Abstract
The growing importance of the audiovisual essay, a form based on using existing footage for critical or research purposes, poses a challenge to many questions which film theory and film-philosophy have been asking since their origins. One of these questions is how to overcome the distance between film theorist and his or her filmic object, potentially how to translate the sensory and affective engagement with moving images into critical or theoretical writing. Digital manipulation presents scholars with many opportunities to narrow this gap, not only to analyze it but also to reflect upon the whole experience of touching the "unattainable object".
There is a certain tendency in videographic film studies that focuses on these issues - we could call it affective, or, more specifically, "haptic". Laura U. Marks's concept of "haptic criticism", concerned with erasing the distance between film and its spectator, proves to be particularly useful in this respect. Audiovisual essayists such as Catherine Grant, Cristina Álvarez López, or Adrian Martin project their cinephiliac experience into manipulation with sound and images in the editing program, using operations such as slow-motion, split-screen, or distortion, and thereby giving the haptic criticism a concrete manifestation.
Nevertheless, this subject-object relation is not unidirectional. The author's haptic manipulation clashes with the editing program. The filmic object imported into video-editing software becomes a mosaic of sounds and images, sorted in a way that makes them infiltrate into the creative process and confront the subject with a different mode of seeing. Some audiovisual essayists incorporate this complex interface, making visible how their cinephiliac-theoretical associations and insights are being reworked through technological mediation.
This essay aims to theorise this "anthropotechnical" interface, which emerges through the encounters between the haptic subject, the responsive yet elusive filmic object, and the mediating video-editing software. First, it focuses on the methodological questions linked to the conversion of haptic criticism into an audiovisual format. Second, it examines the "vitality affects" of haptic theorists and their impact on the shaping of moving images in audiovisual essays. Third, it analyses the position of the filmic object in the editing program and the creative possibilities that result from the clash between human and technological perspectives. Ingmar Bergman's film Persona (1966), viewed through the audiovisual essays by Catherine Grant, serves as a case study that reveals how many forms a single film can attain through these haptic encounters.