ISSUE #15 – Net found footage

Introduction

In 2019, the Cinema Department launched its first workshop around images found on the Internet and social media (Instagram, TikTok, etc.) under the impetus of the director and teacher Maryam Goormaghtigh. The theme was “Apocalypses”. In this workshop devoted to editing, the Cinema Department considered the status of images and the strength of both the narrative and the voice-over. In 2020, artists and directors Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel – whose films explore a contemporary youth disillusioned with reality and overwhelmed by virtual images – were invited to give a new workshop on the notion of “care”, with the participation of artist and musician Christelle Oyiri (Crystallmess). They will return in 2021 for a workshop on “portraiture”, with the participation of the film director Guillaume Lillo.

Several of the films made during these workshops were selected in national and international festivals, including the Locarno Film Festival, the Int. Kurzfilmatge Winterhur, the Journées de Soleure, the GIFF, the Festival Côté Court (FR), IndieLisboa (PT), and the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal (CA).

This short focus starts off with a text by the filmmaker, critic and lecturer at the HEAD Cinema Department, Jean-Sébastien Chauvin. In it, Chauvin explores various ways of creating a narrative with images found on the Internet. Three films from the 2021 and 2022 workshops are presented. Finally, an interview with the English filmmaker Louis Henderson, also a lecturer at the HEAD, looks at the uses of found images in his decolonial practice.

Cover image: screenshot from All that Solid, Louis Henderson, 2014

Content

Condensation of the immaterial

Assemble. That’s the watchword of British artist and filmmaker Louis Henderson. For the past thirteen years, Henderson has been building a 2.0 filmography, essentially using the teeming universe of expanding images and sounds from the Internet, better known as net-found footage. In this respect, his protean texts and films take an archaeological approach to examining the materiality of the Internet while exploring themes as varied as politics, sociology, and anthropology. More specifically, Henderson’s practice stresses the permanence of cultural relics related to colonial pasts. We met with him ahead of his intervention in the Cinema Department’s net-found footage workshop in 2023.

Louis Henderson

Mariama Balde

The 1001 images of a big brain

“The world has already been filmed, it is now a matter of transforming it”, said Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle in 1973. This reservoir of images has since been made available by the Internet. In this article, the French filmmaker and critic, Jean-Sébastien Chauvin, considers the practice of filmmakers who – rather than adding images to the world – recycle traces of historical events or fragments of everyday life in a deliberately non-productive approach. The montages they make (re)articulate the flow of images found on the Internet, producing often-engaged narratives that counter the alienating logic of spectacle denounced by Debord. This article introduces a programme devoted to “net-found footage”, presented at the Entrevues film festival in Belfort from 22 to 27 November 2022.

Jean-Sébastien Chauvin

Three films from the net-found footage workshops

From a fantasy aroused by some men′s underwear packaging, to the search for oneself in the depths of social media, to research into one′s own Iraqi origins; these three films created within the framework of Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s net-found footage workshops at the HEAD – Genève can be watched here.

Alberto González Morales

Tabarak Abbas

Varvara Mashanskaya