Both Lyrical Nitrate (1991) and Decasia (2002) are types of avant- garde films that are (or can be) alternatively called found footage, collage films, com- pilation films, or abstract- montage experimentations; however, most often they are a combination of all of these aesthetic and/or formal techniques. As early
as the 1920s, and in some cases before then, experimental filmmakers began formal and theoretical investigations of film’s capacity to render ephemeral and phenomenological moments of time in fractured, collagist, and abstract ways— meaning they explored how fragments of film are expressive, enigmatic bits of ontological spaces forged through celluloid. Quite literally, found footage films assemble fragments of (primarily) early silent films into avant- garde features that follow conceptual frameworks that re-imagine the original bits of film in new ways that distinguish them — and the completed found footage film — as something at once familiar and exotic, continuous and ruinous, and disem- bodied yet interrelated. In some regards, the found footage film (and I will refer to both Lyrical Nitrate and Decasia as such) are aesthetic, philosophical, and even metaphysical inquires into the past and how it shapes, conflates, or dis- integrates memory, time, and/or fragments of things captured, preserved, and finally lost. They are archives of previous moments of creation. Cinema, and particularly the cinematic form of found footage films, “is a trace of historical time rendered visible: it invents a new relationship to time and contingency. This “time,” in our common encounter with films, can become even more visible if gaps and accidents fragment and stain the film,” as is the case with both
Lyrical Nitrate and Decasia.92
Rediscovering the very materiality of decayed film and the fragments of early cinema forms the basis for much found footage films. Using an assort - ment of film clips in a particular manner creates entirely new meanings and associations for the spectator, so much so that the question arises over the very authenticity of meanings of the originals that serve as the sources: Anything and everything becomes connotative. According to Andre Habib:
Found Footage is an open category of avant- garde or experimental cinema that pres-
ents, according to Catherine Russell, all the aspects of an “aesthetic of ruins,” often animated by nostalgia, or by apocalyptic themes, which resonate through their style, based on fragmentation, elliptic narration, temporal collisions and visual disorien- tation.... Found footage ... appears as a form of cultural recycling, often informed by a social critique, by discourse concerned with the end of history, and subverting the material through ironic and violent montage.93
Several ideas here emerge that are (mostly) characteristic of fond footage films. Experimental filmmakers interested in rediscovering the past- on-film have often exploited older films for the poetic possibilities created through fragmentation, ellipses, recycling, spatial- temporal dislocations (or collisions), and perceptual confusion based on the composite form of found footage film. The avant- garde montage that gives rise to the found footage film valorizes “lost” and “discovered” cinema. The concept of an “aesthetic of ruins” seems apt for describing the found footage film, especially the experimental nature (or dialec- tic) of using something “dead” to create a “resuscitation.” Again, Habib sees this idea of the ruinous, which I take to mean the literal destruction and eventual dis- appearance of an artifact, as a fundamental aspect of the found footage film:
As with ruins, the film object had to be taken out of its regular function, so that it could appear as a cultural artifact.... When an object loses its physical integrity, its shape and coordinates that permit it to actualize or accomplish a certain number of actions or tasks, we say this thing is in ruins. But it is by falling into ruin that it appears as image, since its usage has ceased to replace it.94
The found footage film, then, is arguably an attempt to re-capture the essence of something ruined through its image, here preserved on celluloid (and, in particular, nitrate, which itself disintegrates over time), and re-pre- sented in fractured, fragmentary form. One may also refer to the “ruin” of any film narrative since the found footage film assembles various images from dis- parate sources to create the final film; yet narratives do emerge as the compi- lations assert a form of associative montage that serves as a new narrative based on the tension that arises from the non-linearity of the found footage and its juxtaposition or collision in the finished film that establishes original, innovative means of storytelling.
