This is our first themed collection, one which we hope will inspire other makers to explore (and share) any outtakes from their practice. We are very grateful to Alan O’Leary for taking the time to submit this collection and statement and to Will Knowles for writing a letter in response.

Our Definitions

• ‘Fragment’ – what you submit for inclusion in the journal via our online submission form
• ‘Collection’ – a regular editorial gathering and reflecting on the Fragments submitted.

The four fragments collected here are outtakes from Men Shouting: A History in 7 Episodes, a video essay project about films on the 2008 financial crash (O’Leary 2023).

Inspired by the deformative work of scholars like Mark Sample (2012) and Jason Mittell (2019, 2021), Men Shouting was conceived to develop and test a parametric approach to the analysis of the film material, and, among other sources, it drew from the exercises used to teach videographic criticism at the Scholarship in Sound and Image workshops at Middlebury (Keathley & Mittell 2019).

As published, Men Shouting deals with just three films — The Big Short (2015), Margin Call (2011) and Too Big to Fail (2011)— but I originally intended to include a fourth, 99 Homes (2014), and had been working with the film for some months before deciding not to use it. I remember discussing early work in progress from the Men Shouting project with the IVERN research group, and Juan Llamas-Rodriguez wondered if 99 Homes was too different in tone and theme from the other three films, being concerned with the victims rather than the stewards or beneficiaries of the financial crash. I was relieved at Juan’s suggestion that I omit the film: the project was already taking a long time and risked becoming unwieldy.

The published version of Men Shouting contains seven episodes (plus a coda); if I had included 99 Homes, the permutational form of the video essay —which devoted an episode to each individual film, and then all combinations of the films — would have generated a full fifteen episodes, as indicated in the table.

Table: Permutational form of the abandoned four-film version of Men Shouting
Episode	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15
Films	(a)	(b)	(c)	(d)	(a)+(b)	(a)+(c)	(a)+(d)	(b)+(c)	(b)+(d)	(c)+(d)	(a)+(b)+(c)	(a)+(b)+(d)	(a)+(c)+(d)	(b)+(c)+(d)	(a)+(b)+(c)+(d)
Key: (a) The Big Short; (b) Margin Call; (c) Too Big To Fail; (d) 99 Homes

With the exclusion of 99 Homes, the four exported fragments collected here were abandoned in an echoey sub-folder of my university OneDrive, sometime in 2020. I dig them out now not so much because I’m persuaded of their quality or intrinsic interest — the first is banal, and the others whimsical — but because their very existence suggests the possibilities of a longer form video essay built with parametric and deformative means.

In truth, certain of the episodes actually included in the published Men Shouting are also banal or slight (I leave it to the viewer to decide which). But I would assert that their relation to other episodes in the published video essay — relationships established through repetition, recapitulation, elaboration, etc. — grants them substance. Those ‘certain episodes’ are themselves fragments, rescued from abjection by their place in a whole. Perhaps the abandoned fragments published here could have achieved substance in similar fashion? And if the three-film Men Shouting is a kind of EP, might the four-film version have become an LP—maybe even a double album?

I allude to defunct forms associated with vinyl because one of the points of reference for Men Shouting was the debut album, Pink Flag (1977), by art-punk band Wire, which features twenty-one tracks in its thirty-six minutes. Several of the songs on Pink Flag are fleetingly short, some under a minute in length, operating precisely like song-fragments that one critic described as ‘shrapnel’ (Tangari 2006); but even the briefest materialise an idea, fashion a hook, that helps make the album more than the totality of its fragments.

I tried to make Men Shouting work in a similar way, and I ask myself if the abandoned four-film version, even built from brittle little fragments like those exhumed here, had the potential for something strikingly ambitious. And might this thought experiment of a long-form permutational videographic analysis suggest a possible future work, an epistemic-aesthetic edifice assembled from fragments, that performed its parametric operations at an unusually large and complex scale?

The four fragments

Fragment 1 is a version of the video pechakucha used to teach basic editing skills on the first day of the Middlebury Scholarship in Sound and Image workshop, and contains ten video clips of six seconds each, coupled with a continuous minute-long audio segment, all from 99 Homes. As Chris Keathley and Jason Mittell (2019) have observed: ‘One of the first responses that parameter-based assignments prompt in the maker […] is to apply more parameters. That is, with the Videographic PechaKucha, makers [tend] not to select clips with total freedom, but to select and organize them in some logical and limiting way.’ In this case, I decided to alternate images of the protagonist seen from behind with extreme long shots of urban and suburban landscapes. The result is not very interesting, but the landscape shots might have motivated the selection of similar shots from the other three films in a potential fifteen-episode version of Men Shouting. Perhaps such images could have played under the alphabetized montages of financial jargon that erupt over black screen in the published version of the video essay.

