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The Experimental Film Remake

and the Digital Archive Effect:
A Movie by Jen Proctor and Man with
a Movie Camera: The Global Remake

Jaimie Baron

When we think of film remakes, what come to mind are likely Hollywood
narratives reproduced with new stars, more special effects, and bigger budgets,
whose producers hope to cash in on a tried and true formula “updated” to suit the
tastes of contemporary audiences. Recently, however, a number of experimental
filmmakers have chosen quite different sources to “update.” Over the past few
years filmmakers Jennifer Proctor and Perry Bard have returned to classics of
experimental film to “remake” these provocative works in and for the digital
era. Jennifer Proctor’s A Movie by Jen Proctor (US, 2010) uses images from
online file-sharing sites to mimic Bruce Conner’s classic 1958 experimental film
A Movie, while Perry Bard’s Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake
(ongoing since 2008) uses online interactive software to allow users worldwide
to upload images and participate in a collective, daily remake of Dziga Vertov’s
seminal 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera. Given that experimental film
often encourages the viewer to explore the very experience of viewing a film,
these digitally based remakes of experimental films inevitably draw attention
not only to how the world that is imaged within them has changed but also to
how our experiences of that world through its reproduction as image have been
altered by digital media.
The form of the remake allows us to see both similarity and difference as they
emerge across time. As Laura Grindstaff has noted, writing about the more main-
stream form of remake mentioned above, “The remake is . . . a rich site for critical
analysis precisely because its derivative status, its very secondariness and duplicity
forces a certain assessment of conventional notions of authorship, authenticity,

Framework 53, No. 2, Fall 2012, pp. 467–490. Copyright © 2012 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

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and originality. On the one hand, the existence of a remake only seems to confirm
the fact that originality lies elsewhere—in the other, prior text. On the other hand,
the remake helps expose originality as a relative, not absolute, concept.”1
These two shot-for-shot remakes explicitly reveal the fact that their “origin”
lies in an “other, prior text”; that is precisely their point. More significantly,
however, I would argue that these two films in their “secondariness” point to
the “relative” experience of watching similar images produced through different
moving-image media, indicating the ways in which digital media technologies
have altered the very conditions of knowledge about the world—both past and
present—as it is obtained through images. By appropriating images either from
digital archives in A Movie by Jen Proctor or into a digital work in Man with
a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, these filmmakers draw attention to the
ways in which digital media have reshaped both our experience of watching a
film—experimental and otherwise—and our experience of the world through
its reproduction as images. In this essay, I argue that these two “remakes” offer an
opportunity for us to think through the ways in which digital media produce a
mediated experience of the world both similar to and different from the mediated
experience of the world produced by filmic images.

A Movie by Jen Proctor

In 1958, Bruce Conner’s A Movie radically disrupted notions of authorship
while simultaneously drawing attention to the materiality of the filmic image
and performing an incisive critique of the relationship between film images and
the spectacle of human violence and destruction. Drawing on previously shot
or “found” film footage from a variety of sources, including films commercially
produced for the home market, Conner crafted a twelve-minute reflection of the
contemporary cinematic unconscious, bringing together pieces of footage—of
motorcycle accidents, women undressing, atomic explosions, and a charging
elephant, to name only a few—that would likely never have found one another
otherwise.2 Fifty-two years later, experimental filmmaker Jennifer Proctor rep-
licated Conner’s film in and for the digital era in A Movie by Jen Proctor (2010).
Using the same soundtrack—Ottorino Respighi’s 1924 Pines of Rome—Proctor
constructed a (nearly) shot-for-shot remake of A Movie using video images down-
loaded from the video-sharing sites YouTube and LiveLeak.3 Juxtaposed against
Conner’s film, Proctor’s remake reveals the play of similarities and differences
between the contents and form of the specifically filmic archive—which includes
films found in home movie collections and flea markets as well as in official
archives—in 1958 and of the digital archive of images available on the Internet
for appropriation in 2010.4 Moreover, it simultaneously offers the opportunity

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to reflect on the very different experiential effects documents derived from

the material filmic archive and the immaterial digital archive offer as they are
appropriated into experimental films.
Throughout its history, A Movie has provoked discussion and speculation
about the effects it may have on the viewer. William Moritz and Beverly O’Neill
describe the film as a polysemic exploration of the filmic medium, arguing that,
“In the hands of another artist, A Movie might have become a didactic, apocalyptic
message film, but Conner manages to open up his material to richer meanings,
rather than pull in tight on a single denotation.”5 Other theorists have also seen
within Conner’s film the revolutionary potential for a new kind of spectatorship
or a new relationship between film and viewer. Writing for the Walker Art Center’s
retrospective of Conner’s work entitled 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part
II (of which there was no part I), Bruce Jenkins writes that “It would be Conner’s
singular contribution to remove the viewer from the [experimental filmmaker
Stan] Brahkagean paradigm—from a close encounter, that is, with the personal
vision of the filmmaker—and from Hollywood’s third-person, omniscient fictions
as well. The result would be a completely novel viewing experience that might best
be termed ‘second-person film,’ continually addressing itself to the experience
of ‘you,’ the film viewer, through an active reworking of the already coded and
manipulated cultural material of the movies.”6
In contrast to Jenkins’ notion of the second-person film, however, Jennifer
Horne has argued that, despite or perhaps because of its parody of continuity edit-
ing, Conner’s film suggests that the address of any film—including and especially
that of A Movie—is impossible to locate. She writes,

Against the haunting accompaniment of Respighi’s 1923–24 composition,

Pines of Rome, the action of one shot seems to set off a reaction in the one that
follows, in the time-honored manner of Hollywood. On closer view, however,
the frames retain their value as stock imagery. The spectator’s desire for logic is
repeatedly frustrated and rewarded as sequences are interrupted by countdown
leaders and blank frames; at one point the “end of part four” appears on the
screen, startling a viewer who had not realized there were any parts at all. The
unsettling proposition that Conner makes with A Movie is that in its efforts to
speak directly to its spectator, film must speak to no one in particular.7

