Recycled Images: the Art and Politics of Found Footage Films

Abstract

Whatever the filmmaker may do to them — including nothing more than reproduce them exactly as he or she found them — recycled images call attention to themselves as images, as products of the image-producing industries of film and television, and therefore as pieces of the vast and intricate mosaic of information, entertainment, and persuasion that constitute the media-saturated environment of modern — or many would say, postmodern — life. By reminding us that we are seeing images produced and disseminated by the media, found footage films open the door to a critical examination of the methods and motives underlying the media's use of images.

Full text

Uma publicação do Laboratório de Investigação e Crítica Audiovisual (LAICA) da USP
RECYCLED IMAGES: THE ART AND POLITICS OF FOUND FOOTAGE
FILMS
William C. Wees
Dedicated to Bruce Conner
Abstract: Whatever the filmmaker may do to them — including nothing more
than reproduce them exactly as he or she found them — recycled images call
attention to themselves as images, as products of the image-producing industries
of film and television, and therefore as pieces of the vast and intricate mosaic of
information, entertainment, and persuasion that constitute the media-saturated
environment of modern — or many would say, postmodern — life. By
reminding us that we are seeing images produced and disseminated by the media,
found footage films open the door to a critical examination of the methods and
motives underlying the media's use of images.

RECYCLED IMAGES – William C. Wees
2
Chapter 4 - In the Domain of Montage: Compilation, Collage, Appropriation
I have been arguing that the recycled images of found footage films have more in
common than simply their origins in footage that was found by the filmmaker.
Whatever the filmmaker may do to them — including nothing more than reproduce
them exactly as he or she found them — recycled images call attention to themselves as
images, as products of the image-producing industries of film and television, and
therefore as pieces of the vast and intricate mosaic of information, entertainment, and
persuasion that constitute the media-saturated environment of modern — or many
would say, postmodern — life. By reminding us that we are seeing images produced
and disseminated by the media, found footage films open the door to a critical
examination of the methods and motives underlying the media's use of images.
To open the door is one thing; to go through it and confront the media on their own
ground — the manipulation of images — is another thing, and the filmmakers most
likely to take this further step are those who draw most heavily on the resources of
montage. Therefore I want to elaborate on my previous discussion of montage in found
footage films, not only because I think its critical — and ultimately political —
implications are especially noteworthy, but also because the conjunction of montage
and found footage also appears in other, more widely recognized forms, such as
conventional compilation films and, at the opposite extreme, an increasing number of
music videos. Montage, in other words, has many applications, and to more fully
appreciate its function in films by experimental and avant-garde filmmakers, I want to
take into account these comparable forms of film and video designed for mass
audiences.
For the purposes of the following discussion, then, I propose to distinguish between
three kinds of found footage montage, which I have labelled compilation, collage, and
appropriation, and I will try to show why collage {as I define it below) has the greatest
potential to criticize, challenge, and possibly subvert the power of images produced by,
and distributed though, the corporate media.
Since compilation, collage and appropriation have a variety of meanings, some of which
overlap to a considerable degree, I will distinguish between the three methodologies

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3
along the lines suggested in the following model or conceptual grid of relationships
between signifier and signified (signification), modes of cultural production (exemplary
genre), and broad sets of aesthetic premises and practices embracing all the arts
(aesthetic bias):
METHODOLOGY SIGNIFICATION EXEMPLARY GENRE AESTHETIC BIAS
compilation reality documentary film realiBm
collage image avant-garde film modernism.
appropriation simulacrum muoic video postmodernism
Of course these are broad categories employed in a highly schematic way, and will
require further explanation in due course. Their only value, at this point, is to suggest
that different methods of using found footage are related to different paradigms of
artistic practice and cultural theory. These paradigmatic relationships help to explain
why a montage of found footage does not automatically raise politically charged
questions about the origin of the images and the ways they have been used in the mass
media. Everything depends on the methodology and related contexts governing the
work's reception.
* * *
The practice of making new films from pieces of earlier films is nearly as old as the
institution of cinema itself. As early as 1898, a French distributor concocted an account
of the Dreyfus case with previously existing shots of an officer leading some French
troops on parade, a Parisian street scene including a large building, a tug boat sailing
toward a barge, and the delta of the Nile River. Accompanied by oral commentary, this
sequence of shots apparently convinced audiences of the day that they were seeing
"Dreyfus before his arrest, the Palais de Justice where Dreyfus was court-marshalled,
Dreyfus being taken to the battleship, and Devil's Island."15 Here, in a nutshell, are the
principal characteristics of nearly all compilation films: shots taken from films that have
no necessary relationship to each other; a concept (theme, argument, story) that
motivates the selection of the shots and the order in which they appear; and a verbal
accompaniment (voice-over or text on the screen or both) that yokes the shots to the
concept.

