WRITING ABOUT SCREEN MEDIA

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Part I. Strategies for Writing about Screen Media

Lisa Patti

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1.  Introduction

This chapter introduces the book, recounting the author’s experiences learning to write about screen media and summarizing the ways that the second edition of this book develops and updates the original edition. The chapter proposes a series of fifteen units that readers may use to navigate the book: writing style, research, history, access, form and design, digital media, paratexts, authorship, industries, ethnography, audiences, exhibition, representation, national and transnational media, and comparative case studies.

            

2.  Writing practices: How to begin writing about screen media

This chapter presents three practices for writing about screen media. First, frame your analysis, defining the scope of your work and the critical methods it deploys. Second, curate media objects into sets or series that facilitate comparisons and provoke questions. Finally, collaborate with other writers, approaching writing as a conversation among colleagues.     

           

3.  Entering the conversation: How to develop a critical argument

This chapter explores ways to develop critical arguments across writing formats and platforms. The first section focuses on drafting thesis statements and developing digital arguments in video essays and other formats. The subsequent sections – on free writing, outlines, evidence, introductions, and conclusions – review the phases of the writing process and the key components of a writing project. This chapter presents writing guidelines that apply to a range of writing formats, explaining the ways that traditional writing practices such as writing outlines may be applied to video essays, podcasts, and other projects.

 

4.  From notebook to network: How to use practical and digital writing tools

This chapter offers guidelines for using practical and digital tools to conduct research about screen media and compose and share writing in different formats. Providing an overview of popular tools, their utility, and their limitations, this chapter updates well-established practices for exploring a wide range of screen media subjects and formats. Following discussions of reading, watching, and writing practices, the chapter examines current guidelines from the Modern Language Association (MLA) for in-text citations, notes, and bibliographies, presenting sample citations for screen media sources such as a YouTube video and considering fair use policies as they relate to media studies publications. The concluding section discusses the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for writers, comparing their affordances and limitations to their print and digital predecessors.

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5.  Elements of screen style: How to write about screen media form 

This chapter focuses on formal analysis – approaching screen media texts through careful attention to cinematography, sound, editing, and mise-en-scène. The opening discussion of screening notes offers guidelines for preparing for screenings, recording important details during screenings, and reviewing your notes after screenings. The chapter then explains how to analyze form by examining a screen media text (for example, a film, television show, or other media object) and by exploring contextual sources of information about the text (for example, interviews with the text’s authors). Multiple screen shots accompany the case studies, illustrating key terms central to formal analysis. The chapter concludes by highlighting online resources for analyzing screen media form.

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Part II

Writers on writing about screen media

 

Objects and events

 

6. Writing about transnational cinema: Crazy Rich Asians

Olivia Khoo  

Crazy Rich Asians (2018) is a landmark film, both in terms of its representation (as the first U.S. studio-released film with an all-Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club (1993)), and in terms of its popularity (as the highest grossing romantic comedy in a decade). This transnational film – shot in Malaysia, set in Singapore, with a cast and crew from around the world – has been met with divergent responses since its release. How do we write about a film as symbolically significant as Crazy Rich Asians? How can we approach the question of ethnic stereotyping in transnational screen media without succumbing to descriptions of racial purity or attempting to avoid stereotypes altogether?

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7. Capturing moments: Writing about film festivals as events

Kirsten Stevens  

This chapter offers up strategies for students and researchers new to the topic to write about film festivals as events. It highlights the challenges that the temporary, experiential and multifaceted nature of festival events pose for approaches to research and writing. In response, it offers strategies connected to ethnography and participant research, archival research and contextual analysis to aid writers in capturing festival moments. While writing about film festivals can take many forms, this chapter presents avenues to begin the process of writing about festival events.

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8. Writing about experimental cinema: Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964)

Glyn Davis  

How do you watch, and then write about, a film that tests your patience and endurance? Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) is eight hours long and central to the canon of experimental cinema, but it is not easy to source or sit through. When writing about experimental film, this chapter argues, it is not only acceptable but useful to discuss accessing a film, and the physical conditions of watching. The value of sitting diligently all the way through a conceptual piece of cinema is explored, including whether this is necessary in order to be able to write about it. Finally, the chapter asks whether experimental forms of writing are more appropriate to adopt when writing about experimental film.

