Jason Mittell

Jason Mittell is Professor of Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College. His books include Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NYU Press, 2015); The Videographic Essay: Practice & Pedagogy (with Christian Keathley & Catherine Grant, videographicessay.org); Narrative Theory and Adaptation (Bloomsbury, 2017); and How to Watch Television (co-edited with Ethan Thompson; NYU Press, 2013; revised edition 2020).

He serves as journal manager for [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies (published by the Open Library of Humanities), co-director of the NEH-supported workshop series Scholarship in Sound & Image, and series editor of Videographic Books for Lever Press.

In 2022, he received an NEH/Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication for his project The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad: A Videographic Book—the first NEH fellowship awarded for videographic criticism. The book was published in 2024 by Lever Press.

The project

Title: Media Mirrors: How 21st Century Film & Television Represent Themselves

"Contemporary media has embraced reflexivity as a central mode of storytelling. From the popularity of mockumentary sitcoms to films about filmmaking, from reality television hoaxes to found-footage horror, film and television often invite viewers to reflect on how media represents its own creation and consumption. Reflexivity is not a new phenomenon, but its techniques and prevalence have shifted in the 21st century with the rise of digital technologies of production and reception. This project explores these developments by examining how reflexive media operate for both creators and audiences, considering them as both narrative strategies and cultural objects.

Media Mirrors will be a multimodal book designed for a broad readership, combining written and videographic analyses of dozens of reflexive films and television programmes, including Mulholland Drive, Adaptation, The Rehearsal, The Souvenir, American Vandal, One Cut of the Dead, The Show About the Show, and Parks & Recreation. During my residency in Paris, I plan to produce video essays on selected case studies in collaboration with French colleagues. Ultimately, I aim to publish a book with integrated video supplements, building on my previous work in videographic scholarship and my research on film and television narrative."

Hosting Institution: Université Paris Cité

Selective Bibliography

• Mittell, Jason. The Chemistry of Character in Breaking Bad: A Videographic Book. Lever Press, 2024. 
• Mittell, Jason. “‘It Was a Work of Art, and It Was Just Real Life’: Watching The Rehearsal.” [In]Transition 11, no. 1 (2024): 1. 
• Mittell, Jason. “How Not to Comprehend Television: Notes on Complexity and Confusion.” In Puzzling Stories, edited by Steven Willemsen and Miklós Kiss. Berghahn Books, 2022.
• Mittell, Jason. “Deformin’ in the Rain: How (and Why) to Break a Classic Film.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 015, no. 1 (2021).
• Mittell, Jason. “Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.