A Research Site Devoted to the Past and Future of Found Footage Film and Video
“A lot of people who call themselves artists now are cultural critics who are using instruments other than just written language or spoken language to communicate their critical perspective.”
-Leslie Thornton
Friday, December 7, 2007
Some new Machinima: Mashups and Mourning
I don't quite know what to make of this film. It is an interesting follow up to "The French Democracy" machinima, which dealt with the Paris Suburb Riots of 2006. This film, a memorial for the Virginia Tech Victims oscillates between a statistics and facts about the tragedy and images from Halo 3 presumably reenacting the massacre. It seems a bit trite to critique the massacre with this particular game but it's nevertheless a conscientious little film.
The Films of Scott McElroy
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
MPAA's Copyright Woes
Canadian Copyright
The Canadian government is about to introduce new copyright legislation that will be a complete sell-out to U.S. government and lobbyist demands. The new Canadian legislation will likely mirror the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act with strong anti-circumvention legislation that goes far beyond what is needed to comply with the World Intellectual Property Organization's Internet treaties. Moreover, it will not address the issues that concern millions of Canadians. For example, the Conservatives' promise to eliminate the private copying levy will likely be abandoned. There will be no flexible fair dealing. No parody exception. No time shifting exception. No device shifting exception. No expanded backup provision. Nothing that focuses on the issues of the ordinary Canadian.
Instead, the government will choose locks over learning, property over privacy, enforcement over education, (law)suits over security, lobbyists over librarians, and U.S. policy over a "Canadian-made" solution.
check out his YouTube video:
Also--check out this animation that addresses the recent privacy issues facebook has had:
Sunday, December 2, 2007
This Spartan Life on Net Neutrality
“This Spartan Life,” is a machinima show which some have dubbed “virtual reality TV.” The show, which takes place in the violent Halo 3 environment, follows a host who interviews significant media theoreticians, avant-garde artists and open source programmers inside the game. The show has attracted Criterion Collection creator and Voyager Company founder Bob Stein and avant-garde, found-footage filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh. The dramatic tension of the show is centered on the fact that interviews are over if the guest’s avatar is killed. Videos are available on YouTube and Machinima.com
Thursday, November 22, 2007
EBN: The Emergency Broadcast Network
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Santiago Alvarez and the Latin American Found Footage Contingency
Santiago Álvarez (born 1919–died 1998) was a Cuban filmmaker. He wrote and directed many documentaries about Cuban and American culture. Among his most famous works was the short Now (1964), about racial discrimination and featuring singer/actress Lena Horne. LBJ (1968) and 79 Primaveras (1969) examined figures of the Vietnam War. In 1968, he collaborated with Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas (members of Grupo Cine Liberación) on the four-hour documentary Hora de los hornos, about foreign imperialism in South America. Among the other subjects he explored in his film were the musical and cultural scene in Latin America and the dictatorships which gripped the region. He died of Parkinson's disease in Havana on May 20, 1998 and was buried there in the Colon Cemetery.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Monday, October 29, 2007
Andrew Keen's dissapointing self-reflexivity
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Copyright Hitmen
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Apologies
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Christian Media--for the young and the out of shape
Gospel Aerobics with ambiguously gay instructor:
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Exporting Freedom One Sitcom at a Time
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Hail! Total Recut
They're currently featuring a film by Caped, Masked and Armed; those beloved people who brought you "Kodak Moments," one of the most scathing political mashups to date. Now they give us....
I am currently working on two "improved film" mashups. I will be taking a shitty genre film and mixing it with an art house film for a trailer. Anyone interested in working on one of these, I would love to feature you on an upcoming post.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
The Big Brother you never knew you had
MyEverythingdotcom
Monday, June 25, 2007
Great New Work
"Cosas de Mujeres" by Javier Plano takes after many great avant-garde structuralist films in the spirit of Hollis Frampton or Michael Snow. The film has a leitmotif for each character, except instead of a musical theme, they are given a single tone. Javier explains it like this:
i can say that it was made following a path in the beggining: A, B, C, D (Antonioni, Bresson, Cocteau and Dreyer), and i try to make a tone for each one of the women that correspond with that musical note (A -> la , B -> si , C -> do , D -> re).
