El video-ensayo. La escritura o el montaje soberano

The word «writing» is more and more a central word in the contemporary audiovisual scenario, characterized by a fruitful «impurity». Precisely because we are increasingly witnessing a convergence between practices that belong to literary or non-fiction writing, with the use of images and editing. A subterrean but powerful wave crosses apparently different practices such as literature and cinema: an idea of hybridization, of research of a constitutive impurity that a certain cinema and a certain literature have in common. One of the trends that is more and more present in the study and analysis of media is that of the video-essay or Videographic Criticism, in which new forms of editing and writing about and with images are merged. This essay explores this trend, identifying some of its founding moments (Eisenstein), recognizing its potential and hypothesizing a possible mapping of the forms that have spread in recent years. In all these forms, the aspiration of the montage to become a form of discourse vibrates in different ways, not to replace the word, but to integrate it, hybridize it, discover its intimate nature as an image. This mobile field must be explored, and this is one of the theoretical, aesthetic and critical challenges of our time.