The Recycled Cinema

European Media Art Festival and Mark Boswell

2010-03-05T09:06:00.000-08:00

This year "mash-up" is the theme of the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück. If you happen to be in lower Saxony between April 21st and 25th you might drop by.

Also, drop into Mark Boswell's site Novakino for some beautiful and hallucinatory videos that are equal parts Vertov and Debord. More to come on these soon.

SCOPE Film Journal: Cultural Borrowings

2010-03-03T14:56:00.000-08:00

My taxonomy of digital remixing and contemporary found footage practice on the Internet was just published by Nottingham University's Scope Online Film Journal. The entire issue is devoted to "Cultural Borrowings" and details some of the presentations of a conference I attended several years ago in the UK. Happy readings!

http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/cultborr/chapter.php?id=8

York Appropriation Conference

2010-03-02T20:31:00.000-08:00

On Friday March 19th, I'll be delivering a paper titled "Intermedial Strategies of Appropriation in Art and Found Footage Practices" at the York Art History Department's Appropriation conference. For more info, see the posters below.

(In)appropriation Festival in LA

2010-03-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

*********CALL FOR ENTRIES!**** *****

CALL FOR ENTRIES:

Los Angeles Filmforum invites film and videomakers to take part in the 2010 FESTIVAL OF (IN)APPROPRIATION.

WHO: All film and videomakers
WHAT: Call for entries for the Festival of (In)appropriation
WHEN: Entries must be received by May 15, 2010.
WHERE: Send submissions to Jaimie Baron, 10480 National Blvd. #308, Los Angeles, CA 90034
PRESENTED BY: Los Angeles Filmforum

Santa suit in July? Brussel sprouts for breakfast? Cat in the bathtub? Fish on a bicycle? All of these things are possible, but they are just "not done." At least, in our view, not often enough! Of course, the notion of what is "appropriate" always depends on context – the right time and the right place. What is permissible in one context may not be so in another. Indeed, the "inappropriate" is all about what is in the "wrong" place and at the "wrong" time, which is exactly where we think it should be. Mash-up, machinima, remix, collage, compilation, found footage, détournement – these terms all refer to films and videos that tear materials from one (con)text and place them in another, constantly questioning the limits of what is "appropriate. " At its best, this act of (in)appropriation may produce revelation that leads viewers to reconsider the relationship between past and present, here and there, truth and lie, intention and subversion.

With that idea in mind, Los Angeles Filmforum invites submissions for the 2010 Festival of (In)appropriation – our third festival! We are open to all works that appropriate film or video footage and repurpose it in "inappropriate" ways. We will consider both films and videos, including works that are made up entirely of found footage and those that only use small segments of appropriated material. We are especially interested in – but certainly not limited to – films that put history into question and films that explore the ways in which digital technologies are reconstructing our relationship to preexisting audiovisual materials. Particular consideration will be given to films that repurpose materials in an inventive way and to films that are under 20 minutes long. We will only accept work finished in 2008 or later.

The Festival of (In)appropriation will take place at in Fall 2010, specific date TBA.
Curated by Jaimie Baron and Madeleine Gallagher.

Guidelines:
• Submission deadline: May 15, 2010
• Please send all submissions in DVD format to: Jaimie Baron, 10480 National Blvd. #308, Los Angeles, CA 90034
• Submissions must be 20 minutes or less and must contain some form of "(in)appropriation. "
• Acceptable submission formats: DVD and VHS
• Acceptable exhibition formats: mini-DV, DV-Cam, 16mm film, 35mm film, DVD (but discouraged, since DVD is not a reliable projection medium).
• Please include: title, filmmaker, running time, a 30-word or less synopsis, and contact information (phone and email).
• No submission fee, but please send only good films!

Los Angeles Filmforum is the city's longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film and video art, documentaries, and experimental animation.

For more information, please go to: http://www.lafilmforum.org/

Patterns of Collection

2009-12-19T09:54:00.000-08:00

I have previously discussed some tendencies of experimental filmmakers to rigorously construct patterns of images usually related to a prominent trope in cinema. For a good example, see Volker Schreiner's amazing film "Counter" below.

Watch Counter By Volker Schreiner in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

This tendency has become a significant part of digital remixes in the past year demonstrating a rigorous form of collection, repetitive editing and exhaustive archeology of popular media. A recent example:

Many appropriation artists are first and foremost, collectors. The materials collected, their visibility in popular culture and the modes of transformation implemented by the artist all help to characterize their approach to appropriation. Joseph Cornell was well known for his elaborate collections of found objects—ordered in numbered and catalogued boxes and reconstructed into archival boxes themselves turned into art objects. Critic Jodi Hauptman characterizes Joseph Cornell’s artistic career as a form of “image search” or new form of portraiture utilizing “exploration, research [and] collection” (Hauptman 1). Cornell’s interest in cinema revolved around the actress-muses that found their way into his box assemblages, collages and subsequent found footage films.

While much could be made of Cornell’s obsessive fascination with Hollywood actresses Hedy Lamarr, Rose Hobart, Lauren Bacall and Greta Garbo to name a very few, more interesting is his method of collection. Cornell produced dossier folders of images and trinkets, some literal and others highly personal and oblique, which reminded Cornell of these individuals. He engaged in research in order to link actresses to historical figures by weaving invented stories. Cornell was also deeply interested in presentation, creating archives and “romantic museums” to commemorate his obsessions. Hauptman suggests that, “In his dedication to preservation and his labors as an archivist, he is less a surrealist and more a historian” (Hauptman 37).
Much of Cornell’s work can be understood as a sophisticated method of interrogating popular images and fostering of an individual mysticism and alchemy of everyday objects. In this way, Hauptman describes Walter Benjamin as being in harmony with Cornell’s ideas on collection. She writes:

Cornell’s activities call to mind Walter Benjamin, a figure who similarly turned his attention to history and to the survivors of the past. Benjamin’s interests—book collecting, childhood, the city, miniatures, the nineteenth century, photography, flanerie, the trivial and shabby—parallel Cornell’s own. In the artist’s archival accumulation of texts, quotations, and images, Cornell resembles Benjamin at work on his Arcades Project, a “materialist philosophy of history” that excavates Paris (Hauptman 37).

The connection between these two thinkers also leads back to the surrealist movement, as indicated by Hal Foster in Compulsive Beauty. Described as an uncanny form of found object, the ruin, referred to as the “romantic ruin,” strikes an “auratic register and represents a “displaced” object that has been “outmoded” by capitalist production. Assigning value to this outmoded object is a form of détournement to Foster (Compulsive Beauty 127) who sees the collection of such objects existing outside of capitalist production as a subversion of that process. The romantic ruin is emphasized by the Surrealists because it is seen to “redeem the outmoded and to mock the mechanical-commodified” (Foster, Compulsive Beauty 127). The “romantic ruin” described by the Surrealists and later by Benjamin, is echoed in the language of Cornell when describing the “flotsam and jetsam...” of found objects (Hauptman 21). Like Benjamin’s penchant for a critical montage of quotes in the Arcades Project, Cornell “began to see his collecting…as a viable, if not critical, form of art-making” (Hauptman 22). Part of Cornell’s impetus towards manufacturing boxes from ephemera, was to turn the found detritus he had collected into something that could, in his own words “transcend the dustheap & ruthlessness of time” (Hauptman 3).

Cornell’s fascinations, however, do not account for what motivated his obsession with cinema. As an aesthetic form, Hauptman suggests that Cornell’s “flanerie” extended to the cinema and that the fleeting images and objects he collected on the streets were replicated by the camera. Cornell’s fascination with maps and the flaneur also link him to the Situationists. Cornell’s “Souvenirs for Singleton” box, made for actress Jennifer Jones, was a map made from detritus which is reminiscent of a chronologically simultaneous image, “Discours sur les passions de l’amour,” by Guy Debord, which offers a psychogeographic guide through Paris with map fragments united by red arrows. One of the connections between the flaneur and the person undertaking a dérive , is the goal of both “to find.” The recovery of objects is frequently associated with the pedestrian strolling through the city and coming upon some discarded artifact of overlooked importance. Collage itself is described as a kind of artistic corollary of the views of the city walker. Hauptman writes “In its accumulative structure, collage visualizes the city’s temporal layering.” She invokes Rosalind Krauss’ contention that collage is a form of image reading that focuses on duration—“the kind of extended temporality that is involved in experiences like memory, reflection, narration, proposition.” (Hauptman 153) William Burroughs suggests that collages, or as he called them, “cut-ups” resembled the human mind’s perceptual approach to the world. He wrote, “the cut-up is much closer to the actual facts of perception. As soon as you look out the window, look around the room, walk down the street, your consciousness is being cut by random factors. Life is a cut-up…rather than a straight linear narrative” (Burroughs, quoted in the film William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers). In this way, we might see collage as an attempt to reproduce the reality of the city dweller, walking down a busy urban street.

The search for moving images by remixers often takes place on YouTube, which allows Internet spectators to search through videos by clicking other videos associated through key-words, users and actual video responses. This allows for YouTube users to scroll through videos without creating new search terms and, in effect, drift through the digital archive the site provides. This pattern of spectatorship, which promotes an aimless drift, a discovery of images and reuse of those materials re-imagines the urban derive as a stroll through the spaces of a digital archive.

The appropriation artist and avant-garde musician Christian Marclay was deeply influenced by artist Bruce Conner and employed found images in his visual artworks for years before moving into the cinematic milieu. However, unlike Conner, Marclay was interested in using recognizable materials rather than ephemeral industrial or educational films. Critic Jennifer Gonzales suggests, “For Marclay, it is crucial that the films he uses are recognizable, that they spark a memory in the viewers who see them. The individual film clips are not merely archival, they parallel our memories of them” (Gonzales 63). The importance of recognizable materials to these artists cannot be overstated. Part of the pleasure of the spectator when viewing these materials is experiencing the nostalgia and memories they elicit in the spectator.

In terms of appropriation, Marclay has said that “To be totally original and to start from scratch always seemed futile. I was more interested in taking something and making it mine through manipulation” (Seliger 136). All of these strategies come to paint a picture of the artist as collector and archivist. Hal Foster suggested, “the classic site of the surrealist dérive” was “the flea market…” (Foster, Compulsive Beauty 159); a site that Marclay explores in his own work. Jennifer Gonzales suggests that though “nearly all of Marclay’s works rely upon readymade images, objects or texts, they can also be called ‘archival’” (Gonzales 56). She argues that Marclay is overwhelmingly dealing with historical and cultural memory—inscribing new meanings onto the work through his transformation of the materials. Sometimes the materials are simply curated—as in his piece Arranged and Conducted (1997) in which Marclay “arranged, with frames abutting, more than a hundred prints, drawings, paintings and photographs drawn from the permanent collection of the Kunsthaus, each depicting a musical event.” (Gonzales 57) These materials have not been altered—they have been dropped into a new context, yes, but the overwhelming sense is that they have been selected and organized anew.

Once digital media became the paradigm of home spectatorship and editing, moving image appropriators could transform materials with a newfound ease and on a larger scale. Christian Marclay has produced three significant works appropriating mainstream images and sounds with the use of digital video. Marclay’s three major film works, Telephones (1995), Up and Out (1998) and Video Quartet (2002), are compiled from recognizable films edited based on an organizing principal Marclay has set out to explore. In Telephones, Marclay has constructed a “seemingly plausible linear dialogue between historically (and spatially) unrelated characters” (Higgs 88) by appropriating clips from mostly Hollywood films of actors on telephones. Up and Out uses the images of Antonioni’s film Blow Up (1966) and blends the film with the soundtrack to Brian De Palma’s homage to the film, Blow Out (1981). His most ambitious work, Video Quartet, features over 700 DVD clips from films of actors “playing instruments, singing or making noise” (Higgs 88). The film is a quadriptych, featuring four simultaneous screens that are expertly arranged to create a seemingly cohesive soundtrack. The grouping of multiple sounds has features “akin to that of a hip-hop DJ,” (Higgs 89) with the pleasant collision of sounds from disparate source materials. These works often feature the exploration of film clichés or frequently employed film motifs—the dramatic telephone conversation or the café piano player.

This kind of archeology of repetition in film scenes has permeated both contemporary avant-garde films and digital remixes on the Internet. In German artist Matthias Müller’s found footage film Home Stories (1990), women from disparate Hollywood melodramas go through the same series of actions—answering a phone, receiving dramatic information, running down a lavish flight of stairs and grabbing their coat and fleeing outside. Müller also enacted similar patterns of collecting with his epic Phoenix Tapes (1999), which examines numerous Alfred Hitchcock films.
These patterns of collection and ordering of archives is a stalwart feature of found footage today. German video artist and essay filmmaker Harun Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006) is a twelve channel video installation building upon the first Lumière Brothers’ film “Workers Leaving the Factory” (1895). The installation goes through eleven decades of cinema and appropriates scenes of factory workers leaving work. In the digital remixing community these patterns of collection appear often though in many cases without the implicit political concerns observed by Farocki. In his writing, Farocki has justified this form of collecting in his call for “An Archive for Visual Concepts.”

Many digital remixers catalog repetition in films through humorous reconstructions of tropes into a new ensemble. In Augart Media’s remix Crash (2008), images of car crashes and car explosions are assembled into pulsating rhythmic crescendos. The remixer transforms Hollywood’s overwrought love affair with automotive destruction into densely layered percussive experiments which reveal an incredible attention to detail and a highly patient and disciplined editor. Augart assembles other experiments by exploring screams, parades and war film images. One of his most ambitious works, YouTube Symphony (2009) is strikingly similar to Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet. In this work, Augart lifts YouTube clips from amateur musicians and layers them to construct his own experimental music piece.

The remixer AMDS, by far one of the most adept editors in the remix community, documents the use of black sunglasses as a device for imparting mystique onto characters in the remix Black Glasses (2007). The video utilizes hundreds of clips in which mostly male action heroes put-on or take-off sunglasses with a focus on the gestural continuity between each film. Unlike political remixers, AMDS does not construct a visible critique onto the materials he appropriates, but rather celebrates these films and their characters. A figure highly regarded in the remix community because of his seamless integration of multiple film images, AMDS is unlike other remixers who construct relationships between films through montage as mash-ups do. Instead, AMDS is a collage remixer, putting multiple films into the same image. In Neo Vs. Robocop (2007) the editor masterfully places both characters (including Charles Bronson’s character from Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Yoda from the Star Wars (1977) films into the same frame. This kind of work, which celebrates films rather than critiques them, is discussed (albeit in an art context) by Hal Foster, who is concerned with appropriations that merely reproduce images rather than engages critically with them. In the last chapter of his book Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Foster addresses appropriations which reveal a “fetishism of the signifier” or an uncritical passion for the materials appropriated (Foster, Recodings 175). This work might be a prime example of such a fetishism of spectacle and celebration of Hollywood semiotics, which does not possess an implicit critique.
The examples above imply that the collection and ordering of archival images only occurs on a superficial level in digital remixes and do not necessarily consider the implications of the frequency of such images. But this criticism applies widely in the digital remixing community; remixers are more prone to making observations about cinema rather than examining what the prevalence of certain images might signify. This of course, does not apply to the entirety of the community.

30 years of unconventional camera movements from the Vtape collection

2009-11-06T15:56:00.001-08:00

For those of you in Toronto, this looks pretty great. Forwarded message below:

Dear Friends of Vtape

As many of you know, for over a decade, Vtape has developed an intensive and multi-faceted intern programme for students and members of the interested public. We are very happy to support all your future endeavors and provide as many opportunities as we can within our facilities.

Dragging my video camera down the front steps: 30 years of unconventional camera movements from the Vtape collection provides a showcase for the curatorial research of one of our recent - and longest serving – technical interns, John Shipman.

Shipman says this of his intriguing selection: “Eight short videos, from 1974 to 2004, playfully use unusual camera positions and movements to create a slightly different visual gravity, showing things improbable, but viscerally informative."

The opening screening will be on Saturday November 21 from 2pm-4pm. The screenings will be at 2:00pm and 3:30pm with a curator's talk at 3:00pm.

Dragging my video camera down the front steps: 30 years of unconventional camera movements from the Vtape collection.
Saturday November 21 2009
Screening at 2& 3:30pm, Curator talk at 3:00pm
Curator will be present!

This installation will run until December 19 2009.

Hal Foster @ OCAD

2009-10-28T20:52:00.000-07:00

ALK | OCAD | Hal Foster | NOV 3
------------------------------

------------------------------------------
Nomadic Resident Hal Foster presents
a free public talk at OCAD:
"How To Survive Civilization, Or What Dada Can Still Teach Us"
Tuesday, November 3, 7:30 p.m.

Ontario College of Art & Design
Auditorium, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto
416-977-6000 | www.ocad.ca

OCAD is pleased to welcome internationally acclaimed author
Hal Foster as the next resident of its Nomadic Residents
program, generously supported by the Jack Weinbaum Family
Foundation. Foster will be in residence at OCAD from
November 2 to 6, and will deliver a free public talk on Tuesday,
November 3 at 7:30 p.m.

