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FOUND FOOTAGE, MASH-UPS, AMVs, THE AVANT-GARDE, AND THE STRANGE CASE OF APOCALYPSE POOH
The greatest moment in Tigger's screen career is in T. Graham's presumably illegal short Apocalypse Pooh, soundtrack excerpts from Apocalypse Now vce laid over brilliantly edited excerpts from Disney's Pooh films, and Tigger's bouncing first entrance is cut to the dialogue from the 'it's a fuckin' tiger' scene from Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam epic. Sadly, nothing in this belated series entry [...] comes up to that mark.1
-Kim Newman, review of The Tigger Movie (2000), Sight & Sound
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a sea change was underway in avant-garde and experimental cinema. While many 'old-guard' critics lamented the death of the avant-garde as a meaningful force (Fred Camper's essay "The End of Avant-Carde Film" in the twentieth anniversary issue of the Millennium Film journal comes to mind as a salient example)2, a new generation of experimental and avant-garde filmmakers were re-imagining what the avant-garde could and should become. The arrival of feminist, queer and ideological critiques in regards to both avant-garde theory and practice, along with a newfound concern with popular culture and politics, lead to a radical re-imagining of the avant-garde. Perhaps most (in)famously, this at times Oedipal battle played itself out at the "Experimental Film Congress" held in Toronto in 1989, where the new and old guards vied for control over the direction of experimental and avant-garde film.3 One of the key reasons that the avantgarde was seen by 'old boys' (or, less generously, 'almost-dead white men') as being embalmed and buried had quite a bit to do with these newfound political and popular concerns, and a concurrent move away from high-Modernist preoccupations with film's formal elements to the exclusion of all else. One of the key ways this shift was articulated was in the rise and relative popularity of found footage films.4 William C. Wees offers an insightful and succinct definition of avant-garde found footage filmmaking:
While the makers of documentary compilation films draw principally upon the resources of archives and stock shot libraries, avant-garde found footage filmmakers range much farther afield to find their raw material in the bargain bins of camera shops, thrift shops, flea markets, and yard sales; in piles...