The Found Footage Open Forum is the first of a new series of events to showcase the creative work-in-progress of research students. This event will feature contributions from research students, who will discuss their own experience of working with found footage in academic and artistic contexts. Above all, the event will provide a critical forum for conversation and exchange, and an open platform for practitioners to introduce themselves and their work and engage in discussion about found footage and the archive.
Boat People (2016), 23 mins Murmuration x 10 (2015), 21 mins Azure (2016), 7 mins Dear Rosa (2019), 3 mins
This event was followed by a Q&A with Sarah Wood, which is available to watch online here
At the end of the nineteenth century when the Lumière brothers perfected their cinématographe they dispatched envoys across the world to demonstrate the new technology. Their invention was about movement – the moving image was a form that travelled.
In this online event we presented Home in E Major, originally scheduled for the 2020 Essay Film Festival, a first-person essay film about unlikely friendships and what it means to find a home.
Following the screening, filmmaker Tamar Rachkovsky was in conversation with academic and experimental film programmer, Dr Kim Knowles (Aberystwyth University). The recorded Q&A is available to watch here.
Following on from the previous day’s screening, a lecture by filmmaker Leandro Listorti explored the role of found footage in his practice alongside his work as an archivist.
In this online event we presented Leandro Listorti’s The Endless Film (La película infinita), originally scheduled for the 2020 Essay Film Festival. Following the film, there was an online Q+A between Leandro Listorti and researcher Nicholas Freeman.
The Endless Film is an expansive multi-layered compilation film assembled in the archives of the Buenos Aires film museum where the filmmaker is employed. This cinematic experiment retrieves fragments of films that were unfinished or lost, investing new life into objects considered incomplete and invisible, were it not for their reappearance in this new artistic context. The film acts as a valuable film-historical document, showcasing the various thematic and aesthetic currents that Argentinian filmmakers have engaged with from the 1950s to celebrated directors of the so-called ‘New Argentine Cinema’. Archives, memories, traces and remains, these are of fundamental importance for understanding the past, present and future of a country whose records have been routinely buried, burnt and destroyed. In this way, The Endless Film offers a window to forgotten memories, and the work becomes an elegy for the ghosts of Argentina’s dictatorial past. At the same time, the film offers an insight into the materiality of filmmaking, subtly drawing our attention to aspects of production processes such as countdown timers and pen-marked film strips, while the soundtrack makes use of extracts of dialogue and other extraneous audible elements that emerge from behind the camera on a film set. The use of damaged film footage (tramlines, scratches, faded colours, etc.) incorporates new physical elements into the texture of Listorti’s ‘endless film’.
