...

..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..

dossier
..

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/63/1/123/6552043 by University of Hong Kong user on 10 June 2023

..
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
Found footage at the receding of
..
..
..
..
..
..
the world
..
..
...
..
..
.. BYRON DAVIES
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. Of the various developments following the recent and ongoing
..
1 See especially Dave Burnham, ..
.. reassessments of Stanley Cavell’s writing on film, one of the most
‘Turning to nature: Cavell and ..
..
...
important has been some scholars’ proposal of a greater rapprochement
experimental cinema’, Discourse, ..
vol. 42, nos 1–2 (2020), .. between Cavell’s thought and experimental or non-narrative cinema.
..
pp. 173–208; Rebecca Sheehan, .. Increasingly such scholars are recognizing that despite Cavell’s seeming
..
..
American Avant-Garde Cinema’s ..
.. disavowal of experimental film, the implications his writing bears for it
Philosophy of the In-Between ..
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
..
.. are substantial.1 So far, however, there has been no explicit accounting of
..
2020). For reappraisals of Cavell by ..
.. Cavell’s relationship to one of the characteristic techniques of
scholars of the American avant ..
..
.. experimental cinema, namely the substantial or exclusive reliance on
garde, see P. Adams Sitney, ..
‘Apologies to Stanley Cavell’,
..
.. found or repurposed footage. There are several reasons for regarding this
..
Conversations, no. 7 (2019), .. omission as a missed opportunity. Cavell’s emphasis on film’s capacity
...
pp. 8–13; Scott MacDonald, ‘My ..
.. to displace persons and things, and thus for it to facilitate a certain
troubled relationship with Stanley ..
.. reflexivity among things screened, raises questions about what becomes
Cavell: in pursuit of a truly ..
..
cinematic conversation’, in David ..
.. of footage when it is displaced from its original context.2 Additionally,
..
LaRocca (ed.), The Thought of ..
.. experimental cinema’s reappropriation of images from Hollywood
Stanley Cavell and Cinema ..
(London: Bloomsbury, 2020),
..
.. films has often functioned, albeit sometimes at the level of parody, to
..
pp. 107–20. ..
.. probe themes central to the opening chapters of Cavell’s The World
2 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: ..
..
.. Viewed. Here the principal example would be Bruce Conner’s A Movie
Reflections on the Ontology of ..
Film, enlarged edn (Cambridge,
..
...
(1958), with its explorations of what Cavell formulates as Hollywood’s
..
MA: Harvard University Press, .. reliance on types and typicality, though the variety of cases examined
..
1979), pp. xiv–xvi, 233–34, fn. 21. .. by William Wees in his work on found footage and movie stars
..
3 William Wees, ‘The ambiguous ..
aura of Hollywood stars in avant-
..
.. would also be relevant to Cavell’s concerns with stardom.3 Finally,
..
garde found-footage films’, ..
.. Cavell’s frequent noting of narrative films’ reliance on archival or
..
Cinema Journal, vol. 41, no. 2 .. stock footage, expressed most evocatively in his remarks in The World
..
(2002), pp. 3–18. ..
.. Viewed on François Truffaut’s use of newsreel footage in Jules et Jim

123 Screen 63:1 Spring 2022

© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjac009
 ...
..
..
(1962), points toward lines of thought in his work that still await further
4 Cavell, The World Viewed,
..
..
..
examination.4
pp. 140–41; cf. Jay Leyda, Films ..
.. There are reasons why, despite these points of potential connection,
Beget Films (New York, NY: Hill ..
..
and Wang, 1964), pp. 133, .. Cavell’s thinking has not been brought to bear on experimental works
..
143–44. .. relying substantially on found footage, or what I will call fragments: that
..
..
.. is, films foregrounding their nature as collections from archival sources.
..
..
dossier

.. The limitations one faces in applying Cavell to found-footage film are

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/63/1/123/6552043 by University of Hong Kong user on 10 June 2023

