Video Essays
In addition to podcasting, teaching, curating, and writing about video essays, I am also a creator myself. Below is a selection of my work. For a full archive, visit my Vimeo page.
Rio Bravo Diary. 365 tweets. (Dec. 2020 - Dec. 2021)
Divided Howard Hawks’ 1959 film into 365 equal parts, watched over the course of one year and chronicled the journey via Twitter. Created several video essays from tweets.
Named to the 2021 Sight & Sound poll of the year's best video essays
Online at www.riobravodiary.com
"I didn’t grow up with any real affinity for the western, so to read Will’s essays about what this film in particular meant to him growing up and coming of age really helped me reappraise this specific film. His transparency has been really revelatory to see, and I really appreciate how he’s invited us all to get to know him a little better through this year-long project." - Cydnii Wilde Harris
"This is ‘video/essay’ as iterative performance rather than reporting of analysis and I like to think of it in the tradition of Barthes’ S/Z, where scientific method is pushed to absurdist (and intensely personal) ends." - Alan O'Leary
Against Polish or, Notes on Videographic Labor or, You Could Remix Blazing Saddles Today (2023)
Named to the 2023 Sight & Sound poll of the year's best video essays
Published in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, ZfM Online, Videography, September 2023.
"With the insouciance of late Godard or Leos Carax’s New Order music video, Will disassembles our need to assemble." - Scout Tafoya
"DiGravio’s original audiovisual essay may work against the idea of perfection and neatness as a possible disguised style. But it is also an exposition of the work involved in the audiovisual essay. In this sense, it enters a loop, a mise-en-abîme where a “meta worker” develops a similar “meta mirror” to better highlight the nature of what is involved when reworking the images and sounds of a film. " - Carlos Natálio
Dean Martin is Calm (2023)
Published as part of the inaugural group of Screen Stars Dictionary entries in Tecmerin. Revista de Ensayos Audiovisuales, “Screen Stars Dictionary,” No. 11 2023 (1).
Bid Up (2022)
Named to the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the year's best video essays
Screened at the Cary Comes Home Festival (2022)
Sharing Stories: On Poupelle of Chimney Town (2021) 11 min.
Commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam for Critics' Choice VII: On Positionality to accompany the screening of Poupelle of Chimney Town (2021)
One of two video essays commissoned, the other, seeing through Feast, is available via the IFFR website.
The Barber Approves (2019)
Named to the 2019 Sight & Sound poll of the year's best video essays
"The barber knows best. A small, fleeting and seemingly insignificant gesture at the border of one of film history’s most beloved classics is unfolded and spread out into the grand coordinates of this film and Western movies in general: East/West, civilisation/wilderness, in/out, myself/other. And it doesn’t end for me there. I keep wondering. For example about the odd way the barber holds his customer’s hat. What is it that the barber knows?" - Johannes Binotto