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4
With varying degrees of subtlety and sophistication, these characteristics are to be found
in virtually all compilation films from the pioneering efforts of Esther Schub in Fall of
the Romanov Dynasty and The Great Road (both released in 1927), to Walter
Ruttmann's The Melody of the World (1929), to Stuart Legg's The World In Action
series (1941-45) for the National Film Board of Canada, to Frank Capra's Why We
Fight series (1943-44) for the U.S. War Department, to the critical portraits of American
politics by Emile De Antonio in films like Point of Order (1964) and Year of the Pig
(1969), to the innumerable television specials that "look back" at significant historical
events. There is, in other words, a long and distinguished tradition of using archival
material to make documentary films of the type Jay Leyda was the first to call
compilation films in his survey of the genre, Films Beget Films.
Leyda also supplies the clearest description and strongest justification for compilation
films when he writes, "Any means by which the spectator is compelled to look at
familiar shots as if he had not seen them before, or by which the spectator's mind is
made more alert to the broader meanings of old materials — this is the aim of the
correct compilation."16 Compilation films may reinterpret images taken from film and
television archives, but generally speaking, they do not challenge the representational
nature of the images themselves. That is, they still operate on the assumption that there
is a direct correspondence between the images and their profilmic sources in the real
world. Moreover, they do not treat the compilation process itself as problematic. Their
montage may make spectators "more alert to the broader meanings of old materials," but
as a rule they do not make them more alert to montage as a method of composition and
(more or less explicit) argument. As Leyda himself says, "the manipulation of
actuality ... usually tries to hide itself so that the spectator sees only 'reality' — that is,
the especially arranged reality that suits the film-maker's purpose."
The methods of compilation films are so familiar they hardly need illustration here, but
I want to offer one concrete example from a film that comes close to crossing the border
between compilation and collage — which is one of the reasons I have chosen it. The
other reason is that it shares one extremely significant image with my examples of
collage and appropriation: the familiar mushroom shaped cloud of a nuclear explosion.
The Atomic Cafe (1982) includes a sequence devoted to the U.S. nuclear test at the
Bikini atoll in 1946. It begins with part of a documentary showing the inhabitants
readily agreeing to leave the island that has been selected as the site of the test. On the

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5
soundtrack the local people sing "You Are My Sunshine" in their native language, while
the islanders carry their possessions onto large open boats provided by the U.S. Navy,
and wave happily as the boats head out to sea. The singing fades out with shots of
planes in the air and observers anxiously awaiting the explosion. We hear an on-the-
spot radio reporter describing the final preparations, mixed with a voice-over count
down, as we see an aerial shot of the island, ocean, and ships anchored around the tiny
island below. When the count down reaches zero, a hissing whoosh! accompanies an
aerial shot of the nuclear explosion. This is followed by a shot of the explosion taken at
sea level (and a louder concussion on the soundtrack), and then a third shot taken from a
closer position at sea level (synchronized with another resonant boom!). The last shot
offers an awesome view of the massive column of water and steam rising into a canopy
of clouds over the ships anchored in the vicinity of the blast. Then blaring, dramatic
music introduces a Paramount News-reel, "1947: The Year of Division," and in the
urgent tone characteristic of newsreels, a voice-over recounts the beginning of the Cold
War, while the film presents maps, animated graphics, shots of Stalin, troops parading
in Red Square, and American and Russian troops shaking hands on the banks of the
Elbe River.
Unlike traditional compilation films, The Atomic Cafe does not provide its own voice-
over to guide viewers through its archival material and tell them how they should think
about it (though, one might argue, the ironic use of "You Are My Sunshine" is a subtler
way of doing the same thing). On the other hand, in the convention of most compilation
films, it follows a clear, linear development, and does not continually question the
representational nature of the images it uses. While the film implies that the shots of the
local people happily leaving their island were staged for American propaganda purposes,
its images of the actual explosion are presented as straight fact: this is what the
explosion looked like, these are signifiers of an event solidly grounded in reality and
contextualized by other real, historical events such as the beginning of the Cold War.
The kinds of representation that compilation films tend to take for granted are precisely
the kind collage films call into question. To emphasize this point, I want to take a closer
look at the particularly memorable sequence from Bruce Conner's A Movie referred to
earlier in this essay. Four brief shots of a submarine submerging conclude with only the
sub's periscope slicing through choppy waves. Cut to an officer staring into a periscope
and turning it to look in a different direction, cut to a scantily clad model (strongly

