Found Footage

No Damage is a composition made out of fragments from over 80 different feature and documentary films that show the architecture of New York City — its architectural presence as captured on film over eight decades. Lifted out of their original context and juxtaposed in groups, these scenes reveal their emotional implications: grandeur, glamour, the wake of modernism, post-modernism and, most recently, post 9/11 sentimentalism. A number of particular clips that resonate such emotions enter into a non-verbal discourse on age, status, functionality and aesthetics.

In 1939, Westinghouse made a film about a small-town family visiting the New York World's Fair. Trapped inside that film was a completely different film that shows a mysterious alternate universe, revealed by Bryan Boyce’s own patented brand of narrative deconstruction and evisceration.The outcome is an absurd and chilling drama of a family transfixed by the technological wonders that would soon transform consumer society.

In this interview, American filmmaker, teacher, and video artist Peggy Ahwesh (b.1954) delves into the key figures and primary texts that have inspired her work in Super-8 and video since the 1970s.  She discusses her early influences as a member of the underground art scenes in Pittsburgh in the late 70s and Soho’s Kitchen in the 80s. Ahwesh’s experimental hand-processing and controversial subject matter can be traced to feminist theory, and her exposure to underground experimental films, including works by Werner Herzog, George Amaro, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith and her teacher at Antioch College, Tony Conrad.

Sable Elyse Smith's How We Tell Stories to Children is a single channel video that combines found footage, music clips, and audio of the artist reading with video clips of her father recording himself from prison. Focal points and significant moments seem to always occur just offscreen, or quickly flash away.

The Prognosticator (Or, We Are All Pythagoreans Now) is Chapter 1 of Mysterium Cosmographicum.

Strained Andromeda Strain is a frame by frame re-edit of Robert Wise's 131-minute sci-fi biological thriller into a 7-minute anxious oscillation.

This video is a 7-minute single channel piece consisting of two monologues: the first is a speech prepared for Richard Nixon in the event of a moon landing disaster in 1969, the second is the final words of the computer HAL from the film 2001.

This title is only available on Suitable Video, Volume 1.

Guided expertly by those who live on the land and driven by the pulse of the natural world, Mobilize takes us on an exhilarating journey from the far north to the urban south. Over every landscape, in all conditions, everyday life flows with strength, skill and extreme competence. Hands swiftly thread sinew through snowshoes. Axes expertly peel birch bark to make a canoe. A master paddler navigates icy white waters. In the city, Mohawk ironworkers stroll across steel girders, almost touching the sky, and a young woman asserts her place among the towers.

An allegory recycling images from the past, still relevant to the present moment.

“Horses are lucky, they’re stuck with the war same as us, but nobody expects them to be in favor of it, to pretend to believe in it.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, 1932

A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted) is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions. Animals, human bodies, children, ritual, and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire, and a visceral movement that is more felt than seen.

By accident, the content of a computer encyclopedia is transferred into the brain of an animated parrot resulting in the emotional breakdown of a fine peach.

"I would never have known how to do anything on my computer if it wasn't for Computer Smarts."

—Mark Roth

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 3, Computer Smarts.

Found-footage video that addresses American racism and the violence that it spawns. 

The latest in Muntadas and Reese's series documenting the selling of the American presidency features political ads from the 1950s to ads from the 2004 campaigns, and highlights the development of the political strategy and marketing techniques of the TV campaign process.

Edited without commentary, the artists show an endless stream of candidates, from Eisenhower to Kerry, who are marketed like commercial products. As Muntadas and Reese trace the development of the campaign TV spot, what becomes apparent is a consistent sameness of political issues amid complex, changing visuals.

A deceased hoarder, reconstituted through technology, recounts a difficult childhood as inhabitants of a virtual world struggle to reconcile materialistic tendencies. A scientist leads an effort to understand the passage of time, but the data is unreliable. The question remains, what happens to our things after we are gone?

My TV Dictionary: The Drill is one of several video works Breder created by re-editing recorded footage from cable television movies. This video conveys the violent and sexist subtext of the 24/7 stream of cable television “and thus becomes a potent metaphor for our times” - Jon Hanhardt, 1987

Workers Leaving the Factory - Ten Days that Shook the World – downloaded, repeatedly recompressed and reversed V.1 is a 13-minute re-edit of the film Workers Leaving The Lumière’s Factory in Lyon.

Moving Stories strings together scenes of passenger aircraft in flight.  In this short study of the dramatic and narrative power of image and sound, Provost manipulates cinema language and reaches, though minimal means, a strong, emotionally loaded result.  With a limited number of images, an absorbing soundtrack, and a suggestive story line, the viewer's imagination is stimulated to the maximum.

"Superimposing the stories of two women—the filmmaker’s late grandmother and the amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin—Home When You Return explores the psychogeographies of mourning through a variety of modes, from documentary to melodrama. Emptied and put up for sale following its matriarch’s passing, the family home becomes the site of a winding tour through polymorphic representations of the past in media and memory." - NYFF Currents

Fashioned out of home movies recovered from failing hard drives, this glitch-art video makes comparisons between different forms of memory - suggesting that, while error and decay may keep us up at night, they might also be the way we put our ghosts to bed.

-- Evan Meaney

In Spank an eight-second film clip has been re-edited, frame by frame, into a 7 1/2-minute video, tranforming discreet gestures into suggestive, pulsating sequences. This deconstruction of narrative Hollywood cinema exposes and intensifies the authoritative relationship between a man and a young girl. 

Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth installment of the Transformers movie franchise directed by Michael Bay, was released June 27 2014. But for months ahead of the release, on YouTube one could already access an immense trove of production footage recorded by amateurs in locations where the film was shot, such as Utah, Texas, Detroit, Chicago, Hong Kong and mainland China. Transformers: the Premake turns 355 YouTube videos into a critical investigation of the global big budget film industry, amateur video making, and the political economy of images.

At the heart of Alone With You is the notion of impassioned avarice, i.e. the kind of motivated acquisitiveness that drives both erotic desire and obsessive collecting.

A hyper-collage endurance test of sado-masochistic proportions, mixing an anthology of corporate video music with a feng shui video.

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 2, Hot Mirror Mix.

A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted) is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions. Animals, human bodies, children, ritual, and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire, and a visceral movement that is more felt than seen.

The union of humankind and the camera is a long and sordid tale. This lyrical dance illustrates the inseparable nature of the two.

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 3, Computer Smarts.