The formal experimentation that is part of the assembly of found footage films is a decidedly avant- garde one, in that it eschews any type of classical filmmaking. There is no essential construction of mise- en- scène, no “original” cinematography, and no script that outlines a narrative. These types of avant- garde films use rephotography and optical printing to re-imagine and reuse “footage that was originally shot for another purpose, whether portions of the finished film, or footage that was never used in a film.”95Found footage films
offer a radical disassociation of content and form that becomes reconstructed, reconfigured, and creates a “dialectic between memory and oblivion, preser- vation and destruction.”96Lyrical Nitrate and Decasia both use images that
stand alone and work in tandem to create something gloriously new, evoking a melancholic nostalgia for the images lost in space and time, while also thrilling us with their remarkable aesthetic technique. Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests watching such films (particularly Lyrical Nitrate) is “closely related to the voyeuristic appeal of pornography, specifically the old- fashioned stag reels.”97
He clarifies this by adding, “The experience of watching these fragments is, like the fragments themselves, fleeting and therefore tantalizing, suggestive and therefore provocative — and so far off the beaten track of what’s supposed to be viewer friendly in our culture.”98Indeed, the fragmentary nature of the
found footage film is part of its charm, since it allows for multiple kinds of viewing and cognitive experiences. Further,
[These] films untie the knots of narrative continuity to focus on gestures, facial expressions, visual tricks, producing a poetic montage of “distant fragments,” revis- iting the damaged remnants of a damaged history or the ghastly beauty of decom- posed celluloid. They document a gaze in time, offer a look at a history of looking — the multifaceted visual culture of a certain age.... These montages all pro- duce the impression that a world is disappearing before our very eyes, and that the
Since many found footage films are composed of silent films, they are examinations of nitrate film (hence the title of Delpeut’s film). Nitrate was used in cinema until the 1950s; it was a highly organic, perishable, flammable mate- rial that was out of necessity and safety replaced by an acetate stock (“safety film”). It decays by itself (hence Morrison’s title of Decasia: The State of Decay). The idea of a simultaneous acknowledgement of the older image as an existing monument and its corresponding disappearance provides the viewer with a confrontation with the past, articulated through assemblage yet expressed fully in the present as an experiment in filmmaking technique. This is one reason why found footage films are unique and can arguable suggest the fundamental ways perception van be articulated more fully through avant- garde cinema.
L
YRICALN
ITRATEIn many ways, Lyrical Nitrate is an abstract homage to a lost era, a lost art — silent cinema. Using a wide variety of assorted clips— newsreels, docu- mentaries, travelogues, fiction films—from different sources, director Peter Delpeut has crafted an ingenious experimental feature whose shifting color tones and tints, and close- ups of faces and ephemeral objects, make it beautifully hypnotic, the ghosts of the past hovering slightly within our minds as they pen- etrate our deeper consciousness. None of the films that Delpeut uses are iden- tified until the final credits, so we are dealing with a film unmoored, a film seemingly uncomplicated or undemanding in its presentation of the images, yet ultimately complex in its hybridity. Lyrical Nitrate is indeed a highly lyrical film, as the title indicates, where “its lyricism stems from the material properties of the film material: the different coloring processes, often of astonishing brightness, are not only preserved; they are often accentuated by biochemical degradation.”100Delpeut also slows down the speed in some places, creating an
eerie, uncanny effect, as most silent films were shown at higher speeds. This affective manipulation of the rate at which the images are projected allows us to see the beauty that nitrate stock emits, as well as the beauty of the enigmatic images. Images are lost in time without referents— they infer alternate spaces of reality, which gives the film its poetic force. Delpeut abandons the stories behind each clip, instead giving fragments that float by, carrying their own pri- vate stories. The film does have a loose structure; it is divided into six categories, indicated by intertitles: “Looking,” “Mise- en- Scène,” “The Body,” “Passion,” “Dying,” and “Forgetting.” This arrangement only suggests a connection among the images through subject matter, a pattern of association. Most of the clips are run at different speeds, including freezing them. Some are sepia or blue, some have musical accompaniment (from the likes of Bizet and Puccini), and a handful have sound effects. A certain surrealism emerges in their foreignness; strange pictures of women walking through a garden, a crucifixion scene, gig- gling children, men crossing the street and eyeing the camera, railroad cars,
and even a glimpse of a movie theater audience all suggest a netherworld pres- ence. The strange collage of documentary and fiction yields a fascinating ambi- guity. We see images of boats on water, cityscapes and country idylls, melodramatic scenes and comedic ones, people at work and play; it is the ephemeral nature of these “lost” fragments of people and objects and scenes that creates for us a wonder that is both anthropological (even archaeological) and historical, as it is avant- garde and experimental. “The fragment has become a mode of knowledge and of poetic expression, carrying its own history.”101The
film ultimately becomes a celebration of the past and a cautionary tale, an alle- gory of cinematic history that relates memory as abstract, searching for some- thing tangible.
