I've been playing around with creating video essays, inspired by the work of various film critics and scholars who have been exploring this form. Many of these video essays have been published, often with accompanying text essays, by Press Play.
Embedding them all makes the page load very slowly, so I've only placed a small selection here. (You can see everything I've done on my Vimeo pages.)
The Good Extra is subtitled "a movie memoir" and tells the story of my high school experience of being an "extra" in a major Hollywood movie.
The Face Of is an essay about the faces of Greta Garbo and Jean-Claude van Damme.
Seeing War is an essay about war movies and the act of watching them.
A Train Between Worlds offers some thoughts on one of Wes Anderson's least-appreciated movies, and one I particularly love, The Darjeeling Limited.
Painter with a Movie Camera: A Tribute to Tony Scott is exactly what its title says, a tribute to one of the great action directors, a man who, especially in the last decade of his life, wedded avant-garde and blockbuster aesthetics.
Vigilante Man - Eastwood and Gran Torino is a companion piece to my earlier video about Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales.
And a few years ago some friends and I created this 40-minute psychological horror movie:
Meat from Matthew Cheney on Vimeo.