Through editing, a melody appears in the presentation of each character, giving unity to this examination of fighting women. A and C confronting D, with a bystander, B. Thanks Javier. This is truly amazing work.
ikat381's film "my heart will take a kayak" is a satirical mashup of "Titanic", celebrity journalism and Hurricane Katrina. I feel artistically akin to ikat381, especially since we've both been criticized online for mixing satire and parody with serious subjects. ikat381's mash-up is reality based, and works by forming connections between pop culture ("Titanic" and Celine Dion's famous song for the film) with real life tragedy (Hurricane Katrina) and the strange intersection they have on Larry King Live. It's also hilarious...
I recently took off a post I made which irreverently looked at some of the critics of my satirical mashup, "Ocean's 9/11" because it descended into petty name calling on my part. I'm working on new (less controversial) projects right now, one surrounding the great character actor Harry J. Lennix and his life playing an Uncle Tom, and the other regarding Capitalist critiques and Marxist undertones in horror films. Ocean's 9/11 was in the LA Times last week. The link is here.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Towards a Poor Cinema
Towards a Poor Cinema: A Credo of Recycled Cinema
1. Cinema, like other arts, should remain in a constant state of flux. Stasis is the enemy of art the same way it is the enemy of science and medicine.
2. The dialectic, in which a thesis, antithesis and eventual synthesis are produced is the most productive means of facilitating a constructive, socially relevant artistic tradition. Artistic output is a conversational practice by which ideas and sensibilities are evaluated, imitated, critiqued, devalued, buried and eventually resurrected. All of these components are part of a rich process of evolution by which societies and artists contribute. This tradition currently has little or no place in the infrastructure of cinema.
3. Current economic and social conditions have strained the desired dialectic from taking place. Several hindrances have arisen. A.)Studios have divested themselves of earlier models of funding vying instead to spend large sums of money to attract large audiences with astronomical returns; B) the endowments and benefactors of other art forms are not present for cinema because of the immense popularity of the form and immense commercial successes possible thus eliminating funding for those who haven’t been granted access by gatekeepers of popular distribution corporations; C) The labor involved in the business of making films have a strong grasp on the industry. A combination of self-sustaining unionization which makes it difficult to self-produce, guarded and expensive distribution platforms which make it unfeasible to deliver films to audiences, and a nearly universal acceptance of these parameters has made true independence a fallacy. A poor cinema will abscond from every one of these tyrannical forces in the film-making process.
4. We believe as Cocteau did when he stated that "film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper." In other words all commercial cinema is the sale and marketing of products by corporate monopolies designed as a part of what Guy Debord has called “the spectacle.” These products have been tailored to appeal to mass audiences based on the successes and failures of the past, making innovation (which translates as economic risk) more and more sparse.
5. We believe that the new technological innovations made possible by internet distribution platforms, digital video, and the tools of the age of reproducibility must be harnessed by individuals with a commitment to re-instituting an artistic dialectic. We believe this is the only possible step in reviving an art form which admittedly for a lengthy period of time necessitated significant capitol for materials and participation, but has recently been dramatically stunted by a rising trend of artistic stasis.
6. We believe that the Recycled Cinema is the most powerful pedagogical tool in this process of reinvigoration. The goal in this circumstance is not only to think, but to remember. It is a revaluation of the art form in the hopes of discovery and critical deconstruction in an artistic laboratory. We support this process in part because the tools necessary to produce art are more widely available with an enormous cannon of works to detourn, re-construct, manipulate and addend.
