Writing in Motion: A Visual Essay for Jafar Panahi's <em>This is Not a Film<em> (2011)

By Behrang Garakani

Video essays are electric. We adapt written essays with visual and aural effects. Video essayists harness their words as critics, analyzers, and theorizers and electrify the audiences' senses. We dialogue with the films, the filmmakers, and other scholars. We apply academic rigor yet defy traditional written forms. 

We, the video essayists, write with words, light, and sound. Effects transform into affects. Our recuts of media serve as homage to the original texts and as deliberate protests, urging viewers to see form and content from different perspectives. Jafar Panahi's This is Not a Film (2011) navigates various positions within the confines of an apartment, layering its narrative with neorealistic protest. 

Panahi, an Iranian director repeatedly arrested for his artistry, crafted this film under house arrest, clandestinely challenging the constraints of the Islamic regime. Let me guide you through this landscape from my vantage point as an Iranian immigrant living in a society freer than Panahi's.

—-

A media technologist and former digital game executive, Behrang Garakani works at the Whitney Museum of American Art and is a professor of video essays at Columbia University.