C106
article
Retelling
history from lost sources
Orla Ryan examines
the use of 'found footage' as critical tool in art practice.
Within film studies found
footage is most commonly understood as related to
contemporary documentary practices.
Its principle dynamic, of "retrieval and recycling" of
moving images to re-interpret their original narrative
context, offers documentary film makers both a cheap resolution
to small budgets and a philosophically rich terrain in
which to explore contemporary society and its relationship
to media images.
From the humorous and politically acerbic Roger and
me (dir. Michael Moore) to the most plodding and mundane
television documentaries and their use of the media institution's
moving-image archive, found footage has become a standard
documentary practice.
 |
Matthew
Buckingham: Situation leading to a story,
1999, film still; courtesy the artist
|
In the following
discussion, however, I want to concentrate on found footage
as a practice within art contexts, the way in which some
of this work operates as a form of critical and experimental
documentary practice. In looking at Matthew Buckingham's
Situation leading to a story (1999) we can explore
this work's engagement with found footage as historical
artefact or document and a recurrent questioning of the
archive itself as representation. The assumed authority
of the archive and historical representation is targeted
by the destabilization which occurs through much found-footage
moving-image practice.
Here the use of found footage is related to an emphasis
on history and memory, allowing the artist/filmmaker/viewer
the opportunity to explore debates on documentary as representative
of objectivity, authenticity, truth, fiction and the factual
in relation to the moving image. Catherine Russell remarks,
"found footage is a technique that produces 'the ethnographic'
as a discourse of representation,"
by which I understand her to mean that the ethnographic
model loses its given assumption of mimetic transparency.
Situation operates as a means of exposing the vulnerability
of ethnographic discourses which are reliant on objectivity
and authenticity, etc., denying the underlying documentary
assumption of transparency in representation.
Found footage
as a practice also offers a potentially more grounded
historical precedent as a method of destabilization within
narrative studies than more recently fashionable (though
out of date) theoretical fantasies mapped onto digital
technologies. Here utopian desires are projected onto
digital narrative's supposedly 'intrinsic interactive'
and multi-narrative properties and are used as a means
of distinguishing them from the supposedly 'linear narratives'
of analogue media such as the book or film. While the
irrelevance of this distinction may be obvious perhaps,
it is still important to qualify the point. At its most
basic, a narrative strategy or particular form may place
certain coded structures in place to direct and even control
meaning; however, the existence of linear narratives within
any form is questionable. Film theorist Paul Willemen,
for example, reminds us that "narrative has never been
linear [...] narrative constantly loops back and branches
out, condenses and proliferates uncontrollably, which
is precisely why the 'meaning' of a story can never be
fixed once and for all."
Once one
accepts that meaning does not reside in the text/film
alone, is not created solely by the writer or filmmaker
but is a process that constantly involves the intellectual
labour of the reader or viewer of the work, the linear
narrative as bad theoretical object ceases to exist. The
process in which the reader or viewer constructs the narrative
is dependent on such a mix of multiple and interweaving
discourses which, to simplify matters (unnecessarily perhaps),
are usually categorised as class, gender, race, nationality
age, etc. Given the complexity of subject formation and
subjectivity, the idea of linear narratives should at
this stage really be understood as more to do with the
critical limitations of particular writers who employ
the term rather than serving any useful intellectual function
in the discussion of the moving image or indeed any narrative
form.
 |
Matthew
Buckingham: Situation leading to a story,
1999, film still; courtesy the artist
|
This of course
is not to say that the film maker is devoid of any critical
responsibility in the closing down or opening up of a
space of meaning production. In the work presented here
the use of found footage is employed by Buckingham as
an important structural device in the creation of an expanded
intellectual space where we are openly invited to analyse
meaning production in the field of visual representation.
In Situation
leading to a story four found films are projected
one after the other with minimal intervention by the filmmaker
These found films are 1920's home movies, presenting a
wealthy family strolling on a lawn, a bullfight, a cable
tramway construction in Peru and the building of a four-car
garage. The four found films used in Situation are
not part of any archive, recognized and named, but, rather,
they are fragments, detritus found on the street. In his
attempt to make a connection between the films, looking
for the same people in each film, for example, Buckingham
eventually concedes "that the four films had been thrown
out - they were connected to each other in this way -
someone did not want them."
