Alberte Pagán

[Found Footage & Collage Films. The Artist’s Voice, 2025, pp. 237-244]

There is a certain ecology in the use of found footage. In the face of today’s saturation of images, excess of spectacle, and overabundance of propaganda and manipulation, the only ethical alternative is recycling, reuse, and resignification.

Cinema is matter: found footage is an existing manufactured product, transformed back into raw material.

Cinema is time perceived through sight and mind; it is the art of duration (without duration, there can be no change or movement), but the found footage adds a rich layer of temporality, a duplication of the time dimension.

Cinema is montage: when found footage is reused in a new film, the original editing, if any, is subverted into a new montage; if none, the one-shot film acquires a new context.

But, above all, cinema is meaning. Filmmakers must be held accountable for the potential interpretations triggered by their work. The production of meaning implies a contract between creator and audience, mediated by the social context and personal ethics: aesthetics without ethics is mere conformist cosmetics. Images mean nothing because they can mean anything, one thing and its opposite: only context can limit and define their meaning. In found footage filmmaking we extract significations from their original contexts and recontextualise them, i.e., we resignify them.

…MAIS