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9. From meaning to effect: Writing about archival footage

Jaimie Baron  

This chapter explores the difference between trying to write about the “effect” as opposed to the “meaning” of a text. The chapter argues that we cannot talk about a text as if it were isolated from the viewing experience because the text is co-constituted in the viewing experience. Ignoring our own bodily sensations, our own emotional reactions, and our own intellectual activities in our encounter with a film or video in favor of some abstract “meaning” we are supposed to deduce is nonsensical. Looking at “archival footage” as footage producing an “archive effect” for the viewer frees us from thinking primarily about filmmakers’ intentions or a film’s “meaning” in favor of thinking about archival footage as an experience, which opens up many new avenues of thought.

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10. Making the absent present: Writing about nonextant media

Allyson Nadia Field 

How do scholars write about films and media artifacts that they cannot see? With large percentages of our audio-visual heritage lost or in states of decay, it is incumbent on scholars to find strategies for accounting for these missing pieces of media history. This chapter addresses the reasons for the low survival rates for media objects, reasons for looking past archival absence, and approaches for finding presence in the absence of viewable materials.

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11. Expressing race in Brazilian telenovelas

Jasmine Mitchell  

Brazilian telenovelas, serial melodramatic narratives, have functioned as a central foundation of Brazilian identity in both national and global imaginations. TV Globo, the leading Brazilian network and producer of telenovelas, captures audiences and reinforces racial myths. With millions of viewers across the globe, Brazilian telenovelas function to disseminate racial ideologies that privilege whiteness and negate racial inequalities. From industry structures to racial representations, this analysis covers some key components and questions to consider when writing about race in telenovelas based on the author’s experiences and subject position as a U.S. researcher of mixed black ancestry.

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12. Writing about music video: Tracing the ephemeral

Carol Vernallis  

Remarkably little has been written about the genre of music videos. The paucity of music video scholarship is due in part to the fact that the analyst must feel comfortable with addressing the music, the image (including the moving bodies, cinematography, and editing), the lyrics, and the relation among them. This chapter explains how writers can approach music videos, offering practical strategies for analyzing the formal and narrative elements of music videos and emphasizing the value of collaborative approaches to music video analysis.

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13. Writing across divides: Locating power in K-pop music videos

S. Heijin Lee  

Using South Korean rapper PSY’s 2012 viral hit, “Gangnam Style” as a case study, this chapter argues that an analysis of the uneven power dynamics and historical relationship between the U.S. and South Korea and how these have shaped South Korea’s music industry offers a rich methodology for thinking and writing about the transnational music videos K-pop produces. Devoid of an analysis that tracks the genealogies of power that shape cultural forms, analyses of music videos, and the stars that produce them, fall flat, often relying on stereotypes or generalized assumptions without centering on the music itself and how imperial histories have produced hybridized global forms of music.

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14. Playing to write: Analyzing video games

TreaAndrea M. Russworm and Jennifer Malkowski  

This chapter prompts readers to consider the unique opportunities and challenges of writing about video games, from the conceptual recognition of medium specificity and how analyzing video games is different from, say, analyzing films or novels to logistical challenges like accessing playable versions of the games one is writing about. The authors also reflect on the importance of situating oneself as a writer in relation to the game (integrating the human with the computational) and on how one’s personal relationship with the medium changes when it becomes a topic of scholarly examination. The chapter also points readers to additional resources for learning game studies terminology and for accessing older video games.

 

15. When it all clicks: Writing about participatory media

Lauren S. Berliner  

This chapter shares critical insights gleaned from researching and writing about queer youth media producers and the media they have created. The chapter provides advice for pre-writing considerations, such as ethical frameworks and project scope, as well as suggestions for creating clear and convincing analyses.

