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Collage film is a style of film created by juxtaposing found footage from disparate sources (archival footage, excerpts from other films, newsreels, home movies, etc.). The term has also been applied to the physical collaging of materials onto film stock.
The idea of combining film from various sources also appealed to another surrealist artist André Breton. In the town of Nantes, he and friend Jacques Vaché would travel from one movie theater to another, without ever staying for an entire film.André Breton, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), and Breton, “As in a Wood.” L'age du cinema (1951) as reprinted in The Shadow and Its Shadows, ed. Paul Hammond (London: The British Film Institute, 1991). As cited by Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Quick and the Dead: Surrealism and the Found Ethnographic Footage Films of Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao: The Turtlelike. Camera Obscura. Jan2003, Vol. 18 Issue 52
Working at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in the 1960s, Arthur Lipsett created collage films such as Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) and 21-87 (1963), entirely composed of found footage discarded during the editing of other films (the former earning an Academy Award nomination). French filmmaker Edouard de Laurot made politically-charged collage documentaries such as Black Liberation (1967) and Listen, America (1968) during this period as well.
In 1968, the young Joe Dante made The Movie Orgy with producer Jon Davidson that featured outtakes, trailers and commercials from various shows and films.
The technique was employed in the 2008 feature film The Memories of Angels, a visual ode to Montreal composed of stock footage from over 120 NFB films from the 1950s and 1960s. Terence Davies used a similar technique to create Of Time and the City, recalling his life growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s and 1960s, using newsreel and documentary footage supplemented by his own commentary voiceover and contemporaneous and classical music soundtracks.
Christian Marclay's The Clock, a 24-hour compilation of time-related scenes from movies, debuted at London's White Cube gallery in 2010. Marclay made several forays into video art that informed The Clock with his 1995 film Telephones, forming a narrative out of clips from where characters use a telephone, and his 1998 film Up and Out combining video from Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup with audio from Brian De Palma's Blow Out. The latter was an early experiment in the effect of synchronization, where viewers naturally attempted to find intersections between the two works, and it developed the editing style that Marclay employs for The Clock. A similar art installation by Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho (1993) Designing Video Installations with Douglas Gordon – VICE on YouTube consists entirely of an appropriation of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 psychological thriller film Psycho, slowed down to approximately frame rate per second from its original 24. As a result, the film lasts for precisely 24 hours, rather than the original running time of 109 minutes (1 hour, 49 minutes). A century later, New York-based artist Chris Bors responded by tweaking the film as 24 Second Psycho while accommodating the short attention span of information age society. 24 Second 'Psycho'|Dangerous Minds Chris Bors|24 Second Psycho (2012)|Artsy
The 2016 experimental documentary Fraud (by Dean Fleischer Camp, later known for the Oscar-nominated Marcel the Shell with Shoes On) was sourced from over a hundred hours of home video footage uploaded to YouTube by an unknown family in the United States. The footage was combined with additional clips appropriated from other YouTube users and transformed into a 53-minute crime film about a family preoccupied with material consumption going to extreme lengths in order to get out from under unsustainable consumer debt.
Scottish poet Ross Sutherland made his 2015 feature film debut Stand By for Tape Back-Up, consisting of recordings from an old VHS tape left by his late grandfather. STAND BY FOR TAPE BACK-UP - Torino Film Fest British Council Film: Stand By For Tape Back-Up VISIONARY FILM: Stand By For Tape Back-Up (2015) Ross Sutherland
Canadian experimental filmmaker Stephen Broomer's first feature work was Potamkin (2017). The film is about the late pioneering film critic Harry Alan Potamkin (1900-1933), who was one of the first to proclaim cinema as an art form. Potamkin is composed of fragments from the many films he reviewed for newspapers and magazines during the 1920s and 1930s (e.g. Battleship Potemkin, The Passion of Joan of Arc and Metropolis). The Carriage Set Upright: Stephen Broomer on Potamkin - Film International Canyon Cinema : Canyon Cinema 50 — February & March Events Now Available: New Digital Files from Stephen Broomer
Canadian video art Todd Graham is known for his 1987 cult fan film Apocalypse Pooh, a bizarrely comedic mash-up of Disney's Winnie the Pooh and Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now. The Accidental Father of Mashup Culture: Jim Knipfel on Todd Graham and Apocalypse Pooh - Believer Magazine Apocalypse Pooh & 7 Other All-Time Great Fan-Made Movie Mashups - Screen Rant Todd Graham's Apocalypse Pooh in CBC Toronto 1991 Entertainment News Segment - Todd Graham on YouTube
Another notable collage film that also used this technique is Fruit Flies (2010) by Canadian artist Christine Lucy Latimer similar to Mothlight. Fragile Systems: The Media Hybrids of Christine Lucy Latimer - Art & Trash on Vimeo
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