Transformations in Film as Reality (Part 6)

On the Virtues and Limitations of Collage

Paul Arthur

We ran Elizabeth Cowie's article on documentary and spectacle in our last issue of
Documentary Box as the first part of our revival of the popular "Transformations in
Film as Reality" series, which has explored the history of film's relation to reality—
how documentary as a genre, as well as the "realistic feel" of cinema, have evolved
over the last century. As the next edition in that series, we are pleased to present Paul
Arthur's discussion of the use of collage in documentary, especially in relation to the
work of Emile de Antonio.

—The Editors

André Bazin was not the first but possibly the most influential proponent of the idea
that cinema, under the aegis of photography, "freed Western painting, once and for all,
from its obsession with realism and allowed it to recover its aesthetic autonomy." 1
What Bazin located as the autonomous properties of film were obviously quite
different from those which his contemporary Clement Greenberg defined as the
modernist imperatives of painting. It would be intriguing to know what Bazin, who
made his ontological claim in 1945, would make of the current international art scene
in which boundaries between painting and photography have been all but abolished.
Moreover, given his celebrated endorsement of temporal continuity and the
transparent immediacy of film recording as the basis of realism, how would he assess
the paradigmatic use of found footage collage in post-sixties' nonfiction cinema?
Bazin was of course well aware that the introduction of extrinsic materials into cubist
painting in 1912, and the subsequent development of various collage styles, posed a
powerful challenge precisely to the aesthetic "autonomy" of the painted surface, and
to the principle of organic composition, the integral relationship between part and
whole. His attacks on Soviet montage effects and on analytical editing in general,
elaborated in the essay "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage" and elsewhere,
offers a possible blueprint for the rejection of collage as a divisive, "authoritarian"
mode of filmic discourse. 2 From a contemporary vantage, however, Bazin's approach
is of little help in understanding either the historical legacy of found footage or its
material-aesthetic status in the representation of reality.

By 1945, the deployment of archival images to reanimate or polemically reinterpret

prior versions of events, figures, and social processes--a practice nearly as old as the
cinema itself 3 --had become a standard procedure in various types of non-
mainstream film (i.e., apart from its common functions in commercial fiction films of
filling iconic gaps in logic or continuity). Indeed, the recent outpouring of wartime
newsreel compilations and military training films had underscored the primacy of
found footage in corporate and state-sponsored propaganda (Frank Capra's "Why We
Fight" series is exemplary here). In terms of the larger domain of nonfiction film, the
use of appropriation techniques had developed along parallel, at times overlapping,
trajectories: a figurative or experimental foregrounding of aesthetic features contained
in otherwise mundane artifacts (films by Hans Richter, Walther Ruttmann, and
Charles DeKeukeleire belong in this tradition); and the politicized activation of
"suppressed" ideas or the inversion of conventional meanings culled from newsreels
and other documentary materials (the work of Esfir Shub and Dziga Vertov are
indicative of this tendency). 4

Found footage continued to play a role, albeit less prominently, in postwar Anglo-
European production but was pushed aside by the advent of cinéma vérité and direct
cinema in the early Sixties. Documentary styles that favored analytical editing and
voice-over narration--in particular, New Deal documentaries of the thirties--became
principal targets of vérités cultural ideology of spontaneity and semantic ambiguity.
The movement's didactic insistence on present-tense recording and a non-judgmental,
detached first-person address, its cult of the sync-sound image as replete signifier of
the Real, implicitly or, as in the body of interviews with vérité practitioners, explicitly
proscribed associational or rhetorical montage effects derived from the rearrangement
of found materials. 5 To put it another way, the ostensible reduction of editing to the
barest necessities--and, the contemporaneous fixed-camera masterpieces of Warhol
notwithstanding, it is always necessary--in the accretion of successive moments of
immediate recording served as a shibboleth for the vérité camp. The vérité method, as
style and ideology, was tailor-made for the anti-authoritarian ethos of sixties'
counterculture, and its dominance was predicated on a disavowal of history as vehicle
for the adjudication of conflicting truth claims. Not incidentally, it was an almost
ideal fulfillment, in the precinct of nonfiction, of Bazin's theory of cinematic realism.

