NCJCF 13 (1) pp.

51–64 Intellect Limited 2015

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film

Volume 13 Number 1
© 2015 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ncin.13.1.51_1

MARIA LUNA
Autonomous University of Barcelona

CAROLINA SOURDIS
Pompeu Fabra University

Colombian found footage:

The tradition of rupture

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article examines the use of archival footage in Colombian cinema, following found footage
three lines of enquiry: film as meta-history, film as montage and video recycling as archive
counter-information. First, the section on ‘film as meta-history’ studies the historical Colombian cinema
discourse on Colombian cinema in three films by Luis Ospina: En busca de María/ counter-information
In Search of María (Ospina and Nieto, 1985); the series on film history De la meta-history
ilusión al desconcierto/From Illusion to Confusion (2007); and the ‘epic collage’ montage
Un tigre de papel/A Paper Tiger (2007a). Second, ‘film as montage’ addresses
Fragmentos/Fragments (Santa and Campos, 1999) and Paraíso/Paradise
(Guerrero, 2006), two films that critically address the discontinuity and fragmenta-
tion of Colombia’s history. Finally, ‘video recycling as counter-information’ explores
the media news as a source of archival construction through a group of five films
produced by students and professors at the University of Valle (Cali, Colombia) that
show a more radical way of understanding television news produced during periods
of political polarization.

Everything had broken down in any case, and new things had to be
made out of the fragments.
(Schwitters 1930 in Dickerman, 2005)

51
Maria Luna | Carolina Sourdis

INTRODUCTION
Found footage is a revitalized term crossing different fields from archive film
to digital video and is usually related to compilation film (Eisenhut 2006: 244;
Kuhn and Westwell 2012: 185). Approaches to understanding its usage and
value have evolved from defining an underground practice with a few semi-
nal texts, particularly linked to museum and art exhibitions (Hausheer and
Settele 1992; Bonet 1993; Wees 1993; Hibon and Beauvais 1995), to becoming
the object of multiple interpretations across different academic fields. Recent
research on the topic (Baron 2014: 8, 2012: 103) and the release of Found
Footage Magazine (Ustarroz 2015), a journal exclusively devoted to found foot-
age practices edited in English and Spanish, are some of the recent outcomes
of this revitalization (Rannou 2008: online).
The aim of this introduction is not to provide a historical overview of
found footage practices and works, which in its strict sense would go back to
the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s (Eisenhut 2006: 244; Bonet 2010). For the
purposes of this article, we focus instead on the evolution of the discussion of
found footage in academic literature and apply some of the ideas found here
to an understanding of contemporary Colombian films that have used found
footage in different ways. Several academic texts refer to the book Films Beget
Films (J. Leyda, 1964) as the precursor in the field, and, although the term
found footage itself was not yet defined at this time, Leyda’s text refers to
compilation and archival films and arrives at the notion of ‘usable footage’
(1964: 142). Although ‘found footage’ is a difficult term to define precisely
(Danks 2006: 242), it is generally understood as the reuse of archival foot-
age, compilation film, collage and appropriation. In this slightly ambiguous
context then, one term that might be useful here is ‘foundness’, which clari-
fies ‘the continuities between documentary and experimental appropriations’
(Baron 2012: 103). According to Baron:

‘Foundness’ is a constituent element of all archival documents, whether

they were ‘found’ in an archive or ‘found’ on the street. This ‘found-
ness’ of the archival document exists in contradistinction to documents
that we perceive as produced by the film-maker specifically for a given
film. Indeed, this sense of ‘foundness’ is integral to the experience of
the archival document. It is part of what lends the archival document its
aura of ‘authenticity’ and enhances its seeming evidentiary value.
(2012: 103)

Although it is true that global academic references on found footage usually

coincide in two seminal works (Wees 1993; Leyda 1964), it is worth high-
lighting the importance of the Spanish context as pioneering in terms of the
reflections on this practice. The exhibition and catalogue of Desmontaje: Film,
Vídeo/Apropiación, Reciclaje/Disassembly: Film, Video/Appropriation, Recycling
(Eugeni Bonet, 1993) is particularly important, to the extent that it includes
Spanish and English texts by authors such as William C. Wees, Yann Beauvais
and Catherine Elwes, among others, and in the way that Bonet introduces the
term desmontaje/disassembly as important in this context – in that it highlights
the conceptual and technical possibilities of montage. Another key refer-
ence in the Ibero-American framework is the work of Antonio Weinrichter,
who has undertaken a long-term research project on found footage prac-
tices, from the publication of a seminal article in the journal Archivos de la

