Issue #8

Stan VanDerBeek’s appropriations of popular imagery from newspapers and magazines arranged as complex moving-collages and shown as multiple-windowed compositions, have received extensive critical attention. However, his work with sound—equally complex—has not enjoyed the same consideration. This omission is not surprising. Discussions of found footage films rarely concern the dimensions of music and sound, yet the use of recognizable popular music as a found object—a déjà entendu—is an obvious feature in a wide range of classic avant-garde films. VanDerBeek’s use of pop songs participates in the general transformation of his appropriated materials, a context that produces shifts that philosopher Bernard Stiegler describes as a potential implicit in all replays of any media—that one can listen again to the same thing and hear something different.

While rooted in the tradition of the twentieth century’s avant-garde, in the twenty-first century found and archival footage-based cinema has re-emerged as a widespread nonfiction subgenre. Over the past two decades filmmakers in numerous countries have been reusing the archive to make new films entirely from old footage. In this essay I propose to look at found and archival footage-based films from a specific historical context: the use of soviet-era footage appropriated by post-communist filmmakers. I direct my attention to two works—Revue (2008) by the Ukrainian film director Sergei Loznitsa, and Into the Unknown (2009) by the Lithuanian video artist and filmmaker Deimantas Narkevičius—to examine how these films recycle archival images of socialist people. In doing so, I will consider the purpose that these images once bore, and how these works cinematically reflect their heterotopian bonds with collective memory today.

Sam Ashby’s film The Colour of His Hair (2017) melds hyper-staged fictional reenactment with a documentary-style investigation of queer archiving to explore the nuances of queer history. Ashby’s film takes an experimental approach to both narrative and documentary, maintaining that a successful attempt to historicize queerness acknowledges that queer past is not fixed, and instead functions to inform the present and hopes for the future. Drawing on the work of queer theorists like José Esteban Muñoz and film critics like Trinh T. Minh-ha, this paper argues that Ashby’s sourcing of archival materials scrutinizes the fraught relationships that queerness has to temporality and truth.

The works of experimental filmmaker James Benning are predominantly examined through an ecological lens due to his interest in landscapes or are situated within the context of structural film. This paper however examines the historical dimensions of Benning’s work through a case study of his 1984 film American Dreams (Lost and Found). The film juxtaposes the career highlights of baseball legend Hank Aaron and the diary entries of attempted political assassin Arthur Bremer as a means of contrasting the way two dissimilar individuals navigate the American experience between the years 1954 to 1976. Benning supplements these viewpoints with a variety of media materials such as era appropriate radio broadcasts, advertisements, music, and interviews with figures from popular culture as a means of contextualizing scenes historically. The combination of these diverse media sources gives rise to a dialectic that allows the spectator to ponder the contradictory nature of the material put in front of them, and in turn, draws their attention to the various ways in which history is constructed. Moreover, this approach foregrounds how artifacts of all kinds can serve as markers of the past and have historical value.