Wees William C Recycled Images The Art And Politics Of Found Footage Films 6aly

Recycled Images

by William C. Wees

RECYCLED IMAGES The Art and Polltics of Found Footage Films by William

C. Wees

Anthology Film Archives New York City 1993

Publication of this book has been assisted by a grant in aid from McGill University, by funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and by the National Endowment for the Arts. This book has been published by Anthology Film Archives in conjunction with a May 1993 survey of found footage and collage films. The public presentation of these films has been ed in part by a corporate contribution from MCA-Universal Pictures.

Copyright © 1993 Anthology Film Archives Manufactured in the United States of America Printed by Braun-Brumfield Inc., Ann Arbor, MI ISBN 0-911689-19-2 Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Avenue New York, N Y 10003 (212) 505-5181 On the Cover: Frame enlargements from A Movie (1958) by Bruce Conner.

Dedicated

to Bruce

Conner

Contents l

Preface and Acknowledgements

1

2.

Introduction

3

3.

Surveying the Field

5

4.

I n the D o m a i n of Montage: Compilation, Collage, A p p r o p r i a t i o n

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5.

Epic Collage

48

6.

Notes

58

7.

Selected Bibliography

63

8.

Speaking of Found Footage: Excerpts from Conversations w i t h Craig Baldwin, Abigail C h i l d , Bruce Conner, David Rimmer, Keith Sanborn, Chick Strand, and Leslie T h o r n t o n .

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^-

Filmography

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preface & Acknowledgements At last, found footage films are winning the recognition they deserve, cspecially in European festivais, such as Peter Tscherkassky's Found Footage Festival i n Vienna i n the summer of 1 9 9 1 ; the retrospective programs of found footage films at the 1991 and 1992 VIPER festivais in Lucerne, organized by Christoph Settele; and Eugeni Bonet's touring e x h i b i t i o n of f o u n d footage films and videos w h i c h opened i n Valencia in February 1993. These festivais also generated i m p o r t a n t publications on the subject of found footage (see the Bibliography for details). I hope that the present publication and the "Recycled Images" screenings it is intended to accompany, w i l l keep the bali rolling. There are many more found footage films and videos than any festival could show — or any one individual is likely to see. Nevertheless, I have been able to see a large number of w o r k s (my "master l i s t " contains approximately five h u n dred titles), thanks in large part to the advice and assistance of a number of people w h o went out of their way to help me. I am pleased, therefore, to acknowledge the help of Dominic Angerame, Paul Aí^hur, Craig Baldwin, Yann Beauvais, Garry deitei, Louise Bourque, Stan Brakhage, A b i g a i l ^*^ild, Cathy Cook, Bruce Conner, Laurie Dunphy, Brian Goldberg, H o w a r d G u t t e n p l a n , Robert ^^••er. Barbara H a m m e r , Bob H a w k , Chris

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H o o v e r , Ken Jacobs, Scott M a c D o n a l d , Jonas Mekas, W i l l i a m M o r i t z , Julie M u r r a y , Larry O n ions, James Peterson, A l Razutis, Lynne Sachs, Keith Sanborn, Sandra Sandusky, M . M . Serra, Christoph Settele, Rogcr Simon, Innes Sommer, Daria Stermac, Chick Strand, W i l l Straw, Julia T e l l , Leslie T h o r n t o n , Peter Tscherkassky, and Stephen V i t i e l l o . I also w a n t to thank Noreen Bider and Ian McKenzie w h o worked as research assistants on this project. I am also grateful to the f o l l o w i n g organizations and institutions for their assistance: A n t h o l o g y Film Archives, Canadian Filmmakers D i s t r i b u t i o n Centre, Canyon C i n ema, Chicago Filmmakers, D r i f t , Electronic Arts Intermix, Film Arts Foundation, Museum of M o d e m A r t Film Department, N e w Y o r k F i l m - M a k ers' Cooperative, V-Tape, Videographe, and Zeitgeist Films. Thanks are also due t o my home i n s t i t u t i o n , M c G i l l University. I began my research on this project during a sabbatical leave in 1990-91, and M c G i l P s Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research provided w i t h a substantial research grant, as well as a special grant in aid of the present publication. Earlier versions of some of the material included here originally appeared i n Found Footage Films, edited by Cecilia Hausheer and Christoph Settele (Luzern: VIPER, 1992) and Desmontage: Film, Video/Appropriations, Recycling, edited by Eugeni Bonet (Valencia: I V A M , 1993). I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint that material here.

Introduction Due to the great number and variety of f o u n d footage films in existence, I should at least indicate the parameters w i t h i n which I propose to discuss the subject. Although I make a few references to European films, the bulk of my examples come from N o r t h America, not only because they are the films I k n o w best, but because I assume they are more likely to be k n o w n to my readers — or at least to those readers w h o are familiar w i t h found footage w o r k at ali. For those w h o are not, I hope to provide a suitable i n t r o d u c t i o n in the next section of this essay. Readers should be warned, however, that I have used a relatively small n u m ber of films to exemplify a very large and diverse body of w o r k . A n d while my division of found footage films into three broad categories is i n tended t o provide a reasonable overview o f the field, it cannot do justice to the variety of ways Creative filmmakers have recycled found footage. That variety is adequately represented, I bclieve, in the Filmography at the end of this publication. Furthermore, there are many films w i t h f o u n d footage that are not, strictly speaking, found footage films. Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, Bruce Baillie's Quixote, Robert Nelson's Bleu Shut, and Yvonne Rainer's The Man Who Envied Women (to mention a few of many possible examples), are ilms w i t h found footage, and each in its o w n way '^akes significant use of that footage, but the films 3

as a whole are not based on found footage, nor are they " a b o u t " found footage. O n the other hand, Bruce Conner's A Movie, Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart, Ken Jacobs' Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son, A b i g a i l Child's Prefaces and Mercy, and Craig Baldwin's RocketKitKongoKit and Tribulation 99 (to mention, again, a few of many relevant examples) are not only composed of f o u n d footage, but highlight that fact and make it one of the film's principie points of interest. While I have no strict rule for calculating how much found footage a f i l m must have in order to be a bona fide f o u n d footage f i l m , I t h i n k more than intuition or arbitrariness leads me to include some films w i t h a fair a m o u n t of o r i g i n a l footage such as Leslie Thornton's Peggy and Fred in Hell, M a r y Filippo's Who Do You Think You Are, Gunvor Nelson's and D o r o t h y Wiley's Schmeerguntz, and M i k e H o o l b o o m ' s Eat — w h i l e excluding the films listed at the beginning of this paragraph. Clearly, it is not a question of merit, but of emphasis. Similarly, although 1 offer a survey of f o u n d footage f i l m m a k i n g , my emphasis falis on films constructed according to the principies of m o n tage or collage (a term of equal relevance, as I w i l l try to show). There are other valid strategies for recycling f o u n d footage, of course, but montage/ collage seems to me the most effective means of exposing the social and politicai implications of found footage while, at the same time, adapting it to the demands of the "quintessential twentieth century art f o r m , " namely, collage.^ Finally, and perhaps it gocs w i t h o u t saying, the

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privileged realm of f i l m m a k i n g for this project is experimental or avant-garde f i l m , where the most interesting, aesthetically satisfying, critically i n formed, and politically challenging uses of found footage are to be found. O r so it seems to me.

Surveying the Field Recycling found footage may require nothing more than finding it and showing it to someone w h o appreciates i t . " A lot of f i l m is perfect left alone, perfectly revealing i n its u n - or semi-conscious f o r m , " Ken Jacobs writes in a note on his Perfect Film (1986).2 That f i l m , which is composed of unedited interviews, location shots and other material gathered for television news reports on the assassination of M a l c o l m X , is distributed (with only a slight adjustment to the soundtrack) cxactly as Jacobs f o u n d i t " i n a Canal Street bin."3 Similarly, Brian Goldberg's and Jackie Goss' Perfect Video (1989) reproduces on f i l m a discarded video tape containing degraded, jumbled and repeated images of John Hinkley's attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. In both cases, a aphazard assemblage of newscast left-overs yields Jjnintentional insights into the media's handling of ^'oicnt public events. (By contrast, the treatment ^ the Kennedy assassination in Bruce Conner's ^Port [1967] — a f i l m to which Perfect Film and

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Perfect Video invitc comparison — clearly derives f r o m Conner's o w n montage of radio reports and found footage. His film's sources are f o u n d , but its f o r m is constructed by the f i l m m a k e r and communicates an individuaPs conscious intention — which is precisely what is absent f r o m Perfect Film and Perfect Video.) Jacobs' Urban Peasants (1975) and H o l l i s Frampton's Works and Days (1969) offer other examples of found footage that seems "perfect left alone." Simply by connecting 100-foot roUs of 16mm home movies shot by his wife's aunt in the 1930s and '40s, Jacobs permits the original footage to be seen as its maker and her family and friends saw i t . However, the age of time has invested it w i t h nostalgia, historical and sociological interest, and an aesthetic value that is apparent only because Jacobs left the footage intact, rather than re-editing i t to suit his o w n f o r m a l and thematic concerns. (The latter practice is much more common among avant-garde filmmakers, as exemplified by such works as Alan Berliner's Family Álbum [1986], Ron Finne's People Near Here [1969], N o l i Brinkmann's Der Fater [1986], and Abigail Child's Covert Action [1984]). In a similar vein, Frampton's Works and Days reproduces an early documentary of a man and woman methodically planting their vegetable garden, to w h i c h Frampton added nothing but the title and his logo. Because the title is the same as that of Hesiod's ancient almanac and agricultural handbook (c. 700 B.C.), it encourages viewers to be aware of traditional patterns and rituais in the seemingly

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mundane activities of t w o anonymous gardeners, and Frampton's logo implicitly acknowledges the aesthetic accomplishments of the equally anonymous camera operator and editor. Frampton said that he placed his logo at the end of the f i l m " i n the spirit of the Chinese connoisseurs w h o affixed their vermilion seals to paintings as a mark of iration.""^ In the same spirit of nonintervention — but not necessarily iration — Craig Baldwin includes found footage in the avant-garde f i l m series he regularly presents in a store front gallery in San Francisco's Mission District. In the fali of 1991, for example, he offered a program entitled "The Return of Industriais A m o k ! " which he d as follows: Like a bad habit, our perverse fascination with the time-warped informational films of the '50s and '60s finds US with Frank Capra's propaganda "pièce de résistance" Your Job in , foUowed by Civil Defense clips, Alcatraz Escape bulletins, and Mob and Riot Control trainers. Also unspooling unashamedly is the nudist review The Raw Ones, the bohemian-befuddled religious kinescope Delinquent, Hipster and Square (with music performed by Max Roach), a Censorship lesson for kids, slo-mo Crash Tests, and other ludicrous left-overs. ^ • IH

If these "left-overs" are also "perfect left alone," it •s not because they are unrecognized gems of '^'"^"latic art, but because their very artlessness ^^Poses them to more criticai — and more amus'tíg readings than their original makcrs i n -

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tended or their original audiences were likely to produce. In most cases, however, filmmakers do n o t assume that found footage only needs to be shown to be appreciated. The more common practice is to rework the footage in some way, so that its richer implications become more apparent. I n Ernie Gehr's Eureka (1974), for example, a five-minute f i l m shot f r o m the front of a tram descending San Francisco's M a r k e t Street in the early 1900s, is step printed and stretched into a 30-minute tapestry of cluttered street life in an American city at the turn of the century. For Tom, T o w , The ?iper's Son (1969), Ken Jacobs refilmed a short, 1905 version of the well-known nursery rhyme, and by stretching its action, repeating movements, and blowing up details of its mise-en-scene, he "reverently examines" the original f i l m for nearly t w o hours.^ Jacobs' "Nervous System" presentations (which require specially designed equipment operated by Jacobs at each performance) also use short segments of found footage to make lengthy forays into unfamiliar and often baffling realms of perception. Equally unfamiliar are some of the perceived movements in M a r t i n A r n o l d ' s Pièce Touchée (1989), in which the frames of a mere 18 seconds of f o u n d footage are rearranged in extrcmely complex variations on a two-steps-forward-onestep-back progression. The result is a bizarre 15minute exposé of "the hesitation and discomfort in a H o l l y w o o d B-movie couple heading towards a kiss."'' A very different, mirage-like effect results

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the slow, frame-to-frame dissolves in David Rimnier's Surfacing on the Thames (1970). A brief clip t w o ships ing on the River Thames bccomes an eight-minute exploration of texture, color, and barely discernable shifts in the relationship of forms in space. I n several other films, Rimmer uses a technique favored by a number of filmmakers: looping found footage to make the same sequence of frames appear over and over again. In The Dance (1970), for example, Rimmer looped a brief shot of t w o ballroom dancers spinning rapidly as they execute a large circle at the front of a band stand. W i t h just a little " j u m p " where the ends of the loop meet, the same movement continues for five minutes in an ingenious isomorphism of form, content and technique: circles within circles w i t h i n circles. By simply changing the order of shots, filmmakers have f o u n d other ways of opening f o u n d footage to new, unexpected readings. For Rose Hobart (1939), Joseph Comell rearranged a comparatively small number of shots f r o m a 1931 feature f i l m , East of Borneo. His "re-make" celebrares the beauty and cinematic allure of the film's star. Rose H o b a r t , at the same time as it produces a surreal narrative of unmotivated gestures, unexplained confrontations, and unconnectcd spaces and temporal relationships. I t is a ^ o r k that both savors and w r y l y deconstructs "lany familiar conventions of H o l l y w o o d narrative cinema. I n The Doctor's Dream (1978), Ken Jacobs tums a sentimental, cliché-ridden T V movie >nto an oddly ambiguous psychodrama by begin-

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ning in the middle of the original f i l m , alternating shots f r o m progressively earlier and later points in the narrative, and finishing w i t h the original film's opening and closing shots cut next to each other. Donna Cameron's Dracula and the Baby Sitter (1986) derives its disted, dream-like narrative f r o m the re-editing of a movie about gambling addiction, and in The Falcon (1987), Cameron introduces only a few changes in a documentary about falconry in K u w a i t to make a sardonic commentary on the politics of leisure among wealthy Arabs. Pushing the re-editing process still further, Daniel Barnett rearranged and repeated shots f r o m a trailer for a James Bond movie. H i s Pull Out/Fall Out (1974) comically deconstructs the contrived excitement of ali trailers for actionthriller films. N i n a Fonoroff carries the deconstructive process further still in Some Phases of an Empire (1984), by rearranging, repeating, reversing, and cropping shots f r o m the H o l l y w o o d spectacular, Quo Vadis. A few other noteworthy examples of re-cutting and repeating shots f r o m a single f i l m are also w o r t h mentioning. Sharon Sandusky's CMon Babe (Danke Schoen) (1988) which is both a black comedy about compulsive and self-destructive behavior and a sly critique of manipulative "nature f i l m s , " comes f r o m a Disney documentary about Lemmings' suicidai journey t o the sea. Charles Levine's Bessie Smith (1968) uses repeated shots f r o m a 1929 f i l m , Saint Louis Blues, to celebrate the great blues singer and, at the same time, to criticize some of the stereotypes imposed

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on images of black women. Bruce Conner's Marilyn Times Five (1973), an homage/critique of a different sort, comes f r o m a tawdry little f i l m of a teenaged M a r i l y n M o n r o e (or someone looking very inuch like her) a w k w a r d l y adopting a series of peep show poses. L o o p e d again and again, Monroe's inept gestures are almost graceful, yet their mechanical repetition undercuts their playfulness and naive simulation of erotic pleasure. They become increasingly artificial and anti-erotic. Despite its stag movie and pin-up girl clichés, the film reneges on its initial invitation to the voyeur. Instead of a closer, more intimate view of a woman's body, the repetition of shots and the extreme grainincss of the f i l m increasingly draw attention to the body of the f i l m itself, to the film's o w n image-ness. And that, I would argue, is the effect of ali found footage films. Whether they preserve the footage in its original f o r m or present i t i n new and different ways, they invite us to recognize it as found footage, as recycled images, and due to that self-referentiality, they encourage a more analytical reading (which does not necessarily exclude a greater aesthetic appreciation) than the footage originally received.

