[in]Transition

A bit of fun with a ton of collateral damage, Ariel Avissar’s 'What is neo-Snyderism?' wagers all or nothing on a contest between certain types of cinephilia and cinephobia. It is a battle that is implicitly waged between Joss Whedon, defiler of Zack Snyder’s vision for Justice League (Zack Snyder 2017), which does not warrant an auteurist video essay, and Zack Snyder’s revisionist Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Zack Snyder 2021) which clearly does, albeit at the risk of semantic satiation in the matter of Zack Snyder. 

Pull back and the angels of HBO, which financed Snyder’s cut, rise up in the DC extended universe against the devils of Warner Brothers, who hired an uncredited (for his direction) Whedon to take over when Snyder dropped out, causing the Twitterverse to take sides, its armies racing towards each other wielding sarcastic memes. But the impulse to satirise ‘neo-Snyderism’, which is apparently worthy of both a 242-minute director’s cut of a 120-minute film about superheroes and a video essay that pretends to take this seriously, is also directed at the kind of video essays that endorse film as art, such as Kogonada’s seminal 'What is Neorealism?'.

'What is neo-Snyderism?' offers viewers as many ways to travel as a staircase by Escher. Go one way and Avissar’s playful work smirks, but go another and the solemnity of its auteurist adulation seems sincere. Snyder’s authorial urge to pad, to extend the already over-extended DC universe, is almost justified until Avissar admits to losing control of the meaning of the work as it went viral and thereafter conceals his intention. Instead, he mines the territory of this tentative review with enough clauses and footnotes to rival a Borgesian labyrinth and pre-empts any video-essayist who might play his and Kogonada’s films together side-by-side by performing the task himself. 

What Avissar leaves us with is a video essay that cross-examines the academic weight of neo-realism, neo-Snyderism and video essays, which suggests in its summation that the video essay has evolved from the philosophical rhetoric of ‘Que’est-ce que le cinéma?’ to the fan-boy didacticism of ‘Now That’s What I Call Cinema!’ Or Escher-like, perhaps Kogonada’s video essay is to Avissar’s what Cervantes’ Don Quixote is to that by Borges’ Pierre Menard, for whom ‘there is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless’ (Borges, 2000: 69).

Work cited

Borges, Jorge Luis, (2000) ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, Labyrinths, London: Penguin Modern Classics, pp. 62-71.

This playful audiovisual essay is, above all else, a beautifully executed – technically flawless, really – ‘shot-by-shot’ remake of its Kogonada intertext. Music, editing patterns, fonts, the recording textures of the voiceover – everything is so precisely calibrated to conjure the look, sound and feel of the original. It even begins (but wisely doesn’t continue throughout) in black-and-white – anachronistic in this case, but an effective gesture pointing those familiar with 'What is Neo-Realism?’ towards the recognition necessary for pastiche, parody, or any intertextuality to serve its intended purpose. This fact in itself makes this a fascinating addition to the field of audiovisual film studies: has an ‘experiment’ of quite this kind ever happened before? And could one ever imagine its like in the realm of written film scholarship? 

Mentioning pastiche, parody and purpose above begins to hint at the crucial matter of the essay’s tone, and the author’s motivation for applying Kogonada’s format specifically to these two versions of Justice League (2017 and 2021). Plainly, there is the fundamental unexpected but irresistible correlation of subject matters. Admittedly, Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon’s pair of films hardly map perfectly onto the two 1953 movies examined by Kogonada: for one thing, whereas Selznick’s Indiscretion of an American Wife simply sheared down De Sica’s (prior) Terminal Station, Whedon’s (prior) Justice League often uses wholly different footage than Snyder’s cut (finished subsequently). Yet there is ample overlap to justify the exercise. 

Both essays examine the differences between two versions of films that were re-edited by Hollywood studios without input from their original directors – directors who are certainly both, albeit in very different ways, definable as auteurs. Both pairs of films also share similarities in how the alternative cuts of their films differ. That ‘What is Neo-Snyderism?’ uncovers such similarities is partly dictated by the imitative nature of its exercise, yes, but the evidence compiled speaks for itself, and has only required explication – not manipulation – to neatly fit the concept. Eschewing a focus on major narrative/thematic differences, the author concentrates (like Kogonada) on strategies of pacing, shot length and point of view that act subtly to slow and stall narrative trajectory, complicating slightly but perceptibly the film’s dramatization of its protagonists’ purposive actions. Snyder’s film does allow comparative longueurs, lingering longer than Whedon on plot-adjacent details, letting events play out more fully, inviting background players to the fore, and so on. Unsurprisingly, these strategies are of a different order and kind to de Sica’s, but part of the skill of the essay lies in deftly demonstrating their mere presence, whatever we make of their significance and value.

