TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Found Footage and the Optical Printer, by Stephen Broomer

The optical printer, an invention of the 1930s, established the conditions for this particular form of visual manipulation. Strips that are loaded into a projector component can be re-photographed a frame at a time using a printer’s camera. While this technology served a utilitarian purpose for all of cinema, as a means to create titles and subtitles and complex visual effects, artists would make use of its capabilities for setting images into reverse, creating staggered rhythms (step printing), speeding and slowing the flow of images, magnifying details, and transforming compositional orientation.

By the 1960s and 70s, the optical printer had found a particular division in its common usage: while commercial outfits, for example Industrial Light & Magic, and master technicians, such as Larry Cuba, used the printer and specifically its matting abilities to animate starship battles, avant-garde filmmakers began to use the tool for a hybrid purpose: to manipulate time and scale and to create layered, cosmic images. These techniques were employed in broad application to films that used original footage, such as those of Scott Bartlett, Ed Emshwiller and Pat O’Neill. This same era saw a dramatic growth in the field of found footage filmmaking: artists began to borrow mass media images using traditional animation stands (Arthur Lipsett, Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley), or altered found images by acts of re-photography from projections and editing consoles (Ken Jacobs, David Rimmer). Joseph Cornell’s technique of editorial reassembly as a means of alienating images from their intended context carried on in the work of Bruce Conner. All of this established a thriving field of found footage filmmaking, and while the optical printer had been used for diverse purposes, it would increasingly become the dominant tool of this field.

Ken Jacobs’ Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969) was made through re-photography of images cast by an analytical projector, one which could slow down his source material to a low ebb. However, it had a longstanding impact on the ways in which artists manipulated time and scale when working on the optical printer. The act of taking a modest piece of film and expanding it to through variations of emphasis or of motion would be taken up by British filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice in his Berlin Horse (1971), an exercise in repetition, variation and colour exploration, and by Canadian filmmaker Al Razutis, whose Lumière’s Train (Arriving at the Station) (1979) follows in the motion analysis of Jacobs’ film, later alternating positive and negative images of trains, car crashes and tracks.

Martin Arnold would take up these themes in works such as Pièce touchée (1989), an intense, rhythmic meditation on an eighteen-second clip from an American film, The Human Jungle (1954), in which a man arrives at a domestic scene and embraces a waiting woman. Arnold has described his process: “I work with a more-or-less continuous forward and backward motion. I start with frame x, go forward to frame x + 1 and then from x +1 back again through x to x – 1.”^[3] Arnold’s pragmatism is common to work on the optical printer, which tends by its interface to force the operator to think in rhythmic figures. The result of Arnold’s computation is a stuttering image in which the figures, suffering spastic movements, are locked into the rhythms of their activities (most comically, the twisting of a doorknob that readily assumes sexual connotations).

The contributions of Razutis, Arnold and others had been made possible with the introduction of the JK optical printer in the early 1970s. Through the JK, a greater number of filmmakers were able to access these tools, as the affordability and relative portability of the JK system – typically utilizing a small projector with modular gates and a Bolex 16 mm camera – made it both a mainstay of filmmaking cooperatives and university film departments as well as an affordable home unit. This was the unit on which Phil Solomon made The Secret Garden (1988) and his Twilight Psalms (1999-2002), films that pilfered scenes from mainstream film and television and transformed them into Romantic manifestations of the filmmaker’s interior.

While many contemporary filmmakers working with the same values – repetition, temporal reordering and elasticity, magnification – have shifted their workflows to embrace digital substitutes for the optical printer, traditional printers, the JK printer paramount among them, remain in use by filmmakers who seek to capture the particular aura of its effects.

These filmmakers have, more often than not, been trained in this technology through university film departments. For example, in Montreal, Canada, filmmaker Daïchi Saïto and members of the Double Negative Collective have consistently used optical printers in their work, many of them trained in its use by Concordia University’s François Miron. Saïto’s dual-screen installation, Never a Foot Too Far, Even (2009), is in continuity with the work of Le Grice, Razutis and Arnold, metamorphosing images from a kung fu film, and yet, has a greater commitment to material rumination and is less concerned with analysis than were his forebears. Saïto’s contemporary, Alexandre Larose, has also used optical printers to more romantic aesthetic ends, beginning with 930 (2004-6), in which images of a train tunnel, looping and cast in high contrast, take on the symmetries of a Rorschach test.

The work that originated this particular collision of genre (found footage) and tool (optical printer) came in an era in which film was not so precious a commodity. Filmmakers were using printing techniques to probe structures, to break down and reorganize movement, and the materials they were drawing from suggested a retreating gaze to industrialization – this is true of Razutis’ train, Le Grice’s horse, and even Arnold’s domestic scene (in which the dream of post-war happiness becomes tribal). As this sociological theme declined, Romantic work, emphasizing the aesthetic traits of film itself (grain structures, painterly textures), has been offered not in the vein of critical comment, but as acts of machined improvisation. Such work bears a soulfulness previously confined to the lyric film, often far removed from the impersonal character of structural filmmaking.