So far, it should be noted, my examples have come f r o m films based principally or entirely on jniagcs taken f r o m one source, be it a feature^ngth movie or a fragment of a single shot. I n a

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great many found footage films, however, the images come f r o m a variety of sources and are juxtaposed in montage constructions that invest them w i t h new or previously unrecognized i m p l i cations. As Chick Strand has put i t : " N o t h i n g is sacred. Y o u just r i p it out of one context — or leave a couple of the little sub-contextual things in it — and m i x up the whole thing w i t h something else entirely: make up a context."^ O r , in Craig Baldwin's words: " Y o u can go i n any direction. That's the naturc of found footage ... I like that proliferation and multiplication — opening out, and a kind of complexity and layering, layering, layering."^ The nature and degree of "complexity and laye r i n g " depend upon t w o factors: the kinds of images found by the filmmaker and the way those images are juxtaposed. Newsreels, documentaries, propaganda films, educational films, industrial films, travelogues, stock shots, archival footage, cartoons, pornographic films, early silent films, H o l l y w o o d feature films, T V ads, game shows, news programs, and the rest of the detritus of the f i l m and television industries supply the images for montage constructions that range f r o m loose strings of comic metaphors and analogies, to off-beat narratives, to surreal visual poems, to formal experiments in graphic and rhythmic relationships, to critiques of the media's visual codes and the myths and ideologies that sustain them. In every case, the film's montage exploits discrepancies between the image's original and present functions. That is to say, it does not disguise the

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fact that the shots come f r o m different sources; yct, at the same time, it prompts us to recognize an ^ppropriateness in their juxtaposition. I n their ncw setting, even individual shots may have i m p l i cations that their original contexts suppressed, as when Bruce Conner exposes a phallocentric subtext in the famous shot of the U.S. Marines planting the American flag at Iwo Jima (in Cosmic Ray [1961]), or Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley bring o u t the trivialization of women in beauty contest footage (in Schmeerguntz [1966]). A l t h o u g h Bruce Conner is probably the best known filmmaker to m i x and match fragments of found footage, there are many others w h o have transformed found footage through similar m o n tage techniques. A m o n g Conner's contemporaries, the most productive have been A r t h u r Lipsett, Standish L a w d e r , C h i c k S t r a n d , a n d Stan Vanderbeek, but one might also mention Jerry Abrams, Stan Brakhage, Louis Brigante, Charles Gagnon, Adolfas Mekas, Paul Morrissey, and Raymond Sarnoff among older filmmakers whose found footage films have been — w i t h the exception of Brakhage's Murder Psalm (1981) — overlooked, underrated, or f o r g o t t e n . A m o n g the younger generation, Craig Baldwin, Alan Berliner, Jean-Claude Bustros, Abigail Child, M a r y Filippo, Heather McAdams, Julie M u r r a y , Jay Rosenblatt, Greta Snider, and Michael Wallin are a few of the tnany filmmakers w h o have kept the t r a d i t i o n alive by adapting i t to their o w n interests and skills. Whatever their individual differences, ali of these filmmakers — young and old — have one

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t h i n g i n c o m m o n : the abiHty t o make others' images serve their o w n purposes through the transformative power of montage. Investing disparate shots w i t h a kind o f pseudocontinuity is one way of transforming found footage, as Bruce Conner demonstrares in a well known sequence of A Movie (1958): a submarine captain seems to see a scantily dressed w o m a n through his periscope and responds by firing a torpedo which produces a nuclear explosion followed by huge waves ridden by surfboard riders. I n Short of Breath (1990), Jay Rosenblatt recreares the Freudian " p r i m a i scene" w i t h a shot o f a young boy getting o u t o f bed, w a l k i n g d o w n a h a l l , a n d l o o k i n g through a partially open door. This is f o l l o w e d by a shot o f sexual intercourse (obviously taken f r o m a pornographic f i l m ) , and then another shot of the boy standing i n the hallway w i t h an ambiguous cxpression o n his face (for w h i c h the classic Kuleshov effect supplies the appropriate e m o t i o n ) . I n Loose Ends (1979) Chick Strand concocts a somewhat more complex narrative out of shots of a boy running about in a field, a man firing a double-barrelled shotgun, the boy falling, and a w o m a n suddenly looking u p f r o m her ironing board and hurrying o u t o f the r o o m . After more shots of the gunman and the boy, the sequence continues as the abandoned iron sets the ironing board on fire; smoke and flames b i l l o w u p w a r d ; the panic-stricken w o m a n runs out of a smoky r o o m and u p a flight of stairs; flames appear superimposed over several standing figures; and finally a long pan reveals fields dotted

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vvrith burning haystacks as far as the eye can see. I t is Strand's montage that spreads the fire f r o m an ironing board to acres of farmland. This pseudo-narrative is part of a broader theme of violence, death and disaster, which is i n t r o duced early i n the f i l m w i t h footage of a question mark superimposed over flames and smoke. Subsequently, there are shots of a horse being slaughtered (from Franju's Blood of the Beasts), and people starving to death i n índia (taken, I w o u l d guess, f r o m Paul Rotha's 1947 compilation f i l m , The World Is Rich). Similar images of starvation and death r e t u m at the end the f i l m , where they take o n an hallucinatory quality t h r o u g h step printing and a soundtrack taken f r o m the meandering inventory of architectural details at the beginning of Last Year at Marienbad. The examples I have cited so far illustrate t w o kinds of associative processes characteristic o f found footage montage. The less common one is immediate shot-to-shot associations that produce (however improbably) narrative continuity: a boy leaving his bedroom accidentally sees his parents making love; a man shoots a child whose mother hears the gunshot and rushes out, leaving her iron to start a fire that spreads to the surrounding countryside; a submarine officcr sees a sexy woman through his periscope and excitedly fires a torpedo which sets o f f a nuclear explosion that creates I^uge waves f o r surfers to ride o n . The other, more common process of association hnks shots conceptually, metaphorically, and theniatically. As each shot contributes to a reading of

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nizes that they were never intended t o be seen together.

the one next to i t , so the accumulated readings produce thematic categories or paradigms in which most i f not ali of the film's images f i t , no matter h o w unrelated their original contexts might have been. I have already noted this associative process in A Movie and Loose Ends, but I w o u l d like to d r a w upon t w o other films — A r t h u r Lipsett's Fluxes and Abigail Child's Mercy — for examples o f thematic unity in found footage that is n o t linked by implied (if obviously impossible) causeeffect relationships. Fluxes (1967) includes the f o l l o w i n g sequence of shots: a monkey in a laboratory touching glass paneis as they light up, a man placidly sitting w i t h electrodes taped to his bare chest, a disk and cam turning and pumping back and f o r t h , and Adolph Eichmann, behind the buUet-proof glass of the witness stand, testifying at his w a r crimes trial i n Israel. H u m a n s and other animais reduced to subjects of conditioning, testing, measuring; living beings as machines; one of the human gears in the tcrrible machinery of genocide n o w caught i n a machine of retribution and placed i n a glass cage like a rat in a laboratory experiment. Other viewers might make different associations and f i n d different ways o f characterizing the sequence's theme of dehumanization (for lack of a better w o r d ) , but so strong is the mind's inclination to t u r n juxtaposed images into something meaningf u l (which is, as Eisenstein always insisted, the psychological basis of montage), that every alert viewer w i l l f i n d some way of associating and thematizing these images, even as he or she rccog-

Abigail Child's Mercy (1989) fits these generalizations as well, but it also shows that in addition to thematic development, found footage montage can produce rigorous formal designs w i t h graphic and rhythmic relationships between shots, comPlex alignments of image and sound, and subtle variations of tempo. A characteristic age ^egins w i t h a man in his undershirt breathing

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Moreover, as is often the case w i t h found footage films, the meaning dcrived from viewing Fluxes dends not only on its montage of images but also on the soundtrack's accompanying montage o f "found sounds." As Eichmann takes the witness stand, for example, an anonymous voice barks, "Are you k i d d i n g ? " A guard hands Eichmann a book (presumably a Bible) as a different voice cxplains, " A n d if you d o n ' t touch this box while you're d o i n ' it ..." Still another voice then asks, "Are there any clues?" Loud audience laughter follows as Eichmann refuses to take the book and pushes it away. Such inanities and clichés on the soundtrack, juxtaposed w i t h the stiff, f o r m a l solemnity of the trial (and w i t h everything that an image of Eichmann on trial brings to mind), p r o duce an ironic tone and anxious, dark humor that is characteristic of the f i l m as a whole — indeed is characteristic of Lipsett's films in general. For that matter, most found footage films assembled f r o m seemingly incongruous pieces of f o u n d footage engender an ironic view of their images and the world those images depict.

through a tube attached to a measuring device of some sort. A n enthusiastic male voice on the soundtrack begins to recite, " I t ' s colorless, it's odorless," and continues, "and if you could drink it, it would be tasteless!" over a brief shot of a dark shadow advancing along a railroad track (accompanied by a rattling sound and strong bow strokes on a cello), an equally brief and ambiguous image of water or steam f l o w i n g behind rocks or metal, and a longer shot of a man's bare arm bending and flexing its muscles (synchronized to the sound of a creaking board). A cacophonous m i x of sounds dominated by a pulsing r h y t h m on the cello coincides w i t h the arm opening again and then dissolving to a schematic drawing of the arm's muscles and tendons. That sound continues over another ambiguous and very brief shot of t w o large disks or wheels turning on what may be a ship's deck, f o l l o w e d by an even briefer shot of a machinedriven hammer striking red hot metal. A strong stroke of the cello's bow is synchronized w i t h a cut f r o m the fiery bl o w of the hammer to an aerial view of many simultaneous explosions along the edge of a large quarry. T h r o u g h Child's editing, the impact of the hammer "sets o f f " the explosions; its d o w n w a r d action " p r o d u c e s " an u p ward reaction and a release of the m o u n t i n g tension of the sequence. That tension, generated by the tempo of the montage as well as by energetic movement w i t h i n the shots, is thus temporarily released in the explosions: a spectacular image of destruction for constructive ends. That image and the sequence as a whole embody the film's princi-

As both Mercy and Fluxes illustrate, found footage films frequently include a playful and ironic vertical montage," as Eisenstein called the m o ment-by-moment juxtaposition of a f ilm' s sound and image tracks. A t the very least ( w i t h the ^'fception of a few films w i t h no sound at ali, such Stan Brakhage's Murder Psalm [1981], and ^ " u c k Hudina's Nigéria [1989]) music accompa-

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pai theme: the domination of nature and human beings by science and technology — though it must be added immediately that the film's w i t and the liveliness of its rhythms prevent it f r o m being as heavy handed and didactic as my restatement of its theme might seem to imply. The bursts of energy that carry this montage sequence to its explosive c lima x call to m i n d Eisenstein's comparison of montage to "the series of explosions of an internai combustion engine, driving f o r w a r d its automobile or tractor; f o r , similarly," Eisenstein continues, "the dynamics of montage serve as impulses driving f o r w a r d the total f i l m . " ^ 0 As Eisenstein knew and demonstrated in his o w n practice, however, strong m o n tage does not carry the f i l m f o r w a r d in equal, cvenly spaced impulses, but in unequal thrusts and surges, interrupted by pauses and counter-thrusts that retard and even mo m e n t a r ily reverse the film's momentum. This is h o w Child's montage works, and while it is notable for its intricate, jazzlike rhythms, it is like the montage of most found footage films in its creation of a thematic connection between diverse and dissimilar sounds and images.

nies the images and influences the way we are Hkely to read them (as a soft, lyrical age of Respighi's "Pines and Fountains of R o m e " produces an oddly peaceful counter-point to the i m ages o f the submarine-to-nuclear-explosion sequence in A Movie). M o r e frequently, filmmakers influence a shot's signification by introducing "inappropriate" sound effects (laughter w i t h a shot of Eichmann, a note on a cello synchronized w i t h a hammer blow and an explosion), or by adding brief comments and sound bites obviously taken f r o m other contexts. A few examples of the latter strategy, chosen more or less at random, include: the saccharine voice of a T V commentator at a Miss America pageant saying, " A beautiful g i r l , isn't she, John? A n d certainly a lovely representative of our c o u n t r y , " as t w o women contestants in a roller derby fight in front of an American flag hanging prominently on the w a l l behind them (in Nelson and W i l e y ' s Schmeerguntz); the voice of Lyndon Johnson i n toning, "This is a time for decision. Y o u are the generation that must decide," as t w o sky divers descend in free fali (in Stan Vanderbeek's Paneis for the Walls of the World [c. 1966]); a series of " G o o d Evenings" by T V news anchor persons synchronized w i t h shots of people sneezing, and later in the same f i l m a shot of an African woman breast feeding her baby accompanied by applause and an anchor woman saying cheerfuUy, " N o w that's scary!" (in Laurie Dunphy's Journalism Conducts A Tour [1989]). While examples of this sort are endless, the underlying tactic remains

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ntially the same: the incongruity of sound and ^magc expose, satirize, and produce new readings ' f the banalities, clichés and conventional modes discourse — verbal and visual — that are endemic to the mass media. Some filmmakers attach more extended verbal statements to their montage of found images. O n the soundtrack of M i k e Hoolboom's Eat (1989), for example, a woman describes her symptoms of anorexia nervosa; then as the images of the first half of the f i l m appear again (with a few variations), a m a n tells an extravagant story o f overeating. In Better Be Careful (1986), Heather McAdams makes w r y comments about herself and her w o r l d by scratching words i n the emulsion of her found footage. A n d in Daniel Eisenberg's Displaced Person (1981), extracts f r o m a talk by Claude Levi-Strauss, mixed w i t h a Beethoven string quartet, accompany footage f r o m a documentary on H i t l e r and repeated shots of t w o boys on a bicycle in w h a t appears to be a Jewish ghetto somewhere in Europe. While there is no indication that Levi-Strauss is referring spccifically to H i t l e r or to the events of W o r l d W a r I I , his elegant, thoughtful comments on the relationship of the individual to culture and history deepen the mean•ng of the footage (some o f w h i c h is cropped, looped, and step printed to augment its visual and emotional intensity). Together, the words, music and images make a m o v i n g meditation on the relationship between a particular historical catastrophe and, in Levi-Strauss' words, "the question meaning w i t h o u t order."

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In addition to thematic contexts, extended voiceover narration can introduce a more subjective p o i n t o f view than is c o m m o n i n most found footage films. I n the first section of Greta Snider's Futility (1989), a woman's voice listing synonyms f o r f u t i l i t y introduces sexual connotations (the synonyms include flaccid, impotent, and infertile) w h i c h become explicit in the second and t h i r d sections o f the f i l m . In the second, the w o m a n recounts a first person narrative about becoming pregnant and getting an abortion, and i n the third section she reads an ambivalently aggressive letter f r o m a w o m a n to her lover. I n Michael Wallin's Decodings (1983) a male voice recounts three anecdotes w i t h overlapping themes of isolation, alienation, friendship, and male bonding, and like Futility, Wallin's f i l m includes a wide diversity of found footage to illustrate (albeit indirectly, allusively, and sometimes ironically) the stories t o l d on the soundtrack. In She's Just Growing Up, Dear (1992), Julia Tell draws upon a few shots f r o m a sex education f i l m of the 1950s as accompaniment to a series of diary entries recounting events in a woman's life after she dreams that her father sexually abused her when she was very young. Similarly, i n Remembrance (1990), Jerry Tartaglia reproduces a few images f r o m Joseph Mankiewicz's AU About Eve, interspersed w i t h some home movie footage o f a big family gathering, as he describes his a d m i r a t i o n f o r , and I d e n t i f i c a t i o n w i t h , the strength, independence and bitchiness of M a r g o Channing, the character played by Bette Davis i n

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that f i ' t n . Less indirect and metaphoric t h a n futility and Decodings, the films of T e l l and Tartaglia also depend less on montage. I n fact, they are more like Bessie Smith or Marilyn Times five in their use of repetitions, freeze frames, looping, and other manipulations of a comparatively small amount of found footage. But like Snider's and Wallin's films, they show h o w extended verbal commentary can t u r n mass p r o duced public images into components of i n d i vidual and even autobiographical statements. For Craig Baldwin, voice-over narration serves a more politicai and polemic purpose. I n RocketKitKongoKit (1986) and Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991), Baldwin creates a distinctive f o r m of pseudo-documentary that parodies the voice-over narration and compilation montage of conventional documentary films. While p u r p o r t i n g to document elaborate conspiracies between governments, m u l t i - n a t i o n a l corporations and (in Tribulation 99) extraterrestriais, his films are funny, satiric, anarchic ( " u n derground" and " p u n k " are Baldwin likes to use in talking about his o w n w o r k ) , and astute critiques of the visual and verbal rhetoric of the mass media. Baldwin not only steals images from the media, he appropriates modes of discourse used by the media to authenticate their Information and envelop themselves i n an aura of authority and omniscience. In both films, Baldwin parodies the familiar tactic of using solcmn, fact-filled c o m mentary to make unrelated shots seem related to

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jhc media through montages of the media's o w n ords and images. Also like Baldwin's films, they occupy an interestingly ambiguous position vis à vis the media, since their methods of organization rnirror, at the same time as they mock, the f o r m a l strategies of the media themselves. That is to say, television, movies, radio and the popular press already use montage to give their discrete units of i n f o r m a t i o n some semblance o f formal coherence. Baldwin, Vanderbeek, Conner and others p u l l the media's montages apart and put them back together i n ways that make their montage structure more apparent and their coherence (and claims to accurate representations of the world) more problematic. Furthermore, our total communication environment — McLuhan's " g l o bal village" — is a macro-montage of ali the media; so the micro-montage of every found footage film implicitly reflects the experience of living in a media-dominated w o r l d . Just as ali f o u n d footage films are self-referential, so they are ali media-refcrential as w e l l . They cannot a v o i d calling attention to the "mediascape" f r o m w h i c h they come, especially when they also share the niedia's f o r m a l and rhetorical strategies of m o n tage.

each other, as well as relevant to an overriding narrative or thesis. For instance, a sequence in RocketKitKongoKit cuts f r o m a shot of business executives sitting around a conference table, to Captain K i r k and his crew also sitting around a conference table i n a scene f r o m Star Trek, to M o b u t u Sese Seko speaking on television, while an earnest voice-over describes the efforts of a German-based " O r b i t a l Transport Rocket Corporat i o n " to build secret rocket bases i n Zaire. In Tribulation 99 Baldwin neatly parodies the mass media's propensity for making images of p o l i t i cians suit prevailing public o p i n i o n . The most memorable example occurs when the narrator remarks, " O u r good friend Noriega is suddenly replaced by a grotesque voodoo-spouting freak," as the face of H o l l y w o o d ' s W o l f M a n undergoes its famous transformation f r o m human to canine features. • '^^•''''•h • Baldwin shares w i t h many other filmmakers an alienated, antagonistic M c L u h a n i s m that takes the omnipresence of the media for granted, but is determined to expose the silliness, n u m b i n g redundancy, and ideological conformity w i t h which the media represent the w o r l d to a more or less acquicscent public. Ahhough they lack Baldwin's inspired mimicry of media exposés, films like Stan Vanderbeek's Paneis for the Walls of the World and Newsreel of Dreams (1964), Bruce Conner's Report (1967), Alan Berliner's City Edition (1980), A l Razutis' The Wild West Show (1980), and Laurie Dunphy's Journalism Conducts A Tour imitate, parody, and to varying degrees ridicule

If "perfect" films, entire and untouched, occupy °ne end of the found footage spectrum, and m o n tages of found footage occupy the middle, then at the other end are films w i t h footage that has been

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scratchcd, scraped, perforated, p a i n t e d , dyed bleached, chemically-altered, or subjected to various techniques of optical printing that radically change its appearance. The content of the original footage may continue to be recognizable, but its impact depends principally on its new visual aspect, and in the most extreme cases only hints or fragments of the original images may remain within a k i n d o f f i l m i c palimpsest created by the filmmaker's erasures and additions. A n early, classic example of graphically enhanced found footage is Len Lye's Trade Tattoo (1937), w h i c h combines painting on f i l m w i t h special optical effects applied to out-takes f r o m documentary footage of factories, docks, ships, trains, workers, etc. W i t h its strong, poster-like colors and lively rhythms, Lye's f i l m celebrares modern labor and industry while advertising the services of the f i l m ' s sponsor, the General Post Office of Great Britain. Chick Strand adopts many of Lye's techniques (cxcept painting on film) for her short f i l m , Waterfall (1967), and Pat 0 ' N e i l l produces a virtual catalogue of optical printing effects applied to f o u n d footage in Runs Good (1971). 0 ' N e i l l often loops and superimposes shots in collage-like compositions that not only play w i t h f o r m a l relationships of color, scale, spacial arrangements, and movement, but comment i r o n i cally on the repetitive structures and stereotyped images of the mass media. Similarly, in Scott Bartlett's Heavy Metal (1978), footage f r o m gangster films goes through a number of optical permutations which are not only striking in their o w n

