Outsider Cinema

Found footage

Films made from footage someone else shot, such as newsreels, home movies and Hollywood outtakes, re-cut until it says something new.

Technique · Four filmmakers in the guide

Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart, cut in 1936 from a jungle melodrama, is one of the earliest. Bruce Conner's A Movie, from 1958, made the method famous, turning stock shots and countdown leader into a comedy that tips into horror.

Found footage can be satire, memorial or a study of film itself. Arthur Lipsett pulled his material from the trim bins of the National Film Board of Canada. Phil Solomon and Pat O'Neill reworked old film on the optical printer until it became something else.

Films to start with

In the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.

  1. A still from A Movie.

    A Movie

    Bruce Conner · 1958 · 12 min · 16mm, black and white

    Countdown leader, stock footage, newsreel disasters and a submarine periscope, cut to Respighi's Pines of Rome. It starts as a joke and ends somewhere else.

  2. A still from A Trip Down Memory Lane.

    A Trip Down Memory Lane

    Arthur Lipsett · 1965 · 13 min

    A time capsule cut from about fifty years of newsreels. It was his first collage made entirely from stock images and sound.

  3. A still from Crossroads.

    Crossroads

    Bruce Conner · 1976 · 36 min · 35mm, black and white

    The 1946 Bikini Atoll underwater nuclear test, seen again and again from different cameras, with music by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley.

  4. A still from The Secret Garden.

    The Secret Garden

    Phil Solomon · 1988 · 23 min · 16mm, colour, silent

    Images from a silent film of The Secret Garden and from The Wizard of Oz, reworked chemically and on the optical printer. He made it while his parents were seriously ill.

Where it led

Lines from these films into work you may already know.

Nearby

Movements, forms and techniques that share filmmakers or methods with this one.

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