Search Results

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.

Found footage filmmaking often generates novel juxtapositions and produces new meanings unintended by the footage’s original makers—meanings that are, in other words, “inappropriate.” One response to many such films is laughter. Through an examination of several experimental found footage videos made in the past decade, this chapter explores the notion of “inappropriation,” of the unexpected and potentially subversive possibilities of audiovisual appropriation at this social and historical moment. Drawing on the theories of Henri Bergson, the chapter argues that the laughter associated with inappropriation is often generated through the blurring of certain boundaries and/or from the recognition of a connection between two (or more) things previously unrecognized, disrupting habitual associations and establishing alternative ones. This laughter does not guarantee that inappropriation is always subversive of the dominant ideology, but the chapter suggests that such laughter at and with an inappropriation film may sometimes constitute a complex form of critique.

This chapter discusses the visual style of The Blair Witch Project (1999). In notable opposition to the slasher cycle and the later ‘torture porn’ trend in modern horror, The Blair Witch Project takes a distinctively ‘less is more’ approach to visuals. It fails to reveal much that is horrific in the truest sense of excess that characterises much of the horror genre in film. The Blair Witch Project relies on the power of suggestion and the fear of what is unseen. While the film has a witch as the central antagonist and the dark and frightening woods as its primary location, it attempts to create a realistic atmosphere through its presentation, deceiving the viewer into thinking they are watching the actual found footage of three disappeared students. It is presented to the audience as a work of fact; not a traditional horror film, but a documentary chronicling real events that were filmed by someone involved in a terrible experience. The chapter then considers the mockumentary or mock-documentary approach of The Blair Witch Project.

This chapter analyzes the recent development in first-person camerawork in horror, in which the killer-aligned camera of Killer POV has been supplanted by the victim- or protagonist-aligned cameras of “found footage”—and in the realm of gaming, first-person shooters (FPS). Where Killer POV communicates the owner’s mastery over the objects of their look, this “searching camera” indicates vulnerability and inadequacy, and the chapter looks to a long history of writing about documentary cinematography to theorize the connection between handheld camerawork, and the body of the camera operator. An FPS game like Left 4 Dead (2008), however, pairs that feeling of vulnerability and an always-partial view of its zombie-filled landscape with action and the ability to combat the threats surrounding the players. In [REC] (2007) and [REC] 2 (2009), the camera operator is always placed in a position of impotence, and an inability to act. The chapter closes by examining a recent trend in horror gaming, which equates powerlessness with horror. So games like P.T. (2014), Layers of Fear (2016), and Paranormal Activity: The Lost Soul (2017) pair an FPS-like first-person interface with an inability to directly attack or defend against the threats that populate the diegesis.

This chapter focuses on how surveillance cinema incorporates the consumer-subject in the era of home video, online networking, and “dataveillance.” By positing Debord’s account of the “spectacle” as a necessary element of surveillance in a consumer economy, the chapter argues that consumer-level surveillance in cinema is best approached through “compulsive documentation” films—films shot entirely in first-person-camera style and based on the premise that the entire narrative is directly presented through “real” footage shot on consumer video equipment, such as The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. Even as first-person and found-footage conceits seek to present a direct, individualized perspective, they are best understood as a phenomenon through their tremendously successful interactive online marketing campaigns and their diffusion of the cinematic experience into the “virtual” space of internet communities and digital economies. By showing the formal and structural contiguities between the narrative and technical elements of these films, their marketing campaigns, social media, and internet consumption, this chapter shows how co-defining subjective experience and surveillance have become in a digital economy, and the part that video mediation plays in establishing that relation.

This chapter studies how The Blair Witch Project (1999) was marketed, how it was received by critics and audiences, and the legacy that endures more than a decade after its release. The Blair Witch Project was one of the first films to fully explore the potential of the Internet as a marketing tool. The distributors of The Blair Witch Project used ancillary media methods, including a detailed website that immersed the browser in the mythology of the film and an accompanying documentary, The Curse of the Blair Witch. After the Sundance screening that allowed the filmmakers to sell it to distributor Artisan, the marketing became a huge part of making The Blair Witch Project the phenomenon it was in 1999. It affected the reception with audiences being encouraged to see the film as just one more part of a larger experience and helped build the legacy that would make The Blair Witch Project such an enduring part of popular culture, with spoofs, a sequel, porn versions, and a whole sub-genre of horror imitating it by copying the found footage format.

This chapter interrogates how artists’ moving image has grappled with the increased ridigification of copyright that has occurred over the last two decades. Many artists champion the freedom to reuse copyrighted materials, but fail to interrogate the particular circumstances that it make possible for them to do so without retribution, while simultaneously avoiding an engagement with the significant encroachments on fair use and the public domain that have been implemented as part of new copyright legislation that seeks to control the unruliness of digital reproduction. As a counterpoint to such positions, this chapter examines Ben White and Eileen Simpson’s Struggle in Jerash (2009), a work made by repurposing a public domain film of the same title made in 1957 in Jordan. Simpson and White contest the increasing privatization of visual culture, insisting on the wealth of the cultural commons precisely as it is under threat.