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right, but highlight — at the same time as they begin to deconstruct — some of the clichés of the genre: prison escapes, shoot outs, anguished g i r l friends and stoic, unexpressive men. The ambivalent relationship between celebrating and deconstructing found footage is even more apparent in A l Razutis' Sequeis in Transfigured Time (1976), Ghost: Image (1979), and For Artaud (1982): three of the six virtuoso performances on the optical printer that constitute Razutis' Visual Essays series (1973-84). The source of Sequeis is footage from films of Georges Méliès, which Razutis reprinted on color stock bipacked w i t h high contrast black and white negative. The combination results i n mysteriously beautiful images that look like elaborate tableaux etched in metal or translucent glass. Freeze frames and step p r i n t i n g slow d o w n the pace of the original films and reveal, in the filmmaker's words, "Méliès' invisible cuts — where he turns an o m n i bus into a hearse or midgets into puffs of smoke. I wanted to show how he's making these transform a t i o n s . " ! ! The footage for Ghost: Image comes from Dadaist, Surrealist, and German Expressionist films. Razutis flipped the images and superimposed them so that a profile facing left is symmetrically balanced by the same profile facing right, a figure moving in one direction splits into t w o identical figures moving in opposite directions, and so forth. The effect is strangely hallucinatory, and at the same time evokes the libidinous energies and macabre, gothic fantasies through which the original films engaged their audience's imagina-

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t i o n . I n For Artaud a few images f r o m Carl Dreyer's ion ofjoan of Are (in which Antonin A r t a u d played a small but significant role) occasionally and only barely show through a midnightblue ground filled w i t h sparkling grains of bluewhite light. Although Razutis has referred to the f i l m as " a n essay in expressionism and the tradition of Gothic h o r r o r , " l 2 I w o u l d suggest that it is equally illustrative of the mutability of the film image itself. A similar trope of mutability appears in David Rimmer's Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (1970). The f i l m is based on a loop of black and white footage (taken f r o m a National Film Board of Canada documentary), in which a w o m a n in a factory raises and lowers a large sheet of cellophane. As the woman repeats the gesture over and over again, the image undergoes a series of subtle but increasingly dramatic transformations. Due to various combinations of negative, high contrast and color effects introduced through optical printing, the conventional photographic representation at the beginning of the f i l m gradually metamorphoses into abstract patterns of pulsing colored light at the end. What begins as a clever image of repetitiveness in factory w o r k , becomes increasingly rich aesthetically, and more than that, offers viewers an unusual o p p o r t u n i t y to experience shifting relationships between perception and cognition as the footage works its way from documentary realism to painterly abstraction.

tive in changing the appearance and signification found footage. A t its simplest and most playful, this approach appears in Heather M c A d a m s ' Scratchman II (1982) w i t h its graffiti-like lines, circles, arrows and other r u d i m e n t a r y shapes scratched into footage of an earnest, executive typc speaking directly to the camera (though what we hear is a tinny repetitive tune produced by what sounds like a cheap music box). In Victor Faccinto's Book of Dead (1978), deviPs tails, horns, slithering snake-like shapes, triangle noses and hats, and other more or less representational forms are drawn on footage that includes a dead body floating in a river, cowboys driving cattle, a wife being told that her husband has been killed, a w o m a n adjusting her bikini and other scenes on a beach. Although simple in technique, the effect is strangely disturbing, as if some mischievous, demonic spirit were playing tricks and mocking proprieties while people go on about their business, oblivious to this sly, derisive presence in their midst.

M o r e direct methods of working on film (scratching, drawing, painting, etc.) can be equally effec-

As methods of modifying found footage become more complex, the viewer's attention increasingly shifts f r o m the photographic content of the found footage to the textures, colors and rhythms created by the filmmaker's methods of effacement and erasure. The strip of f i l m itself becomes the principal object of interest. A n early and fairly primitive example is Walter Ungercr's Meet Me, Jesus (1966), in which i n k , paint and scratches partially obscure a loose montage of found footage taken from a variety of sources. M o r e sophisticated applications of the same techniques (elabo-

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ratcd and intensified by optical printing) appear in H y Hirsh's Scratch Pad (1960) and La Couleur de la forme (1961) and Jane Conger's Odds and Ends (c. 1950s). These films have an off-the-cuff, improvisatory appearance — suitable for a "scratch p a d " or collection of "odds and ends" — that makes them seem more like studies and experiments than fully developed and organically unified works. In M a r k Street's Winter Wheat (1989), on the other hand, the predominantly orange tones painted on the f i l m , the bleached and intricately scratched emulsion, and the limited set of images taken f r o m an educational f i l m on farming, produce a work w i t h greater formal unity and "a quiet but persistent theme of destruction [that] winds its way through the f i l m . " ! ^ The most obvious destruction occurs on the surface of the f i l m itself, as Street removes portions of the emulsion and the images embedded in i t . The process of obscuring the content of found footage is carried much further in films by Caroline Avery, Cécile Fontaine and Phil Solomon. In Big Brother (1983), Midweekend (1985) and Simulated Experience (1989), Avery uses short lengths of found footage that have been scratched, painted, split, cut into small pieces, and reassembled in collage-like constructions reminiscent o f b o t h Pop A r t and Abstract Expressionism. Fontaine not only bleaches, scratches and paints found footage, but for films like Two Made for TV Films (1986) and Cruises (1989), she soaked strips of f i l m to loosen the emulsion and rearrange or layer it on other strips of f i l m . The shifting, overlapping

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.^^ges constantly appear on the verge of t o t a l disintegration. In Phil Solomon's The Secret Garden (1986), the chemically treated and re-photoaraphed images taken f r o m children's films, i n cluding The Wizard of Oz, virtually disappear i n a rich texture of prismatic light that flickers and flows in rhythmic patterns suggestive of fire or reflections on water. Occasionally, recognizable shapes emerge like mirages or fragments of hypnagogic vision, only t o be reabsorbed into an undifferentiated figure/ground which Paul A r t h u r has aptly characterized as "granular, reticulated clumps at the edge of abstraction."^'* W i t h abstraction comes a whole new set of aesthetic and criticai concerns that have nothing to do with found footage as such. Yet, even films with little direct evidence of their origins as found footage differ significantly f r o m purely abstract films made w i t h similar techniques. Clearly, the films of Solomon, Fontaine, Avery, Street, et al have a good deal in common w i t h the abstract animation of Len Lye, N o r m a n M c L a r e n , H a r r y Smith, and others w h o scratch, draw, and paint on clear or black leader. However, when a f i l m ' s starting p o i n t is neutral, imageless leader, the emphasis falis entirely on the dance of lines, shapes, textures and colors created " o u t of n o t h i n g " by Jhc filmmaker. When the filmmaker w o r k s on ound footage, something different happens. I n aadition to their innate interest as gestures o f personal expression, the visual effects added by ^ filmmaker assert the individual filmmaker's Power to reclaim the terrain of public images for

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personal use. Thus even the most painterly and abstract f o u n d footage films offer an i m p l i c i t critique of the f i l m industry's conventional, standardized representations of the w o r l d , and like other kinds of found footage films, they interrupt the endless recirculation and unreflective reception of mass media images.

In the Domain of Montage: Compilation, Collage, Appropriation

To open the door is one thing; to go through it and confront the media on their o w n ground — the nianipulation of images — is another thing, and the filmmakers most likely to take this further step are those w h o draw most heavily on the resources of montage. Therefore I want to elaborate on my previous discussion of montage in f o u n d footage films, not only because I think its criticai — and ultimately politicai — implications are especially noteworthy, but also because the conjunction of montage and found footage also appears i n other, more widely recognized forms, such as conventional compilation films and, at the opposite extreme, an increasing number of music videos. Montage, in other words, has many applications, and to more fully appreciate its function in films by experimental and avant-garde filmmakers, I w a n t to take into these comparable forms of film and video designed for mass audiences.

I have been arguing that the recycled images of found footage films have more i n common than simply their origins in footage that was found by the filmmaker. Whatever the filmmaker may do to them — including nothing more than reproduce them exactly as he or she found them — recycled images call attention to themselves as images, as products of the image-producing industries of film and television, and therefore as pieces of the vast and intricate mosaic of i n f o r m a t i o n , entertainment, and persuasion that constitute the mediasaturated environment of modern — or many w o u l d say, postmodern — life. By reminding us that we are seeing images produced and disseminated by the media, found footage films open the door to a criticai examination of the methods and motives underlying the media's use of images.

Since c o m p i l a t i o n , collage and a p p r o p r i a t i o n have a variety of meanings, some of which overlap to a considerable degree, I w i l l distinguish between the three methodologies along the lines suggested m the f o l l o w i n g model or conceptual g r i d of

S2

SS

For the purposes of the f o l l o w i n g discussion, then, I propose to distinguish between three kinds of found footage montage, which I have labellcd compilation, collage, and appropriation, and I will try to show w h y collage (as I define it below) has the greatest potential to criticize, challengc, and possibly subvert the power of images produced by, and distributed though, the corporate media.

relationships between signifier and signified (signification), modes of cultural production (exemplary genre), and broad sets of aesthetic premises and practices embracing ali the arts (aesthetic bias):

MBTBODOLOGY

SIGNIFICaTIOH

KXKMPLRHY GEHRB

MSTHBTIC BI^s

compilation

reality

documentary f i l m

realism

collage

image

avant-garde f i l m

modernism

appropriation

aimulacrum

music video

postmodernlBra

O f course these are broad categories employed in a highly schematic way, and w i l l require further explanation in due course. Their only value, at this point, is to suggest that different methods of using found footage are related to different paradigms of artistic practice and cultural theory. These paradigmatic relationships help to explain w h y a m o n tage of found footage does not automatically raise politically charged questions about the origin of the images and the ways they have been used in the mass media. Everything depends on the methodology and related contexts governing the w o r k ' s reception.

»

•

The practice of making earlier films is nearly as cinema itself. As early as tor concocted an

»

new films f r o m pieces of old as the institution of 1898, a French distribuof the Dreyfus case w i t h

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previously existing shots of an officer leading some French troops on parade, a Parisian street scene including a large building, a tug boat sailing toward a barge, and the delta of the Nile River. Accompanied by oral commentary, this sequence of shots apparently convinced audiences of the day that they were seeing "Dreyfus before his arrest, the Palais de Justice where Dreyfus was courtmarshalled, Dreyfus being taken to the battleship, and DeviPs I s l a n d . " ! ^ Here, in a nutshell, are the principal characteristics of nearly ali compilation films: shots taken f r o m films that have no necessary relationship to each other; a concept (theme, argument, story) that motivates the selection of the shots and the order in which they appear; and a verbal accompaniment (voice-over or text on the screen or both) that yokes the shots to the concept. W i t h varying degrees of subtlety and sophistication, these characteristics are to be found in v i r t u ally ali c o m p i l a t i o n films f r o m the pioneering efforts of Esther Schub in Fali of the Romanov Dynasty and The Great Road (both released i n 1927), to Walter Ruttmann's The Melody of the World (1929), to Stuart Legg's The World In Action series (1941-45) for the N a t i o n a l F i l m Board of Canada, to Frank Capra's Why We Fight series (1943-44) for the U.S. War Department, to tnc criticai portraits of American politics by Emile ^e Antonio in films like Point of Order (1964) and ^ear of the Pig (1969), to the innumerable television specials that " l o o k back" at significant historical events. There is, in other words, a long and aistinguished tradition of using archival material

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to make documentary films of the type Jay Leyda was the first to call compilation films in his survey of the genre, Films Beget Films. Leyda also supplies the clearest description and strongest justification for compilation films when he writes, " A n y means by which the spectator is compelled to look at familiar shots as if he had not scen them before, or by which the spectator's mind is made more alert to the broader meanings of old materiais — this is the aim of the correct compilat i o n . "^^ Compilation films may reinterpret i m ages taken f r o m f i l m and television archives, but generally speaking, they do not challengc the representational nature of the images themselves. That is, they still operate on the assumption that thcrc is a direct correspondence between the images and their profilmic sources in the real w o r l d . Moreover, they do not treat the compilation process itself as problematic. Their montage may make spectators "more alert to the broader meanings of old materiais," but as a rule they do not make them more alert to montage as a method of composition and (more or less explicit) argument. As Leyda himself says, "the manipulation of actuality ... usually trics to hide itself so that the spectator sees only 'reality' — that is, the especially arranged reality that suits the film-maker's purpose. "1^ The methods of compilation films are so familiar they hardly need illustration here, but I w a n t to offer one concrete example f r o m a film that comes close to Crossing the bordcr between compilation and collage — which is one of the reasons I have

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chosen i t . The other reason is that it shares one cxtremely significant image w i t h my examples of collage and appropriation: the familiar mushroom shaped cloud of a nuclear explosion. The Atomic Cafe (1982) includes a sequence devoted to the U.S. nuclear test at the Bikini atoll in 1946. I t begins w i t h part of a documentary showing the inhabitants readily agreeing to leave the island that has been selected as the site of the test. O n the soundtrack the local people sing " Y o u Are M y Sunshine" in their native language, while the islanders carry their possessions onto large open boats provided by the U.S. Navy, and wave happily as the boats head out to sea. The singing fades out w i t h shots of planes in the air and observers anxiously awaiting the explosion. We hear an onthe-spot radio repórter describing the final preparations, mixed w i t h a voice-over count d o w n , as we see an aerial shot of the island, ocean, and ships anchored around the tiny island below. When the count d o w n reaches zero, a hissing whooshl accompanies an aerial shot of the nuclear explosion. This is followed by a shot of the explosion taken at sea levei (and a louder concussion o n the soundtrack), and then a t h i r d shot taken f r o m a closer position at sea levei (synchronized w i t h another resonant booml). The last shot offers an awesome view of the massive column of water and steam rising into a canopy of clouds over the ships anchored in the vicinity of the blast. Then blaring, dramatic music introduces a Paramount Newsreel, « 1 9 4 7 : The Year of D i v i s i o n , " and in the ^rgcnt tone characteristic of newsreels, a voice-

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The kinds of representation that compilation films tend to take for granted are precisely the kind collage films call into question. To emphasize this point, I want to take a closer look at the particularly memorable sequence f r o m Bruce Conner's A Movie referred to earlier in this essay. Four brief shots of a submarine submerging conclude w i t h only the sub's periscope slicing t h r o u g h choppy waves. Cut to an officer staring into a periscope and turning i t to look in a different direction, cut

^ a scantily clad model (strongly resembling a very young M a r i l y n Monroe) lying back in a provocative pose, cut to the submarine officer reacting to what he has seen in the periscope. He turns, and shouts an order, cut to a close up of a hand pressing a button, cut to a torpedo speeding through murky water, cut to a sea levei shot of a nuclear explosion, cut to an aerial shot of the explosion, cut to another sea levei view of the explosion, cut to a closer view f r o m sea levei, showing the lower edge of the cloud of steam and gases beginning to sink downwards while a huge white w a l l of vapor engulfs a battleship, cut to a large wave carrying a surf board rider who jumps off his board and is covered by the water, cut to another surfer paddling his board up a rising wave. The formal ingenuity of the sequence is matched by its thematic complexity and critique of representation. A t a formal levei, one notes such things as the four shots of the submerging submarine matched by f o u r shots of the mushroom cloud rising f r o m the sea and spreading across the sky; the momentum of the explosion continuing i n the waves ridden by the surfers; and the introduction of a water/disaster motif that continues through a number of subsequent shots and is "resolved" at the end of the f i l m w i t h shots of a diver descending into the hold of a sunken ship. Thematically, Conner's collage of shots f r o m at least four different sources not only produces a series of visual gags and metaphoric links between sexual desire and military aggressiveness, between orgasm and annihilation, it also deconstructs conventional

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over recounts the beginning of the C o l d W a r , while the f i l m presents maps, animated graphics, shots of Stalin, troops parading i n Red Square, and American and Russian troops shaking hands on the banks of the Elbe River. Unlike traditional compilation films, The Atomic Cafe does not provide its o w n voice-over to guide viewers through its archival material and tell them h o w they should think about it (though, one might argue, the ironic use of " Y o u Are M y Sunshine" is a subtler way of doing the same thing). O n the other hand, in the convention of most compilation films, i t follows a clear, linear development, and does not continually question the representational nature of the images i t uses. While the f i l m implies that the shots of the local people happily leaving their island were staged for American propaganda purposes, its images of the actual explosion are presented as straight fact: this is what the explosion looked like, these are signifiers of an event solidly grounded in reality and contextualized by other real, historical events such as the beginning of the Cold W a r .

editing strategies that link one shot w i t h the next t h r o u g h implied cause and effect relationships. Like Eisenstein's "intellectual montage," the obviously contrived connections between shots in A Movie not only call attention t o the montage technique itself, but provoke a self-conscious and criticai viewing of cinematic representations, especially when they are representations that were o r i g i n a l l y intended to be seen as unmediated signifiers of reality.

choir, sings: Tm starting with the man in the mirror. Tm asking him to change his ways. And no message could'a been any clearer: If you want to make the world a better place, Take a look at yourself and make a change.

The methodology I have labelled appropriation also capitalizes on the manipulations of montage and the equivocai nature of cinematic representations, but it lacks the deconstructive strategies and criticai p o i n t of view characteristic of collage films. M y example of appropriation comes from Michael Jackson's music video, The Man in the Mirror (1987), and centers on the image of a nuclear explosion, which marks the emotional and thematic turning point of the whole video. The first half of the video presents images of poverty, famine, and violence, culminating in the following sequence of shots: an explosion in the middle of a Middle-East city, marching soldiers, a t h r o n g of Blacks r u n n i n g d o w n a wide city street, P.W. Botha making a speech, Blacks holding up antiracism placards, a "For Sale" sign in f r o n t of a f a r m , g r i m looking farmers at a meeting, people carrying a banner saying "Farms N o t A r m s , " a crowd burning an American flag, a parade of tanks w i t h rockets mounted on them, bombs falling f r o m a large jet bomber, a nuclear explosion at sea. Meanwhile, Michael Jackson, backed by a large

The last w o r d , sung by the choir i n a dramatic, inspirational change of key, is synchronized w i t h the nuclear explosion. Immediately f o l l o w i n g , are shots of w o r l d leaders expressing joy: Begin, Sadat and Cárter shaking hands, Reagan and Gorbachev shaking hands, Lech Walesa and his ers celcbrating the v i c t o r y of S o l i d a r i t y , Bishop Desmond T u t u smiling and clapping his hands. Then a shot of a relief worker slipping a shirt on a painfully thin (but smiling!) Black child leads into many images of people accomplishing various sorts of good works — the k i n d of "feel g o o d " images that the media like to use as counterweights to their images of despair and disaster (from which the first half of the music video draws its imagery).

