Cutting through History Found Footage in Avant-garde Filmmaking ROB YEO The practice of using earlier films from a variety of sources'—found footage?—as the raw material for new works of film art has a history that dates back almost to the origins of cinema and is currently considered “a, if not the, dominant critical procedure in independent film and videomaking.”? Variously known as compilation, archival, collage, assemblage, montage, or recycled films,* works incorporating found footage can take a range of different forms. Film scholar Wiliam C. Wees has simplified the matter by reducing the terms and categories to three—compilation, collage, and appropriation— noting that found-footage films can be classified as one or more of these types.5 Some of the resulting fllm forms are quite complex and may superimpose the documentary realism of compiled archival footage along with modernist collage techniques and postmodern appropriation. The manipulation of found footage was taken up by avant-garde artists by the 1930s and has been widely used by experimental filmmakers since that time. Looking at a small cross-section® of the films and examining some of the conditions of their production may shed light on contemporary artistic strategies involving found footage. During the mid-1890s there were a number of people, including Thomas Edison, in North America and Europe who were simultaneously developing various motion picture apparatuses. Although the question of who came first is still contested, Auguste and Louis Lumiére are on record as holding the first public movie premiere—a screening in a café basement in Paris, on December 28, 1895. In spite of their push to refine and market their invention of the cinematograph— a combination camera, projector, and contact printer—and seek revenues from an admission-paying public, they were not at all optimistic about the long-term prospects for their fledgling enterprise. Despite the novelty of the motion picture as a technology and cultural phenomenon, they thought that people would quickly tire of watching projected images when they could just as easily go outside and see the real thing. Antoine Lumiere, Louis and Auguste’s father and theorganizer of their first screening, proclaimed to Georges Méli8s, who was in the market for his first camera, that the cinema was an invention with “no commercial future.”7 Antoine, a businessman, was nevertheless supportive of his sons as they ambitiously set out to make the most of their machinery and its product before public interest waned. In 1898 Francis Doublier was working for the Lumigre brothers, traveling and presenting public programs from their collection of film documents. Movies produced by the Lumiéres were primarily topical records of places and everyday human activities, some of which were staged. The stationary camera was fixed on a tripod, and the individual shots were of relatively long duration, often the length of the camera roll. While traveling in South Russia showing films in the Jewish districts, Doublier was inspired to take advantage of the local interest in the scandalous Dreyfus case. He cut scenes from several of the Lumiares’ disparate stock rolis—none of which included any scenes of Alfred Dreyfus—and combined them to create a rough sequence that, when accompanied by live narration, sufficiently fueled the imagination of his, audience to the point that they believed that they were watching a recently shot, linear document of Captain Dreyfus being arrested, court-marshaled, and shipped off to Devil's Island. This new technique of taking disjointed footage and compiling it into a convincing film that could render evidence and promote the authenticity of an event set the stage for future newsreel and documentary productions.® In the United States, in 1902, Edwin S, Porter was working at the Edison Manufacturing Company, directing and photographing movies for distribution at nickelodeon theaters. One day, while searching through Edison’s film vault for some appealing footage on which to base a story, Porter found scenes depicting various activities of a fire department. To this rather generic footage he added some new, dramatic scenes of the perilous rescue of mother and child from a burning building. This assemblage of staged, narrative-driven scenes with existing footage of “authentic” activities was a first, and Porter's Life of an American Fireman demonstrated the potential of motion pictures to create complex new forms of fiction that could be enhanced by nonfiction elements. Esfir 1. Shub!° worked as a film editor in the postrevolutionary Soviet Union, putting translated titles on American serials for local audiences. In her free time, Shub experimented with cast-off film and learned firsthand about the formidable ower of editing found footage in order to express concepts and influence meaning. A friend and coworker of Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov, Shub saw enormous potential for applying the formal editing principles being used in their films. Where Eisenstein and Kuleshov were using elements of graphic composition and rhythmic editing as a bridge to their fictional content and Dziga Vertov was using them in his documentary form, Shub envisioned their application in a compilation film as a way to rethink and recombine past events. Against great odds and with considerable effort, she researched, tracked down, acquired, and sometimes even restored prerevolutionary newsreel footage from many sources, including the prewar "home