ABSTRACT
Even if they stop manufacturing film tomorrow, the world is full of already shot film in a multiplicity of gauges that has been abandoned, thrown on the trash heap and is ready for you to repurpose and make into a piece of art. You may use a piece of found footage because it has a kind of inherent beauty that you want to use as the building blocks for your movie. You may use a piece of film because it has content either visual or aural that you want to repurpose either to highlight what the film is doing overtly or to comment on what you see as its subliminal message or the hierarchies of power that you may feel the film supports. What I mean by subliminal message is the message(s) behind or underneath the overt “text” of the film—the message behind the message. What I mean by hierarchies of power is anything that you see in broader culture, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, etc., that helps to keep some people in power, making decisions and hogging all the resources and keeps other people feeling like they have little impact on the way things go and without enough money, food or freedom. There are many great found-footage collage films from the history of cinema that set a precedent for the repurposing and redirecting of found footage. Some of these are politically charged and critical of the mass media from which they draw the material with which they are made. Some artists make use of found footage as a textural element. The title of this chapter is called “Film-destroy” because in order to make a new work all collage films have to cut up another film or films. In addition, this chapter will discuss other techniques of deconstruction that have been employed by filmmakers such as bleaching, scratching, baking, rotting, molding, boiling, cutting up and gluing.
