Re-finding found footage: encounters with the video essay

Kevin B. Lee for Found Footage Magazine

In a 2016 issue of Found Footage Magazine, Alejandro Bachmann invited me into a dialogue to explore the relationship between video essays and found footage filmmaking. Alejandro offered the phrase “aesthetics of analysis” to describe a particular function and form that video essays bring to found footage filmmaking: that by reflecting critically upon existing cinema and media, video essays devise their own formal strategies to express insights. To elaborate on the ethos behind this approach, he cited a distinction made by Tom Gunning between “an impulse that collaborates with the world of material to make it expressive, rather than simply impressing a creative will and technical skill onto indifferent or resistant ‚stuff’.” In response, I wrote that the video essayist “retains a position of being the audience for the material even while acting upon it.” In other words, through the video essay, the act of spectatorship can express itself as visual art.

This collaborative approach between the video essayist and their materials is by no means how most video essays are produced today. Back in 2016 I noted a dispiriting tendency among video essays that used found footage as an “indexical vocabulary to make an argument, or to produce new forms of audiovisual spectacle,” the unilateral impositions that Gunning lamented. Those tendencies have only become more dominant.

A popular YouTube video essay of 2023 titled The Marvelization of Cinema bemoans how the Marvel blockbuster franchise subjected mainstream cinema into a monoculture of uninspired formulas. One could also speak of The YouTubeization of video essays, which The Marvelization of Cinema exemplifies. Following the standard practice of today’s YouTube video essays, it follows a script that outlines a generalized media phenomenon without close audiovisual analysis of specific examples. Instead, the use of existing footage consists of clips not lasting more than a few seconds, so as not to violate the platform’s guidelines regarding use of copyrighted materials, as strictly monitored by YouTube’s content detection systems. This algorithmically-governed montage leads to visually overloaded sequences that produce a perpetual state of visual distraction, interrupted occasionally by the video essayist’s on-camera appearances (a tactic for eliciting greater audience engagement through parasocial affect).

From this example, one becomes sensitive to how economic and algorithmic forces predetermine and regulate found footage practices in popular media industry and culture. It seems naive today, but 15 years ago I considered YouTube a utopian space for the next generation of found footage practice, due to its accessibility for those like me who were not established in festival film circles. The disappointing outcome of YouTube as a space for found footage filmmaking provoked a shift in my attention away from close analyses of film footage and towards the larger systemic contexts in which these materials exist. This shift can be found in Transformers the Premake (2014), the last video essay I ever published on YouTube, which uses 350 YouTube videos to visualize a global system in which social media content serves a Hollywood agenda.

Perhaps because close, extended readings are discouraged by YouTube algorithmic governance, macro-level analyses also dominate the discourse of contemporary YouTube video essays. The Marvelization of Cinema focuses less on analyzing specific films than industrial trends. Two of my favorite YouTube video essays of recent years, Feeling Cynical about Barbie (Broey Deschanel, 2023) and Fixing My Brain with Automated Therapy (Jacob Geller, 2022) also use specific media objects, the 2023 movie Barbie and therapy apps respectively, to delve into larger questions about how personal identities and values are formulated by media platforms operating under techno-capitalism. However, even these exceptional videos follow the established YouTube formulas for content creation; their exceptionalism lies in the uniqueness of their arguments, supported by extensive research, rather than an ability to work with and through the media object itself. Such an ability prioritizes a different type of encounter with the media object. As I wrote in 2016, “the real material being worked on is not the thing being encountered, but the act of encountering itself, what happens in the space between.”

Such encounters between creator and material are more likely these days to be found in the scholarly community of videographic film and media studies. Partly inspired by early YouTube video essays, from the early 2010s film scholars began to work with found footage to open an audiovisual dimension of academic research and publishing. The online journal [in]Transition, launched in 2014, played a critical role in legitimizing video essays as scholarly publishing, partly by incorporating written creator statements and peer reviews in the publication process. Catherine Grant, one of the most prolific videographic scholars with hundreds of videos to her name, established a similar methodology by consistently publishing academic articles to accompany her videos. This textual framework for justifying the scholarly value of the videos can generally satisfy the text-based criteria for academic scholarship, while giving greater space for the scholar to experiment with their media materials, so long as they can account in writing for the research value of their experiments. This arrangement has resulted not only in a transformation of contemporary film and media studies, but a growing and increasingly diversified set of approaches for found footage media practice.

