This panel, part of Weird Weekend III’s Squint strand, took place via Zoom on Sunday, 30th October, 2022. Originally intended to be hosted before a live audience, the venue’s A/V presentation was beset with technical problems, meaning we ultimately had to decide to record it, during the festival as planned, but with no audience in the room. The host’s composure may or may not reflect the palaver that immediately preceded the recording.
TRANSCRIPT
[Sean Welsh] Hello and welcome to the Cinema from Cinema Panel, part of Weird Weekend’s Squint strand, on the practicalities and possibilities of Stolen Cinema. My name is Sean Welsh. I’m the programmer of Matchbox Cine and Weird Weekend and your host for today’s panel. In terms of a visual description, I’m a bespectacled white man with a shaved head and greying beard. In a moment, I’ll introduce you to our esteemed panel today, but, just to set the scene, in the Squint strand this year, we presented films made from films, transformative creations that parody and détourné cinema to radical new ends, alongside the collage and found footage movies that capture and reframe the bizarre and ephemeral.
Many of you will have just watched our Squint Shorts programme, which had a particular focus on the repurposing of Western cultural detritus to examine, interrogate and undermine the dominant male viewpoint. And the festival closes later tonight with Anti-Banality Union’s Earth II, which brings me to our first panellists.
Anti-Banality Union is an anonymous collective who re-cut Hollywood blockbusters into new feature films – feature-length films, rather. Their work has been screened at Spectacle Theater, Anthology Film Archives, UnionDocs and several undisclosed squats and communes. Earth II, their latest epic project, repurposes four decades of disaster movies, over 200, into a disaster epic that contains a meta-narrative on both Hollywood tropes and our cultural grasp of the eminent environmental apocalypse.
LA-native Bret Beg has been a video store manager, a film distributor, a college radio DJ, a film programmer and a non-profit founder. With the Museum of Home Video, Bret shares his enthusiasm for finally watching anything he’s ripped over the past 20 years, while inviting fellow download cultural obsessives to join the party. His weekly live show is found at MuseumOfHomeVideo.com.
Elizabeth Purchell is a queer film historian and programmer. She is the creator of Ask Any Buddy, a multi-media project that explores the history of the gay adult film industry and its role in the development of queer cinema and the spread of gay male visual culture. The project consists of an Instagram feed, a feature-length mash-up film that was selected to play nearly two dozen international film festivals and a companion podcast. Recently, she has appeared in home video releases by Altered Innocence, the American Genre Film Archive and Vinegar Syndrome and programmes and hosts the monthly queer cinema Lost and Found screening series at Austin Film Society. Her work has been featured in publications such as ArtForum and New York Times.
Katie Rife, finally, last but not least, of course, is a freelance writer and critic with a background in VHS hunting and found footage comedy. She was a founding member of the collective Everything Is Terrible, posting under the name Future Schlock from 2006 to 2… to 2014, excuse me. She was a writer for The AV Club from 2014 to 22 and currently writes about film and TV for outlets including Vulture, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, IndieWire, Polygon and RogerEbert.com.
So, thank you all for joining us today. So, as advertised, we’re going to talk a wee bit about your backgrounds and the practicalities and possibilities of stolen cinema, including your practice, the practicalities of actually producing this work. So, Katie, your foundational work with Everything Is Terrible is a little obfuscated, partly by its pseudonymous nature, but certainly unfairly. Can you tell us how you first got started with found footage and what drew you into it?
[Katie Rife] Well, what got me started in found footage was I was a thrift store, you know, obsessive thrift store goer, from way back from my very early days, like, you know, pre-teen years. And when I went to school in Athens, Ohio, we had…which is kind of the… It’s a college town in the middle of Appalachia, in Southeast Ohio, and, needless to say, some very strange artefacts came out of the hills and hollers, into the thrift stores, mostly religious tapes. And so that’s kind of when I became obsessed with… with watching these strange tapes. One was called Rock Music and the Occult and it was, you know, a classic fear-mongering tape about how if you played Led Zeppelin backwards it was the devil and that sort of thing. So, I started combining those into clip shows using two VCRs and Dimitri Simakis, who we went on to found Everything Is Terrible, he went to the same school as me, and we became friends, based on our mutual obsession with digging up VHSs. And then, shortly after I graduated college in the mid-2000s, I started a group called Future Schlock. It used to be two people, it was me and Nick Moore, and we made two found footage mixes under the name Future Schlock and then, around that time, I got back in touch with Dimitri and he said that they were starting this group and would I like to join up with that? So, that’s kind of how everything got rolling.
[Sean Welsh] Anti-Banality Union, you’re an anonymous collective of indeterminate number. We’ll talk a bit about your practice a bit later, hopefully, but perhaps you can talk about how you came together with found footage as your preferred medium, collaborative medium. And, if it’s not too obvious, why you chose to work collectively and anonymously.
