Bren O’Callaghan A Runaway at the Media Circus!

Rinse and repeat

Destination Earth (1956)

Although the central theme for this year’s AV Festival across Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Sunderland was Energy, it was the adhesive suture of Recycled Film that held the programme together and made a powerful case for shedding notions of ownership by allowing others to revisit and sculpt anew. Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Archives and Library delivered a keynote speech that fizzed and popped with genuine truisms on the current conflict between archives and potential users, including the following:

Archives are like children; they are largely conceived to fulfill the agenda of their parents.

It takes more energy to repress information and material than it does to release.

The opportunity to physically touch archive content, rather than access the ‘born digital’ alone, has the ability to engage the user in a profound manner and should not be underestimated.

Man On The Land (1951)

Prior to a day-long symposium was an evening screening curated by Rick of shorts from the Prelinger Archive: A is for Atom, a 90-minute journey through vintage animated shorts on the topic of energy, power and perceived progress, from nuclear fusion to capitalist ideologies. All are available online, from the confident cleft-chins and rooster chests of Man on the Land (UPA, 1951) to the infant capitalist propaganda of Destination Earth (American Petroleum Insitute, 1956). The naïve yard-sale of nature’s resources never looked so good: imagine if UKIP hired The Powerpuff Girls to battle blue Venusians with no visas and the political arena would be transformed.

What became referred to as The C-Word, in every sense, loomed large despite repeat attempts by panelists and filmmakers to avoid an issue with no simple answer. Vicki Bennett of People Like Us, a Boudicea amongst artists working within archive-footage, stood firm and resolute. “It would cost me £200,000 to clear copyright within the clip of the film you are about to see,” she explained, before a musical-that-shall-not-be-named burst upon the screen in a mash-up of high notes and helicopter gunships. Both Vicki and Rick were of the opinion that popular film is part of our collective palette, a memory shared by many, and as such belongs to no one person or agency but to all.

Of the multitude of radio hits including Elvis Presley that feature with such apparently subversive intent within Kenneth Anger’s experimental opus Scorpio Rising (1964), all were – astonishingly - rights-cleared and paid-up. But of Ich Will! (2008), his latest collage film featuring sourced footage of The Hitler Youth, his response to permissions was unique to say the least. “Don't need 'em. War booty”, he chuckled.

Elsewhere the exhibitions programme tapped into a similar vein of repurposed work: Bruce Conner’s Crossroads (1976) seemed a much more crafted, personalised exercise in adapting existing material to create something new (footage of the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946), in contrast to Anger’s Ich Will!, which feels shallow, pedestrian and empty of any additional authored intention when shown alongside his much earlier but more outrageous works.

Over at the Baltic, Jordan Baseman mixed and mounted spoken-word reminiscence with the skill of a Victorian butterfly collector. An elderly female Botanist recalls seeing a donkey being eaten alive by maggots, while a cocksure London gangster boasts of his sexual magnetism… the first lacking images but for a few final seconds, the second underscored by footage of women slowly undulating at a retro disco, sourced at the North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Even Jenny Holzer was busy adapting seemingly old-fashioned LED signage by using it to reveal censored text, piling tables with human bones and magnifying the obscured handprints of detainees, sifting traces of human ephemera to grant silenced voices a means of resurrection made all the more unnerving by her explicitly mechanical processes. Similar to the opening of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, what at first seems like streams of disassociated data begins to form grinning skulls and howling souls.

Homework: check out the wealth of the copyright-free Prelinger Archives. Because you really should.