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6
resembling a very young Marilyn Monroe) lying back in a provocative pose, cut to the
submarine officer reacting to what he has seen in the periscope. He turns, and shouts an
order, cut to a close up of a hand pressing a button, cut to a torpedo speeding through
murky water, cut to a sea level shot of a nuclear explosion, cut to an aerial shot of the
explosion, cut to another sea level view of the explosion, cut to a closer view from sea
level, showing the lower edge of the cloud of steam and gases beginning to sink
downwards while a huge white wall of vapor engulfs a battleship, cut to a large wave
carrying a surf board rider who jumps off his board and is covered by the water, cut to
another surfer paddling his board up a rising wave.
The formal ingenuity of the sequence is matched by its thematic complexity and critique
of representation. At a formal level, one notes such things as the four shots of the
submerging submarine matched by four shots of the mushroom cloud rising from the
sea and spreading across the sky; the momentum of the explosion continuing in the
waves ridden by the surfers; and the introduction of a water/disaster motif that continues
through a number of subsequent shots and is "resolved" at the end of the film with shots
of a diver descending into the hold of a sunken ship. Thematically, Conner's collage of
shots from at least four different sources not only produces a series of visual gags and
metaphoric links between sexual desire and military aggressiveness, between orgasm
and annihilation, it also deconstructs conventional editing strategies that link one shot
with the next through implied cause and effect relationships. Like Eisenstein's
"intellectual montage," the obviously contrived connections between shots in A Movie
not only call attention to the montage technique itself, but provoke a self-conscious and
critical viewing of cinematic representations, especially when they are representations
that were originally intended to be seen as unmediated signifiers of reality.
The methodology I have labelled appropriation also capitalizes on the manipulations of
montage and the equivocal nature of cinematic representations, but it lacks the
deconstructive strategies and critical point of view characteristic of collage films. My
example of appropriation comes from Michael Jackson's music video, The Man in the
Mirror (1987), and centers on the image of a nuclear explosion, which marks the
emotional and thematic turning point of the whole video. The first half of the video
presents images of poverty, famine, and violence, culminating in the following
sequence of shots: an explosion in the middle of a Middle-East city, marching soldiers,
a throng of Blacks running down a wide city street, P.W. Botha making a speech,

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7
Blacks holding up anti-racism placards, a "For Sale" sign in front of a farm, grim
looking farmers at a meeting, people carrying a banner saying "Farms Not Arms," a
crowd burning an American flag, a parade of tanks with rockets mounted on them,
bombs falling from a large jet bomber, a nuclear explosion at sea. Meanwhile, Michael
Jackson, backed by a large choir, sings:
I'm starting with the man in the mirror.
I'm asking him to change his ways.
And no message could'a been any clearer:
If you want to make the world a better place,
Take a look at yourself and make a change.
The last word, sung by the choir in a dramatic, inspirational change of key, is
synchronized with the nuclear explosion. Immediately following, are shots of world
leaders expressing joy: Begin, Sadat and Carter shaking hands, Reagan and Gorbachev
shaking hands, Lech "Walesa and his supporters celebrating the victory of Solidarity,
Bishop Desmond Tutu smiling and clapping his hands. Then a shot of a relief worker
slipping a shirt on a painfully thin (but smiling!) Black child leads into many images of
people accomplishing various sorts of good works — the kind of "feel good" images
that the media like to use as counterweights to their images of despair and disaster (from
which the first half of the music video draws its imagery).
With its accumulation of more or less familiar images culled from the news media, The
Man in the Mirror \$ very much like a traditional compilation film. In its rapid
juxtaposition of extremely divergent images, however, it may seem more like a collage
film. Yet, in at least one crucial way, it is like neither. To understand why this is so —
and to gain some insight into the kind of appropriation that permits the representation of
a nuclear explosion to signify a change for the better — we need to pursue the related
issues of montage and representation in found footage films a little further.
***