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W i t h its accumulation of more or less familiar •mages cuUed f r o m the news media, The Man in the Mirror is very much like a traditional compilation f i l m . I n its rapid juxtaposition of extremely divergent images, however, it may seem more like a collage f i l m . Yet, in at least one crucial way, it is like neither. T o understand why this is so — and

to gain some insight into the kind of appropriation that permits the representation of a nuclear explosion to signify a change for the better — we need to pursue the related issues of montage and representation in found footage films a little further.

One way of conceptualizing the relationship between archival representations of history and the meanings they acquire in compilation films is offered by Emile Benveniste's categories of history and discourse. The anonymous footage i n f i l m archives is very much like the kinds of utterances Benveniste calls history: "There is no longer a narrator. The events are set forth chronologically.

they occurred. N o one speaks here; the events sccm to narrate themselves." O n the other hand, ^hen the filmed representations of events are taken f r o m the archives and made to serve the purposes of a particular filmmaker, they enter the plane of discourse, in Benveniste's sense. They are used by an identifiable "speaker" (in my analogy: the filmmaker) w i t h "the intention of influencing the other (in this case: the viewer) in some way."^^ Ester Schub's Fali of the Romanov Dynasty, for example, draws upon bland, anonymous archival footage of public events and politicai figures (some of which was shot by the czar's o w n "home movie" cinematographer) to produce a trenchant discourse on the evils of the czarist regime. In the hands of a czarist editor (or screened uncut for the czar and his family), the same footage w o u l d say something quite different. The same is true of archival shots of nuclear explosions, many of which were made by cameras that were n o t even operated by human beings during the time the f i l m was being exposed, and which lack even the minimal narrative of a countdown and climactic boom — until they are taken out of the archives and inserted into discourses designed by particular addressers for their i n tended addressees. In The Atomic Cafe they are put at the service of an ironic discourse on the mendacity and foolishness of American responses to the threat of atomic warfare in the years immediately f o l l o w i n g the Second W o r l d W a r . I n A Movie they serve a wittier and more complex discourse on desire and destruction; in The Man in

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A good place to begin is w i t h Walter Benjamin's comment that, " T o write history ... means to quote history. But the concept of quotation implies that any given historical object must be ripped out of its c o n t e x t . " ! * Compilation films are composed of visual quotations o f history (or more precisely, selected moments of historical "reality") that have been ripped out of context and placed end to end according to the filmmaker's theme or argument. I n such cases, quotation and representation are synonymous. They offer, in the words of Allan Sekula, "the appearance of history itself." Sekula is speaking of photographs, rather than films, but the same principie applies, just as it does when he says, " N o t only are the pictures in archives often literally for sale, but their meanings are u p for grabs."l9

the Mirror the one shot of the Bikini test marks the absurdly optimistic turn in the music vidco's visual discourse. I n the latter, the representation of a nuclear explosion signifies hope; in the former jt signifies just the opposite; in The Atomic Cafe it signifies the bomb's actual, destructiveness which profoundly influenced the mentality of politicians and ordinary people alike. Yct, in the archive, it is puré, impersonal history, the representation of an event that "narrares itself."^! Returning, then, t o the crucial difference between representation i n w o r k s of appropriation and in other methods of presenting found footage, I w o u l d begin by stressing the basic difference between compilation and appropriation. In compilation films, an archival shot is prcsumed to have concrete, historical referents that ground the film's discourse in reality, and lend crcdence to its overall argument. Clearly, the makers of The Atomic Cafe made this assumption when they inserted shots o f various thermonuclear explosions, i n cluding the ones taken at B i k i n i . But, there is nothing except the emotional appeal o f Michael Jackson's music to associate the Bikini test w i t h a "change" that reduced Arab-Israeli tensions, or led to the success of the Solidarity movement in Poland, or contributed to the weakening of apartheid i n South Africa. I n other words, the shot of a nuclear explosion i n Michael Jackson's music video is simply one image in a stream of recycled images presented w i t h little, if any, concern for their historical specificity — let alone logical or even chronological connection. W i t h The Man in

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^the Mirror we enter the postmodern w o r l d of (in the words o f Fredric Jameson) "representations that have no truth content, [and] are, i n this sense, shcer surface or superficiality."^^ j h e object or event in history has been superseded by — or i n Baudrillard's , preceded by — simulacra, by representations of other representations produced and preserved by the mass media. I f compilation films "quote h i s t o r y , " The Man in the Mirror quotes the media, which have replaced history and virtually abolished historicity. In the context of Benjamin's remark that "the concept of quotation implies that any given historical object must be ripped out of its context," I would say that for works of appropriation like Michael Jackson's music video, the context is the media, from which the quotations have been ripped and into which they have been reinserted w i t h o u t regard for their " t r u t h content," as Jameson puts it. The simulacra produced by postmodernist "superficiality" occupy the opposite end of the spectrum f r o m the representations of reality that are essential to compilation films and their aesthetic bias t o w a r d realism.

Between compilation and appropriation lies the terrain of collage, to which I w a n t t o return i n order make explicit some of the assumptions about collage t h a t have remained implicit up to this point. Starting w i t h the experiments of Braque and

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Picasso i n 1912, and rapidly spreading to ali art forms, collage proved to be the avant-garde's most effective means of challenging traditional assumptions about the nature of representation i n art. Indeed, one could argue that collage became an essential weapon in the modernist assault on realism i n ali the arts. By incorporating disparate materiais f o u n d , rather than made, by the artist, and by dispensing w i t h long-respectcd principies of coherence and organic unity in art, collage changed the basic rules of artistic representation — or w h a t M a r j o r i e Perloff calls referentiality: "The question of referentiality inherent i n collage thus leads to the replacement of the signified, the objects to be imitated, by a new set of signifiers calling attention to themselves as real objects in the real w o r l d . "23 Note that Perloff is n o t talking about the representation of "real objects," but the literal presence of objects f r o m "the real w o r l d " in the w o r k of art itself.

robes, highiights, contrasts; a p p r o p r i a t i o n acctSj leveis, homogenizes. I f both use montage to dislodge images f r o m their original contexts and çj^phasize their "image-ness" (that is, their constructed rather than " n a t u r a l " representations of reality)» only collage actively promotes an analytical and criticai attitude t o w a r d those images and their uses w i t h i n the institutions of cinema and television.

T o apply this argument to f i l m , one must recognize that "the real w o r l d " f o r f o u n d footage filmmakers is the mass media w i t h their endless supply of images waiting to be ripped f r o m their context and reinserted i n collage films where they w i l l be recognized as fragments still bearing the marks of their media reality. A g a i n , collage and appropriation have something i n common, but as in the case of their responses to the equivocai nature of photographic representation, collage and a p p r o p r i a t i o n part company over the way they respond to media-as-reality. Collage is criticai; a p p r o p r i a t i o n is accommodating. Collage

An image's historical referent — such as the United States' nuclear tests in the South Pacific — may continue to be important in a collage f i l m , but the more significant referent w i l l be the image's original context of production, distribution, and reception: everything the media do to invest their images w i t h an aura of reality. Unlike postmodernist appropriations of found footage, i n which the media as the source of images are taken for granted (indeed are more or less explicitly celebrated for their image-producing powers), the collage f i l m subjects its fragments of media-reality to some form of deconstruction, or at the very least to a recontextualizing that prevents an unreflective reception of representations as reality (as presumed by the c o m p i l a t i o n f i l m ) , as well as an indifferent or cynical reception encouraged by postmodernist a p p r o p r i a t i o n . I f collage is, as Cregory Ulmer has written, "the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation in our century,"24 then appropriation is the movement that follows behind, profiting f r o m the tevolution w i t h o u t embracing or advancing its goals.

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One of the masters of surreaHst collage, M a x Ernst, once wrote, "Ce n'est pas la colle q u i fait le c o l l a g e . A n d f o r filmmakers, i t is n o t the splicer that makes a collage f i l m . I t is the decision to invest found footage w i t h meanings unintended by its original makers and unrecognized i n its original contexts of presentation and reception. I n its most comprehensive sense, then, a collage f i l m could be anything a filmmaker finds and decides to show i n the f o r m he or she found i t : the filmic equivalent of a Duchamp "ready m a d e . " But found footage films based on a montage of disparate and incongruous images are, i t seems t o me, more likely to challenge the media's power to make ideologically loaded images seem like unmeditated representations of reality.

Epic Collage N o discussion of montage in found footage films w o u l d be complete w i t h o u t some reference to large-scale cycles or serial works that not only use f o u n d footage but bring together more or less autonomous films under a single, comprehensive title. While found footage plays an important role in A l Razutis' magnum opus Amerika (1972-83) — most notably in The Wild West Show (Interrupted By A Message From Our Sponsor) and the

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short, concluding piece, O Kanada — i t is less important, i n the overall structure of the w o r k , than the images made by Razutis himself. Similarly, found footage appears in a few sections of Lewis Klahr's Super-8 series, Picture Books For Adults (1983-85), but cut-out animation is Klahr's principal technique f o r recycling mass media i m ages. Hollis Frampton's Magellan was intended to include found footage films, such as Public Domain (1972) and Gloria! (1979), but not only was that project left uncompleted upon Frampton's death in 1984, it appears that most of the films he planned to include in the complete Magellan cycle would not have been composed of found footage. By contrast, Abigail Child's Is This What You Were Bom For?, Keith Sanborn's KAPITAL!, and Leslie Thornton's Peggy and Fred in Hell not only make extensive use of found footage, but j u x t a pose a number of shorter films w i t h i n a larger structure that might be labelled "epic collage" t o designate the ambitiousness of their projects. Child's Is This What You Were Bom For? (198189) consists of eight films, ali but t w o of w h i c h draw upon found footage f o r some, i f not a l i , of their imagery. I n its complete f o r m , Sanborn's KAPITAL! (1980-87) encomes seven films; however, because the first and last involve live performance and/or multiple projection, only parts 2 to 6 are in regular distribution. T h o r n t o n ' s ^eggy and Fred in Hell (1984-90) includes five Works (with another installment, Whirling, likely to be completed before these words appear i n Print). The Prologue is on f i l m , the next t w o parts

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are on video, the fourth uses both f i l m and video and the f i f t h is on video only. AU five parts combine f o u n d footage w i t h live scenes improvised by the t w o children, Peggy and Fred, who are the protagonists of the series.

According to Donald Kuspit, collage is revolutionary because, " I t brings the whole idea of art into question."2^ N o t only does it question the nature of artistic production by substituting actual objects and images for drawn and painted representations, it also questions the idea of the autonomy and the organic unity of art. Invaded by "reality fragments" (in Peter Búrger's phrasc^^), the collage w o r k cannot offer a haven for purely aesthetic appreciation, nor can it present itself as self-sufficient and bound only by its o w n rules of representation and signification. Just as it unapologetically displays its fragmentary form and content, it openly announces its affiliation w i t h the everyday world of ordinary objects, consumer products, and popular culture. Its fragments do n o t blend into a seamless, illusory whole, and its significance cann o t be enclosed w i t h i n the borders of the w o r k

itself- As Donald Kuspit writes, "By its seeming indiffcrcnce to the fragments that constitute it — conveyed by the seemingly random way in which those fragments are gathered together — the collage forces US to t u r n f r o m the fragments to the attention that selected them... They themselves, simply by being fragments, exist i n attenuated form as stimuli — but never w i t h any absoluteness, only relative to an individuaPs attention."28 Por Kuspit, this makes collage the appropriate p r i n cipie of organization for art in an age of relativity. For theorists w i t h a more pointedly politicai view on art, collage is also the most appropriate way for art to "articulate d i s c o n t i n u i t y , " i n Theodor Adorno's w o r d s , and thereby "shock people into realizing how dubious any unity [is]."^^ Echoing A d o r n o , Peter Biirger argues that the absence of a coherent, unified meaning in collage "is cxperienced as shock by the recipient," and shock, in Búrger's view "is the means to break through aesthetic immanence and to usher i n (initiate) a change in the recipient's life praxis."^^ At the very least, I think it is tenable to argue that collage politicizes art by confronting the viewer with actual pieces of reality w i t h i n a " f r a m e " that has traditionally signified the separation of art and reality, aesthetic immanence and life praxis. The presence of mass produced objects and images in the previously privileged realm of unique artistic representation not only challengcs the autonomy ° f art (much as mechanical reproduction challengcs the " a u r a " and " c u l t value" of o r i g i n a l ^ o r k s of a r t ^ l ) , it also offers artists a way of

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These works are too long and diverse to discuss in detail here, but I hope at least to indicate what they have contributed to the genre of found footage films t h r o u g h their adaptation of the principies of coUage/montage. A n d to do that, I want to return to the whole issue of collage as a revolutionary development in 20th Century art.

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placing ali images — whatever their original source and f u n c t i o n — on the same plane of visual expression and subjecting them to the same levei of criticai analysis. W h a t I have been calling collage, A d o r n o and Búrger prefer to call montage, except when referring specifically to the papier collée techniques of Cubism — as, for example, when Biirger writes, " A theory of the avant-garde must begin w i t h the concept of montage that is suggested by the early cubist collages. As far as I am concemed, either term w i l l do, so long as it is understood to mean the juxtaposition of pre-existing elements extracted f r o m t h e i r o r i g i n a l c o n t e x t s , d i v e r t e d (or " d é t o u r n e d , " i n the t e r m i n o l o g y o f the Situationists) f r o m their original, intended uses, and thereby made to yield previously unrecognized significance.^-^ A Creative technique that is also a criticai method, collage/montage obliges the audience to recognize the motivations behind the choice of the elements extracted, as well as the significance of their new j u x t a p o s i t i o n . I t argues by concrete example rather than discursive reasoning. As Walter Benjamin said of his Árcades project, " M e t h o d of this w o r k : literary montage. I have n o t h i n g to say, only to show."^^ H a d Benjamin completed that project, in which he intended " t o s h o w " thousands of examples of concrete phenomena taken f r o m , i n his w o r d s , the "garbage heap" of I9th century commodities, the result might well have been the largest and most impressive w o r k ever to be based o n "a shock-like montage of the mate-

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^j^l "35 As it is — or more precisely, as Benjamin cnvisioned it — the Árcades project validates the principie of montage construction as the basis for vsrhat Susan Buck-Morss calls "the dialectics of seeing," by w h i c h she means "the interpretive power of images that make conceptual points concretely, w i t h reference to the w o r l d outside the tcxt."^^ A n d i t is precisely this " i n t e r p r e t i v e power of images" that makers of f o u n d footage films count on when they construct their critiques of the image w o r l d lying outside their o w n filmic texts. Both collage and montage are that emphasize the constructive end of the process, the act of putting the pieces together (however jarring and fragmentary their juxtaposition may t u r n o u t to be). I t is important to , however, that collage/montage begins with the artist tearing pieces out of context or picking them out of the cultural "garbage heap." It is useful, in this regard, to recall Walter Benjamin's observation that, " I n t e r r u p tion is one of the fundamental methods of ali f o r m giving. I t reaches far beyond the domain of art. I t 's, to mention just one of its aspects, the origin of the quotation. Quoting a text implies interrupting 'ts context."37 Benjamin was referring to Brecht's epic theatre, but I think his words can be made ^qually applicable to the "epic collages" of C h i l d , Sanborn and T h o r n t o n .

Th ere are t w o fundamental ways i n which inter-

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r u p t i o n serves these filmmakers as a " f o r m - g i v i n g " device. The first is extrinsic to the films themselves, and involves finding the materiais that w i l l end up as "montage cells" or fragments of filmic collage. What is interrupted, in the extrinsic sense, is the context i n which the materiais normally exist and in which they seem perfectly "natur a l " — " n a t u r a l , " that is, i n the sense Roland Barthes applies to the function of m y t h : "giving historical i n t e n t i o n a n a t u r a l j u s t i f i c a t i o n , and making contingency appear eternal."^^ For instance, to make the section of KAPITAL! called A Public Appearance and a Statement, Sanborn interrupted the natural f l o w of television news to extract A B C s live coverage of the events at A n d r e w s A i r Force Base when the body of President Kennedy was brought back to Washington and Lyndon Johnson made his first speech as the new president. The home movie footage for Child's Covert Action is the product of a different sort of interruption, having been ripped out of its n o r m a l mode of presentation at home to family and friends. In a somewhat comparable manner, Leslie T h o r n t o n interrupts the historical context of archival footage by taking i t out of the archives and inserting it in films that do not — like compilation films, f o r example — recreate its context through some f o r m of direct historical discourse. I n each case interruption produces what Sanborn calls "a forced reading of the popular mythology of the culture."3^ By being interrupted, in other words, cultural artifacts are forced to expose their less obvious, ideological functions.