While these theorists put forth different interpretations of the relationship A

Movie establishes with the viewer, it is clear that the film poses questions about
how the viewer may respond to this or similar gatherings of cinematic fragments.
The notions of polysemy, second-person film, and a film that frustrates
viewers’ desire for logic or a coherent address resonate with experimental found

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footage films—including A Movie by Jen Proctor—from later eras as well. How-

ever, John P. Bowles notes the specificity of Conner’s films to the particular social
and historical context in which they were made, suggesting that “It is the specific
ways that Conner’s assemblages combine objects of postwar American consumer
culture to interrogate the interrelatedness of consumerism, the mass media, the
military-industrial complex, and compulsory heterosexuality that makes them so
compelling.”8 Indeed, A Movie emerged in response to a particular—and disturb-
ing—moment in American history. Moreover, in terms of sheer amount, the film
footage available to Conner for appropriation was greatly limited in comparison
with the film and video footage that has become available since the invention
and dissemination of digital media. Fifty-two years later, Proctor’s remake of
Conner’s film reflects a very different social, historical, technological—and,
hence, spectatorial—moment in which the Internet has become a prime source for
appropriated sounds and images. While A Movie by Jen Proctor is also polysemic
and invites an active (or perhaps frustrated) form of spectatorship, I would suggest
that it is precisely in the gaps between the “then” of Conner’s film and the “now”
of Proctor’s remake that the fascination of Proctor’s film lies.9
One difference between “then” and “now” is that the distinction between
“archival footage”—once understood as film footage stored in an official state
or commercial archive and used for “documentary” purposes—and “found foot-
age”—once understood as film footage found in a flea market, a trash can, or a
home movie collection and deployed in experimental films—has lost its effectivity.
When Conner made his films with projectionists’ scraps and sequences cut from
films sold for the home-viewing market, these images were clearly “found” as
opposed to “archival” images culled from an official state or commercial archive.
Moreover, Conner did not use his appropriated images in the service of docu-
mentary-style explanation but rather in the service of a work of avant-garde art.
Thus, A Movie could be easily categorized as an experimental found footage film.
However, with the advent of extensive unofficial archives—including private film
and video collections as well as online archives of audiovisual documents—from
which filmmakers are appropriating sounds and images, the distinction between
“found” and “archival” footage no longer makes sense. It is often impossible to
know from exactly where a given piece of footage used in a film derives. Moreover,
the line between an expository compilation documentary and an experimental
found footage film has been blurred by the circulation of the same images across
both genres. Thus, I suggest that it is now more useful to define “archival footage”
in terms of the experience of or effect on the spectator watching a particular kind
of text, which I refer to as an “appropriation film,” a category that includes both
documentary and experimental films.
Indeed, when the spectator watching a given film becomes aware of certain

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kinds of textual differences between different elements of the same film, that film
produces for the viewer what I call the “archive effect.”10 The archive effect may,
on the one hand, be produced by the spectator’s phenomenological experience of
a “temporal disparity” between different elements of the same text—e.g., footage
of the same person at the moment of a film’s production and at an earlier time. For
instance, in Michael Apted’s Up series (UK, 1963/1970/1977/1984/1991/1998/20
05/2012), we see the same interview subjects at different ages. The newest footage
of the interview subjects at 56 years old produces the footage of the same subjects
at seven, twenty-one, twenty-eight, and so on as “archival.” The archive effect
may, on the other hand, also be produced by the spectator’s phenomenological
awareness of an “intentional disparity” between different elements of the same
text, in which the spectator’s perception of the “original” intended use of a piece
of footage (which is, of course, ultimately unknowable but nevertheless imagined)
contrasts with its current use. For instance, in Emile de Antonio’s Point of Order
(US, 1964), footage that reads as originally intended to simply document the
McCarthy hearings is reedited into a scathing critique of McCarthy and his
interrogation methods. In both cases, the experience of temporal and intentional
disparity produces the footage in question as precisely “archival.” The archive effect
is, however, ultimately a matter of a given spectator’s perception. If the spectator
does not experience temporal or intentional disparity, the archive effect will not
occur and the footage will not be produced as archival.
Conner’s A Movie, like many experimental appropriation films, depends heav-
ily on the production of an experience of intentional disparity. Indeed, Conner’s
film constantly produces a sense that each piece of film comes from a different
source and that each was intended for a very different purpose than the one it
serves in A Movie. Ethnographic footage of bare-breasted women carrying huge
loads above their heads, snippets of Hollywood B-movie Westerns, documentary
footage of car crashes, and many other images collide with one another, gesturing
toward their diverse previous contexts of use but held together through Conner’s
skillful editing and the musical score. As Warren Bass puts it:

Conner . . . often achieves his effects by working against the dominant impres-
sion of a shot. He does this by placing it in a context that denies the shot’s
original intent or by using black spaces, clear spaces and loops as a way of
extending the duration of his images while respecting their integrity. Through
these strategies, Conner brings out latent associative meanings (what Eisenstein
would call overtonal meanings) while subverting or neutralizing the dominant
meaning. Conner makes films that have many possible associative meanings
at any one moment but no simple direct dominant meaning. His films are
purposely ambiguous giving the audience freedom to think and bring their own

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personal and possibly tangential associations into the fugue of sound/picture

relationships.11

Thus, “latent associative meanings,” seemingly in excess of the original producer’s

intentions, subvert the “dominant meaning” seemingly intended by the original
producer of the images—thereby producing intentional disparity. At the same
time, however, temporal disparity may also be in effect in the film. Moritz and
O’Neill, for instance, write:

