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 supported 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

2.

Introduction

3.

Surveying the Field

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

32

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 .

65

^-

Filmography

101

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
A^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

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 support 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

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

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 passage 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 lbum [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

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
admiration.""^
In the same spirit of nonintervention but not
necessarily admiration 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 advertised
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 "pice de
rsistance" Your Job in Germany, 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'tg
readings than their original makcrs i n -

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 Pice
Touche
(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 expos 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

the slow, frame-to-frame dissolves in David

Rimnier's Surfacing
on the Thames (1970). A
brief clip
t w o ships passing 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, clich-ridden T V movie
>nto an oddly ambiguous psychodrama by begin-

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 disjointed, 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

10

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 clichs, 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

11

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

12

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

13

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

14

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 ndia (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

15

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 passage
^egins w i t h a man in his undershirt breathing

16

17

Moreover, as is often the case w i t h found footage films, the meaning dcrived from viewing Fluxes
dcpends 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 clichs 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 Nigria [1989]) music accompa-

18

19

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 passage 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

20

ntially the same: the incongruity of sound and

^magc expose, satirize, and produce new readings
' f the banalities, clichs 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 meanng 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."

21

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

22

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 terms 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

23

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
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 exposs, 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

24

25

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

26

right, but highlight at the same time as they

begin to deconstruct some of the clichs 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
Mlis, 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,
"Mlis' 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-

27

t i o n . I n For Artaud a few images f r o m Carl

Dreyer's Passion 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-

28

29

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, Ccile 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

30

.^^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

31

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 account 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 account

new films f r o m pieces of

old as the institution of
1898, a French distribuof the Dreyfus case w i t h

34

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

35

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

36

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 reprter 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-

37

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

38

39

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 Crter shaking hands, Reagan and Gorbachev
shaking hands, Lech Walesa and his supporters
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).

40

41

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

42

43

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
pur, 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

44

^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 terms, 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

45

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 acccptSj leveis, homogenizes. I f both use montage to

dislodge images f r o m their original contexts and
j^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.

46

47

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

48

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) encompasses 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

49

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 Brger'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 Brger'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

50

51

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.

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
Brger prefer to call montage, except when referring specifically to the papier colle 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 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 rcades 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-

52

^j^l "35 As it is or more precisely, as Benjamin

cnvisioned it the rcades 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 terms 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 remember, 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-

5S

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.

54

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 . "

55

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 clichd 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

56

57

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 Passos' 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.

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'

58

Cooperative

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 Passage
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

59

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 Frum, 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

60

(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 rcades 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

61

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 Passage
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.

63

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
Chos,
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.

64

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) encompasses 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 Ren Vinet's "dtourned"
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-

65

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 admired, 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-

66

67

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 .

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'

68

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.

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

69

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 passe 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

70

71

of raunchy, suburban, post-World W a r I I American optimism and 'Os psychedelic revolutionary

idealism and feminism. That's the topos for this
w o r k . O f course, each of us is different.

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 contact,
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

72

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-

73

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 x i c o and N e w M 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.

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 reas u n t i l everything k i n d of fell t o gether.
That was the basic structure. I had

74

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 supports 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 .

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

75

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.

76

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 , indcpendent 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.

*
77

I d o n ' t believe that anything Hke A AOV/

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 clich 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
'Os 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 remember 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

78

79

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 joined 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 Califrnia, that I
know of. I t was called Camera Obscura.

80

81

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 bons
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.

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

82

83

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.

quite different by changing the context.

*

I disagree w i t h the tendency to make " f o u n d

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.

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.

84

85

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
Intermdia 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 remember
quite distinctiy that I had four projectors, each
with the same loop projected on the wall, and I was

86

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

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

87

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 passages 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

89

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.

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 membership 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 membership, 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 terms of

90

quality, but certainly in terms 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.

91

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!

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 terms 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.

Chick Strand

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.
*

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

94

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 artfice 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

95

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

96

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.

'

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-

97

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.

98

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

99

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 contacted 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

101

Alvarez, Alfonso. Film For . . . , 1989, 7:3o min

CC
A r n o l d , M a r t i n . Pice Touche, 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

102

The Family lbum, 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

103

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

104

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

105

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, Ccile. 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 Parallles, 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

106

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. Nigria, 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:

107

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 Chos, 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 ,

108

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
Lemitre, 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

109

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

110

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

111

1 . Lumire'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. MHs 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

112

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

113

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,
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Szirtes, Andrs. 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 .

114

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
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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
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Newsreel of Dreams, N o . 1 , c. 1962, 8
min FMC
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min F M C
Paneis for the Walls of the W o r l d , 1967,
8 min F M C
Vinet, Ren. 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

115

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
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Wuschke, Caroline. Appropriate M o m e n t ,
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116

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117

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 Califrnia Press, 1992).

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