[Anti-Banality Union] I can field that one for now. So, we…started… in, about 12 years ago or 11 years ago, in 2011. At the time, we were… ..involved in a screening space in Brooklyn called the Spectacle Theater, which is a micro cinema, and were exposed through that to different kinds of found footage…video practice that a lot of other people who were involved there were working on. And the first project we did together… as a collective, was a short – I forget how long it was, probably 10 minutes or so – short of…basically a supercut of scenes of New York City being destroyed in Hollywood features, that we screened at a very informal gallery show on loop on a monitor, on around the 10th anniversary of September 11th. And that short video piece turned into, over the next year, turned into a feature, where we basically – that’s called Unclear Holocaust – which is where we took the concept of that short supercut that we had done and expanded it to make it narratively somewhat coherent and tried to combine, tried to be as comprehensive as possible in cataloguing instances of New York City being maimed in different ways by asteroids or nuclear attacks or strange weather phenomena, and also kind of weaving the events of 9/11 into that narrative. And we continued working in that idiom in sort of collaboration with Spectacle Theater, and exhibiting our stuff there, along with a bunch of other people who were showing their stuff there regularly and in dialogue with that work. And we, yeah, we made another feature a year later, two years later, called Police Mortality that also started out as kind of a supercut concept of just collecting every instance of a cop getting killed in a Hollywood movie. And then also, we tried to form a narrative within that of the militarisation of policing in America and… and this was around the time that Black Lives Matter was taking off, in 2014. So, we’re responding to that moment as well, or attempting to, at least. And then our third feature was called State of Emergence. It was a zombie movie without zombies. We basically took about 75 zombie movies and removed the zombies and…into this kind of, like, feature-length thing about… about people barricading themselves in houses and then having all kinds of, like, just interpersonal quarrels and paranoias and then Earth II took us about four, five… well, four and a half, five years to put together. And it’s a climate disaster movie made up of a ton of climate disaster movies, but also lots of different genres. So, we didn’t really restrict ourselves to one genre in this project. Anyway, that’s a short overview. Basically, we’ve only worked in this kind of, like… supercut or collage film feature… Hollywood feature idiom for the past 11 years, and… you know, we’re inspired by, like I mentioned before, our work with people at Spectacle Theater… Spencer Yeh, Soda Jerk, a number of other people, and, you know, other people who, at the time, were doing kind of elevated, high profile sort of…versions of supercuts that were being exhibited in a fine art context, like Christian Marclay. So, taking that kind of stuff and trying to apply it to this kind of material. So, yeah, that’s kind of the origin.
[Sean Welsh] Bret, your archives are legendary, I think you referred to them a wee bit, do you remember when and why you started to accumulate this material and what brought you first to repurpose it to new ends?
[Bret Berg] I would say the original inspiration for me to start messing with material would be Negativland, which is audio, not video. Because somewhere when I was 13 or 14, my branch of the public library in L.A. had Negativland’s Helter Stupid on cassette, you could just check it out from the library, and it was a weird cover and I didn’t know anything about it, so, I gave it a blind rent and it completely changed my life, in terms of how I think about media and how to put stuff like this together. And then I would say my years managing at a video store called CineFile Video, here in LA, an expansive store. An analogue in New York would be, like, the old Kim’s Video. Anyways, so, we had a pretty deep “culture jamming” section in our experimental film section, which was all kinds of… like all the stuff that we’re talking about here and kind of previous figures, like Craig Baldwin and Bruce Conner and… ..and people that took the, you know, the more wacky side of things, like, Animal Charm was a collective in the ’90s and 2000s that I paid a lot of attention to. TV Carnage, who was Derrick Beckles. His stuff was pretty influential to me, in terms of knowing that you could just put your own style on something. And EIT, later. As they were making their stuff, I started to make the first stuff of mine. I grew into making found footage pieces and trailers for a now defunct place in LA called Cinefamily and it was just part of the job to mess with media. And that evolved into now The Museum of Home Video, which is, I guess, more like Negativland than any of these things, now that I think about it. So, really, it was Negativland. [He chuckles]
[Sean Welsh] Okay, that’s fantastic. Thank you. Liz, your Ask Any Buddy film is an expression of your larger Ask Any Buddy project. We saw an extension of that last night at Weird Weekend, in the Unsee strand, a work-in-progress trailer assemblage. You’re doing the Lord’s work in archiving and preserving these films, but can you talk about what brought you to work with the material in the way that you have with these projects?