During the opening portion [of A Movie], [Conner] constructs a series of mini-
films, each beginning and ending with titles, some ascribed to Bruce Conner, and
each parodying one common expectation that people have about the nature of
movies. One shows an excerpt from a cowboy fiction film, another a snippet of
a girlie-porno movie, another the technical identity of film itself (an emblematic
use of leader), another a fragment of documentary or newsreel footage. Some
are informed by ruthless satire, and all are distanced by a certain datedness.
Thus, using these devices, Conner establishes a sense of critical perspective at
the film’s beginning.12

Along with experience of intentional disparity, it is the viewer’s perception of

fragments resurrected from a (slightly) earlier time that may produce such a
“critical perspective”—and the archive effect.
As a shot-for-shot remake that mimics the structure of Conner’s film, A
Movie by Jen Proctor necessarily also depends on the viewer’s perception of both
intentional and temporal disparity. The diverse contents of the images as well as
their varied quality suggest that they have come from a huge number of different
filmmakers who are not Jennifer Proctor. Simultaneously, the very fact they were
downloaded from the Internet opens a temporal gap (however short) between
when they were uploaded and when Proctor appropriated them. For instance, in
an early sequence in the film, Proctor inserts a series of video images of women
taking off their stockings, shots that parallel a filmic image—most likely from
a porn film from the 1940s or ’50s—of a woman taking off her stockings that
appears in Conner’s film. The video images in Proctor’s film show four different
women engaged in this act—one clearly located on a brightly lit, gaudily colored
stage set, another sitting on a bed leaning against a white wall, another sitting
outside near a swimming pool, and the last in what looks like a motel room.
This final woman wears a mask, suggesting that she may, in fact, be a man. These
images seem connected only at the level of their content—women taking off
their stockings—as if they all came up together in response to the same search
term (which they probably did). Despite this denotative commonality, they seem

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Figure 1. Four appropriated images from A
Movie by Jen Proctor, each of a woman (or
perhaps one man) taking off her stockings.
These images “substitute” for the image of
a single woman taking off her stockings in
Bruce Conner’s A Movie.
Jaimie Baron

to come from completely different sources, and this recognition on the part of
the viewer (if it occurs) produces a sense of intentional disparity between their
original purposes (each posted online for some reason, however unclear) and
the purpose to which they have been put in Proctor’s film. At the same time, our
recognition that Proctor searched for these images using a search engine places
these images in a (slightly) past tense. They preexisted Proctor’s searching for,
finding, and repurposing of them.
Yet Proctor’s explicit mimicry of Conner’s film also opens up an additional
experience of temporal disparity between the images in her remake and those in
Conner’s original. For viewers familiar with Conner’s film, an awareness of the
temporal disparity between the two films is also present throughout the viewing
of Proctor’s film.13 Indeed, I would argue that it is precisely this experience of
temporal disparity between the two films that enacts the broader difference
between what I term the material archive effect and the digital archive effect. As
viewers, we may recognize the difference between the material and digital sources
of each set of appropriated images, which allows us to examine our disparate
encounters—through the archival footage in each of these films—with the archive
of each of these media forms. Archives, moreover, hold the promise of retaining a
trace of “the real,” and while both material and digital audiovisual archives offer us
traces of “the real,” our encounters with material and digital traces each produce
a unique experience of difference between the archival document and our lived
experience of the world these traces claim to represent. These encounters, then,
point toward the specificity of the mediation at work. Conner and Proctor’s
appropriation films, placed side by side, unveil the specificity of their archival
mediations. What follows is a comparison between the different experiential
effects produced by each film.
At a general level, the contrasts between Conner’s and Proctor’s films
illuminate some of the experiential differences between watching film and video
images that have been “archived”—whether stored in an official archive, a film
can in a family basement, or an online database—and then appropriated into a
new text. However, the music and the denotative content of the images serves as
a common baseline against which these differences may emerge. Writing about
the soundtrack of Conner’s film, Moritz and O’Neill note that

The track for A Movie, Respighi’s Pines of Rome, with its romantic, emotional
dynamism, could easily destroy the potency and coherence of image; but
instead Conner’s judicious choice of sound excerpts enhances the drama
inherent in each found scene. In the tightrope walking sequence, for example,
the fear the acrobats will fall is allayed by the music’s delicate, mysterious tones
emphasizing the moment’s truly magical and gravity-defying properties. Some

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of the terrifying shots (a sinking ship, car crashes with drivers dismembered
and mutilated, malaria victims pathetically shivering, Mussolini’s body being
hung up in a city square, a firing-squad execution, etc.) are given a sense of tragic
dignity by the swell of the symphonic sound, but this feeling in turn is undercut
by the interjection of absurd shots: a grotesque bicycle race or motorcycles
plowing through mud.14

Proctor’s use of Pines of Rome not only cues the viewer familiar with Conner’s film
to recall the original but also guarantees that the affective experience of the two
films will bear some similarity regardless of the differences in imagery. In addition,
the denotative content of the imagery in both films is very similar. Indeed, much
of the pleasure of watching Proctor’s film lies in marveling that the filmmaker was
able to find parallel contemporary images for some of the more unexpected shots
in A Movie: full-grown adults racing one another on tiny tricycles, water-skiers
violently crashing after jumping a ramp, airplanes disintegrating in midair, a
charging elephant, and so on.
It is against this parallel sonic and denotative backdrop that differences in
era and medium begin to emerge. One of the first and most immediate visual
differences between the two films is that the appropriated film images in A
Movie are all black and white, while nearly all of the video images in A Movie by
Jen Proctor are color, pointing to the fact that digital video—unlike film—has,
from its beginning, been primarily a color medium. While watching black and
white film emphasizes the difference between the film image—its materiality
as celluloid—and our lived experience of the world, digital video ostensibly
replicates our experience of color in the “real world.” I would argue, however, that
the perceptible digitality of the appropriated images in Proctor’s film in fact works
against this sense of continuity with the lived world. Indeed, both Conner’s film
and Proctor’s film point to the gaps between image and referent but do so with
different effects. This is suggested by several other contrasting qualities that mark
a difference between the filmic and digital images as well as their relation to the
lived world in these two films.15
To begin with, while many of the images in Conner’s film bear traces of dirt
and scratches, the images in Proctor’s film are absolutely “clean.” Although the
former have clearly been stored somewhere in the material world and therefore
display the marks that physical contact with the prints has left, the latter do not
display such marks because, presumably, they have been stored exclusively in
the digital realm. In fact, there is no trace of the material world on these images
except for—in cases in which the digital image reads as an indexical image of
the “real” world—the contents of the images themselves. For instance, one of
the places in which the materiality of the images in Conner’s film contrasts most