7. While the financial irreducibility of cinema as we know it today plays a part in our support for Recycled Cinema, or the act of utilizing appropriated and sometimes “found” footage, our ultimate conclusions in this direction are liminally based on money, though we find this fact very convenient. The “cinema povera” or cinema of poverty allowed through the pillaging of images makes it a revolutionary practice on a number of levels. Ideally, a person is re-claiming the works of those who erred, mistreated or denigrated the medium so that they may redeem them by highlighting, altering or critiquing their work. Recycled Cinema in itself is an end towards showing the essentially uniformity and creative vapidity of commercial cinema.
8. The financial infrastructure by which films are made is fundamentally at odds with the practice of recycled cinema on a number of counts. The studio model, by which large sums of capital are invested up in hopes of larger returns has no place in a system in which films are made often “on the fly” with limited need for materials which can be distributed and accessed for free on internet video platforms. This aesthetic and economic difference will not be left as a simple artistic divergence. Capitalist forces in the industry will always retaliate against individuals offering competitive products at zero cost to the public. Copyright infringement suits will always be a looming threat to appropriators of footage, but for now the relative obscurity of the medium is its best defense against truly crippling legal action. But just as various forms of online video have had enormous overnight success, some unfortunate spokesman of the digital age will be left trying to explain to intellectual property owners the difference between appropriation and piracy, fair use and theft, and all of the other artistic practices of the post-modern era. Inevitably they will fail to move the holders, and it is likely they will fail to persuade the courts. These are necessary battles that must be waged.
9. The fading remnants of independent film (a term usually falsely attributed) and the tradition of the art film has little or no relationship to the burgeoning recycled cinema. These traditions, which are endemic to the academy, highly intellectual and theory based art institutions is produced by a fringe of the society for themselves. It has little or no interest in harnessing the popular distribution platform that is the internet which Recycled Cinema has been a part of since the inception of internet video portals.
10. The purpose of detournement, compilation, mashups and other techniques attributed to recycled cinema is to reach to the root of the artistic stasis present in the commercial cinema. Mashup films which combine two or more films expose the uniformity present in narrative today. The most skilled mashup filmmakers will use the tropes and styles of commercial films like an armory of easily imitated techniques, ultimately undermining the elements present. In the process these tropes and styles can be understood as easily employed “tricks” which require no artistry in their execution and only an understanding of quick ways to manipulate people. Compilation filmmakers like Craig Baldwin seek to discover the subconscious of styles and genre through the prism of history and culture. In this way, he exposes the temporal nature of commercial cinema—which stands in stark contrast to the universality and timelessness of real works of art.
11. Ultimately the Recycled Cinema offers tools to evaluate an even more threatening tyranny over independent artistry; the universal specter of narrative, most contemptibly in the stylistic mold of the novel. Much can be said of the novel’s rise to become the foremost model of narrative structure, but ultimately the most important idea to note is the needless choice made by filmmakers to perpetuate it. The single most differentiating attribute of avant-garde film from commercial narrative cinema is its reliance on non-novelistic models. Whereas avant-garde films overwhelmingly rely on literary traditions like poetry, the short story, stream-of-consciousness, and religious literature; non-literary art forms like painting, sculpture, animation, and dance; social sciences like psychology, and anthropology; and human phenomena like ritual, mythology, synesthesia and the subconscious. The novelistic mode has dominated cinema because in film-making’s nascent stages, novels were the most popular art form in the western world. We believe as Bruce Elder when he wrote “narrative is the artistic structure of technocracy. The cinema we need, the cinema that combats technocracy will, therefore, be non-narrative.” The co-incidence of the novel and the industrial revolution which followed soon after has devastating implications. Narrative at its foundations is a cause and effect, chain of events structurally identical to the assembly line on a factory floor. This linear means of representing human life is often defended by the false adage that human life is best represented by narrative. Instead, we are faced with propaganda, aimed at witling realistic events into a highly unrealistic framework.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Friday, May 25, 2007
Ocean's 9/11 - The First Act of Recycled Cinema
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Found Footage Film Festival
Below are some clips from the fest:
Arnold in Rio: The groping begins....
