Abstract

Since 2013, Adrian Martin and his collaborator Cristina Álvarez López have been making audiovisual essays – experiments in film criticism and analysis using the format of re-edited images and sounds to produce a revamped mode of commentary upon the object. They conceive this practice as a type of multi-media, mixing written texts with audiovisual montage through the presentational possibilities allowed by digital publishing. This final chapter of Mysteries of Cinema isolates the literary element of these experiments: a selection of the short, telegrammatic, self-contained essays that accompany the audiovisual files. In these pieces, many themes, motifs and ideas from the preceding chapters of the book are recalled and recast in a different way, opening a new path in the writer's trajectory.

Keywords: Audiovisual essay, film criticism, cinephilia, Alfred Hitchcock, Asian cinema

These are incomplete texts – incomplete, because they were written to accompany the online audiovisual essays that we have collaboratively made for various websites in the US and Europe (predominantly MUBI, as well as Transit, de Filmkrant, Sight and Sound – and Fandor until it expunged much of its past video content) between 2013 and 2016. However, these notes are composed in such a way as never merely to reproduce or repeat (and still less to explain) what is in the videos themselves; rather, they offer a supplement, in the fullest sense of that word – variously contextualising, extending, and probing the works. The interplay of such writing and digital image/sound montage is part of what we see (and have proposed elsewhere) as the polyphonic, multi-medial possibility of this new form of criticism. Duly detached and placed on their own in this present context of publication, we think of these written texts as poetic-critical fragments: their condensed, at times cryptic form allows a dense, telegraphic energy that is unlike, exactly, either journalistic or academic writing. In them, certain ideas, figures, names and obsessions that are scattered throughout earlier pages and phases of this book are rewired, reignited, not retrospectively or nostalgically, but reinvented thanks to the creative process of collaboration, and the renewed intimacy with materials that the audiovisual essay form allows.