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Figure 2. In A Movie by
Jen Proctor, digitally-
generated images and
effects replace similar
filmic images from
Conner’s A Movie.
 The Experimental Film Remake

visibly with the digitality of the images in Proctor’s film is in the use of projec-
tion countdowns and titles in the first sequence. At the beginning of A Movie,
the titles “Bruce Conner” and “A Movie” are repeatedly shown, accompanied
by bits of leader that include numbered countdowns, titles, leader marked at
some earlier point by projections, and titles that—despite the fact the film has
just begun—say “End of Part Four” or “The End.” Many of these images clearly
show signs of use and wear in the form of marks, scratches, and punch-holes.
Proctor’s film replicates the denotative contents of these images, but not the
qualities. In this case, the titles and countdown numbers are completely “clean,”
digitally generated, and therefore immune to worldly wear. There is no scratch,
no projectionist’s mark; in other words, there is no direct trace of the material
world on these images. Instead, the countdown numbers are smooth and
seamless, loaded with visual effects that clearly betray their digital origin. To
the title “Jen Proctor” is added an animated “star effect” so that the title seems
to “sparkle” in a blatantly artificial manner. Moreover, instead of simple images
of numbers, we are presented with numbers surrounded by moving graphics of
clocks, eyeballs, and graphically simulated filmstrips. The words “End of Part
Two” fly onto the screen from either side over a graphic image of what looks like
the Grim Reaper. In this smooth, clean, and impenetrable world of the digital,
material contingency is eliminated. These images and effects come from an
elsewhere that exists only within the computer.16 Paradoxically, the inscription
of the “real” produced by the dirt and scratches on film, which briefly obscures
parts of the images in Conner’s film, produces a certain haptic reality effect,
a sense that we could physically touch this film image in a way that the video
images in Proctor’s film can never be touched.
This pattern of contrast between dirtiness and cleanness is not limited,
however, to the “title sequence” of each film; rather, it occurs throughout the
films. For example, in a later section, three slightly blurred black-and-white
images of an unmarked blimp in Conner’s film are marred by scratches and
contrast dramatically with the sharp, clean color images of three blimps in
Proctor’s film—one unmarked, another labeled Metlife, and the third labeled
“Who is Ron Paul? Google Ron Paul.” In addition to the shift toward increased
commercialism reflected in these latter blimps, the difference between the filmic
and digital images of the blimps also reflects the untouchability of digital images.
Indeed, while the images appropriated by Proctor are in color and are much more
“clean” than those appropriated by Conner, the very lack of markings signifies the
immateriality of the digital images and thus their distance from “the real.” Thus,
the contrast between the “dirtiness” and “cleanness” produced as these different
kinds of images are appropriated and become “archival” is one factor in the dif-
ferential experiences of the material archive effect and the digital archive effect.

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Figure 3. Appropriated from the

digital archive, the images in A
Movie by Jen Proctor begin to
blur the lines between indexical
video imagery and purely
iconic digital imagery
generated for a videogame.

In addition, while the scratching and material degradation of the filmic

images in Conner’s film emphasizes the materiality of the filmstrip, the visibility
of the digital compression of the images in Proctor’s film emphasizes the digital
nature of the representations. Both degradation and compression work against
our sense of their continuity with the lived world. A filmic image—made up of
light-sensitive silver on an acetate substrate—is, in fact, no more “like” its referent
than a digital image; however, I would suggest that the dirt, scratches, and other
marks on the images in Conner’s film gesture toward the images’ material status
in a way that the digital images do not. Looking at these projected images, we may
experience a sense of “peering through” the tactile debris to the “real,” even if this
experience is fundamentally misleading. In contrast, many of the images in Proc-
tor’s film show signs of pixelation due to digital compression. As Peter Lunenfeld
notes, “In most commercial systems, image compression is a vital component of

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Figure 4. Indexical video

images of what appears to be a
real firing squad intercut with
images of similar violence from
a videogame.

digital imaging, in order to keep file sizes, transfer rates, and archiving manageable.
With each compression and expansion, the digital image suffers at least its own
mutation and degradation, just as does its analog predecessor. Uncompressing
digital images does not reproduce them, it rewrites them. Networked environ-
ments promise to worsen, not lessen, this situation, due to the need to compress
images before sending them out, only to unstuff—and thereby rewrite—them at
the other end.”17
Thus, even though both analog and digital formats degrade, the compres-
sion of digital files as they are archived and transferred through networked
environments involves a “rewriting” of the very code that allows the image to
appear. Moreover, at an experiential level, while both the dirt and scratches in
Conner’s film and the compression in Proctor’s point to the mediated nature of
the images—to their difference from “the real”—the pixelation does not allow for

