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  • Claiming the Found:Archive Footage and Documentary Practice
  • Vance Kepley and Rebecca Swender

T he following essay, "Claiming the Found," is the work of the late Rebecca Ann Swender, or simply Becca, as she was known to her large network of friends. A potentially outstanding academic career was cut short when she died in June 2008 at age thirty-seven. A PhD candidate in the film studies program at the University of Wisconsin, Becca was starting to make a mark in the discipline through publications and several conference presentations, the high quality of which suggests the kind of intellectual contribution she might have made in the course of a full career. That sense of promise is sustained by some of the research that remained unfinished at the time of her death. The publication of "Claiming the Found" in the Velvet Light Trap brings forward one particularly worthy project in finished form and provides it with an appropriate scholarly forum.

The article makes a measurable contribution to the theoretical literature on documentary and reflects Becca's capacity for original thought. A central issue in documentary theory involves the question of whether actuality footage enjoys some special bond with reality or is simply another form of mediated representation. In this essay Becca takes the next step by inquiring about the status of archival footage when it is reused in documentaries, exploring the additional types of mediation that would obtain in that common practice. Her essay will likely not be the last word on that subject, but it will prove to be an invaluable first word.

I did some editing and revising of her extant manuscript to prepare it for publication in line with ideas Becca had discussed with me on a couple of occasions. Thanks are in order to the VLT editorial committee, especially Dave Resha, for some excellent editorial guidance and for facilitating this posthumous publication of Becca's fine work. The salutary consequence of the committee's editorial action will be twofold: a memorial tribute to a friend and admired colleague and, more important, a lasting contribution to documentary scholarship.

—Vance Kepley, Jr.
University of Wisconsin–Madison

A photograph of the Krupp works or the A.E.G. tells us next to nothing about these institutions.

—Bertolt Brecht, quoted in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 526

In the above statement Brecht voices an epistemological challenge to the conventional notion that photography provides reliable access to reality. The capacity of photographically produced imagery to reference surface reality convincingly has yielded a common belief that photographs represent the world truthfully. The image may be legible, but it is also transparent, Brecht warns; meaning can be ascribed to the image, but it cannot be claimed by the image itself.

Though he was somewhat radical in his skepticism, Brecht's concern about the truth-value of photographs anticipates a movement in documentary film theory regarding the role of actuality footage in documentaries. Actuality footage is, of course, the primary raw material of most documentary practice. The fact that such imagery has an indexical connection to the real, that it provides trace evidence of the existence of some segment of reality, has helped secure the assumption about the footage's special right to make truth claims. This has helped sustain the parallel assumption that the image's meaning is unshakably linked with its real-world referent. These assumptions have now come under salutary theoretical scrutiny, and documentary footage is best recognized as having a mediated rather than pure relationship to the real.1 [End Page 3]

Further pursuant to this theoretical interrogation, we can ask what happens when existing actuality material is reused in documentaries, when extant archive footage is edited into subsequent documentary projects. It is certainly common practice for filmmakers working in any number of documentary genres to acquire archival or found footage that was shot by someone else and then to reemploy that footage by incorporating it into a new film. What degree and what types of mediation take place during that common practice, and how stable or unstable is the bond between the original actuality footage and its referent when such footage finds its way into new documentaries? How might archive footage...

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