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16. Feeling out social media

Julie Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim  

This chapter suggests that exploring and understanding the powers of social media and digital culture more broadly require “feeling out” what’s actually happening in everyday lives. It argues that digital media are largely affective phenomena and offers an approach for studying them as such. More specifically, drawing heavily on their own research and writing about mothers’ everyday lives with digital media, the authors reflect on how traditional ethnographic methods, including long interviews and participant observation, coupled with engagement with emerging theories of affect, can help media scholars and makers better understand the complex and often highly mundane ways that digital media are shaping everyday experiences and sensibilities and thus our broader social worlds.

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17. “A Very Black Project”: A method for digital visual culture

Lauren McLeod Cramer  

Regular social media users are familiar with the ways image and video sharing platforms like Instagram allow users to curate dynamic online identities and how social media has dramatically changed the culture of commerce and information sharing. Our familiarity with these digital spaces can make it difficult to identify knowledge gaps and articulate new research questions that enrich our understanding of the images we make, view, and share daily. Through an analysis of the Instagram account “The Very Black Project,” (@theveryblackproject), this chapter offers strategies for writing about online image repositories like Instagram and focuses specifically on the work of developing research questions and methods that not only reveal new information about contemporary screen media but also reflect our ethical and ideological investments as writers.

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18. Writing about transnational media: From representation to materiality

Fan Yang  

This chapter argues that critical screen studies in transnational contexts can benefit from a rethinking of media not just as textual artifacts but also material objects. The implications of this re-conception for writing about transnational screen cultures are three-fold. First, it involves approaching media as events rather than preformed artifacts. Second, it entails attending to the more explicit roles played by audiences today in shaping the configuration of transnational media objects. Third, it requires recognizing ourselves not only as “writers” who study screen cultures from a distance but also as participant observers who take part in the production, circulation, and consumption of our objects of analysis. Drawing on the author’s experience writing about Under the Dome (2015), a transnationally circulated documentary on smog in China, the chapter suggests these ways of probing into the multifaceted processes of mediation can help us better engage the discourse and reality of “rising China.”

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19. Writing about digital and interactive media

Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann 

Digital and interactive media require rethinking the research and analysis process. These new forms open up disruptions in user access and modifications. They transition from linearity to modularity in navigable databases across transmedia platforms. This chapter guides writers through a process of how to think and write about these new forms. It suggests architecture, navigation, interface, automation, design, data, structures, and patterns as key analytical modes. It offers a writing system: use the 90/10 workflow, immerse deeply, handwrite notes, specify, research context and compare, interpret significance, make connections, outline by word count, read out loud, revise, and copyedit.

 

20. (Un)limited mobilities

Rahul Mukherjee  

This chapter reflects on how to write about the imaginaries of freedom and mobility enabled by the contemporary mobile phone, which as a medium marked by rapid convergence of technologies has broken all limits to move from basic cellular mobile telephony to become a complex assemblage of a range of mediascapes. Mobile media companies promise frictionless mobility and tout the boundless capabilities of mobile media through faster download speeds, “seamless” streaming services, and a plethora of apps. However, the use of the word “unlimited” by telecom corporations and app developers to characterize their services itself suggests that they brush up against “limits” all the time, whether resolving bottlenecks of storage and bandwidth or the challenge of introducing new apps and technologies on mobile phone networks. Finally, the concept of “(un)limited mobilities” should help us examine how lived experiences of social space and time have changed with mobile media technologies.

 

21. Context is key: How (and why) you should write about outdoor advertising

Beth Corzo-Duchardt 

Context is important to consider when writing about any medium. But it’s especially important in the case of outdoor advertising because each time we view an outdoor advertisement, we see something different. This chapter lays out three guidelines for taking in the context of outdoor advertisements: limiting yourself to one specific ad in one specific location, observing and recording objects and images that coexist in the visual field surrounding your advertisement, and considering unintended viewing positions in addition to intended ones. Additionally, it provides some research tips for accessing images and descriptions of outdoor advertisements in their contexts so you are not limited to writing about those that you can physically access.

