TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Montage: Film, by Annaëlle Winand

The first form of found footage cinema is that of assembling film stock. As a particular and tenacious orthodox doctrine has it, the elaboration of “film language” was directly related, on the one hand, to the adoption of a range of conventions and codes associated with film editing (continuity, matching shots, crosscutting or parallel montage), and on the other to the division of production into genres. In this context, the ironic or poetic subversion of editing conventions (and of the rationality resulting from them) and genre boundaries (fiction film, science film, newsreels) by means of a simple re-assembly of films and sources, has been a powerful breeding ground in the history of experimental re-use cinema.

This early form of found footage cinema also appears to be connected with the rise of 8 mm and 16 mm film formats and to the possibility for amateurs not only to shoot films but also to own films of various kinds at low cost. These could be 8 mm or 16 mm prints of commercial, educational or science films, but also compilations of “attractions” (accidents, sporting feats, circus numbers, etc.), in which the distribution company Castle Films,^[3] for example, specialized. Bruce Conner has written: “I went to the local photography store and bought 100-foot reel condensations of 16 mm feature films like ‘Hopalong Cassidy’ and newsreels and racing cars and all sorts of stuff. That is how I got access to footage. I bought Castle Home Movies [sic] and gathered any TV commercials and old movies that I could find.”^[4] This remark helps us understand the eclecticism of Conners’s films, especially that of his early work, but also the great diversity of the material easily available in 16 mm for filmmakers wishing to make an artisanal film using a pair of scissors and some glue.