movies” of Nikolai Il. in 1927 The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, a compilation of newsreel footage shot between 1912 and 1917 that depicted the events leading to the revolution, was released. Shub quickly followed 14 CUT: FILM AS FOUND OBJECT IN CONTEMPORARY VIDEOwith the creation of several more works in this manner, including The Great Road (1927) and The Russia of Nickolai i! and Lev Tolstoy (1928). Through these productions, Shub set new standards for establishing and maintaining cinema archives, and she introduced compilation techniques for producing new analyses of historical events with archival film." In 1923 Eastman Kodak introduced the sixteen-millimeter format for production and presentation. The lower cost, the use of equipment that was smaller and easier to operate, and the incorporation of nonflammable acetate safety stock made the tools of filmmaking more widely accessible and led to the establishment of a network of Kodak film- processing laboratories throughout the world.!? Increased access to the materials of production served as a magnet to creative individuals who were excited about the potential of film. Artists such as Rudy Burckhardt, Mary Ellen Bute, Joseph Cornell, Jerome Hill, Ralph Steiner, and Paul Strand were among those working in a variety of other media but strongly attracted by the possibilities of expressing ideas through motion pictures. Joseph Cornell was one of the most innovative filmmakers who worked in the early avant-garde. He merits special attention for his contributions as a film artist as well as for his influence on other artists. Cornell is best known as a collagist, who created handmade wooden boxes with glass fronts, containing a carefully arranged variety of small objects, photos, ‘news clippings, illustrations, and other paper ephemera. Although he never embraced the movement, Cornell is considered to be America’s best representative of Surrealism. He maintained many different collections, including cast-off movies that he purchased by the pound at a New Jersey warehouse. Cornell had a lifelong passion for a variety of art forms, and the movies in particular. During the course of his lifetime (1903-72), he made more than twenty films, primarily in collaboration with younger filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt, and Larry Jordan. But in 1936 he worked Joseph Cornel, Rose Hobart, 1936 MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM 15independently to make his earliest and most influential film, Rose Hobart. It is a piece that was far ahead of its time and is now viewed as a pivotal work in the history of the avant-garde, with renewed resonance today. Cornell created Rose Hobart from a 1931 Hollywood jungle adventure feature entitled East of Borneo, starring the actress Rose Hobart. Though she was fading from public view, Hobart was a favorite of Cornell's. By cutting up East of Borneo (alternately known as Ourang or White Captive), removing all of the requisite action scenes and most scenes ot containing Hobart in the frame, rearranging the sequence of events to demolish the continuity and narrative and intermittently inserting shots from scientific film sources, Cornell created a distilled portrait of the actress and an experience that is charming yet both mysterious and unsettling.’® He further manipulated the material by slowing the projection Speed from twenty-four to sixteen frames per second, employing a dark biue filter in front of the projection lens, dropping the original sound track and substituting a looped recording of the smooth samba sound of Nestor Amaral's Orchestra Performing “Holiday in Brazil." This nineteen-minute projection performance, when combined with the radical editing structure, resulted in a film in which the characters appear to "move with a peculiar, {ugubrious lassitude, as if mired deep in a dream." The completed Rose Hobart premiered at the Julien Levy Gallery in December 1936. This film matinee coincided with the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in which Cornell was represented by two of his boxes and ten small bell-jar objects. Also on the film program, for which Cornell served as the projectionist, were Duchamp's Anemic Cinema, Man Ray's Etoile de Mer, and a selection of shorts from Cornell's collection, which Levy called “Goofy Newsreels.” Salvador Dall, who was in New York for the MoMA show, attended the matinee and was among the very few who really understood the signiticance of Cornell's achievement. It is reported that midway through the Presentation of the film, Dali became obviously agitated and boisterously shouted out insults before knocking over the Projection stand as he stormed out of the gallery. Perhaps perceiving that the Surrealist goal of unleashing the unconscious had been achieved by Cornell, Dalf later explained his actions to Levy, insisting that Cornell had taken “his" film concept, Perhaps even from Daifs own unconscious. “I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it.’” indeed, even if Cornelt had never telepathically visited Salvador Dal’s private thoughts before, it can be assumed that Rose Hobart took up at least temporary residence in Dali's consciousness following the screening. Through its restoration and Preservation by Anthology Film Archives, itis a film that continues to influence and inspire many artists working today. It was almost thirty years before another artist, however indirectly, picked up on the path opened by Rose Hobart. Bruce Conner is widely acknowledged to be the founder and inspiration for much of the interest in found-footage filmmaking over the past forty-plus years. If a person has seen only one example of avant-garde filmmaking, it is very likely that it was A Movie (1958), the first film produced by Conner. 