Recycled Images: from orphan works to found footage

Abstract

The focus of this article will be on the artistic practice of found footage film-making—with which is understood the practice of creating new films with extant material—and the ‘aesthetics of access’. Lucas Hilderbrand introduces this term in his 2009 publication Inherent Vice, in which he assembles issues of copyright, preservation and bootlegging and applies it to the specific case study of VHS. When he speaks of aesthetics of access he does so in reference to the formal characteristics of the image. That is how the term is intended here as well. So for instance, film-maker Matthias Müller shot the footage he has used to compile his found footage film Home Stories (1990) with a 16 mm film camera off a television screen. Whether this mode of production was favoured for its specific visual impact or for circumventing having to obtain permission to re-use the (mainly Hollywood feature) film material, the resulting slightly degraded look of the duplicated material is a direct result of how the material was accessed, hence its ‘aesthetics of access’. This article argues that the legal provenance of archival material, and potential ways of circumventing legal restrictions in obtaining that material, can be traced in the ultimate form of found footage films. It also argues that in their new amalgamated states, the films emphasise such concepts as ownership and authorship and that they can be seen as illustrative in their allusions to the ways that institutional context, copyright and film form are interdependent.