52
 Colombian found footage

Filmoteca/Cinematheque Archives (1998) to the publication of the book Metraje

Encontrado: La apropiación en el cine documental/Found Footage: Appropriation
in Documentary Film (Antonio Weinrichter, 2009). The importance of these
texts is not only theoretical, as they have also influenced the production
of video footage in Latin America (Vallaza 2012; Campo 2002a; Luna and
Santacruz, 2001b). More recently in Argentina, BAFICI published the book
Cine encontrado: Qué es y a dónde va el found footage?/Found Cinema: What is
Found Footage and Where is it Going? (Listorti and Trerotrola in E. Bonet, 2010)
to accompany the emphasis on this topic in the twelfth edition of this major
film festival. This compilation reasserts, from a cosmopolitan perspective, the
enduring interest in this type of film within Latin America, bringing together
texts and discussing some of the issues this audio-visual form presents.
The perspectives that tend to define found footage in relation to docu-
mentary as impure cinema can be linked to a conceptualization of the form
established in recent definitions as a ‘more disrespectful form from the origi-
nal material’ (Kuhn and Westwell 2012: 185) or as ‘bastard cinema’, refer-
ring to the use of ‘ephemeral films’ and ‘leftovers of products in themselves’
(Prelinger in Bonet 2013, online; Paletz 2011, online; Bonet 2010: 44). Whether
impure or ‘bastard’, found footage thus creates an alternative ecology in which
the sources of archive are motors of ‘re-creation’, returning to the Latin roots
of the word ‘to create again’. In many cases, this re-creation often serves to
undermine the archival material as a source of tradition and history.
Despite the explosion of theories and references on found footage, there
is still a lack of reflection on the practice as a political approach to film-
making, particularly regarding its relation to the artistic avant-garde(s) in
Latin America. The idea of a specifically Latin American approach to found
footage has hardly been explored and remains ignored in the great major-
ity of texts. Moreover, encyclopaedic texts generalize definitions, sometimes
in different contexts, affirming that ‘the practice of found footage tends to
avoid political positions’ (Stalter 2006: 433). A few exceptions published
in the Hispanic environment refer to practices of found footage in Latin
America (Ortega 2009; Bonet in Listorti and Trerotrola 2010; Vallaza 2012).
Nevertheless, in Latin American cinemas there are several different approaches
to the use of archives in cinema that address political positions, such as the
purely found footage practices in Now (Alvarez, 1965) or La hora de los hornos/
The Hour of the Furnaces (Solanas and Getino, 1968), or the use of archival
footage in fiction films to underscore political meaning, such as in Memorias
del subdesarrollo/Memories of Underdevelopment (Gutierrez-Álea, 1968),
or documentary collages with an ironic tone, such as Ilha das flores/Isle of
Flowers (Furtado, 1989). The diversity of referents in films that work with
archival materials in Latin America has led us to take a broad perspective
to the concept of found footage in this article. We therefore refer not only
to films made exclusively of archival material that has been found by chance
but also to films that incorporate what Baron has suggested as foundness, ‘a
constituent element of all archival documents, whether they were “found” in
an archive or “found” on the street’ (Baron 2012: 103).
In this article, we focus on the political uses of archival ‘foundness’ in docu-
mentary films produced from 1999 to 2010 in Colombia. This period, based on
previous research, was particularly prolific for film-makers from this country
in terms of their usage of found footage practices (Sourdis and Lowis 2010),
and we suggest that the use of found footage in Colombia during this period
is very much part of a political context of fragmentation and nostalgia for

53
Maria Luna | Carolina Sourdis

unity. Thus, the article interrogates not only the politics of nostalgia for a lost
and partly found archive but also the context of fragmented politics in which
they were produced.
The expression of found footage that would correspond to nostalgia for
a unity that may never be achieved can also, in more aesthetic terms, be
characterized as an ‘epic collage’ that implies the strategies of ‘interruption’
and ‘quotation’ (Wees 1993: 157). We thus examine the uses of ‘foundness’
in Colombian cinema following three lines of enquiry: archival footage as
meta-history, that is to say, as the generator of a discourse on film history;
the political dimensions of poetic montage and video recycling; and coun-
ter-information as a radical method to understand television news produced
during periods of political polarization.

FILM ARCHIVE AS META-HISTORY

The appropriation of audio-visual material suggests a reassessment of the
potential of cinematographic montage beyond its dimension as a tool to
provide narrative continuity or as an aesthetic mechanism to explore the
plasticity of the filmic image. Even in very different geographical and histo-
rical contexts, the re-use of audio-visual material of diverse origins highlights
its fragmentary nature and the potential for this medium to unveil its own
mechanisms through meta-discourses. Cinema watched within cinema opens
up a greater perspective for montage to be conceived from a wider dimension,
both as an aesthetic form and as a method of thinking and writing.
Although there has not been a ‘school’ or a generalized ‘trend’ in
Colombian cinema that explores, as such, the potential of cinematic montage
and develops the practice of ‘foundness’, the Colombian film-maker Luis
Ospina has insisted on the use of archival footage in his works. He has deve-
loped a particular approach that incorporates appropriation of a hetero-
geneous body of audio-visual material, using footage from both abandoned
and ‘orphan’ films – that is to say films without a specific origin or fragments
of lost films – and his own works.
Our analysis of the use of archival material by Luis Ospina is closely
related to the concept of meta-history developed by Hayden White in 1973.
This is a study that considers history as a narrative discourse and which ques-
tions the certainties of historical knowledge:

Historical accounts purport to be verbal models, or icons, of specific

segments of the historical process. But such models are needed because
the documentary record does not bring forth an unambiguous image of
the structure of events attested in them. In order to figure ‘what really
happened’ in the past, therefore, the historian must first prefigure as a
possible object of knowledge the whole set of events reported in the
documents. This pre-figurative act is poetic inasmuch as it is precogni-
tive and pre-critical in the economy of the historian’s own conscious-
ness. It is also poetic insofar as it is constitutive of the structure that will
subsequently be imagined in the verbal model offered by the historian as
a representation and explanation of ‘what really happened’ in the past.
(White 2014: 31)

