Editing is anything: pratiche di video essays tra semiotica ed estetica

The article examines, through methodological references to semiotics and film studies, the textual mechanisms of video essay, placed in the perspective of an evolution of studies on remix and remake, as audiovisual practices of recombination. The essay describes the analytical will aimed at deepening and explaining, through a collective practice of commentary, and a communicative pact with the users which, through mediation dynamics, tends to make clear, using exemplification and comparison, the implicit elements of the analysed work. By placing the phenomenon in a broader selection and composition logic (Manovich), the video essay appears similar to a form of tutorial that, however, through a hybrid statute placed between educational and entertainment, calls into question the authority of the institutional figures linked to audiovisual knowledge.