The hold exerted by vérité on documentary discourse, especially in the United States,
began to weaken in the early seventies with the emergence or acceleration of political
struggles for racial, gender, and sexual equality, and their concomitant demands for
the revision of individual and collective histories. A mandate for the revival of found
footage strategies was in part spurred by academic historians intent on reinterpreting
American Cold War policy in the midst of the Vietnam debacle, and received further
reinforcement from the gradual acceptance of new European historiographic models
of evidence and argument, including Foucault's notion of archeology. 6 Hence the
widespread post-sixties' appetite for found footage coincides with two interdependent
initiatives: the desire to reformulate tropes of historical narrative, and the micro-
political critique of historical exclusion or distortion conducted on the terrain of mass
cultural representation by disenfranchised groups as a precondition for self-
determination.

It is possible to generalize the opposition of vérité and found footage-based

documentaries in more narrowly discursive as well as political parameters. Although
it frequently operates in tandem with present-tense interviews, the filmic structures in
which recycled footage appears inevitably privilege the perception of conscious
construction over "unmediated" presentation, relations of (dis)continuity between past
and present rather than a reified semblance of temporal unity. Where the film image
in vérité is registered as unique, temporally bounded, and phenomenologically
embodied through camera movement and position, in the collage format it tends to be
seen as dis-embodied, materially discrete, and iconographically interchangeable with
other images. That is, the found footage aesthetic assumes not only the possibility that
images are capable of eliciting multiple responses--an important tenet in vérité as
well--but that the burden of meaning shifts according to context and surrounding
articulation; it cannot be universalized or freed from historical determination. The
organizing "voice" in collage films is decentered or split between an enunciative trace
in the original footage--encompassing both stylistic features and material residues of
production such as film stock, speed of shooting, and aspect ratio--and an agency of
knowledge manifest in the overall text through editing, the application of sound, titles,
and so on. In its framework of enunciation, as well as its thematic focus, collage
constitutes a corrective to vérités predominantly individualist (and performative)
encounter with social reality.

In the opening of an anthology of essays devoted to collage and filmic montage,

Matthew Teitelbaum declares that the practice of recombining extant images "invokes
the discontinuous and the ruptured as the talisman of our century." 7 This sentiment
has been echoed repeatedly and in various guises in art-historical writings since the
1970s, or roughly the same period in which found footage renewed its claim on
documentary practice. 8 In one of the few dissenting opinions of which I am aware,
Theodor Adorno, who had praised the potential of earlier collage experiments as a
"negation of synthesis" or false unity of meaning, asserts that after World War II
collage effects had become neutralized through overuse and the unproblematic
display of mass cultural detritus. 9 It is possible that both valuations are accurate in
regard to different tangents of post-sixties documentary. Nonetheless, what is
surprising is that given its centrality in art-historical discourse, collage has received so
little attention in classical or contemporary film theory.

As might be expected, Soviet writers such as Vertov and Pudovkin are more attuned
to questions of mixed materiality than are writers primarily concerned with narrative
cinema, and some of their utopian pronouncements on the political efficacy of
montage resurface in the claims of a current generation of film activists. 10 Perhaps
the most interesting clues to the conjectural status of found footage are discovered in
fleeting comments by Siegfried Kracauer, Parker Tyler, and Bela Balazs, aimed at the
attributes of newsreels rather than collage per se. There is mutual agreement that
newsreels and documentary reportage in general are "innocent" or "artless" due to
their lack of aesthetic reconstruction. Kracauer, in a discussion of Housing Problems
(1934), states that "it is precisely the snapshot quality of the pictures that makes them
appear as authentic documents." The absence of "beauty" yields a greater quotient of
"truth." Tyler makes a related point, suggesting that newsreels fail to meet
requirements of historical narrative since the latter "implies not only recorded events
but furthermore a narration of events having form--beginning, middle, end, and
coherent outline." Newsreels, according to Tyler, have no "abstract perspective" and
thus "make actuality seem (in terms of formal significance) fragmentary, superficial,
and even trivial." 11 The assumption here is that the representation of "actuality" must
be ordered by a coherent system of causality.

