Video Essay Showcase: Constraints (Bilkent University)

Coordinated by Colleen Kennedy-Karpat and Wickham Flannagan

Oct 2026

The video essays presented in this showcase were initially created as part of a three-day workshop held in June 2026 at Bilkent University (Ankara, Türkiye) on the topic of Constraints. Participants were given different sets of parameters each day, with the expectation to select one to begin drafting as a work of videographic criticism. After concluding the workshop, participants were invited to develop their favorite draft for inclusion in the showcase. All seven participants revised their work, engaging with and pushing beyond the feedback discussions that took place during the event.

The TV is Dreaming: Down the Rabbit Hole

by Wickham Flannagan

Jan 2026

David Lynch’s 2002 web series entitled RABBITS is a comfortably confounding addition to his oeuvre, depicting rabbits as personified animal deities existing within their own uncanny, sitcom-infused nightmare. Lynch’s rabbits exist as a unique symbol from a singular artist that are in keeping with previously surreal uses of the rabbit animal within different forms of media. A curious thing occurs when Lynch adapts his own work within his feature film, Inland Empire (2006). The titular rabbits within RABBITS become a metaphorical bedrock in an otherwise enigmatic film. Including the rabbit web series’ characters within this film creates a familiarity for the viewer because Lynch provides a very specific television sitcom aesthetic framework. Read More →

The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century: “Parasite and the Ones Below…”

by Wickham Flannagan

Nov 2025

Wickham Flannagan’s “Parasite and the Ones Below…” explores the inherent connotations of being one of the ninety-nine below the eternal number one. To deconstruct the meaning from this kind of relationship, this video essay is a juxtaposition between the top of the mountain and the titular ones below, exploring not only their visual similarities, but also their thematic repetitions. Within this list of greats, such a hierarchy is not ultimately as important as the communal connections that all one hundred of these movies share. Read More →

(Medieval) Poetry in Motion (Pictures)

by Colleen Kennedy-Karpat

Jun 2023

This video essay considers how THE GREEN KNIGHT (2021) invokes authenticity of feeling rather than history, as medievalist Amber Dunai has also argued in her review of David Lowery’s adaptation. Lowery’s film adopts a visual language that echoes the defamiliarizing poetic structures of its source, the 14th-century Middle English poem SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT. Its patterns of formal expression also diverge markedly from conventional medieval representation on film.

A version of this video essay was first presented at the Association of Adaptation Studies 2023 Conference, University of Birmingham, UK. Read More →

The Shandy Experience

by Adnan Şahin

2024

Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, being regarded as an “unfilmable novel”, is adapted by Michael Winterbottom in 2005. Yet, his unorthodox adaptation generates discussion about whether the film can be regarded as an adaptation or not. In this video essay, traditional and modern approaches to adaptation are discussed. Then, Winterbottom’s film’s status as an adaptation is studied with three main chapters: meta quality, rendering of chaos, and the obsession with the human body. Tristram Shandy is an experience that leads its audience to the middle of the ongoing discussion of adaptation. Thus, this video essay attempts to talk about different approaches to adaptation by centering Tristram Shandy as the focal point of its study.