In the final throes of deterioration, these discarded
films, "delicate and brittle" and giving off a "pungent
odour" (possibly vinegar syndrome), are disassociated
from their original context as home movies. In this process
of detachment these four found films have neither fixed
meaning in and of themselves nor in their relationship
to each other; their connection is immersed in contingency,
brought together through an emptying out of use-value;
any connection they may once have had to one another remains
elusive.
Unlike standard
found-footage documentary practice, where there is often
an expectation of prior knowledge of the original narrative
which is then disrupted through a process of re-editing,
in Situation Buckingham does not re-edit the films
but instead shows them without hierarchy one after the
other. The gap produced by this process suspends the idea
of finding and retrieving while the viewer makes connections
where none ostensibly exist. While this minimal serial
procedure invests Situation with a surface calm,
the gap maintained between the projected images and the
dialogue (narrated by Buckingham) actively constructs
a site to analyse meaning as constantly in transition
rather than fixed.
In her discussion
of documentary practices, Trinh T. Minh-Ha writes,
if
life's paradoxes and complexities are not to be suppressed,
the question of degrees and nuances is incessantly crucial.
Meaning can therefore be political only when it does not
let itself be easily stabilized, and, when it does not
rely on any single source of authority, but rather empties
it, or decentralizes it.
In Situation
the voice-over constantly digresses away from what appears
directly relevant to the images on screen to more personal
issues related to finding and researching the films. The
dialogue accompanying the projected films explains how
Buckingham found the films, along with his research in
trying to resolve where the films originated from. Though
the voice-over could, perhaps, be momentarily associated
with the narrative voice of authority and knowledge of
standard documentary and ethnographic film practice, (what
Minh-Ha refers to as the "almighty voice giver")
the narrator
displaces the authoritative voice by constantly acknowledging
his lack of knowledge in relation to these found films.
This process
of destabilization by Buckingham places his film work
within an allegorical practice. Here the films point towards
negotiating a certain way of occupying history. In Situation
not only do the images shown in the found films function
allegorically but, also, the actual materiality of the
films contains traces of historical occupancy, what Russell
refers to as an "aesthetic of ruins."In her study of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project,
Susan Buck Morss explains that "in allegory, history appears
as nature in decay or ruins and the temporal mode is one
of retrospective contemplation."
Considering this in relation to Situation, the
negotiation of the past, memory and history occurs not
only through what is represented but also through the
actual decaying film stock.
 |
Matthew
Buckingham: Situation leading to a story,
1999, film still; courtesy the artist
|
The way in
which Situation displaces what is represented on
these films as undisputed access to the past is linked
to contemporary debates on representation. It is the materiality
of the found film stock which situates an indexical link
with the past; yet a hidden indexical link with the present
occurs when Buckingham re-films the material in order
to prevent further decay and the material acquires a new
date code. The 'lost' indexical relationship between what
is represented on film with a particular moment in time
and a presence in front of the camera is conventionally
attributed to the transition to digitalization. Here the
replacement of standard film and photography with digital
processes is seen to challenge the perceived authenticity
of the photographic/film image and re-open questions of
the images' veridical nature. However, throughout the
history of photography/film, techniques such as double
exposure, superimposition, collage, ghosting, subliminal
effects, etc., have all been processes of destabilization
in relation to fixing the real. Yet it is this indexical
link, in all its instability, that has been exploited
to excess by documentary practices relying on a rhetoric
of undisputed access to the real. This position is usually
dependent on a naíve prioritization of the visual
in which truth is reduced to what is visible. As Minh-Ha
writes, "truth lies in between all regimes of truth,"
and while Buckingham does not engage with an irrelevant
retreat from the 'fact' of the document, neither does
he use the found films to present a questionable authenticity
of the image.
As Russell explains, "the found image doubles the historical
real as both truth and fiction, at once document of history
and unreliable evidence of history."
In Situation the dialogue travels from the known
to the uncertain and then to a reinsertion of these 'home
movies' through a social history of home movies in the
United States and later to the impact of U.S. mining interests
in Peru.
The situation
leading to a story in the title becomes Buckingham's account
of U.S. capitalist interests in Peru. Tracking the history
of the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation (CPC) from 1901
to its nationalization by the Peruvian government in 1974,
Buckingham tells of the exploitation of the miners, the
residents in the region of the mine, as well as the environmental
pollution produced by U.S. industrialists. Due to the
serial presentation of the films, this information is
given while the viewer watches the foundations of the
four-car garage being dug. While hearing the narrator's
historical description of U.S capitalism in South America,
the growing prosperity and upward mobility signified by
the four-car garage is linked to events in the Andes mountains,
where we're told, "With the encouragement of CPC, the
Peruvian government passed a law in 1926 exempting all
copper and zinc production, i.e., CPC, from paying taxes
for the next ten years."