This chapter represents an attempt to bracket the discourse of private property, authorship, and cultural ownership with which we commonly frame discussions of sampling practices. Instead, the chapter uses psychoanalytical theories of repetition as an alternative framework to counteract the conceptual flattening that often befalls sampling practices when they are accused of infringing intellectual property rights. Exploring this approach in Martin Arnold’s 1998 found footage film Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, an award-winning work of audiovisual sampling, this chapter proposes that the repetition characterizing all sampling works does not require legitimization as an analytical mode of (re-)interpretation or critique. Rather, the repetitions of sampling are symptomatic of culturally, socially, and psychologically productive tendencies that may allow us to work through the alienation characterizing our relationships to cultural expressions bound in repressive circuits of ownership and commodity exchange.

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.”

This chapter examines the notion of identification in relation to The Blair Witch Project (1999). One of the primary reasons for the continued use of the found footage aesthetic, popularised in The Blair Witch Project, must be that it increases identification for horror film viewers. These fans of the horror genre search for films that will terrify them. Having a character hold a camera is the closest a spectator can get to living the film, but they get to experience it from the safety of their seat in front of the screen. Considering the positioning of spectators, and exploring the cognitive processes that lead to increased identification, is essential. Is it really as simple as suggesting that, because the cameras are in the hands of the characters, audiences will identify more with them, and therefore be more scared? Many film theorists have considered identification, empathy, and emotion and some have applied their findings to The Blair Witch Project.

Hand-held cameras and night vision technology have become increasingly common in the contemporary horror film. Taking Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's phenomenally successful REC films (2007, 2009, 2012) as exemplary of this and other recent trends (e.g. intertextual cannibalism and girl monsters), this chapter will examine how these innovations relate to the certain generic constants of the horror film (such as obstructed visibility and mounting dramatic structure). The driving motor of both REC and REC2 is their use of video recording technology. While the threat seems to shift from zombie-like contagion in the first film to demonic possession in the second, the technological gambit of the two films remains the same: both films are entirely mediated by recording equipment. A single professional TV camera occupies center stage in the first case while in the second, there is a proliferation of devices and locations (including cameras embedded into firefighters’ helmets). Both films give the night vision function a key role in the final (climactic) segment during which the dialectic between visibility and invisibility itself becomes the main drama and the camera the central protagonist.

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.

Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) launched the horror subgenre of “found footage”—pseudodocumentary horror—into the mainstream. The film was marketed as a true story and features the footage of three student filmmakers who got lost on a trip to document the Blair Witch phenomenon. The film was remarkably effective in using simple cinematic techniques to generate an authenticity aesthetic, and in using a suggestive multiplatform advertising campaign, thus capturing audience interest and generating strong emotional responses. The film tapped into evolved defense mechanisms through its depiction of vulnerable youths getting lost in an unknown, hostile natural environment and being hunted by some malignant, apparently supernatural agent. The film’s promise of authenticity, of real horror, made the narrative premise even more salient to audiences.

Chapter Four examines how ambient video stages spaces of shallow depth between the software space of image compositing and the aleatory discoveries of found footage, creating “soft” spaces of attention restoration and subjective dispersal that serve as spatial models for the neoliberal emphasis on autonomy and freedom amidst environmental controls.

The introduction to Sampling Media, this chapter furnishes an overview both to the idea of sampling studies and to the content of the specific chapters collected in the book. The chapter opens with an episode from the cooking show Top Chef: Just Desserts, which unexpectedly remixes the culinary and musical meanings around “sampling.” This example illustrates and encapsulates the gist of the book: that sampling has moved beyond its origins in hip-hop music to function in widespread and compelling ways across a variety of media. The introduction emphasizes that sampling can be understood as a contemporary digital incarnation of a long-standing history of collage and appropriation in the arts. The introduction also contextualizes sampling in terms of politics, academics, aesthetics, and culture more generally, implicitly calling for (and initiating) “sampling studies.” Last, the introduction highlights the four sections of the book: “Roots,” “Scenes,” “Cinema,” and “Web.”

Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2012) and Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (1991) are collage works made up of decayed silent-era film fragments. The films approach sound in contrasting ways: Lyrical Nitrate uses old 78 rpm recordings of operatic music as musical accompaniment to its decayed images, whereas Decasia uses a specially commissioned score and exists not only in DVD format but also as an elaborately staged performance piece. This chapter is an investigation of the role of the soundtrack within both films’ repurposing strategy, comparing and contrasting their sonic approaches, using a Chion-esque idea of “audio-vision” in an effort to understand their aesthetic workings. Despite the material heterogeneity of film sound and film image, the spectator takes in the experience as a synthesis. Yet beyond representational strategies the materiality of sounds and images in the pre- and postdigital ages is arguably the subject of exploration unifying this comparative analysis.