Voir, the series of video essays produced by David Fincher, is now on Netflix. The first one, on Jaws, directed by David Prior and written and narrated by Sasha Stone, looks big-budget and is unlike most video essays you might be familiar with: it has a lot of filmed fictionalised accounts of the writer’s childhood. It is also clichéd — ‘(Spielberg’s)whole creative team was firing on all cylinders’ — self-indulgently autobiographical — who aside from her family cares about Sasha’s coming of age at and out of the movies ?– and banal in the extreme. There are other video essays to follow by the likes of Tony Zhou, whom i admire, so I hope the series improves. It is not a good start.
José Arroyo
