letters to [and from] Pablo
During a recent conversation with my predecessor Sarah Minor, now the video essay editor at Brink, Minor inspired me to think about language in video essays as a texture or a character. Our conversation reminded me of when I studied video essays at the University of Iowa with Corey Creekmur, and I saw first kogonada’s beautiful collage of various shots of hands in the films of Robert Bresson. kogonada’s film, devoid of voiceover or text on screen, prodded me to ask, How can a video essay convey an idea without saying anything? What can montage do in place of language? These questions were at the forefront of my mind when curating the 2025 summer issue for TriQuarterly. Each of these three films are preoccupied with language to varying degrees, though not every film coheres around the communicability of language. Rather, language is both legible and indecipherable, a grain and a feeling, something that narrates and something that obscures. I’m thrilled to continue to think through this multimodality genre that can break apart or sculpt language anew through the lens of Katherine Franco, Rana San, and Auden Lincoln-Vogel’s work.
Rana San’s epistolary video essay letters to [and from] Pablo is about exchange and meaning-making, translation and distance. The opening of the film features a voiceover confessing, “Dear Pablo, I should say up front that I thrive on sunlight.” A montage of black and white images ensues: tiny shards of rocks, a landscape, an empty director’s chair. Though the images are not always emblematic of “bright bursts of blue,” it is this very incongruity that amplifies the poetry of San’s words. Argentinian musician and artist Pablo Schvarzman’s scintillating soundtrack is yet another textural layer of synthesizer arpeggios that transfixes the ear and eye in this deeply hypnotic film.
