers an extended reflection in dialogue with the roundtable on the inclusion (and omission) of different sources, noting that “the authors of 'Kiss Off' clearly seem to have agonized over the inclusion of any works by or featuring non-normative identities, racialized, or marginalized groups—which begs the question: why?”

We are attaching a document with a few minor formatting notes (consistent with the ones we marked for the videographic statement). We would also like to kindly ask that you shorten the roundtable to better align with our length guidelines. We typically request a maximum of 7,000 words for the miscellany section; however, given the scope and value of this conversation, we would be happy to accept up to 9,500 words. The current version is approximately 14,000 words, so this would require a reduction of about 4,500 words.

Thank you very much, and please let us know if you have any questions.

 

Peer Review Reports

Reviewer A

Please, comment on the most relevant aspects (positive points and areas to improve) of the reviewed article.
(Your comments will be published if the article is accepted)

This roundtable discussion provides intriguing insights into the authors’ respective curatorial decisions and the dynamic interdependence of their creative visions for “Kiss Off.” In reading Author 1’s summary of the impetus for initially organizing these roundtable discussions at three month intervals, each led by one creator following “the relay” model of Ian Garwood’s Indy Vinyl for the Masses series, one has the distinct impression that the novel experience of collaboratively working within the conceit of Garwood’s series to deliberately interrogate the
boundaries of—by “behaving badly in”—the ever-expanding non-traditional archive of the videoessay left each author wrestling with unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions of access and representation. Authors 1 and 2 embark upon a productive discussion about access and representation (and the lack thereof) within the unique archival and counter-archival spaces of the video essay’s digital materiality, which singularly bridges the popular and the academic, and yet which has also recently become increasingly “institutional[ized] . . . (for better or worse).”

In this vital sense, then, this roundtable follows in the tradition of pioneering scholars of the film and videoessay such as Catherine Grant, Alan O’Leary, and Laura Rascoli, each of whom has likewise seized upon the “openness” and ambivalence of the film/videoessay as “a creative intervention” and a virtual space that simultaneously enacts the self-problematization of its form and content at every turn—with the arrangement and distortion applied to each and every clip which, in turn, exposes and subjects curated moving-image artifacts to a disciplinary power. Indeed, a question that implicitly stalks this roundtable discussion is whether the videoessay is, by its very form, the embodiment of an “anti-hierarchical collage” (as Authors 1 and 4 seem to espouse), or if this—and indeed any—videoessay, must rather articulate a mode of audiovisual bricolage that, despite its transgressive and contestatory potentiality, is nevertheless bound to economies of capitalist and neoliberal representation (Vimeo, Patreon, and YouTube, to name but a few) which reflect and reproduce a mosaic of interlinked classed practices of display, production, and consumption? Long a source of insoluble perplexity in academia, concerns about access, representation, and control are all the more vital to the theory and praxis of videographic criticism as a (putatively) more egalitarian space of collaborative (“fragmentary, heterogeneous, and incomplete”) knowledge production that can extend and integrate an “ethics of care.” Since the other reviewer has already provided a meticulous compte-rendu the authors’ exchanges, I will use the space of my review to primarily attend to what one could identify as the productive sense of dissatisfaction shared by all 4 authors towards the videoessay as a fraught site of “discursive labor” where regimes of power, inequality, and control are inscribed. I first turn to what is arguably the most striking (and inspiring) aspect of this roundtable discussion: the remarkable degree to which all four authors are keenly sensitive to—and indeed, haunted by—the contingent and constructed nature of their own embodied videographic archival practice, which fuses intimacy and strangeness as each clip is uncannily disfigured only to then be subsumed under a new symbolic order, with all of its attendant perils of “erasure, ignorance, or omission.” To be sure, the video esssayist wields a daunting power to fashion associative connections—it’s not for nothing that seminal videoessayist Jason Mittell has isolated the split screen as the video essay’s “superpower”—, but this incredible ability to tease out parallels and create correspondences also belies an even more terrifying institutional power that risks flattening the enthralling richness and specificity of media objects or, worse still, omitting them altogether. The widespread popularity in the videographic community of parametric constraints and branded conceits such as Garwood’s makes this dilemma all the more urgent, and Authors 1 and 5 accordingly contend with these concerns over the course of the latter half of this roundtable. This most notably includes a thought-provoking discussion about risking the personal as videoessay archivists and curators while also acknowledging their own positionality as white scholars, which gives rise to the authors’ shared conflicted feelings over whether they were entitled to include certain highly relevant works, such as Cheryl Dunye’s genre-defying meta-performative archival documentary Watermelon Woman, among the corpus of media objects which comprise “Kiss Off.” Indeed, although Author 1 concludes that “it wasn’t [her] place to use this media object in the narrative that [she] was creating,” when considering Dunye’s enduring achievement in Watermelon Woman, one would be hard-pressed to conceive of another audiovisual work that so powerfully carries out a metafictive archival excavation of the white American heteronormative cultural imaginary, stretching truth and fiction to its snapping point to peel back the patina of Romanticized conventionality and expose the archival traces of erasure and dispossession lying beneath. And yet, despite the video essay’s singular capacity to inhabit and give visibility to these intersititial spaces which have all too often been elided and denied representation by forms of archival custody and control (enacting Russell’s “glitch” or the Adornian “splinter in the eye”), the authors of “Kiss Off” clearly seem to have agonized over the inclusion of any works by or featuring non-normative identities, racialized, or marginalized groups—which begs the question: why?

