OSCAR WATCH 2024 — Video Essay Reflections on Character in ‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)

OSCAR WATCH 2024 — Video Essay Reflections on Character in ‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)

This piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. This post features two video essays responding to Oppenheimer, one by Kai after Kai and one by Ella Wright. Both focus in on the film's depiction of character, asking how we are meant to understand them in moral terms. I encourage you to pay particular attention to the sound in each piece, the careful dichotomies between loudness and silence in “Fission, Fusion, and Character in Oppeneheimer” and the menacing yet also space age-y melodies of Kai after Kai’s original music in “The Guilt of Oppenheimer.” Both essays use sound to reinforce their critical points, rather than simply to ground their audiovisual timelines--an example of the sophisticated analysis going on in the world of video essays and videographic criticism.

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