#essays are now pretty old so they have a very established infrastructure for engaging with other people working that way

[girderednerve]

i'm being mean again but i don't understand the hopes & dreams of the 'video essay' as a format. i have been entertained by long videos of people talking before & i like documentaries just fine; i respect the concision & punchiness of short-form video, although i rarely enjoy it; but i don't really get what the 'video essay' as a self-contained form is meant to distinctively do, aside from provide commentary over video-native media (film, video games), which are annoying to write about because you can't show people what you're commenting on the way you can show them a painting reproduction or whatever. is that just what it's for & i'm being a jerk? i agree that thoughtful discussions of film (&c.) are worthwhile, so that could be cool. are there excellent video essays that aren't video media commentaries? what makes the form work for you? thinking about this a lot because i love the more traditional written essay; i had a brief phase as a high schooler where i read a big chunk of the penguin classics edition of montaigne's essays & was charmed by the idea that one could sit down with one's thoughts & a question which one attempts to resolve, although naturally modern essays generally follow conventional structures & approach questions of certain scope, & to some degree i think they suffer for their connection to the misery of primary school writing education. so hypothetically i would love it if there were a popular argumentative form that is not the beleaguered & baggage-laden essay, but in practice most video essays annoy me desperately: there's the simmering citation crisis & the platform problems (the evils of the youtube algorithm, &c.) but most of the time i'm either like why was this a video, specifically, instead of something else? or i'm left adrift by the lack of structure or argument. maybe i'm just sort of video illiterate? curious about everyone's thoughts