Fragment 2 combines material from the Italian dubs of 99 Homes andThe Big Short, as well as the original English. It might been more apt to use a Spanish dub given the Florida location of the scenes and the presence of Hispanic characters, but the choice of another language encourages linguistic estrangement. Much of Men Shouting is concerned with mystifying jargon that has material impact on ordinary lives: in this fragment, officials speak a ‘foreign language’ in the act of evicting people from their homes.

Fragment 3. Profanity was a key part of the musicality and menace of the masculine idiom that my video aspired to capture. My collaborator, programmer Lucie Vršovská, extracted all the uses of the word ‘fuck’ from both 99 Homes and Margin Call, and I experimented with combining the short clips using multiscreen, stills, and eventually, in the version here, fade-out combined with omission of the word itself in the layered audio. I like that the emphatic appeal of the Teutonic monosyllable (or is it Old Norse?) is, at once, signalled and suppressed. And does the evanescent quality of the fading clips visualise something of the ephemeral character even of scripted speech? Maybe, but the audio is chaotic and fade-out technique undermotivated: this unsatisfying fragment is straightforwardly an entry in the failure diary.

The problem with Fragment 4, shaped as a purposefully inexact palindrome, is that it imposes too much of my authorial will on the found materials. I observed in Men Shouting a principle of imminent critique and employed parameters to surface the texture of the films rather than impose my own interpretation. And so, I doubt this episode would have survived into a fifteen-episode version of Men Shouting (why is it in black and white? I don’t remember), but I would have aimed to retain the suggestive juxtaposition of the perspectives of the powerful and powerless, a juxtaposition absent from the shorter published video essay.

The accursed, shared

So much academic labour is wasted or goes unrecognised. Failed funding bids might be the most prominent thieves of energy and esteem, but there’s a special kind of grief reserved for abandoned projects. All that effort and faith invested in an article never published, in a talk left undeveloped, in ideas or artefacts that failed to find the time or the space for inclusion.

In composing that self-pitying lament, I remind myself that for Georges Bataille the key problem for human society, and so also, in a sense, for our activity as scholars, is not scarcity but surplus—an excess of energy that must be spent, unproductively, as part of what Bataille called the ‘accursed share’. In that light, the abandoned work on 99 Homes in the Men Shouting project is part of a generative excess characteristic of exploratory videographic practice. I have written elsewhere of such a practice as a ‘workshop of potential scholarship’ that experimentally produces more false or potential starts than any final output can contain. This is of course the ethos articulated in the Fragments manifesto, which defines a fragment as ‘something unfinished, abandoned’ and values process over product, experiment over completion, and the making‑visible of work that would ‘otherwise never see the light of day’. Read in that frame, the leftover drafts collected here belong to a general economy of videographic making in which such expenditures are not straightforwardly wasteful (though certainly not straightforwardly useful), but intrinsic to the vitality of the work. Let me think of sharing them not as an act of salvage or redemption of lost labour, but as a celebration of the surplus generated by, or as, a luxury scholarship.

You can read Will Knowles’ letter in response to this collection here.

References

Bataille, G. (1988). The accursed share: Volume I (R. Hurley, Trans.). Zone Books.

Keathley, C. and Mittell, J. (2019). ‘Scholarship in Sound & Image: A Pedagogical Essay’. The videographic essay: Criticism in sound & image, edited by C. Keathley, J. Mittell, and C. Grant. Scalar: http://videographicessay.org/works/videographic-essay/scholarship-in-sound–image?path=content

Mittell, J. (2019). ‘Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method’. Debates in the digital humanities 2019, edited byM. Gold and L. Klein. University of Minnesota Press. 224-242: https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/b6dea70a-9940-497e-b7c5-930126fbd180#ch20

Mittell, J. (2021). ‘Deformin’ in the Rain: How (and Why) to Break a Classic Film’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 15:1: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/15/1/000521/000521.html

O’Leary, A. (2021). ‘Workshop of potential scholarship: Manifesto for a parametric videographic criticism’. NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies. 10:1, 75-98: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16269

O’Leary, A. (2023). Men Shouting: A history in 7 episodes. [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 10:2: https://doi.org/10.16995/intransition.11389

Sample, M (2012). ‘Notes towards a Deformed Humanities’. Blog essay posted 2 May: http://www.samplereality.com/2012/05/02/notes-towards-a-deformed-humanities/

Tangari, J. (2006). Review of Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, and 154 by Wire. Picthfork 5 May: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11866-pink-flag-chairs-missing-154/

About the maker

Alan O’Leary is Associate Professor of Film and Media at Aarhus University. He has published video essays in venues including 16:9, ZFM, and [in]Transition, where he is co-editor. His Men Shouting: A History in 7 Episodes was awarded best video essay in the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) Practice Research Awards 2024. Among his books is a study of the 1966 film classic The Battle of Algiers (Mimesis, 2019), and his ‘Manifesto for a parametric videographic criticism’ appeared in NECSUS in 2021. 

Tags – parametric, deformative, permutational, Georges Bataille