Fractured pasts: Found footage collage and the animated documentary

The paper will present a body of practice-led research within experimental documentary and animation that interrogates the use of found footage as a historiographical strategy. The research examines the capacity of found footage collage in articulating the layered temporalities present in the formation of collective recollection. How can the materiality of found footage be deployed within spatial and temporal collage films that challenge linear notions of memory and the past? The methodology draws from visual ethnography with regards to intersubjectivity, multivocality and the immaterial aspects of human experience. The approach aims to challenge notions of unitary meaning, objectivity and truth in historical representation. Can the fragmented, hybrid aesthetic of the moving collage render the partial and irregular experience of remembering, evoking the contingent and furtive conditions of personal and collective pasts? The work deploys appropriation strategies that decontextualize and recontextualise found footage as a method of ideological interruption, releasing the mutable, multiple meanings that accumulate and shift in the confluence of competing discourses. The paper will describe temporal structures that privilege simultaneity, overlap and layering in constructing unstable images that foreground a dialogical conception of the past. How can found footage collage and animation, as a historiographical practice, expand the language of non-fiction films that address memory and time?PP9101 A