Found Footage Experience. Pratictices of cinematic re-use and forms of contemporary film

edited by Rossella Catanese (University of Udine) and Giacomo Ravesi (Roma Tre University)

In contemporary visual culture, the polysemy of cinematographic language finds its emblematic manifestation in the various paradigms of image re-use, which contextualises and relocates their functions in new interpretative formulas. The practice of found footage consists of the cinematographic, videographic and artistic practice of appropriation, re-elaboration and re- assembly of pre-existing images retrieved from heterogeneous media archives: from photography to stock footage and from home-movies to TV documentation and the web. One of the attractions of postmodern culture as a form of recycling, re-use and combination of different materials recovered from a past interpreted as a vast reservoir of imagery, found footage keeps its interest alive even in the epistemological trajectories of the so-called “new realism,” where a “society of recording” emerges (Ferraris 2011) in which everything must leave a trace and be archived. Moreover, deconstructionist thought has shown how inheritance should be understood not as a datum but always as a task, since archiving also responds to the need for regulation: preserving documents means imposing an order and establishing control through safeguarding and cataloguing devices. At the same time, audiovisual consumption practices have today become complex and composite forms of reception which rewrite the spectatorial experience and the uses and habits of accessibility, availability and relationship with films and audiovisual materials. The history of cinema is configured as a “visual deposit” (Bertozzi 2012) at the origin of the development of new formal writings and metaphorical processes. By manipulating the images and intervening in the linearity and flow of the work, the user-viewer entertains new aesthetic, social and psychic relationships with the images (Mulvey 2006). Similarly, in the field of visual arts, the notion of archive resembles a catalogue-form of various arts and media in which the logic of “post- production” (Bourriaud 2004) is elevated to a representative formula of many of the works of art produced from the 1980s onwards. In the contemporary artistic and media landscape, found footage therefore takes on the characteristics of a pervasive and interdisciplinary artistic and media experience: a significant form of an epistemic transformation with regard to the notion of the work of art, author and spectator, which seems to take on an ever-greater theoretical value, partly by virtue of its numerous applications. Contemporary practices of film reuse involve different spaces and audiences, contaminating and “re-locating” (Casetti 2012) entertainment and popular, avant-garde and mainstream culture: from museums to public art, from the web to urban spaces, from concerts to rave parties and from counter-culture to sub-cultures. Moreover, such practices simultaneously integrate innovative technologies and languages, and often employ multiple audiovisual techniques and practices: from analogue film editing, computer graphics and film-essays to video-essay, virtual reality and Vjing. This dossier of “Imago. Studi di cinema e media” aims to investigate these expressive horizons by combining theoretical, historical and cultural approaches which restore the function of research and sensory and cognitive amplification that the creative reuse of archive cinema activates by acting on processes of the resemantization and intensification of images and evoking an often highly spectacular and performative composite audiovisual scenario. Perfectly integrated with the sensitivities and the most recent developments of the media system, the experiences of found footage completely reformulate the notions of audiovisual creation and fruition both technologically and aesthetically, favouring an “expanded”, interdisciplinary and environmental form: eloquent testimony of an audiovisual sensibility in complete renewal.

The following is a non-exhaustive and non-binding list of possible areas for reflection:

• Theories: the concept of original, copy and model; the culture of “plagiarism”; the practices of re-semantization and replicability; the configurations of remix and mash-up; the concept of memory; the notion of archive in digital culture; the protection of audiovisual heritage in the practices of re-use and valorisation. • Histories: the cases, histories and evolutions of found footage at national and transnational level; the relevance of particular movements and historical moments; the use of audiovisual and documentary material as a historical source; historiographic reconnaissance. • Contexts: the creative environments outside official film production circuits; the link with forms of counter-culture; the roots in urban and youth sub-cultures. • Interdisciplinarity: relations with other arts and disciplines; the forms of exposed cinema: museum, installation, live performance. • Taxonomies: found footage in avant-garde and artists’ film; practices of amateur cinema; the critical-didactic dimension; structural experiences; historical re-writing; montage film and its legacy; the case of the elegy. • Metalanguages and pedagogy: the film and the video essay; criticism and hypermedia didactics. • The role of technology: analogue laboratories and work on film; electronic arts, video and digital culture; museum preservation practices for film material; rediscovery of obsolete and amateur film formats; digital systems for archiving and reproducing images. • Case studies: examples of artists and filmmakers; community, social and participatory experiences of found footage films.