The outputs of certain videographic scholars can attest to this diversity in themselves. Jason Mittell has produced at least a dozen audiovisual experiments on the television series Breaking Bad, available on his YouTube and Vimeo channels and due to be published as a videographic book. In these videos Mittell employs such techniques as re-sequencing of scenes, multiscreen arrangements, image layering and rescaling, and sound remixing. Terming this practice “deformative criticism,” he has also designed a pedagogical practice for an annual videographic scholarship workshop that he hosts at Middelbury College. The “Middlebury method” entails a series of exercises that apply experimental approaches to the basic tools of videographic post-production: timeline-based editing, spatial montage through multiple images on screen, voice recording, audio mixing, and textual and graphical annotation. The annual workshop not only proliferates the deformative approach among film scholars, but also convenes a community of practitioners who share a common experience and framework, comparable to how found footage artists congregate around festivals.

For the most part, videographic scholarship exists in a parallel universe to both YouTube as well as the long-established film festival and gallery contexts for found footage practice. There have been notable instances of crossover between videographic scholarship and cinema, such as the works of Richard Misek, Maryam Tafakory and Chloé Galibert-Laîné. For these scholar-filmmakers, their videographic research manages to be legible to the curatorial codes governing experimental film and documentary. Tafakory’s remarkable recent output provides a general spectrum of contextual belongings for her works. Irani Bag (2021) and chaste/unchaste (2023) are more explicitly works of analysis of visual motifs within Iranian cinema, and have been featured in film journals including [in]Transition. In contrast, her Nazarbazi (2022) and Mast-Del (2023) have circulated to much acclaim in international film festivals. While they also incorporate found footage from Iranian films, they offer less explicit analysis and more personal and poetic reflection in association with the footage. These assignations between her four films could be seen as a divide between the poetic/artistic and the analytic/scientific, but I would argue that the two more analytic works possess their own kind of poetry, precisely the “aesthetics of analysis” that Alejandro identified in our conversation.

The question becomes whether festivals and galleries would be more open to such analytical aesthetics. One can already look to the phenomenal success of Forensic Architecture for an answer. This international research collective, whose works can be found both online and in gallery installation settings, uses found videos from various sources to present evidence-based accounts of human rights violations. Visual materials are orchestrated masterfully through data visualization techniques, though one wonders if, paraphrasing Gunning, this work is more about impressing judicial will through technical skill than about staging a more open and poetic encounter.

For an instance of the latter in a gallery context, I think of recent works like Steve McQueen’s dual channel installation Sunshine State, which employs a parametric technique of erasure upon footage of the early sound film The Jazz Singer (1927) to depict a personal family narrative of racial visibility. A more radical reconsideration of found footage is realized in Zineb Sedira’s Dreams Have No Title, a multi-room installation that reconstructs sites of Algerian cinema: not only sets from films, but also the spaces where these films can be encountered: a theater, an archival storage space, a living room. Spectacular in its own way, it took me two visits to realize that such an immersive work of reconstruction could count as “found footage” and “videographic,” using physically reconstructed movie scenes for its acts of what might be called “spatial remix”. As with contemporary YouTube video essays, it is less focused on analyzing those filmic references than in describing a systemic context that encompasses them. At the same time, like the videographic workshops, this systemic focus results in an immersive physical environment that seeks to impart its devotional vision upon those who enter it.

If this seems like a far cry from found footage art as it has been traditionally known and practiced, it poses a question of what significance found footage practice has in a contemporary mediascape that that is increasingly situated in and among physical spaces and bodies. The collaborative found footage ethos espoused by Gunning is no longer a bilateral encounter between the author and the screen object, but a three-fold interaction that acknowledges the spatial and systemic context in which author and object find themselves. In this way, the future of found footage practice may find itself re-situated within a much bigger world than it has previously known.