Lyrical Nitrate is an amalgam of genres simply because it has many images
extracted from their original narratives, and it plays with how one constructs meaning through narrative or the lack of a coherent one. In this regard, the film
borrows heavily from found footage’s aesthetic of ruins, while refusing its more ironic, theoretical or visually radical aspects. From the compilation films, it retains a doc-
umentary dimension, as trace or testimony of past visual practices, while keeping
those films relatively anonymous [, a negotiation of ] space between avant- garde practice and archival exploration.102
It is visually stunning because it is a compilation of nitrate film, and also because Delpeut is doing something completely innovative himself cinemato- graphically, especially with the deep focus, the slowing of speeds and the tinting, though I would suggest there is a theoretical basis for understanding how these images work on a cognitive level, especially in terms of their associative or attached meanings. Delpeut seems to be addressing a fundamental aspect of moviegoing — and one I have stressed is essential to the understanding and enjoyment of avant- garde film — perception. The film may seem “deliciously prurient” because of its very otherness, its exclusive nature of outsider status deeming it experimental, “old- ish,” and anathema to the giant Hollywood pro- ductions that tend to forget the silent era altogether.103The discontinuity of the
film’s structure and narrative make it difficult for audiences used to classical modes of filmmaking, but it is the type of movie that fascinates because it takes the opposite extreme: an avant- garde collage film that not just stands in oppo- sition, but declares its beauty and wonder in every frame, whether it is an image from a melodrama, a biblical film, children at play, adventure film, scientific examination, or exterior shots of trains, landscapes, and street scenes.
Lyrical Nitrate is a self-reflexive film about deterioration — decay, ruina-
tion — that asks us to consider how film is used on an ontological level. Many of the images in the film are already at the point of decomposition, so it is decidedly harder to make them out; yet that is precisely what makes them com- pelling. Perhaps the ending signifies the self-reflexive tendency of nitrate the best. It is a scene from a movie about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; a figure representing Father Time stands nearby, spinning a globe. Its image is
haunting, mesmerizing, stunning: it appears to be in color, but it is too hard to tell because the film has deteriorated so much that the surface is full of bleed- ing colors, from white to red to green to yellow — all because the nitrate is “dying.” This ending to the film is poignant: Adam and Eve partaking of the forbidden fruit and immediately burned — but in this case literally, in front of our very eyes, as the film deteriorates. This effect produces some of the more ambigu ous and strong reactions to the film as a whole. As Rosenbaum suggests, “Delpeut places the most extreme examples of deterioration at the very end of his compilation, and the emotions they arouse are rather complex because the effects of deterioration are in some cases as beautiful and mysterious as the images that are being devoured.”104 The disappearance of the film image —
Adam and Eve — and the disappearance of the filmstrip itself creates the elegiac, melancholic tone that lasts through much of the film. To Habib, this final scene encapsulates Delpeut’s endeavor to simultaneously create a film about ruin as it ruins itself. He says:
The elegiac tone of the film culminates in a final blaze, which seems to consume all the film fragments seen up to this point, as if this blaze represented their inevitable destiny. During the last minutes of the film, the celluloid strip becomes unstrung, destroyed by mold, to the point where the imprinted scene appears shredded by rapid flashes of colored blots and filaments, bright flares, sumptuous ochre stains.... Here we find the most striking alliance between the medium and its “content”— the destroyed celluloid performatively exemplifies the scene, by ruining it. Amidst the flickering serpentines of dismantled celluloid, we see Adam and Eve sharing the for- bidden fruit, on the verge of