A Brief Eulogy for Every Frame a Painting

We learned last weekend of the passing of Every Frame a Painting, a series of video essays on film form. It is survived by 1.35 million YouTube subscribers.

Making art is hard, of course, but making sense of art may be even harder. Most of us experience art as a feeling—a sensation we notice stirring in our hearts, or even more viscerally in our guts. It takes an appreciation and curiosity for the craft, though, to begin to understand why art makes us feel.

And that’s what Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou were able to do with their videos: combine an obvious passion for the art form and an impressive knowledge of its history with a confident and accessible teaching style. Ramos and Zhou weren’t just making fawning fan videos; they were educating viewers, imparting their substantial knowledge about film techniques and theory, and inviting lay-people to take part in a conversation about film that dug well below the surface of criticism.

Take their video on Jackie Chan. It’s easy for a viewer of Chan’s films to come to the conclusion that he is a master of action comedy. But this essay goes into intricate detail about why he’s so skilled at what he does. They talk about how he establishes disadvantages in his action scenarios to build drama and make opportunities for interesting weapons and comedy, about his obsessive desire to get stunts exactly right, and about how the direction and editing are specifically set up to provide clarity for the action and explain to viewers the stakes of each encounter. They compare Chan’s exceptional work in Chinese features with less effective examples from other films in the genre. And they give credit to the actor’s skill, fearlessness, and inherent charisma.

After watching, it then becomes impossible to watch a movie with Jackie Chan without noticing bits and pieces of what they pointed to in their video. That’s education-leading-to-literacy in its most pure form.

The levels of commitment needed to put together a video series like Every Frame a Painting cannot be understated. A love for film, which the creators clearly were overflowing with, was the most basic requirement to begin. But Ramos and Zhou also needed a keen understanding of the technical side of the medium, which one would assume took years and years of formal and informal scholarship. They needed to storyboard each video, spend time researching (mostly offline), writing the script, and finding clips, and then finally assembling it all (as Zhou writes in the post-mortem blog post, taking about eight hours of editing for every one minute of video). But none of that work would matter without also translating the jargon-y concepts of film theory into lessons that audiences could understand, regardless of their own knowledge of the form.

In the end, each video stood as a piece of art in and of itself. Their series helped deepen viewers’ respect for film, but even more impressively, it made an indelible contribution to the artistic medium. The work of Ramos and Zhou became the gold standard for video essays, and their decision to end the series is indeed a blow to the film world, which has been made richer through their efforts. We should all look forward to whatever they choose to do next, but until then, we mourn the tragic loss of Every Frame a Painting.

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