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Collage film

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with Composite film.

Collage film is a style of film created by juxtaposing found footage from disparate sources (archival footage, excerpts from other films, newsreels, home movies, etc.). The term has also been applied to the physical collaging of materials onto film stock.[1]

Surrealist roots

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The surrealist movement played a critical role in the creation of the collage film form.[2][3] In 1936, the American artist Joseph Cornell produced one of the earliest collage films with his reassembly of East of Borneo (1931), combined with pieces of other films, into a new work he titled Rose Hobart after the leading actress.[4] When Salvador Dalí saw the film, he was famously enraged, believing Cornell had stolen the idea from his thoughts.[5] Predecessors include Adrian Brunel's Crossing the Great Sagrada (1924)[6] and Henri Storck's Story of the Unknown soldier (Histoire du soldat inconnu) (1932).[7]

The idea of combining film from various sources also appealed to another surrealist artist André Breton. In the town of Nantes, he and friend Jacques Vaché would travel from one movie theater to another, without ever staying for an entire film.[8]

Renaissance

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A renaissance of found footage films emerged after Bruce Conner's A Movie (1958). The film mixes ephemeral film clips in a dialectical montage. A famous sequence made up of disparate clips shows "a submarine captain [who] seems to see a scantily dressed woman through his periscope and responds by firing a torpedo which produces a nuclear explosion followed by huge waves ridden by surfboard riders."[9] Conner continued to produce several other found footage films including Report and Crossroads among others.

Working at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in the 1960s, Arthur Lipsett created collage films such as Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) and 21-87 (1963), entirely composed of found footage discarded during the editing of other films (the former earning an Academy Award nomination).[10]

In 1968, the young Joe Dante made The Movie Orgy with producer Jon Davidson that featured outtakes, trailers and commercials from various shows and films.[11]

Examples since the 1970s

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Other notable users of this technique are Chuck Workman[12] with his 1986 Oscar-winning Precious Images,[13] Rick Prelinger known for his use of home movies and ephemeral films on meditative projects like 2004's Panorama Ephemera,[14][15] Wheeler Winston Dixon known for his 1972 examination of TV advertising Serial Metaphysics,[16][17][18] Craig Baldwin in his films Spectres of the Spectrum, Tribulation 99 and O No Coronado and Bill Morrison who used found footage lost and neglected in film archives in his 2002 work Decasia (which alongside Kevin Rafferty's 1982 Cold War satire The Atomic Cafe were inducted to the National Film Registry). A similar entry in the found footage canon is Peter Delpeut's Lyrical Nitrate (1991).

The technique was employed in the 2008 feature film The Memories of Angels, a visual ode to Montreal composed of stock footage from over 120 NFB films from the 1950s and 1960s.[19] Terence Davies used a similar technique to create Of Time and the City, recalling his life growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s and 1960s, using newsreel and documentary footage supplemented by his own commentary voiceover and contemporaneous and classical music soundtracks.[20]

Christian Marclay's The Clock, a 24-hour compilation of time-related scenes from movies, debuted at London's White Cube gallery in 2010.[21] Marclay made several forays into video art that informed The Clock with his 1995 film Telephones, forming a narrative out of clips from Hollywood films where characters use a telephone,[22] and his 1998 film Up and Out combining video from Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup with audio from Brian De Palma's Blow Out. The latter was an early experiment in the effect of synchronization, where viewers naturally attempted to find intersections between the two works, and it developed the editing style that Marclay employs for The Clock.[22][23]

The 2016 experimental documentary Fraud (by Dean Fleischer Camp, later known for the Oscar-nominated Marcel the Shell with Shoes On) was sourced from over a hundred hours of home video footage uploaded to YouTube by an unknown family in the United States. The footage was combined with additional clips appropriated from other YouTube users and transformed into a 53-minute crime film about a family preoccupied with material consumption going to extreme lengths in order to get out from under unsustainable personal debt.[24]