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0 found footage is, in Benjamin's sense, quotation, and can offer the kinds of insights into "the popular mythology of c u l t u r e " Sanborn is talking about, especially when juxtaposed w i t h other found footage quotations. Which brings us to the second basic k i n d o f i n t e r r u p t i o n : i n t e r r u p t i o n that is intrinsic to f i l m i c collage. The most obvious method of intrinsic interruption is the juxtaposition of shots w i t h no apparent relationship between them: archival footage of an early 2 0 t h century factory followed by N A S A footage of a satellite and the surface of the moon in the section of Peggy and Fred in Hell called (Dung Smoke Enters the Palace), or the T V news footage in Sanborn's KAPITAL! followed by choppy, flickering images of a Rocky Graziano fight taken f r o m an old Castle Film, or the rapid, paratactic m o n tage of found footage from many different sources in Child's Prefaces and Mercy. While the juxtaposition of even extremely diverse material can evoke metaphoric, thematic, graphic, and rhythmic relationships that satisfy a viewer's need to find some reason for these things to be juxtaposed, there is still a sense of discontinuity, a gap or interruption m the f l o w of the f i l m which puts conceptual quotation marks around the material and encourages the viewer to see it differently and think about •t more critically — which is to say, more p o l i t i cally. The cumulative effect is nicely summed up [n an intertitle used by Child in Covert Action: goal is to disarm my m o v i e . " N o t h i n g , in other words, should seem quite right, or f i t t o Scther neatly and " n a t u r a l l y . "

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Other kinds of intrinsic i n t e r r u p t i o n can be equally disarming. There is, for example, the i n t e r r u p t i o n produced by the j u x t a p o s i t i o n of different media in Peggy and Fred in Hell, and different media sources in KAPITAL! There are also the discontinuities between sound and image in — to mention only one of innumerable examples — Sanborn's Man with a Movie Camera (Blonde; He Appears To Be Young) i n w h i c h a verbal analysis of newsreel footage of the attempted assassination of Reagan is juxtaposed w i t h black leader and then w i t h a still of a woman w i t h a home movie camera. A n d , as I pointed out in my earlier discussion of a short sequence f r o m Abigail Child's Mercy, the ingenious synchronizing of incongruous sounds and images is Child's forte and one o f her most effective means of opening clichéd images to new readings. Finally, manipulating the " n a t u r a l " f l o w of the f i l m image represents another kind of intrinsic interruption. I have in m i n d such devices as artificially slowing m o t i o n by step printing the home movie footage for Imitation of Life i n KAPITAL!, or repeating and reversing footage of Pete the Penguin in Peggy and Fred and Pete, or looping shots i n Covert Action. The large, serial structures adopted by these filmmakers are also interruptive i n their collagelike juxtaposition of different films made at different times and often in different styles. AU three projects offer an open, potentially unlimited structure that could accommodate almost any k i n d of audio-visual material. This is part of their "epic"

Revealing the cultural function of found footage IS a politicai consequence of the revolution in aesthetics called collage. O f course, found footage IS always already politicai, but its politics may not be apparent u n t i l it has been subjected t o the strategies of interruption and quotation practiced

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quality as well: they are collages of collages, and in that regard, share w i t h modern epics, like Ezra pound's Cantos or John Dos os' U.S.A., the desire to tell the "tale of the t r i b e " (in Pound's phrasc) in large, all-accommodating formats. A n d for these filmmakers the " t r i b e " is our mcdiasaturated modern culture, whose " t a l e " is t o l d through the media's o w n images and sounds.

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Walter Benjamin, quoting a phrase f r o m Brecht, writes, " ' M a k i n g gestures quotable' is one of the essential achievements of epic theatre. "^^ I would suggest that the interruptive techniques of C h i l d , Sanborn and Thornton — and, for that matter, ali makers of collage films — accomplish the same thing w i t h the equivalent o f cinematic gestures. Any interruption of a film's sound and images makes them "quotable," which is to say, makes them stand out from the film's ensemble of audiovisual effects and exposes them to criticai examination — not only for h o w well they serve the needs of the w o r k in which they now appear, but also for w h a t they reveal about their o r i g i n a l function in whatever cultural artifact they first appeared.

by C h i l d , Sanborn, T h o r n t o n and many other experimental/avant-garde filmmakers w h o have, like Walter Benjamin, sought to exploit the "shocklike montage of the m a t e r i a l " taken f r o m the middens of modern media. Benjamin: " I w o n ' t steal anything valuable or appropriate any w i t t y turns of phrase. But the trivia, the trash: this, I don't want to take stock of, but let it come into its o w n in the only way possible: use k."^^ Ken Jacobs: "Is ali garbage like this? O n l y waiting for the talented viewer?"^2 Perhaps. But the first "talented v i e w e r " is the filmmaker w h o must decide h o w best to "use i t " — which means finding the best way to turn us into "talented viewers" too.

Notes 1 . Katherine H o f f m a n n , "Collage in the T w e n tieth Century; A n Overview," i n Collage; Criticai Views, Ed. K. H o f f m a n n (Ann A r b o r : U M I Research Press, 1989): 1 . 2. Ken Jacobs, Film-Makers' Cooperative Catalogue 7 (1989): 272. 3. Ken Jacobs, Films That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective (Astoria, N Y : American Museum of the M o v i n g Image, 1989): 19. 4. Hollis Frampton, Film-Makers'

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Catalogue 7 (\9S9): 168. 5. Craig Baldwin, poster for screenings at 992 Valencia (San Francisco), Fali 1991. 5. Jacobs, Film-Makers', 270. 7. M a r t i n A r n o l d , San Francisco Cinematheque 1990 Program Notes: 4 1 . g. Chick Strand, interview w i t h the author, 25 May 1991. 9. Craig Baldwin, interview w i t h the author, 20 M a y 1991. 10. S. M . Eisenstein, Film Form, Ed. and Trans. Jay Leyda (New Y o r k : Meridian Books, 1957): 38. 11. A l Razutis, quoted in M i k e H o o l b o o m , "3 Decades of Rage: The Films of A l Razutis," Cantrills Filmnotes 67-68 (1992): 42. 12. A l Razutis, Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre Catalogue (1988): 103 13. M a r k Street, Canyon Cinema Catalogue 7 (1992): 335. 14. Paul A r t h u r , "Lost and Found: American Avant-Garde Film in the Eighties," in A age Illuminated: The American Avant-Garde Film 1980-1990, Ed. N . Voorhuis (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1991): 25. 15. Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films (New Y o r k : HiU and Wang, 1964): 13-14. 16. Ibid. 45. 17. Ibid. 10. 18. Walter Benjamin, " N [Theoretics of K n o w l cdge: Theory of Progrcss]," The Philosophical Review 15, 1-2 (1983-84): 24. 19. Allan Sekula, "Reading an A r c h i v e , " in

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Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Contemporary Artists. Ed. Brian Wallis (Cambridge, M A : M I T Press, 1987): 116. 20. Emile Benveniste, " M a n and Language," in Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, FL: University of M i a m i Press, 1976): 209. 2 1 . I do not disagree w i t h Jean-Louis ComoUi, Jean-Louis Baudry and others w h o have argued that ali images produced by the camera are ideologically biased, but in the context of the present argument, I w o u l d suggest that in the archive the bias of individual shots is inert or merely potential; it becomes active when that potential is realized in a particular film's discourse. 22. Fredric Jameson, " ' I n the Destructive Element Immense,': Hans-Jiirgen Syberberg and Cultural R e v o l u t i o n , " October 17 (1981): 112. 23. Marjorie Perloff, "The Invention of C o l lage," i n Collage. Ed. Jeanne Parisier Plottel (New Y o r k : N e w York Literary Fórum, 1983): 40. 24. Gregory Ulmer, "The Object of Post-Criticism," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on PostModern Culture. Ed. H a l Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983): 84. 25. M a x Ernst, Beyond Painting (New Y o r k : W i t t e n b o r n , 1948): 13. 26. Donald B. Kuspit, "Collage: The Organizing Principie of A r t in the Age of the Relativity of A r t , " in Collage: Criticai Views. Ed. Katherine H o f f m a n (Ann A r b o r : U M I Research Press, 1989): 40. 27. Peter Biirger, Theory of the

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(Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1984): 78. 28. Kuspit, 45. 29. Theodor A d o r n o , Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge, 1984): 223. 30. Biirger, 80. 3 1 . Walter Benjamin, "The W o r k of A r t in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in llluminations (New Y o r k : Schocken Books, 1969): 220-225. 32. Burger, 77. 33. Guy Debord and G i l J. W o l m a n , " M e t h o d s of Detournement," i n Situationist International Anthology. Ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, C A : Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981): 8-13. 34. Walter Benjamin, quoted i n Susan BuckMorss, The Dialectics of Seeing; Walter Benjamin and the Árcades Project (Cambridge, M A : M I T Press, 1991): 73. 35. I b i d . , 217, 73. 36. Buck-Morss, 6. 37. Walter Benjamin, " W h a t is Epic Theatre?" [Second Version], in Understanding Brecht (London: Verso, 1983): 19. 38. Roland Barthes, Mythologies. London: Paladin/Grafton Books, 1973): 142. 39. Keith Sanborn, interview w i t h the author, 16 A p r i l 1991. 40. Benjamin, " W h a t Is Epic Theatre?" 19. 4 1 . Benjamin, " N [Theoretics]," 5. 42. Jacobs, Films That Tell Time, 44.

Avant-Garde

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selected Bibliography on Found Footage Films (Rather than include articles and parts o f books devoted to the w o r k of individual filmmakers, I have limited this list to writings dealing w i t h the genre of found footage films, though, of course, specific films and filmmakers also figure in most of these items as well.) Arthur, Paul, "Lost and Found: American Avant-Garde Film in the Eighties," i n N . Voorhuis, ed., A age Illuminated, The American Avant-Garde Film 19801990, Amsterdam: Stedelijk M u s e u m , 1991, 15-29. Baldwin, Craig. "These Are the End Times," Interview, Publics Fear 1 (1992): 56-64. BUmp; Zeitschrift Fur Film 16 (1991), special issue published in conjunction w i t h the Found Footage Festival i n Vienna, June 1991; ali contents are in German. Child, Abigail. " T r u t h Serum," Cinematograph 4 (1991): 43-52. Hausheer, Cecilia and Christoph Settele, Eds. Found Footage Film. Luzern: VIPER, 1992, w i t h articles on found footage films, as well as statements by 21 f i l m makers, a filmography, and a bibliography; contents are in German and English.

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Katz, Joel. " F r o m Archive to Archiveology," Cinematograph 4 (1991): 93-103. Leyda, Jay. Films Beget Films. N e w Y o r k : H i l l and Wang, 1964. Peterson, James. "Bruce Conner and the Compilation N a r r a t i v e , " Wide Angle 8, 3-4 (1986): 53-62. . "The Logic of the Absurd: The Assemblage Strain," in Dreams of Chãos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-Garde Cinema. Forthcoming f r o m Wayne State University Press. Sandusky, Sharon. "The Archaeology of Redemption: T o w a r d Archival F i l m , " Millennium Film Journal 26 (1993): 3-25.

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Speaking of Found Footage Between the late winter and early fali of 1991 I talked w i t h seven filmmakers w h o have w o r k e d cxtensively w i t h f o u n d footage. F r o m these conversations, w h i c h were quite i n f o r m a l and ranged over a number of topics, I have extracted and condensed comments that seem to me representative of each filmmaker's thoughts about found footage in general and her or his use of f o u n d footage in particular. In many ways, these comments also exemplify the range of attitudes to be found among a much larger number of filmmakers who have worked w i t h found footage since the appearance of Bruce Conner's seminal w o r k , A Movie, in 1958. In N e w Y o r k , I talked w i t h Abigail Child, Keith Sanborn and Leslie T h o r n t o n . Child's f i l m cycle. Is This What You Were Bom For? (1981-89), contains six films w i t h found footage, including her best k n o w n w o r k , Mayhem; one of the films, Covert Action, is composed solely of found material. Sanborn's KAPITAL! (1980-87) encomes seven found footage films, opening w i t h a live performance w i t h f i l m and closing w i t h a multi-projector presentation. Sanborn also made the English subtitles for René Viénet's "détourned" kung-fu f i l m , La Dialectique Peut-Elle Casser des ^riques? (1972, 1990). Thornton's on-going series of films and video works, Peggy and Fred in ^ell (1984-90), combines original and found foot-

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age. Currently she is completing a feature-length narrative about the late-Victorian writer, Isabeile Eberhardt, which also includes some found footage. I n San Francisco I sought o u t the doyen of A m e r i c a n f o u n d footage f i l m m a k e r s , Bruce Conner, w h o has made a dozen films w i t h found footage since 1958, the most recent of which is America Is Waiting (1982). I also talked with Craig Baldwin whose RocketKitKongoKit (1986) and Tribulation 99 (1991) have become increasingly widely k n o w n and ired, and w h o often includes found footage in the f i l m series he programs for an altemative art space in San Francisco. His recently completed O No Coronado! (1992) mixes f o u n d footage w i t h footage shot by the filmmaker. A n d in Los Angeles I met w i t h Chick Strand. Like Bruce Conner, she is one of the older generation of American experimental filmmakers who have worked w i t h found footage. H e r first f o u n d footage f i l m is Waterfall (1967); her best k n o w n a n d , i n my view, richest use o f found material appears in Loose Ends (1979). The Canadian filmmaker David Rimmer has been m a k i n g found footage films since 1970, when he completed three films made w i t h found footage. Rimmer lives near Vancouver, but I talked w i t h h i m briefly (hence the brevity of his remarks in these pages) during one of his visits to Montreal.

fcdundancies and false starts and extraneous comfncnts that are part of the normal f l o w o f informal speech, but are confusing and irrelevant o n the printed page. Sense rather than verbatim accuracy has been m y goal. Also, I have eliminated m y questions and comments, and consequently, o n occasion I have added a few words to a filmmaker's comments t o make the context clear. I n several instances I have changed the order of the original remarks f o r the sake of coherence and continuity of thought and incorporated some subsequent cmendations by the filmmakers. Significant ellipses in the f l o w of the conversation are indicated by a r o w of dots between paragraphs. I am grateful to the filmmakers f o r t a k i n g the time to talk about their w o r k and various related concerns, and I must emphasize that they were n o t presenting definitive statements carefuUy prepared for p u b l i c a t i o n . They were responding t o m y questions and to their o w n train of thought. Like everyonc else, they have the right t o change their minds.

Craig Baldwin

Although I have tried to preserve the way each or the filmmakers talked, I have edited their comments rather extensively. I have cut out most of the

I think you'll find that a lot of the younger generation, the contemporary filmmakers, have read a 'ot of theory. That's not really the case w i t h me. l ' n i more what I call a garage filmmaker. Impov-

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crishcd. M a k c - d o . Bricolagc and this idea of cargo cult I like to talk about. We're here in the ruins of post-industrial culture, and there is ali this value in these shots t h r o w n away and these old commercials and trailers and things, just trying to resurrect them and reinvest them w i t h new meaning. Like someone in N e w Guinea or somewhere trying to worship a plane or something. Y o u k n o w , I sympathize w i t h a lot of the theoretical justifications, but I came to found footage filmmaking not exactly naively, but naturally, as I w o r k e d in the movie business for many years. I didn't make porn, but I worked in porn theaters. W e l l , M a r k e t Street theaters, which means exploit a t i o n or grind houses as they call them or Bmovies or genre movies. I just loved them. I would see the films again and again and again from about three feet away. I w o u l d be totally demystified. 1 knew what film was — it was a piece of image, you k n o w , chemicals on celluloid. I had much more of a plastic, or collage, or more of a visual art approach to i t , and I just played and mucked around w i t h i t , cutting and pasting it. I do collages t o o , you k n o w , on paper. So my approach was more having to do w i t h my impoverished situation or marginalization in the art w o r l d .

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There's a politicai edge to it when you take the images of the corporate media and t u r n them against themselves. So, I have an affinity w i t h that whole justification: that it's a k i n d of politica'

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statement. It's subversive. IVe always been p o l i t i cally active, too, and it's part of an underground jdovement. See, I want to bring back the term underground movement. They d o n ' t talk about underground any more. They say, " W e l l , this is avant-garde," which is meaningless, even more so than "experimental." I think the whole art world's kind of been recuperated by the academy — pardon me — and it's lost its edge. What I like are films that express a sub-culture that rejects and refuses this kind of standardization of perception and this commodification of culture. So it's kind of a thumb your nose thing. It's an art of defiance. Y o u take, steal, however you get their images, and t u r n 'cm against them. Plus you can afford to do i t . I mean, there are images ali over. W a l k d o w n the street, thcrc are bill boards everywherc, therc's the sides of buses, the graffiti, the flyers under your feet. You don't have to go far, wc're bombarded by images. O f course we're gonna say, well, Tve the power to shapc some of this, t o make a comment on it, and turn it against itself. That's the ultimate justice.

