A MOVIE BY ... Appropriation, authorship, and the ecologies of the moving image

Abstract

This essay positions two works of experimental moving-image appropriation art — Bruce Conner’s seminal 1958 found-footage film A MOVIE and a recent ‘remake” by the artist and filmmaker Jen Proctor — as models for a hybrid artistic-scholarly form of materialist media theory through which to examine the ways in which media are produced and circulate. The essay argues that both Conner’s and Proctor’s respective works deploy strategies of appropriation and remix not simply as a form for playful commentary upon contemporary media objects and texts, but crucially as an implicit theoretical framework through which to articulate and expose, on the one hand, the media infrastructures in which the works were made and, on the other, the artists’ own labor within these infrastructures.