Holly Rogers
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- August 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190469894
- eISBN:
- 9780190469931
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190469894.003.0010
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
jaimie Baron
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199949311
- eISBN:
- 9780199364749
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199949311.003.0013
- Subject:
- Music, Popular, History, American
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Peter Turner
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781906733841
- eISBN:
- 9781800342163
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781906733841.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Adam Charles Hart
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- November 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190916237
- eISBN:
- 9780190916275
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190916237.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Catherine Zimmer
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479864379
- eISBN:
- 9781479876853
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479864379.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Peter Turner
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781906733841
- eISBN:
- 9781800342163
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781906733841.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Peter Turner
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781906733841
- eISBN:
- 9781800342163
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781906733841.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Few films have had the influence and impact of The Blair Witch Project (1999). Its arrival was a horror cinema palette cleanser after a decade of serial killers and postmodern intertextuality, a bare ...
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Few films have had the influence and impact of The Blair Witch Project (1999). Its arrival was a horror cinema palette cleanser after a decade of serial killers and postmodern intertextuality, a bare bones ‘found footage’ trendsetter. The Blair Witch Project was the tenth biggest box office earner of 1999. Even with strong competition in the horror genre, the film managed to stand out from the rest. It was arguably a product of its time more than any other film of the 1990s, heralding the advent of digital filmmaking. Backed up by an internet marketing campaign, The Blair Witch Project became a glowing example of what could be achieved with cheap emerging technology, imagination, and a ‘less is more’ approach. By the year 2000, and due to the influx of digital video cameras, there were far more independent features being made than ever before. This book explores the aesthetics of The Blair Witch Project, how identification is encouraged in the film, and the way it successfully creates fear in contemporary audiences. The book tells the story of the film from his conception and production, and then provides a unique analysis of the techniques used, their appeal to audiences and the themes that helped make the film such an international hit, including the pioneering internet marketing.Less
Few films have had the influence and impact of The Blair Witch Project (1999). Its arrival was a horror cinema palette cleanser after a decade of serial killers and postmodern intertextuality, a bare bones ‘found footage’ trendsetter. The Blair Witch Project was the tenth biggest box office earner of 1999. Even with strong competition in the horror genre, the film managed to stand out from the rest. It was arguably a product of its time more than any other film of the 1990s, heralding the advent of digital filmmaking. Backed up by an internet marketing campaign, The Blair Witch Project became a glowing example of what could be achieved with cheap emerging technology, imagination, and a ‘less is more’ approach. By the year 2000, and due to the influx of digital video cameras, there were far more independent features being made than ever before. This book explores the aesthetics of The Blair Witch Project, how identification is encouraged in the film, and the way it successfully creates fear in contemporary audiences. The book tells the story of the film from his conception and production, and then provides a unique analysis of the techniques used, their appeal to audiences and the themes that helped make the film such an international hit, including the pioneering internet marketing.
Erika Balsom
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780231176934
- eISBN:
- 9780231543125
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231176934.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Martin J. Zeilinger
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199949311
- eISBN:
- 9780199364749
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199949311.003.0012
- Subject:
- Music, Popular, History, American
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
David Laderman and Laurel Westrup (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199949311
- eISBN:
- 9780199364749
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199949311.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Popular, History, American
This collection focuses on sampling as a logic of exchange between audiovisual media. While some recent scholarship has addressed sampling as a practice within popular music and popular culture, ...
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This collection focuses on sampling as a logic of exchange between audiovisual media. While some recent scholarship has addressed sampling as a practice within popular music and popular culture, primarily in relation to copyright, this book will be the first of its kind: a critical study of sampling and remixing across the audiovisual spectrum. Of special interest here are works that bring together both audio and visual sampling: music that samples film and television; underground dance and multimedia scenes that rely on sampling; Internet “memes” that repurpose music videos, trailers, and news broadcasts; films and videos that incorporate a wide range of sampling aesthetics; and other provocative variations. Comprised of four sections titled “Roots,” “Scenes,” “Cinema,” and “Web,” this collection digs deep into and across sampling practices that intervene in popular culture from unconventional or subversive perspectives. To this end, Sampling Media extends the conceptual boundaries of sampling by emphasizing its intermedial dimensions, exploring the politics of sampling practice beyond copyright law, and examining its more marginal applications. It likewise puts into conversation compelling instances of sampling from a wide variety of historical and contemporary, global and local contexts. In this way, the book puts “sampling studies” on the academic map.Less
This collection focuses on sampling as a logic of exchange between audiovisual media. While some recent scholarship has addressed sampling as a practice within popular music and popular culture, primarily in relation to copyright, this book will be the first of its kind: a critical study of sampling and remixing across the audiovisual spectrum. Of special interest here are works that bring together both audio and visual sampling: music that samples film and television; underground dance and multimedia scenes that rely on sampling; Internet “memes” that repurpose music videos, trailers, and news broadcasts; films and videos that incorporate a wide range of sampling aesthetics; and other provocative variations. Comprised of four sections titled “Roots,” “Scenes,” “Cinema,” and “Web,” this collection digs deep into and across sampling practices that intervene in popular culture from unconventional or subversive perspectives. To this end, Sampling Media extends the conceptual boundaries of sampling by emphasizing its intermedial dimensions, exploring the politics of sampling practice beyond copyright law, and examining its more marginal applications. It likewise puts into conversation compelling instances of sampling from a wide variety of historical and contemporary, global and local contexts. In this way, the book puts “sampling studies” on the academic map.
Scott MacDonald
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- August 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190052126
- eISBN:
- 9780190052164
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190052126.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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.”Less
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.”
Peter Turner
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781906733841
- eISBN:
- 9781800342163
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781906733841.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719089770
- eISBN:
- 9781781708651
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089770.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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, ...
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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.Less
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.
Scott MacDonald
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- August 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190052126
- eISBN:
- 9780190052164
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190052126.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Mathias Clasen
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190666507
- eISBN:
- 9780190666545
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190666507.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Holly Rogers and Jeremy Barham (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- August 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190469894
- eISBN:
- 9780190469931
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190469894.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This book explores music- and sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital ...
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This book explores music- and sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screen music discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and the audiovisual strategies of experimental film. The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the United States through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film, remediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological and aesthetic tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walter Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of VJing.Less
This book explores music- and sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screen music discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and the audiovisual strategies of experimental film. The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the United States through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film, remediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological and aesthetic tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walter Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of VJing.
Paul Roquet
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816692446
- eISBN:
- 9781452953625
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816692446.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Technology and Society
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Laurel Westrup and David Laderman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199949311
- eISBN:
- 9780199364749
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199949311.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Popular, History, American
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 ...
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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.”Less
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.”
Nessa Johnston
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- August 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190469894
- eISBN:
- 9780190469931
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190469894.003.0012
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
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 ...
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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.Less
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.