Jan Terry: The video you didn't see on MTV
That crazy RV salesman is back at it:
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Found footage by Mireia Visuals
A Spanish found footage filmmaker by the name of Mireia Berenguer recently got in touch with me. These appropriated clips and compilations show the devastating effects that fashion advertising has had on female self-image. This to me represents so much of what Recycled Cinema should strive to be--a critique of commercial cinema and advertising by means of the very material proliferated. The first clip is a simple scene from a model show in Spain, the second a compilation of grotesque scenes from Hollywood films and the last is a wonderful evolution of a model shoot. Please visit Mireia @ http://mireiavisuals.blogspot.com. Recycled Cinema salutes you!
Sunday, April 22, 2007
(Recycled Cinema pioneer Arthur Lipsett)
“Narrative is the artistic structure of technocracy. The cinema we need, the cinema that combats technocracy will, therefore, be non-narrative.” -- R. Bruce Elder "The Cinema We Need."
Seeing Arthur Lipsett's "Very Nice, Very Nice" was as impacting as the first time I saw Bruce Conner's "A Movie." This work of recycled cinema made in 1962 uses Eisenstein's idea of vertical montage, "the moment-to-moment juxtaposition of a film's audio and visual tracks" (Brett Kashmere in Senses of Cinema). Lipsett mixes sound and footage for his portrait of 1950s consumerism and social apathy. While watching I couldn't help but notice the image of a crowded movie theater watching a 3D film used on the cover of Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle." However, Debord's text was published in 1967 . Is it possible Debord looked to this film as resource for the defining work of the Situationist International?
(The now iconic cover of Debord's classic text, seen five years before in Lipsett's film)
The film subtly but stealthily depicts social apathy, rampant consumerism and the very dark underside of the seemingly innocuous pop culture that Debord so despised. Reading more about Lipsett and the NFB's abandonment of his work I was again reminded of how most of our avant-garde film innovators are shunned by the establishment and ignored by film critics because of their inevitable unbankability. Too bad Lipsett hadn't made this more recently--it may have become a viral video phenomena, but perhaps that's just wishful thinking.
It is hard to not be floored by seeing the origin of so many techniques I've seen in later recycled cinema: the ambiguous layering of audio that seems at first only tenuously related to the images, the sophisticated blending of multiple sources to create many contrasting ideological conclusions, the unity of style and content best described by Lipsett's illustration of the "dissolving phantasmagoria of a world."
In Brett Kashmere's wonderful essay on Lipsett, he writes that "Kubrick described Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) as “one of the most imaginative and brilliant uses of the movie screen and soundtrack that I have ever seen.” Kubrick was so enthused with the film he invited Lipsett to create a trailer for Dr. Strangelove, an offer Lipsett refused."
All of these obstacles compounded and Lipsett became mentally unstable. "Lipsett began wearing winter coats in the summer and would tape his fingers into Buddhist mantra position for protection from phantom voices. In 1982 he was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia. After numerous failed suicide attempts (which he dubbed his “little experiments”), he took his own life in April 1986, shortly before his 50th birthday" (Brett Kashmere "Arthur Lipsett")
I hope you all enjoy his film as much as I did--and if you know where to find more please let me know.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Chris Marker's "Last Bolshevik"; Jonathan Lethem puts his money where his mouth is
I found a VHS copy of Chris Marker's "The Last Bolshevik" over at Suspect Video-an absolutely amazing video store in Toronto. With no info on the film, I was blown away by a documentary about repression and "smuggled" polemics in early Soviet Cinema. The film focuses on filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, a contemporary of Eisenstein and recycled cinema hero Dziga Vertov. Chris Marker writes several video letters to Medvedkin, whose classic film "Happiness" follows a simple Russian farmer trying to find happiness that he can put into a wheat bag and bring home to his wife. The scenes of this film are so incredibly brilliant, funny, and bizarre you will scower the ends of the earth to actually find the film. You can see a short clip here, about how Eisenstein's fictional rendering of the storming of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution is rumored to have resulted in more deaths than the actual event itself. This movie reminds you of why the Russians got it right ten years before Western Europe and at least thirty before American Maya Deren.
