Festival of (In)Appropriation

Film Festival and Q&A

Free Public Event & Reception 

Remix Filmmakers push boundaries by taking previously existing footage and reediting it to generate new meanings. The Festival highlights 13 of the most innovative short films of this kind.

The Festival of (In)appropriation is a yearly showcase of short contemporary audiovisual works from around the world that appropriate film or video footage and repurpose it in “inappropriate” and inventive ways. Found footage filmmaking is a practice in which preexisting footage is appropriated, recontextualized, and juxtaposed with other pieces of footage to produce new meanings and resonances. Indeed, these combinations may generate ideas that may not have been intended by the original makers – that are, in other words “inappropriate.”

Tickets are available in the Film & Media Studies Office, 2433 SSMS or by email to PollockTheater@gmail.com

The festival is premiering in Santa Barbara for the first time thanks to sponsorship from the Department of Film and Media Studies, the Carsey-Wolf Center, and Los Angeles Filmforum.

Lucky Strike

Lucky Strike, a film by Taiwan-based filmmaker Shashwati Talukar, is split-screen video which juxtaposes light-hearted Lucky Strike commercials from the fifties encouraging us to “light up a Lucky” with footage of military operations and atomic bomb tests, pointing to the seductive power of media images to obscure the destructive consequences of modern life. 

Interdimensional Headphase

In Interdimensional Headphase Los Angeles-based filmmaker Dillon Rickman uses footage from the Turkish version of Star Wars as a substrate on which he performs a variety of digital manipulations. In doing so, he transforms the original representational images into chromatic abstractions

Camp

Peter Freund’s Camp  consists of footage of Nazi concentration camps and footage from the over-the-top Busby Berkeley film The Gang’s All Here, among other images, combined with a split narration delivered in Mandarin Chinese and Arabic. By placing these voices and images in dialogue with one another, Freund explores the various meanings and implications of the word “camp,” finding unexpected connections between them without trivializing their differences. 

Jive

Jive by Steve Cossman is both an assault on the senses and a mystery. To make this film, Cossman took a single photograph and broke it up into 100 segments which he then reshot in various sequences and turned into a flickering barrage of tiny images that have been blown up to fill the screen. A throbbing soundtrack further intensifies this visual experience, transforming it into a full body vibration. At the same time, however, the film challenges us to try to identify or envision the original photograph – which the film teasingly never reveals. 

The Homogenics

In The Homogenics, Spanish filmmaker Gerard Freixes Ribera appropriates footage taken from The Dick Van Dyke Show and reedits the imagery so that Dick Van Dyke multiplies, occupying several roles at once and having hilarious conversations with himself. However, the film also points to the homogeneity of the suburban setting in which the show takes place and the stereotypical gender roles reinforced by the show. 

Ceibas Epilogue: The Well of Representation

Repurposing a hacked, 16-bit video game set in colonial times, Evan Meaney's Ceibas Epilogue: The Well of Representation reveals not only the humor we may find in an outdated media object but also the poignancy of loss – lost data, lost memory and lost life – as our visions of the past break down into digital noise. 

A Reasonable Man

A Reasonable Man, made by experimental filmmaker and lawyer Brian Frye, raises questions about the way in which video footage has been used as evidence within the US legal context. The image track consists of police car surveillance footage taken during a March 2001 car chase in which suspect Victor Harris was run off the road by a police car and was rendered a quadriplegic. Harris sued the police officer, alleging that the officer used excessive force. On the soundtrack, we hear the lawyers and judges debating the legality of the events recorded by the police car cameras. 

Tusslemuscle

Cossman’s second film in the program, Tusslemuscle is a feat of unimaginable patience. To create this film, Cossman took apart hundreds of View-Master reel cells, extracting a total of 7,000 singe frames. He then spliced these single frames – mostly of trees, flowers and plants – together into a linear filmstrip. By using this time-consuming and arduous process to extract these still images and make them “move,” Tusslemuscle creates an hypnotic, mesmerizing space in which nature continues to bloom even as its image begins to degrade.

Avo (Muidumbe) Granny (Muidumbe)

The question of evidence of past events is central to Avo (Muidumbe). In this film, Portuguese filmmaker Raquel Schefer’s personal exploration of her family’s history merges with the larger history of Portugal’s colonization of Mozambique. By dressing up just as her grandmother appeared in the archive footage and restaging the footage with herself in her grandmother’s role, Schefer points to the ways in which descendants of colonizers must still come to grips with the colonial legacy.

Kanye West Apologizes to George W. Bush

Kanye West Apologizes to George W. Bush combines laughter with social commentary. Splicing together footage from two different episodes of The Today Show to create his film, Jaimz Asmundson allows hip-hop star Kanye West and George W. Bush to have a conversation about whether Bush, as West once said publicly, “doesn’t care about black people.” The humor of this film emerges as we come to realize that West and Bush never actually sat down together in the same room and that two separate interviews have been artfully merged into one. However, the film also raises the serious question of how far we have actually come when it comes to communication between people of different backgrounds. 

Self-Destruction for Eternity

In Self-Destruction for Eternity, Taiwanese filmmaker Wei-Ming Ho splices together footage from several recent videogames focused on war to create a massive scene of accumulated destruction, from helicopter crashes to tidal waves to atomic bombs. Ho’s compilation points to the drive toward self-destruction that lurks within such games.

Palindromia 

Palindromia, by Lab Collective, deals with a more recent instance of Western incursion into other countries: the ongoing presence of US and European troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using sound from the Wikileaks Collateral Murder tapes, Palindromia poetically comments on how the destruction of human life becomes banal to those who cause it while those who are its targets are trapped within a zone of perpetual insecurity. 

The Voyagers

Penny Lane’s The Voyagers tells the true story of the two Voyager spacecraft, which in 1977 were sent into interstellar space, each carrying a golden record album, a massive compilation of images and sounds embodying what the Voyager team thought was the best of Planet Earth. While working on the golden record, Sagan met and fell madly in love with Ann Druyan, his future wife. According to Lane, “The record became their love letter to humankind and to each other.” By intertwining the stories of the Voyager mission, of Sagan and Druyan, and her own love story, Lane suggests that both space travel and love are about putting faith in the unknown and unknowable.