Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor, 'homaged' in a recent IBM commercial

Art has always influenced commercial creatives, and artists have often drawn on – appropriated, even – other parts of culture. It’s complicated. On the one hand, freedom of expression, and opposition to the strictures of copyright.

On the other, things can get nasty, with all too frequent tales of artist and independent filmmakers being called up by agencies for a chat, never to hear from them again, only to find that months later, out comes an ad that’s remarkably similar to their own work. It’s certainly interesting to compare and contrast… so here are seven examples of, er… complimentary works…

Do send us any other suggestions. And check out Stoffel Debusyere’s excellent post on the subject here.

1. The Way Things Go, Fischli and Weiss

Creative Review has admirably not shied away from the issue of rip-off, though in claiming to have ‘broken’ the Honda/Fischli and Weiss story, they were playing catch up with many of us.

2. Tango, Zbig Rybczynski

A child enters a room to get back his ball. Slowly, the entire space becomes filled with bizarre characters, all of them intent on repeating the same gesture ad infinitum.

Zbig Rybczynski’s Tango is a masterpiece – winning an Oscar in 1983. Pre-digital (though digital is where Rybczynski was determinedly headed).

“I had to draw and paint about 16.000 cell-mattes, and make several hundred thousand exposures on an optical printer. It took a full seven months, sixteen hours per day, to make the piece. The miracle is that the negative got through the process with only minor damage, and I made less than one hundred mathematical mistakes out of several hundred thousand possibilities.”

The Ariston washing-machine ad from the 1980s is such fun and expertly executed, it’s hard to get angry (though maybe Rybczynski wouldn’t agree). It’s playful, homage, and flattering.

Ariston… and on… and on…

The multiple exposure – impossible simultaneous presence – is, anyway, a technique there to be experimented with and pushed to its limits.

From Tango’s fixed viewpoint, to the dazzling world of Kylie and Michel Gondry’s Come into my World…

And Michel explains things…

3. Conversion, Vito Acconci

In Vito Acconci’s Conversion (1971) he gives his nipples a good seeing to.

And Steve McQueen did the same (to his nipples, not Vito’s) in his installation Cold Breath (2000).

4. Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say, Gillian Wearing

As with Tango, here’s are some examples where creative ambition seems to win out over exploitation. In 1998, Gillian Wearing noted that a Volkswagen ’s photo series owed a little too much to her famous Signs that Say… series of photographs (1992-1993).

People pointed out that Wearing’s photographs themselves could be compared with the promo film for Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965)…

…itself ‘homaged’ by ads for Maxell tapes.

But Wearing certainly made an important point: “I think there is a clear distinction between the sort of humorous parodies agencies often do and the cases where they simply pass off other people’s work. Quite often they pick on individuals who they know aren’t going to cause any problems to them.”

And her works 10 – 16 (installation, 1997) and 2 into 1 (BBC, 1997) seem likely to have been inspired by Dennis Potter’s work, but she’s hardly passing off.

5. Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor

Here are two works – a film and a commercial – that use a similar style on similar themes.

First came Semiconductor’s Magnetic Movie, which has been seen on television and online platforms by well over a million people since it was released in 2007.

And here’s IBM’s recent Data Energy ad…

6. Escape Vehicle No. 6, Simon Faithfull

In 2004, artist Simon Faithfull sent a chair into space in his work Escape Vehicle No 6…

And a few years later, so did Toshiba…

7. The Life Size Zoetrope, Mark Simon Hewis

In 2007, Mark Simon Hewis made his life-sized zoetrope.

And last year, Sony Bravia made theirs…

And a bonus couple of similarities:

From 2006, George Barber’s Automotive Action Painting…

…followed by a year later by artist Robin Rhode’s ad for BMW… quite like George’s but with bigger, zoomier cars…

Dead Ringer, Paul Henreid

These Seven Wonders are inspired by Factum, the latest multi-channel video installation by artist Candice Breitz, that explores the experiences of identical twins in Toronto. Factum will be at the White Cube in Hoxton Square from 12 February.

