This programme proposes a journey of sorts through work which in one way or another reappropriates existing material, from collage and found-footage films through to the realm of the rotoscoped, re-edited and cut-up.  Represented here are both recognisably ‘animated’ films and treated and reappropriated live-action, but the constraints of programme length inevitably mean that this is in no way an encyclopaedic or authoritative account, more a personal selection.

It is evident from the first collage films in this programme that meaning changes with reappropriation.   At its baldest level, a scrap of an image of a tyre, originally intended, perhaps, to sell products, becomes a key symbol of the coming-of-age of filmmaker Frank Mouris in his Academy Award-winning Frank Film.  But its original meaning – the object’s original context – persists to an extent:  we recognise the image’s original, commercial purpose. 

Indeed, the film would lose the greater part of not only its textural qualities but of its popular appeal and cultural significance if the original meaning was obliterated with Mouris’ snip of the scissors.  In Frank Film, at least, it is precisely the fact that the images used to construct the film’s mile-a-minute collage narrative have a ‘former life’ that lends the film its layered appeal and a depth it might otherwise not have had.  Furthermore, the impersonal nature of found material (at least, material which has had direct personal relevance to someone, but not immediately to the artist) means that it is to an extent removed from the artist his/herself – helping to maintain some degree of critical and personal distance to the subject matter of an autobiographical tale.

At first glance, Virgil Widrich’s tour de force Fast Film employs a similar aesthetic, but it’s soon obvious that something else has come into play:  the objects that carry the images themselves become meaningful.  We’d understand the many film excerpts if Widrich had merely edited the films together in a way which suggested the same movement and narrative, but he has gone a step further – one of near-inconceivable effort – and printed the frames from the films in question onto paper and then fashioned them, origami-wise, into shapes with then convey the train and carriages and landscape.  It’s no longer enough to ‘get’ the film references:  the way they are represented has become just as important.

The language of the document – and particularly its veracity – are often challenged in reapppropriated work.  Mother and 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.  Though too long for this programme, Bady Minck’s Im Anfang War Der Blick also uses postcards – on an industrial scale -  using hundreds of found postcards in perhaps a more formally distinctive way.  As with Mother and Toxic’s video, Minck’s work formulates a connection between otherwise disparate elements, creating a mesmeric journey through the Austrian landscape via objects which evidently share a common subject – namely the landscape itself – but were never originally envisaged as forming part of a narrative.

Moving from static to moving found material, Home Stories reads like a typology of Hollywood schlock – the screams, the passion, the utter high-camp of it all.  It relentlessly shows us instance after instance of the same poses (and, we might suspect, much the same plots) yet culled from different films, featuring different actors.  We might well already know that much of the material that the Hollywood studio system churns out is anodyne and formulaic, but the formula is rarely exposed, laid bare for us to see like this.  Nevertheless, Müller’s film is far from critical:  it betrays a real fondness for the melodrama, upstaging and over-acting of it all.

Also sourcing from an old feature film, Martin Arnold’s Passage à l’acte is perhaps as far as this programme deviates from a ‘traditional’ animation aesthetic, even though much of Arnold’s work is carried out at a frame-by-frame level (ironically enshrined as the defining mark of what makes animation ‘animation’ by many animation purists:  perhaps it’s the fact that Arnold works backwards and deconstructs which so worries them). A malevolent, stuttering re-edit of (what we assume must be) a relatively unimportant and certainly brief scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, the film shuttles mercilessly back and forth between single frames, creating an angst-ridden twelve-minute horror-show of clumsy, aggressive and accusatory interaction, the rot at the core of a perfect fifties nuclear family.

Watching the film for the first time – indeed, watching any of Arnold’s work – seems to trigger something deep inside the viewer, at once instigating a strong emotional reaction but also heralding what feels like entirely new cinema.  It’s dangerous, exciting, exhilarating.  Moreover, it truly seems to expose something about human interaction at a quite fundamental, political level.  It’s almost as if by crawling inside the scene and observing the most minute changes of expression, of movement, of gesture at an ‘atomic’ level in this way, the film uncovers an otherwise invisible document of non-verbal communication - indeed, a document of something almost supernatural -  exposing the conditioning and social norms which drive us to act but about which we are ignorant. 

As with the notion that the found material in Frank Film helps to maintain a critical distance, in Arnold’s work, it seems to lend a similar, almost conceptualist detachment which is essential to the meaning of the work – as if Arnold wants the film to have as little unnecessary personal ‘interference’ as possible.  This can only be achieved, it would seem, by using material which has little or no resonance with the artist himself, which found footage offers absolutely.

Beyond the physically quantifiable, then, what about all that is found – knowingly or unconsciously – along with the physical material itself?  What about found memories and found dreams?  The ‘found’ dimension to Robert Bradbrook’s remarkable Home Road Movies, for instance, is altogether more intangible.  Whilst it does draw on pre-existing material in the form of family photos, it feels as though these are merely a mechanical aid – a means to an end – and certainly not the sum of the film.  Indeed, it deals not so much with found objects or reappropriated film footage than with recalled memories.  Though personal to Bradbrook, the story of his father’s car and their holidays as a family are presented in such a way that they appeal to a kind of shared emotional memory in their audience, in part appealing to us on a nostalgic level by virtue of the film’s clever use of colour (recalling the colour-saturated movie and stills film of the era) but also on the level of common human experience, a story to which most people can apply their own actors and relate to their own experiences.

The film’s photorealism 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.  Bradbrook’s use of real photographs as reference creates something which corresponds to a recognisable real world, but somehow also includes another layer - that of memory, as we have suggested, or the unconscious.  It’s worth noting that, considering Bradbrook’s obvious mastery of technique, 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.

In many ways, we return to the beginning with the final film, Run Wrake’s highly successful Rabbit.  In the film, the found elements – educational stickers picked up at a junk shop - are forced to work as actors and jump to the director’s own tune.  The fact that Wrake had so limited a ‘cast’ of characters to use meant that the creative options were narrower, of course, than if he had been working to create original material from scratch.  As Wrake said during a screentalk session in Norwich with Dick Arnall, “the images drove the story, because they were a finite resource. There were - I don’t know - 200 pictures and I was looking for connections between them.”

It seems as though most artists, across disciplines, benefit from setting themselves strict parameters in some way like this:  something, ironically, though, which has been harder to achieve since the advent of digital technology and the endless opportunities for revision it presents.  It is filmmakers such as Run Wrake and Robert Bradbrook, who have adopted the technology as no more than another tool which they continue to twist and dismantle, and Martin Arnold, who subverts the additive, frame-after-frame assumption of cinema itself -  who truly continue  to push filmmaking and what we might understand to be ‘animation’ forward.