Widely considered one of postmodernismâ€™s founding theorists,
Foster has participated urgently in the critical and historical
investigation of avant-garde art for almost thirty years,
producing a body of writing that has informed the practices of
many contemporary artists. He draws from a wide range of
intellectual traditions to illuminate the continuities and ruptures
in the avant-gardeâ€™s critiques of art and society, exposing its
underlying historical and institutional frameworks while
assessing its continuing relevance.

Foster is the Townsend Martin 1917 Professor and Chair, Art &
Archaeology, at Princeton University, where he teaches
modernist and contemporary art and theory and the graduate
proseminar in methodology. In addition, he works with the
programs of Media and Modernity and European Cultural
Studies as well as with the School of Architecture. His
publications include The Anti-Aesthetic (1983), Pop Art (2005),
Art Since 1900 (2005), Prosthetic Gods (2004) and Design and
Crime (2002). A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Foster
is an editor for October, and continues to write regularly for
Artforum, London Review of Books, The Nation, and The New
Left Review.

All are welcome; admission is free. Limited seating available;
guests are advised to arrive early.
http://www.ocad.ca

Pleasure Dome Call

2009-10-04T18:23:00.000-07:00

CALL | Pleasure Dome | New Toronto Works Show 2010 | DUE: JAN 15 2010
------------------------------

------------------------------------------
Pleasure Dome is seeking short experimental film/video works,
expanded cinema performances and media art installations
produced within the last year by Toronto-based artists for the
annual New Toronto Works Show. Now in its sixteenth year, this
members-curated programme features the cutting edge of
experimental film and video produced in Toronto today.
Please send preview tape/DVD or film (Super 8 or 16mm) or
short outline of proposed performance or installation to:

Pleasure Dome
195 Rushton Rd.
Toronto, ON M6G 3J2

or drop off to
Vtape
401 Richmond St. West, #452
Toronto
* note: Vtape is closed for holidays Dec 19- Jan 4 so no drop off
between those dates

The New Toronto Works Show will be presented in March as
part of the Winter 2010 season.
http://www.pdome.org/wordpress/

Call for Submitions

2009-09-19T16:21:00.000-07:00

Trinity Square Video: Call for SubmissionsDeadline: November 15th, 2009
Trinity Square Video (TSV) has a long history of supporting and presenting video-based works that are mediated by images of protest and activism, providing a space to explore the range of meaning that can be generated from such imagery. Our upcoming programming will build from this history. In the fall of 2009, TSV will begin an extended investigation of the current state of political engagement in contemporary art by exhibiting works that question the motivations, objectivity and ethics found in and around political representations.TSV is eager to hear from artists and curators working with video and video installation who are rigorously invested in enriching and expanding the field of socially critical visual and media-based art. We are looking for dynamic video and video-based artworks that are engaged with varying forms of contemporary politics in unexpected or unconventional ways.We are seeking innovative artist's works that use video, its forms and its processes, to examine the modes of presentation found in activist gesture, social action or cultural critique. We intend to offer a wide range of video programs and installations: from those that feature direct activist gestures to those that call into question the relationship between aesthetic value and the promotion of social causes. TSV is an artist-run resource for the production, education and dissemination of video by artists and community organizations. Since 1971, TSV has made access to the means of communication its priority, providing a diverse community of video practitioners media-arts related development through workshops, seminars and classes, as well as offering a space for the creation and exhibition of video-based images. Through its public programming, TSV has advanced the understanding and appreciation of media works produced by various community-based groups and numerous internationally recognized artists, such as Michael Balser, John Greyson, Vera Frenkel, Richard Fung, Nancy Nicol, and Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak. In recent years, TSV has presented works by Sara Angelucci, Jeremy Blake, Deanna Bowen, Manon De Pauw, Isabelle Hayeur and Éric Raymond, Nelson Henricks, Gunilla Josephson, Jude Norris, 640 480 Collective, among many others. Submission Requirements:1. One DVD with a maximum of 10 minutes of previous and/or proposed work.* 2. Written proposal (1-page)3. Artist's Statement (1-page)4. Curriculum Vitae5. Self-addressed, stamped envelope for return of support material.***DVDs can be supplemented with up to 10 digital slides on CD-ROM (Mac compatible, .jpg images only, no folders, all images must be listed with slide number, artist's last name, title of work and year, eg. 01_smith_untitled_2009.jpg).**Support material will not be returned without a SASE.Submissions must be postmarked no later than November 15th. If this date falls on a weekend or statutory holiday, the deadline moves to the next business day.Submissions will not be accepted electronically. A floorplan of the TSV Gallery is available at www.trinitysquarevideo.com We encourage proposals from emerging to established artists and curators. We firmly support the equitable remuneration of artists. TSV pays all of it exhibiting artists in accordance with the CARFAC fees schedule. Our exhibitions are presented for 4 to 5 weeks. We will accept proposals by curators for single-night screenings. If you have any questions, please contact Jean-Paul Kelly, Programming Director at programming@trinitysquarevideo.com, or 416-593-1332. Please send submissions to: Jean-Paul KellyProgramming DirectorTrinity Square Video401 Richmond Street West, Suite 376Toronto, ON, CanadaM5V 3A8
TSV gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council

The New Charter

2009-08-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

I'm back, fresh after completing and defending my thesis "The Work of Art in the Age of [Ctrl]-C: Digital Remixing and Contemporary Found Footage Film Practice." This 120 page tome was primarily devoted to drawing linkages between avant-garde found footage film aesthetics, the practices of the Soviet re-editors and the explosion of digital remixes on the Internet. During that period, this blog focused primarily on the American avant-garde and digital remixing on the net. That phase is now over and I will be continuing my research in some new directions.

First, I will be focusing more on contemporary video art, photography and other new media and practices of recycling, appropriation and adaptation. It will take some time to build the site to reflect these new directions, so I appreciate any advice, links, artists to watch and relevant news to post. I am moving into my Ph.D. at York University and am (at this juncture) looking at discourses and strategies of appropriation in contemporary art.

Second, I will focus less on simply posting videos and more on theories and philosophies of appropriation. I am also interested in manifestos, interviews, artists’ statements and reviews.

Third, I'm very interested in being a part of the larger network of individuals researching copyright issues, digital remixing and found footage film practice. I'm happy to link to other sites you either run or frequent and will take emails through my contact or in comments.

Because the blog is engineered to represent a chronological and continuous record of research as opposed to websites which are ordered by topic, I will also be updating recent gallery or museum openings around the US and Canada as I become aware of them. Anyone interested in publicizing events related to appropriation in art, film and video can email me.

Long Live the Recycled Cinema!

Eli

New Work

2009-04-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been gone for so long. I'm finishing my thesis. Some great new work to send your way:

Below is Enrique Piñuel's "The Dancer's Cut":

Also, check out these gorgeous videos by Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez here and some majorly ambitious work by DDLM, who describes his 4 hour (!) piece "SUCHILECTRO-C°°°°" as a journey through frivolomental irredemption. Wow. Just wow...

Nicolas Bourriaud

2009-02-16T08:38:00.000-08:00

While I’ve been a fan of Lawrence Lessig’s passionate defense of remixing culture for years, I haven’t hailed him as its greatest spokesperson. As Lessig says in his book Free Culture after his failed defense of Eric Eldred which reached the Supreme Court: it will take more than legal arguments to defeat the repressive aspects of copyright law; judges must see the harm it can do to the spread of culture and ideas.

To understand just how valuable appropriation is to a progressive society, there is no better and more dynamic advocate than Nicolas Bourriaud. An art theorist who seemed to shape contemporary art discourse after his book Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud went on to write a small and now out-of-print text which has greatly benefited my understanding of approproiation as a progressive cultural phenomena.

I am including my own thoughts and a link to the book in PDF form.

In Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud explored several artists’ propensity towards dealing with “the interhuman sphere: relationships between people, communities, individuals, groups, social networks, interactivity, and so on.” (7) Postproduction follows this trajectory towards the participation of individuals in shaping new meanings from extant materials—appropriation for the purposes of transformation. Though Bourriaud acknowledges that “citation, recycling and détournement were not born yesterday; what is clear is that today certain elements and principles are reemerging as themes and are suddenly at the forefront, to the point of constituting the “engine” of new artistic practices.” (9) Though this is likely the result of the ease in which materials may be copied, altered and disseminated, Bourriaud’s focus on the moving image is telling. In my own research, I observe this as the result of shifts in media popularity (Georges Braque using newspaper, Koons using mass produced objects based on the zeitgeist of the time) and the supremacy of moving images as a means to disseminate information and entertainment.

First, the term postproduction is used to describe “the scrambling of boundaries between consumption and production.” (19) Though I admire the gist of Bourriaud’s term and it correctly implies the “second look” which occurs with transformed works, it does not posses the singularity of meaning terms like “found footage” or “digital remixing” have. It would be my guess that Bourriaud wanted to include a term that carried the weight of cinematic production with it but also could easily be applied to art works. Like digital remixing and remix culture in general, Bourriaud asserts that postproduction is not simply a tendency in contemporary art, but rather a new and semi-permanent culture of making art. He argues that “artists’ intuitive relationships with art history is now going beyond what we call “the art of appropriation,” which naturally infers an ideology of ownership, and moving towards a culture of the use of forms, a culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing.” (9) Bourriaud locates appropriation, not as a marginal art practice but as a central motif of contemporary art.

Though many of Bourriaud’s descriptions of appropriation are not groundbreaking in their originality, they constitute the first book entirely dedicated to the subject that I am aware of, and he masterfully explains the key concepts. I will briefly quote several of his descriptions of how appropriation functions in contemporary art:

“Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts. (13)

“Artists today program forms more than they compose them; rather than transfigure a raw element (blank canvas, clay, etc.), they remix available forms and make use of data. (17)

“In a universe of products for sale, preexisting forms, signals already emitted, buildings already constructed, paths marked out by their predecessors, artists no longer consider the artistic field (and here one could add television, cinema, or literature) a museum containing works that must be cited or “surpassed” as the modernist ideology of originality would have it, but so many storehouses filed with tools that should be used, stockpiles of data to manipulate and present.” (17)

“The material they manipulate is no longer primary. It is no longer a manor of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects.” (13)

“To use an object is necessarily to interpret it. By using television, books, or records, the user of culture deploys a rhetoric of practices and “reuses” that has nothing to do with enunciation and therefore with language whose figures and codes may be cataloged.” (24)

“A DJs set is not unlike an exhibition of objects that Duchamp would have described as “assisted readymades;” more or less modified products whose sequence produces a specific duration.” (38)

Bourriaud’s continuous invocation of both DJs and programmers seems highly applicable to the dual influences of hip-hop and computer technologies which inform digital remixing. The idea of the DJ as a curator or archivist and the programmer as a person that utilizes platforms, images and processes in an ensemble to form a new product mirrors the practice of assemblagist or collagist. Additionally, Bourriaud correctly places historical bodies of work as places to begin from by replicating those materials and altering them. One cannot help but remember Situationist artist Asger Jörn’s project to “update” paintings by simply painting over reproductions to make them “modern.” This kind of artmaking questions a teleological end to the process of creating an artwork as once supposed and constructs a new paradigm. Bourriaud says, that “The artwork is no longer an endpoint but a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions.” (20) This kind of art making in which works are constantly revised, revisited and altered mirrors the programming algorithms for the Wiki in which a page is constantly changed (for better or worse) under the auspices of improvement over time. Briefly, I will list some of Bourriaud’s comments on the idea of collective and continuous art making:

“To rewrite modernity is the historical task of this early Twenty-First Century; not to start at zero or find oneself encumbered by the storehouse of history, but to inventory and select, to use and download.” (93)

“What if artistic creation today could be compared to a collective sport, far from the classical mythology of the solitary effort? “It is the viewers who make the paintings,” Duchamp once said, an incomprehensible remark unless we connect it to his keen sense of an emerging culture of use, in which meaning is born of collaboration and negotiation between the artist and the one who comes to view the work.” (20)

“Appropriation is indeed the first stage of postproduction; the issue is no longer to fabricate an object, but to choose one among those that exist and to use or modify these according to a specific intention. Marcel Broodthaers said that “ Since Duchamp, the artist is the author of a definition” which is substituted for that of the objects he or she has chosen…If the process of appropriation has its roots in history, its narrative here will begin with the readymade, which represents its first conceptualized manifestation, considered in relation to the history of art. When Duchamp exhibits a manufactured object…as a work of the mind, he shifts the problematic of the “creative process” emphasizing the artist’s gaze brought to bare on an object instead of manual skill. He accesses that the act of choosing is enough to establish the artistic process, just as the act of fabricating, painting or sculpting does; to give a new idea to an object is already production. Duchamp thereby completes the definition of the term creation; to create is to insert an object into a new scenario, to consider it a character in a narrative. (25)

Here, Bourriaud hits upon one of the central themes of contemporary remixing; the curatorial and the selection process which informs many contemporary “postproduction” or found footage artworks. If we look at the major thrust of Christian Marclay’s found footage films, we observe that the emphasis is on the collection of materials rather than on their presentation. Additionally, the “artists gaze” here seems to mirror the idea of the “second look.” The artist’s “definition” of the artwork implies a kind of replacement of the original coding of the work or object which indicates the transformation made through the second look. Many contemporary modes of appropriation deal with constructing “archival interventions” in which features of the archive are reproduced to facilitate transformation in their groupings and combinations.

A Brave New Work

2009-01-22T18:13:00.000-08:00

I've often thought that the next frontier in film mash-ups lay in feature length works. Below is a trailer for one such work by Gabriele Guerra. Remember, this is the trailer for a 53 minute movie!

More incredible digital remix/found footage work from Dinorah de Jesús Rodríguez:

check out more of his incredible work here: http://cinesthesia.blip.tv/

Also, some very fun and mysterious interstellar found footage work from Man Zanas:

Also, I wanted to share the call for works from the 2009 "(In) Appropriation" festival. It looks amazing and I think they may read this blog. Wooooo!

CALL FOR ENTRIES:

Los Angeles Filmforum invites film and videomakers to take part in the
2009 FESTIVAL OF (IN)APPROPRIATION.

WHO: All film and videomakers
WHAT: Call for entries for the Festival of (In)appropriation
WHEN: Entries must be received by April 1, 2009.
WHERE: Send submissions to Jaimie Baron, 10480 National Blvd. #308,
Los Angeles, CA 90034
PRESENTED BY: Los Angeles Filmforum

Whether you call it collage, compilation, found footage, detournement,
or recycled cinema, the incorporation of previously shot materials
into new artworks is a practice that has generated novel
juxtapositions of elements which have produced new meanings and ideas
that may not have been intended by the original makers, that are, in
other words “inappropriate.“ This act of appropriation may produce
revelation that leads viewers to reconsider the relationship between
past and present, here and there, intention and subversion.
Fortunately for our purposes, the past decade has seen the emergence
of a wealth of new sources for audiovisual materials that can be
appropriated into new works. In addition to official state and
commercial archives, vernacular archives, home movie collections, and
digital archives have provided fascinating source material that may be
repurposed in such a way as to give it new meanings and resonances.

Thus, Los Angeles Filmforum invites submissions for a Festival of
(In)appropriation, open to all works that appropriate film or video
footage and repurpose it in “inappropriate” ways. We will consider
both films and videos, including works that are made up entirely of
found footage and those that only use small segments of appropriated
material. Particular consideration will be given to films that
repurpose materials in an inventive way and to films that are under
twenty minutes long. We will only accept work finished in 2006 or later.

The Festival of (In)appropriation will take place in June 2009.
Curated by Jaimie Baron and Andrew Hall

Guidelines:
• Submission deadline: April 1, 2009
• Please send all submissions in DVD format to: Jaimie Baron, 10480
National Blvd. #308, Los Angeles, CA 90034
• Submissions must be 20 minutes or less and must contain some form
of “(in)appropriation.“
• Acceptable submission formats: DVD and VHS
• Acceptable exhibition formats: mini-DV, DV-Cam, 16mm film, 35mm
film, DVD (but discouraged, since DVD is not a reliable projection
medium).
• Please include: title, filmmaker, running time, a 30-word or less
synopsis, and contact information (phone and email).
• No submission fee, but please send only good films ☺

Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization
dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film and video art,
documentaries, and experimental animation.

For more information, please go to: http://lafilmforum.wordpress.com/

Digital Remixing from the Picket Lines

2008-12-09T09:56:00.000-08:00

The dearth of posts as of late has had much to do with the fact that my TA Union at York University has gone on strike and I've been editing for the CUPE strike video committee. These excellent films made by activists and students can be seen at cupestrikevideo.wordpress.com

In the midst of this, renowned video artist John Greyson, whose incredible commitment to appropriation can be discerned from his film manifesto on cultural recycling "Uncut" (1997, has created a digital remix to support the strikers.

