How a Video Essayist Becomes a Filmmaker

From Kubrick to Ozu, Bresson to Tarantino, Wes Anderson to Hitchcock, and much more, Kogonada’s video essays provide comprehensive breakdowns of the formal elements such filmmakers use in their work. For him, video essays offered a way of reconnecting with his love of cinema, outside the world of academia. His first feature, 2017’s Columbus, marked an impressive marriage of the form he studied in his essays with a compelling storyline. In this video, I’ll look at how Kogonada’s essays informed his feature film and, in dissecting one of my favorite scenes, illustrate how studying films and finding what is personal is just as valuable as examining the broader discourse around them.

//CHAPTERS:
00:00 Intro - How a Film is Composed
00:32 Columbus
01:49 Kogonada
03:14 Bank Scene
05:16 Broader Consensus vs. What Moves Us
06:32 My Favorite Scene
09:06 Outro - What Moves You?

//SOURCES:
Columbus (2017)
The Making of The Royal Tenenbaums Doc
Empire of Light (2022)
Kubrick // One-Point Perspective on Vimeo - https://vimeo.com/48425421
Hands of Bresson on Vimeo - https://vimeo.com/98484833
Way of Ozu on Vimeo - https://vimeo.com/157221223
Tarantino // From Below on Vimeo - https://vimeo.com/37540504
Wes Anderson // From Above on Vimeo - https://vimeo.com/35870502
IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast with Kogonada
Late Spring (1949)
Belfast (2021)
The Fabelmans (2022)

//MUSIC:
Pretty Lights by Fog Lake
Little Black Balloon by Fog Lake

#videoessay #kogonada #columbus