La Seconde vie des images en mouvement
In 1936, the surrealist Joseph Cornell decided to re-edit the film East of Borneo (1931) by focusing on scenes featuring its actress, whom he honored by naming the re-cut Rose Hobart. This collage of slowed-down sequences, paired with exotic music and an eclipse shot, became an early fan film, opening a new chapter in modern art: that of found footage, a practice of repurposing pre-existing scenes, akin to the ready-made concept, where an industrial object is exhibited as art. This practice began to flourish in the 1950s with the Situationist détournement, lending political significance to this re-usage, as it forecasted the reversal of imposed life conditions. Led by Guy Debord, the revolutionary movement of the Situationist International repurposed elements of mass culture to subvert and expose its contradictions. Although its attempt to transcend capitalist society ultimately failed, its deconstruction of media representations (both television and film) undeniably left a legacy, with its critique profoundly influencing the use of pre-existing moving images.
Cù a vinuta d’Internet è a multiplicazione di i ritali suciali, u found footage s’hè sviluppatu quantu mai.
With the advent of the Internet and the rise of social media, found footage has experienced unprecedented expansion. The democratization of image access, facilitated by platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and online archives, enables a growing number of artists to embrace this technique. Remixing, mashups, and other forms of audiovisual re-appropriation have become commonplace, not only in art but also in popular culture. Today, this “post-production” is ubiquitous, as the vast repository of available images allows for exploration of diverse themes by drawing from our collective, ever-fragmented memory. La Seconde vie des images en mouvement thus offers a non-exhaustive panorama of this phenomenon of artistic appropriation, a reminder that every creator is also a viewer in a society where the endless circulation of images and its associated attention economy have become defining anthropological traits of the 21st century.
Curator : Fabien Danesi