Lavik Response (Video Essays in the Classroom) – Yiran Xiao

I think the Video Essay can somehow replace the traditional essays in other classes. According to Erlend Lavik in “The Video Essay: The Future of Academic Film and Television Criticism”, the audiovisual film is capable of illustrating and exemplifying by quotations. It takes the format that a variety of clips and quotations can be put together to convey the authors’ arguments. Even though some scholars argue that the center of Video Essays still focus on the text, it is significantly shown that visual elements offers possibilities to make the text to stand out more than itself. Just as Erlend Lavik points out, the audiovisual film “ought to contribute something that mere text on its own cannot”. The value comes from that. Similarly, Video Essays can be utilized wisely in classes like history, sociology, and even math and sciences. For liberal arts classes, the Video Essays can enhance the ability of arguments and analysis. The traditional essays may only provide one aspect of the perspective and sometimes being long-winded for readers to assimilate. Video Essays not only dig into other perspectives, but also make the video more accessible and enjoyable. Admittedly, Video Essays might bear the contingency that they ignore the essential part of the essay itself and focus more on the images. Since in classes like history and sociology, the core is on the text and images play a more auxiliary role. I think it is still “legitimate” academic work.  Video Essay is just another form of academic work. The combination of artistic and academic work make it looks like “dilettante”, but it actually possess the same amount of work and academic value as the traditional essays .