[Frameworks] short fiction films made from found footage or home movies

[FrameWorks Admin]

There are thousands of found footage films.
I like Rumpelstilzchen too - in fact the link you sent is to a pirated rip of the VHS I published in 1996!

To be clear, the question was specifically about fiction films made from found footage.
It’s an interesting question. 

For example I would consider Philip Hoffman’s 1986 “?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film)” - because this film appears to be a documentary made from found home movies but it turns out to be a fiction film that was all shot by the filmmaker (therefore not found footage, finally, but therein lies the fiction).

I would consider “Crossing the Great Sagrada” by Adrian Brunel (1924) which is a parody of a travelogue combining found footage with shot footage - so it is a fictional travelogue.

And a film essay like “The Smell of Burning Ants” (1994) by Jay Rosenblatt. The film could be seen as a fiction about the coming of age of a boy told through home movies and educational documentaries, but the character is only incidentally referred to as “the boy” in a general sense and many boys are shown. Can it be considered a fiction film with nearly no plot and no diegesis? Or is it an experimental documentary?

Finally, a film that comes to mind is “Dragonfly Eyes” by Xu Bing, a feature film from 2017 made entirely with surveillance camera footage in China. The soundtrack creates the fictional story of a woman transitioning from a Buddhist temple to a dairy farm. The genre is classified as a “mystery/documentary” which could only mean a fiction.

Of course experimental films escape from the binary distinction of fiction/documentary but some films escape from the trinary of fiction/documentary/experimental."

- Pip Chodorov

PS Christophe Runne: Thank you for contributing but please refrain from copying the entire digest into your replies!



> On Dec 12, 2020, at 4:02 AM, Christoph Runne <christoph_runne at yahoo.com <mailto:christoph_runne at yahoo.com>> wrote:
> 
> Found footage films.
> 
> One of my favourites Rumpelstilzchen, (Jürgen Reble). <https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ox3j> 
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