..
..
5 The question of taste is ..
.. not simply down to his personal tastes.5 Rather, as I will argue here,
nevertheless raised by Cavell’s ...
..
..
structural issues in Cavell’s early writing on film prevent his thorough
lukewarm response to Standish
Lawder’s experiments with
..
..
..
engagement with found-footage film.6 These issues include what I call
..
reappropriating footage from D. .. Cavell’s proneness to a ‘global-holistic’ approach to film, which informs
..
W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) in ..
.. his anxiety about approaching a film as a fragment, or as consisting of
their shared 1971 appearance on ..
.. fragments. This approach changes over time, partly for reasons to do
Robert Gardner’s television ..
..
programme, Screening Room. His .. with the receding of modernism as an explicit concern in his film writing.
..
..
response to other work by ..
.. The shift has little to do with the familiar critical trajectory whereby
Lawder was far more positive. ..
6 Compare with Burnham’s claims
..
.. scholars move from conceptions of unified, modernist ‘works’ to those of
...
about constraining features of ..
..
differentiated, postmodernist ‘texts’.7 Rather, I contend, Cavell’s
Cavell’s practice of film criticism, ..
..
..
trajectory, as well as the Cavellian account of found footage that it
whose status as ‘structural’ is ..
questioned by Burnham. ..
..
affords, was facilitated by an atavistic turn in his late film writing to his
..
7 See Fredric Jameson, .. teacher J. L. Austin, and especially to his 1962 book How to Do Things
..
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural .. with Words. In the wake of this turn, Cavell would articulate a variety of
..
Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, ..
.. ways of collecting fragments in order to address the world, especially a
NC: Duke University Press, 1989), ..
..
pp. xvii, 31. ..
.. world receding from view. These articulations appear in his 1998 essay
..
..
.. ‘The world as things: collecting thoughts on collecting’, the culmination
..
..
...
of his later considerations about what a collection of fragments might
8 Stanley Cavell, ‘The world as
..
..
..
express.8 Here he also ties collecting to phenomena associated with his
things’, in Philosophy the Day ..
.. late concept of ‘passionate utterance’, the importance of which I will
after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: ..
..
Harvard University Press, 2005), .. gloss below. In the final section of this essay, I bring these arguments to
..
pp. 236–80. .. bear on Monolito (2019), the accomplished film by Oaxaca-based
..
..
.. Mexican experimental filmmaker and video artist Bruno Varela,
..
..
..
.. projecting Cavell in understanding this collection of fragments from
..
..
.. Varela’s personal archive, audiovisual material downloaded from
..
9 On Varela and found footage, see ..
...
YouTube, and digitally distorted VHS footage.9
Itzia Fernández, David Wood and ..
..
Daniel Valdez, ‘Apuntes para una ..
..
filmografıa: de las prácticas del ..
..
..
reempleo (found footage o .. Commentators have already noted that Cavell’s use of the term ‘world’ in
..
metraje reencontrado)’, Nuevo ..
.. The World Viewed refers, in a Heideggerian vein, to a meaningful
Texto Crıtico, vol. 28, no. 51 ..
(2015), pp. 89–108.
..
.. totality.10 This conception of meaning as lying in totality is an aspect of
..
10 Martin Shuster, New Television .. what I call Cavell’s ‘global-holistic’ approach – figuring not just in his
..
..
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago .. conception of a world but also in his conception of a film. The latter
..
Press, 2017); Daniel Morgan, ..
‘Modernist investigations: a
..
...
results partly from his having shared Michael Fried’s conception of
..
reading of The World Viewed’, ..
..
modernism, in which a medium can no longer rely on guaranteed forms
Discourse, vol. 42, nos 1–2 ..
..
..
of meaning-making in order to secure a world’s ‘presentness’; these have
(2020), pp. 209–40. ..
.. instead to be revised with each new work. This conception of modernism
..
.. likewise disbars reliance on pre-established evaluative criteria in
..
..
.. criticism, further informing Cavell’s conception of film criticism as
..
..
..

124 Screen 63:1 Spring 2022
Byron Davies
Found footage at the receding of the world
 ...
11 Although Cavell claimed that films ..
..
requiring nothing short of consideration of the film as a whole.11
had mostly escaped modernist ..
..
..
Moreover, in The World Viewed this Friedian conception of criticism
conditions until the period just ..
before the writing of The World .. operates together with a certain picture of whole films that Cavell draws
..
..
Viewed, his early thinking also .. from his understanding of film history’s topics of criticism. For example,
..
displays uncertainty about the .. early in the book Cavell asks, ‘Why [...] didn’t the medium begin and
..
possibility of separating his ..
.. remain in the condition of home movies, one shot just physically tacked
conception of criticism as such from ..
..

dossier
his conception of modernism. See .. onto another, cut and edited simply according to subject?’12 In answer he

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/63/1/123/6552043 by University of Hong Kong user on 10 June 2023