being plunged into a temporality that is no longer exempt from corruption or contingency ... and this is precisely what the film exposes.105 It is here where Lyrical Nitrate exposes the lyrical nitrate itself as something to behold and something as rich in texture and meaning and nuance as any image that has come before it. Its transient existence shows its beauty in color tints, lights, and surfaces. Ultimately the film gives the impression of rediscovery- through- destruction, an uncovering of the “auratic” and autonomous status of nitrate at the very moment of its disappearance. The discrepancies, disconti- nuities, and the fragmentation work paradoxically to create continuities among the images (and their pattern placement), as well as suggest a stronger link between the undiscovered/lost past and the immediate present. In exquisite detail, Lyrical Nitrate posits that cinema exists as a fragmented yet lyrical art able to capture, retain, and destroy. It is in this idea/l that the film more pro- foundly, perhaps, is about how “the detail ruins, from the inside, the unity of the work: detailing, in truth, is ruining. The detail forces the part to manifest itself, disjointed from that unity. It is this stripping— this powerful extraction of the part from its totality — that is at work in [Lyrical Nitrate].”106
D
ECASIADecasia is much like Lyrical Nitrate in its construction and execution: Film-
decaying film. In some regards it is more experimental, though the themes are similar. Morrison uses decaying film stock as his raw material, focusing on a more ideological aspect of decay and how it is inevitably similar to humanity’s mortality. It is a film about creation and destruction, where decomposition of film serves as a metaphor for existence. In an artist’s statement that accompa- nied retrospectives of his films, Morrison makes this point clear. He wrote, “Like our own bodies, this celluloid is a fragile and ephemeral medium that can deteriorate in countless ways.” The nitrate film used to create Decasia takes on an expressive means, and its inherent qualities— like those of Lyrical
Nitrate— render it an artifact itself. The film uses a variety of images— travel-
ogues, newsreels, fiction films, wildlife documentaries— to create an experiment in the style of collage films and found footage films, where the randomness of images both stand alone and work together to create the story. The film is made up of assorted black and white images of silent cinema, evoking a tone caused by the very way the nitrate film is displayed — with holes, cracks, scratches, blotches, and light refractions that make the fragments unconditionally obscure and surrealistically beautiful and bizarre. To add to its strangeness, “Each frame of Decasia was stretch- printed two or three times, slowing down the image and enabling the eye to capture the passing of the film strip and the stains, marks, and holes that have attacked it, making this struggle between image and matter a fascinating experimental laboratory.”107 Morrison is attempting a more
involved look at how the past mingles with the present in the form of presence and absence. Again we are forced to reckon with images divorced from their places and times, so that each fragment becomes its own means of communi- cating with us about the nature of decay, where “each image seems to be sus- pended between the creation or the origin of the world and its fascinating and irretrievable destruction.”108
Found- footage films are ones that are avant- garde examples of media archaeology. The filmmakers who make these kinds of pictures, like Delpeut and Morrison, excavate the past in order to rescue and reuse what has been buried by time and advanced technology. Decasia can be considered avant- garde for this very reason; its method highlights the ways in which matter trans- forms and is transformative. Decasia, like Lyrical Nitrate, is innovative and offers many rewards to the viewer eager to uncover the past and to experience the present, as conceived or constructed by the past, in startling ways.
Blue
Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) is one of the few feature films to not have a single image projected onto the screen. The entire film consists of a fully sat- urated blue color filling the screen space, accompanied only by the sounds of