Filmmakers as Antiquarians: Adapting and Adopting Found Footage in the Digital Age

<p dir="ltr">In the wake of more and more film prints disappearing, both due to physical forces (film decay) and to societal forces (the general push to go digital and no longer use film or to project on film), Benjamin’s motto has gained tremendous importance for found footage filmmakers. Where before the interest in found footage filmmaking focused on using the images to tell personal stories or to comment on the content of mass media, more and more found footage filmmakers now feel the urge to tell stories about film as a disappearing medium. Besides the usual creative rewriting of history and memory, this particular kind of found footage films is an important contribution to the preservation and appreciation of our celluloid past. Moreover, many found footage filmmakers have adopted so-called “orphan films” to use the images in their films. As film collectors they are often the sole saviors of unknown film treasures that fell outside the scope of official film archives. Where before, in the analogue age, this often meant the destruction of the original film because the filmmaker would literally cut and past the film into a new narrative, in the digital age this is no longer the case: most filmmakers work in digital video which means that they transfer the images and the original film copy stays in tact.</p><p dir="ltr">In contrast to our society’s growing amnesia with regards to analogue film and analogue filmmaking practices, found footage filmmakers remind us of this tradition. Their films operate as moving image catalogues for a widely dispersed and so far undervalued film “antiquarium.” The latter is especially the case for the quickly fading world of 16 mm films and the many lesser known film genres that were shot on this format, such as industrial films, public broadcast announcements, mental hygiene films, scientific experiments, army films, publicity and educational films, anthropological films, independent documentaries and even some home movies. In practice, for who is looking to find new footage, it is evident that many of these films have already disappeared: it is more and more difficult to find 16 mm films, and it is more and more expensive to buy them. Decades ago, first with the coming of analogue video (VHS) followed by the coming of digital video (DVD), university and other public libraries organized major clean-ups and they eagerly trashed most of their 16 mm collections: that was a golden age for film scavengers such as found footage filmmakers. In the mean time, the 16 mm copies that survived these first major sweeps of 16 mm film history in public institutions have become scarce and thus more valuable objects: they not easily to be found anymore as trash or received as freebies, but they circulate as sought for “antiques,” as can be seen in the adds that sell 16 mm films on the internet. Rodowick’s observation that “what we always believed to be the most modern art is suddenly becoming antiquarium” is nowhere as evident as in the vanishing world of 16 mm film production and exhibition: a story and history worth telling both in word and in (found) moving images before it vanishes.</p>