Scottish poet Ross Sutherland made his 2015 feature film debut Stand By for Tape Back-Up, consisting of recordings from an old VHS tape left by his late grandfather.[25][26][27]

Canadian experimental filmmaker Stephen Broomer's first feature work Potamkin (2017), about the late pioneering film critic Harry Alan Potamkin (1900-1933) who was one of the first to proclaim cinema as an art form, is composed of fragments from the many films he reviewed for newspapers and magazines during the 1920s and 1930s (e.g. Battleship Potemkin, The Passion of Joan of Arc and Metropolis).[28][29][30][31]

Notable collage documentaries

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Comedies

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Some of the earliest surrealist collage works were humorous. This tradition of using film collage for comedic effect can later be seen in commercial films such as Woody Allen's first film, What's Up, Tiger Lily? in which Allen took Key of Keys, a Japanese spy film by Senkichi Taniguchi, re-edited parts of it and wrote a new soundtrack made up of his own dialogue for comic effect, and Carl Reiner's 1982 comedy Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid which incorporated footage from approximately two dozen classic film noir films along with original sequences with Steve Martin.

Canadian video artist Todd Graham is known for his 1987 cult fan film Apocalypse Pooh, a bizarrely comedic mash-up of Disney's Winnie the Pooh and Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now.[34][35][36]

Physical film collaging

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Some filmmakers have taken a more literal approach to collage film. Stan Brakhage created films by collaging found objects between clear film stock, then passing the results through an optical printer, such as in Mothlight and The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Another notable collage film that also used this technique is Fruit Flies (2010) by Canadian artist Christine Lucy Latimer similar to Mothlight.[37]

Animation

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Examples of animated collage film (which uses clippings from newspapers, comics and magazines alongside other inanimate objects):