 

Methods and locations

 

22. How sound helps tell a story: Sound, music, and narrative in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara

Nilanjana Bhattacharjya 

Within popular Indian films, the narrative is often interrupted by song sequences that may or may not relate to the narrative, and in which spoken dialogue mostly gives way to music. Within the 2006 film Omkara, the relationships between the narrative and the film’s music are especially rich because its director, Vishal Bhardwaj, also composes the film’s songs. The song, “Nainon Ki Mat Suniyon Re” (Do Not Listen To Your Eyes) reveals how aural and visual texts may work against each other to interrupt, reorder, and complicate our sense of the narrative. The interactions among this song’s visual and aural texts question who the narrators are, whom they are addressing, and whether they are telling the truth. This close reading provides a model for how to write about film sound’s integral role in constituting our sense of the film as a whole. 

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23. Writing outside the text: A cultural approach to exhibition and moviegoing 

Jasmine Nadua Trice  

Grounded in studies of exhibition and moviegoing, this chapter discusses ethnographic approaches to public film consumption. It is drawn from the author’s research on film circulation and consumption in Manila, Philippines. Questions it examines include: How do we define the parameters of an object, when the event of cinema consumption is fleeting? How do we capture the significance of a particular screening event or venue? What kinds of theoretical frameworks should we draw from, in order to unpack our observations? What can our observations tell us about how cinema – as a text or a social practice – becomes meaningful within particular historical, cultural settings? The chapter examines three, interrelated objects for writing about exhibition and moviegoing from a cultural perspective: spaces, discourses, and performances.

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24. Writing about streaming: The drama of distribution

Ramon Lobato  

While the discipline of screen studies has traditionally focused on the analysis of texts, screen distribution can also be a fruitful area for critical writing and analysis. This chapter offers some reflections on how (and why) to write about distribution, using Netflix as an example.

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25. Analyzing and writing about credit sequences

Monika Mehta

Histories of cinema largely rely on archival documents and interviews. While these are important sites for documenting and analyzing cinema’s histories, an examination of paratexts such as credit sequences shows that material histories are imprinted on the film. This chapter shows that analyses of credit sequences provide generative insights into film production. Credit sequences are valuable for exploring: linguistic choices, formal elements, production aesthetics, industrial practices and hierarchies, shooting locations, audience address, and state regulations. Using examples culled from Bombay cinema, the chapter demonstrates how credit sequences advance our understanding of authorship, production norms of different industries, and film’s relationship to nation-building.

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26. “We are not thinking frogs”: The archive, the artifact, and the task of the film historian

Katherine Groo  

This chapter argues that film archives are sites of mediation and interaction. It makes the case for understanding the practice of film history as one necessarily bound to the close analysis and writing of film archives.

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27. Show me the data!: Uncovering the evidence in screen media industry research

Bronwyn Coate and Deb Verhoeven

Data can take many forms, can come from a variety of sources, and can vary in size. This chapter focuses on quantitative data and addresses how “big data” has created a range of new options for evaluating movie and broader industry performance. As a starting point, quantitative data provide the facts or evidence that at a summary level can be used as a reference to describe the state of the world as it stands. However, the use of data can enable further analysis using a range of techniques (such as data visualization) and quantitative methods (such as econometric modelling) to solve real world problems and address issues with policy relevance such as gender equality in the film industry. 

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28. Researching and writing across media industries

Derek Johnson  

The challenges of writing and research across media industries can be overcome by looking not at the sum of these industry relationships, but instead the intersections from which they emerge. By adopting a set of interrelated research and writing strategies, media scholars can transform lists of media franchises into more critical assessments of the franchising processes through which agency and constraint unfold within and across entertainment industries.

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29. The value of surprise: Ethnography of media industries

Tejaswini Ganti  

 

This chapter discusses ethnography both as a method of doing research about media industries, as well as a style of writing to present one’s findings. It details how anthropologists use the term ethnography – both as a specific research practice and a representation of that research – and discusses the various insights offered by an ethnographic approach to the study of media industries. Ethnography grounds the study of media in a specific time and space and offers insights into the processes, possibilities, and constraints of media production that are not apparent from close readings of media texts or analysis of macro-level data about media institutions and commercial outcomes. It also describes the aims of ethnographic writing, which are to animate and make alive a particular sociocultural world for the reader.