In this view, newsreel footage, a primary source for documentary compilation and
collage, is merely denotative or "evidentiary," a series of discrete, transparent,
essentially mute elements requiring a narrativized, univocal fabric in order to
demonstrate how social events are connected. The notion of found images as more-or-
less neutral bearers of meaning is reiterated in contemporary documentary theory by
Bill Nichols and Thomas Waugh, among others. Nichols advises us that the presence
of a "perspective, and therefore a representation or argument, differentiates a text
from mere' film or raw footage," and implies that decontextualized fragments act as
"value-free reproductions of the historical world." The recycled fragment thus seems
to resemble Eisenstein's "montage cell," a shot that acquires coherent meaning only in
juxtaposition with other shots. Waugh, rehearsing the collage effects of Emile de
Antonio's Point of Order (1963), concludes that the ability to invest new meanings in
appropriated images "is partly due to the naive, functional, purely denotative
orientation of the original recording." He adds that "the transfer of video from the
television screen to the movie screen somehow serves to absolve it of whatever lack
of credibility infects it in its original, functional context. It attains purity as a
document." 12 Presumably, the newly-realized "purity" is primarily a function of
excising the fragment from its original context of institutional rhetorics and economic
interests.

The understanding of newsreel fragments as devoid of enunciative or rhetorical

specificity recalls Hayden White's discussion of medieval annals. Traditional
historians characterize this form of historical writing as rudimentary, its objectivity
defined by the absence of all reference to a narrator: "real events should not speak,
should not tell themselves . . . they can perfectly well serve as referents of a
discourse . . . but they should not pose as the tellers of a narrative." White goes on to
argue that historiography is so wedded to the operations of narrative that the sorts of
gaps and discontinuities exhibited in annals disqualify them from being taken as
"particular products of possible conceptions of historical reality, conceptions that are
alternatives to, rather than failed anticipations of, the fully realized historical
discourse that the modern history form is supposed to embody." 13 It is as if at least
one line of documentary inquiry, extending from Kracauer and Tyler through Nichols
and Waugh (odd bedfellows indeed), had situated the newsreel and televisual report
as modern versions of "un-narrated" annals. One might question first whether any
product of mass culture can be successfully stripped of its contextual signification and,
second, whether the transformative process is a matter of subtraction or amplification.

Setting aside for the moment issues of what can be included in the class of "found
footage" and how the material is incorporated in particular filmic structures, the
neutrality stance might have clear theoretical sailing were it not for a body of
statements that appear to take precisely the opposite tack; that is, that the horizon of
possibility--and the claims to political efficacy--in appropriated images is
underwritten by a palpable over-determination, by ideological or contextual biases
already amply inscribed in the artifact. The critical problem then is not combining
unaffiliated fragments in order to generate meanings imposed by a more conscious
historical perspective, but rather the interrogation of ideologically-motivated
signifiers embedded in and disseminated through the original material. In the latter,
found footage is by definition a dialogical strategy, pitting two or more distinct voices
against each other. British nonfiction filmmaker Pratibha Parmar ventures that "It is
[the] politicized appropriations of dominant codes and signifying systems which give
us powerful weapons in the struggle for empowerment." Kobena Mercer remarks that
found footage tactics can "expose the heterogeneity" of social identity denied by
dominant visual discourses and can "defeat monologism" by "creolizing" newsreel
and other representations. 14 De Antonio himself seems at times to buy into the idea
that newsreels do indeed "speak for themselves"; referring to a particularly ripe image
from In the Year of the Pig (1968) of French officers shooing away a group of
Vietnamese rickshaw drivers, he calls it "the equivalent of a couple of chapters of
dense writing about the meaning of colonialism." 15

