Film Categories: found footage

  • It’s a Mixed Up World

    A Bruce Connor-style assemblage film consisting of shots from 1940s and 50s educational shorts spliced together, with synthesizer pop-music by Ron Smulevici. The result is a humorous but cynical view of modern civilized (?) life; a surreal cinematic Rorschach test in which “meaning” is largely a result of the personal associations and subconscious anxieties which the individual view projects onto the images.

  • Kisses

    “Betty Ferguson’s ‘Kisses’, an hour-long anthology of film clips presented without titles or voiceover, is the sweetest and, in avant-garde terms, the most conventional film on the program. Although the kiss reached its supreme expression as the on-screen replacement for copulation in post-Code Hollywood, Ferguson’s material is drawn largely from silent classics and the less-fetishized European cinema of around 1960. She compares her film to a patchwork quilt, but it’s basically morphological, cataloguing clusters of shots where kisses are delivered to the hand, the neck, rained down on a beloved face, perfunctorily bestowed on a spouse, awarded to dogs, dolls,…

  • Kitchener-Berlin

    Part One: “A Measured Dance” 17 min. Part Two: “Prologue” and “Veiled Flight” 17 min. NOTE: Part One can be screened on its own. “Hoffman juxtaposes his home town, the Canadian city of Kitchener (formerly called Berlin), with its European namesake of the World War II era. The hyphen in the title suggests both severance from the past and connections to it. The history of the area underpins the film, but refuses to bind it or restrict it from free association. Hoffman assembles a wide range of visual materials including home movies, television, news footage, and archival film, as well…

  • Mayhem

    “Mayhem” gives homage to Film Noir, soap opera thrillers and Mexican comic books, which generate the action. Perversely and equally inspired by de Sade’s “Justine” and Vertov’s sentences about the satiric detective advertisement, “Mayhem” looks at sexuality and violence in the movies. “Mayhem” links the screen, the bedroom, and the streets to generate a mosaic of the way modern culture sends mixed signals about sexuality to men and women. “‘Mayhem’ is more than a detective story; it’s a hypermodern melding of forms, an erotic send-up of slapstick with a heady dose of cultural nay-saying.” – Elizabeth Pincus, Gay Community News…

  • Mercy

    “Voyeurism, eroticism, violence and pornography are challengingly jumbled together: the result is a mixture of fluttery pictures which cloud what is real and what is not, making the questions that these films provoke all the more disturbing.” – Jane Headon, City Limits “‘Mercy’ shows no mercy as it dissects the games mass media play with our perceptions. It blends found footage, images and sounds into a flow that’s as revealing as it is overwhelming.” – New York Festival Catalogue

  • Mirage

    Typical imagery of a naughty wahine dancing while removing her sarong is looped and superimposed on images associated with Hawaii such as fish, surfers, volcanoes and the Kodak Hula Show. The sound is a loop from the Elvis song “Dreams Come True in Blue Hawaii” and the effect is haunting with a touch of humor. The juxtaposition of these three elements parodies a travel film enticing one to the islands by associating sensuality and sexuality with everything from Kahunas to Pearl Harbor. It is a kind of pop, twisted mantra invoking an exotic space that perhaps only exists in a…

  • My Withered Tomato Friend

    “My Withered Tomato Friend” is a haunting, experimental narrative that merges the roaming voice of a battered wife with popular images of women to question the conventional ideology of representation and the denial of domestic violence. Alternating between provocative poetry and submissive prose, the voice echoes terrifying thoughts of the abused woman while gradually deconstructing – and reconstructing- manipulated found footage. “Absolutely exhilarating to watch, this is the hard edge of feminist experimental cinema.” – Piers Handling, Director, Toronto International Film Festival One Star Award, Canadian International Amateur Film Festival, 1992

  • New Jersey Nights

    “New Jersey Nights” is a film about lingering emotional memories. It is a narrative film which operates at the level of a dream. Three people converse without real conversation: the dialogues between a woman and two men are constructed from random statements and monologues which overlap, almost meet and then move apart. The images were chosen for their ability to evoke private memories which have universal meaning. These images represent moments that have become locked in memory and which act as keys to persons, places, and events. The optical effects suggest the relentless tearing of photographs, the images dissolving into…

  • Now, Yours

    “Once he has focused our concentration on the screen ahead, Hoolboom’s disembodied voice questions who has access to the privilege of a filmic voice and, once granted, the extent to which this authority is unquestioned by both the filmmaker and the viewing audience. ‘Now, Yours’ investigates this power of control through footage from 1950’s tourism and customer appreciation films/advertisements.” – Pleasure Dome, Toronto

  • ?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film)

    Music by Tucker Zimmerman. “Philip Hoffman’s ‘?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film)’ uses a diary format to skirt along the edge of someone else’s filmed narrative (Peter Greenaway’s ‘A Zed & Two Noughts’), and to trace the anatomy of pure image-making. ‘Pure’ is both the right and the wrong word: Hoffman is a man addicted to the hermetic thisness of filmed images, and plagued by the suspicion that these images, far from being pure, are really scabs torn away from the sores of the world. Found footage shot by his grandfather (a newsreel cameraman) is the starting point…