Film Categories: found footage

  • Ranch: The Alan Wood Ranch Project

    “Ranch” is about The Alan Wood Ranch Project, a massive environmental art piece built on 320 acres in the foothills of the Rockies. Combining time-lapse photography, old Hollywood Westerns, television news and aerial photography, “Ranch” offers the viewer a refreshing new appreciation of the work. A film of breathtaking beauty and a document of surprising humour, “Ranch” is part experimental cinema, part documentary.

  • Reunion in Dunnville

    This film started out as a community project involving my students at Sheridan College. On one level, it documents a remarkable reunion of people from as far away as Australia and New Zealand who converge on a small town in rural Ontario, where 2,436 Allied pilots received their training during World War II. A subtext emerges in the dialectic between our own newsreel footage of the event in 1979, and home movies shot by the veterans, including reunions at the base before it became a giant turkey farm. This allows for some revealing interruptions of conventional documentary codification, and serves…

  • Rose, The

    An experiment in film collage made without the use of a camera. It utilizes food dye and handscratched animation directly on the film surface, intercut with live action found footage starring Hayley Mills. Hacked-up footage from an amateur monster movie is parallel-cut throughout, creating the appearance of a narrative.

  • Barbara’s Blindness

    “There is no one named Barbara to be found; a pair of mysterious blind-person’s hands (looking suspiciously like Wieland’s) make only one cameo appearance to ‘read’ us the title; yet these seemingly incongruous elements provide the perfect introduction to the ironic humour of the film itself. The main source of the film seems to be an old grade-school morality-movie on the appreciation of eyesight, starring golden-haired Mary, who finds herself temporarily blind, and a leaden-voiced narrator, who finds himself our unwitting straight-man. The filmmakers re-edited this curiosity and intercut it with other stock footage of disasters, agricultural techniques, and monster…

  • Sammy

    Sammy was a dog I had when growing up in Dundas, Ontario. I found old Super 8 footage of Sammy long after he had passed away, and I decided to work with these images on both a rotoscope and optical printer, to playfully and rhythmically evoke my emotions, memories, and image of little Sammy.

  • Sanctus

    “Sanctus” is a film of the rephotographed moving x-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson (‘Fall of the House of Usher,’ 1929) and his colleagues. Making the invisible visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as its protection on a polluted planet where immune system disorders proliferate. “In ‘Sanctus,’ Barbara Hammer addresses in a visually and aurally stunning fashion the co-fragility of both human existence and the film emulsion, the raw material onto which she cretes images. She has transformed ‘found footage’ – scientific x-ray films from the 1950s – into a lyrical journey, into…

  • Seashore

    “The basic image derives from a shot of women in (Edwardian era ) dresses standing along the edge of the ocean. Within this eight-second loop, [Rimmer] cuts shorter ones. For example, the activity of a central group of three women is cut so that the figures repeat certain motions over and over and over again… “Rimmer also chose to use the forms of surface imperfections, the scratches and dirt patterns, as bases for his loops… Although working in a disciplined style of re-structuring cinematic forms, his highly orchestrated creations have inspired great admiration both from cineastes and the more general…

  • Smell of Burning Ants, The

    “The Smell of Burning Ants” is a haunting documentary on the pains of growing up male. It explores the inner and outer cruelties that boys perpetrate and endure. Through formative events of a boy’s life, we come to understand the ways in which men can become emotionally disconnected and alienated from their feminine side. The common dismissal that “boys will be boys” evolves into the chilling realization that boys frequently become angry, destructive, and emotionally disabled men. “The Smell of Burning Ants” illustrates how boys are socialized by fear, power and shame. The burning of ants is one of the…

  • Spare Parts

    Scenes from old educational and propaganda films, cut up and arranged (deranged) in numerical patterns. Chance collisions occur with techniques based on William Burroughs’ writing experiments and John Cage’s music composition. The final section consists of 24 variations of 24 frames in one second of film; to watch all 6.2 X 10 (to the power of 23) possible permutations would take approximately 76 thousand-trillion years.

  • Stop Darlington

    Through the use of found footage of a TV image, the practical and moral imperatives of the title are momentarily suspended in a problematic of representation. In affirming the density of the material objecthood at the basis of its “message,” the film foregrounds the question: “What are some of the difficulties encountered in the appropriation of media – particularly those of the mainstream – by and for the pedagogical interest of the Left?”