Taking this into account, we suggest that Ospina’s use of archival material
leads to a reflection on the preservation of cinematographic heritage as a vital

54
 Colombian found footage

sphere of the nation’s cultural heritage, devoting part of his cinematographic 1. The exact origin of the
term orphan film is
work to rescuing and building the memory of forgotten films. Besides Ospina’s unclear. By the 1990s,
intention to historicize Colombian cinema, we argue that his films unveil a however, film archivists
‘discursive meta-history’ that is ‘commenting on the cultural discourses and were commonly using
this term to refer to
narrative patterns behind history’ (Zryd 2003: 42). films abandoned by
The short film En busca de María/In Search of Maria (Ospina and their owners. Before
Nieto, 1985) evokes the first Colombian feature film ever shot: María (Calvo the end of the decade,
the phrase emerged
and del Diestro, 1922), based on the foundational novel by Jorge Isaacs. as the governing
The evocation of Calvo and Diestro’s film is achieved through interviews metaphor for film
preservation, first in
with people who were involved in making it, dramatizations based on the the United States and
written journals of the directors and excerpts from the novel displayed as then internationally.
intertitles. Moreover, the twenty-second-long piece that is left from the 2. Rupture, as a synonym
original film – including images of a horseman crossing a river, a bridge of break, is used in the
and some valleys – is shown in the opening sequence of Ospina’s film, context of avant-garde
analysis. The recent
giving an aura of authenticity. The film is framed by a comic dramatiza- exhibition, ‘Shatter
tion: a silent film in which Ospina, together with his friend, the Colombian Rupture Break’, at The
director Carlos Mayolo, plays out the making of Calvo and Diestro’s lost Art Institute of Chicago
from which the
work. Taken together, these elements can be interpreted as indications of opening phrase of the
an ironic meta-history, or in White’s terms (2014: xxxii): the recognition of a article was taken gives
us an insight into the
narrative history that is full of voids. idea of ‘The tradition of
The director’s approach perceives Colombian cinema as devoid of rupture’.
memory. For instance, En busca de María concludes with the line ‘I can’t
remember any more …’ pronounced by the film historian Hernando Salcedo
Silva, even though the historian remembers his experience as a spectator of
the movie during his childhood. From a historical perspective, according to
Ospina, Colombian cinema has never been established as a space for inter-
change and construction; instead, he argues, it is a no man’s land, a collection
of abandoned films that only survive as fragments and remnants. The ‘found-
ness’ in Baron’s terms, existent in the scarce material of one of the pioneer-
ing films of Colombian national cinema, is the pretext of a clear intention to
historicize Colombian Cinema that derives from Ospina’s use of incomplete
audio-visual archives.
The notion of Colombian film history being composed of fragments is
further developed in the series entitled De la ilusión al desconcierto/From Illusion
to Confusion (Ospina, 2007b), a work commissioned by Fundación Patrimonio
Fílmico and given to Luis Ospina. In this series, the treatment is very similar to
the above-mentioned short film in terms of the prevalence of word structures
and the links to found material composed of lost, orphan, confiscated and
bastard films.1 The testimonies of the individuals interviewed, leading figures
in Colombian cinema, are apparently structured in a purely rhetorical way,
and both the presence and absence of the image serve as evidence of what is
inevitably lost and forgotten. Consequently, the interview – similar to classi-
cal documentaries, shot without any particular transgression from the institu-
tional model – is what seems to be relevant as the primary mode of discourse
in Ospina’s work. However, the reconstruction with excerpts is closely related
to the definition of a tragedy that is common to Colombian film history: frag-
mentation and loss of memory. In the end, both the ironic approach and the
apocalyptic tone of the film narrative, together with the inclusion of old insti-
tutional video excerpts, understood in this context as ‘bastard film genres’
(Prelinger cited by Bonet 2013, online; cited by Paletz 2011, online), constitute
a rich source of fragments that taken together contribute to form the tradition
of rupture.2