Identical twins often get a raw deal in Cinema: in the tradition of the doppelganger they often signify that sinister events are yet to come; are used as devices to represent split personalities; symbolise the battle between good versus evil; help complicate the plot with assumed identities; and often engage in battles over love and/or money.

1. Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg (1988)

“Two bodies. Two minds. One soul…” What could be more terrifying than two indistinguishable gynaecologists plunging into a mental breakdown? Jeremy Irons stars in Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers as Elliot and Beverly Mantle, characters loosely based on real life identical twin gynecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus, who died together from withdrawal from a barbiturate addiction in 1975. Beverley’s infatuation with a patient leads to depression, drug addiction and delusions that eventually ends up dragging down his double Elliot into a world of macabre gynaecological implements. If you liked Disney’s The Parent Trap, you probably won’t enjoy this film.

2. Brothers of the Head, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (2005)

Conjoined twins this time, in a mockumentary loosely based on the 1977 novel by science fiction writer Brian Aldiss. Real life twins Harry and Luke Treadway play the young musicians who use punk music as a way to appropriate their status as freaks and in true punk style shove it back at society. In a similar vein to Dead Ringers above, one of the twins falls for a woman leading to jealousy, paranoia and a grisly ending.

3. Adaptation, Spike Jonze (2002)

In Adaptation, Nicholas Cage plays both screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his twin brother Donald, in a film written and produced by the surrealist screenwriter himself, Charlie Kaufman. The film follows Charlie’s struggle to adapt Susan Orlean’s book into a screenplay, whilst trying to cope with the sell-out screenwriting ambitions of his freeloading relation, Donald. The screenplay is credited to both Charlie and Donald, and although Donald is a fictitious character he has won several awards including a BAFTA for the screenplay of Adaptation.

4. Dead Ringer, Paul Henreid (1964)

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, now who’s the fairest twin of all?” As if one Bette Davis wasn’t fabulous enough, here we have two scheming siblings played by the terrifying leading lady herself in this Noir thriller. Sisters Edith and Margaret are reunited by the death of Margaret’s husband Frank unearthing yet another twin love triangle. Cue anger, revenge, and as the title suggests – murder and assumed identity.

5. The Black Room, Roy William Neill (1935)

Horror legend Boris Karloff plays the wicked Baron Gregor de Bergmann and his good natured brother Anton. The scene is set when at the twins birth the Doctor reveals the legend of the House of de Bergmann to the father and prophesises that there will once again be a murder in the Black Room… Here good versus evil, and there’s more duplicity, deception and death.

6. The Dark Mirror, Robert Siodmak (1946)

Another wonderful Film Noir murder mystery, with Olivia de Havilland giving a fantastic performance in another good twin versus bad twin scenario. When the sisters are accused of a murder, a psychologist is brought in to run tests on the twins to discover which is the mad murderess. This film is particularly brilliant for the wonderful quack psychiatry he comes out with such as “all women are rivals, fundamentally” and “lots of twins are reflections of each other, everything in reverse”. And in the spirit of his sentiments, there are many mirror shots throughout the film (particularly poignant in the end scene).

7. The Shining, Stanley Kubrick (1980)

Is there anyone alive who doesn’t recognise the image of The Grady Twins? Two of the most iconic twins in contemporary cinema, the girls have been written about and parodied many times since, (though never fear, the young actors have since gone on to lead normal lives). The image of the girls standing in the corridor is supposedly inspired by Diane Arbus’s 1967 photograph of sisters Cathleen and Colleen Wade in Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967. The Grady Twins were one of may mirroring devices Kubrick used throughout the film to add to the horror of Jack Torrance’s descent into madness at the hands of his demons.

Do let us know below of any twins we’ve neglected, that you think you should join this band of scoundrels.

