Film Categories: found footage

  • Artist Spotlight Series: Roberto Ariganello

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. Roberto Ariganello was a passionate believer in the importance of independent film. Working in a variety of styles and genres, he experimented with narrative and documentary form, playfully exploring the use of appropriated imagery and the relationship between sound and picture. His solo and collaborative films offer humorous and thoughtful alternatives to the conventions of mainstream media and consumer culture. Study guide includes an essay by James Missen. 1) Yesterday’s Wine 2) Shelter 3) Non-Zymase Pentathlon 4) Contrafacta 5) Loteria 6) Gesture

  • This Time Last Year

    On Thanksgiving of 2001, Daniel set her video camera to run while she and her family got ready to pose for a photograph. One year later, she turns the footage, together with notes from the same time, into a portrait of all that is no longer there. “Daniel explores loss as something sensed, felt and lived with in this poetic portrait of the absences we feel in the moments we capture on film.” – Images Festival 2003

  • Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist

    Built from artifacts recovered from her own then her mother’s storage closet, “Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist” follows the filmmaker’s tragic-comic struggle to let go of a few things of obviously no use to her. Part found footage film, part camera-less video, it turns stuff that should have been thrown out long ago into a poignant study of the relationship between the creative imagination and our attachments, be they material or emotional. “[One of] about a dozen superlative selections by women, [and an example of] an intriguing crop of new video works examining the medium’s widespread, elemental function as a…

  • Pictures of Things That Aren’t There

    “Pictures of Things That Aren’t There” is an anthology of six works loosely tied together by the circumstance of their making: all were initiated while Daniel was caring for her mother as she lived out her life with a disease that erodes the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Her mother’s illness is never more than peripherally addressed. Daniel attends instead to the unnoticed workings of the creative imagination – the capacity of mind she believed her mother had lost. They are small works, made for one person and offered to anyone else who cares to appreciate them. Aesthetic…

  • In the Kingdom of Shadows

    “In the Kingdom of Shadows” documents a paragraph being typeset on an early twentieth-century Ludlow Linecaster. The text is taken from Maxim Gorky’s 1896 review of the Lumiere Brothers’ film “Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat” (1895). As the words melt into a pool of lead, the alchemical magic of printing is linked to that of cinema. Commissioned by LIFT (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) for their 25th anniversary program, “Film is Dead! Long Live Film!” Selected screenings: Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2007; Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival, 2007

  • Fascination

    “In order to take the next step (not forward or backwards, but only: to go on) it is often necessary (for me) to lean on a picture made by someone else, sometimes a word will do, a gesture, the look on a stranger’s face. Colin Campbell made the next step possible for me so I took up a video camera (his pictures were my company, and my camera accompanied his pictures). Between his images of the past and mine, Colin Campbell emerged as a Cold Warrior, as an artist who would fight the Cold War with stereo. Yes, a stereo…

  • Role I Was Born To Play, The

    Using borrowed clips from three films about gender bending – two comedies and a tragedy – a personal gender landscape is created. This piece touches on the assumptions, strategies for survival and a the commitment to discussion that alternate gender expressions evoke.

  • Resurrection

    “Resurrection,” a hand-processed Super 8 blow-up, uses direct animation techniques such as scratching, bleaching and painting onto the emulsion of the film, in order to invoke the awakening of the feminine.

  • Twirl Girl

    “Twirl Girl” is a study of circular motion. It incorporates hand processing, xerography, rotoscoping and found footage in order to transpose the image of a woman dancing in circular fashion.

  • Schogt, Elida: A Film Trilogy

    Newly available on DVD, this trilogy from award-winning filmmaker Elida Schogt examines Holocaust memory, the family and the role of photography in history. (For purchase only. For rentals, see individual titles.) ZYKLON PORTRAIT “Zyklon Portrait” is about Zyklon B – the pesticide transformed into a genocidal weapon by the Nazis in the 1940s. It is also an elegy for the filmmaker’s grandparents; after years of silence, the filmmaker’s mother finally talks about her parents’ horrific fate. A Holocaust film without Holocaust imagery, “Zyklon Portrait “ uses family photographs, underwater photography and hand-painted imagery to draw a personal story out of…