Reconfiguring Found Footage Film

The cinema most often associated with the idea of waste is ­undoubtedly that produced from “found footage.” Films qualified by the term are ­generally said to “autonomize the images, favour direct intervention on the film as material, and become attached to different sites (layers of emulsion, for instance) and forms of editing.”¹ 1 - Nicole Brenez and Pip Chodorov, “Cartographie du Found Footage,” Exploding, ­special issue “Tom Tom the Piper’s Son de Ken Jacobs” (n.d.): 99. During the 1950s and 1960s, the comments and self-descriptive writings of many directors ­producing these films—as in texts by the Lettrists Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître—emphasized the fact that the film stock utilized in this way had indeed been found in the trash or editing room bins, a fact that lent their work an undeniable aura of the avant-garde. Interest shown by certain critical writers in this kind of production gradually began showing a semantic slippage in the notion of found footage, which might ­designate, in Yann Beauvais’ words, “as much the object—a found sequence—as a practice that consists in producing films by ­appropriating found, lifted, sampled, and subverted elements not shot by the filmmaker.”² 2 - Yann Beauvais, “Films d’archives,” 1895, No. 41 (October 2003): 5.