Video essayist Leigh Singer explores the online phenomenon of reaction gifs taken from scenes in familiar (and not so familiar) movies

The online age has seen the rise of a multitude of ways to engage with popular culture. Here, Leigh Singer uses one (the video essay) to comment on another (the “movie gif”) for the film magazine Little White Lies.

The GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a file type that allows for short, low-resolution, silent loops of images. Developed in the late 1980s by a team at the early internet service provider CompuServe, the format was eventually edged out by the likes of the PNG, JPEG and MP4 as bandwidths expanded, but it came into its own on social media, where its compressed file sizes and looping animation functionality proved to be perfect for sharing on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

The emergence of the new media landscape flipped the hierarchy of publishers and audiences on its head and pointed towards a potentially more democratic status quo. As a result, traditional print media became just one of many platforms alongside blogs, podcasts and online video – with video essays offering a uniquely versatile medium for engrossing, meticulously researched, accessible journeys through the history of the moving image. They exist at the intersection of the personal and the critical, the narrated and the purely visual, and incorporate certain fundamentals of filmmaking, from editing to sound design, into the work itself.

Leigh Singer has developed a portfolio career as writer, festival programmer, Q&A host and video essayist. Over the years, he has contributed video work to Sight and Sound, Fandor, Indiewire and multiple Blu-ray releases, and now mentors students at the National Film and Television School in the use of video essays as part of their coursework.