..
..
Must We Mean What We Say? .. notes that ‘significance’ was historically located in certain narrative
..
(Cambridge: Cambridge University ...
Press, 2002), p. 183. ..
..
forms. The question of home movies, or fragments, as possible bearers of
..
12 Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 31. ..
..
significance is left suggestively hanging.
..
.. A tension between Cavell’s global-holistic approach and serious
..
..
.. engagement with found footage is likewise evident in his most extended
..
.. study of a found-footage project: the examination, in his essay ‘On
..
..
.. Makavejev on Bergman’, of Dusan Makavejev’s 1978 presentation at
..
..
..
.. Harvard of 25 sequences of moments of silence drawn from nine Ingmar
..
13 Stanley Cavell, ‘On Makavejev on ..
.. Bergman films.13 Although Cavell’s essay is an earnest treatment of
Bergman’, in Themes Out of ...
..
..
filmic reappropriation, he is tellingly reticent to call Makavejev’s project
School (San Francisco, CA: North ..
Point Press, 1984), pp. 106–40. ..
..
a ‘film’ (despite Makavejev’s own description of the project), preferring
14 Ibid., pp. 110–11.
..
..
..
to call it a ‘work of criticism’.14 It is as though Cavell’s lingering global-
..
.. holistic approach, applied to films, could only render Makavejev’s
..
.. project subordinate to the nine Bergman features and their corresponding
..
..
.. ‘wholeness’. Thus the ‘heteronomy’ of Makavejev’s project,
..
..
..
.. characteristic of found-footage films, takes Cavell’s focus elsewhere, to
..
15 Ibid., pp. 113–14. ..
.. the supposedly ‘autonomous’ works composing its parts.15
..
..
...
I referred to Cavell’s lingering approach in his Makavejev essay
..
..
..
because by this point it is possible to see a loosening of the framework
..
.. that held his global-holistic approach in place, especially as it concerns
..
..
.. his relationship to modernism. Jennifer Fay and Daniel Morgan have
..
.. recently argued that after the publication of The World Viewed in 1971,
..
..
16 Jennifer Fay and Daniel Morgan, ..
.. Cavell’s focus on modernism ‘quickly disappeared’.16 While I disagree
..
‘Introduction’, Discourse, vol. 42, ..
.. with Fay and Morgan about the quickness of this transition, it is clear that
nos 1–2 (2020), p. 7. ..
..
.. Cavell gradually found a sustained engagement with modernism to be
..
..
...
unnecessary for his later studies of Hollywood genres. It is also striking
..
..
..
how concerns about modernism are already downplayed in Cavell’s 1974
..
..
..
essay ‘More of The World Viewed’ – and, correspondingly, how part of
17 Cavell, The World Viewed,
..
.. his global-holistic approach is already in recession.17 Here ‘world’, and
..
pp. 162–230. ..
.. its suggestions of a meaningful totality, largely gives way to the more
..
.. neutral ‘reality’. But in seeking to understand how Cavell’s trajectory
..
..
.. might have involved a gradual embrace of the fragmentary in film, the
..
..
..
.. disappearance of modernism remarked on by Fay and Morgan provides
..
..
...
only one, negative condition; another, positive condition, in my view,
..
..
..
was Cavell’s late turn to Austin’s How to Do Things with Words.
18 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc ..
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern ..
..
Although in graduate school Cavell attended the 1955 lectures by
..
University Press, 1988), pp. 1–23. .. Austin that would eventually constitute How to Do Things with Words, it
..
See Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of ..
.. was only in later writing, especially in extended response to Jacques
Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: ..
.. Derrida’s reading of Austin in ‘Signature Event Context’, that Cavell
Harvard University Press, 1994), ..
..
pp. 55–127. .. devoted himself to addressing that specific book at length.18 In this late

125 Screen 63:1 Spring 2022
Byron Davies
Found footage at the receding of the world
 ...
..
..
period, Cavell took up Austin’s well-known notion of performative
..
..
..
utterances, coming to supplement it with his own concept of ‘passionate
19 Stanley Cavell, ‘Performative and
..
.. utterances’.19 At this stage he also gives a greater role to notions from
..
passionate utterance’, in ..
.. Austin’s book in assessing his own earlier approach to film. In a 2005
Philosophy the Day after ..
.. interview with Andrew Klevan, for example, Cavell remarks on Austin’s
Tomorrow, pp. 155–91. ..
..
.. (as well as Wittgenstein’s) influence on his earlier film writing, including
..
..
dossier

