This video essay uses Alex Garland's 2018 film Annihilation for its contribution to the collaborative project, The Essay Library Anthology Vol. 7. The theme is "adaptation." It premiered on Saturday, June 15, 2024.

*Nominated in the 2023 Sight and Sound poll for the best video essays of the year.

This video (2023) places Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem" in direct conversation with the 1961 film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's critically-acclaimed play "A Raisin in the Sun." Hansberry's work takes its title from Hughes's poem.

I made this video essay for the SCMS 2023 Videographic Telephilia seminar. It looks at Michaela Cole’s compelling television series “I May Destroy You,” and considers the nonlinearity of sexual trauma recovery alongside nonlinear access to episodes on streaming platforms.

Remember The Stepford Wives? This video essay concentrates on one of the film's little-known characters and imagines her fate in Stepford.

“Laughter isn’t even the other side of tears / It is tears turned outside out.”

(Alice Walker, Where the Path of Life Leads Us)

In her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman describes the “chorus” as a group of young women whose radical imaginations offer other ways of seeing and experiencing the world. Their gathering together creates space for open rebellion, black radicalism and refusal, collaboration and transformation.

In this visual essay, I use looping, slowed, and briefly stilled images to extend the duration of Nettie and Celie’s carefree expressions of girlish joy.

The goal of this visual essay is to experience and understand the world as Lady, Fily, Adiatou, and Marieme do as they make their way home.

This video explores how the overlapping temporalities of Black girlhood depicted in "Jig-a-Bobo" (Lovecraft Country, 2020) perform an expressionistic mode of cinematic thinking that interrupts anti-Black representational practices.

These days, self-isolation and social distancing are the new normal.

This video essay looks at framing, the use of color, and fantastic realism in Everything, Everything (Stella Meghie, 2017), a romantic teen drama about a girl with a severe immunodeficiency disorder, living in protective isolation, who finds herself after finding romance. It also explores how gendered biases against girl-centric stories train us to devalue films about girls’ lives.

Didn’t love Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017) the first time around? Neither did we.

This video essay takes a closer look at Lady Bird and explores how the idea that “love = attention” makes the film a must-see.

Why is Hollywood so uncomfortable with ambitious women?

In this video, I look at Aaron Sorkin's 2017 film Molly's Game and explore how female ambition in American cinema is often framed as an illness.

In these films, female hysteria is something like a virus...and a rite of passage. Girls' bodies shake and quiver. Pubescent girls faint or experience uncontrollable fits of laughter.

What is “women’s work?” This video essay explores how a newlywed's struggle to become pregnant is emotional and physical work.

We're excited to share our first set of video essays on October 11th, The International Day of the Girl!

But first...here's Desirée's story about how she developed her "cinematic side eye."