Re: [Frameworks] found footage structural films

From: Mark Toscano (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Sep 14 2010 - 00:33:43 PDT


Looking at 133, some films you might want to check out in particular are:

On Your Own (James Otis) - Jim edited the existing job-search educational film purely for sound, ignoring its image completely. The result is a very funny, condensed piece of detourned capitalist sound poetry.

DEFINITELY Peter Roehr's Filmmontagen series - amazing!

Peter Tscherkassky's Motion Picture was made by exposing a single frame of the Lumiere Workers Leaving the Factory film onto a whole bunch of super 8 b/w raw stock laid out in strips. The resulting film is utterly abstract and at times somewhat flickery.

Peter Kubelka's Truth and Poetry

Perhaps Bruce Conner's Marilyn Times Five is worth referencing.

Robert Nelson's newly unearthed Penny Bright and Jimmy Witherspoon as another potentially unusual reference point. A panning shot of a soldier pointing a gun vaguely at the camera is looped over and over, increasing in speed over the course of 4 minutes as the looped soundtrack of his daughter playing a name game gets more dense and layered.

Standish Lawder's Eleven Different Horses presents the same home movie fragment of (I believe) his younger brother with a horse 11 times, never varying it, the only 'difference' being the ambiguous one implied by the title. For me, an unusual and strangely moving commentary on the nature of the medium - the horses are only different in the film, not in the event that was filmed.

Morgan Fisher's ( ). This film is a large assortment of insert shots from commercial films, assembled (not edited) according to an arbitrary rule. Morgan's fascinating and lengthy description of the film can be found here:
http://www.filmlinc.com/archive/nyff/avantgarde2003mf.htm

David Rimmer's Watching for the Queen is more in the vein of what you seem to be looking for than his nevertheless exquisite Surfacing on the Thames.
http://www.holonet.khm.de/visual_alchemy/writings/rimmer1980.html
David's blurb about the film: "A mathematically ordered restructuring of two seconds (48 frames) of stock newsreel footage, primarily concerned with the frame as information unit and the change in formation between frames."

Scott Stark's Back in the Saddle Again might be interesting to consider.

JJ Murphy's Movie Stills is perhaps an odd but worthwhile take on what you're talking about. In it, we see the gradual development, one by one, of about a dozen polaroids that were taken from a pre-existing piece of moving footage that JJ felt he could condense into a narrative of frozen moments which gradually become visible to us as each photo develops in real time.

The Doctor's Dream (Ken Jacobs), Strain Andromeda The (Anne McGuire) and What's Wrong With This Picture (part 1) (Owen Land/George Landow) were already mentioned, but I thought I'd reiterate the suggestions, as these three in particular seemed relevant to your query, considering 133 as a reference point. I'd also like to second Bill Brand's films that he mentioned, which are fascinating.

Mark Toscano

--- On Sun, 9/12/10, albert alcoz <email suppressed> wrote:

From: albert alcoz <email suppressed>
Subject: [Frameworks] found footage structural films
To: "Experimental Film Discussion List" <email suppressed>
Date: Sunday, September 12, 2010, 2:09 PM

Hi,

I'm writing a dissertation about experimental cinema
and I have been doing a research about structural films that uses
found footage.

Some of the films i have found are:

Eureka by Ernie Gehr, Tom Tom the Piper's Son by Ken Jacobs and
Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper by David Rimer.

Can someone add some other films?

Is it right to talk about them as "found footage structural films"?

Does it make any sense?

Thanks,

Albert Alcoz
http://visionary-film.blogspot.com/

      
-----Inline Attachment Follows-----

_______________________________________________
FrameWorks mailing list
email suppressed
http://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks

      
_______________________________________________
FrameWorks mailing list
email suppressed
http://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks