Kevin B. Lee’s work has always existed in the space between categories. Recognized as one of the pioneers of the online video essay and desktop documentary, and one of the defining figures of contemporary cinema, his practice has continually moved between filmmaking, criticism, artistic research, and teaching. Across nearly two decades, he has examined not only images themselves, but the systems through which they are produced, circulated, watched, and assigned value.
Speaking shortly before his participation at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Lee reflects on the evolution of the video essay, the influence of Harun Farocki, the transformation of platforms, and what happens to cinema, memory, and attention when individual works give way to endless streams of images.
Your participation at Locarno explores cinematic possibilities beyond traditional cinema. What does that exploration mean to you?
So there’s this conference that is exploring cinema’s relationship to major issues of the world today, and how it can respond to those issues and reinvent itself or evolve. So it’s a kind of co-evolution, which I think is pretty important because cinema has been dying for the last hundred years (laughs). But it’s always this question of how cinema stays alive. There’s always a recurring anxiety that this art form is just one step away from being obsolescent. But it can be very productive. Reflecting on your death can actually be very productive to think about how to live.
You have often worked in the space between cinema and other forms. Would you say video essays belong inside cinema, or outside of it?
Well, if anything, I’m more interested in blurring the line. I was in New York City, and I was just really struggling to make films. So I retreated to making video essays as a way to reflect on filmmaking, just to see what insights or what techniques I need to develop in myself by studying films.
And then they were a way of articulating the reflection. But then the video essays start to get more and more elaborate, or you can be very experimental in the approach in ways that reflect back on cinema. People would say, “Yeah, you’re good at making video essays, but these are not films.” And I would take that as a challenge.
So this question became more like: how can video essays become cinema?
You were one of the early creators of video essays online. What was that early period like?
I started off as a frustrated filmmaker, just trying to understand how cinema works, just so I could make better films. And then I made video essays and uploaded them to YouTube. And then a community started to build around that.
But then there was the 2009 takedown by YouTube. But that actually worked to my advantage because that was one of the first times that copyright became a clear issue on YouTube.
And then today, if you get taken down, nobody cares because it’s like, you should know better by now. But back then, there was still this question of what are you allowed to do in this space. So as it turned out, there were people very sympathetic to me. And studios like Focus Features reached out to me and said, “Hey, we like what you do, and even if YouTube doesn’t like what you do, we like what you do. So would you like to make video essays about our movies? And we can put them on our website.”
I remember the email. It said, “We’d love to make a decent citizen out of you.” That was such an interesting line, right? “We want to legitimize you,” because right now you’re this kind of YouTube outlaw. But we understand you’ve got value, what you’re doing is valuable. So now we just need to tap into that value, make it institutional, make it acceptable.
That experience eventually pushed me toward teaching. I was getting these emails from film academics saying, “Hey, we love your video essays because it’s one thing to try to teach cinematography to your students just by lecturing. But when I could just pop one of your video essays on the screen and I can go out and smoke a cigarette, then come back and they all understand. They all understand cinematography. So thank you.”
And I’m reading this and I’m like, “Wow, I want that job. I wanna be able to play my own video essays. I don’t smoke, but at least I can go have a coffee and then come back.”
So that’s what motivated me to pursue a terminal degree that I could use for a teaching career. That’s what led me to enroll in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Through your residency with the Harun Farocki Institute, how did that experience change your approach to images?
I wouldn’t be here if not for them. I think it was because of the video essays I made, and because of Transformers: The Premake and Desktop Documentary, they saw it as very Farocki.
Just his way of dealing with images is anti-auteurist. His way of engaging with cinema makes you realize that there are bigger questions to engage with than auteurism, the artistry of one author. And it’s more about systems behind images rather than the images themselves. In some ways, Farocki kind of cured me of that.
This idea of looking beyond the image itself seems central to your work. How did that affect projects like Bottled Songs and Afterlives?
I realized that analyzing ISIS videos through this cinephilic or film-studies approach was a bankrupt approach. Because what it ends up doing is lending the power and the legitimacy of cinema onto a project that really doesn’t deserve it. What does it mean to say, “Oh yeah, ISIS videos are so cinematic?”
I made that series, and then one of my students at the time watched it, and he said, “You know, I gotta tell you, Professor Lee, if I was the ISIS video maker, I would be so honored, that I would have Professor Lee analyzing my work.”
And in the end, this is the violent care concept. So when does your care actually feel a kind of violence—an ideological violence? To think more in terms of a critical awareness of systems, of ideology behind the image, I really had to get more focused on that and away from this kind of old-school cinephilia of elevating the value of the image based on its artistic properties.
You often work with forms that challenge existing definitions, whether that is video essay, desktop documentary, or something else. Are those categories themselves ideological?
Yes, these are ideological constructs. It’s not about aesthetics, but more of what does it mean to ascribe an aesthetic value to this? And how does that ascribing produce ideological value, which also gets connected to commercial value or capitalist value? Or political value.
It’s always this constant struggle of: what do we value as opposed to this? If you’re valuing something then you are almost implicitly devaluing something else just by not giving it as much attention as this.