[Elizabeth Purchell] Sure. I’m kind of glad that I’m last, because everything I’m going to say is, like, bits and pieces of what everyone else has already said. Growing up in a cultural wasteland like Tampa, Florida, where there’s not really much going on, all I could really do was kind of look outside of my state. And that’s how I discovered Negativland and Everything Is Terrible and Spectacle and all these other… venues and groups that were doing found footage work. And that, along with seeing Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy really kind of influenced the way I approach this kind of work. Near the end of my time in Tampa, I was involved with a very underground micro cinema. It was located in the backyard of a noodle shop, where we masked a screen and were allowed by the ownership to do screenings late at night. It was very much kind of modelled off of Spectacle. We’d do pre-shows and create posters and essays for every single thing that we showed, which was a pain in the ass, because it was Florida, so it would rain most of the times we were going to do a screening, so most of them never happened. But that was when I first started… doing actual, like, found footage editing. Like, we were showing Hard Target once, and I had never seen the film before, so I decided to make a found footage pre-show of what I would think Hard Target would be like, which was ’90s dad action movies like Parole Violators, Hard Ticket to Hawaii Action USA… ..the most extreme, absurd stuff you can think of. Moved to Austin, started doing Ask Any Buddy stuff, which was originally just an Instagram, kind of as a mood board for… trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the subject. Eventually, I was approached by a very small, local queer film festival to do a piece for an installation event that they were going to do. And I think the original idea that they had was that I was just going to take some hot porn scenes and put them together and, you know, it’d be a fun little compilation. And, instead, I wanted to do something a lot stranger and, you know, something that people would have to sit down and actually watch. And I had all these different concepts. One of them was, like, It’ll be like a road trip from the West Coast to the East Coast, or it’ll be this or it’ll be that. And, in the end, I settled on the idea of… taking the fantasy that these films present, these adult films, and trying to turn them back into reality, by creating a hypothetical day in the life. So, Ask Any Buddy is made from pieces of 126 films. I didn’t think anything was going to happen with it after that screening. Bret, thankfully, saw something in it and got the American Genre Film Archive to pick it up for distribution. We worked together for…two years, getting it into all these festivals, that started happening right as Covid happened, so it was very online. And then, you know, we had to pull it for reasons that I’m not going to talk about, but… [She chuckles] ..it’s finally starting to get back out there again and we just finished a week-long run at Anthology Film Archives last week, which was very, very successful, just packed screenings every single day. And now I have this new project I’ve been working on, since the beginning of the pandemic, called X-RATED / COLOR / ALL MALE CAST, which is trying to take a found footage approach to a gay porn trailers compilation. So, that’s it.
[Sean Welsh] And, I want to say, everyone enjoyed the work-in-progress version of that. A lot of good reports from Unsee last night. That was kind of the pinnacle. That was the big finale. Fantastic. Thank you so much. So, then, I guess if we can turn to methodology, then, Anti-Banality Union… the practical art of stolen cinema. Earth II is a project many years in the making, you were saying, perhaps deceptively, conceptually elegant, you know. Can you talk about how you developed this kind of work intellectually and how you approached the practical assemblage, especially over so many years?
[Anti-Banality Union] Yeah, I can field that one. So, yeah, I guess, you know, we also watch a lot of Hollywood films leisurely. So we, you know, part of our practice is just going to movies and watching. But we also, in the case of Earth II, we spent about two years… watching all the films. So, it’s like, you know, at least in Earth II, there’s more than 200, but we’ve definitely watched probably double that. So… And, you know, in this case, for Earth II, you know, without working within a specific genre, the parameters were really kind of large. So, we had to… It took a really long time to kind of narrow that down… You know, you couldn’t just… We tried to use every disaster film we could find and climate fiction films, which there’s not a lot of those yet. So… But I think we’ve developed a really… And I think maybe it kind of influences how we watch films now anyway, but, you know, we’re so accustomed to looking for the tropes… ..and, so, when watching a film, they just become a series of units that we can isolate. So, we can… And we’ve come up with this very elaborate keywording system that allows us to create essentially an archive of every moment that something happens in a film. You could just do a quick search in our hard drives, and it’ll come up. You know, every time someone says “DEFCON three”, every time there’s a situation room military meeting, you know, so… that made it easier for us to work separately, that one of us could watch a film and essentially just catalogue a film based on its… like, the smallest units of information. And then, when we… And so, when we create our films, we actually storyboard them out and create almost a script, like, “We want this to happen.” And essentially we’ve watched enough films that we know we can make it happen with everything we’ve seen. So, it’s kind of, instead of necessarily letting… It’s kind of a chicken or egg situation with us, it kind of goes back and forth. And… Yeah, it’s very labour intensive.
[Sean Welsh] Well, I mean, that’s interesting, because I was going to ask, you talked about the cataloguing and the more methodical way to watch things that’s feeding in to your practice, this is something that I’ve thought about and I wanted to ask you, Bret, again, how you approach your mixtapes and cutdowns. I’m thinking particularly about the ones… I want to talk about Fasterpiece Theater and the one that comes to mind is the Beverly Hills 90210 Christmas one and, you know, how do you approach that? I mean, there’s not so much… Perhaps you just have to go through it and stop the tape every time someone says “Christmas”, but what I like to know is what kind of head space that puts you in or maybe you consider them a product of your head space, as it already is. What’s your approach?
[Bret Berg] It’s both. The piece in question is a two-minute supercut of every time the word “Christmas” is said aloud in this one Christmas episode of 90210, from season three. So, in that case… And they say it 200 times in one episode. It’s noticeable to someone who makes found footage. If you put yourself in front of that episode, you’re going to see that, and you’re going to want to go, “I just want to get rid of everything but the Christmas.” So, in this case, my boyfriend was bingeing, back in the Netflix by mail era, was bingeing 90210. And I couldn’t stand 90210. I would always have a book in front of my face while he was watching it, so that I didn’t have to actually look at it while he was watching it. But then I was really intensely reading some book, and then out of the corner of my ear, I hear “Christmas”, “Christmas”, like, about every 30 seconds they said the word “Christmas”. And I just couldn’t ignore it and so I peeked around the book and just paid attention for a few minutes. And then I was like, “I immediately know what I have to do with this thing.” Other examples are me stumbling across something in my kind of dusty fingers travels through media, and…it’s chance. It’s, like, equal parts what’s going on in my life and the Brian Eno, I Ching approach, where chance has an awful lot to do with it, because there’s just so much media. When you’re a pirate, a media pirate, in this age, there’s just so much that you can never really… I hate to say that I do deep dives, because I don’t. I feel like I’m literally just taking a stone and skipping it across the surface, because there’s no way to ever get to the bottom of it. So, this weird livestream that I do is kind of a mixture of what’s going on in my life, and then just the random chance of sailing on the seas of piracy, basically. But, yeah, that 90210 thing was destined to happen. Somebody had to make it. It was just there. [He chuckles]
[Elizabeth Purchell] Your Poltergeist III one too, where it’s every time someone says, “Carol Anne”.
