Paper short abstract:

Foregrounding ideas of temporal and relational forms of the image and image-practices, this paper seeks to formulate a post-future essayism through examples of time-based analytical acts, that uses video live editing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates a dimension of communality, pertaining to the temporal basis for difference in society, through time-based analytical acts. While steeped in insights, knowledges, and affinities with the intellectual history of essay filmmaking, the paper seeks to formulate a post-future essayism (la Cour 2022), when understood as a precarious filmic methodology and epistemological strategy of the moving image. Post-future essayism sidesteps the optimism of current discourses on the cinematic and the essay film, because its viable trait is the training of care, attention and sensibility: Examined through the practice of video live editing – a fragmentary and momentary compositional effect – and drawing from feminist and decolonial ideas of relationality, that challenge the modernist concept of the self-determined subject (Da Silva (2007), post-future essayism looks towards more circular aesthetics (Schneider 2021).

The paper seeks to contribute to new, much needed, conceptualizations of filmmaking not as an act of intention but as an act of relation; filmmaking not as an act of narrating a place or a community, but as an act of engaging situated conditions upon shifting grounds. To foreground ideas of temporal communality, then, is to critically circumvent the historical and colonial legacy of a historiographic concept of futurity, that continue to characterize more site-bounded desires of achieving communality – in filmmaking practices but also in a wider sense.

The paper provides concrete examples of experimentation with collaborative video live editing, as a basis for discussing post-future essayism and temporal communality in relation to media ecological infrastructures.