“On the Origin of the Video Essay” by John Bresland | Blackbird v9n1 | #gallery

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2024-09-16 00:30:02

Jessica Lang Ben Jurgensen Unferth & Bateman Video Essay Suite Irene Ziegler

Beginning with this Spring 2010 edition, Blackbird is featuring a new form of creative nonfiction we’ve chosen to call the video essay. In its intent the video essay is no different from its print counterpart, which for thousands of years has been a means for writers to confront hard questions on the page. The essayist pushes toward some insight or some truth. That insight, that truth, tends to be hard won, if at all, for the essay tends to ask more than it answers. That asking—whether inscribed in ancient mud, printed on paper, or streamed thirty frames per second—is central to the essay, is the essay.

So it’s been, since shortly after Christ, when a Delphic priest named Plutarch wondered which came first, the chicken or the egg. A thousand years later in Japan, Sei Shōnagon compiled a list in her Pillow Book of “Hateful Things” and “Things That Give a Hot Feeling.” These early works of nonfiction were meditations, lists, biographies, diary entries, advice. But it took an amateur in the time of Shakespeare—a French civil servant in midlife crisis who quit his job to become a writer—to attach a name to the act of exploring the limits of what we know. He called these works Essais. Attempts. Trials.