185 1 85 9 Audiovisual Dissonance in Found-Footage Film Holly Rogers At its most basic, the found-footage ilm extracts images and sounds from a variety of sources and places them into new audiovisual conigurations. Cinema history has thrown up numerous examples of such re-appropriation, from the borrowing of stock footage and locational shots between Hollywood ilms in the 1930s and ’40s, to the stitching together of new and original material to form a seamless narrative in more recent ilms such as Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (Carl Reiner, 1982) and Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994). While these examples from mainstream culture produce a new, yet coherent, visual re-contextualisation of sources by obscuring the di ferent pro- duction qualities between clips, however, the experimental found-footage ilm creates something diferent. Although making use of compilation, cut-up, free-association, détournement and the super-cut, experimental directors also embrace footage taken from mainstream culture as their primary material. And yet, they seek to highlight and reinforce the di ferent qualities between collaged clips, inviting audience members not only to construct coherence between newly contextualised images, but also to generate critical readings of the original, deconstructed texts. he form of double engagement that such a process engenders can transform culturally iconic footage into a critique of cinema’s values and methods of construction, as Michael Zryd writes: “Found- footage ilmmaking is a metahistorical form commenting on the cultural discourses and narrative patterns behind history. Whether picking through the detritus of the mass mediascape or reinding (through image processing and optical printing) the new OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Wed Mar 08 2017, NEWGEN acprof-9780190469894.indd 185 3/8/2017 11:56:45 AM