Brink Literary Journal
Issue no. 9
Access
Online Read
Free Public Access to selected work from this issue
 Psilocybin Journey Notes 10/27/22Subhaga Crystal Bacon |  Hair Salon + Personal Attention ASMR in Remembrance of My Mother’s VoiceLiz Kerin |
|---|
Video Essays + Cinepoetry
Enter the Video Essay
On the brink of ACCESS has us thinking about hatches, portals, new points of contact. Perhaps fittingly, in Issue 9, we’re kicking off a new section of the journal that will feature hybrid forms of video literature readers can access from the printed page via QR code.
(THUNDER RUMBLING)
The video essay and the cinepoem are genres of hybrid writing that combine artful text with moving image, often in a very short form. They do this by letting writing and video footage take turns setting the tone, delivering the images, or playing the role of narrator. What we see across this genre are pieces of literature backed by footage that is more than a supercut, but less than a documentary. Or perhaps they’re videos driven by texts that are less than a voiceover, but more than a song lyric. Faster than a mood board, louder than a screensaver, the literary video is a genre that has long anticipated audiences who read long poems, call grandmothers, and binge TikTok all on the same screen.
(LAUGHTER)
This issue features videos by Carolina Ebeid, Richard Frailing, and Sophie Paquette, three writers who work in both text and video, and who each have incorporated captions into three very different video forms. Subtitles—audio made visible—are by no means a requirement of a video poem or essay. Early versions of the genre rarely included them. But these three writers show us how the open subtitle is both more and less than a portal for access.
In “Diaspora Study Slide Projector,” Carolina Ebeid unfurls a family archive—“pictures from New Jersey, Baghdad, Florida, California”—to demonstrate the layers of time, language, and place that survive in the analog slide projector. This piece is interested in overlapping margins, in how the human figure, dressed in a white shirt, has the propensity to behave like a screen. Using text and projected image, Ebeid accesses both the “tongue mother” and “the mother tongue," overlaid in shades of surrender.
Richard Frailing’s “Flying Dreams” stages a conversation between an artist and a therapist who asks him encouraging questions, such as, “People fly in dreams for different reasons. Do you feel like you had to escape?” But the footage playing behind their dialogue evades answers as seamlessly as the artist does. The film reels capture women cutting cake, a man with a baby in his arms, while two voices consider the risks of inheriting scabs along with psychosis. “Flies don’t fly, they swim; the air to them is like syrup or sap,” muses the artist as documents of a personal history hover, paddling just out of reach.
Sophie Paquette’s “I Caught on Fire for This” is a video essay full of humor and longing. This is a project about deep time, inevitable crushes, and the paralysis of the internet age. Voiced impossibly by miniature porcelain figures, Paquette demonstrates once again her ability to draw both blood and tears by combining text and a set of deceptively simple visual elements.