55
Maria Luna | Carolina Sourdis

3. The Acevedo Brothers The interview method is taken to its limit in Ospina’s feature film Un tigre
were pioneers of
Colombian Cinema.
de papel/A Paper Tiger (2007a), a fake documentary about Pedro Manrique
Their production Figueroa, a fictional character who would seem to have originally deve-
company Acevedo and loped the collage technique in Colombia. Art curators Lucas Ospina, François
Sons, founded by their
father, existed from Bucher and Bernardo Ortiz created the character and the documentary
1923 to 1946 (El Gazi through a collage of interviews using different moving image formats. In the
1994). work, the archives, although still linked in logical order, are formally mani-
pulated by Ospina. This highlights the constant irony of the film-maker’s
attempts to establish the relation between art and history in Colombia
throughout the twentieth century; the life of Pedro Manrique Figueroa, an
artist who, according to the legend, witnessed all the events of Colombian
history, is, paradoxically, impossible to track, and barely perceptible through
a bunch of fragments that are loosely assembled. Following Wees, this
mockumentary could be described as an ‘epic collage’ insofar as it can be
categorized within the context of ‘works that not only use found footage but
bring together more or less autonomous films under a single, comprehensive
title’ (1993: 48).
Thus, Un tigre de papel questions the scope of the documentary method
based on the presentation of evidence marked by the authenticity of the
historical world: manipulated newspaper headlines, re-edited television
adverts, political propaganda and television news work as false indexicality.
Here, the great lie of the existence of Pedro Manrique Figueroa is woven as
a great truth in the film, despite the fact that the recorded evidence of him
in archives is non-existent, as this phrase extracted from the film illustrates:
‘These are your images. Take them. They represent you: cover yourself with
them as sorcerers cover themselves with their cloaks. They explain you beyond
appearance. Have faith in this symbolic explanation’ (Ospina 2007). If we take
Hayden White’s theory to its logical limits within the discourse of an ironic
meta-history, we find that the nearest source of historical knowledge is no
more than a fake experience, and consequently an imaginary, rebuilt memory
is the only way to record it.

POLITICAL DIMENSIONS OF MONTAGE

Archives have also been conceived of by some as the ruins of time (Habib
2006). The marks of the passing of the years on celluloid, on top of the faces
and gestures of the spectres projected on the screen, seem to bring to the fore
the fragility of memory itself, its fragmentary and elusive nature. The possibil-
ity of recording ‘the world’, fostered by the invention of the cinematograph,
brought along the possibility of ‘embalming the dead’ as the French theorist
André Bazin suggests in ‘The ontology of the photographic image’ (1960). It is
natural then that found footage practices with a nostalgic and evocative tone
attempt to reflect on the passing of time through the use of images, and to
look at the relationship between images, history and memory.
Commissioned by the Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico/Film Heritage
Foundation, Fragmentos/Fragments (Santa and Campos, 1999) is a feature film
made entirely of Colombian archival films, both fiction and newsreels, dating
from the beginning of the twentieth century until the year 1958, mainly
produced by and belonging to the Acevedo Brothers.3 (El Gazi 1994, online).
By contrast, Paraíso/Paradise (Guerrero, 2006), which evokes the spirit of the
Nadaísta avant-garde movement of the 1950s, is mainly composed of images
shot in 8-mm film by Felipe Guerrero himself, but edited together with

56
 Colombian found footage

archival footage of political and historical events in Colombia between 1958

and 2006.
Both films are structured through images. There is no expositive or intro-
spective voice, nor any interviews or other type of commentary. These films
could be described as poetic montages, following the work of Sourdis and
Lowis, who define the structures of both films as having been created by
sensorial and emotional criteria as opposed to rhetorical discourse, and
which are therefore linked to the discovery of expressive notions instead
of the demonstration of an argument (Sourdis and Lowis 2010). Santa and
Campos use a chronological and sequential order to organize the excerpts of
films by decades, and they explicitly divide the content with intertitles. This
treatment contrasts with the more open, oscillating structure of Guerrero,
who tends to go back and forth from key images throughout the film. Each
image is accompanied by a complex sound design that works as a coun-
terpoint for the images, and undertakes the quest for a political discourse
through montage.
In formal terms, both films allude directly to political events in Colombian
history and propose new scenarios for their historical meanings through
a reconfiguration of their structures. Without following an explicit mode of
ideological discourse, these films succeed in constructing a re-visioning of the
history of Colombia, to the extent that they both present a reassessment of
the idea of a national project. This is achieved through a re-presentation of
existing archival material (images that show, e.g., the historical struggle for
power, political sectarianism, poverty, social inequality, drug trafficking, insur-
gence) as well as through the creation of complementary images that have been
assembled in the same discourse to allow spectators to reinforce their critical
viewpoint and to establish direct relations between past, present and future.
Thus, we are encouraged to look for the meaning of the images as given
by the uses they were first assigned, which in the case of Fragmentos is clearly
related to a desire for legitimizing the political ideals of the time (Mora and
Carrillo 2003). It is not surprising, therefore, to find in the Acevedo broth-
ers’ images a constant search to highlight the benefits of liberal ideals – with
which they sympathized – and the consequent modernizing project from
1930 onwards, or to find that many of the excerpts from the fiction films
correspond with those that illustrate the role that women, men or a specific
social class should acquire in the established order. In the case of Paraíso, the
original ideological nature of the archives is more difficult to define, to the
extent that the structure is more fragmented, and much of the archival foot-
age comes from unknown sources. Nevertheless, the constant interaction
between images from the past and the present still provokes a questioning of
the course of political and historical events.
The bond established here between politics and poetics, very actively
proposed by various artistic movements across Latin America, such as Mexican
Muralism, Argentinian New Realism and Brazilian Cinema Novo, is also linked
to the context of the figurative arts in Colombia from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Artists such as Miguel Angel Rojas and Oscar Muñoz developed their crea-
tive quest in the 1970s through a total break from the so-called canons, thus
exploring materials and techniques such as photography and drawing that,
at that time, were not considered legitimate formats by professional artists
who were granted legitimacy by the scholarly circuits and national art institu-
tions. Furthermore, the techniques of collage – widely explored by Gustavo
Zalamea in the early 1990s through his Proyecto Bogotá/Project Bogotá (1994)

