UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Found footage filmmaking has long been a method that filmmakers have used to critique media images or to pay homage to them–or sometimes both simultaneously. Well-known filmmakers like Abigail Child, Su Friedrich, William E. Jones, Chick Strand, and Leslie Thornton, among others, have appropriated images in the service, at least in part, of challenging the audience to rethink the gender constructions posited by the mainstream media. While the use of found footage goes back almost to the beginning of film history, there is now a rising generation of filmmakers using appropriated images to further deconstruct and reconstruct the gender roles established by Classical Hollywood films, television commercials, medical textbooks, pornography, and other institutions of power.