In 2016 I wrote a series of pieces at Fandor Keyframe about video essay form, all of which ran under the banner ‘The Video Essay as Art’. A throughline in my writing was an argument that video essays should be less didactic and more geared around a process of discovery. Videos in this vein tend to be at a remove from essays commonly found on YouTube and even those made by academics. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that both of these groups want to educate their viewers in some way. YouTubers brea...