Please watch:

My War with Chevrolet on Wikipedia

2008-11-08T08:57:00.000-08:00

You may all remember my posting last year detailing Chevrolet's viral marketing campaign which spawned several hundred parodies and resulted in some very bad publicity for the company. If you don't, you can read the wikipedia post about this below. Several months ago, this page had all the details about the embarassment this caused but when I returned to the page last week it had been scrubbed. I re-entered this information and ONE DAY LATER it was scrubbed again. I think these commercials were a landmark moment for digital remixing and hope that anyone reading this now might go to the Tahoe wiki page and make sure the company isn't pulling more funny business.

Thanks!

The Apprentice make-your-own-ad contest

The 2007 Tahoe was featured on and promoted through Donald Trump's TV series, The Apprentice, where the two teams put together a show for the top General Motors employees to learn about the new Tahoe. Also, The Apprentice sponsored an online contest in which anyone could create a commercial for the new Tahoe by entering text captions into the provided video clips; the winner's ad would air on national television. This viral marketing campaign backfired however, when hundreds of environmentally conscious parodies flooded YouTube and Chevy's website critiquing the vehicle for its low gas mileage. Though Chevrolet initially made a statement saying they would keep these adds on their site the company eventually took them off. The negative publicity that these commercials garnered eventually led many marketing and p.r. firms to question the effectiveness of user generated advertising.

Peter Tscherkassky and Gustav Deutsch: The Contemporary European Contingency

2008-10-14T14:29:00.000-07:00

Manufraktur (1985, Peter Tscherkassky)

Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky)

Happy End (Peter Tscherkassky)

180º - Investigação de Gustav Deutsch (Nuno Lisboa)

Gustav Deutch- review - Borealis ´06

Clash of the Political Remix Trailers

2008-09-11T11:41:00.000-07:00

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Digital Remixing on Appropriation

2008-08-20T16:12:00.000-07:00

A new vid on appropriation & culture jamming. wooooo!

Mondegreens, Animutation, Fanimutation and YouTube Poop

2008-08-18T11:24:00.000-07:00

Somewhere beyond experimental remixes lie a number of small, self-contained groups which promulgate their own styles and tendencies, oblivious or indifferent to the outside world’s recognition or spectatorship. One such underground exists on YouTubePoop.com where these relentlessly absurdist remixers (also known as “poopers”) trade in the bizarre and incomprehensible. A YouTubePoop video frequently uses nostalgic children’s cartoons, Internet memes, public figures and subjects them to crushing transformations and manipulations which focus of three frame forward-reversals (not unlike Martin Arnold’s method of repetition taken to extreme measures) and create jarring, atonal melodies and disconnected rhythms. These remixes are modeled on the frenetic style of contemporary television taken to their teleological end point where images fly across the screen and are sometimes barely perceivable. Titles of films are taken from the Captain Beefheart / Frank Zappa school with films called John Conner’s Cookie Game is Up Due to Popcorn Malfunction.

On the margins of these experimental works lie remixers who have coined their own grammar and style which lie outside of any precedent set in found footage film history. These remixers trade on the humor, absurdity and unbridled originality of their works for their success. A quintessential figure in this area is Buffalax (AKA Mike Sutton), whose name has become a verb in many remixing circles after receiving over ten million views since 2008. A Buffalax film depends on humorous mondegreens (a word referring to misheard lyrics or phrases) of Indian pop music videos which are subtitled on the bottom of the screen. Sutton inventively finds English words which seem to roughly approximate the Hindustani lyrics, constructing absurd songs over hysterically kitschy videos. This mode of filmmaking stems from comedian Neil Cicierega’s “animutations” (also known as fanimuation) in which music in languages other than English are coupled with pop-culture images, subtitled with mondegreens and composed using Adobe Flash Player.

Below are some examples:

Cut-Ups and Mashups

2008-07-28T13:21:00.000-07:00

Always a bittersweet moment when you find someone's been doing what you do , but much, much better. I discovered these cut-up films from Augart Media recently and can't stop watching them. Though this format may drive some of you crazy, it has been an interesting one for me to explore. These works combine film footage and construct musical or percussive songs from it. Weird--wonderful--and a little annoying. Like Martin Arnold on speedy LSD.

Eat This Dow Chemical and Chevron

2008-07-10T14:41:00.000-07:00

I just re-watched "What Farocki Taught", an American remake of Farocki's film "The Inextinguishable Fire." The film is a powerful look at the factors allowing napalm production at Dow chemical. The company has been trying to revamp their image with the "human element" ad campaign. This video is a nice reminder of why they should never be forgiven for contributing to one of the most dangerous weapons of mass destruction in human history.

This campaign is strikingly similar to Chevron's "Power of Human Energy" campaign which receives an "identity correction" from one of our favorite remixers, Jonathan McIntosh. We Love you Jonathan!

BRUCE CONNER (1933-2008)

2008-07-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

If you didn't already know how much Bruce meant to me personally, the image at the head of my blog says it all. Bruce made startling and thoughtful images that reflected on consumerism and capitalism with a playful derision and incredible inventiveness and ingenuity. He single handedly revived the found footage film with his 1958 work ironically called A Movie and went on to create some of the most important avant-garde films in America.

We miss you Bruce.

More to come on this later...

2 New Offerings: Ikat381 and a new essay on Appropriation

2008-06-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

Another gem from Ikat381.

Below is an essay I wrote concerning early modes of cinematic appropriation focusing on Joseph Cornell and the Soviet Re-editors.

Joseph Cornell and the Soviet Re-Editors: Two Modes of Early Cinematic Appropriation

“Everyone who has had in his hands a piece of film to be edited knows by experience how neutral it remains, even though a part of a planned sequence, until it is joined with another piece, when it suddenly acquires and conveys a sharper and quite different meaning than that planned for it at the time of filming.”[1]

– Sergei Eisenstein

Monuments to every moment,

refuse of every moment: used

cages for infinity. [2]

– Octavio Paz “Joseph Cornell: Objects and Apparitions” (1974)

Found footage filmmaking “has been a central genre of cinematic exploration for the American avant-garde in the postwar period”[3] with a significant increase in practitioners across North America and Europe since the 1980s[4]. Though a substantial body of critical work has been presented on the technique, little time has been spent exploring the relationship between the two nascent forms of cinematic appropriation pioneered by the early Soviet film industry and by the Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell. These two approaches both share the common impetus to transform cinematic works as a form of cultural resistance to dominant ideology and aesthetics. However, while the Soviet re-editors were most concerned with transforming Western films to introduce Marxist readings into the texts, in his film Rose Hobart (1936), Cornell was interested in both recapturing the technologically obsolete silent film and constructing his own non-narrative surrealist portrait. This essay explores the aesthetic, political, strategic and technological variations between Cornell’s Rose Hobart and the Soviet practice of transformation in an effort to further illuminate both the beginnings of appropriation in cinema and to understand the profound influence these two approaches have had on the current art practice of found footage filmmakers.

The appropriation and transformation of extant film footage was a dominant feature of early Soviet cinema under the directive of the USSR State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino). Newsreel editors at the Export-Import division compiled disparate images for politically charged weekly news programs to screen to audiences across Russia. The so-called Soviet “re-editors” were engaged in the ideological transformation of Western films—often charged with making cuts and changes to promote Marxist readings of imported films and also, with making alterations to Soviet films so that they were more saleable abroad.[5] Among these editors were four towering figures of Soviet filmmaking and montage: Lev Kuleshov, Esther Shub, Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. Eisenstein first learned editing techniques while assisting Esther Shub in the re-editing of Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse (1922).[6] Years later, after seeing Battleship Potemkin (1925), Shub was inspired to create a seminal film in the cannon of the compilation documentary called The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927)—transforming and incorporating images from Tzar Nicholas II’s court cameraman.[7] It was the emergence of films like these that caused Vertov to suggest that “the history of Soviet cinema starts with experiments in newsreel film.”[8]

Though the newsreel compilation preceded re-editing, the former’s status as a type of documentary is cause for its omission in relation to Cornell’s transformations. It should be noted however that the newsreel is the original pioneering site for found footage[9] and that the use of footage for an early form of documentary has had an impact in the way it was used for re-editors. Critic Paul Arthur writes:

Found footage was established as an integral element of exposition and argument, often serving as illustration of a verbal reference or as a means of filling gaps in spatial continuity or didactic evidence. Indeed, the recent outpouring of wartime newsreel compilations and military training films had underscored the importance of found footage to the rhetorical strategies of corporate and state-sponsored propaganda…[10]

The re-edited feature film has many similar features, though it holds no pretense towards documentary. As Arthur notes, the use of found footage as a powerful tool for government propaganda would become the primary impetus to transform western films. It is worth noting here that the Surrealist film exhibition in which Rose Hobart was first screened was called “Goofy Newsreels” in tribute perhaps to the earliest known form of found footage filmmaking.

While the Soviet practice may employ the tactics of propaganda and even censorship—editors also infused sophisticated new reading into films, dismantling what they saw as capitalist propaganda and replacing it with their own pro-Marxist versions. These re-editors were charged with transforming western films for Soviet audiences both to reflect Marxist ideals and to confirm Soviet suspicions about western capitalism. Many western films were radically altered through sophisticated editing techniques, transformations in intertitles and complete excising of certain characters.

Among the various changes re-editors were charged with making:

happy endings would be removed as suggesting that one can be happy under capitalism…"American endings" were generally believed to be forced upon artists by the capitalist film industry'… '[f]at and virtuous people were turned into villains as a general rule…. characters' nationality would be changed…[11]

These daily transformations developed in editors, not only a sophisticated ability to analyze the political meanings of films but also mastery in the area of montage. Discussing re-edited works alongside newsreel films may seem strange for the simple fact that re-editing does not initially strike one as a form of appropriation. Though the re-editors did not necessarily place their names on the films they altered, their transformation of films is itself a method of appropriation. The constellation of new ideas of form, interruption, appropriation and the reconstitution of meanings onto film objects become the foundation for the aesthetics and theories surrounding found footage filmmaking and may be seen as an application of Marxist aesthetics onto the new art form of the 20^th century.

Marxist critic Walter Benjamin’s body of work often touches upon ideas of reuse, reproduction and authorship which pertain to the appropriation of images. The dialectical image was Benjamin’s model for historiography in The Arcades Project, which critic Jeffrey Skoller describes: “Benjamin suggests that to explore what an object from the past means in the present is to turn that object into a text that has at its center an imagining subject who finds new possibilities for its meaning.”[12] In this way, we might understand the re-edited film as the re-imagined film—a malleable source text reconstructed to fit a reading. Esther Shub’s Fall of the Romanov Dynasty might be best understood as dialectical image making specifically in her exploration of the recent Tsarist past through the prism of the post-revolutionary USSR. Her interrogation of these images is also an interruption of their meaning. The materials were meant to not only to document the lives of the aristocracy, but to do so through their own eyes (and weren’t to be seen by laypersons); however Shub inverts this intention by uniting and juxtaposing the opulence of the Russian aristocracy with the indigence of the workers and peasants, thereby transforming the original intention of the film footage.

In The United States, a young artist named Joseph Cornell would expand on the Soviet ideas with his poetic transformation of an early talkie picture called East of Borneo (1932). Though Joseph Cornell’s status as a member of the Surrealist movement was never official, he was closely allied and influenced by Surrealist artists and collectors—showing his work in the first American exhibition of Surrealist art in 1932 at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. As a practicing Christian Scientist, Cornell was put off by the Surrealist preoccupation with sexuality, however his work projected its own muted eroticism and romantic ideals with many of the same artistic strategies employed by Surrealists. Cornell’s boxes, romantic museums, archives and dossiers composed of appropriated objects from the detritus and found materials of everyday life were transformed by his personal cosmology into brilliant ensembles. The subject of these assemblages was frequently women—most of whom were film actresses. An atypical cinephile, Cornell often disliked the films featuring the women who enchanted him and transformed their images through his own wish-insights into their personas.

All of these features and strategies would make way for his pioneering film Rose Hobart, first screened in 1936 at the Julien Levy Gallery to a room full of Surrealists and resulting in the violent envy of one member of the audience; Salvador Dali.[13] The film was composed of images from an early talkie recovered by Cornell from a production archive selling the film for its nitrate stock. Cornell’s film, like many of his assemblages, is a tribute to an actress, Rose Hobart, the star of East of Borneo, whom Cornell transforms into a very different kind of heroine. The film was a culmination of Cornell’s appropriation of images into cinematic form which would leave a rich legacy for future cinematic appropriators and found footage filmmakers like Bruce Conner, Ken Jacobs, David Rimmer and Craig Baldwin. While the Soviets were predominantly interested in ideological transformation that was hidden[14] within the narrative of a film, Joseph Cornell would highlight his alterations by conspicuously slowing the footage down, replacing the original soundtrack, altering the color (with blue tinted glass) and constructing his own idealized and poetic homage to the main actress, Rose Hobart.

Narrative, Montage and Interruption

While the Soviet re-editors and newsreel creators were attempting to produce or maintain narrative, Cornell’s collage film pursued what P. Adams Sitney calls a “surrealist narrative”[15] which shatters logical narrative progressions utilizing the language of associative images and the grammar of fragmentation. The features which unite these two approaches appear in the idea of montage. Critic Yuri Tsivian suggests

that the innovative Soviet editor Viktor Shklovsky:

“understood art as a special way of assembling things and enjoyed watching the whole change its meaning as he rearranged its parts on his editing table. For a theorist, this process confirmed what Kuleshov (pioneer re-editor..) had earlier shown about cinema and what Tynianov had found about the language of poetry in 1923, namely, that ‘meanings’ are generated through juxtaposition and foregrounding:”[16]

Numerous Soviet montage theorists suggest that montage is essentially the act of assembling meaning through the technique of juxtaposition. Eisenstein suggested that cinema should follow the methodology of language rather than theater and painting because it would allow “wholly new concepts or ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects…”[17] If we accept Eisenstein’s characterization of film as “a language…in which the real is used as an element of a discourse”[18] this language of montage is similar to the language of collage and assemblage, though it does not immediately suggest materials culled from disparate sources. The primary difference might be in the Soviet use of montage to illustrate rational associations for the purposes of narrative progression while Cornell was interested in montage that illustrated the logic of dreams.

Interestingly, Cornell does include one very famous sequence of narrative cohesion, if it might be called that, surrounding one of the major motifs of Rose Hobart. The film opens with a crowd gazing into the sky, which critic Jodi Hauptman suggests represents a kind of “stargazing” befitting not astral bodies but actual movie stars—like Rose Hobart.[19] This stargazing culminates in an eclipse at the end of the film, in which “just after the moon completes its passage in front of the sun, the sun appears to drop into a pool of water.”[20] This editing sleight-of-hand establishes one of the most compelling and imitated techniques in found footage filmmaking—the conjoining of film fragments which when put together indicate a narrative cause-and-effect but are nonetheless quite illogical.

Hal Foster describes Surrealist collage as “a disruptive montage of conductive psychic signifiers (i.e., of fantasmatic scenarios and enigmatic events) referred to the unconscious.”[21] Cornell uses major tropes of East of Borneo and mines them for their associative and metaphorical properties. As Hauptman illustrates in her brilliant book on Cornell and cinema, “the hysterical body of the woman is associated with and echoed metonymically by another site of otherness: the ‘primitive’ island kingdom”[22] in which Borneo is set. Hauptman goes on to explore other metonymic or metaphorical images: an exploding volcano becomes a violent representation of male sexuality and a disembodied object from which to understand the Prince who tries to seduce her, and the island becomes “a double of Hobart.” However these logical associations are interrupted by seemingly random images which punctuate the film. Foster demonstrates that the language of montage frequently features arguments about “disruption” or “interruption.” For Walter Benjamin, critic Susan Buck-Morss suggests, “the technique of montage had ‘special, perhaps even total rights’ as a progressive form because it ‘interrupts the context into which it is inserted’ and thus ‘counteracts illusion.’”[23] Here is the site of one of the major differences between how the spectator watches a film by a Soviet re-editor and how Cornell’s film is received. While the re-editor attempts to similar continuity within a text, Cornell attempts to create disruption. Critic Fatimah Rony describes some of these features in Rose Hobart:

The actress wanders through a nighttime dreamscape: so many unexplained events, the sublime mystery of an eclipse, the concentrated look of the exotic Prince; but nothing ever gets going. All meanings are thwarted, and all linear narrative and causality is deliberately defied.[24]

The shattering of narrative logic, the disruption of continuity and the conjoining of associative images distinctly indicates the province of not only of Surrealist montage but of a frequent interruption of meaning and narrative—forcing the spectator to reorient herself throughout the 19 minute film.

