Found Footage and Found Video

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Found-footage works are built from moving images someone else shot: newsreels, Hollywood features, home movies, television broadcasts or online video. By cutting, looping, slowing or reordering the material, artists draw out meanings its makers never intended.

Esfir Shub pioneered the approach in the Soviet Union, assembling The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) from archival newsreels. Bruce Conner's A Movie (1958) collided westerns, disasters and pin-up footage into a comic, apocalyptic montage, and Ken Jacobs refilmed a 1905 short frame by frame in Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969). Dara Birnbaum looped a television superheroine's spinning transformation in Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79) to question how television pictures women. Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010) stitches thousands of film clips into a 24-hour montage synchronised with real time. Ja'Tovia Gary and Hito Steyerl combine archival and online material with their own footage. Look for abrupt shifts in grain, colour and screen shape.