Filmmakers as Antiquarians: Adapting and Adopting Found Footage in the Digital Age
p. 125-134
Texte intégral
Introduction
“The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space, not to represent ourselves in their space.”1
1In the wake of more and more film prints disappearing, both due to physical forces (film decay) and to societal forces (the general push to go digital and no longer use film or to project on film), Benjamin’s motto has gained tremendous importance for found footage filmmakers. Where before the interest in found footage filmmaking focused on using the images to tell personal stories or to comment on the content of mass media, more and more found footage filmmakers now feel the urge to tell stories about film as a disappearing medium. Besides the usual creative rewriting of history and memory, this particular kind of found footage films is an important contribution to the preservation and appreciation of our celluloid past. Moreover, many found footage filmmakers have adopted so-called “orphan films” to use the images in their films. As film collectors they are often the sole saviors of unknown film treasures that fell outside the scope of official film archives. Where before, in the analogue age, this often meant the destruction of the original film because the filmmaker would literally cut and past the film into a new narrative, in the digital age this is no longer the case: most filmmakers work in digital video which means that they transfer the images and the original film copy stays in tact.
2In contrast to our society’s growing amnesia with regards to analogue film and analogue filmmaking practices, found footage filmmakers remind us of this tradition. Their films operate as moving image catalogues for a widely dispersed and so far undervalued film “antiquarium.” The latter is especially the case for the quickly fading world of 16 mm films and the many lesser known film genres that were shot on this format, such as industrial films, public broadcast announcements, mental hygiene films, scientific experiments, army films, publicity and educational films, anthropological films, independent documentaries and even some home movies. In practice, for who is looking to find new footage, it is evident that many of these films have already disappeared: it is more and more difficult to find 16 mm films, and it is more and more expensive to buy them. Decades ago, first with the coming of analogue video (VHS) followed by the coming of digital video (DVD), university and other public libraries organized major clean-ups and they eagerly trashed most of their 16 mm collections: that was a golden age for film scavengers such as found footage filmmakers. In the mean time, the 16 mm copies that survived these first major sweeps of 16 mm film history in public institutions have become scarce and thus more valuable objects: they not easily to be found anymore as trash or received as freebies, but they circulate as sought for “antiques,” as can be seen in the adds that sell 16 mm films on the internet.2 Rodowick’s observation that “what we always believed to be the most modern art is suddenly becoming antiquarium”3 is nowhere as evident as in the vanishing world of 16 mm film production and exhibition: a story and history worth telling both in word and in (found) moving images before it vanishes.
From Ephemera to Artifacts: Building a 16 mm film Antiquarium
“Collecting is a form of practical memory, and of all the profane manifestations of ‘nearness’ it is the most binding. Thus, in a certain sense, the smallest act of political reflection makes for an epoch in the antiques business. We construct here an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to ‘assembly’.”4
3As a 16 mm filmmaker, I am always on the outlook for 16 mm films. This is how I gradually built a personal film archive with non-fiction films collected from pawnshops, garbage bins, public library dumps, film labs, film coops, film departments, a few I bought on Craigslist and others that were donated by people familiar with my passion for “lost” films to adopt. But only gradually film collecting became the passionate hobby it is now. I was not as fanatic in my early years of making (found footage) films, even worse: I cut up several film prints and caused irreparable damage to them so that I could more easily rework the images on the optical printer.5 Also, where in the beginning I would not take films that were damaged and only those with “funky images”, I now take whatever I can find in whatever state it is in and work with it. Conscious of the fact that I am working with a disappearing medium and history, for me collecting films has become “a form of practical memory” as Walter Benjamin described it, “a small act of political reflection” to mark this specific era in the film business, as it begins to “make for an epoch in the antiques business.6”
4Most of the films in my collection can be classified as “orphan films”, a term that has gained critical acclaim in the past decade thanks to the Orphan Film Movement in the USA. The concern about orphan films comes from the archival community when in the 1990s, the evocation of “save the orphan film” effectively replaced the 1980s credo of “nitrate can’t wait”. New research had brought about that nitrate actually can wait and that all film material, whether nitrate or acetate or even polyester, are potentially equally at risk in the absence of proper storage—not even mentioning the graveyard of dead tape formats or the digital rot that is making lots of archivists anxious about the future of moving images. Archivists used the new slogan “save an orphan” successfully to seek funding from the public and private sector to help restore and preserve orphan films in their collections. As Paolo Cherchi Usai states: “[…] what is so powerful about the term orphan film is not only its effectiveness—it is something that is fairly easy to understand without much explanation—but also its emotional resonance.”7 As such it is a useful concept to draw attention to our disappearing film culture, but despite its emotional appeal I prefer to call the films I have adopted “foundlings” simply because I can always tell the story of how I found the films, very rarely of how they became orphaned.