The “wise and wicked game” of wit that Sergei Eisenstein refers to in discussion of the re-editors has no place in the aesthetics of Joseph Cornell who uses the rhetoric of dream, portraiture and Surrealist collage in his film. Cornell achieves these fractured images by juxtaposing fragments which have no coherent “logical” meaning. This radical juxtaposition of images for the production of alternative meanings was also a strategy employed by the Surrealists in numerous instances and prominently by collagist Max Ernst. Cornell’s encounter with Ernst’s collages was the inspiration for his entire career—turning him into a devout, albeit weary, disciple of Surrealism. It was Ernst’s La Femme 100 têtes, a Surrealist collage novel composed of fragments from “Victorian steel engravings from old catalogues, magazines, and pulp novels”[25] that would capture Cornell’s attention and entice him to begin using his own vast collection of materials in his work. Surrealist games like the Exquisite Corpse which sought to produce radical combinations of images, or the jarring and radical collages which in Max Ernst’s words created the “coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, on a place which apparently does not suit them” [26] were all an influence on Cornell’s assemblages.

Beyond Cornell’s achievement in developing a new form of cinematic appropriation in Rose Hobart, it is also important to consider the intricate montage he constructs for the film, characterized by P. Adams Sitney here:

Cornell’s montage is startlingly original. Nothing like it occurs in the history of cinema until thirty years later. The deliberate mismatching of shots, the reduction of conversations to images of the actress without corresponding shots of her interlocutor, and the sudden shifts of location were so daring that even the most sophisticated viewers would have seen the film as inept rather than brilliant…. The editing of Rose Hobart creates a double impression: it presents the aspect of a randomly broken, oddly scrambled, and hastily repaired feature film that no longer makes sense; yet at the same time, each of its curiously reset fractures astonishes us with new meaning. [27]

Sitney’s authoritative defense of the film’s editing is important. Rose Hobart is frequently discussed only for its contribution to the idea of found footage film and cinematic appropriation rather than for the merits of the incredible montage the inexperienced Cornell composed. The language of the film may be appropriated film fragments, but the grammar creates a sophisticated interplay of those fragments and constitutes a highly original development in film montage.

Transformation, Appropriation and Cultural Resistance

The difference identified in the two aforementioned approaches towards appropriation relates to whether or not a transformation works within the system of the material appropriated. In other words, is the artist appropriating both images and structure? In Cornell’s case the answer clearly is no—as evinced in the narrative disruption, the elimination of sound and the break from Hollywood film grammar. In the case of the Soviet re-editors, the transformation occurs clandestinely—camouflaging changes in the source material and overwhelmingly repeating the grammar of the original text. Though avant-garde cinema is frequently discussed as being inevitably in opposition to Hollywood cinema, this bifurcation has both aesthetic and political dimensions. The Soviet transformation focuses on politics while Cornell’s work would register most overtly as an aesthetic alteration—though this aesthetic transformation arguably has political dimensions. Cornell’s approach befits an assemblage artist, referring to his film as “tapestry in action.”[28]

Soviet film transformations had many incarnations and utilized a variety of source materials which extended from altering contemporary stories to, in the following case, introducing varying attitudes towards history. Eisenstein gives an anecdote to explain just how this was performed with the German film Danton (1924) which dramatized events during the French Revolution. Eisenstein explains a transformation that dramatically alters the film:

Camille Desmoulins is condemned to the guillotine. Greatly agitated, Danton rushes to Robespierre, who turns aside and slowly wipes away a tear. The sub-title said, approximately, 'In the name of freedom I had to sacrifice a friend ...' Fine. But who could have guessed that in the German original, Danton, represented as an idler, a petticoat-chaser, a splendid chap and the only positive figure in the midst of evil characters, that this Danton ran to the evil Robespierre and ... spat in his face? And that it was this spit that Robespierre wiped from his face with a handkerchief? And that the title indicated Robespierre's hatred of Danton, a hate that in the end of the film motivates the condemnation of Jannings-Danton to the guillotine?![29]

The re-editors turned Danton’s spit into a “tear of remorse” through minor alterations which transformed the meaning of the film to reflect positively on Robespierre. This kind of transformation does not only interject a Marxist reading, it in effect creates a kind of revisionist history sympathetic to their view of the French revolution.

Critic Hal Foster makes a case that appropriators find the locus of their power in their ability to reconstitute meanings onto signs and disrupt the “monopoly of the code”[30] by an elite of cultural producers. Foster invokes Baudrillard’s assertion that “semiotic privilege represents… the ultimate stage of domination”[31] and makes a case that appropriation can disrupt the bourgeoisie’s “mastery of the process of signification.”[32] In this way, we might understand appropriation as a means of cultural resistance through the attempt to subvert meanings and control signification. The appropriator can impose new meaning or disrupt accepted meaning through inventive transformation.

As the Soviet editors from Goskino had been given ideological control over the import of Western films by the government, it may appear difficult to justify their transformations as cultural resistance unless we consider the global cinema of this era as dominated by pro-capitalist ideology. If we observe the Soviet re-editing experiment as a way of subverting the pro-capitalist cultural domination of Western films, the idea of cultural resistance could be accepted on a national scale. The Soviet control of signification, however, did not allow for an unchanged referent (i.e., the original film) alongside the altered film for the spectator to compare the transformation—unlike Joseph Cornell who uses a film which was widely released in The United States. In this way the re-edited films of the Soviet era also posses a sinister side—a form of cultural engineering, censorship or propaganda.

In the case of Joseph Cornell, the appropriation of East of Borneo represents a highly successful example of overthrowing the ‘monopoly of signification.’ For its time, Borneo was a major Hollywood feature, but has not endured as a significant film and is most known as the source material for Cornell’s Rose Hobart. Cornell’s titling of Rose Hobart implies an attempt to create a kind of portraiture which eviscerates the traces of plot and channels the actual actress from the character she plays. This kind of séance of the living-being from the character may be the very key to understanding Cornell’s initial impetus for transformation of film materials. Critic Jodi Hauptman suggests that Cornell’s shadow box portraits are rhetorically similar to the language of the “adoring fan”[33] seeking to pay tribute to actresses behind films Cornell often loathed. Critic Diane Waldman writes, “Cornel disliked the introduction of sound into film, stating that the talkies lacked the ability to capture ‘the profound and suggestive power of the silent film to evoke an ideal world of beauty.’”[34] Cornell’s transformation can then be understood as an attempt to recapture the mysterious beauty of the silent cinema lost to sound, and a condensing of all the elements that he found most intriguing in films—faces, expressions, gestures, scene fade-outs and monochromatic film. Additionally we see Cornell disperse with the element he found most oppressive—dialogue and plot. All of these strategies imply a resistance on Cornell’s part, to give in to contemporary cinema by returning to certain older aesthetic models. Ironically, Cornell’s transformation is one that looks both forward and backward—back towards the silent cinema he fetishizes, and forward towards the non-narrative and lyrical filmmaking style that defined the North American avant-garde in the second half of the 20^th century.

Conclusion: The Legacy of Cornell and the Soviet Re-Editors

To conclude, it seems appropriate to briefly touch upon the legacy these two approaches have left for avant-garde cinema. While found footage films in the last half century have frequently featured heavy cross-pollination between the two approaches discussed above, many explicitly borrow from traditions pioneered by either Cornell or the Soviet re-editors. Contemporary found footage filmmaker Craig Baldwin might be described as utilizing both approaches in his left-wing pseudo-historical documentaries which utilize a vast array of images as source material for their associative properties. Perhaps the most well known avant-garde found footage film, A Movie (1958) by Bruce Conner, features sequences which attempt to construct narrative in a highly surreal fashion similar to Cornell’s editing sleight-of-hand with the “falling eclipse” in Rose Hobart. This famous sequence is explained by critic William Wees: “A submarine captain seems to see a scantily dressed woman though his periscope and responds by firing a torpedo which produces a nuclear explosion followed by huge waves ridden by surfboard riders.”[35] Each new scene comes from a disparate film but has a surreal narrative concatenating the scenes. A direct descendent of the Soviet re-editing style is observable in Can Dialectics Break Bricks (1973) by Situationist filmmaker René Viénet. The film appropriates images from a Korean kung-fu film and interjects a Marxist narrative about a group of disenfranchised factory workers and their battle with wealthy bureaucrats through Hegelian dialectics—all achieved through the re-dubbing of the film’s soundtrack. Ken Jacobs cites Cornell as one of his primary influences and even calls his film A GOOD NIGHT FOR THE MOVIES: The Fourth Of July by Charles Ives by Ken Jacobs “a sequel to Rose Hobart.”[36] Cornell’s mentorship of both Larry Jordan and Stan Brakhage, (whom he commissioned to make several of his film ideas) is also said to have guided the two young filmmakers towards their brilliant film careers.

Together, the approaches pioneered by the Soviet re-editors and Joseph Cornell seem to contain the foundations for some of the most radical manipulations of film footage in the history of the technique. The Soviet’s initiate a practice which offers appropriators the ability to facilitate cultural resistance towards dominant cinema and through wit, deconstruct and recreate footage so that it actually argues against its own claims—what some have called media jujitsu. Cornell moves from the nationalistic political arena of the Soviets towards a more personal conviction—which seeks to use film as a found object. Cornell’s transformation attempts to break through the façade of the cinema screen and portray the actress within it—to channel her as if through a dream from within the contrivances of a plot. Together, these two approaches leave a rich legacy and continue to teach artists about a form of filmmaking which requires little more than a flatbed and ingenuity.

[1] Eisenstein, Sergei. “Through Theater to Cinema.” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Ed. Jay Leyda. Harvest Books: New York, 1949: 10

[2] Paz, Octavio. “JOSEPH CORNELL Objects and Apparitions in Thories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz. University of California Press: London, 1996: 509

[3] Skoller, Jeffrey. Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2005: 7.

[4] Wees, William C. “From Compilation to Collage: The Found Footage Films of Arthur Lipsett: The Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture 2007.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 16:2 (Fall 2007): 4

[5] Tsivian, Yuri. “The Wise and Wicked Game: Re-editing and Soviet film Culture of the 1920s”

Film History 8:3 (1996): 327

[6] Yutkevitch, Sergei. “Teenage Artists of the Revolution.” Cinema and Revoltuion. Luda and Jean Schnitzer and Marcel Martin, Eds. Cinema in Revoltuion: The Heroic Era of the Soviet Film (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973): 16

[7] Leyda, Jay. Films Beget Films. Hill and Wang: New York, 1964: 24-25

[8] Vertov, Dziga. “In Defense of Newsreel.” Kino Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. University of California Press: London, 1984: 147

[9] According to Jay Leyda, this tradition can be traced back as early as 1898. See Leyda: 13

[10] Arthur, Paul. “The Status of Found Footage” Spectator - The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television 20:1 (Fall 1999-Winter 2000): 58-59

[11] Tsivian: 329

[12] Skoller: 5

[13] Dali claimed to Breton that “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made…I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it.” Quoted in Solomon, Deborah. Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1997: 89

[14] Overwhelmingly these Soviet transformations were made so that audiences were unaware of them—however numerous cases of “private screenings” amongst editors highlighted in comedic ways, how these transformations occurred.

[15] Sitney, P. Adams. “The Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell.” From Joseph Cornell. Ed. Kynaston McShine. Museum of Modern Art: New York, 1980: 71

[16] Tsivian: 338

[17] Eisenstein, Sergei. “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form.” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Ed. Jay Leyda. Harvest Books: New York, 1949: 50

[18] Ulmer, Gregory L. “The Object of Post-Criticism.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Bay Press: Seattle, 1983: 85

[19] Hauptman, Jodi. Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema. Yale University Press: New Haven, 1999: 103

[20] Ibid.

[21] Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. M.I.T. Press: Cambridge, 1993: 81

[22] Hauptman: 97

[23] Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989: 67

[24] Rony, Fatimah Tobing The Quick and the Dead: Surrealism and the Found Ethnographic Footage Films of "Bontoc Eulogy” and “Mother Dao: The Turtlelike” Camera Obscura 18:1:52 (2003): 132

[25] Solomon: 57

[26] Hauptman: 33

[27] Sitney: 75

[28] Hauptman: 87

[29] Eisenstein. “Through Theater to Cinema.”: 11

[30] Foster, Hal. Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics. Bay Press: Port Townsend, 1985: 173.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Hauptman: 53

[34] Waldman, Diane. Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams. Harry N Abrams Inc: New York: 2002:121

[35] Wees, William C. Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993: 14

[36] Jacobs, Ken. “Painted Air: The Joys and Sorrows of Evanescent Cinema.” Millennium Film Journal 43-44 (Summer 2005): 53

Machinima and Up and Coming Work

2008-06-13T07:05:00.000-07:00

My article detailing machinima and the avant-garde can now be read online here. It may seem strange to lump found footage film and machinima together as their differences appear substantial. I've found that while machinima only appropriates the game engine program (and the images are created by the player) the form frequently has the same critical relationship to the material it appropriates and similarly offers an inexpensive means of making film.

Right now I'm working on a very time consuming and fragmented form of Recycled Cinema using 12-18 frame clips of people talking and synchronizing them into melodies. Though it can be deeply frustrating at times, the experience has revealed how speech is tonal and when isolated can become musical. I've always been very attracted to Martin Arnold's method of repetition to reconstitute meaning through fragmention, and it is a truly fun exercise to do on your own, but am trying to take his idea and isolate it from any semblance of narrative or meaning into a purely rhythmic collage of sound.

Most of my reading and writing right now is concerned with how Surrealists theorized found objects. The principal figures I'm looking at, Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp were not officially inaugurated by Andre Breton into the Surrealist group but made some of the most interesting contributions to found object art with their assemblages and readymades.

Hal Foster's writing has been helpful, specifically the offbeat Compulsive Beauty which gives a very unusual treatment of Surrealism which largely abstains from the routine assessments we're familiar with. Perhaps it is Foster's willingness to look at the work and tendencies rather than Breton's public proclamations that make it so interesting. Also, I'm slightly puzzled by the density and impenetrability of Foster's Recordings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, but some passages and sections have been incredibly useful. I'm largely referring to how Foster suggests appropriation's greatest power is in recoding signs--in forcing encoders of messages to relinquish control. Foster argues that the control of meaning in artworks through appropriation is one of the most powerful forms of cultural resistance.

I'm writing right now on the split approaches of Soviet re-editors (which I've previously discussed) and Cornell's found footage film Rose Hobart when it comes to the strategies both employ. If anyone has tips of good books to look at Surrealist appropriation, shoot them my way.

2 Films by Eric Hill AKA videoheadboy

2008-05-05T14:19:00.000-07:00

The Soviet Connection

2008-05-04T18:07:00.000-07:00

Much of my work has attempted to draw parallels between contemporary video appropriation and transformation on the Internet with avant-garde found footage filmmaking. While I stand by these connections, the contemporary practice, which I call recycled cinema, has much in common as well with Soviet newsreel compilations and re-editing practices.

The use of appropriated footage in Soviet films has been traced back to a French worker from the Lumière factory, Francis Doublier who toured the Jewish districts of Southern Russia in 1898, showing films from his company’s cinematographe. During his tour, Doublier overheard complaints about the lack of images of the Dreyfus case, in its height at the time, and came up with a way of forging images by coupling various film clips of marching soldiers, ships in port and a scene of the Delta of the Nile. Critic Jay Leyda explains the effect:
In this sequence, with a little help from the commentator, and with a great deal of help from the audience’s imagination, these scenes told the following story: Dreyfus before his arrest, the Palais de Justice where Dreyfus was court-martialled, Dreyfus being taken to the battleship, and Devil’s Island where he was imprisoned, all supposedly taking place in 1894.

Doublier, described as “the spiritual ancestor” of Lev Kuleshov, the Soviet montage theorist, uses the metaphoric properties of film to analogize the event where images do not exist. This technique, described by critic Paul Arthur as “metaphoric fabrications of reality” becomes one of the initial attractions to using archival materials in Soviet non-fiction filmmaking.

Two departments of the Soviet film system theorized, experimented and produced what might now be the body of knowledge and practice that have defined the use of found footage in both documentary cinema and the experimental films of Europe and North America since the late 1950s. In the 1920s, the Soviet Export-Import Division of the “The Central State CinePhoto Enterprise (Goskino) founded with an eye, among other tasks, to monopolize distribution” dealt with re-editing films from capitalist countries to reflect pro-communist ideology and made exported films more palatable to international audiences. Newsreel editors, often times also re-editors under the Export-Import division, compiled film for weekly news programs to screen to audiences across Russia. Among these editors were four towering figures of Soviet filmmaking and montage: Lev Kuleshov, Esther Shub, Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. Critic Yuri Tsivian writes: “Lev Kuleshov was among the first professional filmmakers engaged in the re-editing of pre-revolutionary films and it was on the basis of his experience as a re-editor that the famous 'Kuleshov experiment’s were devised.” Vertov is described as “the key figure in the early development of Soviet newsreel…” These re-editors were charged with transforming Western films for Soviet audiences both to reflect Marxist ideals and to confirm Soviet suspicions about western capitalism. Many western films were radically altered through sophisticated editing techniques, transformations in intertitles and complete excising of certain characters. Among the various changes re-editors were charged with making:

happy endings would be removed as suggesting that one can be happy under capitalism…"American endings" were generally believed to be forced upon artists by the capitalist film industry'… '[f]at and virtuous people were turned into villains as a general rule…. characters'nationality would be changed…

These daily transformations developed in editors, not only a sophisticated ability to analyze the political meanings of films but also mastery in the area of montage. It was during one such re-edit of Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse that Eisenstein first learned montage under another towering figure of Soviet film editing, Esther Shub. Soviet Filmmaker Sergei Yutkevitch recalls, “Eisenstein appointed himself [Shub’s] voluntary assistant in order to be able to study the construction of Fritz Lang’s montage.” It is here that we may see the birth of a generation of filmmakers rigorously educated in montage and concerned with the critical dialectics of their films. In these state sponsored editing activities the appropriation of film objects appears, purely as an accidental circumstance of the many cut-out shards of films saved by editors. These shards would come to be used in newsreel films or “compilation documentaries” as well as the experimental works circulating between editors and shown at private screenings for laughs.

