The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Remontage cinema: the art of citing without quotation marks

2020-09-19T20:34:58.375Z


The found footage films, which draw on pre-existing images to create new stories and discourses, return with the French film Don't think I'm going to scream, a film collage that has just hit theaters


In

Don't believe I'm going to scream,

which has just been released in Spain, director Frank Beauvais narrates his voluntary and depressive seclusion, which was accompanied by a compulsive consumption of images.

Composed exclusively of excerpts from films accompanied by a voice-

over, it

is part of the genre of film remontage, appropriation or compilation, also known by English terms such as

found footage

or

mash up,

a multiplicity of names indicative of a genus yet to be marked.

But, while the usual device of this cinema is placed under the sign of the search, of the patient investigation of the precise image, Beauvais, filmmaker and programmer, seems to want to capture the opposite situation, the contemporary regime of the image, which already it is not sought, it is not even offered, but rather overwhelms us, it seems that it is alien to human intervention, ungraspable, unmanageable.

Walter Benjamin spoke a lot about the meaning of the archive, of memory as an archaeological procedure, which unearthed the material vestiges of the past, and of how these joined the present like lightning, forming a constellation, a dialectical image that is already the product of a mounting.

He defended the art of quoting without quotation marks and had the ambition to compose a work made up entirely of quotations.

The remake cinema does (or did?) Exactly all that.

Years ago we negotiated with Fox studios for the reproduction rights of a (beautiful) shot of

Amanecer

(FW Murnau, 1927) to include it in

Constelaciones

(César Rendueles and Ana Useros, 2010), a remake film about Walter Benjamin.

The studio responded, with some haughtiness, that their films were not

stock film,

those filler images that illustrate generic themes: snowy landscapes, 20th century migrations, sea storms ... We had to convince them that this specific shot of that specific film (their content, its materiality and its meaning) contributed something that no other fragment could.

Fox put us to the test by asking us for an exorbitant price and we demonstrated our devotion to Murnau and Benjamin by paying it without question.

But, between their reaction and our response, between the image as an illustration and the image that is the object of cinephile devotion or historical document, almost all the strategies of appropriation cinema are deployed.

And the practical issues of ownership, price and accessibility are the parameters that define the materials you use.

Millions of reappropriation films also bustle across the internet in the form of parodies, reviews, or essays.

For obvious reasons, most appropriation cinema has been produced in the digital age.

In fact, it would be unfair not to mention that, along with those screened in museums and festivals and the few that reach commercial distribution, millions of reappropriation films bustle on network platforms and in social media messages: parodies, criticisms, essays, all gestures of love, from political analysis to tributes to the mother.

The pioneers of the genre, made with patience and craftsmanship in the analog years, were already pointing out the trends that have marked the last 25 years.

In the 1920s, Esfir Shub traveled the Soviet Union looking for materials for

The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty

(1927), the first film to apply the findings of the dialectical montage of Eisenstein and Kuleshov to archival material.

He inaugurates a cinema of historical reconstruction and political criticism that continues and branches out in titles such as

Paris 1900

(Nicole Védrès, 1950);

Le fond de l'air est rouge

(1977), by Chris Marker;

in the brilliant work of Santiago Álvarez, or in that of his self-proclaimed heir, Travis Wilkerson.

Álvarez's films, which dare to play with the materiality of the image and not only with its content, probably continue to be the pinnacle of political re-assembly cinema today.

In Spain, Basilio Martín Patino collects Shub's two torches: recreating a dark age and building an archive by searching foreign film libraries and collections.

His most popular film,

Songs for after a war

(1971), adds the recreation of an emotional climate, a path that, under the sign of contemporaneity and grotesque, María Cañas now continues.

Where politics and the trembling of human lives converge is Péter Forgács.

His films narrate the life of an individual or a family through old

amateur

footage

shot by their protagonists.

The recovery of 8mm and Super8 reels, of the magnetic tapes of the family heritage, is a constant in appropriation films.

Many border on banality, oscillating between a fascination for aged aesthetics and the complacency of the autobiographical.

But there are also beautiful, complex and critical works such as

Un'ora sola ti vorrei

(Alina Marazzi, 2000), at the same time lament for the absent mother, a portrait of a woman trapped in her social circumstances and a demonstration of the need for feminism.

'Histoire (s) du cinéma (1989-1998)', by Jean-Luc Godard, a key title in film re-editing.

Works based on cinematographic material, often with the complicity and funding of museums, archives and film libraries, share this fascination for texture and for the recovery of hidden images, found by chance in a basement or attic.

In the wake of

Rose Hobart

(Joseph Cornell, 1936), authors such as Bill Morrison

(Decasia, Dawson City),

Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet

(Home Stories, The Phoenix Tapes),

Gustav Deutsch (the

Film Ist

series

)

or Peter Delpeut

( Lyrical Nitrate, Painful Diva)

slow down, speed up, tint or enlarge images, sometimes with purely aesthetic intent, sometimes with a film critic and history project.

The most influential work of this last trend is, of course,

Histoire (s) du cinéma (1989-1998),

by Jean-Luc Godard, with a misleading encyclopedic title, although in reality it is a display of the emotional universe of its author.

Two filmmakers, both close and distant, Mark Rappaport and Thom Andersen, today brilliantly practice this film criticism.

Rappaport's elegant essays transform cinephile obsession into a critical scalpel.

The work of Andersen, author of a classic of this genre like

Los Angeles Plays Itself,

more severe and political, seeks to explore reality through the art that he had promised us he would.

Don't think I'm going to scream

is an autobiographical tale, like personal archive films, but it uses cinematographic material that, however, it does not manipulate.

Nor does she choose it for its historical or cinematographic importance, nor does it allow it to be recognizable.

But the difference with the tradition we outline here is that it is difficult to perceive a hand that chooses the images.

It uses inserts, anodyne plans, very brief, in a chaotic flow that short-circuits the memory of the original, that resists being an archive and that no longer wants to be a constellation.

It is as if, now that the images no longer require archeology, but sprout without interruption or order, the remake film loses its link with the past and becomes only present, like any other film.

Don't think I'm going to scream

(2019).

Frank Beauvais.

Released in theaters.

Source: elparis

All life articles on 2020-09-19

You may like

Trends 24h

Life/Entertain 2024-03-28T17:17:20.523Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.