A survey of YouTube and Google Video reveals an abundance of video ‘mash ups’, which appropriate and reedit narrative films, advertisements, music videos and news footage to produce an assault on the authority of the homogeneous filmic text and on the industry which produced it. The act of recycling existing moving images to construct an irreverent collage has a long history, from found footage filmmaking using celluloid, as pioneered by Esfir Schub and Joseph Cornell in the 1920s and 1930s, and the “scratch” video movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Using a computer to make moving image compilations is arguably just the latest phase in this historical continuum.

Yet the shift from analogue to digital technologies of distribution, exhibition and (post-) production opens up exciting new possibilities for found footage filmmaking. The proliferation of moving images available on online platforms makes the act of sourcing raw material almost effortless and truly participatory. Creative Commons licensing has changed models of ownership so radically that, far from imposing copyright restrictions on their archived films, institutions such as the British Film Institute (BFI) and the BBC are now actively encouraging the public to remix their screen heritage. The reproducible and malleable nature of the digital object expands the options for creating visual and audio effects, introducing a new language of moving image aesthetics. Sampling and stitching together material from a range of sources no longer require an intervention into the film strip but have become standardized functions of compositing software. The spatial logic of the computer facilitates a new form of bi-dimensional montage, creating associations between disparate elements within the frame, not just in time.

The paper will consider examples from throughout the history of found footage filmmaking, with a particular focus on the work of British artist Vicki Bennett, aka People Like Us, which pushes the boundaries of the practice at the same time as it references its own construction by a computer. I argue that the developments outlined above problematize the notion of found footage filmmaking as traditionally conceived. They contravene a number of the once fundamental principles of the artform: online distribution renders the romanticized act of salvaging discarded material obsolete; and the buy-in from media institutions co-opts what was once a subversive practice — the resistance of media ownership and derision of conventions of representation and editing — into the mainstream. The paper calls for a reconceptualization of found footage filmmaking to accommodate its digitality.