Marilyn Freeman points out a very crucial distinction between nonfiction film and video essays in her piece “On the Form of the Video Essay.” As Freeman examines the unique form and characteristics of the video essay, she asserts that the documentary filmmaker or film journalist “masks her subjectivity” — hiding it from the audience through strategic interviews or voiceovers — while the video essayist “speaks directly to the audience.” Although, like many of the rules or definitions we try to force in our answers to “What is an essay?”, this rule too can be broken. But subjectivity, it seems to me, is essential to what Freeman calls the “marrow” of the video essay:

Fostering self-conceptions, reconciling them, contending with issues of representation—these are all in the marrow, I think, of the video essay. Its affecting multichannel form—literary text, sound and image—lends itself to a ramified personal point-of-view that is fragmented and contradictory.

Revealing subjectivity, allowing subjectivity to be a part of the work, gives the essayist a necessary tool for confronting ideas of self and representation.

Eula Biss and John Bresland examine the idea of self, studying their roles and identities as new parents, and “contend with issues of representation” to make visible those very complex, contradictory, and often-not-talked-about feelings of parenthood, including guilt, joy, comfort, shame, nostalgia, and hope. Through their video essays, they attempt to overcome issues of representation to communicate these feelings to the viewer.

Each video essay takes as its entry point an object—or several objects. In “Ode to Every Thing” Biss, as narrator, considers “all the plastic of parenthood” and the conflicting, confusing feelings tied up in that plastic: guilt for loving all of it, comfort in what the many things represent, shock at realizing “he needed nothing here,” and fear that it will all come to nothing, that the “duckies and trucks” will last longer than all of us. A meditation on things leads to further exploration of what it means to be a parent; it allows Biss to discern the material and cultural (and personal) expectations arbitrarily assigned to parenthood from the basic human needs of parent and child.

The “multichannel form” of the video essay is perhaps the best means of representing these complexities because it allows the special point-of-view that Freeman suggests—fragmented and contradictory—to reflect or extend those same feelings and points-of-view of parenthood.

Biss’s narration provides a rhythm that the camera follows as it provides the viewer close-up shots of children’s toys, with comforting colors, familiar shapes, and smiling faces, coming in and out of focus as she reflects on the meaning of it all—-as she shares with the viewer the dark, unsettling thoughts and feelings that come up against those shiny-happy-plastic objects.  

The slow panning of the camera across piles of toys in candlelight is suddenly contrasted with a dark screen at the point where Biss says “but the bomb was not a bomb.” Her sudden shift in point-of-view — her shift in thought and self-conception — is reflected in the next shot that comes from a camera high up in the corner of a living room. We’re presented with both a metaphorical and literal shift in perspective. The activity of the living room is sped up and life continues at full speed. The pairing of text, sound, and images allows Biss to present us with contradictions and shifts in feeling that might otherwise be missed or misread on the page.