Waylon Jennings on YouTube

My 7 wonders are all to do with Country and Western, a genre of music that I have begun to explore more of over the last few years. I vividly remember one afternoon as a snotty teenager where an enthusiastic friend tried to convince me of the virtues and wonders of  Country at the altar of his bedroom record player. He had them all – Waylon, The Eagles (all of their damned LPs), Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Rita Coolidge, you name it (and posters from “Country Music Monthly”)… He failed to convince me that it was a worthy pursuit – I was deep into the Velvet Underground and regarded this genre as awful, and stared politely at my black buckled boots whilst nodding faint approval and trying not to look too bored.. Oh how I wish now that I had taken heed that afternoon…

1 & 2. Waylon Jennings

First up we have Waylon Jennings. Or Waylon. First name terms for the devotees please.

Waylon singing “Lonesome On’ry and Mean” – what a band! And “Hoss” can play that telecaster too! (Through his great trademark phaser pedal) Please don’t confuse him with Boxcar Willie – that’s what turned you off country when you saw him on Pebble Mill at One as a child.

I have to put two Waylon wonders in here so you can understand him a little more:

Here he is as a younger man, he has a face for the cinema (and indeed did star in films).

He’s singing “Mental Revenge” on some TV programme in 1966. What a title! Eat your heart out Nick Cave.

3. George Jones

GEORGE JONES – Shine On

Jeremy | MySpace Video

One of the things I love about YouTube is the way people play their old LPs on camera. Some people get it out of the sleeve, switch on player and give an intro. This is my favourite format: The shrine…

4. Lefty Frizzell

And if you’re wondering where Bob Dylan found his voice for Nashville Skyline – here’s Lefty Frizzell with one of his best:

5. Merle Haggard

Here’s the truth – I had to entertain world renouned conceptual artist Dan Graham one afternoon and he turned me on to “The Hag”  – Merle Haggard to you. He also wrote “Okie from Muskogee”.  Didn’t know what I’d bin missin’…

6. Don Rich

It’s been said that a lot of America’s youth felt alienated but country music once Buck Owens started doing his “dumb”  weekly  show on Network TV in the late 60s. Now those “issues” have been played out ,surely we can revel in the baroque splendour of it all.  Here’s Owens’ guitarist Don Rich and band knocking out a great version of “Buckaroo”, the show’s signature tune  (Love the shot of the drummer).

7. Ronee Blakley

Finally, Here’s  a real wonder: Ronee Blakley, one time Bob Dylan protégé (Renaldo and Clara) and Robert Altman’s “Nashville” star.

She should have been huge!  Such Country/MOR crossover potential!

Orphee, Jean Cocteau

Here are 8 “magic” cuts. By “magic” I mean cuts or edits, or sequences made therefrom, which make my heart stop and my mouth open in suspension of disbelief, amazement, and excess of feeling.  

1. Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid, 1943)

The first cut in the film, a jump cut, from the shot of the dummy hand holding a poppy descending towards a pavement, to the same shot with the poppy left on the pavement, the hand having disappeared.

2. Don’t Look Now (Nicholas Roeg, 1973)

In the opening sequence of the film Don’t Look Now (at 4:21), cut from ext. young girl in red raincoat throwing a ball left/right to int. man (Sutherland) throwing cigarette pack right/left to woman (Christie) who catches it – a perfectly matched action cut across different spaces and characters uniting them in an eternal moment.

3. Dog Star Man: Prelude (Stan Brakhage, 1961-64)

There are several, all of them seminal for me then as now, and they are almost impossible to separate out from the flow of the sequence/chapter as a whole.  They showed me editing for the first time, as something made:

• 1’15″ – cut from dull red pulsing to white flash to swaying white light which goes off frame right.  This is about abstraction.  There is no need for me to understand what it is I am seeing in “reality.”
• 3’09″ – cut from dull red superimposed shots to close-up of moon left frame superimposed on red flashes, in a sequence which contains much closer-up shots of parts of smaller objects.  This is about scale and distance and how one can confuse and articulate them at one and the same time.
• 10’38″ – brief superimposition of a few frames in transition from a wide shot of snowy trees – heavily textured and barely recognisable on first viewing – to a mid-shot of a female nude with red spots superimposed – both shots are predominantly very blue.  This is about the recognition of something suddenly shown in a heretofore-abstract sequence, as photographic reality.
• 12’59″ – cut from a shot of green and black soft vertical “stripes” with white pinpoint “holes” to a red hexagonal soft spot mid-frame on black with pinpoint “holes” superimposed near end of shot.  This reveals the materiality of the film’s surface punctured, in suspension with the photographic ILLUSION held in its emulsion.
• 14’44″ to 15’38″ – a ”pink sequence” apparently seamless but perhaps with superimpositions and at least one cut – a long rest in an otherwise furiously cut and dreaming film.