"The Last Bolshevik" is also a self conscious work of recycled cinema, made evident in Marker's opening quote found at the beginning of this post. There are images in this film from some of the most experimental Soviet films (most reviled by Stalin as stylistically decadent), unreleased on video. One sequence continues to haunt me, showing several disembodied Cello's playing a thunderous piece of music superimposed over a steam train barreling towards the screen. The images are so perfectly cropped a superimposed--the light has that silver metalic sheen only old film stock can give you--good old nitrate film! In other ways I am realizing Chris Marker must have been an enormous influence on Adam Curtis, whose historical musings are evidently derivative of Marker's essays. It would be impossible not to steal from Marker whose simple and straightforward style is also so radical at the same time.
Jessica put me onto a fantastic essay by writer Jonathan Lethem in Harper's called "The Ecstasy of Influence." Lethem writes:
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
and
Eliot evidenced no small anxiety about these matters; the notes he so carefully added to The Waste Land can be read as a symptom of modernism's contamination anxiety. Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
I am impressed with Lethem's ability to explain a distinction between modernism and post-modernism that I've never heard before and seems wholly true: post-modernism had no desire to apologize for being derivative. Instead the movement celebrates its derivations in a form of artistic transparency usually hidden by artists.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
The Perils of the 8 hour work day
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Martin Arnold Tributes
A Recycled Cinema song for Arnold using Evangelical "Trinity Network" footage
Harmony Korine's video for Bonnie Prince Billy's "No More Workhorse Blues"
This can cause inexplicable joy and suffering:
All This and World War II
Check out this trailer for a found footage compilation film called "All This and World War II" almost inexplicably constructed around Beatles covers. Amazing!
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Cliff Roth's Reagan Recycling
Chevy Tahoe Detourned!
Instead, these maverick innovators chose you! Yes, that's right, the iconoclasts in the board room thought you were the best person to engineer their new ads. Unfortunately, they put the tools of their own demise into your hands. Viva la detournement! See below for some of the best of the unused entries:
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Black Sheep
Thank you Icon Productions--for The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre and now Black Sheep
Sunday, March 18, 2007
From Russia, Japan and Africa with Love
An offering from the AMSDS filmmakers responsible for many a classic re-cut. Here we have some recycled cinema paying homage to black sunglasses.
For those not familiar, CineFile is a cinema institution in Los Angeles responsible for amazing video sections like "Christ-sploitation," "Horror Franchises" and the wonderful "Shade Tipping" section composed entirely of films with shade tipping on the cover. Beyond lining their shelves at any cost with some of the most rare and important films in the 100 years, they have promoted important filmmakers with their line of Master Filmmaker shirts in Heavy Metal Band fonts.
More importantly, they are now hosting a youtube site with found footage films! Check out Cinefile's video blog for other links and exciting videos.
I have had not one but two wonderful found footage experiences recently:
1) I saw Chris Marker's legendary essay Sans Soliel which moves from Africa to Japan exposing the two "extremes of survival" in the process. I considered writing an essay, but found a good one at here at the Chutry Experiment. Sans Soliel has a remarkable amount of Japanese horror films in it--with some wonderful hypotheses by Marker. He appears to be a believer in the theory that horror films take the pulse of an audiences anxiety.
