This programme follows a path of sorts from collage film through to found-footage work, treated CGI and lastly, a film more about the process of finding and collation than the technique itself.

The first three films are recognisably 2D collage works in one form or another, though it could be argued that Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film exists in 2½D by virtue of its layered structure.  The film appropriates images from old films, but rather than use found footage, Widrich printed out single frames onto paper, folded them origami-style, and animated them frame by frame.  Actors are thus plucked from sets and made to play out a different story.  

Quite apart from its hypnotic, mile-a-minute animation and deadpan two-tier narration (which itself references the language of documentary film) Frank Film presents us with an astonishing catalogue of director Frank Mouris’ fears, hopes and memories.  The film is more than a document of his life, though:  it’s a record of consumer culture, product design and architecture at the time.  Even those elements which are obviously not peculiar to Mouris’ early seventies document (the buildings, for instance) are meaningful and relevant firstly, simply because Mouris has chosen to include them in his film, and secondly because the representation of those objects itself speaks volumes, whether intentional or not.  Of course, any live action film would also contain this sort of historical information:  we can immediately tell the difference between a film shot in the seventies and one in 2006.  They won’t, however, contain the level of autobiographical relevance — and not just the autobiographical relevance of Frank Film, a film about Frank, but about any animated film, as it bears the distinctive mark of the artist themselves.

The shift from static to motive found material comes with successful Austrian commercials director and artist-filmmaker Thomas Draschan’s kitsch pastiche Yes Oui Ja, which uses found footage as source material.  All elements - the clips of old films, the library footage and the innocent soundtrack are lent another, comic-ironic meaning by virtue of Draschan’s editing.

Likewise, Mother / Toxic’s video for Norwegian dance act Röyksopp, Eple, creates a new reality from ‘real’ documents, in this case old photographs.  Clever compositing and seamless transitions between photographs imply a connection between the source material where there was none originally.  So, as the camera pulls away from one photograph, we realise that it is merely a picture on the wall of a room captured by the next photograph, and so on. 

Bady Minck’s Im Anfang War Der Blick also deserves a place in this programme but alas, at over 60 minutes, wouldn’t fit.  Minck’s use of hundreds of found postcards (which in its sheer scale is similar to artist Tom Phillips’ survey of postcards in his book The Postcard Century) doesn’t so much present an ‘altered document’ in the sense of Eple as catalogue and order a hundred different versions of the same reality; an encyclopædic record of the landscape, of minutely different shots of the same tourist attractions, distinguishable as they speed past only by the different seasons, or alternative camera angles.  Sometimes the only discernible difference is that of the variation in colour saturation in camera films over time.

The photorealism of Home Road Movies is a far cry from the see-every-hair-follicle hyperreal ‘feely’ phenomenon which gripped CG animation as soon as it was able to walk:  its version of reality is mediated via memory - particularly emotional memory.  For the film, Bradbrook used collections of real photographs to recreate the world of his childhood:  the result is something which corresponds to a recognisable real world, but somehow also includes another layer - that of memory, perhaps, or the unconscious.  Considering Bradbrook’s obvious mastery of technique, it is some feat that he managed to steer clear of the obvious and banal - that is, that he resisted the temptation to recreate the world vector by vector, and instead treated it to a subtle shift which appeals immediately to a common sense of nostalgia and memory.

And it is perhaps this that found material lends to a story, particularly an autobiographical account:  it is someone else’s material; it has already been used, and therefore it retains some of that original relevance.  In the case of Frank Film, it exists in two instances at once, perhaps more.  It is at once recognisably material sourced from printed adverts, from clothing brochures, from glossy magazines yet at the same time now employed as a prop in another story.  With Home Road Movies, it’s less well-defined, but it’s perhaps because the found material’s original  purpose so closely matches its reappropriated use.  The substance of the shift, therefore, from ‘originated’ to ‘found’ is more that of memory and of the passing of time than from banal advertisement to chapter in life story.

Interestingly, though Home Road Movies bears all the hallmarks of a ‘hyperreal’ work, in the way that Baudrillard intends it (that is, that our representations of the world have become more real than the ‘real’ world itself) with its attention to ‘plastic’ detail such as the exact typeface used in the French road signs it features and the painstaking detail of the father’s car, it goes beyond this with its distinctive (and unreal) colour palette and treated live-action.  It transcends a mere representation of the world, and appeals to us on an emotional level.

An intriguing, though perhaps provocative epilogue for this programme, Sue Constabile and Antye Greie’s remarkable fortythousand3hundred20memories doesn’t use found material, as such, nor conform to a traditional animation aesthetic, but rather explores, tangentially, the act of finding itself. 

© Adam Pugh 2006
This text originally appeared in the festival catalogue.