Discrepancies between the two ontologies of found footage may turn out to be more
pragmatic than substantive. Both groups are involved in promoting particular
documentary styles or bodies of work reflecting a particular set of historical and
cultural conditions. When they discuss the status or use of found footage, they may be
referring not only to different types of materials but different sites of articulation (e.g.,
mainstream documentaries versus experimental essays). There are no obvious
disagreements, say, about the character of newsreel fragments in the films of de
Antonio. Moreover, both camps believe that the goal of documentary collage should
be the contestation of received historical perspectives. However, there are still
considerable divergences on several fronts. Analysts of mainstream documentaries
such as Nichols and Waugh imply that the subversive transformation of artifacts must
be coupled with a demonstrated "respect" for the integrity of the material, that the
credibility of critique is dependent on a formal restraint in the handling of images
(and sound). The principal, if not the exclusive, interpretive resources are those of
editing and sound/image juxtaposition. In addition, the re-envisioning of historical
narrative is predicated on the perceived identity, or at least close compatibility,
between visual depiction and verbal reference--in the form of voice-over narration,
printed titles and texts, and/or diegetic speech. What is illustrated in collage fragments
must be related analogically to its linguistic description. An alternative position might
hold that the process of recontextualization will inevitably, and should, vitiate the
integrity of the original footage, that fidelity to technical standards (e.g., exposure,
speed, cropping) of prior representations is neither a possible nor desirable goal.
Similarly, the prerogative of radically de-forming found footage is based on a
recognition that the site of revision is less the semantic content of borrowed images
than it is the material traces and dominant visual/aural codes which they embody. 16

It is possible that this dilemma can be reduced to a contrast in aesthetic allegiances,

with one group advocating a more reflexive brand of realism while the other opts for a
formalist or figurative program of nonfiction collage. There is no way to resolve in
this space the contradictory accounts of the status of found footage. Nonetheless, a
closer examination of its supposedly denotative functions and of the range of
interactions among sequential fragments will help to test some of the discursive
assumptions made by documentary theory. Perhaps the most appropriate field for
such an inquiry is the well-known batch of mainstream documentaries produced in the
seventies and early eighties in the wake de Antonio's pioneering work, including
Union Maids (1976), The Day After Trinity (1980), and Atomic Cafe (1982). These
films share certain tendencies in construction, politics, and historical focus--
tendencies which, by the way, continue to inform contemporary nonfiction projects.

It should be apparent that both modes of inscription--the illustrative or analogical and

the metaphoric--can be commingled in the same documentary text. The selection of
archival images to be included in a given sequence is governed by a variety of criteria,
not just accuracy of depiction but also formal qualities of composition, expressive
movement, camera angle, and so on. It is frequently the case that there is no existing
or available footage to accompany a verbal description and the filmmaker/editor must
resort to generic images that approximate, allude to, or symbolically represent the
event in question. For example, in numerous documentary recreations of the attack on
Pearl Harbor, airborne shots of Japanese fighters are shown in advance of, or intercut
with, footage of explosions and burning naval vessels. It seems unlikely that cameras
were placed aboard the planes of kamikaze pilots and, even if they were, how the
footage of their attack was retrieved. Hence as viewers, we may grasp the fact that the
shots of sinking American ships are exactly what they purport to be while those of
Japanese aircraft are generic rather than literal. Needless to say, discontinuities of this
type do not pose a problem for the average film viewer, they are easily assimilated
within a larger fabric of narration, sound, and editing syntax.

To take a more specific example, at the beginning of The Life and Times of Rosie the
Riveter (1980), a group of women are shown huddled around a radio listening, it
seems, to FDR's speech declaring war on Japan. It hardly matters whether the figures
in this shot are actually listening to the words we hear on the soundtrack; nor does it
matter that these women are unrelated to the women shown in present-tense
interviews narrating their stories of wartime factory work. Indeed, with the exception
of rephotographed still images and brief snippets of home movies, the footage
adduced to illustrate the women's reminiscences is almost entirely of a generic nature:
not "this" factory but "a" factory, not "these" workers but "some" workers. In the
compact we as viewers make with the film, expectations of fidelity between image
and verbal statement are limited to areas such as historical or geographic
verisimilitude (we would presumably balk at shots of Indian factory work
recognizably taken in the 1930s). The point is that many, perhaps even a majority, of
illustrative instances in documentary collage are understood not as literal but
figurative representations of their subjects. Something similar can be said for the
commonplace superimposition of synchronized sound effects (e.g., explosions, air
raid sirens, the whirr of descending aircraft) over footage that was almost certainly
silent in its original form. These are stock items in the arsenal of documentary
technique, even though they patently violate the "integrity" of the material.