References

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  1. ^ Beaver, Frank Eugene (January 2006). "Collage film". Dictionary of Film Terms: The Aesthetic Companion to Film Art. Peter Lang Publishing. p. 46. ISBN 978-0-8204-7298-0.
  2. ^ Borrowed Dreams: Joseph Cornell and the Archive as Psychic Imprint by Stephen Broomer - Frames Cinema Journal on Vimeo
  3. ^ Cut: film as found object in contemporary video - Internet Archive (pg.16)
  4. ^ Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Quick and the Dead: Surrealism and the Found Ethnographic Footage Films of Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao: The Turtlelike. Camera Obscura. January 2003, Vol. 18 Issue 52
  5. ^ Olivia Laing (July 25, 2015). "Joseph Cornell: how the reclusive artist conquered the art world – from his mum's basement". the Guardian.
  6. ^ "Crossing the Great Sagrada (1924)". BFI Screenonline.
  7. ^ "CINEMATEK - Koninklijk Belgisch Filmarchief". www.cinematek.be.
  8. ^ André Breton, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), and Breton, “As in a Wood.” L'age du cinema (1951) as reprinted in The Shadow and Its Shadows, ed. Paul Hammond (London: The British Film Institute, 1991). As cited by Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Quick and the Dead: Surrealism and the Found Ethnographic Footage Films of Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao: The Turtlelike. Camera Obscura. Jan2003, Vol. 18 Issue 52
  9. ^ Wees, William. Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films Anthology Film Archives, New York: 1993: P.14 ISBN 0-911689-19-2
  10. ^ Wees, William C. (Fall 2007). "From Compilation to Collage: The Found-Footage Films of Arthur Lipsett" (PDF). Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture, 2007. Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Retrieved 25 February 2012.
  11. ^ TFH Exclusive: A Clip from THE MOVIE ORGY. Trailers from Hell on YouTube.
  12. ^ "The Source". The A.V. Club. 29 March 2002.
  13. ^ Visionaries|2010 Tribeca Festival|Tribeca
  14. ^ DIMINISHED HORIZONS: TWO FOR THE ROAD - Spectacle Theater
  15. ^ Dead Media Beat: Rick Prelinger and his ephermera film collection|WIRED
  16. ^ Dixon, Wheeler W. (1997-01-01). The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema. SUNY Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-3565-6.
  17. ^ "First Fruits of Inspiration: The Films of Wheeler Winston Dixon". FilmInt.nu. 2014-05-21. Retrieved 2024-05-19.
  18. ^ "Wheeler Winston Dixon: From Ancient History to A Hundred Years from Today - LA Filmforum". www.lafilmforum.org. Retrieved 2024-05-19.
  19. ^ Hays, Matthew (October 8, 2008). "Montreal, mon amour". CBC News. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 28 January 2010.
  20. ^ "Liverpool film portrait takes Cannes film festival by storm". Liverpool Daily Post. Retrieved 21 May 2008.
  21. ^ "'It's impossible!' – Christian Marclay and the 24-hour clock made of movie clips | Art and design". The Guardian. Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  22. ^ a b González, Jennifer; Gordon, Kim; Higgs, Matthew (June 2005). Christian Marclay. Phaidon Press. p. 61. ISBN 978-0-7148-4374-2.
  23. ^ Pollack, Barbara (10 July 2012). "It's About Time". ARTnews. Retrieved 5 June 2015.
  24. ^ Bray, Catherine (9 May 2016). "Hot Docs Film Review: 'Fraud'". Variety. Michelle Sobrino. Retrieved 15 May 2016.
  25. ^ STAND BY FOR TAPE BACK-UP - Torino Film Fest
  26. ^ British Council Film: Stand By For Tape Back-Up
  27. ^ VISIONARY FILM: Stand By For Tape Back-Up (2015) Ross Sutherland
  28. ^ "Potamkin by Stephen Broomer | Arts + Literature Laboratory | Madison Contemporary Arts Center". artlitlab.org. 29 July 2022. Retrieved 2024-08-02.
  29. ^ The Carriage Set Upright: Stephen Broomer on Potamkin - Film International
  30. ^ Canyon Cinema : Canyon Cinema 50 — February & March Events
  31. ^ Now Available: New Digital Files from Stephen Broomer
  32. ^ LA 92, directed by TJ Martin and Daniel Lindsay|Time Out
  33. ^ "La película infinita | IFFR". iffr.com.
  34. ^ The Accidental Father of Mashup Culture: Jim Knipfel on Todd Graham and Apocalypse Pooh - Believer Magazine
  35. ^ Apocalypse Pooh & 7 Other All-Time Great Fan-Made Movie Mashups - Screen Rant
  36. ^ Todd Graham's Apocalypse Pooh in CBC Toronto 1991 Entertainment News Segment - Todd Graham on YouTube
  37. ^ Fragile Systems: The Media Hybrids of Christine Lucy Latimer - Art & Trash on Vimeo
  38. ^ a b "Oddball Films: Cine-Collage - Remixing the Moving Image - Thur. Sep 25 - 8PM".
  39. ^ a b c d Earmarked for Collision: A Highly Biased Tour of Collage Animation - Routledge
  40. ^ McCormack, Tom (October 3, 2011). "Eye Washes: ROBERT BREER, 1926–2011". The Brooklyn Rail.
  41. ^ Know Your Indie Filmmaker: Winston Hacking|Cartoon Brew
  42. ^ Binocular Briefs - Spotlight on Collage|Animation World Network
  43. ^ SATURDAY SHORT: ERODIUM THUNK (2018)|366 Weird Movies
  44. ^ Paperback: Prisoners of the Printed Page and the Frayed Aesthetics of ‘The Timekeepers of Eternity’ (2021) - Split Tooth Media
  45. ^ ‘The Timekeepers of Eternity’ CFF Review – ‘The Langoliers’ Gets an Innovative, Experimental Reworking - Bloody Disgusting
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