I was particularly taken with Charlie Shackleton’s “Frames and Containers,” mainly because I had not been exposed to Sergei Eisenstein’s “The Dynamic Square.” It’s one of those blindspots that seems to stem from translation and/or international copyright licensing (I had only read the more widely available Film Form and The Film Sense as a student and it appears the edited volume the author cites only went in print in 2010!), but I was thankful that Shackleton’s summary and commentary made it particularly lucid. By the end of the video, I felt I had a pretty strong grasp of what Eisenstein was arguing and how he was arguing it. Obviously, I still want to read the essay for myself, as I think it may help revisit some of my own work on the formal relationships between comic books and film, but I think Shackleton’s piece has great pedagogical value as an illustration, summary, and introduction to one of Eisenstein’s lesser known pieces. It is extremely well crafted and I got a particular thrill when the voice-over finally came around to the significance of the 1:1 “container” that defines the bulk of the piece.

As Richard Misek describes in his introduction, the objective of this assigned exercise was to push a videographic critic to respond to an essay. On that front, Shackleton does a fantastic job of summarizing and illustrating Eisenstein’s ideas, especially when he focuses on older films like those by Duras, Resnais, and The Dynamic Square. Moreover, his attempt to apply his article to contemporary viewing patterns (mobile phone viewing, computer screens) and future technologies (virtual reality) is a provocative spring board into territory more fully mapped by Media Studies scholars like Lev Manovich and the late Anne Friedberg. In short, its a thrilling videographic appetizer and I look forward to assigning it in my classroom as an example of how to vividly and concisely adapt a theorist’s work visually.