4. Sherlock Jr.  (Buster Keaton, 1924)

The famous sequence (from 3:43) in which Sherlock Jr. falls asleep on the job in the projection booth of the cinema, and wakes in his dream to walk into the theatre and through the screen to become the film itself and back out again.  Pure magic, even if or because the matching cuts are all too visible to self-consciously naked and post-modern eye.

5. Ran, (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)

Near the end of the film (at 5:45), this is not a cut but a camera move which functions as a cut:  a 3-shot of Lady Kaede seated centre frame with two soldiers standing either side, only their legs visible – the camera pans left and tilts up as the soldier left draws his sword and strikes Lady Kaede now off-screen below – a huge spray of blood/red paint hits the silver-leafed wall behind.  Brilliant mise-en-scene which understands how to cut without cutting.

6. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

Near the end of the film (at 2:2:21) and like the choice from Ran, partly a single shot as jaw-dropping mise-en-scene, and completed with an actual cut of heart-stopping poetic beauty: after The Stalker and his party have returned to the café from The Zone, a close-up shot on the exterior of the young girl who has been established at the beginning of the film as unable to walk – the camera holds her centre frame for nearly a minute as it follows her moving left to right, then as the girl appears to descend and move away,  the camera tracks back and left to reveal the girl carried on the Stalker’s shoulders and with the Woman and the Dog walking along the edge of an expanse of water, a derelict and smoking factory and landscape seen across it.  As the family group slows and turns, there is a cut to a very dark interior and a close-up a wooden bowl into which creamy white milk is poured, splashing over the edge of the bowl – a female hand briefly brushes across the split milk and the Black Dog drinks noisily.

7. Orphee (Jean Cocteau, 1949)

At about 17’10″ into the film, a sequence of three shots and two cuts:

• from a close-up front shot seen from the “behind” a mirror of Marais/Orphee with hands raised and laid against the surface of the “mirror”/glass, falling against the glass and sliding down, cut to
• reverse angle from behind Marais/Orphee to his reflection as he slides down the glass, dissolve to
• close-up high-angle Marais/Orphee hands upraised, asleep on sand, face reflected in pool of water/mirror.  He wakes.

Like the sequence from Sherlock Jr, and all of Meshes of the Afternoon, a beautifully orchestrated series of shots which take us through the looking glass.

8. On the Town (Stanley Donen, 1949)

Contemporaneous with Orphee and no less magical – the Empire State scene in On the Town in which a group of cops are questioning two of the sailors and their girls, as the third sailor is held over the edge of the Empire State Building – the angles of the shots and the backgrounds match perfectly even when the two sailors holding the third lose contact – a perfect and perfectly knowingly gag, in an All-American eighth wonder.

Editing glossary:

edit (verb):  to prepare material for a film, recording or broadcast.

cut (verb):  to make, shorten, remove or divide with a sharp implement; make or design  (a garment) in a particular way (as an impeccably cut suit); reduce the amount or quantity of something; go across or through (as cut through an alley); stop filming or recording; move to another shot in a film; make a sound recording (as cut a record)  (noun):  a piece of meat cut from a carcass; a share of profits; a version of a film after editing (as the director’s cut).

abstract (adjective):  relating to ideas or qualities rather than physical things; (of art) using colour and shapes to create an effect rather than attempting to represent reality accurately  (verb):  to take out or remove something  (noun):  a summary of a book or article; an abstract work of art  (origin): from Latin abstrahere to “draw away”.