In addition to these re-edited feature films was what has been variously called the “non-played film,” newsreel film, compilation documentary or the “real film.” In 1905 the Soviet Duma had begun financially supporting regional newsreels under the guidance of the official photographer of the Duma, Alexander Drankov. Once these newsreels were created, Marxist filmmakers, headed by Esther Shub began making passionate calls for a “non-played cinema” to facilitate an analysis and historiography of life under Tsarist rule before the revolution. The exemplary film of this genre is Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). After seeing Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin Shub would “seek in newsreel material another film way to show the revolutionary past” by appropriating footage taken by Tsar Nicholas II’s court cameraman. The film, according to Shub was an enormous success with “queues…in all the big cinemas in Moscow.” It was the emergence of films like these that caused Vertov to suggest variously that “the history of Soviet cinema starts with experiments in newsreel film” and support these experimentations as a powerful alternative to film as entertainment when he wrote:

On the moviehouse habitué, the ordinary fiction film acts like a cigar or cigarette on a smoker. Intoxicated by the cine-nicotine, the spectator sucks from the screen the substance which soothes his nerves. A cine-object made with the materials of newsreel largely sobers him up, and gives him the impression of a disagreeable-tasting antidote to the poison.

The diametrical separation between films critically assembled from newsreels and the formalist “played film” frequently appears in the writings of Soviet editors. We may see in Shub’s project the use of film as documentary evidence to intervene and détourn the intentions of the film creator. When Nicholas II’s court cameraman innocently filmed images of dancing aristocrats, it was not for the purposes of contrasting these activities with the toil of ditch diggers that Shub edits into her film. It is Shub’s intervention which radicalizes film fragments that are themselves either apolitical or even counter revolutionary.

Another significant moment in Soviet filmmaking and its relationship to contemporary found footage is observable in a film script by Lilya Brik. Critic Yuri Tsivian notes:

[another] project comes from the pen of Lilya Brik (active in LEF through her connection with Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky) occasionally involved in script writing, acting and directing. Her first film script (as well as her first film part earlier), The Glass Eye, was a film about filming; her second script is lost, but Lilya Brik remembers it in her memoirs: 'Soon after [having finished The Glass Eye] I wrote a screenplay with a parodie title Love and Duty. The entire story of the film would go into the first reel. The other [four] reels would acquire a completely new meaning as a result of re-editing alone: ... - nothing to do with the original plot. Re-editing alone, not a single shot would be added!'.The style of the proposed film would change from one reel to another: sensational drama (boevik) - a film for teen-aged audiences soviet re-editing - American comedy. In the epilogue, tin cans with film would be shown rolling back to the film factory to be washed off - 'the suicide of film'."

Doesn't this script seem reminiscent of the constant reworking of films by re-cutters and mashers?

Total Recut Contest

2008-04-25T17:31:00.003-07:00

The following is a release from the holy grail of remix sites:

TotalRecut.com is hosting a Video Remix Challenge over the next two months and we want you to create a short video using the theme: 'What is Remix Culture?' You can you use any footage you can find, including Public Domain and Creative Commons work, but the finished video cannot be longer than 3 minutes or shorter than 30 seconds long. The prizes include a Laptop computer loaded with video editing and conversion software, a digital camcorder, a digital media player, as well as Special Edition Total Recut T-Shirts, Books, DVDs and CDs. We have an amazing lineup of judges for the contest including Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Kembrew McLeod, Pat Aufderheide, JD Lasica and Mark Hosler. You can find out more information at: http://www.totalrecut.com/contest1.php. Entries will be accepted from the 1st of May until the 2nd June 2008 when public voting will begin. The best 10 videos at the end of the 2 week voting period will be put forward into the final, where they will be voted on by the judging panel. The winners will be announced around the 1st of July. So get busy making those videos!

Here's a link to the YouTube promotional video for the contest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdgDTS3diGk

Thanks again for your support and participation in this and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

2008-04-25T17:31:00.001-07:00

Recycled Cinema for Cultural Borrowings Conference

2008-03-13T15:15:00.000-07:00

Chevy Tahoe Commercial 1

Chevy Tahoe Commercial 2

10 Things I Hate About Commandments

Kodak Commercial

In the case of extra-time:
Shining:

Communist Manifestoon

The Metaphorical and Expressionistic Use of Found-Footage in the Documentary Films of Adam Curtis and Craig Baldwin

2008-03-02T16:33:00.000-08:00

“Refuse is the Archive of Our Times”: The Metaphorical and Expressionistic Use of Found-Footage in the Documentary Films of Adam Curtis and Craig Baldwin

“Cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object as much as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a lost referent.” Jean Baudrillard (47)

The use of found, archival and stock footage in films is a practice that began with the compilation documentary, pioneered in 1927 by Esfir Schub. The compilation documentary, often amassed from a mélange of newsreel clips, became commonplace in the 1930s and in numerous instances used footage outside of its original context in order to serve evidentiary functions for a documentary film. Over time however, documentary filmmakers encountered problems where no footage could be used to literally and realistically express concepts and ideas. As the film essay became a dominant form of documentary, the use of footage to serve metaphorical and expressive functions became commonplace. These moments began appearing in films with higher frequency and announce several important changes to documentary form and our cultural understanding of representations of history itself. Increasingly, found-footage in documentary is utilized for its expressionistic and metaphorical properties as a means to explore history and historiography through the prism of media and documentary cinema.
It would be difficult to find documentary filmmakers who employ found footage to serve metaphorical and expressionistic functions as frequently and with such distinction as Craig Baldwin and Adam Curtis. When discussing Curtis and Baldwin, the use of the word documentary necessitates some defense. As documentaries increasingly move away from the principles of “Clarity, Simplicity, Transparency” (Arthur, 2003, p. 58) as suggested by critic Paul Arthur, aspects of the essay film have become dominant components of contemporary documentary. Many have already characterized Curtis as an essay filmmaker and Baldwin as an anti-documentary filmmaker—yet both still maintain a distinct “documentary-ness” despite bending the proverbial rules. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that Baldwin and Curtis are engaged in a highly subjective form of documentary which mirrors the film essay. They employ a diverse array of media with a focus on the social and cultural power of both fictive and documentary images. They have devised several coding and metaphoric strategies which I will discuss in detail as they pertain to each film.
Metaphoric Strategies
Before exploring the implications of metaphoric and expressionistic footage in documentary, I will first give examples of how it has been employed in the past. In Jay Leyda’s study of the compilation documentary Films Beget Films he alludes to avant-garde artist and documentary filmmaker Hans Richter, who describes a dilemma he had while compiling footage for a documentary:
I had to film the subject of the functioning of a stock-exchange. For this an exact record in chronological sequence of all stages of its functioning, no matter how well observed, is not sufficient…The task given this sort of documentary film is to portray a concept. Even what is invisible must be made visible…In this effort to give body to the invisible world of imagination, thought and ideas, the essay film can employ an incomparably greater reservoir of expressive means than can the pure documentary film . (Leyda 31)
Richter illuminates the moments in documentary films where concepts, ideas and even historical realities are insufficiently represented with literal footage or re-creation. These are moments when footage can be employed to serve expressionistic functions and turn abstract concepts into vivid visual metaphors which no “literal” footage can adequately represent. This non-literal use can be used for irony, because unembroidered images do not exist or are not available, and to set mood or tone. In some instances, the purpose of utilizing specific images is simply inexplicable.
Leyda points out ironic use of expressionistic footage in Esfir Schub’s seminal compilation documentary The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) :
A crowd of elegant idlers are dancing [a mazurka on the awinged deck of a yacht]
The dancing tires some of them. They drink wine.
Title: ‘It made me sweat.’
And again they dance.
Title: ‘…sweat.’
A peasant, exhausted by his work, ploughs a furrow (Leyda 39)

Here, footage is employed in montage to express ironic distinctions between the pleasant sweat of dancing the mazurka and the sweat of a laborer, toiling in the fields. The ironic effect created by Schub is done solely in the editing process through juxtaposing images, rather than finding footage that is inherently ironic. The hyperbolic effect of this juxtaposition is achieved solely through editing as opposed to something inherent in the images themselves. Her metaphoric construction benefits her ideological agenda; to expose the disparity between rich and poor; the “hard work” of leisure and the hard work of labor. Ultimately the meanings of these images are transmogrified into the contextual parameters set by the filmmaker, in a kind of editorial comment by Schub.
The Berlin workers’ film society of 1928 employed this technique when harsh censorship bans prohibited the use of contemporary news reels to show during their meetings. They were faced with the difficult task of creating footage where none was available. Ingeniously, the projectionists utilized old UFA newsreels which weren’t prohibited and edited them to resemble the news of the day, effectively constructing the news through history. The reels were so effective that according to Siegfried Kracauer, they “stirred Berlin audiences to clamorous demonstrations.” (Leyda 29) Here, footage has been transformed to fit a reality because under the circumstances, no literal footage could be used.
Radical Metaphor in the works of Craig Baldwin and Adam Curtis
In all of the above examples, footage is used for documentary purposes to fill in for events which for various reasons aren’t available in their literal documentary form. In essence, this footage serves a metaphorical purpose. Critic James Peterson alludes to this use of found footage when he writes:
In a film metaphor an object or event is represented by an image of something that shares some of its features. A classic example…comes near the end of Strike (1925): during the ruthless attack on the workers, Eisenstein cuts to an image of a bull being slaughtered. In such a metaphor…the vehicle – the bull – stands for the tenor – the workers. Understanding this metaphor is quite easy because the narrative sequence specifies quite precisely what is happening, and the bull’s slaughter enriches our understanding of what is happening to the workers. We can call this kind of metaphor, in which the vehicle is brought in to help flesh out our notion of the tenor, a canonic metaphor. (Peterson 58)

This form of metaphor is common and employed often, but the radical metaphor, also discussed by Peterson has some small but important differences. The canonical metaphor shows us both the actual subject (in this case the workers—the tenor) and the metaphorical stand-in (the bull being slaughtered—the vehicle), whereas radical metaphors give us only the metaphoric image, while the actual subject is only suggested. In other words, we are given the vehicle—while the tenor is only implicit. Adam Curtis and Craig Baldwin frequently employ metaphors that have no visible tenor.
Adam Curtis’ use of radical metaphor is done most often in the service of creating a specific emotional atmosphere. Sometimes, he uses footage to metaphorically support the suppositions of his literal documentary footage. Curtis is as likely to use narrative films, popular music, television commercials and TV programming as he is historical footage. The end result is a documentary comprised of all the materials of culture—many ignored by traditional documentary films. Errol Morris astutely remarks about Curtis’ work that “Here stock-footage becomes expressionistic – never literal – an excursion into a dream – or, if you prefer – nightmare.” (Morris) Though I disagree with Morris’ definition of the images as “stock” footage , his characterization of their non-literal use gets to the heart of why Curtis is not a compilation filmmaker. When asked in an interview with GreenCine how he came to use found footage in his first film Pandora’s Box, his answer is purely practical. Curtis had great difficulty attempting to create images to support his complex thesis linking science and politics: “it was just a disaster until I suddenly realized you just throw anything in you like. It is out of desperation.”(Eaves 1) Curtis’ convenient discovery has led to a practice which has come to define his films and is integral to their success with audiences. Curtis’ documentaries deal in ideas and their often catastrophic immutability and attraction through history. Because Curtis must fabricate the links between various pieces of historical footage, it becomes necessary that he uses radical metaphor to solidify their relationships.
In Century of the Self (2002, BBC) Curtis tells the story of Edward Bernays, inventor of public relations and nephew of Sigmund Freud, and how his ideas became powerful tools in advertising and politics. Bernays impact on advertising and mass media necessitates an investigation into the commercials and advertising he helped create. In this situation, Curtis unifies form and content by editing his film like a commercial. When discussing the attempts of the tobacco industry to induce women to smoke (then a decidedly unladylike thing to do) Bernays linked cigarette smoking to the penis, in order to make women believe that they would become more powerful and by extension more free if they took up smoking. When describing Bernays linking of unconscious desires to mass produced goods we are given numerous metaphorical examples linking products to sex and prosperity.
The Power of Nightmares (2004, BBC) explores how politicians who once offered positive visions of the future now promise to protect us from nightmares of terrorism and political unrest. Curtis capitalizes on images and music that create a paranoid atmosphere and then contrasts the mood with images that suddenly caricature and rupture these sentiments. The opening of each episode features a montage of lights flickering off, dark and empty rooms, and silhouetted figures at a rally carrying flags, all contributing to a sense of intense fear. Suddenly an orientalized caricature of an Arab appears followed by a shot of a man in a horror film running down a hall and shutting a door, followed by the iconic scene from Nosferatu of the vampire opening the door to drink Huttor’s blood. The trope of the bloodthirsty Arab terrorists pervades the film, but is placed in contexts that completely undermine the images. Instead, the viewer finds themselves alarmed not by the might of Al Quaida, but rather at the small group of people are amassing unprecedented power by exaggerating this danger.
The Trap (2007, BBC) details how game theory, once used by the American military to predict the response of the Soviet powers to nuclear attack, has been filtered into economic and foreign policy. Curtis is interested in seeing how ideas and theories play out in real world scenarios. He supports this investigation with footage employed in a wide variety of ways, but most often to create an emotional or intellectual atmosphere that reflect one colossally overlooked truth: human beings aren’t mechanical—their behaviors and actions cannot be calculated because they are inherently unpredictable. More than any of his previous films, the montage technique is rife with radical metaphor and highly ambiguous images. In the opening of the film large red titles appear: “Human beings will always betray you” and “You can only trust the numbers” over an automaton-like voice counting down from 10 with images of hordes of angry crowds, a manikin arms touching a carpet, the nervous and jagged images of the inside of a hospital. These grotesque images are suddenly interrupted by the naively optimistic sounds of Brian Eno’s “On Some Far Away Beach” with a montage of speeches by Tony Blair and George Bush announcing a new age of liberation and freedom for the world. But these speeches seem absurd when framed between Curtis’ montages of a chaotic world, where freedom, it is implied, often means chaos.
Experimental filmmaker and documentarian Craig Baldwin uniquely employs all of the techniques discussed in regard to the metaphorical and expressive use of found footage. He utilizes footage to create irony, when no footage exists and to set mood or tone. Baldwin’s documentaries often mix history with narrative fiction, conspiracy theories, lies, and predictions for the future. He is a unique artist in the film world because he seems to be discussed amongst both documentary scholars and avant-garde film scholars. As Peterson says, “In the avant-garde compilation, metaphors are not just commentary or enrichment, as in Strike, rather, they are the very fabric of the discourse.” (Peterson 58) While these designations by Peterson are identical to Baldwin’s form, his use of the documentary discourse makes him a more problematic figure.
His film ¡O No Coronado! (1992) is a historically accurate look at the life of a lesser known Spanish Conquistador, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, whose attempt to discover the mythical Seven Cities of Cibola resulted in brutal genocide and the “discovery” of much of what is now the South Western United States. However no footage exists to portray these events, which are depicted through the appropriation of a variety of old films and television, from “The Lone Ranger” to Swashbuckler films of the 1930s and 40s. This use of footage is discussed heavily in Paul Arthur’s “The Status of Found Footage”:
Rather than reaffirming the transparency of visual depiction in historical memory, this common form of dissonance raises the specter of evidentiary blockage or partiality. Documentarists who would never dream of restaging an event with actors do not hesitate in creating collages which amount to metaphoric fabrications of reality. The guarantees of authenticity ostensibly secured by archival footage are largely a myth. In consequence, the binary opposition of unalloyed illustration--as the province of conventional documentary-- and figurative reshaping is hardly as solid as it initially seemed. (Arthur, 1999, p. 66)

