January 2010

published in the newspaper of
Clemens von Wedemeyer's exhibition "The Fourth Wall"

Archive Books

Media Cannibalism

In the expanding commercialization of the homogenized media-landscape of the Western world, found footage film practice has become one way of negotiating many contemporary issues: Public domain, intellectual property rights, Open Source, Fair Use, détournement, Appropriation Art, film essays, as well as documentary and narration. One such nexus of the found footage practice is San Francisco, which has a vibrant and energized community of filmmakers, media- and anti-copyright activists, pionering thinkers on the electronic fronteer, and archivists. In the face of disappearing public space and increasing corporatization of public and private images, one unique archive is that of American filmmaker Craig Baldwin. Comprising a collection of about 2500 educational, propaganda, industrial, narrative, and amateur films, as well as animations, newsreels, TV commercials, and early kinescopes, Baldwin not only uses his archive to create his own films, but makes this treasure trove, developed over three decades of dedicated collecting, available to an international community of filmmakers, both emerging and well established.

The unusual thing about Baldwin’s praxis is that––unlike other archives that offer copies of the source material (leaving the original film intact)––filmmakers sit down at one of Baldwin’s basement editing benches and physically cut out shots of 16mm films, taking home with them a purchased reel containing a myriad of sequences that they wish to use. In this way, the source films are not preserved in their archived condition, but get torn apart, disassembled, and are provisionally spliced together again until, over the course of time, they dwindle down to their core. This practice can metaphorically be described as “media cannibalism”, a strategy in which artists ‘rip apart,’ ‘disembowel,’ and ‘devour’ pre-existing films in order to make new works of––possibly––art.

But why tear apart films to make new films? There are at least three incentives for this kind of activity: recycling, repurposing, and recontextualizing. The accelaration of technological inventions for the moving image art rapidly shortens the lifetime of a medium, creating an ever-growing graveyard of “dead” formats and their images. It is the creative mind that turns the industry’s scrap field into a playground, a laboratory for experimentation. The work process can be compared to that of a “mad scientist”, who builds a “Frankenstein” out of bits and pieces of “cannibalized” films, while surfing the waves of enhanced media obsolescence.

Rather than using pre-existing material to illustrate something in an indexical way (as was often practiced in the early compilation documentary of the 1930s and 40s), the contemporary experimental maker chooses to rescuscitate “dead” media to create a bricolage that alludes to both the represented material, as well as metaphorical or expressionistic uses, opening up new spaces for reflection and storytelling. The information that is embedded in the source material (true to the format of the period in which it was created) offers a way of bringing its own particular history back in its own terms. Using the form of the montage, the images are “detoured” into a new context, for political, essayistic, documentary, or narrative purposes, creating new cinematic phrases and dialogues between the different contexts, times, and narrratives, similar to the concept of hyperlinking.

Finally, found footage films interrogate new, playful ways to subvert mainstream media, beating it with its own language, all the while examining the body and flesh of it. A perfect way to exploit a mountain of bones: orphaned films, rescued films, stolen films, and forgotten films.

Sylvia Schedelbauer