More interesting, but only slightly more problematic, are montage sequences
connecting a series of verbal assertions in which the denotative and expressive
valences of successive shots shift in its relation to what is being described. Near the
beginning of The Day After Trinity, a twelve-shot sequence is employed to illustrate
the build-up of the Nazi war machine by 1937. Images of marching troops, a bomber
squadron flying in formation, and rows of advancing tanks create an impressive,
rhythmically edited, right-to-left on-screen movement. An inserted close-up of Hitler
in a virtual eyeline match is distinctly analogical, but the overall impression made by
the sequence is symbolic, cued by the voice-over of a scientist who refers to a "wave"
of German aggression (not incidentally, the leftward movement matches the map-
direction of forces invading Western Europe). Again, while certain archival shots or
sequences create a direct, transparent fit with their verbal referents, others are chosen
for their visual expressivity or vividness in order to convey an abstract idea. In these
interludes, questions of "who-where-when" are bracketed in favor of an affective
charge or latent meaning.
Yet another class of familiar collage constructions display a more troubling ambiguity.
The opening of Atomic Cafe revisits the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. Pieces of an
interview with the captain of the Enola Gay, in which he describes the chronology of
events leading up to the blast, are laid over shots of peaceful Japanese streets, the
municipal tower at the center of Hiroshima, the bomber in flight, and other pre-blast
scenes. There are also several low-angle medium shots of a well-dressed, clean-cut
man standing against a gleaming white sky. He gazes upward, we hear airplane
sounds. The man's inquisitive look is cross-cut with the bomber, which is followed by
the explosion. The image of this innocent citizen is presumably generic; its presence
defies the logic of direct recording. In context, the montage sequence makes a
discursive leap that frays our intuitions of documentary protocol, adopting a narrative
editing trope that both heightens dramatic anticipation and elicits pathos for a specific
individual. Since we may reasonably doubt that this man was an actual victim of the
bombing, his function within the sequence is confusing. The fact that he does not
belong to the scene portrayed becomes important, and misleading, in ways that related
substitutions do not. 17 It is uncertain to what degree this example illuminates
responses to other narrativized uses of found footage but, regardless of its general
significance, it hints at the wide latitude of non-denotative tasks performed by
documentary collage.

A final pattern, extracted from Union Maids, concerns a level of outright

contradiction between image and speech that is not cognitively disruptive, as is the
Hiroshima sequence, but considerably more intriguing. Activist Sylvia Woods is
telling the story of how a group called the "Unemployed Council" tried to halt the
eviction of an unemployed worker. She says: "The police came out from everywhere,
one of them, a detective with a sawed-off shotgun. He was so big and so mean and he
said. . . ." One does not have to be a weapons buff to notice that the image supporting
her description is of a uniformed officer with a tear gas launcher and vest full of
canisters. It is a powerful shot, although it is neither generic enough nor sufficiently
analogous to create a transparent match. There are several ways of assessing the split
evidenced here, depending on the model one adopts for film spectatorship. Given an
active, narrativist model of hypothesis testing of the type endorsed by David Bordwell
for fiction films, 18 we can infer that, as with many other events described in the film,
no recorded evidence exists and that the shot is representative of "all cops" mobilized
in the suppression of labor struggles of the 1930s. It is also possible that the menacing
cop shown in the sequence was present at the confrontation and Woods's memory,
given the erosions of time and subjective storytelling, is faulty. It is far from unusual
for found footage to occupy the same structural position and logic as a fictional
flashback. The tension between Woods's description and what is seen could serve to
modify or even displace her verbal account, substituting detached vision for personal
recall.

Rather than reaffirming the transparency of visual depiction in historical memory, this
common form of dissonance raises the specter of evidentiary blockage or partiality.
Documentarists who would never dream of restaging an event with actors do not
hesitate in creating collages which amount to metaphoric fabrications of reality. The
guarantees of authenticity ostensibly secured by archival footage are largely a myth.
In consequence, the binary opposition of unalloyed illustration--as the province of
conventional documentary-- and figurative reshaping is hardly as solid as it initially
seemed. Ironically, this opposition is more pertinently applied to collage-interview
documentaries of the seventies and beyond than it is to the seminal early films of de
Antonio, as a brief consideration of In the Year of the Pig will readily confirm.