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8
A good place to begin is with Walter Benjamin's comment that, "To write history ...
means to quote history. But the concept of quotation implies that any given historical
object must be ripped out of its context."18 Compilation films are composed of visual
quotations of history (or more precisely, selected moments of historical "reality") that
have been ripped out of context and placed end to end according to the filmmaker's
theme or argument. In such cases, quotation and representation are synonymous. They
offer, in the words of Allan Sekula, "the appearance of history itself." Sekula is
speaking of photographs, rather than films, but the same principle applies, just as it does
when he says, "Not only are the pictures in archives often literally for sale, but their
meanings are up for grabs."
One way of conceptualizing the relationship between archival representations of history
and the meanings they acquire in compilation films is offered by Emile Benveniste's
categories of history and discourse. The anonymous footage in film archives is very
much like the kinds of utterances Benveniste calls history: "There is no longer a narrator.
The events are set forth chronologically, as they occurred. No one speaks here; the
events seem to narrate themselves." On the other hand, when the filmed representations
of events are taken from the archives and made to serve the purposes of a particular
filmmaker, "they enter the plane of discourse, in Benveniste's sense. They are used by
an identifiable "speaker" (in my analogy: the filmmaker) with "the intention of
influencing the other (in this case: the viewer) in some way."22 Ester Schub's Fall of the
Romanov Dynasty, for example, draws upon bland, anonymous archival footage of
public events and political figures (some of which was shot by the czar's own "home
movie" cinematographer) to produce a trenchant discourse on the evils of the czarist
regime. In the hands of a czarist editor (or screened uncut for the czar and his family),
the same footage would say something quite different.
The same is true of archival shots of nuclear explosions, many of which were made by
cameras that were not even operated by human beings during the time the film was
being exposed, and which lack even the minimal narrative of a countdown and climactic
boom — until they are taken out of the archives and inserted into discourses designed
by particular addressers for their intended addressees. In The Atomic Cafe they are put
at the service of an ironic discourse on the mendacity and foolishness of American
responses to the threat of atomic warfare in the years immediately following the Second
World War. In A Movie they serve a wittier and more complex discourse on desire and

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9
destruction; in The Man in the Mirror the one shot of the Bikini test marks the absurdly
optimistic turn in the music video's visual discourse. In the latter, the representation of a
nuclear explosion signifies hope; in the former it signifies just the opposite; in The
Atomic Cafe it signifies the bomb's actual, destructiveness which profoundly influenced
the mentality of politicians and ordinary people alike. Yet, in the archive, it is pure,
impersonal history, the representation of an event that "narrates itself."
Returning, then, to the crucial difference between representation in works of
appropriation and in other methods of presenting found footage, I would begin by
stressing the basic difference between compilation and appropriation. In compilation
films, an archival shot is presumed to have concrete, historical referents that ground the
film's discourse in reality, and lend credence to its overall argument. Clearly, the
makers of The Atomic Cafe made this assumption when they inserted shots of various
thermonuclear explosions, including the ones taken at Bikini. But, there is nothing
except the emotional appeal of Michael Jackson's music to associate the Bikini test with
a "change" that reduced Arab-Israeli tensions, or led to the success of the Solidarity
movement in Poland, or contributed to the weakening of apartheid in South Africa. In
other words, the shot of a nuclear explosion in Michael Jackson's music video is simply
one image in a stream of recycled images presented with little, if any, concern for their
historical specificity — let alone logical or even chronological connection. With The
Man in the Mirror we enter the postmodern world of (in the words of Fredric Jameson)
"representations that have no truth content, [and] are, in this sense, sheer surface or
superficiality." The object or event in history has been superseded by — or in
Baudrillard's terms, preceded by — simulacra, by representations of other
representations produced and preserved by the mass media.
If compilation films "quote history," The Man in the Mirror quotes the media, which
have replaced history and virtually abolished historicity. In the context of Benjamin's
remark that "the concept of quotation implies that any given historical object must be
ripped out of its context," I would say that for works of appropriation like Michael
Jackson's music video, the context is the media, from which the quotations have been
ripped and into which they have been reinserted without regard for their "truth content,"
as Jameson puts it. The simulacra produced by postmodernist "superficiality" occupy
the opposite end of the spectrum from the representations of reality that are essential to
compilation films and their aesthetic bias toward realism.