Arthur’s characterization of “metaphorical fabrications of reality” and the problematic relationship to documentary are significant attributes of Baldwin’s films. These metaphoric fabrications are also identical to Peterson’s radical metaphor, in which the vehicle (the appropriated images of The Lone Ranger) is implicitly representative of a visually non-existent tenor, in this case Francisco Coronado.
In Craig Baldwin’s most conventional documentary, Sonic Outlaws (1995), footage from The Wizard of Oz is used to frame the film. Baldwin says, “My use of ‘Don’t mind the person behind the curtain,’ …was just a formal device to suggest that I want to expose the powers-that-be behind the media machine. It’s one metaphor in Sonic Outlaws out of five-quadrillion.” (MacDonald 176) In this particular instance, the vehicle is a phrase which when placed into new circumstances has a radically different meaning. This kind of radical metaphor could also be called “aberrant decoding” a term coined by Umberto Eco and defined by William Wees as “situations in which the receiver of a message fails (intentionally or not) to interpret the message according to the set of rules governing signification ("codes") used by the sender of the message.” (Wees, 2002, p. 3) Much of Baldwin’s own purported love of détournement resembles this process, where the intentionality of footage is confronted by its own historical biases.
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991) is an even more problematic film, integrating the history of American intervention into Latin American Communist politics during the Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr. era with paranoid conspiracy theories. These theories surround an Alien race called Quetzals, who encourage South American communist regimes by creating an army of androids to ascend to powerful political positions in order to overthrow the United States and eliminate the underground nuclear testing which threaten their subterranean world. His conspiracy tract is depicted with appropriated Science-Fiction and ephemeral classroom films. The film was described by critic Michael Zryd as a “meta-historical critique of how American historical narratives are structured by apocalypse and conspiracy…” (Zryd 54) The metaphorical use of footage extends beyond moments—the entire film is predicated on linking alien invasion and atomic mutation films to the pervasive American fear of Communist world domination. In many ways P. Adams Sitney’s description of the “Menippean satire” is the best categorical representation of this particular film. Sitney writes:
All the ideas proposed in a Menippean satire are subject to irony; the very concept of a philosophical resolution becomes an occasion for parody. Fantasy and realism alternate or even coincide, more often than not with a concatenation of styles and perspectives. The Menippea frequently incorporates other genres and films-within-films. (Sitney 411)

The heterogeneous inclusion of materials is a formal exercise in reality distortion. This particular work by Baldwin also points to the non-diegetic suggestion of the psychology of modern man—specifically represented by the paranoid-schizophrenic narrator; a man whose 99 rants manifest the symptoms of an individual who has come to integrate fictive narratives and historical truths to form a delusional master narrative about the benevolence of American imperialism in foreign policy. Much of the conspiracy theories interjected into Baldwin’s history come from actual outsider literature, which Baldwin calls “maniac literature.”
Another critical entry point into this work is to consider the purpose of Baldwin’s blending of ignored historical truths about the CIA with patent distortions so obvious that they are easily separated from the authentic materials. In this situation, the viewer is invited to separate information in the film into categories of truth and misinformation the same way an enlightened spectator does while watching news and documentary histories. Baldwin’s documentary is deeply skeptical of didactic media because of its historical misuse for propaganda—his strategy in Tribulation 99 is to openly acknowledge the propagandistic elements and create a space where viewers become active in the process of separating fact from fiction. In many ways Tribulation 99 is a didactic film, as it forces the viewer to use their own media literacy to get to the truth. This process also mirrors the way many individuals, who live in societies where the government repressively controls the media, must separate state propaganda from actual news.
To explain the unreasonable overthrow of Salvador Allende funded by the United States Government, Baldwin’s paranoid narrator explains that “ president so-called ‘Salvador Allende’ proceeds to disrupt the economy, ferment chaos and alter the earth’s polar axis.” These suppositions about Chile are half true and half unbelievable. The narrator takes truths about the Chilean economy, in severe decline from 1970-1973 and mix it with false rationale for the US support of the coup to overthrow him, namely the attempt to alter the earth’s axis and make it uninhabitable by humans. Baldwin gives a similar treatment to the iconic Grenadian revolutionary Maurice Bishop by positing that he was helped by a Quetzal team of psychic vampires to assume power in Grenada—illustrated by using scenes from Blacula and a number of ephemeral b-horror films. In these metaphors, revolutionary figures in Latin America are demonized not for the possible economic or political turmoil they inflict upon their countries, but rather because they are literally supernaturally evil figures.
Continuing the pseudo-documentary style inaugurated by Tribulation 99, Specters of the Spectrum unifies the history of media from Nicola Tesla to the Internet with a post-apocalyptic narrative about the danger of concentrated media in the 20th Century. The film begins in the future after a single corporation has complete control over the media and all copyright. This history of media from the phonograph to television is told in a long montage which includes footage shot by Baldwin. A character from the film is traveling away from Earth and picking up radio waves and television dispatches as they radiate through space. These dispatches are a collected history of media, telling of the strange parallel lives of the inventor of electric television Philo T. Farnsworth and the inventor of radio, Nikola Tesla, both men whose scientific ingenuity and inventions were undermined, questioned and eventually stolen from them by corporate entities. Through this extended documentary segment, Baldwin tells the compelling history of media innovation and the inevitable cooptation of these ideas by corporate enterprise that quickly eliminate any public control. The segment reminds contemporary viewers that the early days of radio were much like the internet is today—unregulated and highly democratized. Through this historical investigation, we are invited to make parallels between the corporate media control of the past and the impending new regulation of the internet many telecommunications companies are trying to secure now.
The metaphoric use of footage for documentary purposes is a process which mirrors the avant-garde’s employment of the same technique. The difference between the two is that the relationship between concept and representation is exactly the opposite. While avant-garde artists respond to footage by constructing (or discovering) its alternate meaning or conceptual potential, the documentary filmmaker already has a conceptual framework and seeks to find footage to reflect those ideas. It is easy to see how Adam Curtis writes an essay and raids the BBC archive to find footage to reflect his talking points. Craig Baldwin however seems to occupy both the space of the avant-gardist and the documentarian. He uses footage to represent his narratives but also in order to explore its hidden implications.
Documentary Film as Editorial and Film Essay
Earlier in this essay, Hans Richter referred to the film essay as a valuable form because of its greater potential to illustrate the “invisible world of imagination, thought and ideas.” Richter draws distinctions between the documentary and the film essay principally because of expressive use of footage and what could be characterized as highly subjective narrative elements. Since Richter’s distinction was made, a number of new techniques have become deeply entrenched in documentary forms which are as, if not more, radical than these innovations. Re-creation, the non-neutral or disinterested “bull in china shop approach of Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore” (Tovey) seem to create a union between the film essay and the documentary. Critic Paul Arthur describes the film essay as “a meeting ground for documentary, avant-garde, and art film impulses.” (Arthur, 2003, p.62) In my formulation, there are two distinguishing factors between traditional documentary and the essay film; editorializing and the use of fiction media in the form of television shows and films. Curtis and Baldwin greatly benefit from these two elements, because, as Arthur notes, “the essay offers a range of politically charged visions uniquely able to blend abstract ideas with concrete realities, the general case with specific notations of human experience.” (Arthur, 2003, p. 58)
Alexander Pudovkin referred to the use of archival/stock/found-footage in documentaries as “The Global Film.” He remarks that, “Such a documentary film is not merely informational. It differs from the newsreel in the same way that an editorial or article in a newspaper differs from the news item in the next column.” (Leyda 37) Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis directly reports history, like the news item, but he interprets it through image and sound like an editorial writer. Paul Arthur explains the return to the found-footage documentary from the pervasive “verite” style dominating the 1960s in his essay “The Status of Found Footage” by explaining that:
The widespread post-sixties' appetite for found footage coincides with two interdependent initiatives: the desire to reformulate tropes of historical narrative, and the micro-political critique of historical exclusion or distortion conducted on the terrain of mass cultural representation by disenfranchised groups as a precondition for self-determination. (Arthur, 1999, p. 60)
Arthur’s invocation of reformulating the tropes of historical narrative appears throughout the work of Adam Curtis and Craig Baldwin, who recycle media as a way of finding the nexus between history as it is experienced and history as it has come to be understood through media. Arthur’s quote also gets to the root of found-footage filmmaker Craig Baldwin’s own purported mission to “liquidate the distinctions between official and unofficial history,” (Yeo 24) particularly by showing news footage which is, through our present vantage point, completely false and often alarmist in nature. However news footage is not the material used most often by Baldwin or Curtis to create metaphor. Instead, they find ephemeral films and television shows which do not have literal resonance outside of the historical conditions in which they were created. In some ways, they are like media archeologists, pointing to the historical significance of forgotten mass cultural narratives. They utilize strategies like radical metaphor and aberrant decoding in order to achieve these ends.
Curtis’ invocation of non-documentary footage is a way of dissociating viewers from the belief that they are watching an objective documentary. In an interview, Curtis says his use of images is integral to conveying a message about the way his work should be watched:
In a way, the pictures have a sense of disassociation. They stop people thinking, "Oh he's trying to Agit-Prop us." Instead, I'm having fun with this argument. I show quite clearly in the way I use pictures that this is an argument. I don't pretend that this is the voice of God, that this is an authorial thing. What I'm saying is, look, the world is very complicated and this is my argument, based on an assembly of facts which are not untrue, but this is my argument, and the way I use pictures shows that and it's almost like they know what they're going to get and they can argue with it. (Eaves 1)
Like any talented editorial writer, Curtis forms arguments by drawing connections between facts. The thesis to the film he is discussing, The Power of Nightmares is factually unverifiable, because it is conceptual and highly subjective. The film asserts that the rise of Neoconservativism and Islamic Fundamentalism are parallel and that both ideologies have benefited from manufacturing nightmares about the world without the protection and empowerment of their repressive political agendas. While his thesis is highly subjective, Curtis compiles three hours of interviews, news footage, and well researched facts to prove his argument. But the inclusion and exclusion of facts is not done in the spirit of creating an objective look—it is done to best serve his argument.
The Mass-Media Documentary
Baldwin and Curtis are engaged in a form of mass-media documentary which seeks to illuminate the power of fiction media on the world at large. The distinction between these two filmmakers is that while Curtis uses non-documentary media to accent his documentary footage, Baldwin is as concerned with his “fiction” footage as he is with documentary footage. This form of documentary is closely related to documentaries which seek to give viewers a deeper understanding of how media, specifically marketing and advertising, functions. The Persuaders (2004) and Merchants of Cool (2001) produced by Frontline PBS were revealing looks into the minds of the “creators of popular culture” and are good examples of this documentary form. These documentaries seek to educate individuals about the way desire is manufactured within them. It is ironic that while the cliché of a media saturated world is repeated endlessly, teaching media literacy is rarely undertaken by public educators to help students deal with the ubiquitous manipulation and propaganda of advertising and marketing. This is precisely the roles undertaken by Baldwin and Curtis.
Another fascinating entry point into the work of Craig Baldwin and Adam Curtis is to consider the “passive reception” model of media discussed at length in Bertolt Brecht’s essay “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication” and in Jean Baudrillard’s “Requiem for the Media.” In these essays the current “distribution only” model of both television and radio are critiqued for their unilateral nature and non-adherence to an actual model for reciprocal communication. Baudrillard condemns “the media as the institution of an irreversible model of communication without a response.” (Baudrillard 84) However Curtis and Baldwin are engaged in just that—a lucid response aimed at the media (both fiction and non-fiction) and at promoting greater media literacy in the world. The possibility of appropriating the materials of media to produce such a response changes non-reciprocal media practices—which may account for why the traditional media has been so aggressive towards this practice. In the case of Adam Curtis, he is unable to secure North American distribution because of the control over the materials he uses. Umberto Eco conceived of this practice when he described “groups of communications guerillas who would restore a critical dimension to passive reception” (Eco, 1986, p. 142) of radio and television.
The profound cultural influence that fiction media has on society warrants serious documentary investigation. Though there are numerous examples of fiction films and television shows entering public consciousness and even helping form government policy, recently the television show 24 has had deep significance to the American Congress and was invoked by Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (to loud applause) as evidence for supporting the torture of suspected terrorists. (Kovacs)
Craig Baldwin’s work is in a dialogue with documentary form. He employs the shibboleths of the documentary, which are utilized to subvert and challenge the authoritative position that documentaries have in our society. Critic William Wees points out that:
Baldwin creates a distinctive form of pseudo-documentary that parodies the voice-over narration and compilation montage of conventional documentary films. While purporting to document the elaborate conspiracies between governments, multi-national corporations and (in Tribulation 99) extraterrestrials, his films are funny, satiric, anarchic 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 in an aura of omniscience. (Wees, 1993, p. 23)
In a bold unification of form and content, many of Baldwin’s documentaries assume the same roll as the media he critiques; they are full of blatant misinformation, lies, and mischaracterizations but sprinkled with facts that are distorted into unbelievable arguments. Baldwin’s meticulously researched pseudo-documentaries formulate alternative histories from their union of the media, politics and culture of a period of time. In many ways, Baldwin espouses the ideas and practices of Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project” in which “‘the garbage heap’ of 19th century commodities” (Wees, 1993, p. 52) is put onto display. Baldwin literally scavenges garbage cans for footage because, in his own words “refuse is the archive of our times.” (Yeo 24) Baldwin’s serious studies of media and history together are rivaled only by film and media theorists. He is one of the only documentary filmmakers to acknowledge that generations of children won’t get their history of World War II from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or even The Sorrow and the Pity but from Saving Private Ryan and The Great Escape. Baldwin characterizes his work and its relationship to history and documentary:
The narration of history is really what my films are about, because it's all narrative; it all has to be told a certain way, and obviously there's a lot of stuff that's left out. So I'm trying to open up a space where ideas about history can be generated, to create a sort of a theory in which we can kind of see this process, where you can see how certain kinds of meanings become attached to certain kinds of images, and how that can be undercut. (Attell)
In other words, Baldwin finds the strange territory between the mass cultural narratives of cinema history and integrates them with “actual history” as he envisions it. However Baldwin’s contributions to documentary are multifarious. It is important to remember that in his critique of media, he adopts the discursive methods of media in order to exemplify its failings. Baldwin calls his works “pseudo-psuedo-documentary,” which highlights the strange mixture of fact and fiction, history and its representations.
Like a conventional documentary filmmaker, Curtis’ works are meticulously researched and backed up by interviews, news footage and other objective fact based support. His inclusion of a variety of non-fiction films is used in several ways. First, he uses films and television shows to invoke a specific period of time discussed by the documentary, second, to construct mood or tone, often in ways that aren’t immediately comprehensible and third, to unite the content and form of his investigations.
In the documentary Pandora’s Box (1992, BBC), Curtis explores the intersection of politics and science. In a segment exploring the insecticide DDT, Curtis shows how the rise of the product also paralleled a dramatic increase in films featuring gigantic and monstrous insects. Was the success of DDT (and the refusal by many to recognize its harmful effects on human mammary organs and various wildlife) attributable to the preponderance of narratives about insect invasion? The answer does not matter much to Curtis, but the link is irrefutable. While these films reflect fears of genetic mutation by nuclear material, they also conveniently provide a narrative of man using science and technology to overcome the insect world. In this example, Curtis has linked historical fact with historical fiction media.

Conclusion
While critical suspicions over the inherent authenticity of documentary films has long been a point of contention in their academic study, the recent politicization of documentaries has made these reservations a widespread reality . There are positive and negative components of these developments. On the positive side, individuals are increasingly aware of how facts, statistics and arguments can be distorted easily in visual media. Their awareness forces them to get information from multiple sources rather than be victim to the false information of a single entity. The negative side is easily observed by the way misinformation is used to create more debate where none once existed for political purposes. The works of Adam Curtis and Craig Baldwin are interesting exercises in both acknowledging the fallibility of documentary while still making important claims. Perhaps the most striking aspects of these two oeuvres is their initiation of many viewers towards a more detailed picture of how media operates and how media should be seen in relation to truth.
Works Cited

Arthur, Paul. “The Status of Found Footage” Spectator - The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television 20:1 (Fall 1999-Winter 2000) p. 57-69

--. “Essay Questions: From Alain Resnais to Michael Moore: Paul Arthur Gives a Crash Course in Nonfiction Cinema's Most Rapidly Evolving Genre.” Film Comment, 39:1 (January-February 2003)

--. A Line of Sight : American Avant-Garde Film since 1965. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Attell, Kevin. “Leftovers/ Ca Redemption Value: Craig Baldwin's Found-Footage Films.” Cabinet Magazine. Issue 3, 2001. (http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/3/CraigBaldwin.php)

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Glaser. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Eaves, Hannah and Jonathan Marlow, Interview Adam Curtis. “I’m a Modern Journalist,” GreenCine, May 29, 2005 (http://www.greencine.com/central/node/430?page=0%2C1)

Eco, Umberto. "Toward a Semiotic Inquiry into the TV Message," Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 3 (Birmingham, U.K.: University of Birmingham, 1972), 103-21, Op.Cit Wees, William C. The Ambiguous Aura of Hollywood Stars in Avant-Garde Found-Footage Films. Cinema Journal 41:2 (Winter 2002) p. 3-18

Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality, Trans William Weaver, New York, 1986, p. 142. Op.Cit. Jesse Lerner, “At Play in the Media Scrap Heap” published as an insert in the Other Cinema DVD for Sonic Outlaws, Dir. Craig Baldwin (1995).

