The Hidden Archive of Essays from Every Frame a Painting
Jason Kottke celebrating the continued return of Every Frame a Painting:
I’m gonna call it: Every Frame a Painting, my all-time favorite YouTube channel, is back. Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos stopped producing their fantastic video essays back in 2017 and while they have popped up here and there since then, they’ve mostly stuck to their retirement.1
But for the past few months, the duo have been releasing video essays produced in partnership with Criterion: Night of the Living Dead: Limitations into Virtues, The Blade (1995): The Edges of Wuxia, and just yesterday, The Visual Comedy of Isle of Dogs(embedded above).
But is it a return or are buried essays finally surfacing?
Out of the recent uploads, two of them are actually old essays made for the Criterion releases of Night of the Living Dead and Isle of Dogs. In fact, it seems that the Night of the Living Dead essay was made eight years ago for the Blu-Ray release of the film before the iconic duo retired.2
The essay for The Blade is also a part of the Criterion release, but that just came out in March~April of this year, so that essay is brand spanking new. Taylor and Tony just (like the one hour ago kind of just) put out a new essay with Turner Classic Movies about Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu.
I had no idea Every Frame a Painting had an archive hidden away on certain Criterion releases. It makes me wonder how many more are hidden away. A targeted search on Google tells me there is an essay on Tampopo and on The Breaking Point, the latter of which is already on Criterion's YouTube channel from eight years ago (again!).
All this searching reminded me of the essays the duo made for David Fincher's Voir on Netflix—I wonder if Kottke knows about those. If this trend of releasing new old essays continues, I suspect we will see the Tampopo one next. I wonder if there is more to this "hidden in plain sight" archive or if we will get more new essays or if Every Frame a Painting will once again go away until there is more to say. Either way, I am always here for more essays by Taylor and Tony.