16 CUT: FILM AS FOUND OBJECT IN CONTEMPORARY VIDEOBruce Conner, A Movie, 958 Conner is a highly accomplished artist who incorporates collage techniques into his sculptures, graphic works, and films. His films have been composed almost exclusively of found footage and unmanipulated, often well-known, musical sound tracks. Inspired by the Marx Brothers’ comedy Duck Soup and developed conceptually over many years, A Movie is made up of shots condensed from longer action films, available to Conner at his local film supply store. These were assembled along with scavenged newsreel, scientific, soft-core porn, leader, and other types of film.!® Generally known as “the one experimental film that everybody likes," A Movie is a prime example of how seemingly random film footage can be recombined to develop complex concepts and construct a larger logic. Often called on to serve as an exemplary model of avant-garde filmmaking, it has probably been studied more closely than any other film in the genre. A Movie is commonly divided into discrete sections by analysts,” and the section following the titles includes a sequence of short, fast-moving shots with a transportation theme: galloping horses, charging elephants, speeding locomotives, race cars, and tanks. While it starts off quick, funny, and light, by the end of the segment it takes on a different tone. Cars are shown crashing, and a sense of threat emerges. The next section includes a series of accidents and disasters, along with some images that are humorous (but with an aura of sexist aggression)?°—such as the famous sequence of a submarine officer looking into a periscope and launching a torpedo, followed by a posing pinup model and an atomic bomb climax—or simply bizarre, such as the cyclists awkwardly riding a very strange collection of bicycles. The last section begins with military aerial footage and proceeds with some of the most horrifying imagery in the film, interspersed with some brief shots of more peaceful imagery. After the disasters and atrocities culminate, the film ends with a series of underwater shots in which a scuba diver examines a sunken ship and finally swims into it. The sequence is, accompanied by a musical crescendo on the sound track. MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM. 17Considering the grim and disturbing nature of the imagery in A Movie, it may appear somewhat contradictory that it continues to be received so positively and widely. A partial explanation for this may lie within the complex manner in which we receive any found-footage film. While individual images from horrible events in history are placed with other such images to create a compounded dread, there is relief within the montage. Moreover, viewers tend to have selective memories, and there is the spatial and temporal distance afforded by events that obviously aren't current and happened to “someone else.” This “Bosch-like vision of modern progress"2! uses disparate archival footage and simple, straight-cut editing to develop associations, constructing an extremely dense and sophisticated vision that is at times 9, Dut always accessible. It provides relief in the end, the sense that it is ultimately “only a movie! humorous, mostly disturt As Patricia Mellencamp has pointed out, “A Movie is a history of cinema as catastrophe" that “becomes the history of Western culture or the United States—a history of colonial conquest by technology, resolutely linking sex, death, and ithin the safe, perverted distance of cinema~ questioning our very desire for cinema (a fetishistic, deathly pleasure voyeurism, economic superiority, and national boundaries). ‘A Movie has had considerable cultural impact and is pointed to by many filmmakers, both peers and students, as the reason they became interested in the potential of experimenting with film. Robert Nelson has acknowledged the influence of Conner’s work. which is most evident in one of the three films he made with William T. Wiley. The Great Blondino (1967) plays with both black-and-white and color imagery and incorporates found footage along with ive action, an improvised narrative loosely based on the activities of Harry Blondin, a nineteenth-century acrobat who pushed a wheelbarrow across a tightrope suspended over Niagara Falls. Nelson describes the editing process: “I just dove in and started mixing the footage [of Blondinol with TV outs and other material. AS | was working on it, could see a kind of story evolving, so| went with that. After a while it seemed to be making itself, telling a story in some crude, episodic way: art of the creation of the ‘The construction process Nelson describes is similar to that expressed by Bruce Conner Sequence you're thinking about happened during the process of collecting film. | snip out small parts of films and collect them on a larger reel. Sometimes when | tail-end one bit of the film onto another, I'l find a relationship that | would have never thought about consciously—because it doesn't create a logical continuity or it doesn't fit my concept of how to edit a film."25 ‘Among other films with formal ties to Conner's found-footage work, yet providing their own distinct personal sion, are Raphael Montafiez Ortiz's Cowboy and “indian” Film (1958) and