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Drawing on ideas of the Surrealist automatic and filmic détournement, artists working with found footage are able to construct new meanings and aesthetics by deconstructing completed audiovisual texts. When original music is retained, or replaced by a new sonic collage, the disjointed sonic flow problematises and enhances the collage aesthetic by extending the possibilities for juxtaposition not only in a linear fashion, but also in a vertical, audiovisual direction, a process that highlights the materiality and artifice of the new combination of images. Here, pre-used footage can be collaged in such a way as to bring to the fore the conventions of mainstream cinematography and the languages of mass media. The result is not audiovisual synchronicity, but rather collision, or dissonance. Through the close reading of several found-footage films, this chapter traces the evolution of an activated form of audiovisual consumption that arises from a process of alienated listening.

This chapter focuses on Péter Forgács’s two films Wittgenstein Tractatus and Bourgeois Dictionary. Both films utilize amateur film footage and stand out for their explicitly reflexive, metapoetic treatment and their innovative, nonnarrative formal structure. In fact, both films share overlapping film materials and explore linguistic and quasi-mathematical frameworks for organizing the found images and motivating their potential meanings. Music, voice-over, image, and text stand in a highly complex and often explicitly divergent or paradoxical relationship to one another. Wittgenstein Tractatus could be characterized as a poetic montage of verbal statements and visual documents that resonate with the historical pathos of the Central European, bourgeois, Jewish lifeworld that Wittgenstein shared with the filmed subjects of Forgács’s found footage.

Austrian filmmaker Gustav Deutsch has been a major contributor to what has come to be called “found-footage filmmaking” and/or “recycled cinema”—that is, he is best-known for making films from other films. This interview focuses on a range of his projects: his first found-footage project, an exploration of home movies made by Austrians visiting the Italian coast in the years after Super-8mm became a popular film gauge for documenting family events; a collaborative diptych of Place, made with an Algerian friend, comparing the Algerian oasis Figuig and Deutsch’s native Vienna; his revisiting of proto-cinematic technologies in the construction of a panoramic camera obscura on a Greek island; his remarkable feature film Shirley—Visions of Reality (2013) in which he (and his partner Hanna Schimek) dramatize a series of canonical Edward Hopper paintings; and the recent Notes and Sketches 1: 31 Pocket Films. 2005–2015, a panorama of everyday events, made with new camera technologies.

This is the first career interview with French Canadian Dominic Gagnon, whose controversial work has been a crucial contribution to a recent tendency within the history of found-footage film (or recycled cinema) of mining YouTube and similar sites to find raw material for new, feature-length works. Gagnon is drawn to YouTube postings that are edgy (and often quickly suppressed) by the host sites: postings by conspiracy theorists, teenagers facing “the end of the world,” and most recently postings garnered with the directional keywords “north” and “south.” Gagnon’s of the North (2015) has been particularly provocative, since it recycles many postings by indigenous individuals in the Canadian north. Gagnon’s feature-length videos are vivid, engaging, often troubling panoramas of internet “territories.”