Found footage is the practice of building new work from existing moving images rather than shooting original material. It grew out of Dada and Surrealist collage: Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart (1936), re-cut from a B-movie, is usually called the first found-footage film. After the war Bruce Conner's A Movie (1958) turned newsreel, Hollywood and stag-film fragments into a headlong montage that changed avant-garde filmmaking. From the 1990s artists and filmmakers - Douglas Gordon, Bill Morrison, Christian Marclay and others - used appropriation and slow motion to interrogate memory, mass media and the decay of the film medium itself. The method crosses art and cinema: the same re-editing logic drives essay film, video installation and experimental documentary, and it remains one of the central strategies of appropriation art.
Defining characteristics
- Existing footage re-edited into new work instead of newly shot material
- Meaning created by juxtaposition, rhythm, and repetition
- Visible grain, splices, and decay of the source kept on screen
- Sources range from Hollywood and newsreels to home movies and industrial film
- Often reflexive: the work comments on the moving-image medium itself
- Sound and image frequently mismatched or deliberately dislocated
Key figures
- Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) — Collagist whose Rose Hobart (1936) pioneered found-footage film
- Bruce Conner (1933-2008) — Made A Movie (1958), the landmark of found-footage montage
- Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) — Turned Hollywood footage into installations such as 24 Hour Psycho (1993)
- Christian Marclay (b. 1955) — Compiled cinematic time from found footage in The Clock (2010)
Example works
Sources
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