Meee aed] It’s all in the material, in the question of the material we want to work with. —Esther Shub, 1927! It is clear to us CVC mrt Le) Poiana mia OR Ccu ce ager cues Reece rate omen Pein tnet schist kuti Secon ROR uCMuce Mun Cimms eur Pee ei cuuendctl ime uments leceie cs film from, adjacent material and aesthetic practices.58 ‘Andre Bazin, a prominent contributor to this discourse, was extending an already familiar premise when he asserted in 1945 that cinema, under the aegis of photography, had “freed Western painting, once and forall, from its obsession with realism and allowed it to recover its aesthetic autonomy.”* What flowed from this reassuring dispensation was of course the espousalofarealist program centered on an idealized version of film’s “autonomous” image. His insistence on {qualities of temporal immediacy and indexicality as inherent to, and best served by, the cinematic. apparatus historically paralleled as it inverted the prescriptions of Clement Greenberg, for whom, authenticity in modernist painting tured on a negation of external reference, the bedrock of Bazin’s ontological approach.” ‘Subsequent histories of film and painting have done little to enhance the leverage of erstwhile defenders of aesthetic autonomy. It is bad enough that in the international art world ‘meaningful distinctions between photography and painting are as anachronistic as the gilt-edged frame. In the contemporary documentary, putatively the last bastion of Bazin’s unalloyed iransparency of the image, found footage collage has become not simply a preeminent trope in the expression of historical consciousness, ithas emerged as the very emblem of a postmodern ‘materiality—the photographic as always and inevitably second-hand, a re-contextualization, Bazin was undoubtedly aware of the history of modernist collage, of the introduction of printed materials into Cubist painting in 1912andthe powerful challenge it posed to the autonomy of the painted surface, to the desiderata of or- ganic composition and internal closure. Al- though Bazin does not, to my knowledge, con- 3 frontthe implications for filmic realism of a grow- Bruce Conner's A Movie( 1958) ing reliance on found footage, his attacks on Soviet montage and on analytical editing in general, elaborated in “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage" and elsewhere, offer a plausible blueprint for his repudiation of collage as disruptive of the bond between image and referent and an undue manipulation of the viewer's judgment of events.‘ To put it bluntly, Bazin’s fixation on the unity of present-tense recording, on image as signifier of presence, might well have inoculated him against the prospects for cinematically reconstructing a shared past from fragmentary images. n retrospect, then, it seems more than coincidental that Bazin’s claims for medium specificity were fashioned at exactly the juncture when the momentum of 20th century history—and with it he burden of historical representation—plunged into the Year Zero of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and the intimation of a new world order. By 1945, the deployment of archival images to reanimate or polemically reinterpret prior accounts of events, figures, and social processes was a standard feature of nonfiction filmmak- ing, In the arena of commercial fiction, intermingling archival or stock footage with “original” images had been restricted to ancillary functions such as the interpolation of establishing shots, of exotic backgrounds or unusual bits of action. In documentary, however, where the practice of rearranging extant materials in fresh combinations dates from the time of Lumiere, found footage was established as an integral element of exposition and argument, often serving as illustration ofa verbal reference orasameans offiling gaps in spatial continuity or didactic evidence. Indeed, the recent outpouring of wartime newsreel compilations and miltary training films had under- SPECTATOR vou, 20 NOt FALL TSOSWINTER 2000ARTHUR FOUND FOOTAGE scored the importance of found footage to the rhetorical strategies of corporate and state- sponsored propaganda, for which the Why We Fight series is exemplary. Addressed in the broader historical framework of nonfiction cinema, the appropriation of existing images manifests two principal tendencies that were initially closely related but increasingly diverged in the development of post-WWII non-mainstream practices. Within European avant-garde circles of the '20s and '30s, found footage was reworked through editing techniques emphasizing fantastical, previously ignored formal or metaphoric qualities in otherwise banal scenes, a method of "estrangement" found in films by Rene Clair, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttman, and Charles DeKeukeleire. A second tendency, evidentin the work by Esther Shub, Dziga Vertov, and Joris Ivens, offers a politicized