.. the way it allowed him ‘to resist the idea that the relation of a photograph

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/63/1/123/6552043 by University of Hong Kong user on 10 June 2023

..
..
20 Andrew Klevan, ‘What becomes ..
.. to what it is of is well thought of as representation’.20 In fact How to Do
of thinking on film?’, in Rupert ...
..
..
Things with Words is never explicitly mentioned in The World Viewed,
Read and Jerry Goodenough
(eds), Film as Philosophy (London:
..
..
..
and Austin is referred to only by allusion.21 But Cavell’s remark to
..
Palgrave, 2005), p. 168. .. Klevan invites a fresh re-reading of The World Viewed, one in which the
..
21 Cavell, The World Viewed, ..
.. foregrounding of representation in film is understood to be as much in
pp. 114, 133. ..
.. error for Cavell as the foregrounding of constative utterances in speech
..
..
.. was for Austin. Such a re-reading would also emphasize the variety of
..
..
..
.. things we do with film, as with words.
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
..
Cavell’s late Austinian reassessment of The World Viewed is one part of
..
..
..
his broader turn to Austin in his late film writing. In drawing attention to
..
.. this turn, two lines of thought regarding Cavell’s relation to found footage
..
.. present themselves. First, in this later writing on film, Cavell’s
..
..
.. understanding of a meaningful context for footage (allowing it to be the
..
..
..
.. topic of criticism), need no longer be anchored in the earlier global-
..
..
.. holistic approach, or his conception of modernism; Austin’s notion of the
..
22 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things ..
...
‘total speech situation’ can now provide this framework.22 ‘Total speech
with Words (Cambridge, MA: ..
..
..
situations’ are the historically and culturally situated contexts that Austin
Harvard University Press, 1975), ..
pp. 52, 148. .. recurs to in understanding speech acts, and which are characterized by
..
..
.. their plurality and possible openness. Upon bringing the variety of such
..
.. speech situations into view, the early Cavell’s picture of a meaningful
..
..
.. context in film (his picture of ‘films as wholes’) comes to seem like it was
..
..
..
.. an extraneous imposition. With a variety of ‘speech’ situations in view,
..
..
.. there is no longer a serious question about whether, say, Makavejev’s use
..
..
...
of Bergman’s footage constitutes a ‘film’, or whether that only resolves
..
..
..
into its being subordinate to other, ‘autonomous’ works. The earlier
..
..
..
impediment to an encounter with found-footage film recedes.
..
.. Secondly, as Cavell’s turn to How to Do Things with Words
..
.. centralizes questions of passionate utterance, his thinking holds promise
..
..
.. for assessing the emotional or affective qualities of found-footage film.
..
..
.. Cavell’s last substantial engagement with Austin’s book was his 2000
..
..
..
.. essay ‘Performative and passionate utterance’. There Cavell criticizes
..
..
...
Austin for being ‘skittish’ about emotional expression, something evident
..
..
..
in Austin’s focus on the ‘illocutionary’ force of utterances, like telling
..
..
..
and promising, at the expense of ‘perlocutionary’ effects characteristic of
..
.. self-revealing ‘passionate utterances’, like embarrassing someone or
..
.. stopping them in their tracks. For Cavell, what Austin neglects in
..
..
.. slighting emotion is that passionate utterances require or ‘reward’ self-
..
..
.. understanding, curiosity and imagination, in contrast to the standard and

126 Screen 63:1 Spring 2022
Byron Davies
Found footage at the receding of the world
 ...
23 Cavell, ‘Performative and ..
..
conventional procedures that ensure one’s ability to tell or to promise.23
passionate utterance’, p. 173. ..
..
..
Passionate utterances also uniquely tolerate forms of fragmentariness and
..
.. incompleteness. Whereas leaving one’s words as partial, unfinished and
..
..
.. tentative would impede one’s ability to make a promise, it would be no
..
.. impediment to, and might even facilitate, various forms of passionate
..
..
.. self-revelation. (We reveal ourselves in fragmented speech.) Indeed,
..
..

dossier
.. scholars of found footage have recurred to notions of speech acts in

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/63/1/123/6552043 by University of Hong Kong user on 10 June 2023

