What if Kant had a B-Roll?

In Manfred Keuhn’s biography of Kant, he noted that Kant rose in the morning at 5:00 AM, drank tea and smoked a pipe (while meditating, of course) until 6:00, and then prepared lectures or did other writing until 7:00 or 8:00. Kant then spent the next few hours of his day giving lectures.

It is somewhere between preparing lectures and giving them that I want to pause to consider what the preparation and delivery would look like if Kant used a PowerPoint or a b-roll (in television news, supplemental footage running behind the news reader).

The immediate answer is that he would choose not to use either. Or, upon turning around during his lecture and noticing the b-roll behind him, he would cringe and go back to his pipe and tea and meditation.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting thought experiment to consider what events or people from an author’s time s/he would choose to help make the lecture more accessible, more powerful.

What would be running on the b-roll behind a feminist or post-colonial scholar lecturing on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice?

“IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

or behind Marx while he read:

x commodity A = y commodity B, or
x commodity A is worth y commodity B.
20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or
20 Yards of linen are worth 1 coat.

The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this elementary form. Its analysis, therefore, is our real difficulty.”

Could teachers use this thought experiment to ask students to contextualize the works of writers they were studying? To critique them using one school of criticism or another?

Post your thought experiments here. What if Kant had a b-roll?