2) I went to Cinemateque Ontario for a special screening of "Pervye na Lune" or "First on the Moon" directed by Aleksey Fedorchenko. The film is a revisionist history of the Soviet Space Program, positing that the Russians were the first to send a team of men (and one woman) to the moon on a secret mission. It was never revealed to be successful--so it was never declassified. The film mixes incredible soviet space program footage with perfectly rendered "surveillance footage" of the team. The film stock is so perfectly grainy and decomposed that it looks quite authentic when paired with the other archival footage. Aleksandr Gonorovskiy and Ramil Yamaleyev who wrote the screenplay infused it with a wonderful madcap humour which sheds light on the Soviet space program: something most North Americans know very little about.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
New Sites and Future Essays
From the mysterious Pleasure Dome Site, I give you: "I. SPIRIT: THE INNER ESSENCE OF MAN (FROM CINEMA TO LIFE)" I came upon a site through an old avant-garde film primer I used called cosmic baseball association which is a metaphysical baseball team composed of avant-garde filmmakers . This new site, called the "TRUTH IN CINEMA QUEST" is a remarkable research site devoted to films which depict a spiritual essence--without being facile garbage. This site contains some of the most beautiful prose about cinema in a poetico-historical way. It is much like a combination of Geoffrey O'Brian's wondrous poem about film "Phantom Empire" and Sitney's "Visionary Film." The site allows you to enter several doors, each marked with different questions and modes of navigating the site. Click "To have a good time" and take a meta-tour of the spiritual significance of the greatest filmmakers of our time. While searching, I came across this film "I. SPIRIT: THE INNER ESSENCE OF MAN ('FROM CINEMA TO LIFE" which is embedded above. It is a compilation film of transcendent moments in film with the creator's spiritual ethos entagled within it. It is a remarkable found footage film, so cohesive in its presentation that it makes one believe in a unified artistic vision in the films of directors as disparate as Tarkovsky and Passolini. This and other films can be found also at the cinemaseekers site.
A recent comment brought this site "caped masked and armed" to my attention. It is a wonderful political mashup site. The video titled "Kodak Moments" may be one of the most scathing political mashups to date.
Also, it is worthwhile to check out this interview between documentary film legend Errol Morris and his heir apparent Adam Curtis.
One of the most interesting things about this interview is Errol Morris' insistence on calling Curtis' films media appropriations. If you haven't seen them, go too google video and see "Power of Nightmares" and "Century of the Self." They are truly remarkable.
I am working on an essay soon to appear here called "What is Footage" about the nature of footage and the physicality of footage as portrayed in narrative films. In addition, bewildered, depressed and incredulous about the gaping void of websites devoted to my beloved recycled cinema, I am going to begin working on a data base for everything in existence on the subject.
I also realized Godard's film "Week-end" may have been a pun on the French phrase "Fin de Semaine" (end of the week) as "Fin de Cinema."
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Work In Progress: Found Footage on the Internet
Once the exclusive province of the avant-garde and a few rogue outsiders, found footage filmmaking became a popular and widely emulated technique on internet media forums like YouTube in the last two years. Found footage filmmaking is the practice of appropriating or literally scavenging for footage and compiling multiple source materials together in a montage to construct a new film. Based on a hybrid of culture jamming[i] and detournement[ii], the technique as an art form came to fruition under the pioneering auspices of artists Joseph Cornell[iii] and Bruce Conner[iv]. This once obscure technique has found its way into the homes of millions of computer users in the form of online viral videos. While similar in technique, the found footage films of the internet have many marked stylistic differences with the found footage films from the avant-garde.
Parody requires the recognition of a reference—and because we live in an age where media is overwhelmingly controlled by private entities, it follows that most media that is part of the public consciousness is protected by a copyright. Within this paradox is contained the fuel for both sides of the legal battle over contemporary found footage filmmaking.
Most early found footage films are derived from what is commonly referred to as “ephemeral[vii]” media or footage. Due to the fact that the source material of early found footage films is usually unknown, the critical focus is on constructive properties. New found filmmakers transform well known source material, and so, the artfulness of the transformative process becomes the critical point of focus. In other words, the critical inquest becomes, “In what ways has the filmmaker played with music, scenes, and dialogue to present a well known film work, in a new way?” Unlike the antecedents of found footage, new filmmakers abandoned a conceptual framework and focused in on presenting reinterpretations of famous storylines, incorporating the most recognizable elements from several films, or, alienating the viewer from familiar films by altering genre or tone. In many ways, the “artiness” of found footage filmmaking has been abandoned in its co-optation of popular culture. To understand the social value of the new found footage filmmakers, I have elaborated on the categories, styles and contributions of various found footage films made for distribution on YouTube and other online video forums.