 

30. Listen up!: Interviewing as method

Alicia Kozma  

This chapter examines ethnographic interviews as a critical method in production studies. Since writing and analysis from ethnographic interviews are heavily dependent on the research design of the study, the chapter reviews the process for constructing a project based on ethnographic interviews. Once this has been established, the chapter works through writing with other people’s words and the place for the researcher within that process. To do so the chapter uses examples from an ethnographic project in production studies.

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31. The need for translation: Difference, footnotes, hyperlinks

Tijana Mamula  

This chapter is built around two closely related and only apparently contradictory observations: one, that translation matters; two, that it should not be trusted. Starting from that dual premise, it asks the question: How can screen media scholarship make more room for linguistic difference both through and within the practice of translation? A notion often voiced in the field of translation studies is that footnotes are the death of a translation. By adding a footnote, you distance the text from its original form, you contaminate it. But doesn’t that contamination need to exist, and to be made explicit? The move to digital publishing is opening countless possibilities for the inclusion of notes, asides and links to all manner of written and audiovisual material, far exceeding the scope of the traditional footnote. Rather than denigrating the footnote as the death of translation, then, this chapter urges the young scholar to embrace the death of the footnote itself and its rebirth in the form of the hyperlink – where both of these are understood as metaphors for difference.

 

 

Forms and formats

 

32. Words and more: Strategies for writing about and with media

Virginia Kuhn  

This chapter draws attention to the formal qualities of the critical essay and the media reviewed. Verbal language remains the main critical mode; as such, the chapter focuses on the rhetorical use of text on the page, on screen, and in video. Reviewing and revising our critical structures can push back against some of the logocentrism and linearity of current institutional modes, encouraging polyvocality and a respect for alternative ways of knowing. Screen literacy requires the ability to both consume and produce meaning; writing with media is key to writing about it.

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33. Best practices for screen media podcasting 

Christine Becker and Kyle Wrather 

This chapter offers a collection of best practices for media scholars and educators who may be considering starting a podcast. Based on a survey of scholars and researchers currently recording and producing their own podcasts, this chapter synthesizes their responses into advice for those interested in participating in this growing medium. These recommendations are organized into six categories: planning ahead for a podcast, gathering the right tools, finding a clear concept, recording, editing, and understanding podcasting as a platform. Together, these best practices offer general guidelines for the kinds of considerations, challenges, and opportunities that may face individuals or organizations that are considering publishing their own podcast.

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34. Confessions of an academic blogger

Henry Jenkins

The author’s blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan (now Pop Junctions), launched in 2006 and has now hosted more than 2000 posts, including interviews with more than 350 media scholars and producers. This chapter adopts a style appropriate for blogging – intimate, personal, concrete, practical – as it offers insights about the value of blogs as a form of public-facing academic writing and offers some thoughts on what might allow someone to succeed at this practice.

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35. The research and the remix: Video essays as creative criticism

Jeffrey Romero Middents 

This chapter explores how crafting video essays can become a way to perform criticism using creative license that is backed up with critical knowledge. By re-examining the processes involved in developing three video projects that play up the interplay between audiovisual texts, the author explores the relationship between video essays and more traditional written projects. The chapter centers around a case study on auteurism and Alfonso Cuarón which combines images from the 2018 film Roma and sound from the 2001 film Y tu mamá también.

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36. Foregrounding the invisible: Notes on the video essay review

Chiara Grizzaffi  

This chapter explores the peculiar process of reviewing video essays. In the first part, it addresses the novelty of the video essay as well as of the process of open peer review. In the second part, the chapter describes the structure of the video essay review, detailing its different sections – the opening paragraph, the analysis of the argument and of the formal strategies adopted to convey it, the interpretation – and providing examples and advice on how to write them. Finally, it urges potential reviewers to engage with video essays by reducing some critical distance and responding to how the video essay makes them feel.

 

 

37. Review, edit, repeat: Writing and editing book reviews

Alice Leppert 

Based on the author’s experience as the book review editor for Film Criticism, this chapter provides an overview of how to write and publish an academic book review. It includes a discussion of what information and assessment a book review needs to include, tips for approaching and working with book review editors, and ideas for dealing with some of the unique challenges posed by the genre. It also gives a glimpse into the editing process and outlines the importance of book reviews in academia.