Eyes Without a Face, Georges Franju

A host of new, interactive viewing technologies mean that when it comes to moving images we’re increasingly used to being in the driving seat. All of the works below play at some point or in some way with notions of what it means to be a passenger – to sit back, delegate control and see where you end up.

1. Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face), Georges Franju (1959)

The opening shot of this classic chiller is a file of bare, headlamp-illumined trees. The low angle and the arterial involutions of the branches create a sinister ambience from the off, but only gradually do the audience realise that they’re seeing through the eyes of a woman who’s been kidnapped, etherised and maimed, and whose body is about to be disposed of. The sequence perfectly sums up the passenger-like condition of the horror viewer, sat in the dark with no choice but to watch as the projector’s cone of light leads them who knows where.

2. Tinchy Stryder Freestyle,  Tim & Barry (2007)

Grime never really worked in LP format, but this footage of Bow  MC Tinchy Stryder rhyming as he drives, checking his mirrors and changing gear with out missing a beat, both encapsulates the genre’s strengths (immediacy, improvisatory flair, sense of place, overall griminess) and communicates Tinchy’s effortless talent, suggesting he was best heard from the passenger seat of an Audi rather than the front row of an auditorium.

3. The History of the Main Complaint, Willliam Kentridge (1996)

Pinstriped Soho Eckstein figures in Kentridge’s cycle of films about recent South African history as the incarnation of callous white capitalism. If Pilate washed his hands, Eckstein turns on his windscreen wipers. Having driven passively by when he had the power to intervene, he seems to have received his comeuppance when rendered a helpless passenger in his own failing body. Eckstein survives however, suggesting Kentridge remained equivocal about South Africa’s own prospects of recovery.

4. Metro-land, Edward Mirzoeff (1973)

Although it’s an altogether cosier film than Main Complaint, Metro-land also treats national history as a journey and asks how far we can affect its course. Beneath the quaint and quizzical exterior there’s  a nagging disquiet, as John Betjeman attempts to dissociate one form of progress (an elegant, ambitious, old-fashioned one) from another (a new-fangled, impersonal, machinically efficient one), trying to find the point where the tracks switched. The train’s-eye-view footage suggests the breakneck pace of societal change, the exhilarating but giddying sensation of being what Anna Parejo Vadillio has called ‘passengers of modernity.’

5. Panzer Dragoon Zwei, Yukio Futatsugi (1995)

Video can’t really communicate why this moment is so effective, both because the visuals of this 1995 Sega game now look shockingly abstract and primitive and because YouTube clips aren’t interactive. Nevertheless – and notwithstanding how kooky and juvenile this Miyazakiesque Japanese title’s premise might sound – it’s a brilliant set piece. You’re mounted on a trotting bipedal lizard which perpetually moves forward. Hostile drones are chasing you. Suddenly the lizard careens right over the edge of a cliff. At first it seems you’ve made a wrong turn, but then – without any input from the player, who’s been turned from controlling pilot to helpless passenger – the animal sprouts wings, entering a glide and saving both of you.

6. Meter’s Running, Richard Wilson (2006)

The filmic component of Richard Wilson’s ‘Meter’s Running’ sees the artist hacking his way out of a claustrophobically cramped, machinery-filled space. Braving showers of sparks and spurts of oil, he saws, drills, bores and cleaves his through foam and leatherette, plastic and metal in a desperate effort to escape. Only at the end of the film is the space he’s escaped from revealed to be the interior of a black London cab being towed along the road. An extreme example of refusing to sit back and enjoy the ride

7. Motley Crue Uncensored, Wayne Isham (1986)

According to this profile of one of rock’s most repulsive bands, the Crue live too fast and party too hard to waste time speaking to journalists. As such they have to be interviewed on the move, and it’s around two minutes into the video above that things take a turn for the vehicular. There’s an ‘along for the ride’ vibe similar to the Tinchy video, only this is a world where men with wallfulls of platinum discs conduct interviews from limo-mounted jacuzzis while rolling down Sunset Strip. The abiding impression is of grown adults racing to keep up with their vanishing adolescence, and the film only becomes weirder and sadder when you know that at the time of filming Vince Neil (him in the jacuzzi) was barred from driving, having been convicted of vehicular manslaughter after a drunken smash that killed his friend. Rock’n'roll.