The most highly visible and imitated found footage techniques on YouTube today are mashups, re-cuts and machinema. Mashups combine multiple films to produce a cohesive work, often in the form of a film trailer. Re-Cuts usually take a single film or trope and alter it in several ways. One popular form of re-cut is re-genre, in which the tone, plot and genre of a film is altered by manipulating title cards, music cues, and selectively using scenes which when presented out of context serve the purpose of the appropriator. Machinema, a very recent development in found footage filmmaking utilizes screen captures from video games, which are later dubbed to produce a film.
Re-Genre and Re-Cut
Re-Genre films on YouTube often delve deep into iconic genre films and find the possibility of a new reading of the work. Re-genre places a traditional genre film into a new genus by manipulating music and selecting pertinent scenes to present a re-imagined trailer of a film. These transformative works play with the formulas and shibboleths found in
Machinema
Machinema (a portmanteau of machine and cinema) utilizes the images generated by video games to produce visuals for a film. The narrative of a machinema film is composed through overdubbing and selective editing. Instead of using the expensive computer generated images designed for big budget
[1]
[2] “What’s Up Tiger Lily?” was originally a Japanese film by Senkichi Taniguchi called “Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi.” Woody Allen liberated this silly Japanese spy film and transformed it into a story about a man trying to find a secret egg salad recipe through the use of overdubbing.
[3] “Can Dialectics Break Bricks?” directed by René Viénet from the Situationist International liberates footage from the Chinese chop-socky film "The Crush" by Doo Kwang Gee, explores non-violent resolution and Marxist ideology.
[i] Culture Jamming: “I first came across the term in a 1991 New York Times article by cultural critic Mark Dery. It was coined by the San Francisco audio collage band Negativeland on their 1994 release entitled Jamcon ’84, as a tribute to jam radio “jammers” who clog the airwaves with scatological Mickey Mouse impersonations and other pop culture “noise.” Early culture jammers put graffiti on walls, liberated billboards, operated pirate radio stations, rearranged products on supermarket shelves, hacked their way into corporate and government computers and pulled off daring media pranks, hoaxes and provocations.” (P. 217, “Culture Jam: How To Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge—And Why We Must” by Kalle Lasn, Quill Publishing,
[ii] Detournement is described as when “an artist reuses elements of well-known media to create a new work with a different message, often one opposed to the original. The term "detournement", borrowed from the French, originated with the Situationist International; a similar term more familiar to English speakers would be "turnabout", although this term is not used in academia and the arts world.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detournement)
[iii] Joseph Cornell: American artist and filmmaker. “Cornell’s first collage film, Rose Hobart, was made in the late 1930s…It represents the intersection of his involvement with collage and his love of the cinema; for Cornell had been for many years a collector of films and motion-picture stills. Rose Hobart is a re-editing of
[iv] Bruce Conner: American artist and filmmaker. “Investing disparate shots with a kind of pseudo-continuity is one way of transforming found footage, as Bruce Conner demonstrates in a well known sequence of A Movie (1958): a submarine captain seems to see a scantily dressed woman through his periscope and responds by firing a torpedo which produces a nuclear explosion followed by huge waves ridden by surfboard riders.” (P. “Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films” by William C. Wees, Anthology Film Archives,
[v] Traditional tools of found footage filmmakers would include film stock, a flatbed, splicing equipment, and sound equipment.
[vi] P. 27 “A Theory of Parody” Linda Hutcheon,
[vii] “Critic Rick Prelinger uses the term ephemeral to describe films that are produced for a specific, short term purpose, then are normally discarded.” (p. 25, “Cut: Film As Found Object In Contemporary Video”,