To submit an article, we welcome abstracts (max 2,500 characters) in Italian or English, plus 5 essential bibliographic references, 5 keywords and a bio (max 5 lines). Proposals should be sent by email to the editors ([email protected] and [email protected]) by 30 June 2021. The results of the selection will be communicated by 5 July 2021, and the completed essays (max 40,000 characters), written in Italian or English, must be sent no later than 24 September 2021 for double-blind peer review. References

- AA.VV., Speciale Found Footage, «Cinergie», 14, September 2007. - Alice Autelitano (ed.), The Cinematic Experience. Film, Contemporary Art, Museum, Campanotto, Udine 2010. - Jaime Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History, Routledge, London-New York 2014. - Marco Bertozzi, Recycled Cinema. Immagini perdute, visioni ritrovate, Marsilio, Venice 2012. - Marco Bertozzi, Documentario come arte. Riuso, performance, autobiografia nell’esperienza del cinema contemporaneo, Marsilio, Venice 2018. - Marente Bloemheuvel, Giovanna Fossati, Jaap Guldmond (eds.), Found Footage. Cinema Exposed, Amsterdam University Press / Eye Film Institute Netherlands, Amsterdam, 2012. - Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo, Eivind Røssaak (eds.), Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology, and the Social, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2016. - Christa Blümlinger, Kino aus zweiter Hand, Vorwek 8, Berlin, 2009. - Jay David Bolter, Richard Arthur Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1999. - Nicolas Bourriaud, Post Production. La culture comme scénario: comment l’art reprogramme le monde contemporain, Presses du Réel, Paris-Dijon 2002. - Nicole Brenez, Christian Lebrat, Jeune, dure et pure! Une histoire du cinéma d’avantgarde et experimental en France, Cinémathèque française, Paris 2001. - Dagmar Brunow, Remediating Transcultural Memory: Documentary Filmmaking as Archival Intervention, De Gruyter, Berlin-Boston 2015. - Francesco Casetti, The relocation of cinema, «NECSUS», November 2012. - Rinaldo Censi, Copie originali. Iperrealismi tra pittura e cinema, Johan & Levi, Milano 2014. - Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive une impression freudienne, Galilée, Paris, 1995. - Bruno Di Marino, Pose in movimento. Fotografia e cinema, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2009. - Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images, Éditions de Minuit, Paris 2000. - Nicola Dusi, Lucio Spaziante (eds.), Remix-Remake. Pratiche di replicabilità, Meltemi, Rome, 2006. - Francesco Federici, Cinema esposto. Arte contemporanea e immagini in movimento, Forum, Udine 2018. - Maurizio Ferraris, Anima e ipad, Guanda, Parma 2011. - Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel. The Archival Life of Film in Transition, Amsterdam University Press / Eye Film Institute Netherlands, Amsterdam 2012 (new edition 2018). - Peter Geimer, Inadvertent Images. A History of Photographic Apparitions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2018. - Chiara Grizzaffi, I film attraverso i film. Dal “testo introvabile” ai video essay, Mimesis, Milan 2017. - Cecilia Hausheer, Christoph Settele, Found Footage Film, VIPER/zyklop verlag, Luzern 1992. - Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina 2014. - Kim Knowles, Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland 2020. - Elisa Mandelli, The Museum as a Cinematic Space: The Display of Moving Images in Exhibitions, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2019. - W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science. Iconology Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2015. - Emiliano Morreale, L’invenzione della nostalgia: il vintage nel cinema italiano e dintorni, Donzelli, Rome 2009. - Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image, Reaktion Books, London 2006. - Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, xtine burrough (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, Routledge, London-New York 2015. - Viva Paci, La machine à voir. À propos de cinéma, attraction, exhibition, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, Lille 2012. - Cosetta G. Saba, Archivio cinema arte, Mimesis, Milano 2014. - Paolo Simoni, Lost Landscape. Il cinema amatoriale e la città, Kaplan, Torino 2018. - William C. Wees, Recycled Images. The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films, Anthology Film Archives, New York 1993. - Francesco Zucconi, La sopravvivenza delle immagini nel cinema. Archivio, montaggio, intermedialità, Mimesis, Milan 2013.