..
..
..
.. accounting for what filmmakers ‘say’ with footage, just as they have
...
24 William Wees, Recycled Images ..
..
examined how filmmakers repurpose footage to emotional effect.24 These
(New York, NY: Anthology Film ..
..
..
aspects of found footage are not isolated, and neither should be our
Archives, 1993), pp. 42–43; ..
Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect .. accounts of them. Thus Cavell’s writing on passionate utterance provides
..
..
(London: Routledge, 2014). See .. the kind of speech-act framework required to elucidate the passionate
..
especially Baron’s concept of the ..
.. character of found footage – a proposal I illustrate below.
‘archive affect’. ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. Cavell’s late Austinian considerations and his resulting reassessment of
...
..
..
film along the lines of speech acts allow him to approach the question of
..
..
..
fragments and wholes differently. This is evident in the work that
..
..
..
culminates Cavell’s gradual embrace of the fragmentary, the appropriately
..
.. titled essay ‘The world as things’. Here Cavell directly addresses films
..
.. dealing with archival footage and its powers, in particular Chris Marker’s
..
..
25 Cavell, ‘The world as things’, ..
.. Sans Soleil (1983) and, by allusion, his Immemory CD-ROM (1997).25
..
pp. 273–78. ..
.. Cavell’s shifted approach to film is conspicuous, as Marker’s filmic ‘total
..
..
.. speech situations’, as we might call them, are now no longer framed as
..
..
...
complete or whole works (in some strong, constraining sense) but rather,
..
..
..
more loosely, as collections, including those of literal refuse and debris.
..
.. What is more, Cavell frames these collections as vehicles for expressing
..
..
.. passion, revealed in his remarks on the expressive powers of Freud’s
..
.. collection of statuettes, or (in later writing that builds on the collecting
..
..
.. essay) on the Venezuelan performance artist Antonieta Sosa’s
..
..
26 Ibid., p. 260. Stanley Cavell, ..
.. ‘sublat[ing...] the debris or leaving of life into a work of art’.26
..
‘Crossing paths’, in William ..
.. Cavell’s essays on collecting and on passionate utterances were written
Rothman (ed.), Cavell on Film ..
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005),
..
...
within two years of each other, both for projects at the Centre Pompidou,
..
p. 369. ..
..
and were included by Cavell in the same volume. In claiming these as
..
..
..
complementary, and as together offering a distinctive account of found-
..
.. footage filmmaking, I have in mind the notion Cavell provides in the
..
.. collecting essay on Walter Benjamin’s behalf of a ‘skepticism of traces’, or
..
..
27 Cavell, ‘The world as things’, ..
.. the belief that collecting is tantamount to self-evasion.27 Noting Benjamin’s
..
p. 247. ..
.. views on the fetishism for collections in the creation of the 19th-century
..
..
.. European bourgeois home, Cavell comments here on how collecting
..
..
...
‘traces’ of bygone or ephemeral events can typically serve to ward off self-
..
..
..
knowledge, an outcome figured in Benjamin’s ‘portrait’ of the collector as
28 Ibid.
..
..
..
lacking ‘interiority’.28 But Cavell is concerned less with bringing out the
..
.. dangers of collecting than with its expressive powers. For him these
..
.. include the varieties of self-revelation that allow collecting to participate in
..
..
.. the powers of passionate utterance. Indeed the examples Cavell chooses
..
..
.. show collectors as engaged in activities of self-understanding or

127 Screen 63:1 Spring 2022
Byron Davies
Found footage at the receding of the world
 ...
..
..
self-revelation: Cavell comments on Freud’s collection as marking the
..
..
..
space of his therapeutic procedures, while Sosa’s ‘debris’ amounts to the
..
.. reconstruction of her apartment for museum visitors. In other words, it is
..
..
.. only within the grip of a narrow conception of collecting’s function – one
..
.. that cannot survive Cavell’s late turn to Austin, and his emphasis on a
..
..
.. variety of self-revealing, expressive functions from which we have no good
..
..
dossier

.. reason to exclude collecting – that collecting can seem bound up with a

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/63/1/123/6552043 by University of Hong Kong user on 10 June 2023