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a sense of “seeing through.” On the contrary, pixelation transforms the image itself
into a set of colored squares, so that the referent seems to be partially dissolved
rather than partially obscured. At a certain point, the line between pixelated
images of the real and “realistic” images from video games becomes potentially
indistinguishable, blurring the boundaries between iconic and indexical images—
a blurring that does not occur at any point in Conner’s film.
This is particularly significant in Proctor’s film when pixelated but indexical
images of the “real” are juxtaposed with pixelated images that are iconic but
not indexical. In several instances, Proctor inserts images appropriated from
video game gameplay into a sequence of more obviously indexical imagery. In
Conner’s film, soon after the initial “title sequence” (although titles continue to
reappear throughout), we see a series of images from Hollywood Western cowboy
chase scenes, intercut with an image of an elephant running and then a series of
vehicular crashes of various kinds from various points of view. In Proctor’s film,
we witness a range of approximations and intensifications. First, in place of the
cowboys and Indians, we see color images of dogs running alongside cars, a cow
running down the middle of a well-manicured street, a goat pulling a race kart,
an elephant running through a group of trees, a car being chased down a freeway
by several police cars, and then races involving various kinds of vehicles. Next, we
are confronted by a series of racing shots—of trucks, cars, motorcycles, and even
a tank—many of them from the point of view of the racing vehicles themselves.
The camera then cuts to a shot from a first-person, car-racing video game, which is
followed by more indexical point-of-view shots taken from racing vehicles. Finally,
the sequence ends with a series of vehicles (with human beings on or inside them)
crashing and flying through the air.
Like Conner’s film, Proctor’s film points to the human fascination with
speed and motion, as well as the visual parallels between different forms of
technologically enhanced human motion. However, by inserting the first-person
point-of-view shots alongside the shot from the first-person car-racing video game,
Proctor’s film also points to a blurring between the indexical and the iconic, the
first person and third person, and an overall de-realization of the image due to
both the ever-increasing realism of video game imagery and to the pixelation of
indexical video images as they are compressed for transmission. This is also true in
a later set of images in Proctor’s film, in which we see a video game simulation of
a firing squad, followed by the indexical image of an apparently real firing squad
raising their weapons, followed by an image from a first-person shooter video
game in which a man writhing in flames (which is eerily reminiscent of the famous
image of the monk Thích Quảng Đức, who set himself on fire in Saigon in 1963 to
protest the persecution of monks by US ally Ngô Đình Diệm). These images are
parallel to indexical images of an execution by firing squad and dead bodies being

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Figure 5. In A Movie by Jen Proctor images of the attacks on the World Trade Center replace images of
nuclear explosions in Conner’s film.

strung up by their feet in front of a crowd in Conner’s film. However, by switching

back and forth between “real” violence and “simulated” violence, Proctor’s film
points to the ways in which we are increasingly encouraged to treat violence
against other human beings as “play.” Moreover, at the level of form, when every
file is digital and compressed as it circulates through the digital archive, it becomes
increasingly difficult to tell the difference between a literally deadly crash and its
thrilling simulation, an actual execution and its ludic corollary.
Both A Movie and A Movie by Jen Proctor point toward the inherent and
transformative qualities of the two mediums—cinematic and digital—through
which we may attempt to experience “the past.” Conner’s film emphasizes the
materiality of cinematic images, drawing attention to both the filmstrip itself
and the conventions of editing. Proctor’s film similarly acknowledges the ways in
which the specificities of digital technology—digital video and digital archiving—
alter our relationship to the referents. However, the contrast between these two
films points to the fact that we have entered a different era of mediation. Our
relationship with the past, through the lens of the appropriated image, has been
altered. Thus, while all of the images in each film are likely to produce the archive
effect, they may also simultaneously produce an awareness of the different kinds
of archives from which they have been appropriated: the material film archive or
the immaterial digital archive. Whether stored in an official archive or a home
movie collection, images that pass through material archives bear the trace of the
physical world that may, in fact, increase their aura of “authenticity.” Images that
pass through digital archives, however, bear the traces not of the physical world
but of digital technologies. Thus, while the passage of filmic and digital images
through different kinds of archives each give rise to an experience of mediation
as these images are appropriated, the material and digital archive effects signal a

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shift in our relationship with the past through its image, even if that relationship
continues to shift and has yet to be fully theorized.
In addition to these experiential differences in watching A Movie and A
Movie by Jen Proctor, however, a comparison between the content of the “origi-
nal” and the “remake” also points to the ways in which the world—as its image
has been produced, archived, and made available for appropriation—has both
changed and remained the same since 1958. Indeed, the quality that seems to
remain most constant across the material and digital archive is a fascination with
motion, speed, death, and destruction. In Conner’s film, this takes the form of a
series of increasingly violent crashes, submarines shooting missiles, and planes
dropping bombs, culminating in the documentation of nuclear bomb blasts. In
Proctor’s film, despite the very different geopolitical context represented, the
violence seems only to have intensified or perhaps been replaced by equivalent
acts of violence. In place of Theodore Roosevelt silently pontificating, we see
George H. W. Bush doing the same. This is followed by a series of images of
huge, glittering skyscrapers being dynamited and producing enormous clouds
of debris, images of fighter jets dropping bombs, and what looks like the “shock
and awe” campaign in the early days of the Iraq War. The images of the airplane
hitting the second tower of the World Trade Center and of the burning towers
crashing down seem to stand in for the images of nuclear war as the war on terror
has replaced (at least rhetorically) the fear of nuclear warfare. Images of residents
during Hurricane Katrina also function as a reminder that human beings are not
in control of nature. Nuclear fusion and natural disasters (in conjunction with
human error or failure), even as we may often have held them at bay, overwhelm
both our bodies and our comprehension.
Thus, while the archives and media technologies in which images are stored
have changed, the contrast between Conner’s and Proctor’s films reveals that
the human tendencies to both create and record disaster fill both the material
and digital archives. Technologies of representation may change but our drive to
destroy ourselves and the world around us apparently has not. While Proctor’s
film produces many moments of pleasure at the parallels between the “then” of
Conner’s film and its own “now,” the parallels between the atomic bomb explo-
sions and the September 11 attacks are much more likely to produce dismay at the
fact that, while so much has changed, our urge to harm one other and ourselves
persists. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may in our minds belong to
another era, a “then” for which we no longer feel directly responsible, but the
September 11 attacks, the Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina cannot be held at the
same distance. As a remake of Bruce Conner’s film, A Movie by Jen Proctor denies
the “progress” through the technology on which its very substance depends.
Indeed, it suggests that, even as digital media make images of the real infinitely

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more accessible, our ability to cope with—or even recognize—the realities behind
them seems to have diminished.

Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake

The ways in which A Movie by Jen Proctor reflects a changed relationship between
ourselves and the past engendered by digital media may be further illuminated by
an exploration of the functioning of the archive effect in another experimental
“remake”: Perry Bard’s online project entitled Man with a Movie Camera: The
Global Remake.18 This online work is a collaboration by a potentially unlimited
number of filmmakers around the world. On Bard’s website, Dziga Vertov’s Man
with the Movie Camera, a 1929 film that showcases not only the then emergent
Soviet Union but also the potential of the cinematic medium itself (and what
Vertov called the “kino-eye”) through its foregrounding of camera techniques
and effects, has been broken down shot by shot.19 Participants in the project,
who potentially include anyone with a video camera and an Internet connection,
are encouraged to shoot a video image that is in some way parallel to an image
in Vertov’s film and then upload it to the website. The website then produces a
split-screen film with Vertov’s images on the left side of the frame and the parallel,
uploaded images on the right side of the frame. A new split-screen film is produced
every day as participants upload new images to the site. Whereas in Proctor’s
film part of the archive effect depends on the difference between the viewer’s
experience of A Movie by Jen Proctor and the viewer’s memory of the experience of
Conner’s film, in The Global Remake, the split-screen format allows for the experi-
ence of temporal and intentional disparity between original and remake within
the moment of viewing the work itself on Bard’s website. Moreover, in contrast
to Proctor’s film, in which the archive effect is produced within a closed system,
the archive effect in Bard’s work is constantly reconstituted. As Erika Suderburg
elegantly describes the piece, “No screening can ever be identical; its linearity
is upended by the possibility of the space of the moving image that is not just
three-dimensional but hyper-dimensional (hyper textual) with layers cascading
unseen behind every shot, potentially accessed at the next screening and the next.
The work becomes a site that can be revisited and reworked alongside the steady
invitation of the original work, which continues to unspool in the left-hand frame
as its database restlessly reconfigures.”20
Thus, The Global Remake is perpetually changing; however, the presence of
Vertov’s images, as well as the contemporary soundtrack created by Steve Baun,
remains the same from one version to the next.
As a result of this perpetual reconstitution, the functioning of temporal
and intentional disparity in the film is exceptionally complex. The temporal and

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intentional substrate of similarity against which disparities may continuously

emerge in the work is provided by Vertov’s footage. However, the primary
intentional disparity in the piece is produced not in the contrast between Vertov’s
original intentions and those of the many participating filmmakers but, rather,
in the contrast between Vertov’s intentions and the intentionality of the work
itself. Indeed, it is important to acknowledge that the software used to create The
Global Remake has its own “intentionality,” which is not precisely coincident with
Bard’s. Seth Feldman notes that “the software that powers this project (written
by John Weir—now open source) puts the process of uploading shots entirely
in the hands of the contributor, making it, in digital parlance ‘crowdsourced.’
Contributors choose the shots they are matching. Bard refrains from exercising
any curatorial power over whether a given uploaded shot is appropriate, or
whether it is placed correctly or not next to Vertov’s original. In cases where more
than one image is submitted for each shot, the software displays the variants in
a daily rotation.”21
The intentions of the “crowd” are thus—at least partially—subsumed not to
Bard’s intentions but to the website’s own intentionality (even if the website was
Bard’s idea). Suderburg further describes the experience of the participant in (who
is also a viewer of ) the work as follows:

The upload interface has metered every shot, categorized each section and laid
out a fastidious template online that documents each shot and gives instructions
for uploading your own re-make side by side with the original frames. You can
enter your shot into the database, indexically attached to a specific sequence, and
watch the overlapping uploads that merge into multiple versions of the re-made
film. . . . If no one has uploaded material, the original will play alone in the left
frame with a blank black void to its right. This space serves as an invitation to
every viewer to remake herself as maker.22

This participatory structure is important in that, in contrast to the images in Proc-

tor’s film, whose producers are presumably oblivious to Proctor’s appropriation
and repurposing of them, there is little to no intentional disparity between the
images uploaded by different users and The Global Remake. The contemporary
images in the work come from disparate geographical and authorial sources, but,
unlike the people whose images—unbeknownst to their producers—participate
in Proctor’s film, the people whose images we see in Bard’s piece have consciously
chosen to participate in the work, actively uploading these images specifically
for the purpose of adding them to Bard’s film. Indeed, we can assume that, for
the most part, the contemporary images were shot specifically for The Global
Remake since they have to “match” an image from Vertov’s film. The intentions

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Figure 6. Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake includes Vertov’s images alongside images
uploaded by online remake participants.

Figure 7. The “then” and “now” of Vertov’s film and Bard’s interactive, collaborative online project
produce the archive effect in a specifically digital (con)text.