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The bottom line is probably my impoverished, debased, marginalized status. I mean, I intend on making films. I don't have the money really. Td 'ke to get a grant. That's for sure. But, you k n o w , technically I do everything wrong. Vd rather do somcthmg against the g r a i n , and to spite the

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corporate market — but also the art w o r l d . If I cai, w o r k w i t h the art people, that's fine, TU do i t . But my films, you k n o w , they're raw. Ugly. They're supposed to be noisy. They're supposed to be filled w i t h dissonance and texture. So there's this k i n d of against the grain attitude. This sarcasm. This refusal of some k i n d of aestheticism. Later they are aestheticized by critics, scholars, or whatever. They take 'em out of the real world and sort of place them i n a frame and talk about them theoretically. That's fine w i t h me. But to me, I w o r k w i t h the community. I live in a big teeming mass here. Hundreds of people come to my shows. I show i n ali sorts of places. I d o n ' t stick w i t h galleries. I show i n clubs. I show i n altemative spaces. I show to a lot of pissed off people. People w h o are sick of the corporate media, people who k n o w they d o n ' t have to go to art school to be trained. So it's more like a raw, tearing out the heart of the beast kind of thing. There's that sense to i t , you k n o w . M o r e of a politicai activist thing. Underground. Again, an altemative movement or altemative sub-culture that doesn't try to get accepted by the bourgeoisie by being good artists and minding their manners, but talks back, is sarcastic, has an attitude, steals your images and ali that kind of thing. Punk k i n d of attitude.

their audience, and they're saying, well, we're not just going to aim our stuff at this little cult of experimental filmmakers, because it gets boring after awhile. I t gets e after awhile. They just don't want to see this retinal thing, this play o f images on the eye. I mean, they do, but that's not enough. It's not enough any more. San Francisco 20 M a y 1991

Abigail Child

Formal experimentation is good too. It's not to say, hey, we can't go into that territory. But people try to do more now. They have more respect for

M y generation of filmmakers, people born after W o r l d W a r I I — we are T V kids. We were easily influenced by media and by h o w the media i n f l u ence our worlds. In the '70s a lot of us were seeing structural f i l m , and yet we were coming f r o m this T V background. N o w what I think a lot of us are doing: we're using emotional images, images that mean something to us, powerful, resonant images — not taking just anything, but being attentive to what images say and mean and h o w they can be read, actually approaching the f l o w of imagemeaning, representation — and then rolling those representative images into structures that m i g h t share more formalist ideas. Ideas of repetition, disjuncture or materiality, for instance. The inheritance of structural f i l m then, on top of this combo

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of raunchy, suburban, post-World W a r I I American optimism and 'éOs psychedelic revolutionary idealism and feminism. That's the topos for this w o r k . O f course, each of us is different. •

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As an editor, I think it is easier to keep your criticai distance w i t h found footage. It's easier to k n o w exactly what w i l l w o r k , what's beautiful and should last, what's ugly and should last, what's amazing and remarkable. W i t h your own footage, you have ali kinds of a priori affections for various pieces. You have ali these hopes about the material, but in the end you have to see what it actually projects. A n d you may have to lose something i t took ten hours trying to get because it's not really what you need for this f i l m . Increasingly I find that Fve gotten better at looking at my o w n footage and having the kind of attitude that just lets you say, "This is useful, this is not. This is useful, this is n o t . "

^omen. It was very familiar and very horrifying at the same time, in the way the women are posing for the camera and in the way they are both volunteering themselves as objects and being treated as objects. It's pretty familiar to one's o w n w o r l d but also horrific. I set it aside, and about t w o years later when I picked it up and said, ok, let me see if I can make a f i l m out of this, I looped actions, anything that w o u l d make a dance, and then working w i t h this very limited material — probably no more than 400 feet, and using about 100 feet of that — I went through what was left for anything where people touched, any body , body gesture, body movement. In the process of r e w o r k i n g the material, the document becomes a kind of " f i c t i o n . " I did not know the source of my material, so I made up a story that may or may not have any relevancy to the true source. Covert Action is the first of my films that begins a narrative exploration of this type. »

Covert Action came f r o m some footage I got through an ad posted at the Collective for Living Cinema: the remnants, since a colleague of mine got there first, about a thousand feet, and there was this little bit that I always imagined was two brothers on vacation. Vil never k n o w ; i t seemed like t w o brothers on vacation, either on successive weekends or successive summers w i t h different

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In Mercy I k n o w what almost ali the source material is. It comes f r o m educational films and science films. Here Pm subverting the original meaning. Pm looking at the material to reveal what is the essence of i t , what's been hidden f r o m US i n the f o r m i t was o r i g i n a l l y , whether it's scientific, "objeaive" footage, or advertising you're not supposed to question, or footage that looks playful but is documenting something very differ-

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ent, the unnamed ideology at the heart of American culture. In that sense, Mercy is an archaeology of the document, forcing the image to "give u p " its history. I n college I d i d w o r k as an anthropologist in M é x i c o and N e w M é x i c o , and that experience raised questions of my o w n about "actuality," and the ability to represent the " r e a l . " Experientially, I knew there were multiple sides to any " t r u t h . " This was not Scholastic knowledge for me. As a filmmaker, as an editor, T m trying to dislodge, unearth and subvert the image, e x p l o r i n g the limits of representation, asking h o w can I bring f o r w a r d the contradictions i n the image, its partialities, its beauty, or as the case may be, its horror.

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Mayhem was inspired by sound. There's always a number of things that go into a w o r k , but in Mayhem it was especially the idea that sound could choreograph emotions. W i t h o u t a script, sound could be my script, and specifically found sound. One of the first things I did was tape off cable T V and Latin soap operas. I used them as the score of the piece: "jealousy," "anger," "anticipat i o n , " "romance," "fear," "melodrama." Y o u get that quality of history and expectation f r o m the soundtrack. I had a silent rough cut, first, and then the sound was cut i n , and things moved into different áreas u n t i l everything k i n d of fell t o gether. That was the basic structure. I had

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additionally recordings of sound effects and news stuff and machine noises, and I organized that. f h e aural track becomes very specific; f o r examplc, when the woman is taking off her dress, can't get out of her dress, there is the sound of a stalled car. A n d when there's that little title that says " n o , n o " y o u hear "yes, yes" on the soundtrack. Again, F m subverting the image, this time through sound. The sound s a certain reading of the image that I twist. F m t r y i n g to keep you conscious. F m trying to give you pleasure and make y o u conscious of its source, where y o u r pleasure is c o m i n g f r o m . F m playing w i t h a number of strategies to deflect the initial thrust of the w o r k , to complicate it so that you read one thing and t w o other things come to m i n d as well; to push you back into the fact that it's a constructed thing. You've been seduced and made conscious of the seduction that's going o n .

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Mayhem was supposed to be ali my o w n shooting. I was trying to break out of some patterns and give myself a chance to develop my o w n lighting. I never had been able to deal w i t h that before. I did the shooting for about a year and a half, and the f i l m was in process when some f o u n d footage came my way. One was a negative of a French romantic story w i t h ali the sprocket boles broken; another a British science f i c t i o n thriller about a man w h o married a woman w h o turned out to be

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an alien — that related to my concept — the third a fiction f i l m of W o r l d W a r I I in which Germans interrogate French partisans. A t some point I said to myself, F m going to include this, and started cutting. I was interested in the match. It wasn't that I was t r y i n g to hide the source or the cut, but I was interested in the visual match, where it "mimes" fiction. Similarly to how in Covert Action I place Inuit speech in the mouths of the Western women, a doubly false dubbing. One of Mayhem's themes was voyeurism and the seduction of fictive structures. I wanted to foreground movie illusion and additionally, explore my love of kinetic movies, of feeling the cut. Also I knew I wanted to bias it sexually, b i - and multiply, set experience against social convention. I don't feel I treated the found footage differently after awhile. I kept them on separate rolls, but they became strands feeding into the f i l m as a whole. I n that sense of weaving and process, there's a real relation in my w o r k to a filmmaker like Brakhage or Frampton. The shape of Mayhem is the same shape as Covert Action is the same shape as Mercy, which is in my eyes a spiral shape. Images come in and they come in again, and get added on to. It's a rich, open structure that you can keep developing, adding and expanding. It also allows for associations, peripheries, returns back beside itself but changed, like memory and consciousness. In Covert Action, a story develops by digressions, by what's missing. The spiral suits this space of inclusion.

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Found footage is potentially an archive of the world's images, past cinema. I love the encyclopedic quality and as well, the hand-making process. Projects get bigger, stretch my facilities and time, but F m committed to this hand-made process o f making films and rcluctant to let go of that. W h a t found footage does is give me access to images that I could never have otherwise. This is the landscape of our brains, shaped by the social. I access that landscape, ethnography of the seen. N e w Y o r k City 11 February 1991

Bruce Conner Fve always k n o w n that I was outside the m a i n , mercantile stream. I have been placed i n an environment that w o u l d have its name changed now and again: avant-garde f i l m , experimental f i l m , underground f i l m , indendent f i l m , etc. I have tried to create f i l m w o r k so that it is capable of communicating to people outside of a limited dialogue within an esoteric, avant-garde or a cultish social f o r m . Jargon I don't like.

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I d o n ' t believe that anything Hke A AíOV/£ existed i n f i l m p r i o r to 1958 ... as far as my experience was concerned. The only movies I can relate to it were outside of experimental f i l m . i went to movies a lot. I would see third-rate, cheap movies that came out of Poverty R o w i n H o l l y w o o d . They had a stock footage library and would use the same images again and again. When there was a scene in N e w Y o r k introduced, you would see the same shot of the Brooklyn Bridge f r o m the same position. A n d in a foreign locale there would be a classic cliché shot to represent that the tiny sets and exteriors were to be imagined to be there. Also it was cheaper to shoot in front of a rear projection screen in the studio instead of going out. People were walking in front of a movie\s would pick up their guns and poin| them, and up would pop shots taken f r o m pre\ us and larger productions: Indians attacking and things like that. So 1 became aware that there was a "universal movie" that was being made ali the time! It's classic images. It's the Mona Lisa, it's the Sistine Chapei, it's the Statue of Liberty, it's ali these symbols, except it is in f i l m .

side of a cliff. I also saw weekly adventure seriais where the sequence of events at the end w o u l d lead you to believe the consequence of those events was totally disastrous to the hero. But the hero w o u l d survive the next week since something had been left out of the sequence of events — or they w o u l d just lie about i t . So it became apparent to me that you can create an emotional response which is very different f r o m what was socially agreed upon as a narrative structure. However, anything which was taken for granted as not serious, not art, just things that are t h r o w n away, were exactly what I paid attention to. By the 'éOs this attitude was codified into a structure called Pop A r t — as if it was a big new discovery. But ali that Pop A r t d i d was to f o l l o w philosophical premises that have been around for a long time: if you want to k n o w what's going on in a culture, look at what every body takes for granted. Put your attention on that, rather than on what they want to show you. I view my culture here i n the United States as I would regard a foreign environment. That is, it's supposed to be my culture. I don't feel that way.

It seemed natural that I w o u l d make this movie called A MOVIE. One of the other things that influenced me would have been "coming attractions," where the highiights of a new movie are encapsulatcd into t w o or three minutes. M o r e specifically, I scenes Hke Barbara Stanwyck t h r o w i n g a glass of liquid in a man's face and saying " I bate y o u ! I bate y o u ! ' A n d the next was of a railroad train going off the

Another influence on A MOVIE was television: when you can switch f r o m one channel to another. Also, watching T V w i t h o u t sound and adding your o w n selections of music and other sound. I saw movies using stock footage such as the sequence in the M a r x Brothers' Duck Soup, when ^arpo appeals for help in a border war and calls ^P ali variety of helpful creatures. Short subjects shown in movie theaters w o u l d

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use newsreel footage and m i x it up w i t h something else or put a different soundtrack w i t h i t , and alter it i n that way. Spike Jones and H i s City Slickers, d i d some parodies in their stage show. One of their classics was a monologue about a horse race featuring a loser of a horse always running last. Except the horse, Feetlebaum, suprisingly is announced the winner. The last time I saw them perform i t , they had created a movie to project on stage. N o t only was there a horse race, there were racing cars and a pathetic and o l d sway-backed horse named Feetlebaum. The movie cut back and f o r t h between Feetlebaum and the race footage. These images were used in a comic manner. I t was just silly.

l4 years o l d when my interest made more de0iands. I wanted to see more of the "surrealistic" films. I didn't see much of it i n commercial films. I ed the W i c h i t a Film Society, and they showed one or t w o films that were supposed to be surrealist, but they weren't quite what I was expccting. Later I found myself f o r m i n g new f i l m groups in order to see the films I wanted to see. I managed to meet a filmmaker, Stan Brakhage, when I started the Experimental Film Group at the University of Colorado in 1956. I had met another filmmaker earlier in the 1950s named Harry Smith, But Harry was paranoid about showing his films. Afraid that his ideas w o u l d be stolen. I never saw Harry Smith's films until the mid-1960s. I went to Cinema 16 programs in N e w Y o r k .

The reason I made A MOVIE was because I was waiting for somebod( to make a movie that seemed obvious to my mind. I became interested in what was called "experimental" movies, because I had seen some unusual short sequences disguised as "dream sequences" in 1940s movies. Fantasy scenes w o u l d not be seen in narrative feature films except occasionally when a character w o u l d dream events similar to real life. Strange transformations w o u l d take place in normal scenes. Images might be i n negative instead of positive, slow motion, backwards, extremely fast, etc. A door would open revealing something different f r o m what you w o u l d expected. These were t h r o w - a w a y sequences similar to the low-grade H o l l y w o o d movies that had the stock footage in them. So I saw a lot of these movies during the 1940s. I was about

When I moved here [San Francisco] in 1957 and started a f i l m society w i t h Larry Jordan, it was the only f i l m society in N o r t h e r n Califórnia, that I know of. I t was called Camera Obscura.

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Larry showed me h o w to use a splicer. A n d I used his Griswold splicer and rewinds and viewer. I went to the local photography store and bought 100-foot reel condensations of 16mm feature films like " H o p a l o n g Cassidy" and newsreels and racing cars and ali sorts of stuff. That is h o w I got access to footage. I bought Castle Home Movies and gathered any T V commercials and old movies diat I could find. I had virtually no money, so most of my films have to be considered bare bonés poverty films. I could not buy a camera. I t was actually much cheaper to buy a hundred feet of film already developed and processed, than to buy

a hundred feet of f i l m , shoot it and have it processed. I t w o u l d cost about five or six times more to shoot your o w n f i l m . Since there was a movie I wanted to see, and didn't see it being made, I decided it had to be my job to make it. A n d absolutely nothing was being taught in schools on how to make films. I couldn't take a class in filmmaking. I had to invent my own ways of making movies. A l i I could leam was how to glue one piece of f i l m to another. A MOVIE was made in the most primitive f i l m editing process that is possible. You just glue it together. I had no w o r k p r i n t , synchronizer, m o v i o l a , sound reader. I had none of the technical tools that beginning f i l m students use today. I had never even heard of most of these technical tools. A l though A MOVIE is being used today — and has been used sinc^it was completed in 1957 — in teaching f i l m classes, the way I made A MOVIE is not the way anybody is ever taught h o w to make films.

peculiar, or maybe they touched a reminiscence i n mind ... an image that I would not t h r o w away. I would cut out ali the footage in between, and the reels would keep getting shorter and shorter. Sometimes an image w o u l d accidently find itself fitting with a couple of other images and creating a k i n d of emotional context similar to the move star slapping a man and the train going over the cliff. An emotional, symbolic gesture of a different sort. It might be more enigmatic. I w o u l d save sequences of images that I didn't k n o w what reason I wanted to save them for, or w h a t they might represent, except they were fascinating to me. Many times when making the films, I have n o t been able to consciously understand what they are communicating. Fve been able to talk about them after the fact, but that doesn't necessarily represent what they are. •»

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A t the time I made these films, I loved to look at anything that moved. When I got a movie projector, I w o u l d r u n movies over and over. I t was fascinating to see them again and again. A n d on my Craig viewer I could w i n d them by hand, backwards and forwards. I could stop the frame and examine i t . As I went through these films, educational films and others, there w o u l d be shots I thought were curious or interesting, absurd or

I started REPORT as soon as the day Kennedy dicd. W o r k i n g in relationship to the death of President Kennedy became very involved. The process turned into paintings, sculpture, events, film in several different forms. The f i l m titled REPORT was made into a negative f r o m the original f i l m edit after five years of transformations. In the meantime it changed. Every print was different, except that it was edited to the same soundtrack. The assassination was transformed in the media by politicai, social and economic pressures. W h a t was obscured was the confrontation

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w i t h death, and that here was a man shot and k i l l e d . The death became an object that was played w i t h in ritual, tribal observances of one k i n d or another. Almost immediately there were gross politicai exploitations of his image to promote politicai action that Kennedy w o u l d have been opposed t o . I t represented to me what apparently happens i n the complexity o f every human's death. The assassination of President Kennedy in REPORT is my death, your death, it's everyone's death. He is a figure that symbolizes it. It had become so common and prevalent a cultural image through this process, that ali the ways in w h i c h death is exploited and reused and deified and everything else were centered on his death. Here was a death assumed to be closely documented and r'early communicated. There couldn't have beenv .lore camcramen, reporters, witnesses, and yet ali of it is fragmented into thousands of points of view.

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I disagree w i t h the tendency to make " f o u n d É i j f o o t a g e " a category, rather than a description. • | A n d possibly montage comes closer than collage, because collage, as I understand i t , is a French word that deals w i t h the placing of separate layers of paper on a flat surface. Assemblage is a French w o r d , but it is also an English w o r d . But it's such an ali inclusive term that it has virtually no definition whatsoever. I d o n ' t t h i n k we should be talking about collage when we speak of f i l m . W c should be talking about montage.

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M y approach to f i l m m a k i n g , whether I have shot the f i l m or taken footage f r o m another f i l m is not different. AU footage is found footage for a film editor, if the editor has not made the f i l m . M y technique is no different despite the fact of having shot the f i l m myself or not. The editor's role is to w o r k w i t h given images, put them together and, perhaps, make them do things that were never there in the original intent. There are many examples of h o w footage can be made to appear

M y films are the "real w o r l d . " It's not a fantasy. It's not a found object. This is the stuff that I see as the phenomena around me. A t least that's what I call the "real w o r l d . " We have "reality shows" presented to us regularly. The most prevalent one is the five minute "reality show" — the five minute news. If you listen to a news program on the radio it may report ten events in a r o w . It's no different than A MOVIE. Something absurd next to a catastrophe next to speculation next to a k i n d of instruction on how you're supposed to think about some politicai or social thing. Y o u k n o w : "President Bush had lunch w i t h his wife and went to K e n n i b u n k p o r t , M a i n e , today. Fifty thousand people died in Bangladesh in a horrible disaster.

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Sony says they're going to produce a new threedimensional hologram television set which w i l l be released sometime in the 21st century." GaGa GaGa. I mean this is comic book time. San Francisco 22 M a y 1991

putting color gels over i t and playing around, and then I just thought w h y don't I f i x it and make it into a f i l m , and began working w i t h it and worked it up to the f i l m it finally became. I just became interested, I guess fascinated, w i t h ali this o l d footage. I also made Surfacing on the Thames and •fhe Dance at the same time, both w i t h stock footage. So since then Fve been looking for it and collecting it and stealing i t . I have lots of i t ! *

DaviCi Rimmer [In the late 1960s] I was associated w i t h the group Intermédia in Vancouver. The N a t i o n a l Film Board had given us t w o boxes of o l d f i l m . So I began going through them, and we were also at that time doing performance events w i t h f i l m p r o j e c t i o n , music, dance performance. A n d I w o u l d take some of these stock images and just loop them and project them during the performances. Variations On A Cellophane Wrapper began as part of a performance where I quite distinctiy that I had four projectors, each with the same loop projected on the wall, and I was

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Fm an editor. I love that part of it where it begins to make sense. But I usually feel that it's my footage because of h o w I r e w o r k it — t h r o u g h either optical printing or whatever I do to i t . It's no longer just somebody's straight footage. A n d I don't feel guilty about manipulating other people's images, especially when they're so far in the past — some of the ones — so it doesn't bother me. 4

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Some of my w o r k has to do w i t h a critique or a deconstruction of the image, but hopefully in a poetic way rather than i n a didactic way. Because I d o n ' t w a n t to just deconstruct i t , I w a n t to transform i t into something else. So that's what I 'ook for i n some kinds of w o r k : an appreciation for the old stuff. I like the o l d stuff. Montreal 19 September 1991

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Keith Sanborn I always liked found footage. I always loved Bruce Conner's stuff. A n d it seemed to me that a lot of the interests of formalist f i l m , as they were developing in the '70s, had to do with trying to eliminate content quite deliberately, quite didactically. Sometimes that was interesting and sometimes it wasn't. A n y w a y , I found that that desire to rob things of content in favor of f o r m was a dead end for me, and I thought, w h y can't you have interesting formal experimentation in conjunction w i t h interesting content? Also, there's a certain point at which there's a k i n d of a change in generational sensibility, from the u t o o i a n belief i n f o r m to something more critica, a belief that f o r m a l critique is not adequate in itself. A n d there was a lot said, around that time, i n other segments of the visual arts, about what were called then "appropriated i m ages." Exactly what you call those kinds of movies or that k i n d of art is certainly open to debate. I always thought of mine more as expropriated images, but how you call things has to do a lot with the politicai understanding of t h e m . I mean, there's a long stretch f r o m the sort of casual surrealism of found footage to detournement as a rigorous project of cultural critique. A n d I guess I lean much more toward detournement, albeit in a playful k i n d of way.