In searching for an answer, it may be useful to start with a (re)affirmation of the oft- repeated but seldom achieved mantra that representation does, indeed, matter—all the more so in  our days of “dark academia” where the putative independence of the institutions entrusted to uphold academic freedoms (however illusory or exclusionary in the first place) and to serve as ethical stewards of archival records, has been exposed as fictive and leached of any credibility as colleges, museums, and cultural organizations have cowed to the lowest common denominator of brute political influence and undisguised corruption. In proclaiming their own shared unease in the face of having to make the curatorial decisions which comprise “Kiss Off,” the authors point towards the need for serious and sustained consideration of how the evolving field of videographic criticism’s own archival standards have been and are being consolidated: Who is accorded space within the videographic order of representation? Who benefits from the privilege to speak (as the result of each year’s Sight and Sound “best video essay” poll highlights, the overwhelming majority of voiceovers remain problematically white, Anglo, and heteronormative)? Which voices and identities are preferentially affirmed or countenanced over others that are correspondingly minoritarianized and relegated to classist and racialized positions of silence and invisibility? These questions take on a heightened importance if one heeds Achille Mbembe’s sobering warning about “the inescapable materiality of the archive” that always entails the disappearance of an Other, for every archive denotes, following Derrida’s inaugural treatment in Archive Fever, a lieux of absence that is authorized by an institutionalized mandate to forget. Thus the historical recit’s archival record is marked by a triumphal amnesia that is all-too conveniently riddled with lacunae which occlude genocidal atrocities from public consciousness. If cultural and historical memory is often marred by the ignorance of past and present crimes and atrocities, videographic theorists such as Grant and O’Leary have isolated the bracing iconoclasm of the video essay’s novel intermedial archival form as a living cultural repository whose performativity is intimately and dialectically intertwined with each videoessayist’s affective investments. (In this connection, one wishes that Author 2 would have enlarged upon her promising sidebar contemplating the self-reflexive demands of this project, which spurred her to question the multiplicity of I-positions which fluidly make up “[her] archive” and to critically reflect upon associated issues of “legibility and illegibility.”) Therefore, even though our ignorance will always be complicit in these sanctioned archival erasures, the videoessay (not unlike essay films such as John Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs) can perhaps uniquely enact the promise of generating archival counter-histories by unlocking a trove of secret and subjugated knowledge that can ward off this oblivion of forgetting. However, recalling Audre Lorde’s famous dictum, oft-cited by Dunye herself, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”; as a result, in order to live up to this promise, videoessayists must remain keenly committed to attending to the archival silences and gaps which we are all heirs and, above all, to challenging the privileges of Western neoliberalism by according representation to those who have been neglected and made invisible.


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

See comments above

 

Reviewer B

AI POLICY

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

Yes, it complies


Please, comment on the most relevant aspects (positive points and areas to improve) of the reviewed article.

