[Commlist] New Issue Open Screens (8.2) published: Thinking in the Timeline: Videographic Dissection as Analytical Method

/Open Screens /would like to announce the publication of its latest 
Special Issue “Thinking in the Timeline: Videographic Dissection as 
Analytical Method” (Vol 8. Issue 2). Edited by Ariel Avissar, Barbara 
Zecchi, Colleen Laird and Matthew Payne. This Special Issue explores the 
use of the editing timeline as a reflective methodological tool, an 
analytical lens, and a testing ground for delivering meaning. The 
Special Issue includes an Introduction, five video-essays and a podcast. 
As always, it is available open access and you can access it here 
https://openscreensjournal.com/issue/1749/info/ 
<https://openscreensjournal.com/issue/1749/info/>:

*Simplified Table of contents: *

 1. *Introduction to “Thinking in the Timeline: Videographic Dissection
    as Analytical Method”
    <https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/29118/>*, Ariel Avissar
 2. *Silent Eyes and the Politics of the Timeline: Dissecting /With
    Hitchcock in Jerusalem/
    <https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/26041/>*, Iddo Better
    Pocker**
 3. *Videographic Dissection: Anatomy of a Peace in Two Acts
    <https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/26263/>*, Carol
    Pinzon Masmela**
 4. *_In a Galaxy a Wipe Transition Away
    <https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/26150/>_*_, Meg Healy**_
 5. *Dissecting the Dissected: The Split Screen in El año del
    descubrimiento (dir. López Carrasco, 2020), Eva
    Álvarez-Vázquez<https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/26128/>*
 6. *The Severed Timeline*
    <https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/26288/>, Yaron Baruch
 7. *Thinking in the Timeline: A Conversation with The Video Essay
    Podcast,* with Ariel Avissar, Lucy Fife Donaldson, Colleen Laird and
    Matthew Payne<https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/29640/>

*Table of contents with abstracts:*

*Introduction to “Thinking in the Timeline: Videographic Dissection as 
Analytical Method” 
<https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/29118/>, Ariel Avissar*

This introduction situates the special issue within the 2025 “Reframing 
the Argument” workshop from which it emerged, and outlines the 
“Videographic Dissection” exercise as a process-oriented method for 
audiovisual research. It frames the editing timeline as a site of 
inquiry and material thinking. The introduction highlights the 
contributions’ diverse outcomes—from concrete insights to productive 
failures—and presents them as experiments in developing videographic 
methodology. This approach sees the timeline as an epistemological space 
in which knowledge is generated through making, and in which editing 
functions as a mode of thinking.

*Silent Eyes and the Politics of the Timeline: Dissecting /With 
Hitchcock in Jerusalem/ 
<https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/26041/>, Iddo Better Pocker*

This video essay employs the method of videographic dissection to 
examine With Hitchcock in Jerusalem (1966), an Israeli state-sponsored 
propaganda film produced for American television. It shifts from the 
metaphorical timelines constructed in historical scholarship to the 
literal, visual timelines of videographic criticism. Using color-coded 
parallel timelines, original shots of Alfred Hitchcock are separated 
from later intercut views of Jerusalem added at the request of Mayor 
Teddy Kollek. The visualization reveals that roughly half of the film 
was assembled without Hitchcock present, after his departure from 
Israel. The work demonstrates how such insertions can direct the gaze of 
“silent eyes,” shaping what is seen and silencing what is not – a 
reminder of the enduring power of propaganda to frame historical perception.

*<https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/26263/>*

*Videographic Dissection: Anatomy of a Peace in Two Acts, Carol Pinzon 
Masmela, <https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/26263/>*

In 2016, Colombia lived through an extraordinary political twist: the 
government and the world’s oldest active guerrilla group, the FARC-EP, 
signed a peace agreement twice, within just two months. The first 
signing, on September 26, was followed by an unexpected turn when a 
national plebiscite rejected the accord. Forced back to the negotiating 
table, both sides reworked the deal and signed a new version on November 
26. This video dissects the televised broadcasts of both ceremonies, 
placing them in dialogue to explore what emerges when key moments are 
isolated and examined along a timeline. It invites the viewer to see not 
only the analytical potential of this method, but also how audiovisual 
communication plays a central role in shaping political reality.


*_In a Galaxy a Wipe Transition Away 
<https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/26150/>, Meg Healy_*

This video essay, made for the "Videographic Dissection" exercise during 
the Reframing the Argument workshop, explores the movement-based 
motivation behind the 42 wipe transitions within /Star Wars: Episode V - 
The Empire Strikes Back/ (Irvin Kershner, 1980). The video essay and 
accompanying statement recount my process for dissecting, reorganizing, 
and finding coherence among the wipe transitions, and showcase how the 
editing timeline as a site of analysis helps to reveal nuances in the 
seconds between sequences during which these transitions occur.

*<https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/26128/>*

*Dissecting the Dissected: The Split Screen in El año del descubrimiento 
(dir. López Carrasco, 2020), Dr Eva 
Álvarez-Vázquez<https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/26128/>*

This video essay examines the split-screen montage in/ El año del 
descubrimiento/ (/The Year of the Discovery/, dir. Luis López Carrasco, 
2020), a 200-minute experimental documentary. Shot in only nine days but 
assembled over nine months, the film’s complex montage resists easy 
systematization. Through a videographic dissection, I segmented and 
color-coded the timeline to trace how testimonies, archival footage, and 
conversations are distributed across the split-screen. This method 
revealed less a rigid formal code than a strategy that generates 
simultaneity, immersion, and ambiguity, inviting viewers to dwell in 
fragmentation, contradiction, and the unstable boundaries between 
history, memory, dream, reality, and fiction.

**

*The Severed Timeline 
<https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/26288/>,* Yaron Baruch

This videoessay examines Severance (Apple TV+, 2022–present) as a 
paradigmatic case of identity fragmentation within twenty-first-century 
American prestige television. Drawing on Seth Friedman and Amanda 
Keeler’s conception of “Prestige TV” as a discursive evolution of Robert 
J. Thompson’s “Quality TV,” the study situates Severance within a 
lineage of serialized dramas—The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire—that 
foreground the tension between professional and private selves under 
neoliberal capitalism. While Severance appears to literalize this divide 
through its science-fiction premise of surgically severed identities, 
the videographic analysis presented here reveals a more intricate 
spatial and psychological configuration. Employing a timeline-based 
analytic method inspired by Ariel Avissar’s “Problems and Prompts,” the 
project exposes a proliferation of liminal, ambiguous sites that 
destabilize the show's ostensible binary division of work and life. The 
Severed Timeline thus demonstrates how videographic criticism can expose 
latent formal and ideological complexities within ostensibly transparent 
texts, and argues that Severance both crystallizes and complicates 
prestige television’s broader preoccupation with fractured identity and 
the capitalist demand for self-division.

<https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/29640/>

*Thinking in the Timeline: A Conversation with The Video Essay 
Podcast,with Ariel Avissar, Lucy Fife Donaldson, Colleen Laird and 
Matthew Payne<https://www.openscreensjournal.com/article/id/29640/>*

This conversation, produced in collaboration with The Video Essay 
Podcast, brings together three of the special issue co-editors – Ariel 
Avissar, Colleen Laird, and Matthew Thomas Payne – and guest moderator 
Lucy Fife Donaldson. The discussion reflects on the special issue, the 
Videographic Dissection exercise, and the “Reframing the Argument” 
workshop, exploring questions of videographic methodology and pedagogy 
and the role of collaborative, in-person workshops in fostering 
communities of practice.

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