5The growing scarcity of 16 mm films in general has made the ones in my collection more valuable, just as it happens with antiques. Thanks to their disappearance from (film) history these formerly “unimportant” films such as educational and industrial films gradually gain importance and “aura”, and this even more thanks to the poor state they are in due to a lack of care. As Laura Marks states, “with its disappearance and fading away, film accumulates aura. Mechanically reproduced images supposedly lack aura, but as images decay they become unique again: every film is unhappy after its own fashion.”8 Moreover, “the less important the film was considered, the less likely that it will have been archived with care, and thus it is more likely that the discovery of the object will be a bittersweet pleasure.”9 Indeed, most of these non-commercial non-fiction films are on acetate film, which is as much subject to chemical decay as nitrate film is, despite its label “safety film.” A process called “acetate degradation” causes the films to shrink, curl and turn brittle. It has actually been dubbed “vinegar syndrome” after its distinctive odor when you open the can. There are also the numerous Eastman colour films, some even only a few years old that have turned rosy-pink.10 And if these film-deteriorating phenomena are not bad enough in itself it also has (and has been) the perfect excuse to trash lots of these films that were considered unimportant. This is the major difference between films of a commercial or a non-commercial nature, between fiction and non-fiction films, and between 35 mm and small format films. The latter are far more at risk to vanish from archives or will simply never get there to be preserved as part of our film culture. It is not surprising then that in these times when most 16 mm film is quickly disappearing, filmmakers who work with this material day in and day out are inclined to make films that remind us of these overlooked films and of the material aspects of film, those characteristics that make film and that cannot be replaced or reproduced in video. Also, outside the filmmakers’ community, there is a growing interest and recognition for small gauge films and for the fact that damage and use makes every film print unique, that these are valuable artifacts. “Often criticized in the history of the aesthetics as a medium of mechanical copying, the aesthetic experience of cinema is in essence non-repeatable. No two prints of the same film will ever be identical—each will always bear its unique traces of destruction with a specific projection history; thus each print is in some respects unique.”11 It is exactly that unique quality of each print, and of any form of film damage, that has become a popular creative tool in the hands of found footage filmmakers who, paraphrasing Benjamin, are constructing “an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to ‘assembly’.”12
Turning a Bittersweet Discovery into a Honeysweet Recovery: The B-Film Keeper (16 mm transferred to digital video, 13 min, 2009)
6I have made many what Laura Marks calls “bittersweet discoveries” in my scavenging of film dumps and pawnshops. Most of the films in my collection are faded prints, others show severe scars from their active lives as projection prints, yet others have a very particular type of damage such as my 16 mm copy of Belles of the South Seas (16 mm, 10 min., Castle Films, 1944), a travel film on which every single frame in which the indigenous people have exposed upper body parts is scratched out by hand.13 (Fig. 1) But the film find that had by far the most impact on me and on my work as a filmmaker and film scholar, was a damaged silent 16 mm film about beekeeping. Back in 1999, I saved this print from a pile of damaged films in the National Film Institute (INC) of Mozambique in Maputo, formerly the biggest film archive and film lab in Africa.14 This particular film was one of the few 16 mm copies in a huge pile of 35 mm films damaged by fire and water left to decompose after the INC burned down in 1991.
7My experience in Maputo was the major impetus to focus my PhD research-creation thesis on the Afterlife of Film15, and as part of this research I transformed the silent German educational film on beekeeping and honey making into a found footage digital video titled The B-Film Keeper (2009). I have kept the original film until I had access to proper transfer facilities so that I could copy the film myself to either digital video or onto film.16 I wanted to do this myself because I was afraid that lab professionals would be reluctant to work with the dusty film print and I knew that the film was too brittle to survive any intense cleaning. I carefully transferred the images frame-by-frame twice: once with a slightly broader frame than usual so that the damage in between the sprockets shows, and once as a strip of three frames with black strips on the side, to show even more how the water damage (white patches) travels over the film’s edges across several frames. I used both framings in the film, at times even inserted one into the other to double the effects of the damage around the edges (Figs. 2-3). I also recorded the sound of the film’s decay by letting the sound device of a film projector read the washed away pattern on that side of the film where normally the optical soundtrack would be. There was no original sound (it is a silent film), which made for a nice, clean recording of the decayed-film-sound so that I could use it as the basic soundtrack for the entire film. I combined this with natural bee and cricket sounds, both rhythmical sounds that mix easily with the melodious “cracking” of the damaged film.