..
..
..
.. kind of self-evasion, or a ‘skepticism of traces’.
...
..
..
Extending Cavell’s picture of collecting as an activity of passionate
..
..
..
utterance and self-revelation, and aiming to describe the powers of found
..
.. or repurposed footage as such an activity, I turn in closing to Varela’s 40-
..
..
.. minute film Monolito. It is significant to this discussion not only because
..
.. Varela is an avowed reader of Cavell, but because the film offers a
..
..
.. sustained interrogation of the relations between repurposed footage and
..
..
..
.. global-holistic thinking, especially with regard to questions about a world
..
29 On Varela’s reading of Cavell, see ..
.. receding from view.29 Indeed the film’s motivating philosophical
Byron Davies, ‘The specter of the ...
..
..
reference is to Felix Guattari’s unproduced science-fiction screenplay, A
electronic screen: Bruno Varela’s ..
reception of Stanley Cavell’, in ..
..
Love of UIQ, which recounts the discovery of an ‘Infra-Quark Universe’
David LaRocca (ed.), Movies with
..
..
..
that ‘will eventually overturn and reshape the entire planet’.30 Varela’s
Stanley Cavell in Mind (London: ..
.. way of ‘filming’ Guattari, however, is to turn to his own personal
Bloomsbury, 2021). ..
.. archive, and above all to fragments from this: MiniDV footage of the
30 Personal conversation with ..
..
Varela. Felix Guattari, A Love of .. 2006 popular uprising in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca shot by
..
..
UIQ, trans. Silvia Magloni and .. Varela; digitally distorted VHS images from films by Jean-Luc Godard
..
Graeme Thomson (Minneapolis, ..
MN: University of Minnesota
..
.. and Andrei Tarkovsky; still images from Varela’s previous work in
..
Press, 2012), pp. 57, 50. ..
...
indigenous community video; and audio downloaded from YouTube of a
..
..
..
speech about fire, transformation and the Mexican gods by the
..
.. Colombian-Mexican gnostic Samael Aun Weor. In other words, in
..
..
.. speaking from his own archive, Varela here turns a science-fiction
..
.. narrative into exactly the kind of act of self-revelation central to Cavell’s
..
..
.. writing on collections and passionate utterances.
..
..
..
.. Monolito’s images revolve around the 2006 ‘Oaxaca commune’
..
..
.. uprising and the titular monolith belonging to the autonomous community
..
..
...
of Santa Cruz Yagavila (shown in an image recycled from Varela’s 2000
..
..
..
video Nuestra Ley). Though Varela leaves his footage’s sources and
..
..
..
original context unidentified, he here (re-)documents the horror of the
..
.. 2006 protests’ violent repression. Yet what he ultimately communicates is
..
.. the feeling of an old world being transformed into a new one. We tremble
..
..
.. at the sound of reordered fragments of Aun Weor’s speech as they play
..
..
.. over Varela’s archival videos; these sonic invocations of fire’s renewal of
..
..
..
.. nature inform our sense of disruption across images of police barricades
..
..
...
and disparate electronic screens. Varela’s collecting and recycling of old
..
..
..
footage then functions much like finding one’s words – or one’s place – at
..
..
..
just the moment when a world is receding from view. Such conditions
..
.. also elicit a kind of provisionality and openness in expression, which
..
..
.. Varela thematizes in labeling Monolito as a continual work in progress.31
31 See Monolito, <https://vimeo. ..
.. As with other forms of passionate utterance, Monolito’s refusal of
com/368070969>, accessed ..
..
28 October 2021. .. completeness is crucial to its self-revelations.

128 Screen 63:1 Spring 2022
Byron Davies
Found footage at the receding of the world
 ...
..
..
Cavell himself never lost his interest in what it means for a world to
..
..
..
recede from view. The notion of release from previous ties to something
..
.. cosmic, and the imperative of finding new modes of expression in that
..
32 See the reading of Maurice
..
.. moment, even structure the final pages of his autobiography.32 It is the
..
Blanchot in Stanley Cavell, Little .. aspect of his global-holistic approach that most survives his turn away
..
Did I Know (Stanford, CA: ..
.. from modernism – and rightly so, since it is the aspect most richly
Stanford University Press, 2010), ..
..

dossier
pp. 522–48. .. complemented by his late embrace of the fragmentary in film. After all,

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/63/1/123/6552043 by University of Hong Kong user on 10 June 2023

..
..
..
.. as Cavell and Monolito both have their ways of asking: what other means
...
..
..
do we have of making sense of a ‘world lost’ but its fragmentary traces?
..
..
..
And if we can project those traces – if they can be means for passionate
..
.. self-revelation – what other kind of wholeness could we want?
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..

129 Screen 63:1 Spring 2022
Byron Davies
Found footage at the receding of the world