A lot can happen when you have an image that has been taken f r o m one context and put in another. It comes trailing its context behind i t in various ways, and for me what distinguishes an interesting from a not-so-interesting found footage movie is whether or not it actually gives the image a new meaning in its new context. I really love Bruce Conner's films, especially A Movie, but I think the most successful ages are when he does create a new meaning, like that sequence w i t h M a r i l y n Monroe and the submarine and the torpedo and the atomic bomb. I mean, that's montage. A lot of the rest of it is just high weirdness by Castle Films. W h i c h is a lot of f u n , but it's just not the most interesting part of the f i l m .

I think another thing w i t h the people of my generation is that if video represents the eternal present, film represents history. It represents the category of memory, of that w h i c h preceded us, in a way that T V or video does not. A n d besides there are the essential physical qualities of f i l m and the social aspects of projecting f i l m . Films are the stuff of history i n a w e i r d way. They're palpable. They're material. There's a difference between a found footage f i l m and a found footage video. I n video the image is so obviously f r o m the T V , but in f i l m there's something more insidious, because it implies an access to a public body of images. There's always very much of a power struggle about whether or not they are your images or their

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images or what your abiHty to participate in the Hfe of those images is. AU of that's also related to the idea of context and meaning in f o u n d footage films.

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Found footage is like a very concrete f o r m of history, and w o r k i n g w i t h that k i n d of material gives you a chance to research in history, which has always been a fascinating topic to me: creating meaning i n history or finding it — creating things out of pre-existing material. A n d the other thing for me, f o r my generation, was the sense that formal experimentation was at a dead end, that in fact there were too many films already, and that w h a t was needed wasn't new films or formal i n n o y - i o n in that sense, but rather a better understanding of what was already out there. I don't k n o w if the people I consider my generational peers w o u l d say it in exactly the same way, but there was definitely a sense of f o r m a l cinema having become this k i n d of end game which was basically a very exclusive club, the hip to which had been rounded out and the door shut on it. Even if one wanted to belong, one was not going to be offered a hip, and so it takes on the dimensions of a p o l i t i c a i struggle, an oedipal struggle. Also I think it has to do with being part of the T V generation, and that as a group we were much more visually literate in a certain kind of way than the previous generation, not necessarily in of

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quality, but certainly in of quantity. A n d that sort of shcer mass of data required a different sense of the politics of seeing, and for the people I Itnow, I think the politics of seeing is a more key issue than the art of vision. O f course, thcrc can be more and less interesting uses of f o u n d footage, and I think thcrc was a desire to do something w h i c h w o u l d have an immediate resonance. I f y o u have pre-existing material then, in a way, you can get a much deeper and more immediate reach into people's consciousness than you can by creating another w o r l d where an ideal vision can be carried out. It's sort of a forced reading of the popular mythology of the culture, which has an immediate impact. I also think that found footage films are among the most fragile historically. A lot of the nuance is lost f r o m them more quickly than other kinds of avant-garde films, because they have a sense of context, because an image — the meaning of an image — can change drastically over time. I mean, for Esther Schub when she made The Fali of the Romanov Dynasty, footage of the Czar's family or footage of the peasants had a specific i n f o r m a tional structure, and of course the intertitles are extremely didactic, whercas about 100 years removed, w i t h o u t an incredibly aggressive supplemcntation of that material, it simply reads as historical. It's almost as if its meaning is exhausted hy the category of the historical.

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Sometimes f o u n d footage movies, the typical surrealist use of them, you k n o w , the schoolboy surrealist use of them, is just one weird thing with the next. It's sort of like a l o w budget version of the Kuleshov effect. I guess it's amusing if you're high on drugs, but after awhile it's not so interesting even if you're high. A n d that's a problem with f o u n d footage movies in general. They can be really, really boring or else they can be really interesting. They have that quality of the irresistible force meets the immovable object. N e w York City 16 A p r i l 1991

a couple of the little sub-contextual things in i t , and m i x the whole thing up w i t h something else entirely, and make up a context. I love i t , it's just great!

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When Pm editing I sort of view ali footage as found footage. I like to distance myself f r o m the footage I take. Editing is a whole different thing from the emotional involvement you get, or I get, when Pm filming people doing things. When I edit I withdraw myself, hopefully, to have a better eye, a more objective eye, in of what it's going to look like as a whole, rather than keeping something in because I can't let go of i t . So I try to be ruthless.

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Having seen A Movie and the possibilities therein, I knew it was possible to w o r k w i t h old f i l m and not be intimidated at ali about it — lifting things and rearranging them, doing collage. It's just sort of a miracle to find some junk nobody wants. AH that stuff I got w o u l d have been t h r o w n away, except for the few pieces I heisted f r o m a couple of prints. I was so entranced by the image itself and how I could mess with it, stick it in another context in a sort of semi-outrageous way. N o t h i n g sacred. Y o u just r i p it out of one context, or leave

It seems to me that a lot in my films, especially the found footage stuff, refers to filmmaking and to movies. As an anthropologist (which is what I was preparing myself to be before I got involved w i t h film), I see movies as artifacts of the culture, so i n a way they hold exceptional value like, maybe — I ' m trying to get a really good example — maybe like the Codex of the Aztecs. I mean, that's much more romantic and idealized than old movies that Were made for some other reason than religious. But I don't think it matters what name we call i t , •t's an artifact, it's part of our material culture. I t Says a lot about our culture in one way or another.

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so I see it as artifact. But also, like the Codex, it's part of our history For example, some of that Muybridgc stuff that I have in Loose Ends is not only an historical piece of our culture, an artifact from that time, but it also relates to our whole idea of movement and ali kinds of related things. Y o u k n o w what I mean, it's like finding a bowl in a cave or something, only we're going to interpret it much differently than people who come after us and haven't lived through our times. I k n o w these pieces of f i l m are artifacts when Fm editing. Intellectually, I see them as artifact, but emotionally, because F m part of the culture, I see them at a whole different levei. This brings me right back to W o r l d W a r I I when I was a k i d watching Movietone News. Yet when I use text f r o m Last Year at Marienbad [in the conclusion of Loose Ends] along w i t h the images that were shot, I t h i n k , reasonably soon after W o r l d W a r I I was over, F m just reinventing a history and really messing things up, because, really, they don't have anything to do w i t h each other. But what I think is that the way that guy describes Marienbad, the rococo this and that, is sometimes how we perceive or internalize what we're watching on the screen — that terror and that awfulness i n the war footage, for example — t u r n i n g i t into rococo marble. *

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W h a t I see as the wonderful joy of i t is that you

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can m i x up so many things, and not everybody is going to get everything. I guess, F m an old fart because I choose older stuff. To me, it just seems flioTC important. I mean, it's just too crazy n o w . It's ali out of context anyway. We're living in i t , in a collage. Los Angeles 25 M a y 1991

Leslie Thornton There are a number of different ways that Fve worked w i t h found footage, so I can't really make an overriding statement about i t . But I can talk about some of the things that Fve thought about, some of the things that have occurred to me. One thing is that in Peggy and Fred in Hell these children have constructed an environment out of cultural detritus. So there is a way in which showing three minutes of an old Westinghouse factory documentary isn't so dissimilar to Fred picking up a telephone and enacting the behavior of a T V actor. I n a sense w i t h Peggy and Fred, ali their behavior is " f o u n d " — as is everyone's, really. But 1 try to create a k i n d o f artífice for them. So, I Would say that in using that k i n d of c u l t u r a l artifact, F m not privileging i t , or making it very inipressive — devaluing its historicity, in a way —

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but, as is often the case in my w o r k , I try to do lots of things at the same time. A t the same time that it might be handled rather flippantly, it has on the other hand an aura of importance about i t . Depending on h o w the material comes up in the project — it's either embedded through montage or some k i n d of story that's going o n , or it's just another element of their environment — it's grand something overarching, so much bigger and ineffable, but still maybe very ordinary at the same time. Tve thought so much about the use of others' material, appropriation, that if I use the material in a way that I think is beautiful, or provokes the experience of beauty, I always want to shift it a little to an uncomfortable position. So there's always something ambivalent about i t . But that's a very particular point of view on i t , I recognize. I guess I could sum up the direction of what Tm saying as being interested in archival material for its historical presence, but also to make historical presence ordinary, not to regard the historical as spectacular. I t might look spectacular, because if you take shots of bombs dropping i n W o r l d War I I it looks spectacular, and that is, in a sense, acstheticizing something that had a very different quality at its source. There's a way of looking at bomb footage as if you were there. But that isn't the point either. The point is to see something spectacular, but to recognize that it has a referent, and the referent is enormous, but it is somehow w i t h i n the present as well as the past. Y o u read it in the present, but your present is made up of ali

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pasts, and so f o r t h . So that's the kind of circiing that's going on. I t h i n k one of the reasons this is hard to talk about is because it is really about looking at one thing in a number of different ways. Part of the discomfort of a project like Peggy and Fred is that it really tries to confront the viewer i n a way that doesn't allow one to be complacent. Y o u see the story, you see what's happening to these kids, you see what the time frame is. A t the same time there is always something odd or strange to look at. So, there's even an entertainment value, certainly there's that levei of engagement. But at the same time there is a pressure to exert your viewing to accommodate what's being throvm at you. It's not nonsense, but what is it? Y o u can't say what i t is. It's not really recuperable in language. »

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There is another thing I want to say about the use of found material, particularly in the project Peggy and Fred. I n a w a y , Pve approached ali the material as if it was f o u n d . The behavior of the children is virtually found behavior, though it was always instigated or set up by suggestions. But it wasn't shot w i t h a script, and I did shoot for eight years. I n The So-Called Duck Factory there is a way in which the archival material and the material I shot become almost indistinguishable as far as developing the story is concerned. I n the future the position of the archival footage may not be so much w i t h quotations marks around i t . The nar-

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rative T m w o r k i n g on now w i l l cmbed the archival material differently, the embedding w i l l be deeper I t h i n k you can see this starting to happen now iri the video, The So-Called Duck Factory, particularly some odd nature images that maybe look like they weren't shot consciously, w i t h an aesthetic end, or you can't understand what the purpose of shooting might be — which is often the case when you look at archival material — so that quality has been incorporated into the shooting, that kind of absence of mind in the shooting.

T m just beginning to appreciate the unremitting, formally linear machine of narrative, of narrative discourse in general. A n d I just feel like I can breathe when T m l o o k i n g at something whose purpose isn't entirely locatable. A n d that's part of the freshness of w o r k i n g w i t h archival material, separate f r o m ali these other things we've talked about, and I guess that has been contributing a lot to my practice. The camera is ideologically loaded, so T m just asking questions about h o w to use the camera — as well as having a good time and trying to talk about something. M y number one rule is that there are no rules in filmmaking, and archival stuff really works in well that way because it comes f r o m a million different places for a million different reasons.

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A r t is changing, it's changing. I t h i n k a lot of people who call themselves artists now are cultural critics w h o are using Instruments other than just written language or spoken language to communicate their criticai perspective. But I d o n ' t p u t myself in that category, absolutely not. I w o u l d say I see that as an aspect [of my w o r k ] , but — T m not sure IVe ever said this before — I really believe in art. I think if it's important right n o w in this world to have a criticai perspective as a cultural producer, it's just as important to pursue forms of address that we call aesthetics. You can't just cut one o f f and say it's, you k n o w , questionable, bourgeois, corrupt, or whatever. It ali goes t o gether, and the w o r k that's going to last is art. Art's going to be there. New Y o r k City 19 February 1991

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Filmography In addition to films made by filmmakers referred to earlier in this text, this list includes a number of other f o u n d footage films representative of the genre. I emphasize, hov^^ever, that this is a selection of titles, and that, in keeping w i t h my distinction between films w i t h found footage and found footage films (see the I n t r o d u c t i o n ) , I have not listed w o r k s in the former category. For the benefit of f i l m teachers and programmers, I have included the film's distributor(s) as the final item in each entry, but it should be noted that there may be other sources of the f i l m , and filmmakers sometimes w i t h d r a w films f r o m circulation or change distributors. When no distributor is listed, the filmmaker must be ed directly. (The key to the abbreviations of distributors' names appears at the end of the filmography.) T o the best of my knowledge, the information was accurate as of March 1993. Unless otherwise indicated, the films are 16mm sound films; variables include silent (si), Super-8 (S8), and sound on tape (s.o.t). Abbott, Sarah and Michelle Harrison. M y Withered T o m a t o Friend, 1991, 9 m i n — CFMDC Abrams, Jerry. Lotus W i n g , 1968, 17 m i n — CC

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Alvarez, Alfonso. Film For . . . , 1989, 7:3o min CC A r n o l d , M a r t i n . Pièce Touchée, 1989, 15 min — CC Austen, Jayne. That's What They D o T o Does 1991, 10 m i n , s i — D r i f t ' Avery, Caroline. Big Brother, 1983, 7 m i n si — CC, F M C M i d w e e k e n d , 1985, 8:45 m i n — CC FMC The Living Rock, 1989, 9 m i n , si — CC Simulated Experience, 1989, 45 see, si — CC Baldwin, Craig. W i l d G u n m a n , 1978, 20 min R o c k e t K i t K o n g o K i t , 1986, 30 m i n — Drift T r i b u l a t i o n 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, (1991), 50 m i n — D r i f t O N o Coronado!, 1992, 40 m i n Barnett, Daniel. Popular Songs, 1979, 18 m i n — CC Pull Out/Fall O u t , 1974, 4 m i n — CC Bartlett, Scott. Heavy M e t a l , 1978, 12 m i n — CC, F M C , M O M A Beauvais, Yann. Soft Collisions (The Dream of a Good Soldier), 1991, 15 m i n , s.o.t., 3screen — CC Berliner, Alan. City Edition, 1980, 10 m i n — CC, F M C M y t h i n the Electronic Age, 1981, 14 m i n — CC, F M C Every where A t Once, 1985, 10 m i n — CC, F M C

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The Family Álbum, 1986, 60 m i n — FMC Beveridge, Richard. T u r n to Y o u r Dogs/Gods, 1977, 17 m i n — C C Binkey, George (Adolfas Mekas). A n t i f i l m # 2 , 1951 (revised c. 1956), 18 m i n . Bourque, Louise. Just W o r d s , 1991, 10 m i n . Braidwood, T o m . Backbone, 1972, 11 m i n — CFMDC L i m i t e d Engagement, 1976, 6:30 m i n — CFMDC Brakhage, Stan. 23rd Psalm Branch, Part 1 , 1966-78, 30 m i n — CC, F M C M u r d e r Psalm, 1981, 16 m i n — F M C , CC, C F M D C Breer, Emily. Fluke, 1985, 6:15 min — F M C , CC Brehm, Dietmar. Pool, 1990, 4 m i n , si. The M u r d e r Mystery, 1992, 18 m i n . Blicklust, 1992, 18 m i n . Brigante, Louis. Assemblage, c. 1967, 17 m i n — FMC Brinckman, N o l i . Der Fater (The Father), 1986, 25:30 m i n — F M C Brunei, A d r i a n . Crossing the Great Sagrada, 1931, 15 m i n — L C Bustros, Jean-Claude. La Queue Tigre sur u n Pendentif de Pare-Brise, 1989, 26 m i n — CL Zero Gravite, 1990, 28 m i n — C L Cameron, Donna. Dracula and the Baby Sitter, 1986, 14 m i n — CC The Falcon, 1987, 13 m i n — CC

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Chambers, Jack. The H a r t o f L o n d o n , 19681970, 79 m i n — C F M D C C h i l d , Abigail. Is This What Y o u Were Born For?, 1981-88, 73 m i n — F M C , CC 1 . Prefaces, 1981, 10 min — C C , F M C 2. B o t h 1, 1989, 3 m i n — C C , F M C 3. M u t i n y , 1982-3, 11 m i n — C C , F M C 4. B o t h 2, 1988, 3 m i n — CC 5. Covert A c t i o n , 1984, 11 m i n — CC FMC 6. Perils, 1985-6, 5 m i n — C C , F M C 7. M a y h e m , 1987, 20 m i n — C F M D C , CC, F M C 8. M e r c y , 1989, 10 m i n — C F M D C , CC Conger, Jane (Jane Belson). Odds and Ends, 1950s.>, 4 m i n — C F S Conner, Bruce. A M o v i e , 1958, 12 m i n — CC Cosmic Ray, 1 9 6 1 , 4 m i n — CC T e n Second Film, 1965, 10 sec — CC Cosmic Ray #1, # 2 , # 3 , ( 8 m m loops) 1965 — C C Report, 1963-1967, 13 m i n — CC Permian Strata, 1969, 3:30 m i n — CC M a r i l y n Times Five, 1968-1973, 13 m i n — CC Crossroads, 1976, 36 m i n — C C Take the 5:10 t o Dreamland, 1977, 5:30 m i n — CC Valse Triste, 1979, 5 m i n — CC M o n g o l o i d , 1978, 4 m i n — CC America Is W a i t i n g , 1982, 3:30 m i n — CC Cook, Cathy C. T h e M a t c h That Started M y

