Special Issue #10

Joseph Cornell is best known for his collages and box-constructions, in which he assembles found objects in a way not dissimilar to the cinematic concept of montage. The artist applied the same collagist technique to his films. If there is a canonical work in the history of experimental cinema, it is Rose Hobart, his first and most well-known film, made in the 1930s, which marked the beginning of the fruitful and long-standing practice of found footage cinema.

Two less explored but equally compelling avenues of analyses will be additionally discussed in this essay: on one hand, a materialist anti-narrative interpretation and, on the other, the decolonial meaning embedded within the text (and texture) of the film, since Rose Hobart could be seen as a decolonial intervention that disrupts, critiques, and subverts the colonialist narratives present in the source material.

The digital archival project Gayblevision showcases a window into Vancouver’s LGBTQ+ communities in the 1980s through video materials, raw footage, interviews, and photographic files. The television series—preserved on ¾” Umatic videotapes and fully digitized by VIVO Media Arts Centre in the 2010s—demonstrates community organizing, video activism, and the importance of marginalized communities leading in the archival preservation processes of their cultural material. In the following, I interview media archivist Karen Knights and discuss the idea of the archive as a living entity sustained through processes such as digitization, migration, remediation, and transformation. Accordingly, some questions arise: Are digital and online repositories guaranteeing a greater longevity for information and memorabilia? How do we manage the remediation, translation, and interpretation of material in a living archive? Drawing on the records continuum model (RCM) and using the Gayblevision television project as a primary example, this paper argues for the framework of archives to be more open and accessible, and to be seen as a dynamic and living entity, which ultimately would provide increased support and care for vulnerable audio-visual material as well as for marginalized communities.

The notes for the Ji.hlava IDFF festival screening of Polish-born, London-based artist Kamila Kuc’s latest film, Her Plot of Blue Sky, managed to scupper my perceived original take regarding a motif running through several of Kuc’s found footage/archive-based films: a grainy analog image of a seagull. The gull is seen flying against a blue sky in Her Plot of Blue Sky, a signifier of freedom that has been denied the film’s heroine, while the gull is set against a reddened sky to suggest the horror of the Soviet purges in Batum, an earlier short about the legacy of Stalin’s purges in the former Soviet Union state of Georgia. The seagull is the nonhuman Other who embodies the instinctual properties of nature: the pure drive of unfettered freedom.

From 2016 to 2022, Kuc, made three films that can be classified under the rubric of found footage and archival film: Batum, I Think You Should Come to America, and What We Shared. In this article a proposition is tested regarding the ethical force of these three films working as a trilogy. I want to consider that Kuc’s analogon, in the form of the seagull image, operates at a level of form and content that is formative to the three films’ status as a found footage trilogy based on recounting the legacy of Soviet history in the present.

In a conversation with Scott MacDonald conducted in the late 1990s, interdisciplinary artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz recalled the vision behind his now well-known 1957 found footage work Cowboy and “Indian” Film. His ritual destruction and the ethnic implications it entails bring down an order of representation, even though the imagery of the American Western—so firmly rooted in the viewer’s imagination—remains recognizable.

Far from leading to a boycott of Western films by found footage artists, their capacity for being recognized or identified instead encourages the development of increasingly diversified restructuring strategies which derive more or less visibly from Montañez Ortiz’s first attempt. Cowboy and “Indian” Film may then be seen as the starting point for the rich corpus of recomposed Westerns that has kept expanding from the 1960s onwards. For several decades, gestures as diverse as fragmentation, erasure or digital reprocessing have been used to criticize the discursive forms of the original films and to offer them a new life.

João Moreira Salles’s films offer a clear overview of a particular use of the archival footage, which I would like to call utopian work with the archive. In my opinion, his films achieve an exemplary use of the archive. They demonstrate that even though archives bring the past to the present, rather than being mere memory exercises they also help to write the future.

In Moreira Salles’s films it is possible to find the key questions to understand the haunting quality of certain uses of the archive in some contemporary films: What kind of spell does time cast upon the images to transform them into archives? What are we talking about when we talk about making archive films? The archive films I refer to in this paper have a tense relation with history. They are works that revisit existing images to try and find out what is new in them. I suspect that that new element might be a utopia, and based on these ideas I will outline the specific characteristics of what could constitute the utopian work with the archive.

Analog media are linked to their physical sources directly since their recordings exist as analogies to whatever physical phenomena they preserve. This connection renders analog media a trace, literally a materialization that remains after the original event has long past; as such, analog media became an aesthetic feature guiding their production/reception during the twentieth century.

The historical reuse of existing film or video material during the analog epoch developed as a response to the restrictive costs and expertise required for media production: through montage anyone could become a movie maker, constructing novel and creative arrangements of meaning that offered opportunities to challenge and subvert the original source material. These moving-image practices have become commonplace with the democratic expansion of digital media, but are also increasingly in conflict with the legal frameworks of copyright and the systems of digital rights management that control when, how, and if media can be employed as found footage. This debate continues with AI and machine learning over the artworks (found media) incorporated into the databases used to create new works; the quotational nature of AI is inescapable because of how the technology itself operates.

The photographic work Wild Places by Lisl Ponger features four words that have been freshly tattooed on a client’s forearm and subsequently crossed out: missionary, mercenary, ethnologist, and tourist. Ponger’s image serves as the thematic inspiration for this discussion of three films: Raquel Schefer’s Avo (Muidumbe), Laurence Favre’s Nwa-Mankamana, and Roger Horn’s Research/Souvenir (Dialogues). These archival creations explore the intricate legacies of colonialism in Southern Africa through diverse methods, inviting audience interpretation. They contribute to a deeper comprehension of our collective past. Bound not only by their incorporation of found footage from pre-independence Southern African nations they also share a unifying element in their utilization of a variety of written source materials.

Video mixtape is a term that describes hand-made VHS collage tapes primarily consisting of found footage re-recorded from movies, television, and home videos. Some call them “video complications,” while others colloquially refer to them as “VHS shit mixes,” “video cut-ups,” “scratch videos” (as the British call them), and to a few lonesome (or perhaps hopeful) creators they are “party tapes.”

In this paper, I consider a diverse range of video mixtapes to discuss their different aesthetic aspects while highlighting several of the most-discussed and paradigmatic works. I argue that the video mixtape can be seen as an extension of mondo film and the shockumentary, but also has roots in experimental cinema, video art, and zine culture. I will also demonstrate that these tapes provide a meta-commentary on the culture in which they were produced.