[Bret Berg] Oh, yes, that’s another one. If you ever if anyone’s ever seen Poltergeist III, if you watch it with an editor’s eye, you’re like, someone is saying somebody else’s character name aloud every 30 seconds, and that’s just uncomfortable and it’s lazy screenwriting. And how fun is it to just string those all together. Yeah, I mean, has anyone seen the… the movie From Beyond by Stuart Gordon? Mm-hm. You know, there’s a fair chance some of us have seen it. And in it, the lead character played by Jeffrey Combs – has this like… – [He groans] this little, like, pineal gland shooting out of his head, like a… like a weird third eye, or something else. And I guess… when I make those kinds of pieces, – it just tries to activate that, like… – [He groans] It shakes your head up a little bit.
[Sean Welsh] That’s a great reference. Thanks for that, Bret. And the image, too. Katie, yeah, just on that token… how much were you led by the content? How intuitive was the process for you, practically? Did you always have a clear idea of what the final edit would be, or, like Bret, are you led by your nose?
[Katie Rife] Oh, yeah. It’s very much according to chance, and I think that it is quite different if you were making found footage now because, yeah… So, when I started, it was all thrift stores, it was all whatever you could find in the thrift store. That was, like, the original game that became gamified into found footage videos. So, it was very much led by what you could find, because we were working with not only thrift store videos but also… public access television and late-night infomercials. And so, it… it really was a lot of, like, surfing the high seas, as Bret put it, to just kind of see what you could find. And then, as you collected more and more and more of this stuff, that’s when larger pictures started to emerge. You could start to see certain trends, certain tropes, certain things that just emerged from this, really just a soup of just content, just the weirdest stuff that you could find late at night. And so, there wasn’t… So, I think it does… What we were doing does differ from the supercut model in the sense that the supercut model is very based around… honing in on a specific thing and finding all the instances of that thing. And this was more like… It was really done in a spirit of… “Do y’all want to see this really wild thing I found?” That was the original kind of impetus behind it, and what we would do with Everything is Terrible is, it started off kind of as a way to share these tapes with your friends. No-one read the blog when we first started. For the first year and change, absolutely no-one read that blog except for our friends. And so, it was a way… So, what we would do is… The methodology for creating the first two Everything is Terrible tapes… found footage compilations was, every day of the week, someone would take a tape that they found and cut it down into about three minutes to share the highlights. And these started branching off into different… People started developing their own styles. You know, some would be more repetitive and some would be more free-form. You started developing techniques like call and response, you know, fairly simple stuff. So, what we would do is, every day of the week, someone would share a tape and that would be, that tape, condensed down into three minutes of footage. And you do that for a year… and then you have all this huge library of footage condensed down into a relatively smaller form. And so, then you would take… just basically, when you would be watching it, you would… What I would do is I would… I would sit with literally pen and pencil and write down the time codes for the good stuff and then rip the tape… into Final Cut 7, RIP… We loved Final Cut 7. And, um… [She laughs] And then I would just go in and start cutting out all the fat until you were left with the lean. And then you rearrange the lean until patterns start to emerge. And then when you have all of this lean, then you start dividing it up thematically, is what we would do. Like, certain people had certain specialities. Mine was I was really fascinated with evangelical messaging… ’cause I grew up… I had a religious background growing up, so I had this perverse fascination with the kind of extremes… of Christian indoctrination, basically. And so, that was one of my specialities, and my other speciality was, like, stuff for…”for women.” There was a huge… thread of, you know, make-up… instructional videos and dating instructional videos and even marriage and motherhood instructional videos. And those, when you condense them down…the cultural messaging around femininity and gender roles just leaps out. [She laughs] And so, what we would do is… Yeah, so, everyone would kind of take a chunk of everything that we had done throughout the year, and you would start condensing that and rearranging that, and then the voice would come out of that. And so, to… The short answer to your question is, it was almost entirely led by chance at first, and the deliberate nature of it emerged over time.
[Sean Welsh] I see, that’s fantastic. Thank you. I mean, by contrast, I suppose, to that kind of collaborative… sharing back and forth, like, forming… or informing the end results and… you know, evolving everyone’s kind of collaborative work or teamwork or however you want to phrase that, working as a group independently. Like, Liz, I mean, your film, and perhaps even X-RATED / COLOR / ALL MALE CAST, your trailer feature, did you have any pitfalls you wanted to avoid in reassembling and reworking the material, because, you know, in a sense, you’re working in isolation, in collaboration with that material from such a remove. What were the pitfalls you wanted to avoid when you were doing that, in that process?