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38. Extracurricular scholarship: “Writing” my audio commentary of Losing Ground

Terri Francis 

This chapter discusses the audio commentary as a form of what the author calls “extracurricular scholarship” through the case of the collaborative commentary she recorded with film scholar LaMonda Horton-Stallings for the Milestone Films release of Losing Ground.

 

39. The sharp, short, sweet art of blurb writing

Leah Shafer  

This chapter introduces writers to blurb writing. Blurbs are short, summative, persuasive texts that manufacture condensed copies of other texts. Blurbs allow writers to curate, creatively cite, and appropriate the story and style of novels, films, video games, and other media for potential new consumers. Writers are encouraged to follow and experiment with four guiding principles when blurbing: citation, context, copy, and comment. Examples of blurbs that follow these guiding principles illustrate the blurb’s ability to construct an elaborate but economical cosmos that reflects and responds to their object of attention.

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40. Bridging the gaps between scholarly essays and mass-market film writing

Nick Davis  

This chapter draws on the author’s years of experience as both a university-based professor of cinema studies and a film critic and journalist for popular publications. On these bases, the chapter argues that skills developed in each of these arenas – often presented as irreconcilable in goals, expression, and audience – can enrich one’s work in the other and create professional opportunities in both. The author gives examples of how scholarly questions, frames of reference, and modes of analysis can elevate popular writing and distinguish a critic’s voice. At the same time, the concision, clarity, and attention to craftsmanship that magazine editors and fan communities value can help to distill and anchor the arguments in academic writing. The chapter includes a handful of sample assignments that can cultivate these abilities in students and help them acquire useful professional skills.

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41. Writing across the page without a line

Holly Willis  

 

What does it mean to write across the page without a line? To write beyond the security of a well-honed critical practice? This chapter describes the evolution of the author’s writing practice and their creation of a craft-based writing workshop dedicated to the exploration of techniques for writing about – or alongside, next to, or near – film, video, still images, sound, and other media forms. Moving beyond the conventions of scholarly writing, the course explores forms that have been variously dubbed creative nonfiction, the hybrid essay, memoir, the fourth genre, the lyric essay, the video essay, and poetic or vernacular criticism; and it considers writers who have contributed often stunning examples to the form. While writing constitutes one of the main activities we engage in as scholars, we devote very little attention to it as a practice and craft within academia. This chapter describes attempts to redress this gap.

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Vantage points

 

42. The algorithm strikes back: Writing about generative AI

Bridget Kies

This chapter examines the widespread integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in film and media production and the potential problems that creates for writing about screen media. Drawing parallels to historical shifts like the adoption of CGI and digital cinema, the chapter argues that scholars can use existing frameworks to study AI-enhanced media. A key distinction is made between “AI-generated” content (created entirely by tools without human intervention) and “AI-assisted” creation (where humans use AI tools as part of their creative process). This distinction helps address concerns about authenticity and counters the stigma surrounding AI, while acknowledging that such use is becoming increasingly common in contemporary screen media production.

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43. Hidden faces and digital affect: Writing about online fandoms

Osarugue Otebele

Writing about digital media fandoms can be a complex process when a writer must consider their personal connections to the object of their analysis. What is the ideal balance between insider knowledge, personal experience, and objective analysis? What are the best practices for writing about a media object that is often highly affective? This chapter offers guidelines for writing about digital media fandoms, exploring the critical questions that arise for writers in this genre and providing a scholarly path for writing about media both critically and experimentally.

 

44. Documenting immersive media experiences with ArcGIS Storymaps

Melanie Kohnen

Capturing immersive media experiences can be a challenge within the confines of the traditional research paper. This chapter introduces Storymaps as a concept and digital tool for crafting an analysis of immersive media. Using the example of experiential marketing promoting films and TV shows at San Diego Comic-Con, this chapter outlines the process of creating a visual journey filled with maps, photos, and videos in Storymaps.

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