Festival Of (In)appropriation: LA

Los Angeles Film Forum, Egyptian Theater, Hollywood Boulevard, 13 December 2009. Its also showing at Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Los Angeles, 17-21 March 2010

Curated by Jaimie Baron & Andrew Hall:

“Whether you call it collage, compilation, found footage, detournement, or recycled cinema, the incorporation of previously shot materials into new artworks is a practice that has generated novel juxtapositions of elements which have produced new meanings and ideas [...] in other words “inappropriate.” This act of appropriation may produce revelation that leads viewers to reconsider the relationship between past and present, here and there, intention and subversion. [...] The past decade has seen the emergence of a wealth of new sources for audiovisual materials that can be appropriated into new works. In addition to official state and commercial archives, vernacular archives, home movie collections, and digital archives have provided fascinating source material that may be repurposed to give new meanings and resonances.

We bring together recent films that appropriate footage from diverse sources in vastly different ways to show the range of approaches contemporary filmmakers are taking in repurposing found materials [...] raising questions about how we define “found footage” filmmaking in an era in which ever more materials are available for reuse in ever more complex ways. We believe that together, these films reveal how (in)appropriation is flourishing at this social and historical moment.”

Films by: Brandon Downing, Gregg Biermann, Leslie Supnet, Dave Griffiths, Colin Barton, Gerard Freixes Ribera, Chris Kennedy, Marcin Blajecki, Ann Steuernagel, Carole O’Brien, Matthew Causey, Jorge Sa, Mike Maryniuk, Tasman Richardson, Clint Enns, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Caroline Koebel, Scott Stark, Heidi Phillips, McLean Fahnestock and Oriol Sanchez.