[Elizabeth Purchell] I mean, a really important kind of guiding light for all the work I do, you know, with the gay adult stuff, is taking the films seriously as films. I never do a, “Ha-ha-ha, look how bad this porn is,” or “Look how goofy…” Like, the Boogie Nights approach, basically. So, I, you know, I wanted… Ask Any Buddy to be funny, but I wanted it to be, you know, “This is funny on purpose,” you know? There’s a lot of talent behind the camera, making these films. There are occasionally good actors in them. And also, I think… kind of inspired by, you know, what I saw in The Movie Orgy and, like, the early Everything is Terrible feature-length works, is I really wanted to put the clips in conversation with each other and kind of create this shared space. So, I mean, you know, I… in assembling it, I kind of had these situations that I wanted to build around. There was, like, the… the piers, the nightclub, the porno theatre, the tea room. And then I would just, you know, go through my memory of all of the films that I’ve seen, ’cause it’s hundreds of them, and, you know, earmark every single one that had a sequence that was shot in a location like that, and then… try to find, like, one film that had a sequence that I could kind of build out. Because I didn’t want every clip to have its own audio because I thought that would be very annoying and unenjoyable if the audio cuts every, you know, ten seconds. So, I would do that, and… you know, weird chance things would happen as I was going. I was in the middle of cutting the tea room, public toilet cruising sequence when I realised that four or five of the movies were shot in the same bathroom. [She laughs] So, you can… you kind of get used to this shared space and how it changes over time throughout these different movies that are all shot in the same location. And also, I mean, with the type of work that I do, a lot of it is very archival, too. Ask Any Buddy has 126 films in it, and I personally digitised about at least half of them. Some of them are ones that are available otherwise online, others are… you can’t see them unless you have a tape of them. And you know, it got to the point where, like, I was… collecting these trailer compilation tapes that porn labels would put out to try to get people to, like, you know, buy their releases. They would just take the theatrical trailer instead of, like, cutting together the highlights. And I started collecting those, and that was kind of the root of X-RATED / COLOR / ALL MALE CAST. But also, you know, some of these movies that I used for Ask Any Buddy, all I had access to is the trailer. So, there are films in my film that I still have never seen the full version of. I’ve only seen the three-minute trailer where I could pull, you know, a couple of shots of, like, a gay pride parade or a couple of shots of, like, a night-time sequence. So, it was a lot of hard archival work putting it together and then… I guess, working in isolation, it is hard because it’s hard, you know… At least with that one, now I know more people. At least with that one, it was hard for me to get feedback, so I had no clue if I was doing something that was good or bad or worthwhile or not, so…
[Sean Welsh] Well, I wanted to ask you, Katie, again, I think it’s been a while, if I’m not misspeaking, since you were actively involved in producing edits this way, at least for public consumption. Do you still dabble at all? Do you miss it, and has that kind of curatorial aspect… I think Bret touched on it as well, it’s partly a way of processing culture and then dealing with the influx and making sense of it. I mean, do you find that energy you’re using elsewhere or have you found a different way to process it?
[Katie Rife] I mean, my immersion into the world of so-called “bad movies…” I always use scare quotes when talking about that because… the motto… I don’t know if they still use it, but the motto, originally, of Everything is Terrible was, “If everything is terrible, nothing is.” And so, we were taking a more broad-minded approach to just appreciating things. Sometimes mocking them. For me, the mocking… the mocking mostly came from a place of, “I have a principled disagreement “with what you are trying to say here, and I’m going to make fun of you “as a way of subverting that.” It was… I guess I guess you’d call that culture-jamming. But… over time, you know, then we started dabbling more in kind of these underground auteurs, basically. It’s like Liz was saying, five films all shot in the same toilet. You start to realise that, “Oh, all of these films came from the same director.” And so, it kind of… A big way it’s influenced my work as a critic is my knowledge of the… I have a totally different canon that I’m working with from other folks, and… [She laughs] So, I think that it’s influenced my work in that way, number one. And in number two, just I… I don’t really think about things in traditional… I don’t consider “good” or “bad” to be, “It fits within an academic framework… “created by white, straight men “of what is quality and what is not.” I tend to think outside of that box more, and I would I would chalk that up entirely to my work in found footage.
[Sean Welsh] Thank you. Thank you. That’s fantastic. As a follow up, I just wondered if you, you know, in terms of the… Everything is Terrible, the theatrical part of that that’s kind of evolved, do you think that’s a necessary enhancement? Not necessarily as a commentary on Everything is Terrible now, I mean. Now in a world where everyone’s making supercuts on their phone, everyone is, you know… and list-making as programming… I don’t know. I’m sure there’s people in the… ..other panellists that might have a take on that, but we see a lot of that. You know, that’s seems to be the kind of bare minimum of curation required to be considered curation, to make a list, a collection with no further effort involved. So, do you…do you think that’s a necessary aspect of this kind of work, the more kind of personality presenting it that way? Yes, Katie, sorry, you.
[Katie Rife] Well, actually, I… This was… I… I understand the eventising utility of using the costumes and the puppets and everything, but I was more interested in moving in a direction that actually Liz has moved in in her work, which is creating narratives out of other narratives. I was very influenced by Craig Baldwin when I first came up, and a lot of our peers were working more in a loose party-tape type of capacity. But, yeah, I was always interested in building narratives out of other narratives and tropes. And so, actually, I would move it more in a direction of refining the tape itself, as opposed to creating a spectacle around the tape. That’s just my personal preference.