Desktop documentaries have resonated in the last ten years because it was like, “Oh yeah, this thing that I spend half of my day in front of actually has value.” Not just as the thing I’m doing my work on, but actually becomes a site of storytelling and turning this experience into something more immersive or more cinematic. But it really irritated the film industry. “We cannot tolerate this. This is not cinema.” I always find myself on the outs. The internet was my film school because I didn’t go to film school. I couldn’t afford to.
Your more recent work, particularly Afterlives, seems to move differently from Transformers: The Premake. How did your relationship to time and attention change?
Thinking about what I feel I gained from doing it this way with Afterlives… In a very, very basic way, I gained time. I gained the ability to make something over a longer duration that could hold the viewer’s interest.
I think the pace of Transformers: The Premake is fine for the way it is, but I don’t think it could last longer because it’s really moving quickly through a lot. So I needed to come up with a different relationship to duration, to attention, and also—by virtue of doing that—a different degree of depth with the material.
Because with Transformers: The Premake, you can say what you want about it. If I want to be critical—maybe some people have said this, actually—it doesn’t go that deep into the subject matter. It’s opening a series of boxes. “Oh, okay, here’s something to think about. Oh, here’s something to think about.” And that really feels like internet-level research.
There’s this theorist, Katherine Hayles, she’s been doing research into what’s the state of literacy and attention in the internet era. And she makes this distinction between what she calls deep attention and hyperattention. And what she’s saying, it’s not that one is better than the other. They’re just different.
Younger people are practicing a different kind of literacy and a different type of relationship to knowledge because there’s just so much knowledge that they’re exposed to. So it’s like they develop new kinds of cognitive processing to be able to manage all of the information that is just coming at them. So this is called hyperattention.
Transformers: The Premake maybe is an example of hyperattention cinema. With Afterlives, because the subject matter is so complex and so challenging and has a lot of ethical questions around it, it needs a different kind of depth.
Your work also seems to be asking what happens to cinema when it is no longer experienced as individual works, but as part of a constant stream of images. Do you see that changing with younger generations?
I asked my students: what are the films that you care about? Because this is very much a question that’s big on my mind: how does the next generation care about cinema?
And I made this big pep talk to motivate them. When I was your age, in the early ’90s, we really embraced certain films that resonated with our generation, like Pulp Fiction or Jurassic Park. Whatever you think about them, they’re still so iconic. They’re like monuments to the times we were living in. So what are those films for you? I’m just curious. What are the films that really stand for your generation?
It was really quiet for a while. And then finally one student raised their hand.
“Yes?”
“It’s… Netflix.”
And I was like, “As in, you mean a film from Netflix? Or a series from Netflix?” He said, “No. Just Netflix.”
So that was a fascinating answer. Because it’s not even about a single work, but about Netflix as a platform. That’s how they experience cinema—or content. Not as a singular work, but as a stream. This thing that keeps feeding you content.
And relating to what we were saying about Farocki before, it is more about a system than a single image. So I found that provocative. And then the next person who answered said, “Yeah, I really love this meme channel on Instagram that documents all the big memes that are happening.”
Because if I’m asking them to think monumentally—what really speaks to your times?—the answer isn’t movies. So it’s kind of sad, but also interesting: memes, Instagram, and Netflix.
But then we did work on it a bit. I found myself in the position of being the one feeding cinema to them. It’s hilarious because when I was their age I always took the classes that had movies as part of the curriculum because then I didn’t have to read so much. But now I have to force them to watch movies.
So I made this playlist called Leeflix as an alternative to Netflix. These are the films that I feel are iconic, or the ones that I most want to put in front of you. But I’m not going to prescribe them as the most important films. If you have others, that’s fine. At least we can have a conversation about how cinema matters now.
In your teaching, how do you get students to slow down and think critically about the media they consume?
I ask them to keep a media consumption journal. For one week they have to record every audiovisual medium they experience, the duration, the platform, and describe what it is. Is it a movie? Instagram? TikTok? YouTube?
So it’s really meant to be a kind of attentional disruption. Breaking the cycle of constant consumption without reflection, without processing. They find it really irritating to do this for a week. Irritating, but also fascinating. Because, of course, there’s a narcissistic impulse that makes you wonder: what am I doing with my life?
I have a colleague who has a really nice term for it: creating a critical hesitation. A critical hesitation that makes them reflect on what they’re doing.
What do you think is lost when that distance disappears?
The final question I ask them is: now that you have a record of everything you consumed, what is the one piece of media that you remember the most? Because it becomes this question of retention: what do you remember?
And for me that’s so important because cinema—at least according to André Bazin—was fundamentally a technology of preservation. But cinema allowed us to capture a moment forever.
But now we have so much technology, we have so much ability to capture everything, that what it actually results in is mass forgetting. You don’t need to remember anything because you can always say, “Oh yeah, I’ve got it somewhere on my phone,” or “It’s in the cloud.” So you stop retaining things in your own mind. And now with AI it’s like, “Oh yeah, just tell me what to think about this.”
So it becomes this offloading of certain cognitive faculties. And that leads to the question of: how do we even understand ourselves if we’re no longer performing certain tasks or exercising certain abilities to remember, to reflect, and to understand?
It’s funny. Plato was already worried that writing would destroy our ability to remember. And now I find myself longing for some of the abilities we’re offloading.