8The two major themes of the B-Film Keeper are the disappearance of analogue film and the possible extinction of honeybees.17 But indirectly the film also refers to the tradition to see the beehive as a centre of creativity, and by extension to film as a creative activity. In the original film, the type of beehive demonstrated is a movable frame beehive: the frames can be taken out to allow the beekeeper to extract the honey frame by frame. For a filmmaker this idea of movable frames speaks volumes, so I replaced the first German inter-title, which read ‘the beehive’, with ‘movable frames’. I made similar replacements for all the other German inter-titles each time with a line that can refer to both beekeeping and filmmaking. I placed the inter-titles in a typical silent movie title-frame as to give the film an older and more theatrical look, and to undo the didactic tone of the original film. I also enhanced the “drama” in the B‑Film Keeper by adding short fragments of the film music from Alien (Ridley Scott,1979) to the film, a choice inspired by the ghostlike images of the beekeeper in his bee-costume wandering through the moonlike landscapes of the damaged film frames.
9To enhance the film-rescue theme even more, where possible and sensible within the original narrative about how to make honey, I inserted images from instructional films about how to make 8 mm films and how to take care of films.18 Inserting clips of these films into the damaged film frames of the bee film (sometimes superimposed, other times inserted fully) allowed me to make the storyline about film being threatened with extinction more explicit, and it allowed to introduce related topics such as film decay and film preservation. No matter how different in nature, several times the honey-making and filmmaking theme naturally overlap and connect. In a section I (re-)titled “the (movie) queen,” a woman who in the original film Facts about Film acts like she is bothered by the scratches on her image caused by the mishandling of the film print is once inserted in the bee film also bothered by a queen bee searching for honey. Consequently, the film-scratches can now be read as the flying pattern of the bee or as the need to scratch after being stung by a bee (the woman covers her face to protect herself). At another moment in the film, the ignition of a nitrate filmstrip is inserted in a series of close-up images of honey extraction by the bees in the hive, as if the burning film and its smoky trail is a fumigator to stun the bees. Towards the end of the B-Film Keeper, I inserted a short fragment of the documentary Race to save 100 years (Scott Benson, 1997) in which we see an employee of the early Mayer Studios putting film reels in wooden cases, ready to be sent off to customers or to be stored in their archives. I added a ‘B’ where it says ‘films’ on the box, a reference to the fact that it is most urgent to save non-mainstream and ephemeral films (B-Films) such as all those used in the B-Film Keeper. Or as the Library of Congress rightly stated: “it is in the task of restoring these orphan films that the urgency is the greatest.”19
10It is obvious that I have imposed my concerns about the death of film on this bee film, in part with the title(s) and the sounds, and most definitely by inserting the images from the films-about-film. Yet, I tried doing this in a playful way so that the death-of-film-theme (and the heaviness that comes with it) does not dominate the entire film. I am conscious that the obvious signs of water damage at the sides of the film act as film-decay-in-motion and thus actively and constantly confront the viewer with the fragility and mortality of the medium film. But as in other work with decayed film, the damage also gives the film a lyricism and a surrealist look not present in the original film, and it actually works very well in tandem with the film’s original theme of honey making. All along the film’s irregular blotches and bleached patches dance along nicely with the bees, buzzing and swarming like they do. At times even phantom sprocket holes drift in and out of the beehive, as virtual honeycombs or ghostly picture frames for other past images. These moments are the closest one can get to experiencing afterimages, not just about film, but also on film. Towards the end of The B-Film Keeper, the film-damage is so rhythmical and prominent in image and sound that it becomes like a spiritual dance with the ghost-like bee-keeper, who as a good apiarist and film-archivist carefully packs and covers his treasures before leaving the moving film frame for good.
