Hi everyone,
Here’s a thread for material for tomorrow’s class:
By class time Friday, you should post in this thread a passage (roughly 2-4 sentences) from the reading for Friday that you find particularly interesting, surprising, inspiring, problematic, or otherwise significant. Remember to cite the page number for your passage.
Also, as I mentioned yesterday, you should also list in your post three top-level conceptual issues or themes in the reading and film that you feel would be important for us to discuss — these can be either conceptual issues directly related to appropriation itself (e.g., authorship, etc.) or thematic issues that these films raise through appropriation (e.g., gender, memory, etc.)
Remixes, Memes, and Mashups 
“Unlike postmodernist appropriations of found footage, in which the media as the source of images are taken for granted (indeed are more or less explicitly celebrated for their image-producing powers), the collage film subjects its fragments of media-reality to some form of deconstruction, or at the very least to a recontextualizing that prevents an unreflective reception of representations of reality (as presumed by the compilation film), as well as an indifferent or cynical reception encouraged by postmodern appropriation.” (Wees 47)
3 Big Themes/Ideas: Social criticism
Montage as Profit Product
“Real” Reality
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“Collage is critical; appropriation is accommodating. Collage probes, highlights, contrasts; appropriation accepts, levels, homogenizes. If both use montage to dislodge images from their original contexts and emphasize their “image-ness”, only collage actively promotes an analytical and critical attitude toward those images and their uses within the institutions of cinema and television.” (Wees, 46-47)
—collage vs. appropriation
—quotation and representation
—voiceovers
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Making a mix CD is a paradox: it’s personal and impersonal, kind of like watching TV using time-shifting software to determine which commercials to cut and which to leave, or like assessing what chess moves to make when you’re playing solitaire. Think of downloading your own MP3 file. What sounds would you choose if they were all free?
Wees 28
Repetition
Idea Evolution
Appropriation, Appreciation, Assimilation, Adaptation
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“Compilation films are composed of visual quotations of history (or more precisely, selected moments of historical ‘reality’) that have been ripped out of context and placed end to end according to the filmmaker’s theme or argument. In such cases, quotation and representation are synonymous. i The offer, in the words of Allan Sekula, ‘the appearance of history itself'” (Wees 42).
Deconstruction of the original
Place of the filmmaker
Collage vs. appropriation vs. compilation.
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“compilation films may reinterpret images taken from film and television archives, but generally speaking, they do not challenge the representational nature of the images themselves. That is, they still operate on the assumption that there is a direct correspondence between the images and their profilmic sources in the real world” (Wees 36)
-Compilation vs. Collage vs. appropriation
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“Any means by which the spectator is compelled to look at familiar shots as if he had not seen them before, or by which the spectator’s mind is made more alert to the broader meanings of old materials – this is the aim of the correct compilation” (Jay Leyda quoted by Wees, 36)
Authorial intent
Compilation/Collage/Appropriation
Archive Effect in avant-garde film
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“To apply this argument to film, one must recognize that ‘the real world’ for found footage filmmakers is the mass media with their endless supply of images waiting to be ripped from their context and reinserted in collage films where they will be recognized as fragments still bearing the marks of their media reality” (Wees 46)
Appropriation, origin, reinterpretation, mass production
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“Compilation films may reinterpret images taken from film and television archives, but generally peaking, they do not challenge the representational nature of the images themselves. That is, they still operate on the assumption that there is a direct correspondence between the images and their profilmic sources in the real world. Moreover, they do not read the compilation process itself as problematic. Their montage may make spectators ‘more alert to the broader meanings of old materials,’ but as a rule they do not make them more alert to montage as a method of composition and (more or less explicit) argument” (Wees 36)
Multimodality in montages
The order of compilation footage – chronology
Scene significance
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“Again, collage and appropriation have something in common, but but as in the case of their responses to the equivocal nature of photographic representation, collage and appropriation part company over the way they respond to media-as-reality. Collage is critical; appropriation is accommodating. Collage probes, highlights, contrasts; appropriation accepts, levels, homogenizes” (Wees 46-47).
Effect of repetition
Voyeurism
Commenting on pop culture
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“Compilation films are composed of visual quotations of history (or more precisely, selected moments of historical ‘reality’) that have been ripped out of context and placed end to end according to the filmmaker’s theme or argument. (Wees 42).
Compilation vs. Collage vs. Appropriation, Repetition, Authorial Intent
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“…for filmmakers, it is not the splicer that makes a collage film. It is the decision to invest found footage with meanings unintended by its original makers and unrecognized in its original contexts of presentation and reception” (Wees 48).
History
Superimposition
Recontextualization
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“Any means by which the spectator is compelled to look at familiar shots as if he had not seen them before, or by which the spectators mind is made more alert to the broader meanings of old materials – this is the aim of the correct compilation” (36).
“The manipulation of actuality… usually tries to hide itself so that the spectator sees only ‘reality’ – that is, the especially arranged reality that suits the film maker’s purpose.” (36).
reality vs modernism vs postmodernism
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“Collage is critical; appropriation is accommodating. Collage probes, highlights, contrasts; appropriation accepts, levels, homogenizes. If both use montage to dislodge images from their original contexts and emphasize their ‘image-ness’ (that is their constructed rather than ‘natural’ representations of reality), only collage actively promotes an analytical and critical attitude toward those images and their uses within the institutions of cinema and television” (Wees 46-7).
Archives as representation and narration
Collage as cultural critique
Importance of art being self-referential
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By incorporating disparate materials found, rather than made, by the artist, and by dispensing with long-respected coherence and organic unity in art, collage changed the basic rules of artistic representation-or what Marjorie Perloff calls referentiality: “The question of referentiality inherent in collage thus leads to the replacement of the signified, the objects to be intimidated, by a new set of signifiers calling attention to themselves as real objects in the real world.,” (Wees 46).
1) referentiality vs. appropriation
2) the role of historical intent
3) simulation vs. simulacrum
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“…It is not the splicer that makes a collage film. It is the decision to invest found footage with meanings unintended by its original makers and unrecognized in its original contexts of presentation and reception” (Wees 48).
-authorial intent
-reclaimation
-deconstruction
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“…to gain some insight into the kind of appropriation that permits the representation of a nuclear explosion to signify a change for the better–we need to pursue the related issues of montage and representation in found footage films a little further…compilation films are composed of visual quotations of history…that have been ripped out of context and placed end-to-end according to the filmmaker’s theme or argument.”
-compilation
-appropriation
-deconstruction
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When quoting Walter Benjamin:
“To write history… means to quote history. But the concept of quotation implies that any given historical object must be ripped out of its context.” (42)
-The effect of the cut
– Music in film
– “Fever dream” aesthetic
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