Issue #6

For some film artists committed to working with archival materials, the hundredth anniversary of World War I was an irresistible opportunity to retrieve something of the historical and cine-historical past and to conjecture how that past has continued to inform the present. Certainly, for artists and writers of all kinds, the war represented a major turning point. Its immense human and economic costs (close to twenty million people died as a direct result of the war) and the sense, in the wake of the signing of the armistice in November of 1918, that nothing of substance had been accomplished by this disaster—indeed, that a second world war might be a distinct possibility—invigorated artistic and literary rebellions against the ways in which the arts had functioned in culture during earlier centuries and was crucial in instigating what we think of as modern art.

Given that the international catastrophe of the war to end all wars occurred just as cinema was evolving into the western world’s major source of entertainment, as well as a source of information, it was virtually inevitable that filmmakers would take their cameras into the field to document what was occurring during the build-up to the war and during the war itself. And, a century later, the lure of the archives where much of this documentation ultimately found a home has made possible a set of remarkable cine-explorations of the war and cinematic representations of it.

Filmmakers covered in this essay include Bill Morrison, Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, Peter Jackson, and Sam Mendes.

When is appropriation appropriate? Kirk Tougas

Every film is a tattoo etched on the surface of time, some more so than others. Certain filmmakers, however, eschew entirely the tradition of distracting the audience from awareness of the fact that they are watching and are customarily invited to submit to a willful disappearance into a real or life-like story. These consummate others instead tend to invite the audience to relish and savor the viewing experience as a sequence of electric paintings, one which may or may not contain a program beyond the temporary tattoo incised onto the dream space they occupy while in a theatre. Some of them, such as Kirk Tougas, go even further: they implore the viewer to actively engage in watching their own watching.

The basis of machinima, as in filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh’s video She Puppet (2001), has a specific contingency about its origins: did Ahwesh herself play the video game Tomb Raider to gather the footage she used? This question gets to the historical definition of machinima’s development out of recordings made using the demo mode for games such as Doom or Quake in the mid-1990s; the transformation of video games through reprogramming and captured gameplay constantly returns as a refrain in their critical appraisals. There is no clear and definitive answer to this question from within the video; the answer is unimportant to her use of this footage. Although what Ahwesh finds for She Puppet is a direct product of past production (the game)—thus resembling found material—at the same time, the shots in She Puppet are entirely new, original, and unique to her video.

By handling the imagery created in Tomb Raider as cinematic material, rather than gameplay, her video has a different focus than those approaches based on game art. However, this interactive environment of the game poses an immediate problem for the familiar conceptions of the readymade material of the archive used in avant-garde practice simply because there is no footage being found.

Found footage filmmaking can be described as the act of finding new meanings in pre-existing images, critically re-working, re-using, examining the original context of the found footage and composing a new film out of it. The first question that occurs to me is: Why would a filmmaker prefer reusing pre-existing, found images to shooting his/her own? It is the particular collection of found footage films made by Jay Rosenblatt that triggered my interest in this non-camera aspect of the field in the first place.

Jay Rosenblatt directly draws to my own concerns by saying: “It is a very different process to work with images that already exist than with something you shoot”. Discussing found footage filmmaking in the context of rejecting the camera offers new insights into this practice.

Ernie Gehr’s 16mm filmmaking activities lasted for more than a quarter of a century (1967-2004). During all that time, he only made a single found footage film in that medium: Eureka (1974). However, since the beginning of the 21^st century, and Gehr’s turn to the use of video, there has been an exponential increase in his attention to this practice. As a way to begin exploring the still too unseen late work of a pivotal figure of the American avant-garde, this essay takes up an in-depth study and close reading of two of Gehr’s found footage videos: The Astronomer’s Dream (2004) and Good Grief ! (2015).