Session as part of the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris.
FOCUS #1 - FIND YOUR FOOTAGE
co-curated by Pétronille Malet and Ellis Laurens, with the Deficit collective
Conceived in partnership with Deficit, a multidisciplinary collective that brings together visual arts, performance, sound and digital technologies, this opening night of the 28th edition of the Paris Festival of Alternative and Experimental Cinema begins with a programme of films made using material found on the internet (net found footage). This approach particularly resonates with the question posed by this year’s Focus theme, “One AND Many…”. Indeed, whilst the issue does not strictly pit personal expression against collective practice but rather focuses on their points of friction, their interdependencies and the redistribution of actions traditionally associated with the author, then net found footage appears to put this reflection directly into practice, bringing forth a unique cinematic gesture from images produced by others and for other purposes.
The reuse of images is almost as old as cinema itself, but found footage truly becomes an artistic and political practice when reuse is no longer merely a means of obtaining images, but the very principle of the film: when meaning no longer precedes the material but emerges from its reworking, its repositioning and the relationships produced by editing. This practice is particularly widespread in experimental cinema as it allows for almost infinite freedom whilst ensuring economy of means. More specifically, net found footage draws its raw material from the vast array of collective, anonymous and circulating images found on the internet.
The films in this screening bear witness to the intrinsic richness of the networks that make up the internet, and to their necessity as spaces for expression and resistance. Their structural interconnection enables the creation of aesthetic, political, symbolic and social architectures that foster exchange and sharing. These works extract their pixels from flows that are as impersonal as they are interconnected, thereby dissolving the notion of authorship in favour of a melting pot of diverse identities and sensibilities. The very principle of the Internet – as a shifting archive, a semantic fabric and a virtual community – enables the practice of video collage, thereby championing a creative potential with no real identifiable beginning or end.
Beyond the screening, the evening is structured around a fluid and evolving installation designed in collaboration with the Deficit collective, in which images, roles and spaces circulate: the evening will feature a participatory VJing session led by the artists Noiram, FrenchFox and Rale, followed by a DJ set by Asha. Visual artist Maïlys Cluzet will present an installation inspired by the object-machine-image systems characteristic of analogue cinematography. Finally, throughout the evening, a camera will be made available to audience members so that they can create a collective film during the event, which will be streamed live: it is no longer simply a matter of finding existing images, but of finding one’s own perspective, picking up the camera, framing the shot, passing the camera on to someone else, and re-filming what is already being projected or performed. ‘Footage’ is no longer merely source material for the film; it is created in the present moment.