An Aesthetic of Ruins or How to Re(dis)cover the Losses
“Found footage filmmaking, otherwise known as collage, montage, or archival practice, is an aesthetic of ruins. Its intertextuality is always also an allegory of history, a montage of memory traces, by which the filmmaker engages with the past through recall, retrieval, and recycling.”20
11There are several different methods to work with found footage, but as Ken Jacobs stated, “a lot of footage is perfect left alone.”21 With the growing interest in small film formats and forgotten film histories, the appreciation for found footage films that expose these has shifted from studying how the content of the found images is used in relation to the new narrative, to the question about the origins and state of the source material used, and to what extend it is left intact to tell its own story. Footage that is not tempered with in the new film permits it to be seen as its maker and his or her contemporaries saw it, and we can then “observe the passage of time, how it has invested the film footage with nostalgia, historical and sociological interest, and an aesthetic value that is apparent only because [the filmmaker] left the footage intact, rather than re-editing it to suit his [her] own formal and thematic concerns.”22 I really understood the complications of such a more historical approach to found footage films through the detailed study of two major trendsetters for this more recent tendency to work with found footage as a post-filmic statement: Bill Morison’s Decasia (2002) and Peter Delpeut’s Lyrisch nitraat (1991), two films that explore the wonders of nitrate films and their decomposition.
12Elsewhere I have discussed in detail the differences and similarities between the two filmmakers with regards to their respective editing strategies and how they collected and respected the original footage.23 Of the two Peter Delpeut’s work aligns itself more with the activities of film archivists than with the better known tradition of found footage filmmakers that use the footage for pure artistic experiments or to expose the oddity and artlessness of the films used.24 Delpeut respects the stories the original films told, while Morrison emphasizes the nitrate blisters over the content of the films and he has scrambled the numerous images from various sources in such a way that it is impossible to retrace the original films or their narratives. Delpeut also carefully lists all the films used in the order of their appearance in the credits of his film so we can use his “collage” as a guide to retrace the history of the original films. Bill Morrison clearly aligns his work more with the tradition to use the found images in an abstract way as the genre developed in the 1960s and was later adopted in video art and music videos. He uses the images for their oddity, for how they look and work in the new film, even just for the rhythm and movement of their nitrate deterioration, not for what they tell us as film, about film or its history, and he does not list the damaged films or the clips he worked with. I would like to see that found footage filmmakers carefully credit the films used at the end of their films. I know that this goes against the idea of making collage films as counter-culture, and I understand that most filmmakers don’t want to attract attention to the fact that they use the images “illegally”. We need a more flexible approach to copyrights by legislators and by filmmakers. Now that this history is quickly fading, filmmakers who use these films for their own creative activities, have a responsibility to help give these films a more prominent spot in film history and in film culture in general. This cannot happen if the adopted films remain anonymous and are completely dissected to serve only the wildest creative fantasies of the filmmaker.
Conclusion: the Medium is the Memory25
“Memory is the most faithful of films.”26
13With the recent total take-over by digital technology, there seems to be another wave of dumping film copies, especially in educational institutions that were some of the last places to hold substantial 16 mm film collections. Simultaneously and contrary to this, there is in the academic and artistic world a growing awareness that thousands of small films are still physically, commercially and historically neglected, and there is an active interest in trying to save these “orphan” films. These two forces make that these films have accumulated aura over the years, particularly those marked with an interesting pattern of damage. In the art world, there is a resurgent interest in found footage filmmaking and films that use damaged footage are a strong new trend in the genre. André Habib aptly described this mode as “poetic archeology” or “archival poetry”: “all these films set up an intriguing dialectic between form and content, between the imprint of the film and its material base, which manifests itself through its accidents, and its imperfections.”27 This quality is exactly what makes images on film so unique: even if they are discolored, brittle, dusty, scratched, broken, shrunk, they can still be seen, copied and used. Through digital transfers or with traditional optical printing, copies can be made that to some extend bring back the original colors of the film. And even if the print remains discolored, or damaged in any other way, we can still see the images and study what the film is telling us about the past.
14As a filmmaker I am interested in both processes: trying to recover lost film history and trying to recover the stories of the lost films. By integrating this in the films I make with found images, I hope to contribute to a greater awareness of the multiplicity, variety and importance of our celluloid past that expands far beyond the well-known master works. This is the task of the antiquarian: to study and share his or her knowledge about the ancient (film) objects as physical traces of the past. Small film formats are a rich and varied heritage that we cannot just let fade away. Films that (re-)use these films and especially those that work with damaged film footage, actively remind us of the fragile state of film as a medium, but also of its beauty even in a state of decay. This is both the story of the death of film and of the many possibilities for a rich and vibrant afterlife. If film is history, the medium is the memory.
