Examples of found footage films, scratch videos, political remix, and fanvids
In chronological order, view discretion is advised (some of these works contain sounds and images that some people may find disturbing and/or offensive).
Lambeth Walk – Nazi Style (Charles A. Ridley, 1942), Ridley was working in the British Ministry of Information when he created this early example of détournement, it was originally distributed uncredited to newsreel companies, who would supply their own narration and music, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCyDnj3S4bE (Movietone version), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYJ5F8ctyus (British Pathe version)
Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, 1936), an experimental collage film re-contextualizing documentary footage and East of Borneo (1931) into a surrealist film, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnbbqiD7C7A (part 1), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQVLLGzhLl0 (part 2).
A Movie (Bruce Conner, 1958), a landmark experimental film assembled from pieces of found footage that come together to evoke new meanings, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FMjBtvsx2o
Cosmic Ray (Bruce Conner, 1961), a classic stream-of-consciousness montage of found footage, https://vimeo.com/83466525
Very Nice, Very Nice (Arthur Lipsett, 1961), a short film combining photographs and audio fragments from audio tape rescued from trash cans, https://www.nfb.ca/film/very_nice_very_nice/
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (Dara Birnbaum, 1978-79), a remix work subverting the ideology embedded in the television series, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6xZOUXNyQg
Death Valley Days (Gorilla Tapes, 1984), scratch video re-framing the relationship between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDQM_UJ0Tm0 (excerpt)
Blue Monday (The Duvet Brothers, 1984), created from recorded television broadcasts to comment on class inequality, privatization, and the polices of the Thatcher government, during the early to mid 80s, the video was screened in nightclubs, independent cinemas, and shared through underground distribution networks, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPpazhkyZQ4
Iraq Campaign 91 (Phil Patiris, 1991), culture jammed network news footage, Exxon and GE ads,, and television shows provide a critique the media/industrial complex and the 1st Gulf War, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_KAkENkfqg, (excerpt)
Get down, get down (EBN, 1993), an example of the work of a relatively obscure group out of Rhode Island that was creating compelling collages from stolen television broadcasts and re-contextualised them into audiovisual mortar rounds in the culture war between producers and consumers, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dh0iEkDEkU
Greatest Taste Around (Harold Boihem / Negativland, 1997), remix video that appropriates soft drink commercials and films, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4MAYyM_wh0
Decodings (Michael Wallin, 1988), composed of 1930s and 1940s archival footage of people combined with a narrator’s voice to create what Manohla Dargis described as an “allegorical search for identity from the documents of collective memory” in The Village Voice.
Winter Wheat (Mark Street, 1989), made by bleaching, scratching, and painting directly on the emulsion of an educational film about farming
River Madness (Dana Plays, 2002), montage of movies scenes that take place in the Los Angeles River, http://www.fandor.com/films/river_madness
Closer (T. Jonsey & Killa, 2004), a Star Trek slash vid set to the tune of Closer (Nine Inch Nails), this video became viral in 2006 and thus provides an example of a vid that became popular outside of the original fan community it was intended for, raising a lot of questions about the context of production and reception, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PwpcUawjK0
Vader Sessions (Steven Frailey, 2006) a somewhat funny, irreverent, and occasionally offensive vid that mixes audio clips of James Earl Jones from other movies into scenes from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, creating a new plot involving a love triangle with Princess Leia and destroying the Death Star, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhaveqRaxwI
The Message (Oliver Laric, 2007), recuts a classic Grandmaster Flash music video into individual words in alphabetical order, http://oliverlaric.com/messagethe.htm
Women’s Work (Luminosity & Sisabet, 2007), this vid, set to Violet by Hole presents an insightful critique of the violent misogyny rampant throughout mainstream television shows, while using footage from Supernatural, it clearly presents a broader critique, http://www.viddler.com/v/1f6d7f1f
Handlebars (Seah & Margie a.k.a. flummery, 2008), this vid spread beyond its intended audience and was praised by the original show’s creative team, presenting a critique of character and power, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly-Vhw1fevM
The Dark Bailout (Matthew Belinkie, 2008), remixes a scenes from The Dark Knight with footage of George Bush to provide a critique of big bank bailouts, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1X6RQLZtoA
Dove Onslaught(er) (Greenpeace, 2008), this remix was successful in raising public awareness and bringing about change, https://vimeo.com/931846
Too Many Dicks in Video Games (Anita Sarkeesian, 2010) this remix juxtaposes the sexist lyrics of Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor by Flight of the Conchords to create a critique of masculine bias and violence in popular video games, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJ0JPLg_-8
I Am Not Moving (shot by you the people, edited by Corey Ogilvie, 2011), this political remix puts in sharp relief the hypocrisy of U.S. government rhetoric in support of the Arab Spring while cracking down on the Occupy Wall Street movement at home, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjfhOPCPJnE
99 Problems (Diran Lyons, 2012), a particularly well-edited political remix, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C22wBf2h5k
MAD MEN: Set Me Free (Elisa Kreisinger, 2012), remix musical featuring the women of Mad Men set to You Keep Me Hanging On by the the The Supremes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_uNqhbTnzM
Examples of documentaries that make extensive use of archival footage
In chronological order:
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Esfir Shub, 1927), this montage of historical newsreels and home movies is a cornerstone of found-footage film, among the first political remix films, http://www.fandor.com/films/the_fall_of_the_romanov_dynasty
Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935), a landmark in propaganda film
Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955), combines contemporary and stock footage footage of the Nazi concentration camps, made just ten years after the atrocities
In the Year of the Pig (Emile de Antonio, 1968), makes extensive use of historical footage, created quite a stir when first released, as it was critical of the Vietnam War
The Life and Time of Rosie the Riveter (Connie Field, 1980), draws extensively on historical footage, March of Time newsreel clips, and recruiting films
Atomic Café (Kevin Rafferty and Jayne Loader, 1982), archival film including newsreels, television news, military training films, television programs, and advertisements to evoke the media message and prevailing understandings of the public of the historical period, available from the Snell Library
Sink or Swim (Su Friedrich, 1990), autobiographical film using archival images and other people’s home movies to create a collage of extraordinary richness, http://www.fandor.com/films/sink_or_swim
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (Craig Baldwin, 1991), a pseudo-pseudo-documentary that became a counter-culture classic, it chronicles U.S. intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate far-right conspiracy theory, http://www.fandor.com/films/tribulation_99
Nitrate Kisses (Barbara Hammer, 1992), an essay exploring the “repressed and marginalized history” of gay women and men in contemporary Western culture since World War I, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGuigR_vPRo (trailer)
This Is What Democracy Looks Like (Jill Friedberg and Rick Rowley, 2000), capture the historic events of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle from the footage contributed by over a hundred media activists, a landmark in collaborative filmmaking, achieves a scope and vision possible only through the perspectives of many observes in different locations during the event, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBUZH2vCD_k
Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003), an autobiographical documentary created from hundreds of hours of old Super 8 film, VHS video, answering machine messages and photographs, available from the Snell Library
The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003), Morris ahistoricizes archival materials, good film to discuss the re-contextualization of archival images
The Corporation (Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, 2003), makes extensive use of news reports, industrial film clips, and archival media, on reserve in the Snell Library
The Phantom of the Operator (Caroline Martel, 2004), highly recommended, fascinating reuse of industrial films to tell the story of telephone operators, the DVD is on reserve in Snell Library, http://www.fandor.com/films/the_phantom_of_the_operator
Race Is the Place (Rick Tejada-Flores and Ray Telles, 2005), a visual and verbal riff on race in America
Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005), fine example of creating a documentary from a collection of someone else’s footage with unanticipated results
American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs (Grace Lee, 2013), incorporates a rich collection of archival footage from the 1920s
Preempting Dissent (Greg Elmer and Andy Opel, 2014), a collaborative, open source documentary on the politics of suppressing dissent, provides a unique point of view made possible by the increasing ubiquity of video-capable mobile phones and their use by activists during demonstrations
Tools of the trade
Sites like archive.org allow you to download videos directly from the site. For other sites or acquiring video from DVDs, there are various apps available that will help you acquire the video assets you need to gathering for your project, here’s some of the tools you can use.
Please read Fair Use and Online Video (Center for Media & Social Impact), http://www.cmsimpact.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-online-video
before downloading or ripping any content that is protected under copyright. These tools are neither recommended nor endorsed. If there are tools you currently use that are not listed here, please share them with me along with what you like, and don’t like, about then, thanks!
Keepvid is a web site that given a URL, will download progressive download and streaming video files from a wide variety of video sites including YouTube, Dailymotion, blip.tv, Facebook, Flickr, TED, Vimeo, etc., a downside is that it requires the use of Java, so there’s a potential security risk, http://keepvid.com
Handbrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a range of widely supported codecs, particularly good for converting individual video segments in a DVD image to individual QuickTime movies, free and open source, versions available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, http://handbrake.fr
Ripit is is a simple DVD ripper for Macs that both rips (creates an image of the DVD on your Mac) and compress (creates a QuickTime File you can then use for editing), http://thelittleappfactory.com/ripit/
MPEG Streamclip is a free video converter, player, and editor for Mac and Windows. It can play many video file formats and transcode videos to a wide range of formats as well as cut, trim and join videos. It has not been updated for a while and no longer is able to download YouTube videos since they changed their format, but it’s still useful as a conversion tool and has a nice batch feature, http://www.squared5.com
Torch Browser is an alternative browser that can be used as a video downloader, media player, and torrent downloader, http://www.torchbrowser.com
Web sites, journals and other resources
Fair Use and Online Video, guide to acceptable practices, drawing on the actual activities of creators from the Center for Media & Social Impact at American University, includes links to other resources, http://www.cmsimpact.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/fair-use-and-online-video
UbuWeb, a repository for visual, concrete, and sound poetry, http://www.ubuweb.com
Transformative Works and Cultures, a peer-reviewed journal publishing articles about transformative works, media studies, and the fan community, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc
Political Remix Video, http://www.politicalremixvideo.com
Found Footage Festival, a unique event that showcases footage from videos that were found at garage sales and thrift stores and in warehouses and dumpsters across the country, http://www.foundfootagefest.com
“Kirby Ferguson: Embrace the remix,” TED Talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/kirby_ferguson_embrace_the_remix.html
Fandor, a wonderful source of alternative and experimental films, many of them hard to find gems, http://www.fandor.com (requires a subscription)
Leave a Reply