Figure 8. A street scene from Vertov’s film juxtaposed with a contemporary street scene in Bard’s remake.
Jaimie Baron

of a potentially infinite number of filmmakers—literally across the globe as the

title indicates—are “synchronized” via the “fastidious template” of the website
interface. Thus, the only actual appropriated (and hence, archival) footage is that
of Vertov. His original intentions for the images (or our projection thereof ) are
contrasted with the collective intentionality of the work itself.
Thus, like A Movie by Jen Proctor, The Global Remake produces a specifically
digital archive effect. Unlike Proctor’s film, however, which follows a preestab-
lished cinematic format but appropriates its documents from digital archives
like YouTube and LiveLeak, the digital aspect of The Global Remake is located
not only in half of its source material but also in its participatory, interactive, and
constantly shifting structure that collates the efforts of many filmmakers into a
new, inherently digital film every day. Indeed, in contrast to the digital archive
effect (produced by films drawing from the digital archive online) produced by
A Movie by Jen Proctor, Bard’s film may produce more precisely a digital archive
effect (placing filmic archival documents within a digital framework).
Moreover, given that the very premise of Bard’s piece is made possible by
digital media, a textual context that could not have been anticipated—at least
not fully—in Vertov’s time, the “then” of an earlier cinematic moment is thus
juxtaposed within the work against the “now” of the era of interactive digital
media. In addition to the juxtaposition of Vertov’s and the remake’s own inten-
tions, which produce part of the archive effect in The Global Remake, much of the
fascination of the work lies also, as in A Movie by Jen Proctor, in the experience
of temporal disparity. In Bard’s work, temporal disparity is constituted primar-
ily through the split screen, in which the “then” of Vertov’s filmmaking and
the “now” of the website’s constantly updated film are ceaselessly juxtaposed.
Describing the experience of the viewer rather than of the participant watching
The Global Remake, Feldman notes that “the viewer sees two concurrent sets
of images on a single screen: Vertov’s original film and the remake of it that has
been constructed on the Internet. The viewer’s visual experience also includes
a third set of images, i.e., comprised of a counterpoint between the first two.
What we are watching then is the 1929 work, already a masterpiece of dialectical
montage, in juxtaposition to a stream of images responding to it. The effect is a
kind of second layer montage, somewhat akin to Roland Barthes’ second layer
of semiotic meaning.”23
This “visual experience” of a “third set of images” is precisely the experience
of the archive effect. Moreover, this “counterpoint” emphasizes not only the
intentional disparities described above but also the temporal disparities between
Vertov’s 1929 images and those of the anonymous contemporary contributors.
Feldman provides a preliminary morphology for understanding the relation-
ship set up between Vertov’s original images and the newly added images that

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in some way “mimic” the original. One relationship is that of “simple replica-
tion,” in which the contemporary filmmaker attempts to recreate an image as
denotatively similar to Vertov’s as possible.24 For instance, Vertov’s image of
an empty auditorium may be accompanied by an image of a more modern but
visually similar empty auditorium. Another relationship Feldman identifies is
“quotation of movement,” which can refer to movement within the frame—such
as a man climbing a ladder juxtaposed against a man climbing stairs—or to
camera movement—for instance, the camera mounted on a moving vehicle in
each image. A third relationship Feldman notes is “chronological juxtaposition:
modern replacement for Vertov’s image,” such as two images, each of a building
that is physically similar to the other in terms of its shape, which were nevertheless
clearly built and filmed in different eras. This chronological juxtaposition may also
take the form of a contrast of technologies from “then” and “now”—for instance,
an image of a man reading a newspaper juxtaposed against that of a man reading
his computer screen.25 Although “chronological juxtaposition” may produce the
most blatant—and tongue-in-cheek—contrast between Vertov’s “then” and our
“now,” the other two also produce temporal disparity against the backdrop of their
similar, denotative content. As in A Movie by Jen Proctor, part of the pleasure of
Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is seeing the differences time has
made, even as the substrate—the original film by Vertov—bears many similarities
to our present.
Not surprisingly, many of the differences between the newly uploaded images
in The Global Remake and Vertov’s own images are similar to those between
Conner’s and Proctor’s images. In The Global Remake, the images on the right-
hand screen are mostly in color while those on the left are black and white.26
The digital images are also completely “clean,” which exposes their own lack of
material existence. As in Proctor’s film, the digital images are pixelated due to the
process of transfer. Interestingly, however, in this case, Vertov’s filmic images are
also pixelated because they, too, have been transformed into digital files. Thus,
the distinction between filmic and digital imagery is blurred due to the online
digital interface.
I would argue, however, that it is the transformed technologies used to create
The Global Remake that produce the most powerful sense of “then” and “now.”
Suderburg has noted the connection between Vertov’s vision of “kinoks,” with
their camera-eyes collectively assembling a greater truth about their society. She
writes,

Kinoks would have come from anywhere, were trained in the field, and became
contributors who in turn went on to train the succeeding generations until a
new visual order was established in the fabric of everyday life. . . . Kinoks would

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Jaimie Baron

make the film-thing together and in making it together fabricate a moving

image—a living evolutionary process built on an armature, a series of modular
“bloks” that ultimately could be re-used indefinitely without removing them
from either their efficacy or their morphing truths. Truths made truer than
truth. Never one to claim veracity in documentary ethics as foundational,
Vertov and company, as true constructivist workers[,] strove to manufacture a
composite closer to experience and ethically devoted to the future Communist
society.27

Suderburg positions The Global Remake as a realization of Vertov’s imaginary

cinematic utopia, equating the participants in The Global Remake with Vertov’s
kinoks. And, indeed, many of the images that have been uploaded to The Global
Remake seem to revel in and celebrate new digital technology in a manner
similar to Vertov’s own film’s celebration of mechanical invention. Although the
juxtaposition between Vertov’s “then” and our “now” inevitably evokes a certain
degree of nostalgia for the lost “then,” I would suggest that some of the hope of
that era has been appropriated into The Global Remake as well. Despite the fact
that Soviet Communism transformed into totalitarianism and Vertov was shamed
under Stalinism for his “formalist” experimentation, in digital media, the seeds
that Vertov planted seem to be on the cusp of fruition.