Notes de bas de page
1 Walter Benjamin, “The Collector,” in The Arcades Project, Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 206.
2 Many 16 mm films are offered by individuals on general sale sites such as Craigslist (<http://geo.craigslist.org/iso/ca>) and this in the category “antiques” (!). Other sites provide similar films as stock footage, and this at rather expensive rates. See for example, <http://grapevinevideo.com> or <http://www.classicimg.com>. On the other hand The Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library, offers many educational and industrial films that are part of the public domain to download for free use to researchers, historians, scholars and the general public : see <http://www.archive.org/index.php>. By far the best example of such a free access Internet film archive (and listed as part of The Internet Archive) is The Prelinger Archives (<http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger>), not by chance a film archive that was build by a (found footage) filmmaker, Rick Prelinger.
3 D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 29.
4 Walter Benjamin, “The Collector,” op. cit., p. 205.
5 An optical printer is a machine composed of a projector and a camera interlocked in synchronized movement that allows to copy film images frame-by-frame, with or without special effects such as dissolves or superimpositions.
6 Walter Benjamin, “The Collector,” op. cit., p. 205.
7 Paolo Cherchi Usai, “What is an Orphan Film? Definition, Rationale, Controversy,” paper delivered at the symposium Orphans of the Storm: Saving Orphan Films in the Digital Age, University of South Carolina, September 23th 1999. Transcript: <http://www.sc.edu/filmsymposium/archive/orphans2001/usai.html> (accessed November 27th 2007).
8 Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. 94.
9 Laura Marks, op. cit., p. 92.
10 David Chute, “Film Preservation at the (Digital) Crossroads,” article written for Film Comment, but remained unpublished. Online: <http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Island/3102/f-prez.htm> (accessed May 1st 2008, no longer accessible in 2010).
11 D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, op. cit., p. 20.
12 Walter Benjamin, “The Collector,” op. cit., p. 205.
13 I assume this print comes from a Catholic School library where someone saw the need to censor the film, but that is only a guess. I bought the film for a few dollars in a shabby pawnshop on a rusty reel wrapped in a newspaper.
14 It is worth noting that there is very little known about the state of the film heritage in poorer countries. The way we can discuss and fuss about saving our crumbling celluloid past in the West is a luxury many other countries can’t afford.
15 Gerda Cammaer, Afterimages and Afterthoughts about the Afterlife of Film: A Memory of Resistance, PhD Thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy at Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, December 2009.
16 In 2007, I started working at The School of Image Arts of Ryerson University, where I have access to the Téléciné transfer facilities of the school’s own 16 mm film lab.
17 Honeybees are currently threatened with extinction due to environmental changes, among other cell-phone radiation and genetically modified crops with incorporated pest control. This has lead to the so-called colony collapse disorder, a term used for the many sudden disappearances of worker bees in from beehives.
18 These are two films I downloaded from <www.archive.org>: The Facts about Film (Atlanta Board of Education and the International Film Bureau, 1948) and How to use your 8 mm camera (Burnford, 1953).
19 Duke Law School, Center for the study of the Public Domain, “Orphan Works: Analysis and Proposal, Submission to the United States Copyright Office,” March 2005, Duke University, Online: <http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/pdf/cspdproposal.pdf> (accessed March 3rd 2008), p. 1.
20 Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video, Durham N.C., Duke University Press, 1999, p. 238.
21 Cited in William Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films, New York, Anthology Film Archives, 1993, p. 6.
22 William Wees, op. cit., p. 6.
23 Gerda Cammaer, “Film Reviews: Lyrical Nitrate directed by Peter Delpeut, The Netherlands, 1990. Decasia directed by Bill Morrison, USA, 2002,” Convergence, Vol. 15, No. 3, August 2009, p. 371-373.
24 See also William Wees, op. cit., p. 6.
25 This is the title of an interesting article by Lance Strate, “The Medium is the Message” in Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan,Essays : Archives as Medium, Ottawa, Library and Archives of Canada, 2007, p. 1. Online: <http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/innis-mcluhan/030003-4060-e.html> (accessed August 7th 2009)
26 André Bazin, “What is Cinema?,” cited in D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film,op. cit., p. 73.
27 André Habib, “Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema: Peter Delpeut’s Lyrisch nitraat,” Substance, # 110, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2006, p. 129.
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