Next time I teach an experimental film class,
I'll definitely use this playlist of Found Footage Films in it somehow.
https://vimeo.com/channels/cfamediamixer
Part of me wants to assign each student a different film to take apart and analyze.
Not sure how I'll do it.

These CFA Media Mixer videos are striking to me because they pull footage from about the same era as most post-Conner found footage works (Child, Berliner, MTV, etc), but they were made in the last decade, and thus get to ask different questions.

What could an assignment over these videos look like?
Should I have students toss a video into Premiere, slice it up where the cuts are and study the editing that way?
Should I have them attempt a poetic "narrative" analysis of it?
Should I have them list recurring motifs?

The assignment needs to be critical and historical.
Since found footage films by definition take footage from one historical context and place it into a different historical context, we must ask: is that context being productively analyzed or aesthetically effaced?

Ex: if they studied the lovely Sky Room (2017), I'd want them to notice the phallic/growth imagery, that it's basically Take-the-5:10-to-Dreamland-in-space & that it thus de-historicizes these images by emphasizing psycho-sexual retro-ness over all else
https://vimeo.com/356468408

This is not to say that found footage *MUST* do historical/cultural analysis to be valid,
but the assignment should at least promote AWARENESS of the big difference between the Situationist politicization of images and the Conner, Marclay, et al aestheticization of the archive

The learning goal, beyond the history and practice of experimental film, is deeper media literacy:
since archival imagery is everywhere (docs, video essays, etc), we should be attuned to how readily and for what ideological purposes it is instrumentalized and depoliticized

For contrast, consider An Anthology of Kinship (2017).
https://vimeo.com/356468248
It's a historical meditation, almost an act of rescuing these images. It asks better questions than Conner asked of his footage, prompts the viewer to ask too, and thus gets more resonant answers.

When I made my first found-footage film in 2003, I just looked for stuff I thought looked "cool" (explosions, car wrecks, trains). I asked bad questions, and thus got useless answers.
Should all found footage artists first think of a "question" before they approach the archive?

And since my experimental film courses involve students making their own found-footage works:
How do I inspire them to not just reproduce the aesthetics of Conner or Workman or YouTube Poop? How to activate a new vocabulary of image recombination? (I ask for myself, too)

Another productive example, this time from Deborah Stratman:
https://vimeo.com/355636141
To me, this project is about showing us how the world looks through the eyes of someone trying to scientifically exploit its resources, and what results. What Conner's Mea Culpa could've been.

This Chicago Film Archive playlist is making me consider the GEOGRAPHY of found footage.
That is, that found footage can be "local." Most mid-century FF films implicitly use "universal" images. This functions hegemonically unless we point it out and give alternatives.
Peggy Ahwesh's Beirut Outtakes (https://www.ubu.com/film/ahwesh_beirut.html) or Adam Curtis's Bitter Lake are examples of getting images from a *particular* archive rather than some universalizing notion of "the archive."
(*though as much as I like those films I'm frustrated that I was only able to think of Western filmmakers doing this; surely if non-Western filmmakers remix their own local archives, this has the potential to be more counter-hegemonic, right? If you know of any, please tell me.)

This whole line of thought makes me re-realize: it's easy to slip into thinking that found footage films are somehow anti-ideological or outside of ideology; but in choosing what to deconstruct and how to reconstruct it, they participate in ideology just as much as anything else.
FF films that retreat into pure formalism, decasia/glitch fetishization, or postmodern kitchen-sink free play might be the most ideological of all, since they implicitly try to take ideology off the table, to make you stop thinking about it. Obviously we need to point this out.

Again, I'm just trying to give students ways to notice things.

Some continua, for instance:
Are the images more "universal" or more "local"?
Are the images more historicized or more dehistoricized?
Is the editing more "linkage" or more "collision"? (How so?)
Is the film stylishly “experimental” or properly avant-garde? That is, does the editing emphasize pleasures of rhythm and movement or avoid/reject such pleasures?

Other highlights:

Flight Records (Brian Ashby, Bill MacKay, 2019) -- a poignant sketch of white flight, how speculators made a killing on racism, and a city broken apart, as told in a flurry of home movies
https://vimeo.com/356451087

Scales in the Spectrum of Space (Fern Silva, 2015), a free-association journey through the cosmic and microcosmic as they intersect in Chicago. Incredible attention to light and, especially, movement.
https://vimeo.com/356464737

Songs for Earth and Folk (Cauleen Smith & The Eternals, 2013) A deep-time meditation on destroying the planet and trying to leave it.
https://vimeo.com/71024774

VVAVEFORMSENTITY (Eric Fleischauer, 2017): one of the most beautiful, inventive, and idea-filled found-footage films I've ever seen
https://vimeo.com/356467576

And some questions about SOUND, too:

How does sound interact with image?
Is sound direct? Effects? Music?
Are effects realistic or not?
How does music counterpoint image-rhythm?
Does sound bend the meaning of the images or vice versa?
Does one seem to be the foundation for the other?
Etc

And a film with which to consider them:
Temple of Truth (Giuseppe Boccassini, Alex Inglizian, 2018)
https://vimeo.com/357902535

Adapted from this thread on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/10OClockDot/status/1364174759810924556
by Max Tohline, 2021.