De Antonio was no stranger to the avant-garde film scene of the sixties, and it is
perhaps no accident that he began assembling found footage tracts just a few years
after Bruce Conner issued his devastating critique of dominant media's exploitation of
violent disaster in A Movie (1958). To be sure, de Antonio had an ample store of
documentary compilations on which to draw, and he was always reluctant to
acknowledge the affinities between his work and avant-garde collage methods. That
said, however, In the Year of the Pig represents his most radically formal treatment of
the possibilities of found footage in documentary discourse--an approach which,
regrettably, has had few imitators among later generations of documentarists. The
film develops a series of flowing yet semi-autonomous segments bound together by
historical chronology, an ongoing commentary by a group of scholars and public
officials, and a set of continuous themes: the life of Ho Chi Minh; the relationship
between Vietnam's struggle for self-determination and America's wars of
independence; contradictions between American political rhetoric and expanding
military involvement.

Scattered among long stretches of historical exposition are interludes that create
nearly abstract montage effects appealing less to our rational faculties than our
emotional instincts. They function as momentary breaks from the onslaught of verbal
argument and description, but they are also integral extensions and complications of
ideas which transcend simple paraphrase. In addition, de Antonio layers over the
image track both sound effects and music which rely on purely metaphoric sensations
as well as intellectual linkages. For the opening montage, the director commissioned
the composition of a concrete musical crescendo of distorted helicopter noise which
registers at different moments as out-of-control machinery and human screams. In the
same sequence, he filters in the sound of two--perfectly segued--versions of "The
Charge of the Light Brigade," a melody evoking strong colonialist associations; one is
a scratchy old record and the other a more full-bodied "modern" recording. The
formal juxtaposition of these two sound artifacts suggests an historical continuity
between earlier and current episodes of foreign intervention. The significance of very
first shot, a statue of a Civil War soldier, remains somewhat obscure until the playing
of a few bars from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in the film's final segment--not
only will there be no glory or honor on the battlefield, we have no business interfering
in a civil conflict.

Thomas Waugh finds that "de Antonio's rhetoric is cool, scholarly and articulate. Its
aim was to convince, not to inflame." 19 His assertion is not wrong but it devalues
both the film's extraordinary range of figurative usage and those passages which do
indeed seem structured to inflame our emotional sensibilities. For instance, in the pre-
credit montage, de Antonio separates almost a dozen heterogeneous glimpses of the
war (including a canny reference to Saint-Gaudens's monument to a company of black
Civil War soldiers) with fades and black leader--in a manner not dissimilar from the
opening of A Movie. These pauses signify the passage of time; they also instate an
almost funereal cadence that is cued by the second shot, a close-up of a decaying
tombstone bearing the inscription, "As soon as I heard of American independence, my
heart was enlisted."
Perhaps the most brilliant formal stroke in In the Year of the Pig occurs at the
conclusion. Daniel Berrigan is heard in intermittent voice-over delivering poetic
testimony to the strength and moral rightness of the North Vietnamese cause. His
words, along with those of newspaper editor Harrison Salisbury, are accompanied by
fructifying images of valiant peasants planting crops and harvesting an abundant catch
from the sea. There is a close-up of an overflowing basket of fish with their mouths
gasping open. It is a complex image, signifying on one level the health and ingenuity
of the Vietnamese people and, on another, the gasping futility of America's military
aggression (it also evokes Mao's famous dictum about guerrilla fighters as "fish in
water"). The double valence of this image is amplified when, after several shots of Ho
and cheering peasants, de Antonio introduces for the first and only time shots of dead
and wounded American soldiers. The most powerful image is of a blindfolded GI
being dragged from the jungle by his buddies. It is followed by litters being hastily
loaded onto choppers. The metaphoric blindness--moral and political--of the
American cause, in juxtaposition with the symbolic vigor of the North Vietnamese,
can only lead to ultimate defeat. The final shot of the film is a split-screen image, one
half in darkness and other featuring the initial shot of the Civil War soldier, this time
on negative film stock. The affective impact of this sequence is stirring, mournful,
angry, and its processes of signification have little do with the recruitment of found
footage to illustrate historical events. De Antonio's example should serve as a lesson
to documentary scholars to be more mindful of the expressive, figurative dimensions
of collage.