Buckingham's
emphasis on discursivity initiates a questioning of the
formal narrative codes of documentary film, while also
challenging narratives of history. Rather than being aligned
to an naïve relativism, what Grant Kester refers to as
"discursive determinism [as the] reductive belief that
'discourse' or dialogue in and of itself has the power
to radically transform social relations,"
Buckingham's discursive strategies constantly target the
problems of representation as a practice - for example,
the ways in which certain representational processes actively
attempt a closing down of intellectual enquiry. The discursive
becomes a way of mobilizing historical 'fragments', such
as the history of CPC's involvement in Peru, to strategically
relate to contemporary global economic power relations.
Buckingham's
"retrieval and recycling" of historical narratives is
dependent on a reflexive account of his own narrative
production and in doing this he concerns himself with
histories of his own practice, experimental film. Tom
Gunning's work on early cinema helps elaborate some of
the discourses in the work. Here Gunning links what he
calls the "cinema of attractions" to certain practices
of the avant garde. By a cinema of attractions he is referring
to the way in which early cinema placed emphasis on showing
or exhibiting rather than the prioritizing of a fictional
world by narrative cinema. Gunning also refers to the
ways in which actors acknowledged the camera, creating
a different relationship with the spectator. While the
sensational spectacle often associated with early film
is hardly a characteristic of Situation, there
are important intersections. Acknowledgement of the camera
is also a dimension of the 'home movies' re-presented
in Situation; however, it is the way in which Buckingham
presents these films that most noticeably highlights what
Gunning refers to as "a cinema that displays its visibility."
The space of presentation is foregrounded beyond the amateur
approach apparent in home movies' 'look at the
camera' by Buckingham's voice-over as narrator/lecturer.
 |
Matthew
Buckingham: Situation leading to a story,
1999, film still; courtesy the artist
|
Peter Gidal's
account of structuralist/materialist film and its anti-illusionist
strategies suggests that "when one states that each film
is a record of its own making, this refers to shooting,
editing, printing stages, or separations of these," placing
great emphasis on the process of the specifically cinematic.
However, this emphasis becomes an ontological blindspot
because of the way in which the "specifically cinematic
is taken to be primarily the picture track."
Situation can only exist as a 'film' of Matthew
Buckingham by positioning itself in the destabilized space
between audio and visual.
Buckingham's
persistence in developing and maintaining a gap between
sound and image is arguably related to the importance
placed on the viewer's intellectual activity. In Roland
Barthes's essay The third meaning the author refers
to the third meaning or obtuse meaning as the one that
exceeds his interpretation, at once "persistent and elusive."
For Barthes it is what allows the "filmic" to emerge.
While he suggests that the filmic resides in the still,
he also remarks that within the "classical paradigm of
the five senses, the third sense is hearing (first in
importance in the middles ages)."
Later in the essay Barthes discusses Sergei Eisenstein's
comments on the possibilities of audio-visual montage,
suggesting that "...the basic centre of gravity is no
longer the element 'between shots' - the shock- but the
element 'inside the shot' - the accentuation within the
fragment..." Within Situation the basic centre
of gravity not only foregrounds film as fragmentary
but accentuates, through the dialogue's relationship to
the image track, a process of fragmentation. In negotiating
the process of its own production, Situation displaces
the centrality of the image-track. Rather than a formal
record of the home movies' own making, Situation oscillates
between a historical record of these early home movies'
"own making" and an account of the making of Buckingham's
film. All of these accounts are arbitrary, possibly fictional,
and fragmentary.
Buckingham
uses contingency, the unfixing of meaning and the ephemeral
as elements in his own labour process. Here what becomes
central is an aesthetic responsibility toward the creation
of and maintenance of an intellectual space for the viewer,
allowing the time to ponder, reflect and think not only
about the material presented but the ways in which we
narrate it and construct it into cohesive tight units.
By examining the ways in which representational processes
close down intellectual enquiry, Buckingham uses the ephemeral
and accidental to re-establish a commitment to a historical
project, aware that a political or critical space cannot
exist without one.
Orla Ryan
is currently a Government of Ireland Research Scholar.
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