Collage film
Collage film is a style of
Surrealist roots
The
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
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 the 1970s
Other notable users of this technique are
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 (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.[14]
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.[15][16][17]
Notable collage documentaries
- Rewind & Play (2022)
- June 17th, 1994 (2010)
- LA 92 (2017)[18]
- Our Nixon (2013)
- Tarnation (2003)
- Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (1975)
- Senna (2010)
- Waking Sleeping Beauty (2010)
- Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
- Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016)
- The Endless Film (2018)[19]
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
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):
- The Oscar-winning Frank Film (1973)[20]
- Our Lady of the Sphere (1969)
- The films of Lewis Klahr[21] and Janie Geiser[21]
- Charles Braverman's American Time Capsule (1968)[20]
- Heaven and Earth Magic (1962)
- The works of Stan Vanderbeek,[21] Terry Gilliam[21] and Robert Breer[22]
- The aforementioned Mothlight (1963) and The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981)
References
- ISBN 978-0-8204-7298-0.
- ^ 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
- ^ Olivia Laing (July 25, 2015). "Joseph Cornell: how the reclusive artist conquered the art world – from his mum's basement". the Guardian.
- ^ "Crossing the Great Sagrada (1924)". BFI Screenonline.
- ^ "CINEMATEK - Koninklijk Belgisch Filmarchief". www.cinematek.be.
- ^ 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
- ISBN 0-911689-19-2
- ^ 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.
- ^ TFH Exclusive: A Clip from THE MOVIE ORGY. Trailers from Hell on YouTube.
- ^ "The Source". The A.V. Club.
- ^ Visionaries|2010 Tribeca Festival|Tribeca
- ^ Hays, Matthew (October 8, 2008). "Montreal, mon amour". CBC News. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 28 January 2010.
- ^ "Liverpool film portrait takes Cannes film festival by storm". Liverpool Daily Post. Retrieved 21 May 2008.
- ^ Bray, Catherine (9 May 2016). "Hot Docs Film Review: 'Fraud'". Variety. Michelle Sobrino. Retrieved 15 May 2016.
- ^ STAND BY FOR TAPE BACK-UP - Torino Film Fest
- ^ British Council Film: Stand By For Tape Back-Up
- ^ VISIONARY FILM: Stand By For Tape Back-Up (2015) Ross Sutherland
- ^ LA 92, directed by TJ Martin and Daniel Lindsay|Time Out
- ^ "La película infinita | IFFR". iffr.com.
- ^ a b "Oddball Films: Cine-Collage - Remixing the Moving Image - Thur. Sep 25 - 8PM".
- ^ a b c d Earmarked for Collision: A Highly Biased Tour of Collage Animation - Routledge
- ^ McCormack, Tom (October 3, 2011). "Eye Washes: ROBERT BREER, 1926–2011". The Brooklyn Rail.