Notes

1. Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," What Is Cinema?, trans.
Hugh Gray, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967): p. 16.

2. Bazin, pp. 41-52.

3. Jay Leyda recounts the story of how in 1898 Lumière cameraman Francis Doublier
constructed a précis of the Dreyfus affair out of a group of generic shots--a military
parade, a government building, a departing boat--none of which bore any direct
relation to the "depicted" event: Films Beget Films (New York: Hill and Wang,
1964): pp. 13-14.

4. The British propaganda films of Len Lye, in their avant-gardist denaturing of

original images, can be said to bridge the two approaches.

5. I have avoided the contested arena of "subjective" versus "objective" point-of-view,

although my allegiances are clearly with those who view the vérité method as a form
of de facto or "naive" subjective inscription--a program whose contradictions are
refracted and exposed by the reflexive subjectivity in breakthrough avant-garde works
by Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, and others during the same period. Limitations of
space and thematic focus prohibit a more detailed critical account of the vérité
philosophy: for further discussion, see for example, Thomas Waugh, "Beyond Vérité:
Emile de Antonio and the New Documentary of the Seventies," reprinted in Movies
and Methods, Volume II, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985): pp. 233-57; see also my "Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments),"
Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993):
especially pp. 118-26.

6. Michael Renov ably discusses the impact of European historiography in "Early

Newsreel: The Construction of a Political Imaginary for the New Left," Afterimage
14.7 (1987), pp. 12-15.

7. Matthew Teitelbaum, ed., Montage and Modern Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1992): p. 7.

8. To cite but two examples, Peter Burger makes collage the centerpiece of his Theory
of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984), and Thomas Crow discusses the integral relation between modernism
and the importation of devalued artifacts in "Modernism and Mass Culture in the
Visual Arts," Modernism and Modernity, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Serge
Guilbaut, and David Solkin (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design, 1983): pp. 215-64.

9. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans.
C. Lenhardt (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984): pp. 233-4.

10. Vertov, who treated immediate footage gathered from disparate sources as if it
were, in the usual sense, "found," analyzes the potential of heterogeneous montage in
a number of essays: see Kino-Eye, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O'Brien
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)..

11. See, respectively: Siegfred Kracauer, Theory of Film (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1960): pp. 194, 202; Parker Tyler, "Documentary Technique in
Fiction Film," The Documentary Tradition, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Hopkinson
and Blake, 1971): p. 254; Bela Balazs, Theory of the Film, trans. Edith Bone (New
York: Dover, 1970): p. 165.

12. See, respectively: Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1991): p. 127; Waugh, p. 243.

13. Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,"

Critical Inquiry 7.1 (Autumn 1980): pp. 8, 10.

14. See, respectively: Pratibha Parmar, "The Moment of Emergence," Queer Looks:
Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson,
and Parmar (New York: Routledge, 1993): p. 11; Kobena Mercer, "Diaspora Culture
and the Dialogic Imagination," Blackframes, ed. Mbye B. Cham and Claire Andrade-
Watkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988): p. 59. The critical discourse on found
footage in avant-garde cinema largely complements the position expressed by Parmar
and Mercer. See for example, William Wees, Recycled Images (New York:
Anthology Film Archives, 1993).

15. Gary Crowdus and Dan Georgakas, "History is the Theme of All My Films: An
Interview with Emile de Antonio," Cineaste 12.2 (1982), p. 22.

16. I am extrapolating this stance from the films and statements of American and
British experimentalists, recognizing that the line between avant-garde and
conventional documentary has become increasingly blurred. The formalist approach
to found footage is exemplified in the work of Craig Baldwin, Keith Sanborn, Leslie
Thornton, Tony Cokes, Martin Arnold, and Isaac Julien, among others. For an
instructive collection of critical statements by filmmakers, see the appendix to
Recycled Images, pp. 65-100.

17. The insertion of the phantom Japanese man-on-the-street is reminiscent of a

virtual leitmotif in the "Why We Fight" series in which the exact same piece of
footage of a woman in a kerchief rushing anxiously along bombed-out street in used
in three different episodes supposedly set in three different countries.

18. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985): especially pp. 31-48.

19. Waugh, p. 250.