[Sean Welsh] And, Bret, on a similar token, everyone can do it, but not everyone can do it. What do you think separates, really, essentially the TikTok supercuts from the ones that play in festivals around the world? Or maybe nothing? Is it a question of quality or is it simply a question of the curator?
[Bret Berg] Uh, it’s usually a question of musicality, because editing is like music to me and I think most editors would agree that there’s some rhythm to it that you have to follow. And, uh, I don’t know… Ones for TikTok, I don’t know. There’s not… There’s actually not a whole lot between them because that’s what the medium will become, this weird, ill-defined medium that we’re all in. But I don’t know, I appreciate the… the long-form jams, the ability to… weave a narrative, but I think of it more musically than I do story-wise. But, uh, I don’t know… the feature films, the ones that play in festivals, are ones that manage to take something from today and apply it to yesterday and how we got to today. And I’m thinking of things, like, from antiquity, like The Atomic Café, from the early ’80s by Kevin Rafferty and crew, stuff like that. I don’t know… I also… It’s going to be harder to archive all the TikTok stuff, because it’s just the sheer quantity of it… and the ill-defined meta-tagging of it all. And does it survive or does it disappear? It’s the ultimate ephemerality, which is, like, that’s what we’re dealing with anyway, most of us, just, like, ephemeral material, which was just evaporated the second that it, you know, it was released. So, they’re going to have a much harder time archiving than any of us. And I’m looking forward to see how they tackle that problem, ’cause I’m not going to do that. It’s not my project.
[Sean Welsh] Well, I guess by extension, there, talking about the ephemerality of things… I did want to ask Liz, but also everyone, we’re, you know, we’re in this culture where… you know, physical media, which I think everyone has some kind of… has had some kind of dealings with, obviously, as consumers, if not producers… generally dwindling, and streaming libraries themselves are essentially ephemeral, I would say. There’s titles that come and go, and people are gradually coming to terms with the fact that they don’t actually own anything, you know, in terms of films, and these films disappear… at the whims of the corporations, whoever’s…or the streaming service. What can you say about piracy as preservation. If anyone has an immediate thought on that? I don’t know. Liz, do you have anything to say about piracy as preservation, in any context?
[Elizabeth Purchell] With the types of films that I have worked with in the past… there are films that have been out of circulation for decades. The last known video release of them was, you know, in the early ’80s to the early ’90s, and that’s it. Film elements for most of those films are non-existent. They were destroyed or thrown away or are just lost and MIA. I mean, that’s a big thing that I’ve been working on this past couple of years, is getting more into the film preservation angle of it – tracking down prints, commissioning restorations, working on things like that to make sure that, you know, these films… can still exist and, you know, get them in front of people again. This anthology series that I just wrapped up the other day was, you know, kind of the biggest form of that. We commissioned a new restoration for it. We showed five films on 16mm for the first time in 40 years. Some of… Three of those five were films that we found in the last year and a half. So, that’s how that’s how recent, like, some of this stuff is happening, and… I think the biggest thing for my stuff is just kind of making people aware that this stuff exists, and then, you know, hopefully if they’re curious viewers like I try to be, they’ll want to see more of it or they’ll want to see, you know, “If this exists, what else is there?” That’s kind of been my guiding principle for everything I do in film is, you know, “If this exists, what else is there?” I want to see all of it. I want to know what it is. And I mean, I guess kind of following up on what Katie was talking about, I think this kind of material works so well presented theatrically. This past series was the first time I’d ever seen my film in a theatre, despite me making it three years ago, because of the pandemic. And I think it’s… it works so much better than watching it at home on a streaming service or on YouTube. I mean, also the fact that I can’t put my film – on any streaming service because… [She laughs] ..a lot of hardcore content, but…it’s exciting to see…films like Earth II and Terror Nullius and all this new work being presented theatrically or in galleries or… in public spaces where people can react to it the way they should.
[Sean Welsh] Fantastic. I mean… I guess I’ll throw that question open to anyone. Anti-Banality Union, in terms of… I don’t know if you have a viewpoint on piracy as preservation, particularly. You don’t have to be drawn on that if you’d prefer not to be.
[Anti-Banality Union] Well, I mean, we don’t really do any kind of archiving ourselves, but… Yeah, the thing about streaming, it’s weird. Like, there’s films that are, you know, people have seen, they might want to rewatch them, but, like, now we don’t own anything any more. And now it’s not on the streaming service, so… I mean, Pirate Bay is really a public service in that regard and, like, really is, like, a way of preserving… you know, access to this sort of common cultural heritage that we have. I mean, it’s interesting because this is all very mainstream stuff, but it can just become… ..inaccessible for, you know, whatever reason. Um… I also do want to shout out, DVD.com still exists.
[Katie Rife] Yeah, it does!
[Anti-Banality Union] We can still get discs…
[Katie chuckles]
[Anti-Banality Union] ..which is one way that we make our work. The way that we acquire material. Yeah, um… But yeah, I mean, I don’t… I don’t know if I have much else to say about that. Yeah, I mean we think that… Yeah, piracy in general…is, yeah, it’s great, and everyone should have access to this material, you know.