recalibration or inversion of scenes culled from “official” newsreels, and more marginal materials; in doing so it anticipates the collage ethos which has dominated the last 30 years of American documentary * The appeal of found footage as a conduit to history was not so much canceled as momentarily suspended during the '60s' flowering of cinema verite and Direct Cinema, Documen- tary styles favoring analytical editing and voice-over narration—in particular, New Deal and British government documentaries of the '30s—were principal targets of a cultural ideology of spontaneity, ambiguity, and an avawedly non-judgmental perspective. The verite movement's embrace of present tense recording andde- tached first-person ad- dress, its cultivation of the sync-sound long take as replete bearer of the Real, served to implicitly or explicily— asin the sizable body of interviews with ‘60s film- makers—renounce the option of associational montage derived from the rearrangement of found materials.” To put it another way, the ostensible reduction of editing to the barest necessities of spatial-temporal continuity was adduced as not only a token of self-definition but of cultural legitimation in a period whose overarching commitment to first-hand experience entailed a concomitant mistrust of official history as a template for present action. Melding technical advances in lightweight cameras and sound equipment with mise-en-scene techniques exploited by Italian Neo-Realism and masters such as Renoir, verite documentary was the perfect embodiment of Bazin’s vision of cinematic, immediacy. By the early '70s, its status as leading paradigm of realist inscription was challenged on several fronts, most significantly by collage. If the verite aesthetic can be said to reify certain culturally. and historically-specific altitudes toward the representation of everyday life, the (re)emergence of found footage in American documentary is similarly linked to a broader renewal of interest in alternative forms of historical narrative. The accelerating institutionalization of film sludies generated both a revaluation of pre-Hollywood production and expanded access to the artifacts of non-mainstream cinemas. In the arena of what would soon be labeled “identity politics,” continuing struggles for the public recagnition and remediation of racial, gender, and sexual oppression mandated radical revisions in the representation of individual and collective histories. The urgent need to reinterpret American history, galvanzied by the debacle in Vietnam, was further enhanced by the assimilation of innovative European models of historiographic evidence and argument, especially the focus on commonplace documents gleaned from 59 Found footage used to crtique media exploitation of violent disasterFoucault's notion of archeology." Hence the widespread post-"60s' appetite for found footage was. {fed by two interdependent initiatives: the desire to reformulate tropes of historical narrative, and the micro-political critique of historical exclusion or distortion enacted by disenfranchised groups Cn the terrain of dominant representation, Itis useful as wel to specify the opposition of verite and found footage documentaries in more narrowly discursive terms. Although the recycling of past images frequently operate: tandem with present-tense interviews, filmic structures featuring this material tend to privilege the recognition of conscious construction over assumptions of “unmediated” presentation. By the same token, tropes of dis-continuity as expressive of the bond between past and present take Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Ratferty’s Atomic Cafe (1982) precedence over illusions of temporal harmony. Where the film image in veri is meantto register ‘as temporally and spatially singular or unique as guaranteed by the phenomenological imprint of hand-held camera movement and framing,’ collage renders the perception of images as dis- ‘embodied, materially discrete, yet with the potential foriconographic substitution. Thats, a found footage-centered discourse will admit not only the possibility that images are capable of eliciting multiple responses—a key tenet of verito—but that the field of meaning shifts according to thematic context and enveloping syntax; that field cannot be universalized or freed from historical determination. The organizing “voice” in collage films is decentered or split between an enunciative trace in the original footage encompassing stylistic features and material residues of production such as film stock, speed of shooting, and aspect ratio, and a second, overriding source of knowledge manifest by the collage work through editing, application of sound, new titles, and so on. As an enunciative framework, collage constitutes an antidote to verite's unabashedly individualist (and performative) encounter with social reality. SPECTATOR VoL. 20 No. FALL TSSSIWINTER 2000