Video Essays

The Eleventh Island: Activating Silent Histories through Video

Janilda Bartolomeu

Essay by Janilda Bartolomeu, filmmaker and the founder and owner of the film production company The Creole Lens. "In recent years, while developing my video and filmmaking practice, I discovered a fascination with this idea of metaphorical lenses. This fascination coincided with my research into the Cape Verde Islands' largely undocumented histories."

Fireworks for Myself: Drake's Toosie Slide Music Video and The Politics of Going Viral

Jason King

Hip-hop superstar Drake's 5 minute 12 second music video for Toosie Slide is a sad boy meditation on soulless rooms and lifeless splendour. Released on 3 April, it became one of the most provocative and controversial visual commentaries of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this essay, Jason King reflects on Drake's promotion of his music through video virality at a time of global contagion, reaffirming problematic class distinctions and the tension between the black indoors and outdoors in the midst of an unprecedented health crisis and worldwide economic instability.

From TopPop to Fata Banana. Dutch music television in the 1970s

Liselotte Doeswijk

In the 1970s television shows, pop music programmes and musical theater provided fertile grounds for experiments with audiovisual language from which eventually the music video sprouted. To illustrate this, Liselotte Doeswijk discusses a number of underexposed or underestimated - and often lost - experiments from Dutch television history.

MTV: Domesticity, Family and the End of Programming

Léa-Catherine Szacka

At the start of the 1980s, American pay television channel MTV began showing around-the-clock music videos to an avid young audience. Generating a non-stop sequence of clips targeting those aged 12 to 34, MTV infiltrated the domestic space, disrupting programming and the traditional family routine.