Five video essays designed and produced by Barbara Zecchi, director of film studies at UMass Amherst, made it into the “Best Video Essays of 2021” by Sight & Sound, the prestigious monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI).
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In particular, “Silence and Words: Voice-over and Trauma in Coixet & Campion,” was defined by German video-essayist Evelyn Kreutzer, Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, as “a powerful, deeply affective video on cinematic sound, specifically the transcendence of internal and external sound, experience and narration.” Dutch cinema scholar Jaap Kooijman, University of Amsterdam, defines “The Black and White Coffee Set: Social/Racial Mobility in Ana Muylaert’s film Que horas ela volta” as “brilliant in its simplicity.”
The list also featured a video-essay produced by Celia Sainz, one of Zecchi's graduate advisees. Zecchi's undergraduate research assistant Emily Su Bin Ko '22, a Film Studies major, is also mentioned as one of the emerging voices in the field. T
hanks to Zecchi's work in video-graphic criticism, the Digital Humanities Initiative and the Film Studies Program at UMass Amherst have been acknowledged as an emerging hubs in this new field. The upcoming "The Videoessay: A Conference" co-organized by Barbara Zecchi and Daniel Pope and to be hosted at UMass Amherst in September 2022 will attract leading video-essayists from all over the world, and will address theory, practice, pedagogy, and future directions in field.