Re-Framing the Past: Recent found footage films by Masha Godovannaya
Readers: this week’s post is a short essay about some of the difficulties of working in the “found footage” genre, using two recent shorts by Masha Godovannaya as examples. Concurrently, Godovannaya is contributing her response to my essay, as a guest writer. You can find her response here. Finally, I’d like to hear from all of you, as well. Please check out the discussion thread for this topic, and let us know what you think.
The “found footage” film, in which the filmmaker uses sequences from other people’s films as the raw material from which to create a new film, has been widely practiced by artists and experimental filmmakers, at least since Joseph Cornell pioneered the genre with Rose Hobart (1936), and Bruce Connor exploited its potential in A Movie (1958). But the genre has always seemed to me to be a tricky one to navigate successfully.
When watching a found footage film, I often ask myself if using this technique was the strongest way for the artist to realize an idea, or if the idea would have been better served by shooting original footage. If the artist wants to make a statement which is about film culture itself, or, more broadly, about the effects which our media environment has on our thoughts, feelings, and cultural attitudes, than using found footage is often a highly effective approach.
When an artist chooses to work with found footage, we don’t sense the artist’s voice in the visual content per se. Rather, that voice is now sensed in the sequencing choices, the editing and compositing of pre-existing images. The genre pulls editing into the foreground, and highlights an aspect of cinema which conventional cinema strives to render invisible.
As a viewer, this sometimes leads me to wonder how much of the film’s expressive power and visual impact is the result of the artistic skills of the artists who created the source footage, and how much can be attributed to the editorial choices of the found footage artist? Filmmaker Masha Godovannaya works frequently with found footage. Watching two of her recent films, I found one of them to be an engrossing and powerful example of the art of the found footage film, while the other one felt overly reliant on the artistic skills of the creator of the original footage, Sergei Eisenstein. The two films, I felt, illustrate how tricky it can be to work with footage created by others.
Landscapes of Nosferatu (2020) is a hauntingly poetic six minute short made in collaboration with Belinda Kazeem-Kamínski with footage from Murnau’s vampire film of 1922. At first, we see deserts, bare rock, scrub, where even the occasional trickle of flowing water brings no relief from the feeling of barren, lifeless space. These shots are set in a square in the center of the frame, surrounded by black.
We hear a poetic narration about travelers who are “near the manmade edge” and contemplating “stepping over the line” where they will be “gone.” We are witnessing the journey of those who dare to leave the defined roles of society, entering a lonely, empty place.
Gently tinting the footage yellow, green, or red, the filmmakers subtly shift the emotional tone of the images. Partway through the film, the black frame around the Murnau footage is filled with overlays of curving flecks of light, as if the landscape is being slowly engulfed in flame.
The narration, continuing in inter-titles, analyzes the term “de-colonization.” The word “leaves the lips easily.” From overuse, it has become a verbal “placeholder,” a buzzword, casually inserted into any discussion of social change, becoming more and more empty. But “in this people-less landscape” the term acquires a new, harsher meaning that will cost more effort, “more blood,” playing on the vampire theme. Societies have been based on the exploitation of the many by the few for a long, long time. But the new changes will bring “total disorientation.”
It seems telling that in the opening narrative, the text is spoken aloud, but when it comes to the text which questions the co-optation of the term “decolonization,” it changes to onscreen titles, unspoken. It is as if the words themselves now contain a danger, a temptation towards too easy solutions, and one needs to use the terms carefully, precisely, without getting sucked into emotional tug of spoken arguments.
The text creatively re-contextualizes Murnau’s footage in order to portray the ruling classes as vampires. The empty landscape becomes “the decolonizing gaze that upends all order.” Perhaps a colonizing gaze is one which looks at other people’s land, erases the presence of indigenous people, and instead envisions it as a blank canvas onto which to project cities, factories, machines for extracting wealth from natural and human resources. So a decolonizing gaze could be, in tune with the vampire theme, simply the end of late-stage capitalism, when the vampires have pretty much sucked everything dry, and now we have a nearly dead, empty world. The remaining ruling classes, in a mental breakdown and spiritual bankruptcy brought on by the collapse of their systems, can think only of destroying what’s left. Surely the world population, with many more people than are currently needed as “workers,” creates a great problem for ruling classes, fueling their preoccupation with population control.
At the end of the film, our eyes are suddenly bombarded with flickering frames of pure red and blue, interspersed with frames of ocean waves breaking on the shore. Normally, the waves might seem pretty, but here, they seem enveloped in a nightmarish, apocalyptic vision.
Godovannaya and Kazeem-Kamínski have performed an artistic magic trick: creatively re-shaping Murnau’s imagery through a variety of sophisticated visual and verbal strategies, and pulling an entirely new poetic meaning out of them, politically astute and emotionally haunting, that nevertheless connects to subterranean mythical meanings encoded into the vampire legends.
The City Bridges are Open Again (2020), her ten minute short, has a more problematic relationship with its source footage, Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin, October, and ¡Que Viva México!. What Godovannaya has done is to choose some of the most striking, original and politically powerful moments from these films and string them together in a way that suggests a slight narrative about the drive to revolt, and the call to connect with other working class people, supported by an original score by Federico Schmucler.
The effect, for me, is that the film chiefly serves to emphasize Eisenstein’s brilliance, especially by joining together highlighted moments which are otherwise widely separated in his films. We luxuriate in his richly striking images of luridly lit puppets, Mexican Day of the Dead statues, gleaming Soviet machinery. Godovannaya’s narrative is merely suggested, and in any case is also borrowed from Eisenstein. The message, which appears to advocate violent resistance, doesn’t seem politically helpful in the struggle against nuclear armed states and globalist elites. The issue becomes that her film’s power and effectiveness are more the result of Eisenstein’s artistic skills, not Godovannaya’s. That doesn’t deprive the film of its impact. What matters to me as a viewer is not having a chance to admire Godovannaya’s skill, but I do want to have an experience where I feel and know something about her way of seeing the world, her unique vision. I come away from this film with only a vague and shadowy notion of what she is trying to say. Eisenstein’s voice is so much louder than hers here that it simply makes me feel the urge to go back and re-watch his films. In other words, her film ends up functioning as a trailer, simply an effective advertisement, whose loudest message is “go watch more Eisenstein.”
I have used these two films as examples because they illustrate some of the difficulties of working in the found footage genre, which I find that Godovannaya handled so effectively and with such originality in Landscapes of Nosferatu. She works with found footage frequently, and a recent retrospective of her work at the New Holland Island festival highlighted the sophistication of her work in the genre. The show was filled with striking, thought-provoking examples of her work, which blends together a political and poetic sensibility with great subtlety.
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