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Fire, 1 9 9 1 , 18:30 m i n . Cornell, Joseph. Rose H o b a r t , 1939, 19:30 m i n , si, s.o.t — F M C Bookstalls, ? , 10:45 m i n , si — F M C Vaudeville De-Luxe, ? , 12 m i n , si — FMC N e w York-Rome-Barcelona-Brussels, ?, 9:45 m i n , si — F M C By N i g h t W i t h T o r c h and Spear, ? , 8:30 f' m i n , si — F M C Cornell, Joseph and Larry Jordan. Three by Cornell f C o t i l l i o n , The M i d n i g h t Party, Children's Party;, 1940s, 25 m i n , si — CC, F M C Three M o r e By Cornell fCarrousel, Jack's Dream, Thimble Theatre;, 1940s, 24 m i n — CC Couzin, Sharon. Deutschland Spiegel, 1980, 12 m i n — F M C , CC Delpeut, Peter. Lyrical N i t r a t e , 1991, 50 m i n , 35mm — Zeitgeist Dunphy, Laurie. A Western, 1987, 9 m i n . Journahsm Conducts a T o u r , 1989, c. 18 m i n Eisenberg, Daniel. Displaced Person, 1 9 8 1 , 11 min — CC Faccinto, Victor. Book of Dead, 1978, 15 m i n — CC, F M C Farley, W i l l i a m . T r i b u t e , 1986, 7 m i n — C C , PS Made For Television, 1981, 5 m i n — PS Ferguson, Betty. The Airplane F i l m , 1973, 35 min — C F M D C

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Kisses, 1978, 60 m i n — C F M D C Ferguson, Betty and Joyce Weiland. Barbara's Blindness, 1965, 17 m i n — F M C , CFMDC Filippo, M a r y . Piece O ' M i n d , 1983, 8:30 min — FMC W h o D o Y o u T h i n k Y o u Are, 1987, 10 min — F M C Feel the Fear, 1990, 20 m i n — F M C Finne, Ron. Keep O f f the Grass, 1968, 12 min — CC People Near Here, 1969, 12 m i n — F M C , CC Fisher, M o r g a n . Standard Gauge, 1984, 35 min — FMC Fonoroff, N i n a . Some Phases of A n Empire, 1984, 9 m i n , S8 — CC Fontaine, Cécile. Overeating, 1984, 3 m i n — LC T w o Made For T V Films, 1986, 6 m i n — LC Cruises, 1988-89, 10 m i n — L C Histoires Paralléles, 1990, 11 m i n — L C Frampton, Hollis. W o r k s and Days, 1969, 12 m i n , si — F M C Remote C o n t r o l , 1972, 29 m i n , si — FMC Public D o m a i n , 1972, 14 m i n , si — F M C G l o r i a ! , 1979, 9:30 m i n — F M C Gallagher, Chris. M i r a g e , 1983, 7 m i n — CFMDC Gagnon, Charles. The Eighth Day, 1967, 15 min — C F M D C

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Gehr, Ernie. Eureka, 1974, 30 m i n , si — F M C Gianikian, Yervant and Angela Ricci Lucchi. From the Pole to the Equator, 1986, 96 min — M O M A Karagoez, 1981, 54 m i n — M O M A Gioli, Paolo. L'Operatore Perforato, 1979, 8 min — LC Goldberg, Brian and Jackie Goss. Perfect Video, 1989, 5 m i n — D r i f t Gottheim, Larry. Y o u r Television Traveler, 1991, 12 m i n — F M C Hammer, Barbara. Sanctus, 1990, 19 m i n — CC Hancox, Rick. Rose, 1968, 3 m i n — C F M D C Hayeem, Ben. Extreme U n c t i o n , 1969, 6:30 min — F M C H i r s h , H y . La Couleur De La Forme, 1961, 5 m i n — CFS Scratch Pad, 1960, 7 m i n — CFS H o o l b o o m , M i k e . Eat, 1989, 15 m i n — CFMDC H u d i n a , Chuck. Nigéria, 1989, 4:30 m i n — CC H u o t , Robert. Cross Cut — A Blue M o v i e , 1968-69, 1 m i n , si — F M C Jacobs, Ken. T o m , T o m , The Piper's Son, 1969, 115 m i n — F M C , C F M D C U r b a n Peasants, 1975, 59:30 m i n , s.o.t. — FMC The Doctor's Dream, 1978, 23 m i n — FMC, CFMDC Perfect Film, 1986, 21:45 m i n — F M C Keaton's Cops, 1991, c. 20 m i n . The Nervous System Performances:

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The Impossible: Southwark Fair, I 9 7 5 The Impossible: Hell Breaks Loose I9» X C X H X E X R X R X I X E X S X , 1980' Ken Jacobs' Theater of Unconscionable Stupidity Presents Camera Thrills of the W a r , 1981 M a k i n g Light of H i s t o r y : The Philippint Adventure, 1983 Janetzko, Christoph. S I , 1985, 14:30 m i n — FMC Jenkins, Patrick. Wedding Before M e , 1976, 7 min — CFMDC Jones, Edward. Cine Insurgente, 1971, 3 min — CC Keller, M a r j o r i e . Daughters of Chãos, 1980, 19:30 m i n — F M C Klahr, Lewis. Her Fragrant Emulsion, 1987, 10 m i n — F M C Picture Book For A d u l t s , 1983-85, 37: 30 m i n , Super-8 — F M C Kless, Larry. Cowboys Were N o t Nice People, 1990, 8 m i n — F M C Knecht, John. Aspects of a Certain History, 1984, 57 m i n — F M C Kortz, D i r k . Temporary Arrangements, c. 1978, 7:30 m i n — CC Land, Owen (George Landow). Film I n W h i c h There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, D i r t Particles, E t c , 1966, 10 min — FMC Lawder, Standish. Intolerance (Abridged), 1960s?, 10 m i n , si — CC Runaway, 1969, 5.5 m i n — CC, F M C ,

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CFMDC ' Dangling Participle, 1970, 16:15 m i n — CC, F M C , C F M D C Raindance, 1972, 16 min — CC, F M C LcGrice, M a l c o l m . Berlin Horse, 1970, 7 m i n — F M C , LFC Little D o g For Roger, 1967, 12 m i n — LFC Lemâitre, Maurice. PelUcule, 1968, 41 m i n — LC U n Navet, 1975-77, 31 m i n — L C Levine, Charles. Bessie Smith, 1968, 13:30 m i n — CC, F M C Horseopera, 1970, 24 min — CC, F M C Steps, 1976, 12 min — CC, F M C Levine, Richard. W a r Stories, 1983, 45:45 m i n — FMC Levine, Saul. The Big Stick, 1967-1973, 15 m i n , si — CC, F M C Notes After Long Silence, 1989, S8, 15 min — F M C L i n , Lana. I Begin to K n o w Y o u , 1992, 2 m i n — Drift T h r o u g h the D o o r , 1992, 2 m i n — D r i f t Sphere: Circle: Round, 1992, 2 m i n — Drift Lipsett, A r t h u r . A T r i p D o w n M e m o r y Lane, 1965, 12:40 m i n — NFB 21-87, 1963, 10 m i n — N F B Free Fali, 1964, 9:15 m i n — NFB Fluxes, 1967, 23:55 m i n — NFB Lipskis, Peter. Spare Parts, 1974, 10 m i n — CFMDC

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It's A M i x e d U p W o r l d , 1982, 8 m i n CFMDC L i p t o n , Lenny. Cornucopia, 1968, 8 m i n FMC Lye, Len. Trade T a t t o o , 1937, 6 m i n — MOMA M c A d a m s , Heather. Scratchman I I , 1982, 3 min — FMC H o l i d a y Magic, 1985, 7 m i n — F M C Fake Previews, 1985, 5:15 m i n — F M C Better Be Careful, 1986, 2:45 m i n — FMC M r . Glen W . Turner, 1990, 9 m i n — FMC M c L a u g h l i n , David. M o t h e r of Five, 1969, 7 m i n — CC M c M a h o n , M a n o n . N u r s i n g History, 1989, 10 m i n — C F M D C M i l l e r , Scott. Step O f f a Ten Foot Platform W i t h Y o u r Clothes O n , 1990, 7 m i n — CC Morrissey, Paul. Ancient H i s t o r y , 1961, 5 m i n , si — F M C Morrisson, Bill. Lost Avenues, 1991, 7 m i n — FMC Footprints, 1992, 6 m i n — F M C M o r i t z , W i l l i a m . Clap/Bored, 1973, 8 m i n . M u l l e r , Matthias. Home Stories, 1990, 6 m i n — CC M u r p h y , J.J. Print Generation, 1973-74, 50 min — FMC Science Fiction, 1979, 5 m i n — F M C , MOMA

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Preview, 1980, 3:15 m i n — F M C M u r r a y , Julie. Fuckface, 1986, 10 m i n , S8 — CC Tr'cheot'my P'sy, 1988, 3:30 m i n , S8 — CC Expulsion, 1989, 10 m i n , S8 — CC A Legend of Parts, 1990, 8 m i n , S8 — CC Conscious, 1991, 7 m i n , si. Nelson, Gunvor and Dorothy Wiley. Schmeerguntz, 1966, 14 m i n — CC, CFMDC, FMC 0 ' N e i l l , Pat. Runs Good, 1971, 15:15 m i n — CC, F M C Pearson, Lyle. Funk, 1980?, 10 m i n — CC Terror T r a i l , ? , 20 m i n — CC Peleshian, Artavazd. SKISB (The Beginning), 1967, l O m i n , 35mm — C F Petrochuk, K o n . Purple Pirate Blues, 1985, 25 m i n , s.o.t — CC Povey, Thad. A Different K i n d of Green, 1989, 6 m i n — CC Raxlan, Rick. Jaffa-Gate, 1984, 5:30 m i n — CFMDC Rayher, Robert. Eclipse: Still Life N o . 3, 1980, 2 m i n — F M C , CC Traces, 1985, 63 m i n , si — F M C Razutis, A l . Le Voyage, 1973, 8 m i n — CFMDC The M o o n at Evertide, 1974, 9 m i n — CFMDC Visual Essays: Origins of Film, 1973-84, 68 m i n

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1 . Lumiére's T r a i n (Arriving at the Stat i o n ) , 1979, 9 m i n — CC, C F M D C 2. MéHès Catalogue, 1973, 8 m i n — CC, C F M D C 3. Sequeis I n Transfigured T i m e , 1976, 12 m i n — CC, C F M D C , 4 . Ghost: Image, 1976-1979, 12 m i n — CC, C F M D C 5. For A r t a u d , 1982, 10 m i n — C C , CFMDC 6. Storming The Winter Palace, 1984, 15 m i n — CC, C F M D C W i l d West Show (Interrupted By A Message From O u r Sponsor), 1980, 20 min — C F M D C Richter, Hans. 2 Pence Magic, 1929, 2 m i n — MOMA Ridley, Charles? The Panzer Ballet, 1940?, 3 m i n . (This f i l m has been mistakenly credited t o Len Lye under the title Swinging the Lambeth W a l k — N a z i Style; in Europe i t is distributed under that title but the filmmaker is identified as Jack Ellit.) Rimmer, D a v i d . The Dance, 1970, 5 m i n — C F M D C , CC Surfacing o n the Thames, 1970, 8 m i n — C F M D C , CC Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper, 1970, 8 m i n — C F M D C , CC Seashore, 1971, 11 m i n — C F M D C Watching for the Queen, 1973, 11 m i n — CFMDC

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Bricolage, 1984, 10 m i n — C F M D C As Seen on T V , 1986, 15 m i n — CFMDC Local Knowledge, 1992, 33 m i n — CFMDC Roberts, C. Larry. Strong W i l l e d W o m e n Subjugate and Subdue Reptiles, 1982, 11 m i n — PS Rosenblatt, Jay. Short of Breath, 1990, 10 m i n — CC Sachs, Lynne. House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, 1991, 30 min — CC Sanborn, Keith. K A P I T A L ! , Parts 2-6, 198087, 65 m i n — D r i f t 2. Something Is Seen But One Doesn't K n o w What, 1986, 1:30 m i n (repeated 2 times) 3. A Public Appearance and a Statement, 1987, 25 m i n . 4. K a p i t a l , 1982, 3 m i n . 5. M a n w i t h a M o v i e Camera (Blonde; He Appears T o Be Young), 1982, 7:30 min 6. Imitation of Life, 1982, 25 m i n . Sandusky, Sharon. C M o n Babe (Danke Schoen), 1988, 11 m i n — F M C Sandusky, Sharon and Dan Dinello. Really Dead, 1992, 6 min — Shock Saroff, Raymond. The Real T h i n g , 1964, 45 m i n , s.o.t — F M C SchmelzDahin. Der General, 1987, 13 m i n , S8 — LC Stadt I n Flammen, 1984, S8 — L C

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Seeber, Guido. K i p h o , 1925, 4 m i n . — L C Sharits, Paul. Epileptic Seizure Comparison 1976, 34 m i n — F M C Shatavsky, Esther. Bedtime Story, 1981, 6 m i n si — F M C Snider, Greta. Futility, 1989, 9 m i n — D r i f t Solomon, Phil. The Secret Garden, 1986, 23 m i n , si — CC N o c t u r n e , 1980, revised 1989, 10 m i n , si — CC Soul, Veronika. U n k n o w n Soldiers, 1990, 41 min — C F M D C Stone, Erosetta. This Is Only a Test, 1980, 11 min — F M C Strand, Chick. W a t e r f a l l , 1967, 3 m i n — CC, FMC Elasticity, 1976, 25 m i n — CC, F M C Cartoon Le Mousse, 1979, 15 m i n — CC, F M C Loose Ends, 1979, 24 m i n — CC, F M C By the Lake, 1986, 9:30 m i n — CC, FMC Street, M a r k . Winterwheat, 1989, 8 m i n — CC Storck, H e n r i . L'Histoire d u soldat inconnu, 1931, 10 m i n — L C Szirtes, András. G r a v i t a t i o n , 1980, 21 m i n — CC Tartaglia, Jerry. Ecce H o m o , 1989, 7 m i n —

CC Remembrance, 1990, 5 m i n — CC H o l y M a r y , 1991, 5 m i n — CC Tell, Julia. She's Just Growing U p , Dear, 1992, 12 m i n .

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Thatcher, A n i t a . T o The T o p , 1990, 8 m i n — M O M A , LC T h o r n t o n , Leslie. Peggy and Fred i n H e l l (Prologue), 1984, 21 m i n — F M C , D r i f t Peggy and Fred i n Kansas, 11 m i n , video — Drift Peggy and Fred and Pete, 1988, 23 m i n , video — D r i f t (Dung Smoke Enters the Palace), 1989, 16 m i n , f i l m and video — D r i f t Introduction t o the So-Called D u c k Factory, 1990, 12 m i n , video — D r i f t Tougas, K i r k . The Politics of Perception, 1973, 33 m i n — C F M D C Ungerer, Walter. Meet M e , Jesus, 1966, 13:15 m i n — CC, F M C Vanderbeek, Stan. Breathdeath, 1964, 15 m i n — FMC, M O M A Found Film N o . 1 , 1968-70, 6.25 m i n — FMC The History of M o t i o n i n M o t i o n , 1960s?, 10 m i n — F M C Newsreel of Dreams, N o . 1 , c. 1962, 8 min — FMC Newsreel of Dreams, N o . 2, c. 1962, 8 min — F M C Paneis for the Walls of the W o r l d , 1967, 8 min — F M C Viénet, René. La Dialectique Peut-Elle Casser des Briques?, 1972, 90 m i n , video copy of 3 5 m m f i l m w i t h subtitles by Keith Sanborn — D r i f t W a l l i n , Michael Decodings, 1983, 10 m i n —

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F M C , CC Wieland, Joyce. H a n d t i n t i n g , 1967, 5:30 m i n si — C F M D C Wieland, Joyce and Betty Ferguson. Barbara's Blindness, 1965, 17 m i n — F M C , CFMDC Wendt, Doug. M i d n i g h t Trailer, 1974, 3 m i n — CC W h i t e , Chel. Jump Cut, 1987, 4:30 m i n — CC W h i t e , D a v i d . Elm Street, 1976, 8 m i n . — CC Wuschke, Caroline. Appropriate M o m e n t , 1985, 20 m i n — C F M D C

Fax (212) 254-3154; D r i f t Distribution Film L i b r a r y (201) 652-1989 F M C = Film-Makers' Cooperative, 175 Lexington Avenue, N e w Y o r k , N Y 10016 (212) 8893820 LC = Light Cone, 27, rue Louis Braille, 75012 Paris, (011 331) 46 28 11 2 1 ; Fax (011 3 3 1 ) 4 3 46 63 76 LFC = L o n d o n Filmmakers' Cooperative, 42 Gloucester Avenue, London N W l 8JD, United K i n g d o m (071) 586-4806; Fax (071) 483-0068 M O M A = Museum of M o d e r n A r t Film Circulation, 11 West 53rd Street, N e w Y o r k , N Y 10019 (212) 708-9530; Fax (212) 708-9531

Distributors CC = Canyon Cinema, 2325 T h i r d Street, Suite 338, San Francisco, C A 94107 (415) 626-2255 C F M D C = Canadian Filmmakers D i s t r i b u t i o n Centre, 67A Portland Street, T o r o n t o , Ontário M 5 V 2 M 9 (416) 593-1808 CF = Cinematheque Française, 29 Rue d u Colisée, 75008 Paris, CFS = Creative Film Society, 8435 Geyser Avenue, N o r t h r i d g e , CA 91324 (818) 885-7288 C L = Cinema Libre, 3575 boul. St-Laurent, Suite 704, M o n t r e a l , Québec H 2 X 2 T X (514) 849-7888 D r i f t = D r i f t Distribution, 219 East 2nd Street #5E, N e w Y o r k , N Y 10009 (212) 254-4118;

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NFB = National Film Board of Canada, 1251 Avenue of the Américas, 16th Floor, N e w Y o r k , N Y 10020 (212) 586-5131; Fax (212) 5752382; National Film Board of Canada L i b r a r y , Complexe Guy-Favreau, East Tower, Suite 005, 200 René Lévesque Blvd. W . , M o n t r e a l , Québec, Canada H 2 Z 1X4 (514) 283-4823/4924 PS = Picture Start Collection, Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 West Belmont, Chicago, I L 60657 (312) 281-8788 Shock = Shock Productions, 107 Harrison, Oak Park, I L 60304 (708) 848-5155 Zeitgeist = Zeitgeist Films L t d . , 247 Centre Street 2nd Floor, N e w Y o r k , N Y 10013 (212) 274-1989

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William C. Wees is an American who has lived for many years in Canada and is an Associate Professor in the Department of English of McGill University in Montreal, where he teaches courses in modern literature, film, and cultural studies. In addition to articles in a number of journals, including Millennium Film Journal, Motion Picture, Cantrills Filmnotes, Cine-Tracts, and Canadian Journal of Film Studies, he is also the author of Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (University of Califórnia Press, 1992).

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