Newsree! (1958), Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley’s Schmeerguntz (1966), Chick Strand’s Loose Ends (1979), and Decodings (1988) by Michael Wallin, Ken Jacobs, who began making films in the mid-1950s in New York City and worked briefly for Joseph Cornell, has been a key figure in the rise of experimental film and continues to greatly influence the field through his films and his Nervous System projected film performances. His Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969-71) is a "2-hour tour-de-force”26 18 CUTEFILM AS FOUND OBJECT IN CONTEMPORARY ViDEOKen Jacobs, Perfect Film, 1985 that expands, through rephotography, a ten-minute 1905 Billy Bitzer short of the same name, obtained from the Library of Congress paper print collection. The original work was based on the nursery rhyme and is didactically yet poetically transmuted into an elongated, highly detailed study in order to, as Jacobs states, savor more of what is, and was, actually there, and to augment and embellish it in various ways, to play it?” A later work by Jacobs, Perfect Film (1985), is composed of outtakes from television news coverage of the assassination of Malcolm X. He obtained the film footage through the purchase of the metal reel that it was mounted on. Jacobs notes that his contribution was “leaving it alone”: “This was the stuff that they had discarded and someone, instead of just throwing it in the wastebasket decided, who knows, it might have some future use, so without any Kind of order the film clips were attached one to the other. And that's how I found it.... | looked at it and said ‘perfect."** Kindred in spirit to Jacobs's Perfect Film is Public Domain, made in 1972 by Hollis Frampton. Part of the colossal, lamentably uncompleted Magellan film cycle, which was intended to be projected over a full calendar year, Public Domain is ‘composed of sixteen short films from the Library of Congress. The films are arranged alphabetically by title, and Frampton intended that they “form a major motif and compositional principle in the completed Magellan.”2? The act of unearthing obscure works and “remaking them’ is consistent with his concept of the “metahistorian of cinema,” one who organizes the history of film through his or her work, which may include film production, perhaps with found footage. [The metahistorian] is occupied with inventing a tradition, thus, a coherent wieldy set of discrete monuments, meant to inseminate resonant consistency into the growing body of his art. MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM 19‘Such works may not exist, and then it is his duty to make them. Or they may exist already, somewhere outside the intentional precincts of the art (for instance, in the prehistory of cinematic art, before 1943). And he must remake them.2° Ina similar fashion, Su Friedrich’s films critique conventional cinema and modern society, yet she does so from a position within the avant-garde and the feminist movement. She has been a leading figure among women artists examining issues of gender and sexuality. Her work is especially noteworthy for her rethinking and rewriting of our conventional boundaries between public and private, past and present, and individual and collective responsibility through her use of found footage and hands-on technique. The Ties That Bind (1984) examines Friedrich's German roots by incorporating images and sounds from a variety of sources. These include archival footage shot in Germany during World War Il, Super 8 images from Friedrich’s ip to Germany to trace her roots, and interviews with her mother. As the avant-gardist notes, films composed even partially from found footage are generally acknowledged to be “editor's films,” as that aspect of the production tends to be especially challenging: “To me the most fantastic part of constructing a film is taking many disparate elements and making some sense out of them, making them work together and inform each other.">! Leslie Thornton explores the relationship between ethnography and found footage’ in her epic, Peggy and Fred in Hell, produced (thus far) as an ongoing series of twelve episodes, the earliest dating from 1981 and the latest completed in 2002. Drawing upon film, video, architecture, radio, and digital media, this film combines archival images and sounds with live-action scenes of “two children who ‘perform themselves’ in an apocalyptic, ruined landscape.’*? The sense of detachment created by the found footage (for example, animals, landscapes, machinery) extends the utter disarray of the cl ren’s surroundings and blurs spatial and ternporal boundaries. Another of Thornton's films, Old Worldy (1997), utilizes a method of production with found objects that is reminiscent of work by Jacobs and Frampton, as well as the mixes of music DJs and other culture jammers. Old Worldy, which is a collaboration with filmmakers Karen Cinorre and Anouk DeClercq, was the fruit of an accident one night. I had bought a ree! of films for $15 at a junk store, and somebody suggested we put music on while we watched them. We were all completely enchanted by the footage and the resulting relationship between sound and image, but it was completely accidental. We transferred everything to video, didn’t cut the image and didn’t change any of the music. We just fooled around until we found an alignment that seemed especially dynamic. That was the one edit—putting 30 minutes of appropriated music to 30 minutes of uncut image.%4 20. CUT:FILN AS FOUND OBJECT IN CONTEMPORARY VIDEO