[Sean Welsh] Did someone have their hand up? Katie, were you going to…?
[Katie Rife] Yeah.
[Sean Welsh] Yeah, please do.
[Katie Rife] Oh, I just had a few thoughts about the whole piracy angle. Um, when I… When Everything is Terrible was first starting and I was really heavily involved with the group, it was a really interesting time because… you know, when… when I first got the inspiration to do this, this was done primarily on VHSs and DVDs that were distributed through the mail. It was, like, very old school and the internet wasn’t really involved. And so, when Everything is Terrible… I think we were the first ones to have, like, a dedicated website to found footage mixes. I’m not sure about that, but I think we were. And so, we started right after YouTube started. So, YouTube was brand-new also. And so, it was very much, like, all this piracy stuff rose alongside us, and the stuff that we were featuring was nothing that was backed by any kind of major… We never discussed it out loud, but it was kind of understood that we would never touch anything that somebody might have a copyright claim on. [She laughs] Like, you know, an active… backed-by-attorneys type of copyright claim. We did get a couple of cease and desists in our day, but… So, it was all rising alongside us, and the kind of stuff that we were working with was not stuff that people pirated all that much. But when we started making full-length mixes, a very interesting development happened, which was people were pirating our mixes, our mixes showed up on Pirate Bay. And so, we kind of… I personally felt… There was part of me that was like, “Well, fair game.” I mean, you know, that’s what we’re doing, so… But what we did… But at the same time, like, you know, we were really scraping together… ..like, just buying all the tapes and all the time you put into it, you kind of want to recoup something from it. We would like for people to buy the DVDs. So, what we ended up doing was, we took the first Everything is Terrible, Everything is Terrible: The Movie, the very first full-length tape, and we ran it through a VCR three times, re-digitised that, and uploaded that onto Pirate Bay ourselves. So, you could watch it, but it would look like shit. And then it had a tag on the end that said where you could buy a better-looking copy of Everything Is Terrible: The Movie. So, that’s how we handled Pirate Bay in the early days.
[Sean Welsh] We’re going to run out of time relatively shortly, so I want everyone to feel like they can, like, chip in… and say, like… I guess we’ve touched on it a wee bit already, but how do you recognise… you know… if we can separate the art from the artist to an extent? How did you recognise what’s quality work in terms of found footage, given that, again, anyone can do it? So-called supercuts are reigning supreme, the listicles… What makes you recognise…? What jumps out as… the voice, perhaps, of the editor? How do you recognise good work in this context, or is it purely, you know, the entertainment value, something that catches your brain and draws you in?
[Katie Rife] I, personally… Something that happened with the work that we were doing in the late 2000s that I feel kind of ambivalent about is… posting these things just to make fun of them. I personally am mostly interested in found footage work that, number one, creates a narrative like I was talking about before, and, number two, has some sort of interest in the material beyond just, “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” like, mockery. I find that a little condescending. And so… Just, yeah, anything that takes a… either, you know, clearly takes a work seriously. And, like, in the kind of archiving work that Bret does, you know, it’s done with respect. And, um… A lot of the kind of supercuts online are just pure… pure mockery, and I want something that digs a little deeper than that, either through respect for the material or transformation of the material, like what Anti-Banality Union or Liz does.
[Bret Berg] My… This is maybe tangential, maybe not. But my favourite… new thing to see on YouTube… is corporate versions of supercuts. There is a Rodney Dangerfield official YouTube account, and they are uploading in 1080 all this, like, archival stand-up and cable specials and stuff. And sometimes they’re going, like, “Every time he goes ‘he-he’ on The Tonight Show,” and it’s, like, five minutes long. That’s kind of fucking amazing. And somebody is being paid to do that. To me, that’s the most interesting work, and that’s where the true new talent is. They’re getting… They’re young and they’re getting sucked up into, like, weird corporate archival gigs and doing things like that. Or one of the best found footage pieces I’ve seen in recent memory was the game show channel, Buzzer… about, like, seven years ago… had a couple 30-second spots… that were found footage. Like, they were, like, awesome punk singles. They were so good because they were musical. They actually, like, made, like, a Bobby McFerrin style… [He vocalises rhythmically] ..like, this weird… beat-boxing vibe with footage of Family Feud and Let’s Make a Deal and stuff. That stuff’s cool. That is fucking amazing to me. And it’s, like, people who are… presumably younger people who are being given these weird new-media jobs who get to do that. That’s what I like to see out of, like, the current crop. TikTok is whatever.
[Elizabeth Purchell] Getting paid to do found footage – must be nice.
[Bret Berg] Must be fucking nice. And that’s why, like, they’re… they’re really good at it because they’re probably, like, working at trailer houses and get to segue into that or something. On that note, when I first… the first time I ever came across, like, that corporate form of supercut was in… ..Live Free or Die Hard… which I think was… I forget when that was exactly… 2014 or whatever…2013… But there’s a…there’s a sequence that’s like a CNN concatenated-style, sort of, like, ransom note that is, like, cut together from presidential speeches. And it’s really great. But it made me happy to see that somebody had been… probably paid decently to make something like that for, you know, to just act as a plot device in a… Bruce Willis vehicle. Another weird thought is that, in some ways, the E! cable channel is an unsung hero of the found footage saga because of The Soup. Not Talk Soup with Greg Kinnear or John Henson, but in the Joel McHale version of The Soup, because they had… they were doing killer supercuts on that show all the time. And they had to metadata tag their own captures probably. They had a whole team of people working on it.