Significance and value bring us back to the question of tone, and to the intriguing supporting statement. This statement self-consciously makes a feature of withholding the impetus behind the essay. Instead, its focus is the divergent interpretations of the video that different online viewers have reported – mostly concerning different answers to the question: how ironic is this, and towards what? For me, this approach threatened to – though ultimately did not quite – lessen my appreciation of the essay itself. I will try briefly to explain why.

The initial draft of the statement referenced Jonathan Swift’s classic ironic essay ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729). This seemed a strange choice; and, although that reference has now been excised, explaining why its original inclusion struck me as odd will help to clarify my point. For all its apparent straight-facedness, Swift’s irony possesses clarity in satiric target and utter unambiguity in perspective. This is what Wayne Booth would call a paradigmatic instance of ‘stable’ irony, which desires to leave readers little room to doubt its (implied) author’s true feelings about their subject. In contrast, by so revelling in the confusion concerning the degree of irony at work in their audiovisual essay (this is described as ‘the most interesting part of making the video’), the author’s supporting statement seeks to offer (or recast?) it as an example of Booth’s ‘unstable’ irony, whose aim is indefinite ambiguity regarding what views the implied author may or may not genuinely hold.

The potentially indefinite ambiguity that may accompany irony (Kierkegaard famously called it ‘infinite absolute negativity’) can be interesting. But, if it is to be critically interesting, should that ambiguity not ideally serve some purpose rhetorically? Should it not at least relate in some conceptual way to one’s critical project? Since the author’s supporting statement at least makes clear their original intention wasn’t to create this form of ambiguity (stating, ‘my intention seemed pretty self-evident’), the question I was left asking was: what is critically interesting about having inadvertently done so in relation to this particular subject matter? Does it somehow connect to the themes of the films, for instance? Does something telling arise by using double-sided ambiguity to discuss Snyder specifically? Could it be because of the apparently extreme sincerity of some aspects of his passionate fandom, for instance? Perhaps because some of Snyder’s films – especially Sucker Punch (2011) and 300 (2006) – have themselves sometimes been defended as instances of Verhoeven-like self-parody? Maybe to question the idea of authorial control itself in some broad sense?

In the absence of an explanation, it seems the ambiguity regarding the degree of irony intended is of less critical than aesthetic significance. (The possibility that zero irony was ever intended appears foreclosed by the concept and title, as well as the phrasing of certain lines like, ‘…who are about to sniff Aquaman’s sweater’). The author simply prefers not to clarify their sincere critical perspective on the subject of their work. A posture common to the ‘artist’s statement’ in galleries, it is a prerogative used less commonly in the realm of film scholarship. Or, at least, not written film scholarship: in Issue 15 of The Cine-Files Ian Garwood noted that a common tendency in supporting statements published in this journal  was, ‘the acceptance of ambiguity as a positive value’ (perhaps this convention itself partly influenced the author’s approach?).

This is plainly to raise again perennial issues concerning the (often) designedly blurred boundaries between scholarly audiovisual essays and audiovisual art – now from the perspective of the author’s statement rather than the videographic work. Despite my reservations, those issues seemed to be revisited in provocative enough fashion here to request no revisions to the statement (though a couple have ultimately been made). Certainly none is required for the essay itself, which (to reiterate) I consider to be playfully but genuinely critically revelatory of its subject matter – however ironically inflected those revelations may in fact be.

Endnote 

In what they irresistibly call the ‘Extended Cut’ of their statement(!), the author offers a few explanations for withholding their original intentions. They ask, ‘Why foreclose such productive avenues of textual interpretation by stating the “proper” way of understanding my video? (And is adhering to my original intention truly the “proper” way to understand it?)’

This raises again the comparison with the artist’s statement, in which wishing to avoid ‘foreclosing […] textual interpretations’ of one’s work is indeed entirely conventional. I’ll simply note, firstly, that it is clearly far less conventional in the field of (written) scholarship; and, secondly, I also presume that most readers of film scholarship do indeed conventionally see their role as requiring them to attempt to grasp as fully as possible the critical meanings and perspectives that an article’s author intended to communicate.

They conclude by quoting one of the comments prompted by their video – '"After all, there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people's eyes”' – and offering in response, ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself'. This demonstrates once more a tendency to assume the value (perhaps necessity?) of mobilising conventionally artistic modes of interpretation in order to grasp as fully as possible the significance of (this example of) audiovisual film scholarship – in contrast to the interpretive procedures conventionally assumed necessary for appreciating textual film scholarship. This still strikes me as ultimately a statement of aesthetic taste rather than critical logic, but it is entirely valid on those terms precisely because it prompts useful reflection on this very permeability and oscillation between communicative/rhetorical and expressive/aesthetic modes of address, which designedly characterises so much audiovisual film scholarship today.

Work cited

Garwood, Ian. 2020. 'Writing about the scholarly video essay: Lessons from [in]Transition‘s creator statements', The Cine-Files, 15, http://www.thecine-files.com/writing-about-the-scholarly-video-essay-les...