4: The Game You Don’t Have to Play
a video postcard by Max Tohline
2021
8 minutes

A postcard I wrote and sent in a single day in December 2021, when I heard that fellow video essayist Sam was working on a project that involved some ideas about games where you do nothing. I'd toyed with some possibly overlapping ideas for a while but never had any idea what to do with them, so they ended up here. Full credits and such over on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAeaBhdFiD4

My thanks to FilmScalpel for including this in their collection of essays on video games.

A video postcard by Max Tohline
2021
8 minutes

A rumination on how to build and rebuild virtual worlds (in this case, virtual houses) with editing.

Over on Twitter, film scholar and video essayist Ian Garwood put out an invitation for other video essayists to quote or remix his essay/supercut Mr Grant's Dream House into something new.

Here's my response to that invitation. Along the way, I also mention my own essay/supercut Alfred Hitchcock's 39 Stairs. You'll enjoy this video more if you watch both Garwood's video and mine first (follow the links above).

Full citations in the YouTube description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48VYQBrDnck

A video postcard by Max Tohline
2020
19 minutes

This video postcard is addressed to Michael Baird, monster/folklore expert, sculptor, art professor, and colleague. His channel is here.

This video is about SWARMS in film, and it touches on a lot of topics -- how VFX artists visualize swarms of non-human machines (drones, robots), why swarms don't really show up in folklore monster tales, patterns in how swarms are used in popular film, and what our relationship with those swarms says about who we are.

Content advisory: swarms of bugs and other creepy things, racism, some violence.

Full list of citations in YouTube description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRaj2jZJekg

A video postcard by Max Tohline
2020
9 minutes

The first in a series of epistolary video essays.

This one is addressed to Keaton Wooden: screenwriter, director, playwright, artist, my brother-in-law, and one of my favorite people to talk to.

The subject is time: film time, cultural metaphors of time, the absurdity of measuring time with space, mechanisms of time in movies (from Orson Welles's The Stranger to The Great Mouse Detective), our changing notions of time in an age of computers and streaming, and how to make the most of the time we have even when we can't be certain of anything.

Full citations in YouTube description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa4inAYS7fo