I was looking forward to "Voir," because it's the first new content in a while to come from Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos, who are best known as the creators of the "Every Frame a Painting" Youtube channel. "Voir" is an interesting experiment, sort of an attempt to legitimize the "visual essay" format that has become popular in recent years on Youtube and other video platforms. Zhou and Ramos contribute three of the six installments, with the other three written by prominent film critics/journalists Sasha Stone, Drew McWeeney, and Walter Chaw. Having Netflix's resources means that the individual essays can contain a good deal of polished original content like interviews, reenactments, and framing devices, along with the usual montages of edited clips from familiar films - now all properly sourced and licensed.
I binged all six segments, and it felt almost exactly like watching a bunch of Youtube film essays with unusually high production values. They run from 17-23 minutes apiece, and cover a nice assortment of topics from the creators' personal experiences with specific films to wider trends and issues in filmmaking. "The Ethics of Revenge," the one installment narrated by Tony Zhou, feels almost exactly like an essay from "Every Frame a Painting," just with a few nice interviews spliced in. One that felt a little out of place was Sasha Stone's "Summer of the Shark," which is an impressionistic, autobiographical piece about Stone's childhood that uses "Jaws" as a focal point, but spends as much time talking about her own life and memories, which are dramatized with actors. Then again, I appreciate the different style and storytelling techniques that this employs.
Another episode, perhaps the most ambitious, is "The Duality of Appeal," where Zhou and Ramos discuss how animated characters are designed, and specifically how female characters have been shaped by marketing forces to all look too much the same. One of their old essays intended for Youtube would have stopped there, but "Voir" commissions a group of artists to design and animate a short sequence for a more unique animated woman, dubbed Cleo. Going through the process allows the creators to highlight and discuss different aspects of design, and the various pitfalls. It's a really lovely look at a topic that doesn't get much discussion in the broader film world, and is a good example of how eclectic this series has the potential to be.
"Film vs. Television" is probably the most straightforward, informational TED Talk style episode that charts the rise of the two mediums and shows how they've recently started to converge due to both technological and stylistic changes. I really appreciated this one for laying out its arguments very efficiently and connecting some dots. For instance, television is structured the way it is because the major networks had their roots in radio. It was also nice to see the direct comparison of television and film approaches to storytelling with examples like Michael Mann's "L.A. Takedown" vs. "Heat," and Stephen Frears' "The Queen" vs. "The Crown." And it ends with a very good "Game of Thrones" joke.
The two installments I found the most gratifying to see - not just as a film nerd but as a film discourse nerd - were "But I Don't Like Him" and "Profane and Profound." In the former, Drew McWeeney discusses his favorite film "Lawrence of Arabia," and goes on to talk about unlikeable heroes in film, with special emphasis on the work of Martin Scorsese. In the latter, Walter Chaw makes a case for Walter Hill's "48 Hrs" being a classic due to the way it discusses race and race relations. I've been reading McWeeney and Chaw's reviews and analysis for years now, and it's wonderful to see them able to translate their work into a visual medium.
The collection of talent involved here is considerable. Interview subjects include animator Glen Keane, and directors Brenda Chapman and Jennifer Yuh Nelson. The series was executive produced by David Fincher and David Prior, and Prior directed two of the episodes. I'd love to see bigger names get involved in the future, but then again "Voir" strikes me as distinctive because it has such a more academic, outsider's viewpoint. There are plenty of documentary series about films made by the people who make films. This is something a little different, a little more personal. And I love to see it.
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