(Your comments will be published if the article is accepted)

This roundtable is a detailed supplement to the “Kiss Off” video that elaborates and expands the aims and insights of each author. With its theoretical breadth and deep engagement with the process of creative-collaborative videography, I highly recommend the publication of this roundtable, ideally in the same issue as “Kiss Off” (and perhaps even in the same section, rather than separated into “Miscellany”). There are far too many ideas colliding and merging to give satisfactory attention to everything (much like in the video itself), but I would like to briefly describe how each author brings a variable and worthwhile perspective to the central themes through their choice of topic: Author 1 opens the tricky but essential discussion about the curator’s racial positionality. Author 2 asks why the archive is gendered and considers how women and bodies are institutionalized (or not) in the archive. Author 3 speaks to archives of queerness, emotion, and ephemera, and introduces the topic of legibility/illegibility in the queer archive—whether legibility is ever a goal for an atrocious archive. Author 3 and Author 4 discuss their fascinating use of contradictory, even oppositional superimposition between sources. Author 4 also proposes the presence of a feminist glitch and anti-hierarchical form in the video (though Author 5 tweaks this as “non-hierarchical”) and reveals the “bad” team practice of “wrecking things that are deemed to be abusive.” Finally, Author 5 contemplates embodied editing and exposure as comfort. Each author enriches their own segment by unveiling details about selection and process, while also bringing the “invisible” experiential component of their thinking to the foreground. This roundtable is forceful evidence that the discursive labor of collaborative engagement (creative, theoretical, analytic, affective) is an act of ethical care and knowledge formation that transforms both the bad archive and the bad archivist.

Would you suggest any changes or make any recommendations to improve the quality of the article?

(Your comments will be published if the article is accepted)

The authors cite Susan Harewood’s Cine-Files essay “Seeking a Cure for Cinephilia” in their video statement, but not in this roundtable despite its clear relevance. Harewood argues, “What is concerning is when scholarly video essays ... share an intense love of the global circulation of the same types of visual images and film movements, which often manifests in a type of Eurocentrism.” Given the entertaining hook of the pop song and infective sense play and fun, this is a particular concern for this project, which the authors mostly and dutifully avoid.

The authors write about their ambivalence toward specific images and movements to varying degrees. On one hand, we can presume that the authors have carefully reflected upon the context and connotations of each source given their expertise and purported intentions—seeking to implicitly “wreck” the colonial violence of Indiana Jones or the transphobia of the Hannibal mythology rather than “circulate” these fragments. On the other hand, Author 3 mentions that this type of collage/supercut/remix always risks becoming a “disrespectful flattening device”—the flip side of inflating a bad source is not giving a "good" one enough attention (for example, Author 1 choosing not to incorporate The Watermelon Woman given their white positionality).

In my opinion, the authors thread the fine line that avoids too much adulation or deflation. But it is always worth contemplating how an audience will receive each fragment, especially as a video slides rapidly across the valences of critique. The one place I remain confused (with the commendable acknowledgment of white positionality and use of very white media) is why the two non-white films—Shirkers and The Handmaiden—elude this self-critique.

 Table of Comments and Responses (C&R Table)

Reviewer and Editor Comments

Response and Action Taken

Reviewer B. In my opinion, the authors thread the fine line that avoids too much adulation or deflation. But it is always worth contemplating how an audience will receive each fragment, especially as a video slides rapidly across the valences of critique. The one place I remain confused (with the commendable acknowledgment of white positionality and use of very white media) is why the two non-white films—Shirkers and The Handmaiden—elude this self-critique.

In our conversation, we touched on our own positionality as white film and media scholars; on how, as videoessayists, we sometimes feel conflicted about engaging with certain media objects. While it is somewhat contrary that we included Shirkers, The Handmaiden, and chose not to include The Watermelon Woman, both our video and roundtable register the complexities and contradictory impulses that we balanced as we responded to the theme and multifaceted notion of the archive. These gestures of self-critique point to our own biases and cinephilic affinities. As we discussed in the roundtable, there are valid arguments for including The Watermelon Woman and for leaving it out in the context of what our video essay is doing.

Reviewer A.  the authors of “Kiss Off” clearly seem to have agonized over the inclusion of any works by or featuring non-normative identities, racialized, or marginalized groups—which begs the question: why?

(See above.)

 

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