Saturday     11:30
The Chopin House
2024, 6 min., English

Director: Alan O'Leary

Classif. & Me (Laird’s Constraint)’ was made in response to a set of constraints extracted by Ariel Avissar from Eye-Camera-Ninagawa (Laird 2023), a virtuoso video essay by Colleen Laird about Japanese director Ninagawa Mika’s Helter Skelter (2012). Riffing on Eye-Camera-Ninagawa in Classif. & Me allowed me to express, in a playful and ambivalent way that ironizes my own scholarly persona, a set of ongoing concerns about the nature of videographic enquiry in what might be dubbed the age of the attainable text.

Alan O’Leary is Associate Professor of Film and Media at Aarhus University. He has published video essays in venues including 16:9, ZFM, and [in]Transition, where he is co-editor. His Men Shouting: A History in 7 Episodes was awarded best video essay in the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) Practice Research Awards 2024. Among his books is a study of the 1966 film classic The Battle of Algiers (Mimesis, 2019), and his Manifesto for a parametric videographic criticism appeared in NECSUS in 2021.