57
Maria Luna | Carolina Sourdis

4. This topic was and composed of various assembled postcards of the city – can be related to
developed in a previous
article: ‘Colombia:
the composition of the films referred to in this section: a huge whale diving
Audio-visual media into Bogota’s horizon, the shipwrecking of the Colombian Parliament in the
landscape in the age midst of Bolivar Square, and the square divided by a crack in the earth filled
of democratic security’
(Luna 2014). with lava. All of these are seemingly iconic surrealistic models, closely related
to the political history of the country: the square as public scenario and the
5. We use the term
apparatus here instead centre of diverse powers (the church, the Palace of Justice), destroyed twice:
of dispositive. For an first during the Bogotazo – two days of civil unrest that arose as the conse-
extended discussion quence of the murder of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the liberal party candidate who
around the English
translation of the was running for presidency in 1958 – and second, in the Palace of Justice siege
term, see Bussolini by the M-19 Guerrillas in 1985. In summary, then, the consideration of form
(2010). As Burchell
in Bussolini affirms:
as political content, as a way to provoke the questioning of thought and ideol-
‘(It) does not seem ogy through images, which was raised by the Colombian artists of the 1970s,
to be a satisfactory are echoed in Fragmentos and Paraíso, insofar as these films rely on the poten-
English equivalent for
the particular way in tial of montage to give rise to historical and political discourse.
which Foucault uses
this term to designate
a configuration VIDEO RECYCLING AS COUNTER-INFORMATION
or arrangement
of elements and Found footage conceived of as a media recycling practice refers to a trend
forces, practices and that expresses a ‘political gesture’: ‘fighting against the sense of material from
discourses, power and
knowledge, that is both toxic popular culture’ (Weinrichter 2009: 172, our translation). Thus, incorpo-
strategic and technical’ rating found footage – understood here as the recycling of cinema or video
(2010: 86).
materials – has been interpreted as an ecological gesture, as archaeology or
as cultural critique (Sandunsky in Bonet 1993: 21–22). At the same time, as
Bonet has pointed out, recycling is related to previous ideas that encompass
the treatment of archival footage and which are known as ‘counter-informa-
tion’ and ‘guerrilla television’ – subjects that have been explored in the semi-
nal book En torno al video/About Video (E. Bonet et al., 2010).
The cases examined here are examples of the treatment of newsreel video
archive that are used as a reaction against the information monopoly in
Colombia. Within the political context of an internal armed conflict framed by
democratic security policy, in turn connected to the global fight against terror-
ism, there exist certain key elements such as a boom in private news compa-
nies and government denial of the existence of a conflict between the army,
guerrillas and paramilitaries. These factors have accentuated the restriction
and control of the circulation of war images.4 The term ‘dispositivo videográfico’
is useful here, translated as ‘video-graphic apparatus’5 (Campo 2012: online;
Bussolini 2010: 86), and alluding to archival television news used in found
footage procedures that combine to form a political and expressive mechan-
ism of counter-information. In this context, ‘the video-graphic apparatus’
(Campo 2012, online) refers to analogue and digital video that is located at
the margins of private image production. This kind of production contain-
ing television news archive is situated in a context of expressive freedom, as
opposed to information control.
The first three videos analysed in this section were produced in agreement
with the producers of the television series Vidas Cruzadas/Short Cuts (Luna
2003: 41) and were supported by regional and national public television. The
other two, however, were made after a change of government and after a
predominance of private channels and the neutralization of public television
came about (Luna 2014: 90). In this new environment, these found footage
works lacked institutional support and their production was completely in the
hands of university students and academics, who experimented with novel

58
 Colombian found footage

possibilities of capturing information with digital video technologies. In any

case, these works of counter-information were marginalized and had limited
distribution, with the result that their political activist intentions remained
restricted to specialized circuits and their audiences. 
The five experimental works proposed here were developed during the
decade 2000–2010 in the School of Communication at the Universidad del
Valle in Cali, Colombia. They are: Manual inconcluso para el silencio/Unfinished
Handbook for Silence (Luna and Santacruz, 2001), No hay país/No Country
(Arias, 2001), Noticias de guerra en Colombia/War News in Colombia (Campo,
2002), Informe 7 p.m./News at 7 p.m. (Hernández, 2005) and Cuerpos frágiles/
Fragile Bodies (Campo, 2010). These works were selected according to their
stories, places of origin and, above all, their practice of ‘foundness’ (Baron
2014) or recycling of information, which refers particularly to their treatment
of television news material. This recycling of counter-information constitutes
a field of visual research and generates knowledge in an expressive space of
common concerns around the contemporary Colombian context. Ultimately,
when taken together, this group of experimental work forms an alternative
research corpus generated by a shared reflection regarding the television news
archive.
The first three films were broadcast as a series on national public tele-
vision and presented at international documentary film festivals. They have
certain common characteristics such as images of the armed conflict, experi-
mental use of sound and a theoretical reflection on the production of informa-
tion. The students’ works reveal a resistance to the use of a privileged voice
and this is expressed, according to Campo, via different strategies:

Each week a documentary by a different film-maker is broadcast. The

identity of the space is given by certain treatments: opposition to the
authoritarian narrator; a mix of images derived from direct television
or other cinematographic or video-artistic aesthetics; challenging of
so-called journalistic objectivity through personal works or through the
participation of voices different from those of the television presenter.
These works adopt a biographical, autobiographical or essay form, in
which fantasy, delirium, absurdity or, even the lack of a search for truth,
are allowed.
(2002b: 99)

Manual inconcluso para el silencio/Unfinished Handbook for Silence (Luna and

Santacruz, 2001) comprises found footage taken purely from non-broadcast
raw material of news about forced displacement. It is a compendium of hidden
images of an undeclared war. Manual is one of the first works that explicitly
reflects on the concept of found footage of television news in Colombia. It orig-
inated due to the impossibility of entering the rural zones affected by the armed
conflict and draws attention to the existence of an unexplored war archive. It
examines the spectral gazes in the anonymous faces that look out of frame,
and interrogates the narrative emptiness of the untold war scenes, found in
slow images usually ignored in the news. The silent sequence of an exodus that
occurred a few hours from the city appears in opposition to the fast rhythm of
the television news montage in which the images are only short fragments to
support the information being given. It seems that the material itself suggests
a demontage, in Bonet’s terms, by generating the possibility of telling an alter-
native history about those who do not usually have a voice in the news media.

59
Maria Luna | Carolina Sourdis

In the second work, No hay país/No Country (Arias, 2001), the director, a
video editor, explores new assemblies of information, music and interviews to
express his own version of a country immersed in political and urban conflict.
The work is an eclectic mixture of archival material recycled from different
sources, including the director’s own recordings, and is a critique of what he
presents as the fake unity of the country. It makes an irreverent use of video
textures controlled by digital video effects tools, which transform and mask
the original image while accompanied by music in a video-clip aesthetic. No
hay país, when taken in the environment of recycling as counter-information,
clearly shows how video-graphic apparatus can be used for the creation of
new discourses expressing experimental freedom through the re-montage of
previously controlled archival news material.
Noticias de Guerra en Colombia/War News in Colombia (Campo, 2002) is the
video that closes what could be interpreted as a trilogy based on circulation
of knowledge and images that have, in turn, inspired different experiments
with the recycling of information. Thus, this full-length television documen-
tary, which includes found footage from the same archive of television news,
reflects on the coverage of the armed conflict. Through interviews with jour-
nalists and directors of a regional newsreel that explain the daily routines of
recording and broadcasting images of war in Colombia, the work not only
interrogates the found images but also uses the archival news to question the
media practices that produced it.
The second group of counter-information works, produced later, received
less institutional media support than the first series Vidas Cruzadas. However,
this situation simultaneously opened up new possibilities of capturing images
with home digital video devices. Video essay with the director’s voice-over
is the dominant form in the two works explored here: Informe 7 p.m./News at
7 p.m. (Hernández, 2005) and Cuerpos Frágiles/Fragile bodies (Campo, 2010).
In Informe 7 p.m., sound is the main expressive element. This film explores
the spectacularization and omnipresence of the armed conflict on televi-
sion, this time from the perspective of the audience of the two main private
channels, RCN and Caracol, which tend to produce a continuous bombard-
ment of violent news. The work uses intertitles that are repeatedly displayed
on-screen in an attempt to unveil strategies of media manipulation. This
explicit media critique is finally fully developed in Cuerpos Frágiles (Campo,
2010), a feature-length video produced almost entirely with images recorded
directly from television. The unifying thread is the sense of discomfort that
is provoked when faced with the image of the guerrilla leader Raúl Reyes,
shown in the mass media as a governmental triumph. The work closes the
cycle as a counter-information and radical criticism, placing the recycling of
war and images of death in a context in which terror becomes a commodity.
In choosing to use the director’s voice as narrator, this work makes authorship
explicit and shows a rejection of global anti-terrorist strategies that use images
as ideological tools on behalf of the state. Deconstruction and appropriation
are used here as tools to resist the regime of informative images.

CONCLUSIONS
These cases of Colombian found footage, in their diversity, show that beyond
a formal reflection on the foundness of the archive the different forms of
using recycled footage point to a historiographical void. We have argued that
this void feeds a certain tradition of rupture in which views of an incomplete

60
 Colombian found footage

history are inspired by fragmented facts and curiosity about lost material. In
this sense, the foundness of incomplete materials is also the foundness of the
possibility of political diversity and freedom of expression in a polarized envi-
ronment. Therefore, the irony that emerges from the alternative readings of
the official history that compose a meta-history, the poetic uses of montage
generated by incomplete and altered images, and the radical uses of counter-
information footage are different expressive mechanisms that could be inter-
preted as the composite of a fragmented national project.
At the heart of the works analysed here, there also seems to be an ascrip-
tion to the general trend of questioning the status of documentary as genre.
If truth cannot be revealed by the document, if the official history is full of
voids, then there is also an ethical position in showing the discontinuities and
fragmentations, in making explicit the interruption to and quotation of the
documentary discourse. Therefore, the uses of found footage as meta-history
and counter-information are evidence of a resistance on the part of these
film-makers to accept a fabricated truth. Finally, we argue that fragmented
montage produces a nostalgic effect for the lost material, which might be
considered an indicator of the impossibility of telling an official history, while
the found footage itself appears to become the ideal medium through which
to express the tribulations of a fragmented nation.

