THRILLS AND SPILLS Found Footage Filmmaking: From Castle films to pornography

The practice of recycling cinematographic images is almost as old as cinema itself. While it has frequently had a utilitarian, documentary or ideological function, it is also intimately tied to the history of avant-garde cinema since at least the 1930s. While many found footage films and artists associated with the practice are relatively well known, less is known about the nature and provenance of the images that are found and repurposed. These images, often coming from orphan films, have been recycled, and precisely because they had no value (notably patrimonial), to think about found footage films is also to think about what a society considers, at a given time, as “waste”. To our great delight, it is this cultural detritus that has allowed the creation of dazzling, exciting, subversive and exhilarating works. 

The program curated for Tabakalera is composed of two parts. The first seeks to show the importance of the films produced by Castle Films (1937-1980), a company which flooded the domestic American market with 16mm and 8mm condensed versions of fiction films, newsreel compilations, travelogues films, sports parades, visual oddities, animated films, etc. These films were at the origin of a number of major works in the history of experimental cinema, from Bruce Conner to Ken Jacobs. Comparing these two “corpuses”—the “originals” and the “aesthetically” reworked versions—is revelatory. The second section of the program offers a brief overview of the reuse of erotic and pornographic films in experimental cinema from the 1960’s to today. It allows to stage the tactile, sensuous dimension of the materiality of the film strip or the video tape, between the hidden and the visible, while proposing a radical criticism of voyeurism. 

André Habib & César Ustarroz, March 2023

PROGRAM 1

• A Thrill a Second (Castle Films, 1941-1963, silent)
• A MOVIE (Bruce Conner 1958, 12 min.)
• News Parade 1946 (Castle films,1646, 9 min)
• Newsreel (Raphael Montañez Ortiz, 1958, 2 min.)
• Skindrums and Tattoos (Gerda Cammaer, 2009, 6 min.)
• The Whole Shebang (Ken Jacobs, 2018, 6 min)

PROGRAM 2

• Permanent Wave (Anita Thacher, 1966, 4 min)
• Removed (Naomi Uman, 1999, 7 min)
• The Lovers (Johannes Hammel, 2004, 7 min)
• The Exquisite Corpus (Peter Tscherkassky, 2015, 19 min)
• The Shadow of Your Smile (Alexei Dmitriev, 2014, 3 min)