TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Introduction, by André Habib and Annaëlle Winand

Re-use in the cinema goes back to early cinema and the practice of re-editing actualities. The film historian Jay Leyda, who wrote the first book on the compilation film, dates its earliest iterations to around 1898, drawing in particular on the apocryphal story of the creation of a film on the Dreyfus affair made out of disparate cut-outs and assembled by Francis Doublier, a Lumière operator.^[1] Other films became exemplary of these practices, such as Life of an American Fireman, assembled in 1902 by Edwin S. Porter, an employee of the Edison Manufacturing Company, and The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, by the Russian film editor Esfir I. Shub. In each case we find images which have been re-purposed away from their original context: actuality footage of a fire is edited into a fiction film; official films documenting and glorifying the life of the tsars is used to denounce the despotic power of monarchs.

The other aspect of re-use in cinema, which concerns experimental cinema more directly, relates to the tradition of collage found in avant-garde practices, from Cubism to Dada, Picasso to Schwitters. Similarly, the poetic force of a collage/montage of disparate and far-removed images, often banal and taken from the fabric of modern life, is explored in numerous avant-garde films of the 1920s, including Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger, 1924) and Emak Bakia (Man Ray, 1926). In many respects, the same reassembly practice characterizes Joseph Cornell’s inventive montages of diverse sources (Rose Hobart, 1936-67; By Night with Torch and Spear, around 1942; The Midnight Party, 1938-69), the landmark work of Bruce Conner (A MOVIE, 1958; Cosmic Ray, 1962) and the epic Star Spangled to Death (1957-2004) by Ken Jacobs. All of these works, often made with rudimentary means (a guillotine splicer and manual moviola) and using cheap and easy to obtain 16 mm films (newsreels, science films, nudie films, stock shots, film lab scraps, scraps from studio trash cans) explored the various possibilities to re-purpose the footage through montage. This approach was also found in Lettrist and Situationist cinema, from Le film est déjà commencé (Maurice Lemaître, 1951) to La société du spectacle (Guy Debord, 1973), which put re-use and montage to political and subversive ends by appropriating advertising films, Hollywood films and classic French films.

The arrival of video in the late 1960s, the circulation of a growing number of films in this format in the 1980s, the role of television networks and the culture of the music video, the introduction of digital technology and the DVD in the 2000s, like the rise of the art video in the visual arts and cinema’s adoption as a “museum object”: all these would have a crucial impact on the evolution of re-use by broadening the field of the “recycled,” the “re-purposed” and the “re-assembled.” In the 1980s and especially the 1990s, this practice shifted from the movie theatre to the museum or art gallery and from film to video: from Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet (Phoenix Tapes, 1999) to Christian Marclay (Telephones, 1995; Video Quartet, 2000) and from Pierre Huyghes (Third Memory, 1999) to Candice Breitz (Soliloquy Trilogy, 1992-2000), the re-use vocabulary now more readily embraced classical American cinema (for example Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho in 1989), popular film and the dominant visual culture. The shift to digital technology in the early 2000s would make image searches in databases much quicker and more efficient and increase storage capacities. One notable aspect of the evolution of re-use practices, in the shift to video and then digital technology (the Internet, YouTube, DVD/Blu-ray), particularly in the work of Müller and Giradet, but also in that of Marclay, is the rise of films in which the montage consists, by means of skilfully arranged accumulations of clips, in showing the recurrence of a particular motif from an established genre and in often recognizable films (melodramas, science fiction films), or from a filmmaker (Hitchcock) or through various periods and styles. The motif can be a telephone, train, mirror, etc. This kind of “collection film” is obviously only possible because one could now accumulate (in analogue videos, which is more laborious, but especially in digital files) a critical mass of films or clips, and carry out accelerated automated searches to find the motifs one is looking for and thereby to construct easily accessible databases and bins for insertion into the “timeline” of an editing software program.^[2] This would yield monumental works such as Marclay’s The Clock (2011).

With the new generations or search engines, algorithms and image recognition technology, along with the kind of metadata embedded in videos on the Internet, gathering images is less a matter of chance discovery (as could still be the case with Conner and Cornell), or even of the artist-cinephile’s memory (as must have been the case for the earliest films of this kind by Marclay, Müller and Giradet), but rather of machines which can aggregate every image having a particular object or motif. This is a significant change in the practice of re-use with respect to montage. In the same vein, since the founding of YouTube and video exchange sites we have seen a series of compositions and re-assemblies drawn directly from this flow of digital images. Examples include the work of Dominic Gagnon (Hoax Canular, 2013), James Benning (YouTube, 2013), the work of the collective of Berliner and Parisian artists Neozoon (Big Game, 2013; Buck Fever, 2012) and Jennifer Proctor’s film A Movie by Jen Proctor (2010-12). In each case, the astronomical mass of videos stored on these platforms enable artists to reveal, through accumulation, often unsuspected commonplaces of today’s culture.

While film and video re-use would over time explore other techniques and other aesthetic paths, montage (in the form of collage, repurposing or accumulation) appears to run through its entire history, finding a variety of forms, from film stock to the digital. It is through montage in particular that found footage cinema’s critical, sociological and political dimensions become most apparent.