REFERENCES
Álvarez, Santiago (1965), Now.
Arias, Guillermo (2001), No hay País/No Country.
Art Institute of Chicago (2015), Exhibition: Shatter Rupture Break, Art Institute
of Chicago, 15 Feb–3 May, http://www.artic.edu/exhibition/shatter-
rupture-break. Accessed 15 September 2015.
Baron, J. (2012), ‘The archive effect: Archival footage as an experience of
reception’, Projections, 6: 2, pp. 102–20.
—— (2014), The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audio-Visual Experience of
History, London: Routledge.
Bazin, A. (1960), ‘Ontology of the photographic image’, Film Quarterly, 13: 4,
pp. 4–9.
Bonet, E. (ed.) (1993), Desmontaje: Film, video, apropiación, reciclaje/Demontage:
Film, Video, Appropriation, Recycling, Valencia: IVAM.
—— (2010), ‘Desmontaje Documental’, in D. Trerotrola and L. Listorti (eds.),
Cine encontrado: Qué es y a dónde va el Found Footage, Buenos Aires: Bafici,
pp. 39–49.
—— (2013), ‘Documentary Demontage, in recovering archive, cultural mate-
rials’, Bulletin 1, http://www.amateurarchivist.net/ephimerida/?p=768.
Accessed 15 September 2015.
Bonet, E. et al. (2010), En torno al video/About Video, Vizcaya: Universidad del
País Vasco.
Bussolini, J. (2010), ‘What is a dispositive’, Foucault Studies, 10, pp. 85–107.
Calvo, Máximo and Del Diestro, Alfredo (1922), Maria.
Campo, Oscar (2002a), Noticias de guerra en Colombia/War News in Colombia.
—— (2002b), ‘Los documentos de la Universidad del Valle: Memorias elec-
trónicas de la realidad colombiana’, Revista Cinémas d’Amérique Latine,
10, pp. 97–100, http://www.cinelatino.com.fr/sites/default/files/lesdocs/
cinemas_damerique_latine_n10_2002.pdf. Accessed 15 September 2015.
—— (2010), Cuerpos frágiles/Fragile Bodies.

61
Maria Luna | Carolina Sourdis

—— (2012), ‘El dispositivo videográfico: Percepciones de una visible

oscuridad’, Revista Visaje, 1, http://revistavisaje.com/?p=515. Accessed
15 September 2015.
Danks, Adrian (2006), ‘The global art of found footage’,  in L. Badley, R. B.
Palmer and S. J. Schneider (eds.) Traditions in World Cinema, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, pp. 241–253.
Dickerman, L. (2005), Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris,
Maryland: The National Gallery of Art.
Eisenhut, S. (2006), ‘Compilation film’, in I. Aitken (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the
Documentary Film, 3, New York: Routledge. pp. 244–46.
El Gazi, L. (1994), Acevedo, Familia, ‘Biblioteca del Banco de la República’,
http://www.banrepcultural.org/blaavirtual/biografias/acevfami.htm.
Accessed 15 September 2015.
Furtado, Jorge (1989), Ilha das flores/Isle of Flowers.
Guerrero, Felipe (2006), Paraíso/Paradise.
Gutierrez-Alea, Tomás (1968), Memorias del Subdesarrollo/Memories of
Underdevelopment.
Habib, A. (2006), ‘Ruins of time: Archive, time and cinema memory. Peter
Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate’, SubStance, 35: 2, pp. 120–39.
Hausheer, C. and Settele, C. (eds.) (1992), Found Footage Film, Lucerna: Verlag.
Hernández, Magda (2005), Informe 7 p.m./News at 7.p.m.
Hibon, D. and Beauvais, Y. (1995), Found Footage: Dans le cadre du cycle.
Analyse, collage, mèlancolie, Paris: Jeau de Paume.
Kuhn, A. and Westwell, G. (2012), A Dictionary of Film Studies, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Leyda, J. (1964), Films Beget Films, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
Luna, M. (2003), ‘Rostros y rastros: La realidad más allá del periodismo’,
Cuadernos de Cine Colombiano, 4, pp. 22–43.
—— (2012), ‘Mapa del archivo del silencio: Reapropiaciones de la imagen
bélica’, in III Encuentro de Investigadores de Cine Archivos Memoria y Presente,
Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia, 31 October–2 November.
—— (2014), ‘Colombia. Audio-visual media landscape in the age of democra-
tic security’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 7: 1, pp. 82–96.
Luna, M. and Santacruz, A. (2001a), Reflexión sobre un documental de metraje
encontrado: Una aproximación al found footage de noticias diarias, Monograph,
Cali: Universidad del Valle.
—— (2001b), Manual inconcluso para el silencio/Unfinished Handbook for Silence.
Mora, C. and Carrillo, A. (2003), Hechos colombianos para ojos y oídos de las
Américas, Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia.
Ortega, M. L. (2009), ‘De la certeza a la incertidumbre. Collage, documental
y discurso político en América Latina’, in S. García and L. Vaquero (eds.),
Piedra, papel, tijera, Madrid: Ocho y Medio, pp. 101–38.
Ospina, Luis and Nieto, Jorge (1985), En busca de María/In Search of María.
Ospina, Luis (2007a), Un tigre de papel/A Paper Tiger.
—— (2007b), De la ilusión al desconcierto: Una historia del cine colombiano de
1970 a 1995/From Illusion to Confusion.
Paletz, G. (2011), ‘The archive in contemporary documentary’, Point of View
Magazine, 83, 1 September, http://povmagazine.com/articles/view/the-
archive-in-contemporary-documentary. Accessed 15 September 2015.
Pickett, J. and Prueher, N., ‘About FFF’, The Found Footage Festival, http://
www.foundfootagefest.com/about-fff/. Accessed 15 September 2015.