Kovacs, Joe . “ 'Jack Bauer' called on at Republican debate” WorldNetDaily, May 16, 2007. (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55722)

Leyda, Jay. Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film. Hill and Wang: New York, 1964.

MacDonald, Scott. A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1988-1998.

Morris, Errol Interviews Adam Curtis. “It Becomes a Self-Fulfilling Thing.” The Believer Magazine. 5:8

Peterson, James. “Making Sense of Found Footage,” in Found Footage Film. Ed. Cecilia Hausheer and Christoph Settele. Viper Press: Luzern, 1992.

Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000, 3rd Edition. New York: Oxford Press, 2002.

Tovey, Ana. “Home Truths, Amatuer Video, Documentary and the Real” BFI Online. (http://www.bfi.org.uk/education/talkscourses/filmjournalism/articles/tovey.html)

Wees, William C. Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993.

---. “The Ambiguous Aura of Hollywood Stars in Avant-Garde Found-Footage Films”. Cinema Journal 41:2 (Winter 2002) p. 3-18

Yeo, Rob “Cutting Through History: Found Footage in Avant-Garde Filmmaking” from Cut: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video. Ed. Stefano Basilico. Milwuakee: Milwuakee Art Museum, 2005.

Zryd, Michael. “Found Footage Film as Metahistory: Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99,” The Moving Image 3.2 (2003) 54

Political Mashup Playlists and Caped Masked and Armed

2008-02-15T12:42:00.000-08:00

I've written previously on the political remixes of Caped Masked and Armed, best known here for the "Kodak Moments" remix below.

After looking at Jonathan McIntosh's site (the artist behind this video), I found his playlist for the recent DIY conference at USC. It was a wonderful experience going through this list because of some of our own identical formulations about remix culture. He is also a supporter of the idea that Brokeback mashups can be read as a "queering" of texts--most often films that deal with homosocial spaces. He did however apparently coin a phrase that beautifully illustrates a tendency in the recycled cinema / remix video community -- Identity Correction. This idea as I understand it relates the frequent remixing of speeches by public figures to create a coalescence between what they say and what they do. You can browse this list by clicking here.

In my research for an upcoming conference in Nottingham called "Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking and Transformation" I have come to find the development of a consensus in terms and critical approaches to these works from a host of disparate sources. I wonder if this is simply because writing on this subject is so sparse and that it has led to a great deal of sharing or whether this has developed because the process is not actually new but part of an age old "found" aesthetic in art.

Arthur Lipsett in Canadian Journal of Film Studies

2008-01-28T18:41:00.000-08:00

William Wees has a nice article on Arthur Lipsett in the latest issue of Canadian Journal of Film Studies comparing his films to the compilation documentary form. Here are the films available on YouTube. Google Video has "Very Nice, Very Nice."
Trip Down Memory Lane P. 1

Trip Down Memory Lane P. 2

Free Fall

21-87

Two Brilliant Cartoon Mashes: Copyright in the words of the Enemy AND The Communist Manifesto

2008-01-22T19:52:00.000-08:00

Nam June Paik

2008-01-21T17:41:00.001-08:00

Much has been said of video artist Nam June Paik and I'm only beginning to look at his work so I'll spare you my incites till a later date. Paik experimented with found images constantly throughout his career opening up the realm of TV images, static and incidental images for found footage film and video. He died in 2006. Click here for another amazing clip.

Zen for Film was the cinematic equivalent of John Cage's (Paik's mentor) 4"33.

Charlotte Moorman on Paik

An instilation from 1995 of Paik's work

Best (Worst) Memes of 2007

2008-01-12T11:44:00.000-08:00

Though devoted to the nascent media critiques present in contemporary found footage films of the avant-garde and the Internet, we at recycled cinema thought some mindless memage to recap 2007 was appropriate. Enjoy.

The Collection: Ualuealuealeuale

Remix of the inimitable "Don't Taze Me" Meme

Local News travesty of 2007: The Mobile Alabama Leprechaun Video Remixed!

Original Leprechaun Video Here:

Local News Run Amok Part II: The Oakland Whistle Tip

The Whistle Tip Remix!

And how's this for convergence culture? The Leprechaun and Whiste Tip Mash-Up!

300 Whistle Tip Mashup

BET Animation's Public Service Announcement: READ A BOOK!

Hebrew Crunk: Revitalizing the Hebrew Hip-Hop Connection

The Pretty Ricky Video Coming in at #1:

The Pretty Ricky Benny Hill Remix:

Pretty Ricky Post Modern Remix:

Kermit Reaction to 2 Girls One Cup:

Abigail Child Films

2008-01-04T09:09:00.000-08:00

Harun Farocki and the Politics of Found Footage with William Burroughs on Cut-Ups

2008-01-04T08:38:00.000-08:00

Harun Farocki has used found footage in innovative ways throughout his career challenging dominant political perspectives with a simple common sense approach to the world. His films are sometimes almost untouched appropriations and others deeply nuanced assemblages that find incredible connections between disparate source materials. He is a humane, empathetic and serious found footage filmmaker who unlike his colleagues has created uncynical films that speak truth to power without being self-righteous. I highly recommend his films Interview, How to Live in the German Federal Republic , Still Life, Videograms of a Revolution, and War at a distance. Below are clips from some films.

A clip from a documentary on William Burroughs explaining the Cut-Up Method:

Here is a Cut-Up Film by Burroughs:

Some new Machinima: Mashups and Mourning

2007-12-07T16:00:00.000-08:00

The film "The Tyrant" sets some interesting precedents in machinima. It is ostensibly a machinima mashup with political undertones. See for yourself.

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

2007-12-07T13:31:00.000-08:00

A nice example of avant-garde found-footage practices seeping onto the net.

MPAA's Copyright Woes

2007-12-05T08:21:00.000-08:00

The MPAA's software to sniff out copyright files on student run P2Ps has gotten the organization into some hot water. Apparently, the Ubuntu-based toolkit they used requires that the source code is published along with the program. This is obvious to all of us open source Linux proponents but could not be understood by the minds of the MPAA. If the source code were published hackers could easily develop new technology to get around copyright tracking. But guess what? TOO BAD--use of Ubantu programs requires it and if you don't follow the licensing rules YOU GET SUED. Did Ubuntu developer Matthew Garrett sue? No, like a nice guy he called and emailed the MPAA. Did they take the program down? No. So he had to call the ISP to do it. The MPAA forcefully had the program taken off their website last Tuesday. Thank you Matthew Garrett. Now if the MPAA could just learn something from this...

Canadian Copyright

2007-12-05T07:54:00.000-08:00

Canada is gearing up to pass their own version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act--only this one has teeth. Below is Michael Geist's take:

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:

This Spartan Life on Net Neutrality

2007-12-02T13:23:00.000-08:00

“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

EBN: The Emergency Broadcast Network

2007-11-22T13:24:00.000-08:00

Remember the "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" as sung by Bush video that was a minor phenomena last year? The technique was invented 15 years ago by the new media collective EBN. The group is led by Josh Pearson whose bad-ass website is an archive of old EBN films. Below are a few gems. EBN makes funky music/video cut-ups which were so powerful in there time, they were co-opted by ad agencies and music video makers to make more shit for EBN to parody. Viva la detournement!

Santiago Alvarez and the Latin American Found Footage Contingency

2007-11-20T09:01:00.000-08:00

I recently came across one of the most original and politically provocative found-footage filmmakers of the 1960s, Santiago Alvarez. His films are available on DVD under the title "He Who Hits First, Hits Twice: The Urgent Cinema of Santiago Alvarez." These are some of the most refreshingly uncynical found-footage films I've seen from a man devoted to montage juxtapositions which have tremendous emotional impact on the viewer. If you like Jon Josts early work it is a must see. Below is one of his early films "Now!" I strongly urge everyone to see his films "LBJ" and "79 Springtimes" aka "79 Primaveras." Alvarez had no formal film training and worked for the Cuban Film Institutes newsreel division. A bio from Wikipedia is below. For anyone interested in newsreel found footage films, check out the book "Films Beget Films" by Jay Leyda.

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.

News Found Footage

2007-11-06T11:22:00.000-08:00

'Special Report' by Bryan Boyce

AMERICAN GULAG (Caution: Graphic)

Andrew Keen's dissapointing self-reflexivity

2007-10-29T14:30:00.000-07:00

I picked up Andrew Keen's "Cult of the Amateur: How Todays Internet is Killing Our Culture" in hopes of finding a thinker who could articulate some of my own anxieties about the subject. I may blog, study internet video appropriation at a graduate level, sing the praises of Lawrence Lessig, etc, etc...but I am aware of serious problems facilitated by the wonderful contributions of the internet. Unfortunately, Keen's work is not the place to find insight. In fact his work seems to suffer from the problems he derides so often. Keen loves to make sweeping generalizations and outrageous claims without evidence. Furthermore his lack of reason and logic is puzzling at times. He blames the blogosphere for Wendy's restaurant's plummeting stock after the "severed finger in the chili" farce, but fails to mention that THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA wasn't skeptical of the event either. He sets out to deride the amateur but spends much of his time attacking the ease by which corporations can moonlight as anonymous amateurs to build product loyalty. Ultimately, he is guilty of what many people in the establishment who didn't grow up in the computer age are; He doesn't realize that internet users are savvy enough to know that everything they read isn't the truth. His major critique of blogs is that they aren't peer reviewed or published and don't face the quality control that authors do. However a myriad of opponents to his ideas (far more than followers of his skepticism) are published authors who've gone through this very process. Lets not forget how much misinformation, plagiarism and forgery occurs even in publishing. Keen has done one good thing--he brought this conversation out into the open in a way it hasn't before. Unfortunately, this serious conversation, which should be dialectical in nature and not a screaming match, has been completely undermined by Keen's amateurish, illogical, unreasoned and ill-researched arguments. Please see the video below celebrating everything Keen hates:

Perfected Jews and Anne Coulter

2007-10-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

Copyright Hitmen

2007-10-24T17:35:00.000-07:00

Below is a video by John "Bull" Dozier. Described by online magazine "Virginia Super Lawyer" as an "Entrepreneur, Technologist, Hired Gun and Founder of Dozier Internet Law, PC." This hired gun's law firm recently threatened the website infomercialScams.com with legal action if they posted A CEASE AND DESIST LETTER?!?! That's right--they threatened to sue if they published their threat to sue. The initial suit was over InfomercialScams.com's publishing of material denouncing the service of a "manufacture-direct" furniture company. Hot damn folks. This is why THE LAW remains in the public domain--so it can't be copyrighted by assholes like this. Here's the original site which goes into detail.

Apologies

2007-10-18T12:36:00.000-07:00

Alright, I know. These Brokeback mashups are done and done. But this is just too good. Best title cards EVER.

Christian Media--for the young and the out of shape

2007-10-16T13:13:00.000-07:00

This is an evangelical Christian indoctrination video. enjoy. praise jebus!

Gospel Aerobics with ambiguously gay instructor:

blackwater footage

2007-10-16T12:17:00.001-07:00

Exporting Freedom One Sitcom at a Time

2007-10-03T13:40:00.000-07:00

It's not enough to fuck the world over through globalization, free trade, and real politik. We must also export the lowest forms of mass cultural narratives as well. With Russia's so-called emerging middle-class, Sitcoms have become the hottest thing on TV. Below are Russian versions of Married with Children, Perfect Strangers and The Nanny. Click here to see the Russian opening of Married with Children.

Hail! Total Recut

2007-09-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

For everyone who had dreamed of the holy grail of recycled cinema sites, wake up and go to Total Recut. This site has all the films, literature, how-to, raw digital footage, and communities for any self respecting found footage filmmaker to want to explode in a frenzy of mouse clicks.

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.

The Big Brother you never knew you had

2007-08-28T11:00:00.001-07:00

The EPIC 2015 video has become a bit dated, but the Googlezon idea (a merger between Google and Amazon and the implications behind it) still resonates today. The most interesting new development is what some people are doing with Google Maps and Amazon wish lists wherein maps can be used to detail purchasing patterns (ie. what regions are purchasing Michael Moore books or Rush Limbaugh books) to map out new congressional districts.

MyEverythingdotcom

2007-08-28T10:09:00.000-07:00

The latest recycled cinema from MyEverythingdotcom is quite good. Here it is, followed by a few oldies.

Great New Work

2007-06-25T13:15:00.000-07:00

I've recently been corresponding with several recycled cinema filmmakers and have found two great films worth mentioning.

"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.

Towards a Poor Cinema

2007-06-10T13:29:00.001-07:00

Below are eleven points of a credo for the "Recylced Cinema" I'm calling "Towards a Poor Cinema" in reference to Jerzy Grotowski's outsider theater manual "Towards a Poor Theater." I've modeled it stylistically off Debord's writing, making brief statements to articulate some points about the intersections of the "high art" or avant-garde tendencies of so called "found footage" and the "low brow" tendencies of mashers, jammers and internet video appropriators. I believe that the term "Recycled Cinema" should replace "found-footage" because it is more intellectually honest about its origins (footage is hardly ever "found" in the way it used to be) and because of the positive association of the word recycle, which defines a certain post-modern tendency to reuse something without the icky suggestion of actually stealing or plagiarizing. In the spirit of Recycled Cinema, feel free to repost wherever!

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.

HOLY SHIT!

2007-06-05T10:28:00.000-07:00

Ocean's 9/11 - The First Act of Recycled Cinema

2007-05-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

Today I am proud to present to you all the first film of The Recycled Cinema. May god have mercy on our souls.

Found Footage Film Festival

2007-05-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

On my way to see David Lynch's "Inland Empire", Jessica discovered in NOW (Toronto's free weekly) that the Found Footage Festival (which has the distinction of being the first google hit when you type in found footage) was on that night. Phew! That was a close one. I was hopeful there might be some avant-garde films in the mix--but I was treated instead to home videos, mcdonalds training videos, that famous RV commercial, Tracy Lords' exercise video and a Carnivale promo starring Arnold fresh off winning Mr. Universe. These guys are true warriors for the cause--traveling the US and Canada to spread the good word. There DVDs are great and can be bought here.

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:

Found footage by Mireia Visuals

2007-04-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-04-22T15:12:00.000-07:00

(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.

Chris Marker's "Last Bolshevik"; Jonathan Lethem puts his money where his mouth is

2007-04-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

"It is not the literal past that rules us: it is images of the past" -- George Steiner

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.

The Perils of the 8 hour work day

2007-04-17T14:32:00.000-07:00

Has anyone else noticed a sudden influx of insane office stress videos? They've become a new genre.Some of them appear to be a Russian stress relief product. The ad campaign is a pretty edgy. Here are my favorites:

The Grey Video

2007-04-17T10:39:00.000-07:00

An appropriate Mashup video of one of the great mashup albums:

A Hard Days Night of the Living Dead!

2007-04-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

This goes in the pantheon! One of the best ever!

Martin Arnold Tributes

2007-04-04T09:42:00.000-07:00

Like most people, I encountered Martin Arnold rip offs before I ever encountered Arnold himself. These are a few Arnold inspired films I love:

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

2007-04-04T09:18:00.000-07:00

Check out this trailer for a found footage compilation film called "All This and World War II" almost inexplicably constructed around Beatles covers. Amazing!

2007-04-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

Cliff Roth's Reagan Recycling

2007-04-01T13:42:00.000-07:00

Here's a great satire on the misguided "just say no" anti-drug campaign perpetrated by the Reagans through the 80s. It was compiled by Cliff Roth.

Chevy Tahoe Detourned!

2007-04-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

Last year Chevrolet decided to forgo paying a smart Madison avenue ad agency for just another slick car ad.

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:

Black Sheep

2007-03-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

As it turns out-- I've been wrong this whole time! The mountains of money that control Hollywood haven't completely undermined innovation. I mean, how could you call this an uninspired cinematic age when the like of THIS is being produced?

Thank you Icon Productions--for The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre and now Black Sheep

From Russia, Japan and Africa with Love

2007-03-18T14:08:00.000-07:00

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.

New Sites and Future Essays

2007-02-24T12:57:00.000-08:00

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."

Work In Progress: Found Footage on the Internet

2007-02-01T18:07:00.000-08:00

Mashups, Re-cuts, and Machinema: The New Found Footage Filmmakers of 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.

While the new found footage filmmakers of the internet have begun to develop superlative work, with their own sub-genres and technical innovations, impending legal battles have threatened to eliminate the distribution of these films. Unlike the found footage filmmakers of the past who found source materials in abandoned archives, thrift stores or literally thrown away in trash cans, the found footage filmmaker on YouTube tends to prefer well known, visible, and highly copyright protected images of mainstream Hollywood, TV shows, and video game screen captures. These tendencies emerge most likely from more than just the artistic fashions of the post-modern age. They are a direct response to the age of reproducibility we are currently living in. Digital media has made copying and manipulating media fast, cheap and easy to use. Abandoning the traditional tools of found footage filmmakers[v], the new cinematic appropriators have instead vied for the digital file and the Digital Video Disc (DVD). But while the ability to find source material has become easier, the law regarding its use has never been more steadfast.

