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Found Footage Opening title cards identify the setting as the Yucatán Peninsula in 1931, where Sylvanus G. Morley, a legendary archeologist who began studying Mayan artifacts in 1904, is teaching a Mayan woman to speak English. The young woman stands in front of a pyramid dressed in traditional Mayan garb and phonetically pronounces these words: “We are dressed as our ancestors were, who lived here in peace and contentment 700 years ago.” The scene ends with a somewhat awkward bow toward the camera, followed by another title card stating simply “Fake Documentary.” The next shot is a pan from the ancient Mayan pyramids of El Rey to the pyramid-shaped hotels of contemporary Cancun, emphasizing that yes, indeed, this is not a real documentary film but instead a film determined to upset the codes and categories that delimit documentary discourse. The film is Jesse Lerner’s Ruins, a feature-length documentary from 1999 that in its “fakeness” illustrates some of the central tenets of “history ” as an open text. The opening sequence functions as a metaphor for the historiographical strategies of the entire film in which past and present are dialogically imbricated in relations of space, time, language, and ideology. In order to truly understand the past, Ruins shows us, one must first grapple with both the desires of the present and the awkward mechanisms—some more insistently awkward than others—through which historical discourse is rendered. In an age of digital reproduction and recombinant media, film, like “history,” occupies an intermediary condition in an inevitable process of revision, recontextualization, and reuse. This is perhaps no more true than in films that use found footage, meaning footage shot for one use but then “found” and repurposed, and thus redirected toward new uses. Found footage films are a staple of the American avant-garde and include experiments with “revised” films made by Joseph Cornell from the 1930s, to the work of Bruce Conner as exemplified by A Movie from 1958, and to art-oriented practices of the 1990s and a new millennium in which artists such as Douglas Gordon revisit existing films to explore dimensions of temporality, spatiality, and narrative, subjecting films to scrutiny and meta-analysis. Why has found footage been so important to the American avantgarde ? The answer is at least partially economic. Found footage films do 3 ] Found Footage · 69 not require cameras or the purchase and developing of film stock. For the most part, among marginal film- and videomakers, the copyright of appropriated works is disregarded or—as in works such as Conner’s 1976 Crossroads (which makes use of footage declassified by the federal government ) or Hollis Frampton’s Public Domain (1972)—irrelevant. In extreme cases such as Ken Jacobs’s Perfect Film (1986) or William Jones’s Tearoom (1962/2007), the filmmaker did little more than retrieve a complete roll of film from obscurity, make a minor adjustment, and sign his name to it. Although the legacy of Marcel Duchamp’s “ready-mades” is clearly in evidence in these examples, found footage is more frequently subjected to transformative processes such as optical printing, reediting, tinting, and so forth. As the title of Jay Leyda’s book Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film suggests, the easy (one is tempted to say natural) reproducibility of film images makes them ideal sources for duplication and rejuvenation. He argues that the process of found footage filmmaking resembles the process of biological reproduction, indicating an almost genetic proclivity for images to be copied, mutated, or recontextualized in the course of perpetuating the film “species.” Leyda’s organic model, however, provides little insight into the political and historiographical implications of found footage works that develop an antagonistic relationship with the texts they appropriate. Although this is clearly not the case with all instances of recycled imagery, a tendency toward oppositionality has contributed to its privileging in the American avant-garde, where alterity has been a defining and sustaining impulse. In James Peterson’s Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-Garde Cinema, for example, oppositionality is clearly at the heart of his focus on found footage as one of the three primary discursive strands in the American avant-garde.1 However, there is good reason to avoid this type of binary thinking about the relationship between commercial and experimental cinema, particularly in light of the discursive complexity and interdetermination of much found footage practice. Film (need I say again, “like history”?) is both material...

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