Collage film

Collage film is a style of film created by juxtaposing found footage from disparate sources. The term has also been applied to the physical collaging of materials onto film stock.[1]

Not to be confused with Composite film.

Surrealist roots of collage film

The surrealist movement played a critical role in the creation of the collage film form. 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.[2] When Salvador Dalí saw the film, he was famously enraged, believing Cornell had stolen the idea from his thoughts.[3] But Adrian Brunel made, twelve years before, Crossing the Great Sagrada (1924)[4] and Henri Storck conceived, four years earlier, Story of the Unknown soldier (Histoire du soldat inconnu) (1932).[5]

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.[6]

Renaissance

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."[7] 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).[8]

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.[9]

Examples since 1970s

Other notable users of this technique are Chuck Workman[10] with his Oscar-winning Precious Images,[11] Craig Baldwin in his films Spectres of the Spectrum, Tribulation 99 and O No Coronado and Bill Morrisson 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.[12] 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.[13]

The 2016 experimental documentary Fraud 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.[14]

Notable collage documentaries

Comedies

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.

Physical film collaging

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.

Animation

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

gollark: Though not the shields thing, since they take time to come up.
gollark: Yes.
gollark: Oh dear.
gollark: None whatsoever, sorry about that, and six.
gollark: I tried to make a parser which did, but it just got stuck infinitely recursing somehow.

References
  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. 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
  3. Joseph Cornell: how the reclusive artist conquered the art world – from his mum’s basement-The Guardian
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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.
  9. TFH Exclusive: A Clip from THE MOVIE ORGY-YouTube
  10. The Source-AV Club
  11. MOVIE REVIEW: Will the Real Andy Warhol Please Stand Up?:Documentary: Entertaining look at the pop superstar illuminates the artist rather than the man-LA Times
  12. Hays, Matthew (October 8, 2008). "Montreal, mon amour". CBC News. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 28 January 2010.
  13. "Liverpool film portrait takes Cannes film festival by storm". Liverpool Daily Post. Retrieved 21 May 2008.
  14. Bray, Catherine. "Hot Docs Film Review: 'Fraud'". Variety. Michelle Sobrino. Retrieved 15 May 2016.
  15. Oddball Films:Cine-Collage - Remixing the Moving Image - Thur. Sep 25 - 8PM
  16. Oddball Films:Cine-Collage - Remixing the Moving Image - Thur. Sep 25 - 8PM
  17. Eye Washes: ROBERT BREER, 1926-2011-The Brooklyn Rail
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