In fact, the most notable distinction between the found footage filmmakers of the avant-garde and those of the Internet can be related to the choice of source material. While cinema appropriators of the past had little to fear in the way of copyright infringement suits from unmarketable, un-saleable films whose authors were often dead or unknown, the class of 2005 has graduated with the dubious honor of pillaging the most recognized media available. However the recognition of an established, popular piece of source material is intrinsic to the artistic, social and satirical value of new found footage films.

Another notable distinction between the found footage filmmakers of today and yesterday is parody. While found footage has a long history of parody, it has never existed so exclusively in this realm until now. The paradox of the new found footage style is that it must violate copyright in order to be an effective parody. Linda Hutcheon writes in her book, “A Theory of Parody”:

In order for parody to be recognized and interpreted, there must be certain codes shared between encoder and decoder. The most basic of these is that of parody itself, for, if the receiver does not recognize that the text is a parody, he or she will neutralize both its pragmatic ethos and its doubled structure[vi].

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.

Mashups

The term mashup, coined in Jamaica to describe destroying something was first widely used when referring to music. Employed most often in hip-hop, mashups described the combinations of a cappella tracks over new beats done by club DJs and on the radio. In the late 80s, John Oswald took this practice to another level when he released his album “Plunderphonics” (another early term for mashup) which utilized multiple pieces of source material put together in sophisticated patterns and combinations. The term has only been used to describe films in the last decade. Early forms of film mashups appeared in compilation films, though distinctions between the two have been made and will be elaborated upon later.

One of the most well known and controversial music mashups occurred in 2004, when Grammy winning hip-hop and alternative rock producer Danger Mouse did a mashup of The Beatles “The White Album” with rapper Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” called “The Gray Album.” This unification of highly disparate source material based entirely on a linguistic association has also entered the consciousness of found footage on the internet in the form of word associated mashups, which I will discuss later. The practice of the mashup has a long relatively uncharted history extending back to literature, and classical music. James Joyce’s epic tome “Ulysses” qualifies as a mashup because it places the themes and characters from “The Odyssey” into Dublin in 1904, introducing numerous other literary styles (women’s romantic literature, boys magazine writing, erotic sadomasochistic novels) into one narrative. Many famous pieces of classical music are the result of European folk songs expanded and altered to reveal complexities and variations. The Dadaists also performed literary mashup by utilizing aleatoric writing practices in which pieces of literature were randomly cut and pasted onto one page.

Behind the technical aspects of mashups, the practice of subverting a work of art by implying a new, often opposite or contrary meaning was a technique developed by the Situationist International called detournement. The practice of detournement has provided a wealth of creative works challenging the very source material employed in the work through manipulation. Most of the found footage films on YouTube display some level of detournement in their execution. While the spirit behind these works is more often playful than overtly political, they ultimately undermine and satirize the source material in a meaningful way. Many find it hard to seriously regard some of the seemingly sophomoric and juvenile works found on internet video forums, but as the technique has only been recently discovered, the most sophisticated applications in this arena have yet to be seen. One truly legitimate issue raised by all of these films is the apparent opposition to the clichés of modern cinema. In this way, YouTube mashups, re-genre and machinema strongly resemble the practice of “culture jamming” in their process undermining commercial cinema.

Mashup films can be broken down into several predominant styles and tropes. Most of the mashups found on the internet fall into one category and more or less obey the unwritten rules of that class of film. These categories, as I see them are: word associated mashups, which like Danger Mouse’s “Grey Album” unite two disparate source materials by a pun or joke found in the name; transgressive mashups, which transgress the sexual norms put forth in a film, often subverting hetero-normative portrayals; and overdubbing mashups, which use the images from a film and replaces the soundtrack with new dialogue or dialogue from another work, which undermines the original narrative.

Mashups based on word associations speak more than just for the wit of the appropriator. In principal, these mashups, when executed well, express some of the central creative tenets of modern found footage filmmaking: 1) Narrative film consistently follows the same filmic grammar and rarely diverts from it, making it easy to unify disparate films because of their similarities; and 2) the formulas inherent in narrative film are so well known by audiences that a few stylistic cues (which have been imitated to the point of cliché) can easily alert an audience to the nature of what they are watching. Using these two principals, mashups are highly successful at parodying more than just the films they chose to amalgamate, but also at critiquing and revealing the tools of narrative filmmaking.

Some exceptional word associated mashups include “Must Love Jaws” a combination of the romantic comedy “Must Love Dogs” and “Jaws” in which music cues and humorous scenes turn visual source material from “Jaws” into a story about a man who falls in love with a shark. Other superlative works include “8 ½ mile” in which Fellini’s 8 ½ is blended with the trailer for the Curtis Hanson, Eminem vehicle “8 Mile” and one of the greatest YouTube mashups I’ve seen, “10 Things I Hate About Commandments” in which Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner’s roles in “The Ten Commandments” are reduced to a petty High School tiff.

Ostensibly a kind of re-genre, transgressive mashups are crude, juvenile, sometimes vicious, and often droll subversions of the hetero-normative sexuality of films. The rise of YouTube fortunately coincided with the release of American culture-shocker “Brokeback Mountain.” The cause of intense derision, and equally impassioned pleas for tolerance months before the films actual release, the now canonical trailer for the film was, even for the open minded American film-goer, a bit shocking. Never before had two leading men played homosexuals on film demanding empathy rather than ridicule. The trailer was so solemn, so serious about the subject matter that it of course, demanded to be parodied.

Armed with the Gustavo Santaolalla score and the template for the Brokeback trailer[1] hundreds of YouTube users constructed mash-ups of popular films with gay themes. Among the most notable is “Top Gun: Brokeback Squadron,” which puts together the most homoerotic scenes from Top Gun. Playing on Top Gun’s homoerotic subtext between Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer, (whose very casting was based on a picture by photographer Bruce Weber, famous for his homoerotic ad-campaigns for Calvin Klein and Abercrombie and Fitch) the film uses the “Brokeback Mountain” trailer template to tell a new imagining of “Top Gun” as a film about two Naval pilots who fall in love, but must keep their homosexuality a secret from their commanders and girlfriends. Other superlative work includes “Brokeback to the Future,” “Brokeback Mission” (Apollo 13) and “Brokeback Weapon.

Overdubbing, a tradition harkening back to Woody Allen’s “What’s Up Tiger Lilly?[2]” and the Situationist International film “Can Dialectics Break Bricks?[3]” has one of the longest histories of incorporating detournement into cinema. Overdubs have been employed most often using television to provide source material, frequently for political purposes to undermine an agenda or ideology. As of late, overdub has been rare—though the ease of employing the technique has kept it in practice.

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 Hollywood genres by showing the ease in which they can be manipulated to fit into new paradigms. Inventive re-genre films can pinpoint the subtle tricks employed in film trailers to inform an audience, often sub-consciously of exactly what kind of film they are watching the preview for. When done well, re-genre films completely invert the tone of a film.

The most widely seen re-genre film on YouTube manipulates the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of the Stephen King novel “The Shining” into a light hearted family film called “Shining.” The romantic comedy re-imagining of the film, constructed by Robert Ryang, a professional editor, depicts Jack Torrance (originally a character driven insane by cabin fever in a remote hotel) as an author struggling with writer’s block who meets a fatherless young boy named Danny (his son in the original film) and his mother (his wife in the original). Accompanied by Peter Gabriel’s sentimental rock song “Solsbury Hill” the trailer uses a voice over to transform the horror film into another genre—the family oriented romantic comedy. Utilizing dialogue from other films with Jack Nicholson, the flawlessly incorporated trailer could easily convince a naïve viewer of its authenticity. To the viewer in the know, it reveals the techniques of film trailers and genre.

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 Hollywood films, the machinema filmmaker appropriates a pre-created 3-D computer generated environment and plays the game according to how the film will look. As is to be expected, some games can be controlled better than others. The video game “Sim Life 2” allows people to create their own films using avatars which move in a designed space. One of the most viewed films on YouTube, (3,111,692 views) “Male Restroom Etiquette” utilizes this Sim Life feature to describe the nuances of appropriate behavior in male restrooms. Utilizing computer generated avatars as actors, the film, designed as an instructional video, allowed someone to create a well developed, intelligent, humorous and wholly original film right at their computer.

Conclusion

Found footage emerged as an art form because of its powerful critical properties. It flourished because of the cheapness of the materials necessary to create found footage films. It has reappeared as an art form because of the powerful distribution platform of the Internet, and Internet video forums like YouTube. While the use of actual film footage to create a film required purchasing film stock, a flat-bed, splicing materials, and sound editing equipment, the new found footage films require nothing more than internet access. All the material and programs required to create a found footage films today can be downloaded over the Internet, creating an unprecedented ability for filmmakers to write, direct, produce and distribute their films. These new technologies have facilitated resurgence in a technique once only used by marginalized artists and filmmakers. As the tools to create these films become more accessible, the powerful properties inherent in found footage filmmaking will allow for a multitude of people without resources to make films.

[1] Brokeback Mountain Trailer Template: Along with the Gustavo Santaolalla score, the template for the Brokeback trailer tends to revolve around the use of the title cards “It was a friendship / That became a secret / There are places we can’t return / There are lies we have to tell / There are truths we can’t deny.” When inter-spliced with well selected scenes from another film can intimate a gay relationship between any one.

[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, New York, 2000.

[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 Columbia’s jungle drama, East of Borneo starring Rose Hobart. It is a breathtaking example of the potential for surrealistic imagery within a conventional Hollywood film once it is liberated from its narrative causality.” (P. 330, “Visionary Film” by P. Adam Sitney, 3^rd edition, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002.

[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, New York 1993.

[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, Methuen, New York: 1985

[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”, Lawrence Lessig and Rob Yeo, Milwaukee Art Museum, Distributed Art Publishers, New York: 2006.

Michael Snow and Bruce Elder

2007-01-26T10:04:00.001-08:00

(Michael Snow's "Powers of Two" 2003)

Last night Jessica and I went to OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design) to see Bruce Elder in conversation with Michael Snow. Snow, who was a contemporary of some of the most important avant-garde filmmakers, was known to me only through his film Wavelength and a few paintings I’d seen.

Wavelength, a film which has been celebrated as one of the pioneering and superlative efforts of “Structural Cinema[1]” and earned Snow the moniker of “Dean of Structural Film-Makers” by P. Adams Sitney, overshadowed his art career in my mind. Fortunately, I had what seems like the exceptionally rare opportunity to see Snow talk about 80 slides of his work.

(Above Left: "Two Sides to Every Story", 1974 ; Below "In Medias Res" 1998)

The unifying principal I discerned from Snows paintings, photographs and installations was a sense of images and media as being sculptural. I was reminded of cinema studies critic Murray Smith, who writes in his essay “Modernism and the Avant-Gardes” that “Modernism represents the phase in the history of art when it reflects upon its materials and undergoes a kind of purification.” Snow may construct images, but the materials these images are placed over tends to take precedence over the images themselves. In the director of OCAD’s introduction to Snow and Elder, an old and prescient Snow quote is uttered (which I am forced to paraphrase because I was without pen and paper): “I have no interest in expressing myself. No interest at all. I am only interested in ways of seeing.” While I find Snow’s interest in form as well as content very much in line with one of my personal favorite literary movements, Modernism, his general apathy towards content seems to hint at a different aesthetic philosophy, which I will try to describe.

When Snow talks about film, he may be speaking literally, about film as the strip of frames with sprockets which when projected at 24 frames per second will appear to move because of the persistence of vision. When he talks about photographs he may be talking about 2 dimensionality, perspective, transparency and light. In other words, he is focused on the medium of the materials which disseminate images, rather than the images themselves. He refers to these thin slices of paper or long and narrow streams of emulsion as sculptural. He is very much the artistic embodiment of McLuhan’s adage that “the medium is the message.” Like the Modernists before him, Michael Snow reflects that phase in the history of film, when the film-maker reflects upon their materials.

(Above: A still from Shtoorrty, 2005.)

After a long and exhaustive survey of Snow’s work, which while completely engaging was also about the length most attendees expected the entire talk to be (around an hour) Snow went on to show two films. The first, Shtoorrty (what happens when you combine “short” and “story”) manipulates time by superimposing two sections of a scene from an Iranian soap opera. The scene, is described here:

Fade in on a door. A doorbell rings. A beautiful young Woman answers the door. A young handsome Artist with a wrapped painting under his shoulder enters and hugs the beautiful Woman. She asks him to unwrap the painting, which he does. She admires the painting and asks the artist to show her Husband in the next room. They walk into the next room. The Husband, burly, ugly and foppish in an expensive suit admires the painting and asks the artist to hang it in the living room. Then the Husband says to the Artist, “Let’s drink to the painting, but not to you.” The Artist enquires why. The Husband states that he is aware his wife is having an affair with the Artist. The Artist makes a rude comment, which elicits the Husband too throw his wine in his face. The Artist takes the painting off the wall, and breaks it on the Husband’s head. The Artist heads for the door and the Woman says “goodbye.”

Beyond the fact that this scene may portray some subtle wish fulfillment on the part of Snow (the rich patron is scorned by his wife for the beautiful artist) its content is of little importance. Snow manipulates the film by superimposing the beginning of the scene over the middle, so that the scene is perpetual; it might be thought of as the cinematic counterpart to the row-row-row your boat chorus, which overlaps with the middle of the song. The mystery of the scene has been revealed upon first viewing, and the performances and cinematography require no more investigation by the audience. Instead, the audience becomes concerned with overlapping and placement of bodies. The double exposure represents two distinct moments in time meeting and breaking from each other. The result is a constructive effort to complicate a very simple narrative moment into an aesthetically complicated experiment with time. It is also notable for its use of found footage.

(Above: A still from Living Room, 2001. )

The next film, called Living Room comes from Snow’s *Corpus Callosum series. Though it feels at times like an expose of all the possible editing techniques and manipulations possible in video in the 1980s, though it was made in 2001. A lengthy conversation about the film is available here (http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/snow_interview.html). Because of the relatively dated analog nature of the film, and its use of digital techniques I have seen performed expertly, I wasn’t terribly impressed.

The subsequent conversation with Bruce Elder shed some light on Living Room which I hadn’t considered. The conversation, which occurred somewhere around the 2 hour mark of the lecture represented that awkward moment when critic and artist converse. Snow’s discourse is terse and to the point, while Elder, a very articulate and brilliant scholar, tends to mine certain ideas and place them in a larger historical and philosophical context. Jessica felt like Elder may have been using the conversation to sententiously impress his own thoughts upon the audience. After one of Elder’s long insights into Living Room, a slightly befuddled Snow said “I just make em.” I was amused by the fact that few artists today would share Snow’s attitude. Most artists today are as engaged in criticism as their critics. They tend to be as well versed in art history and theory as those who deconstruct their work. Snow seems to be one of the last from the era of artists whose work comes from a more intuitive place. While Snow is in part a conceptual artist, (in that he is focused on the process of his art) his work can be understood outside of a conceptual framework. I had been lost in Elder’s effulgent descriptions of Snow’s work, when I remembered that mysterious element which attracted me to Snow in the first place. He just makes em’.

[1] Structural Film: “The structural film insists on its shape, and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline. Four characteristics of the structural film are its fixed camera position (fixed frame from the viewer’s perspective), the flicker effect, loop printing, and rephotography off the screen.” (P. 348 “Visionary Film" 3rd Ed., P. Adams Sitney, Oxofrd University Press, New York: 2002.)

An Index of the Greatest YouTube Mashups, Re-Genre, Re-Cuts and Machinema

2007-01-16T13:00:00.000-08:00

( a still from 8 1/2 mile )

A WORK IN PROGRESS

A list of the absolute finest mashups, re-genre, re-cuts and machinema on the web. for definitions of terms read my essay "The New Found Footage Filmmakers."

MASHUPS

1. 2001 Goodfellas

2. Pooh-pocalypse Now

3. C for Cookie (Sesame Street mash up with V for Vendetta)

4. 8 1/2 Mile

5. Sesame Streets ( Directed by Martin Scorsese)

6. Full Metal Christmas

8. 10 Things I hate about Commandments (10 Things I Hate About You + Ten Commandments by Mike Dow and Ari Eisner of Smaky Productions)

9. Must Love Jaws (by Mike Dow and Ari Eisner of Smaky Productions)

7. Capote of the Lambs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmfFNJHq0nI&mode=related&search=

Re-Genre

1. Shining (as a romantic comedy / family film )

2. Big (as a pedophilic thriller)

3. Taxi Driver (as a romantic comedy)

4. Something Blue (Blue Velvet as a Family Farce) By Robert Ryang

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5. Mount Brokeback (Brokeback Mountain as a Religious Film) By Robert Ryang

3. Casino Royale (starring Tom Hanks)

4. Signs (of antisemitism)

5. Titanic: Two the Surface (by Derek Johnson)

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MACHINEMA

1. male restroom etiquette