Danse Macabre, directed by Pedro Pires

From over nine years of commissioning and viewing screen-based dance, these are the seven that most vividly remain in my mind.  They span the spectrum of what is considered screen-based dance and include experimental films, choreographic objects and installations.

1. Alt-I-Alt, Torbjørn Skårild, 2003

Synopsis: …when all is said and done, conclusions are not so important after all.

Alt-I-Alt is an experimental short where the choreography is created entirely through the rhythmic, humorous and suspense filled editing.  On my first viewing of this the audience burst into spontaneous applause midway through the film.

2. Birds, David Hinton, 1999

Synopsis: Imagine a dance film without dancers, yet filled with fascinating movement. Through film editing, music and a choreographer’s perception, the unrehearsed, natural movement of birds becomes an exhilarating dance experience.

It’s hard to keep to one David Hinton film in this selection as his work is seminal in the development of dance film, particularly his early work with Lloyd Newson.  However Birds remains a favourite not least because I enjoyed the outrage from the traditionalists when David won the ultimate screen dance prize in 2000 for this film which didn’t involve any human dancers or ‘choreography’.

3. Captives 2nd Movement, Nicole + Norbert Corsino, 2000

Visit Nicole + Norbert Corsino’s website to watch Captives (2nd Movement)

Synopsis:  Like reversed Antigones, they follow their circular route from the West to the East. They are unique or multiple and you won’t divert them, hardly get a chance to meet their eye, never reach them. Their battles are inner ones and yet they’ll throw them in your face. They know their way; no one else can see their horizon.

One of the earlier films that used motion capture and gaming technology to create an artistic dance film, strangely atmospheric.

4. Danse Macabre, Director: Pedro Pires, Choreography: Anne Bruce Falconer, 2008

Watch the trailer for Danse Macabre

Synopsis:  For a period of time, while we believe it to be perfectly still, lifeless flesh responds, stirs and contorts in a final macabre ballet. Are these spasms merely erratic motions or do they echo the chaotic twists and turns of a past life?

The original concept for this work came from renowned Canadian stage director Robert Lepage.  This film is beautifully shot, lit and ‘performed’ and I loved that it shocked me.

5. Routes, Alex Reuben, 2006

Watch the trailer for Routes.

Synopsis:  Routes is a road movie through the dance and music of the American Deep South. Inspired by Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (and evocative of Maya Deren’s seminal Meshes Of The Afternoon), Alex Reuben’s film offers an idiosyncratic documentation of lesser-known forms of American culture, and the extraordinary dancing Americans of the Deep South. From North Carolina to the Holy Grail of his childhood hero, Fats Domino, and the Jazz of New Orleans, Reuben captured on the road Appalachian Bluegrass, Clogging, Mississippi Fife and Drum Blues, Krumping, Memphis Hip-Hop, Indian Smoke Dance, Louisiana Cajun, Zydeco and Swamp Pop, all in a vivid stream of sound and vision.

You get a real sense of the personal dedication and passion of filmmaker and DJ Alex Reuben, behind his 48 minutes of hand-held glory.  This beauty of a film is historically important, politically timely and above all a reminder of the sheer unstoppable force that is dance.

6. Synchronous Objects, Creative Directors: William Forsythe, Maria Palazzi, Norah Zuniga Shaw, 2009

Visit the Synchronous Objects interactive site.

Synopsis: Synchronous Objects reveals the interlocking systems of organization in William Forsythe’s ensemble dance One Flat Thing, reproduced through a series of objects that work in harmony to explore its choreographic structures and reimagine what else they might look like.

For many reasons; for the genius choreography of William Forsythe; for the film adaptation of the stage work by renowned dance film director Thierry de Mey; for the creation of an interactive choreographic object that gives insight into the work.