Conclusion
Ultimately, I would argue that the temporal disparity between a technological
“then” and “now” is the stake of both of these experimental film remakes. By
revealing, through the format of the remake and the experience of the archive
effect, both similarity and difference across time and technological evolution,
they offer us a glimpse of both what has been gained and what lost in the shift to
digital media, as well as in the general passage of time. Both of these films attempt
to visualize the present in relation to the past, to find points that “match” so
that we may locate ourselves in the “now” in contrast to a “then.” A Movie by Jen
Proctor, mimicking the unavoidably pessimistic bent of Conner’s A Movie while
commenting also on the specificities of digital media, may be read as a dystopian
vision of technological development, digital or otherwise—as an unending move
toward ever-greater destruction and dehumanization. In contrast, Man with a
Movie Camera: The Global Remake, mimicking Vertov’s optimistic vision, may
be seen as a utopian version of technology as hope for greater human connection
through collective media practice. Taken together and in relation to their source
materials, these films link the present to the past to put forth tentative visions of
our media future. Which one will prevail remains to be seen.

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Jaimie Baron is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research interests
include film and media theory, appropriation, historiography, documentary film, experimental film, and
the transformation of experience through technology. She is also the director of the Festival of (In)appro-
priation, an annual international festival of short experimental found footage films.

NOTES
1. Laura Grindstaff, “A Pygmalion Tale Retold: Remaking La Femme Nikita,” Camera Obscura
47, vol. 16, no. 2 (2001): 134.
2. Bruce Jenkins, “Explosion in a Film Factory: The Cinema of Bruce Conner,” in 2000 BC: The
Bruce Conner Story, Part II (Minneapolis: The Walker Art Center, 2000), 188.
3. Jennifer Proctor, Program notes, The 2010 Festival of (In)appropriation, Los Angeles
Filmforum, September 19, 2010.
4. I use the term “archive” here not to refer to particular archival institutions but rather as the
complete repository of extant sounds and images potentially available for appropriation into
new works.
5. William Moritz and Beverly O’Neill, “Some Notes on the Films of Bruce Conner,” Film
Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 39–40.
6. Jenkins, 187.
7. Jennifer Horne, “Guilt by Association,” Afterimage 27, no. 5 (March 2000): 13.
8. John P. Bowles, “The Bruce Conner Story Continues,” Art Journal 59, no. 1 (Spring, 2000):
106.
9. Of course, if the viewer is not familiar with Conner’s film, the experience of Proctor’s film will
be radically different, perhaps more akin to seeing Conner’s film at the time of its release.
10. For a more extensive theorization of the archive effect, see Jaimie Baron, “The Archive Effect:
Archival Footage as an Experience of Reception,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind
6, no. 2 (forthcoming Winter 2012).
11. Warren Bass, “The Past Restructured: Bruce Conner and Others,” Journal of the University
Film Association 33, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 22.
12. Moritz and O’Neill, 39. (Emphasis mine.)
13. In my formulation, a temporal disparity between two different films does not produce the
archive effect per se since the archive effect is produced between different elements of the same
film. However, for those familiar with Conner’s film, the temporal disparity between the two
films becomes the backdrop against which Proctor’s film is read.
14. Moritz and O’Neill, 39.
15. My analysis draws a comparison specifically between the experience of watching Conner’s A
Movie projected on film and the experience of watching A Movie by Jen Proctor from a digital
source. Conner’s estate has not released A Movie on DVD, suggesting that the copyright

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holders wish his film to be viewed exclusively on celluloid. However, A Movie can be found
online at the Hong Kong-based website tudou.com (www.tudou.com/programs/view/3-
9tCeFX0Eo/). Ironically, for the purposes of writing this essay, I was forced to rely on this
digitized version of the film and my memory of seeing the print projected. Although the
digitized version of A Movie threatens to undo my argument, it also simultaneously points
to the very experiential differences that I am attempting to articulate. The online version of A
Movie could itself be considered a kind of “remake,” since its experiential effects are so different
from the projected celluloid original. However, Proctor’s film raises many other interesting
questions that the digitized version of A Movie does not.
16. Moreover, these digital images of film projectionist cues serve no purpose at all—except,
perhaps, as a vestigial reminder of the filmic medium that has been superseded by the digital.
17. Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Arts, Media, and Cultures (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2000), 59.
18. This online project can be viewed at http://dziga.perrybard.net/. Accessed on April 7, 2011.
19. Erika Suderburg and Seth Feldman have each written at length about the connections
between Vertov’s Constructivist theories of cinema and the theoretical underpinnings of
Bard’s project. See Erika Suderburg, “Database, Anarchéologie, the Commons, Kino-eye
and Mash: How Bard, Kaufman, Svilova & Vertov Continue the Revolution,” in Resolution
3: Global Video Praxis, ed. Ming-Yuen S. Ma and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press) and Seth Feldman, “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re
a Constructivist: Perry Bard’s The Man With the Movie Camera: The Global Remake,”
Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 52 (Summer 2010), www.ejumpcut.org/
currentissue/FeldmanVertov/index.html. Accessed on April 7, 2011.
20. Suderburg, “Database, Anarchéologie.”
21. Feldman, “Constructivist.”
22. Erika Suderburg, “Database, Anarchéologie,” 5–6.
23. Feldman, “Constructivist.”
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. It is also worth noting that a significant number of uploaded “matching” images in The
Global Remake are, in fact, still images. This may point to the fact that digital files are all
fundamentally made of the same code and may be stored on the same hard drive so that the
line between the archive of digital moving images and of digital still images is less meaningful
to participants than the line between the archive of filmic moving images and photographs,
which must be stored differently.
27. Suderburg, 3.

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