Feminist Authorship and Found Footage Film: The Case of Susan Hiller’s Psi Girls

In her sensorially immersive five-screen video work, Psi Girls (1999) UK-based American artist Susan Hiller cites fragments from five well-known Hollywood and European fiction films, narratively connected by a focus on girls with telekinetic powers. Exemplifying her oeuvre, this work foregrounds the persistent cultural stereotyping of marginalised groups and more particularly examines the myth of the girl as supernatural ‘other.’ Found footage film has a long history in experimental film practice and, in recent years, has taken centre stage in the commercial art-world with internationally acclaimed artists such as Christian Marclay and emerging artists such as Elizabeth Price employing it as a principle method. Perhaps unsurprisingly, recent criticism continues to discuss this approach to filmmaking within a postmodern context. However, art critic Amelia Jones has argued that the critical absorption of late twentieth century feminist art strategies into the universal project of postmodernism effectively dilutes their original political impetus; the artist’s authorship as feminist is superseded by a repositioning of the feminist text as postmodern (Jones, 1994). This paper repositions Hiller’s video work as a feminist text situating it within the context of a found footage tendency in late twentieth century feminist art practice, which generated works that ranged from the didactic to the poetic. Using a close analysis of Psi Girls as a springboard, this paper investigates the specifically feminist politics of found footage film practice