62
 Colombian found footage

Rannou, P. (2008), ‘Reconfiguring Found Footage Film’, Esse, 64, http://esse.

ca/en/reconfiguring-found-footage-film. Accessed 15 September 2015.
Restrepo, R. (2002), ‘Documentos de Guerra’, Revista Cinémas d’Amérique
Latine, 10, pp. 79–84, http://www.cinelatino.com.fr/sites/default/files/
lesdocs/cinemas_damerique_latine_n10_2002.pdf. Accessed 15 September
2015.
Sandusky, S. (1992), ‘The archaeology of redemption: Toward archival film’,
Millennium Film Journal, 26, pp. 2–25.
Santa, Carlos and Campos, Herib (1999), Fragmentos/Fragments.
Solanas, Fernando and Gettino, Octavio (1968), La hora de los hornos/The Hour
of the Furnaces.
Sourdis, C. and Lowis, D. (2010), ‘Reinventando formas de ver: Documental
de archivo en Colombia’, Beca de investigación en cine y audiovisuales,
Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia.
Stalter, S. (2006), ‘Found Footage’, in I. Aitken (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the
Documentary Film, 3, pp. 430–33.
Ustarroz, C. (ed.) (2015), Found Footage Magazine, 1, http://foundfootagemaga-
zine.com/issues/. Accessed 15 September 2015.
Vallaza, E. (2012), ‘El found footage como práctica del video-arte argentino’,
Actas de diseño, 13, pp. 147–51.
Vidas Cruzadas (2001, Colombia: Señal Colombia/RTVC).
Wees, W. C. (1993), Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Film,
New York: Anthology Film Archives.
Weinrichter, A. (ed.) (1998), ‘Subjetividad, impostura, apropiación: En la zona
donde el documental pierde su honesto nombre’, Archivos de la Filmoteca,
30, pp. 108–23.
—— (2009), Metraje encontrado: La apropiación en el cine documental y experi-
mental, Pamplona: Punto de Vista- Gobierno de Navarra.
White, H. ([1973] 2014), Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th Century
Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Zalamea, G. (1994), Proyecto Bogotá/Project Bogotá, Bogota: Beca Colcultura/
Galería Sextante.
Zryd, M. (2003), ‘Found footage film as discoursive metahistory: Craig’s
Baldwin Tribulation 99’, The Moving Image, 3: 2, pp. 40–61.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Luna, M. and Sourdis, C. (2015), ‘Colombian found footage: The tradition of
rupture’, New Cinemas, 13: 1, pp. 51–64, doi: 10.1386/ncin.13.1.51_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Maria Luna is Researcher at InCom-UAB (Institute of Communication
Studies), Doctor in Audiovisual Contents in the Digital Age (UAB), MRes
Audiovisual Communication (UAB) and MA Hispanic American Literature
(Instituto Caro y Cuervo, Colombia). Research interests: geographies of
film and communication, practices in documentary films, film co-produc-
tions and EU distribution. Documentary filmmaker at Universidad del Valle,
co-founder at the film association El Perro que Ladra-Barcelona: promotion
of Latin American Cinemas. Member of NECS, AE-IC, ECREA and ICA.
Since 2015 member of the academic board of MIDBO (International

63
Maria Luna | Carolina Sourdis

Documentary Film Festival- Bogotá) and Alados Colombia (Association of

Documentary Filmmakers).
Contact: Institut de la Comunicació, Campus UAB Edifici N, planta 1 CP,
08193, Barcelona, Spain.
E-mail: mariafernanda.luna@uab.cat

Carolina Sourdis is a film and audiovisual maker and researcher trained in

Bogotá and Barcelona. Her films ‘Embracing the afternoon’ and ‘Iron’ have
been exhibited at international festivals in Spain, Colombia and Iran. As a
researcher, she has worked around montage and found footage practices
supported by the Colombian Ministry of Culture with the National scholar-
ship for film and audiovisual investigation. She is currently a pre-doctoral
researcher at Pompeu Fabra’s University Communication Department. Her
lines of inquiry are the essayists drifts in European Cinema and the conver-
gence points between cinematographic theory and practice.
E-mail: carolina.sourdis@upf.edu

Maria Luna amd Carolina Sourdis have asserted their right under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of
this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

64
Copyright of New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film is the property of Intellect Ltd.
and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without
the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or
email articles for individual use.