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10
Between compilation and appropriation lies the terrain of collage, to which I want to
return in order make explicit some of the assumptions about collage that have remained
implicit up to this point.
Starting with the experiments of Braque and Picasso in 1912, and rapidly spreading to
all art forms, collage proved to be the avant-garde's most effective means of challenging
traditional assumptions about the nature of representation in art. Indeed, one could argue
that collage became an essential weapon in the modernist assault on realism in all the
arts. By incorporating disparate materials found, rather than made, by the artist, and by
dispensing with long-respected principles of coherence and organic unity in art, collage
changed the basic rules of artistic representation — or what Marjorie Perloff calls
referentiality: "The question of referentiality inherent in collage thus leads to the
replacement of the signified, the objects to be imitated, by a new set of signifiers calling
attention to themselves as real objects in the real world."23 Note that Perloff is not
talking about the representation of "real objects," but the literal presence of objects from
"the real world" in the work of art itself.
To apply this argument to film, one must recognize that "the real world" for found
footage filmmakers is the mass media with their endless supply of images waiting to be
ripped from their context and reinserted in collage films where they will be recognized
as fragments still bearing the marks of their media reality. Again, collage and
appropriation have something in common, but as in the case of their responses to the
equivocal nature of photographic representation, collage and appropriation part
company over the way they respond to media-as-reality. Collage is critical;
appropriation is accommodating. Collage probes, highlights, contrasts; appropriation
accepts, levels, homogenizes. If both use montage to dislodge images from their original
contexts and emphasize their "image-ness" (that is, their constructed rather than
"natural" representations of reality), only collage actively promotes an analytical and
critical attitude toward those images and their uses within the institutions of cinema and
television.
An image's historical referent — such as the United States' nuclear tests in the South
Pacific — may continue to be important in a collage film, but the more significant
referent will be the image's original context of production, distribution, and reception:
everything the media do to invest their images with an aura of reality. Unlike

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11
postmodernist appropriations of found footage, in which the media as the source of
images are taken for granted (indeed are more or less explicitly celebrated for their
image-producing powers), the collage film subjects its fragments of media-reality to
some form of deconstruct ion, or at the very least to a recontextualizing that prevents an
unreflective reception of representations as reality (as presumed by the compilation
film), as well as an indifferent or cynical reception encouraged by postmodernist
appropriation. If collage is, as Gregory Ulmer has written, "the single most
revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation in our century,"24 then
appropriation is the movement that follows behind, profiting from the revolution
without embracing or advancing its goals.
One of the masters of surrealist collage, Max Ernst, once wrote, "Ce n'est pas la colle
qui fait le collage." And for filmmakers, it is not the splicer that makes a collage film. It
is the decision to invest found footage with meanings unintended by its original makers
and unrecognized in its original contexts of presentation and reception. In its most
comprehensive sense, then, a collage film could be anything a filmmaker finds and
decides to show in the form he or she found it: the filmic equivalent of a Duchamp
"ready made." But found footage films based on a montage of disparate and
incongruous images are, it seems to me, more likely to challenge the media's power to
make ideologically loaded images seem like unmeditated representations of reality.
Notes
15. Jay Leyda, Films beget films (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964): 13-14.
16. Ibid. 45.
17. Ibid. 10.
18. Walter Benjamin, “N [Theoretics of knowledge: theory of progress]”, The
Philosophical Review 15, 1-2 (1983-84): 24.
19. Allan Sekula, “Reading an archive”, in Blasted allegories: an anthology of
contemporary artists. Ed. Brian Wallis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987): 116.

RECYCLED IMAGES – William C. Wees
12
20. Emile Benveniste, “Man and language”, in Problems in general linguistics (Coral
Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1976): 209.
21. I do not disagree with Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean-Louis Baudry and others who have
argued that all images produced by the camera are ideologically biased, but in the
context of the present argument, I would suggest that in the archive the bias of
individual shots is inert or merely potential; it becomes active when that potential is
realized in a particular film’s discourse.
22. Fredric Jameson, “ ‘In the destructive element immense’: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
and cultural revolution”, October 17 (1981): 112.
23. Marjorie Perloff, “The invention of collage”, in Collage. Ed. Jeanne Parisier Plottel
(New York: New York Literary Forum, 1983): 40.
24. Gregory Ulmer, “The object of post-criticism”, in The anti-aesthetic: essays on post-
modern culture. Ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983): 84
25. Max Ernst, Beyond painting (New York: Wittenborn, 1948): 13.
William C. Wees is an Emeritus Professor at McGill University where he taught
literature, film, and cultural studies courses for many years. In addition to numerous
articles and reviews, he is the author of Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, Light
Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film, and Recycled
Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films.
In Anthology Film Archives New York City 1993
Copyright © 1993 Anthology Film Archives Manufactured in the United States of
America Printed by Braun-Brumfield Inc., Ann Arbor, MI
ISBN 0-911689-19-2