The decay is often done over time: for instance, American experimental director Bill Morrison only uses footage that has literally disintegrated throughout the years. His most famous work, entitled Decasia, is a magnificent symphony of rotting that pays tribute to the disintegrated images of early motion pictures. Of course, found footage filmmaking is more than just the act of destroying stuff with a constructive attitude: these filmmakers often re-work visual waste, the leftovers of film history. Their movies are like houses built out of plastic bottles. LJ Frezza’s Nothing, for instance, was made by compiling the empty rooms appearing in the scenes of Seinfeld into a flow of images showing nothing, i.e. empty rooms. Similarly to Frezza, Michael Robinson rummaged through the forgotten music videos and TV shows of the 1980s to make ironic, often completely surreal montage films; his Light is Waiting is like a far-out nightmare of old television commercials. The grandfather of found footage filmmakers is of course Bruce Conner, who laid the foundation of this cinematic genre in the 1950s. Ironically, the title of his most famous work is A Movie, and in this case the director’s sole contribution was compiling shots of perfectly incongruent films as if they belonged together. A captain of a submarine looks into his periscope and sees a woman sunbathing
on a beach: Conner’s cunning editing makes us believe these images belonged to the same movie, but the tension and humour present in it derives precisely from the obvious dissonances. The montage game played with the original meanings and aura of found images is one of the most often utilised strengths of found footage film. György Pálfi, in his 90-minute-long Final Cut, does practically the same as Conner does in his 5-minutelong A Movie, some fifty years before. True, Pálfi’s work is somewhat more predictable, as he does not make use of the endless possibilities of montage as creatively as Conner – still, it is impossible to stop watching the film, addictive like a drug dissolving through the eyes. Using the same simile, we can say that found footage films are basically the gateway drugs of filmmaking: watching them and making them can easily result in a serious addiction. One of the most peculiar side effects of working with found footages is that after some time you start to feel as if the shots made by others were in fact made by you. As you spend days, weeks and months editing, painting and ruining different shots, it is almost shocking to realise that the images you are holding in your hands were made decades ago. This is why using homemade movies is even more addictive for me: their reels are undeniably singular. It is no coincidence that Péter Forgács, the greatest historian of Hungarian cinema, managed to create a whole body of work out of such footage.
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illustration by Misha Szuharevszki
Hamlet by fermenting thousands of metres of celluloid.)