Introduction

This special issue, edited by Ariel Avissar, Colleen Laird, Matthew Thomas Payne, and Barbara Zecchi, gathers a selection of videos created during the “Reframing the Argument” workshop, a week-long, in-residence initiative hosted at the University of Notre Dame in June of 2025. The workshop brought together a cohort of graduate students from a variety of fields including film and media studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and visual arts, representing institutions across North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Working alongside mentors Zecchi, Payne, Laird, and Avissar, the participants applied diverse audiovisual methodologies to their individual objects of research. The videos presented here were created in response to the workshop’s fourth exercise, the “Videographic Dissection” (Avissar, 2024).¹

The Videographic Dissection

While many videographic exercises emphasise polished audiovisual argumentation and the expression or illustration of ideas, the “Videographic Dissection” shifts the focus toward process by using the editing timeline as a site of inquiry and experimentation. Participants were directed to “dissect” a chosen media object within the editing interface to develop their own method of analysis that made use of the affordances of their editing software, applying it directly in the timeline panel. The dissection process unfolded within the timeline itself, through operations such as reordering, fragmenting, or regrouping elements, and makers were instructed to document this process using screen-capture software. This, then, was their output video, which they were asked to pair with some form of explanation that detailed the methods they had devised. The result was simultaneously a record of the experiment and a reflection on individual methodologies as well as what both might reveal (or fail to reveal) about the maker’s media object.

The “Videographic Dissection” prompt builds on and contributes to a lineage of timeline-based videographic analysis, including the desktop documentary works of Kevin B. Lee (2012, 2025), Lého Galibert-Laîné (2019, 2020), and others, in which the editing process becomes a visible, reflexive component of the scholarly act. The desktop documentary mode can serve as “an exemplary site for viewing and reflecting upon the labour of producing thought” (Lee and Avissar, 2023), by laying bare the thinking that takes place within the editing software. The videographic dissection prompt encourages the realisation of this potential, by inviting a mode of documentation that presents the outcomes of an analytical method while also revealing the thinking process itself as it unfolds (Kiss, 2021). This resonates with Catherine Grant’s foundational videographic practice and theoretical writing, particularly her adaptation of Barbara Bolt’s theorisation of “material thinking” (Grant, 2014): an embodied, exploratory mode of scholarship that emerges through direct engagement with audiovisual materials, rather than through the application of pre-existing theory from a distance.

Overview of Contributions

Each contribution in this collection consists of a short video essay and an accompanying written reflection. Some of the videos yield concrete insights, revealing patterns, repetitions, or ruptures in the source material. Others are more ambiguous or embrace “failure” to reflect on what the absence of clear “results” can reveal about both the object and the method. In all cases, the editing timeline becomes a generative space – a medium for encountering meaning (and meaning making) as it takes shape.

Iddo Better Pocker’s “Silent Eyes and the Politics of the Timeline: Dissecting With Hitchcock in Jerusalem,” examines a 1966 Israeli state-sponsored propaganda film produced for American television. Through colour-coded parallel timelines, original shots of Alfred Hitchcock are separated from later intercut views of Jerusalem added at the request of Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek. The work demonstrates how such insertions can shape what is seen and silence what is not – a reminder of the enduring power of propaganda to frame historical perception.

In “Videographic Dissection: Anatomy of a Peace in Two Acts,” Carol Pinzon Masmela maintains this focus on spectacle and propaganda, turning to the 2016 Colombian peace agreement and its two distinct signing ceremonies. By slowing down and reassembling isolated images, the video brings these two televised events into dialogue, attending to the mediated construction of political spectacle. Examining presence and absence on screen, the analysis traces shifting narratives of legitimacy, inclusion, and political affect.

Meg Healy’s “In a Galaxy a Wipe Transition Away….” explores the movement-based motivation behind the wipe transitions in Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980). In cataloguing and pairing these transitions, the video uses the editing timeline to reveal nuances in the brief intervals between sequences, where motion and continuity are negotiated.

Focusing on the affordances of the split-screen format, Eva Álvarez-Vázquez’s “Dissecting the Dissected: The Split Screen in El año del descubrimiento (dir. López Carrasco, 2020)” breaks down Carrasco’s 200-minute experimental documentary about early-1990s labour protests in Spain. By colour coding the film on the timeline and inserting negative space in the preview monitor, the video examines how this formal strategy operates across the film’s extended duration, asking whether its editorial logic follows discernible patterns or emerges through arbitrary decisions.

In “The Severed Timeline,” Yaron Baruch presents a case study within a broader project on identity fragmentation in contemporary American “Prestige television.” Using Severance (Dan Erickson, 2022-present), the video employs videographic dissection to map the show’s spatial and temporal structures along thematic alignments. What begins as an attempt to trace a clear division between work and domestic spaces gives way to a “failure” complicated by the emergence of anomalous, liminal spaces that destabilise boundaries and foreground conflicts between fragmented selves.

Finally, the special issue includes a conversation, in collaboration with The Video Essay Podcast, between three of the issue co-editors – Avissar, Laird, and Payne – and guest moderator Lucy Fife Donaldson. In it, they discuss the special issue, the Videographic Dissection exercise, the “Reframing the Argument” workshop, questions of videographic methodology and pedagogy, and the role of collaborative, in-person workshops in fostering communities of practice.

While the Videographic Dissection exercise was developed prior to the “Reframing the Argument” workshop (Avissar, 2024), this special issue showcases its first collective exploration in a research-intensive, workshop-based setting. It invites readers and viewers to approach the timeline as a site of epistemological encounter, where the operations of audiovisual editing become integral to the production of knowledge, and where cutting becomes an act of thinking.

AI Declaration

The authors have no known or substantial use of generative AI to declare.

Funding Information

The workshop was fully funded thanks to the generous support of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Connections Grant, a Tel Aviv University-Notre Dame Joint Workshop Grant, and additional funding from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.