[Sean Welsh] So, I guess I want to go back to Anti-Banality Union. Like, not to end on a grim note, but… there’s a grim prognosis which your film Earth II, which is going to close the festival… is particularly relevant to, deliberately so, clearly. If it’s not too open a question, what do you hope… not to overwhelm this with a lofty question, but what do you hope it can achieve, your film? What is its role, and will you continue to…? You’ve been working together so long in different configurations. Will you continue to do that, and what’s next?
[Anti-Banality Union] Uh, I can field that. Well, in terms of what the film could accomplish, I mean… I think a lot of film-makers tend to overstate their… ..impact that they can have. I mean, we think it’s… we think it’s an entertaining film, and we wanted it to be something that… people who were maybe like-minded could watch and, like, feel some kinship or, you know, some sense that they… that they’re not the only people thinking about these things. But beyond that… You know, I mean, we really felt like we wanted to make, like, a blockbuster that was for our friends, like, a blockbuster… like make our own blockbuster that could… ..that could speak to the topics that we felt we wanted to speak to. But, you know, while still using this form that we felt was very powerful but, like, not really accessible to most people. So… [Phone alarm chirps] You know, beyond that, um… Yeah, what are we working on next? I mean, we’re going to keep working in this form, probably, because it’s very… I mean, number one, it’s fun to do, to be honest, but also we’ve just kind of programmed our minds in such a way that we can’t not think about media this way. So, we’re probably just going to keep doing it. We do have a couple of projects in the works. One is a period piece. That will hopefully come out… in less than five more years. We’re hoping to finish it before the sea level rise forces us out of New York City. So, yeah, I mean… I don’t know, Earth II does sort of have perhaps a grim prognosis. I mean, we feel like it’s fairly realistic. We didn’t want to do something that was too hopeful because, you know, we just wanted to respect the audience a bit. But we do feel like it does leave the door open, like, there is some hope there in the end. I mean, the way we see it, you know, life finds a way, so to speak. So… I don’t know. I mean, I guess no-one in the audience has seen it. So, I guess you’ll see what I’m talking about when you watch it.
[Sean Welsh] I mean, just for clarity, when I was talking about the grim prognosis, I meant for life on earth, rather than one that was imposed by the film itself. Just because of everything coming out of COP27, it seems like the right couple of weeks to be… focusing on it. So, yeah, hopefully life does find a way.
[Anti-Banality Union] Actually, yeah, to that… Sorry, just to clarify a bit. Yeah. I mean, the way we see it, it really feels like there is no… I mean, there is no way that… Well, let me put it this way. We’re in the midst of the end of a particular way of life. And, you know, it’s up to us to determine what will replace that. But, you know, we can’t… this can’t continue. Like, you know, we’ll see if… what replaces it is better or worse than what we currently have.
[Katie Rife] Coastal Americans are welcome to come to Chicago. If we reverse the flow of the Chicago River again, which we already did once… the lake will flow away from us. You’re all welcome to join us in Chicago.
[Sean Welsh] Well, I guess we’re close to wrapping up. If anyone has any final thoughts on the future of footage or the college film… or can tell us what they’re up to particularly? I don’t know, Liz, you’re still working on the trailer show, I think. Is that what’s next?
[Elizabeth Purchell] Yeah, no, um… Things are finally starting to kind of come together with that, as the version I showed last night hopefully shows. It’s something I started at the beginning of the pandemic, and… A, I kept finding trailers. I have, I think, over 250 gay porn trailers at this point. So, it was like, how do you narrow that down and how do you make it work in a way that’s… entertaining and also not boring and not just, “Here’s a trailer, here’s a trailer, here’s a trailer, here’s a trailer.” So, I think I finally kind of cracked the code, and I hope… the final product comes out good and that people like it and, you know, we can get it out there. It’s been… I feel really reinvigorated after this series I just wrapped up in New York, and it’s been very… cool to see people looking at this film I made three years ago and, you know, liking it, and… finally, I think, starting to get to see the things that I wanted people to see within it, that it’s not just, like, a documentary or whatever, so… we’ll see what happens next.
[Sean Welsh] And, Bret, I’m sure you’ll continue Museum of Home Video… interminably, forever.
[Bret chuckles]
[Bret Berg] Yeah. It is a train that’s left the station. So, it’s every… I do a livestream every Tuesday night at 7:30pm Pacific time on MuseumOfHomeVideo.com. It’s a two-hour plus… I don’t know, VJ session of things that I’ve cut, and then things that I’ve found. Yeah, hopefully we’ll get on tour next year. We’ll do some live shows next year.
[Sean Welsh] It’s been an absolute honour to host you all for Weird Weekend III, and hopefully we’ll see all of you as part of the programmes in future years. But thanks so much for being part of this one, and have a good rest of your day.
Full details of Weird Weekend III’s Squint: Cinema From Cinema strand, which was hosted at CCA Glasgow, 29-30/10/22, are available here.