One of the exciting new types of choreographic objects in the form of innovative scores, creative tools, installations and archival systems for dance.  In addition the filmed adaptation of Forsythe’s One Flat Thing Reproduced is by leading dance filmmaker and composer Thierry de Mey who had to appear on this list somewhere.

7. The Long Road to Mazatlán, Isaac Julien, 1999

Synopsis:  The Long Road to Mazatlán, a video collaboration between Isaac Julien and the choreographer Javier de Frutos, is a fusion of movie and movement, a dance of gazes. Shot in and around San Antonio, Texas, it mixes familiar images of the West – the cowboy, the cattle yard, the dirt road – with a more contemporary and homoerotic iconography, unsettling each one. A tale of frustration and loss, the work offers no prescription for stable identity or for the satisfaction of desire, but the sensuality of its images and form is hearteningly seductive.

Can’t say much more than the synopsis although there was a small scandal when this work was nominated for the Turner Prize in Julien’s name alone…. the myth mill holds this scandal responsible for Julien not winning.

Rose Hobart, Joseph Cornell

“One need not look for new, as yet unseen images, but one must work with existing ones in such a way that they become new,” Harun Farocki.

To accompany the article on artist filmmaker Duncan Campbell’s use of archives for his acclaimed films Bernadette (2009) and Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003) here are seven works representing different facets of found footage work, from pop art collages to political essays to promo music videos and subversive documentaries, these films explore the aesthetics, politics and ethics of appropriation in our mediated society.

1. Rose Hobart, Joseph Cornell (1936)

Prompting accusation of theft from Dali’s unconscious, this classic film from reclusive America surrealist Joseph Cornell is a non-linear tribute to his favorite actress, made by re-editing her exotic feature East of Borneo (1931) and giving birth to the concept of ‘found footage.’

2. America Is Waiting, Bruce Connor (1982)

Filmmaker and artist Bruce Connor, pioneered the use of found footage in his early works such as A MOVIE (1958) and Report (1963-67). America Is Waiting is a dense collage of industrial and military footage made to accompany the track by Brian Eno and David Bryne from their record Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The film and the music both paved the way for the development of audio and visual sampling and the emergence of the music video.

3. WR: Mysteries of the organism, Dusan Makavejev (1971)

Taking the aesthetics of soviet montage, Yugoslav provocateur Dusan Makavejev added the missing element of satire to create ‘Eisenstein with jokes’. Banned in his home country, WR is a international exploration of the relationship of radical politics and sex, exploring the controversial theories of sexologist Wilhelm Reich, rejected by Europe and imprisoned in USA. The film is available on DVD from the Criterion Collection.

4. Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Harun Farocki (1988)

German essay filmmaker Harun Farocki‘s most acclaimed film, Images explores the industrial processes behind the construction of images and what is seen and what isn’t when we look at images. Farocki reveals the gap between seeing and understanding, revealing how all images are ‘found’ and only reveal what they were produced to show.

5. Sonic Outlaws, Craig Baldwin (1995)

San Francisco based filmmaker Craig Baldwin has been making anarchic found footage films since the mid-70s. Sonic Outlaws explore emergent issues around intellectual property and freedom of expression through an investigation of experimental music group Negativland’s legal battle with U2, when they were hypocritically sued by the ‘liberal’ Irish rockers for this subversive EP ‘U-2′ and the use of unauthorised sampling. Full version available on DVD from The Other Cinema.

6. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Johan Grimonprez (1997)

A brilliant and prophetic exploration of the relationship of media, terrorism and the aeroplane industry, a brilliant visual essay from Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez. Full version available on DVD from The Other Cinema.

7. It Felt Like a Kiss, Adam Curtis (2009)

Watch It Felt Like a Kiss on the BBC website.

BBCs resident subversive, Curtis has built a substantial reputation for his powerful political documentaries constructed out of material from the BBC archives, such as The Trap (2007) and The Power of Nightmares (2004). His latest film, It Felt Like a Kiss, is produced in collaboration with theatre company Punchdrunk and presented online, embracing new forms of broadcast and experience.