Found Footage Magazine issue #5

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DOSSIER: (In)appropriation: Dirty Movies and Second Hand Poetics, by André Habib

Can found footage filmmaking inform an archaeology of pornography that would account for the institutional, material, technological and social dimensions that are part of the very archive of pornography? This question is in fact part of a more general thinking of found footage filmmaking as a way to discuss and better understand the history of film heritage and technology, inside and outside of archives proper. By asking simple questions like, “How is found footage actually found and appropriated?”, the idea is to convey what found footage films tell us about archival access, film technology and materiality. Can found footage films give us a sense of what was and is today considered worthy of preserving or, on the contrary, considered disposable at a given historical time? Can these filmmakers shed new light on the archive, simply by displacing or misplacing films that are often dismissed because they were useful (educational, industrial, training films, pornography, advertisements) and have become useless (that is, useless for some but insightful, beautiful, disturbingly poetic for others)? I think these questions can offer a contribution to contemporary debates in the field of moving image archives, at the cross-point between history, technology and film aesthetics. And I would argue that this is particularly true of the exquisite corpus this dossier on pornography and found footage films wishes to highlight.

  • Revisiting the Degraded/Degrading Image:Subversive Decay, Parallel Legacies, and Re-Eroticization of the Pornographic Archive in The Color of Love by Peggy Ahwesh, by Alice Michaud-Lapointe
  • To Strip and to Tease: Archives and Concealment in Found Footage Pornography, by Annaëlle Winand and Éric Falardeau
  • Hidden in Plain Sight: Castle compilations and nudie films as lost intertexts for Bruce Conner’s A MOVIE and MARILYN TIMES FIVE, by Louis Pelletier
  • Interview with Peggy Ahwesh, by Alice Michaud-Lapointe
  • Interview with Alexei Dmitriev, by André Habib
  • Interview with Yves-Marie Mahé, by André Habib

ESSAYS

  • Indictment and Possibility in Ken Jacobs’ Star Spangled to Death, by Zachariah Anderson
  • Aesthetic Violence in the Anarchival Turn: On the Infinite Visions of History, by Kamila Kuc
  • There’s a Crack in the World of Appearances: Thom Andersen’s Slow Writing, by Matthew Levine

ARTICLES & INTERVIEWS

  • Interview with Carlos Adriano, by Scott MacDonald
  • Found Footage: A (Little) Polemic, by Peter Gidal
  • Constellations are just Small White Dots in the Dark: A Conversation with Johann Lurf about his Work ?, by Alejandro Bachmann
  • The Green Fog and the Maddin Mist, by Jonathan Rosenbaum

BOOK REVIEWS

  • Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and archival film practices (Catherine Russell, 2018), by César Ustarroz
  • Paolo Gioli: The Man without a Movie Camera (Edited by Alessandro Bordina and Antonio Somaini, 2014), by Matthew Levine

THE LOGISTICS OF SENSATION, An Interview with Péter Lichter and Bori Máté, by Dan Browne


DÉMONTAGE, Self Portrait Post Mortem, by Louise Bourque


COLLAGES by

John Stezaker, María Cañas, Guy Maddin, Mimmo Rotella, Matthieu Bourel, Douglas Gordon, Mariana Freijomil and Eli Craven.

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