Vidshow Discussion Post: A Brief History of Found Footage Film

[cosmic_llin]

Welcome to the discussion post for the A Brief History of Found Footage Film vidshow, curated by charloween!

Whether or not you attended or supported the 2019 con, join us in the comments to chat about this show.

Comments

[cosmic_llin]

My really strong memory of this show is of how genuinely threatening and upsetting Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (1970) seemed by the end. Like, I had a way stronger visceral reaction to that than I would have expected. Not sure if that was just me or if other people in the room felt that too?

By contrast I remember being totally charmed by Swinging the Lambeth Walk - it was as full as personality as any character study vid, and it was interesting to see how much you can do just with shape, motion and music.

[charloween]

Oh no! But also, there's a reason Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper stuck with me from when I first saw it in an undergrad class. I don't remember the lesson (was it about found footage film?), but I was surprised how disturbing and apocalyptic it feels. On the one hand it's just a lady with some plastic, but on the other it's the end days. The sound does a lot of heavy lifting here, but the repetition of the clip might start off being boring but then becomes unrelenting. /o\

If you liked the Len Lye film, you might enjoy the chapter on his stuff in my friend's book Jazz as Visual Language (Nic also wrote some liner notes for a Lye DVD release, iirc). You're totally right about how the abstract forms have such personality. I'm glad you enjoyed it!

[cosmic_llin]

Yeah, I don't regret having seen it at all, although it was sort of horrible it was also fascinating to see how an effect like that can be created from something so mundane!

Oooh, that sounds interesting, I'll poke the library for it! :D

[soupytwist]

I found this really interesting, and I was especially glad Charloween was around to explain/discuss a bit more. I remember finding it much more immersive than I was expecting - Char obviously curated this to be relatively accessible, andI think she did a brilliant job of pulling in the right context to explain what we were seeing.

And Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper does build up on you!

[charloween]

Thank you! It was a gift to be able to curate some neat bits of found footage and visual music for an audience that has a keen interest in editing and experimental video art (even if we don't call it that). It was my honour to take everyone on a guided tour through a mix of things I find neat, and some canonical bits of found footage film history. :D

[charloween]

For posterity, here are my notes that I used to introduce the clips (all presented for educational purposes!):

VUK 2019 Found Footage notes
40 min of video total
Kind of organised in pairs, roughly chronological, and with the exception of the visual music, on the whole kind of earnest (which is why, again, vids do it better)

1: The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) by Esfir Shub
Made for the 10th anniversary of the revolution, taking documentary footage from Imperial archives and cutting it to highlight the decadent triviality of ruling classes and hard graft of the workers/peasants
Imperial family (Alexei, the princesses) vs the Russian family
The WW1 sections are forceful, with diplomats/gentry meeting for a conference and the intertitle calling them ‘organisers of worldwide slaughter’

2: Rose Hobart (1936) by Joseph Cornell
Cutting together a print of 1931’s East of Borneo, responding to the fad for psychoanalysis and dream states
samba soundtrack is original to the film - showing the final couple of the 19 minute film
Salvador Dali was at its premiere, and he was apparently furious that Cornell had ripped the idea for the film from Dali’s subconscious

3: Komposition in Blau (1935) by Oskar Fischinger
Like many German artists in the 30s he emigrated to the US
Visual music: experimenting with stop motion to illustrate existing music
Familiar? Because Robyn’s ‘With Every Heartbeat’ homages it

4: Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1939) by Len Lye
Another kind of experiment with existing music
Directly working with film stock - painting and scratching it
Takes many different versions of the Lambeth Walk song (a craze of the time) and cuts them together

5: Cosmic Ray (1961) by Bruce Conner
Feat. Beth Pewther (who worked as a commercial artist for decades thereafter)
Follows Conner’s A Movie (1958) as the first collage film to use popular music as soundtrack - for this reason Conner has been called ‘the father of music videos’; Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) is the first to use a rock soundtrack
Watch out for the subtle phallic imagery

6: Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (1970) by David Rimmer
Dramatically different direction! This one takes a few frames of an industrial film, reprinting and processing each iteration
Skipping past a few minutes of progressive iterations to the apocalyptic end!

7: Home Stories (1990) by Matthias Müller
Picks up the idea that experimental films work with iteration, but in a different way
Video art! Hitchcock, Sirk, another thriller/melodramas, using films that had been shown on television

8: Telephones (1995) by Christian Marclay
You probably know the artist’s work - The Clock was at the Tate Modern last year and was awesome. Rather than a 24-hr film, this one is about 8 minutes
Weird now because all the phones have cords

9: Blue Monday (1984) by Duvet Brothers
Warning here for police versus protestors, and for realising that it’s been 35 years and the Tories are still scum
I think it’s making a similar claim to the Romanov one, but the revolution hasn’t come

(and if we’ve got time? Let’s watch another Fischinger! Allegretto from 1936; 2:33)