Collage film is a style offilm created by juxtaposingfound footage from disparate sources (archival footage, excerpts from other films,newsreels,home movies, etc.). The term has also been applied to the physicalcollaging of materials ontofilm stock.[1]
Thesurrealist movement played a critical role in the creation of the collage film form.[2][3] In 1936, theAmerican artistJoseph Cornell produced one of the earliest collage films with his reassembly ofEast of Borneo (1931), combined with pieces of other films, into a new work he titledRose Hobart after the leading actress.[4] WhenSalvador Dalí saw the film, he was famously enraged, believing Cornell had stolen the idea from his thoughts.[5] Predecessors includeAdrian Brunel'sCrossing the Great Sagrada (1924)[6] andHenri Storck'sStory of the Unknown soldier (Histoire du soldat inconnu) (1932).[7]
The idea of combining film from various sources also appealed to another surrealist artistAndré Breton. In the town of Nantes, he and friend Jacques Vaché would travel from one movie theater to another, without ever staying for an entire film.[8]
A renaissance of found footage films emerged afterBruce Conner'sA Movie (1958). The film mixesephemeral film clips in a dialectical montage. A famous sequence made up of disparate clips shows "a submarine captain [who] seems to see a scantily dressed woman through his periscope and responds by firing a torpedo which produces a nuclear explosion followed by huge waves ridden by surfboard riders."[9] Conner continued to produce several other found footage films includingReport andCrossroads among others.
Working at theNational Film Board of Canada (NFB) in the 1960s,Arthur Lipsett created collage films such asVery Nice, Very Nice (1961) and21-87 (1963), entirely composed of found footage discarded during the editing of other films (the former earning an Academy Award nomination).[10] French filmmakerEdouard de Laurot made politically-charged collage documentaries such asBlack Liberation (1967) andListen, America (1968) during this period as well.[11]
In 1968, the youngJoe Dante madeThe Movie Orgy with producerJon Davidson that featured outtakes, trailers and commercials from various shows and films.[12][13]
Other notable users of this technique areChuck Workman[14] with his 1986 Oscar-winningPrecious Images,[15]Rick Prelinger known for his use ofhome movies andephemeral films on meditative projects like 2004'sPanorama Ephemera,[16][17]Wheeler Winston Dixon known for his 1972 examination of TV advertisingSerial Metaphysics,[18][19][20]Craig Baldwin in his filmsSpectres of the Spectrum,Tribulation 99 andO No Coronado andBill Morrison who used found footage lost and neglected in film archives in his 2002 workDecasia (which alongsideKevin Rafferty's 1982 Cold War satireThe Atomic Cafe were inducted to theNational Film Registry). A similar entry in the found footage canon is Peter Delpeut'sLyrical Nitrate (1991).
The technique was employed in the 2008 feature filmThe Memories of Angels, a visual ode toMontreal composed ofstock footage from over 120 NFB films from the 1950s and 1960s.[21]Terence Davies used a similar technique to createOf Time and the City, recalling his life growing up inLiverpool in the 1950s and 1960s, usingnewsreel and documentary footage supplemented by his own commentary voiceover and contemporaneous andclassical music soundtracks.[22]
Christian Marclay'sThe Clock, a 24-hour compilation of time-related scenes from movies, debuted at London'sWhite Cube gallery in 2010.[23] Marclay made several forays into video art that informedThe Clock with his 1995 filmTelephones, forming a narrative out of clips fromHollywood films where characters use a telephone,[24] and his 1998 filmUp and Out combining video fromMichelangelo Antonioni'sBlowup with audio fromBrian De Palma'sBlow Out. The latter was an early experiment in the effect of synchronization, where viewers naturally attempted to find intersections between the two works, and it developed the editing style that Marclay employs forThe Clock.[24][25] A similarart installation by Scottish artistDouglas Gordon,24 Hour Psycho (1993)[26] consists entirely of anappropriation ofAlfred Hitchcock's 1960 psychological thriller filmPsycho, slowed down to approximatelytwo frames per second from its original 24. As a result, the film lasts for precisely 24 hours, rather than the originalrunning time of 109 minutes (1 hour, 49 minutes).[27] A century later, New York-based artist Chris Bors responded by tweaking the film as24 Second Psycho while accommodating the short attention span of information age society.[28][29]
The 2016 experimental documentaryFraud (byDean Fleischer Camp, later known for the Oscar-nominatedMarcel the Shell with Shoes On) was sourced from over a hundred hours of home video footage uploaded to YouTube by an unknown family in the United States. The footage was combined with additional clips appropriated from other YouTube users and transformed into a 53-minutecrime film about a family preoccupied with material consumption going to extreme lengths in order to get out from under unsustainablepersonal debt.[30]
Scottish poet Ross Sutherland made his 2015 feature film debutStand By for Tape Back-Up, consisting of recordings from an old VHS tape left by his late grandfather.[31][32][33]
Canadian experimental filmmakerStephen Broomer's first feature work wasPotamkin (2017). The film is about the late pioneeringfilm criticHarry Alan Potamkin (1900-1933), who was one of the first to proclaim cinema as an art form.Potamkin is composed of fragments from the many films he reviewed for newspapers and magazines during the 1920s and 1930s (e.g.Battleship Potemkin,The Passion of Joan of Arc andMetropolis).[34][35][36][37]
Other award-winning examples of 21st century college cinema includeRaoul Peck'sI Am Not Your Negro (2016) andBrett Morgen'sGrammy Award-winningMoonage Daydream (2022).[38]
Some of the earliest surrealist collage works were humorous. This tradition of using film collage for comedic effect can later be seen in commercial films such asWoody Allen's first film,What's Up, Tiger Lily? in which Allen tookKey of Keys, aJapanesespy film bySenkichi Taniguchi, re-edited parts of it and wrote a new soundtrack made up of his own dialogue for comic effect, andCarl Reiner's 1982 comedyDead Men Don't Wear Plaid which incorporated footage from approximately two dozen classicfilm noir films along with original sequences withSteve Martin.
Canadianvideo artistTodd Graham is known for his 1987 cultfan filmApocalypse Pooh, a bizarrely comedicmash-up of Disney'sWinnie the Pooh andFrancis Ford Coppola's 1979Vietnam War epicApocalypse Now.[45][46][47]
Some filmmakers have taken a more literal approach to collage film.Stan Brakhage created films by collagingfound objects between clearfilm stock, then passing the results through anoptical printer, such as inMothlight andThe Garden of Earthly Delights.
Another notable collage film that also used this technique isFruit Flies (2010) by Canadian artistChristine Lucy Latimer similar toMothlight.[48]
Examples of animated collage film (which uses clippings from newspapers, comics and magazines alongside other inanimate objects):
