Found footage

Found footage is pre-existing film or video material incorporated into a new work, often through reuse, re-editing, or reframing. It can transform archival, amateur, or originally unrelated recordings into new narratives or arguments.

Montage: A film-editing method that creates meaning by arranging and juxtaposing shots. Juxtaposition can make reused images suggest relationships absent from their original context.
Dada: An avant-garde movement that challenged artistic conventions through collage, performance, and deliberate absurdity. Dadaist collage established an influential precedent for making new work from existing material.
The Atomic Cafe: A 1982 documentary that assembles American civil-defense and military films about the atomic age. It uses official archival images to expose the rhetoric and absurdities of nuclear-era messaging.
Stock footage: Pre-recorded video licensed for use in films, television, and other productions. Unlike found footage, stock footage is commonly made or distributed for reuse.
Rephotography: The process of photographing or recording an existing image or screen again. It lets filmmakers transform and recirculate source images through a new recording.
Joseph Cornell: An American artist known for poetic assemblage boxes and films made from existing footage. His film Rose Hobart is an early landmark in cinematic re-editing.
The Sorrow and the Pity: Marcel Ophuls’s 1969 documentary about collaboration and resistance in occupied France. Its interviews and archival material show how reused records can complicate national memory.
Remake: A new production that retells or recreates an earlier work. A remake recreates a prior work rather than primarily re-editing its existing images.
Appropriation art: Art that takes and repurposes existing images, objects, or styles. Found-footage filmmaking is a cinematic form of appropriation.
Rose Hobart: Joseph Cornell’s 1936 film, assembled from and radically re-edited footage of East of Borneo. It demonstrates how cutting and reframing can remake a commercial film’s meaning.

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