Found Footage and Documentary Filmmaking As Visual Sociology

While filmmaking as an ethnographic practice has been relatively well discussed within visual sociology, other forms of filmmaking— especially those understood as non-empirical, non-observational, or experimental —have remained less visible, if not marginalised. This session examines one such visual sociological approach through moving images: found footage filmmaking. Found footage, drawn from traditional film and photographic archives as well as from the internet as a “waste dump” or an “archive” (J.D. Peters, 2015), has supported a range of visual sociological practices, including video-elicitation interviews, longitudinal observation, and even positivist historical sociology through images. Found footage filmmaking is a form of arts-based research that mobilises the researcher’s creative and artistic insights to reconstruct, or challenge, the linear narratives of constructed social life through montages of found images. Its pursuit of contingency, dialectical unfolding, and open-endedness stands in stark contrast to certain social-scientific epistemologies, yet it also promises other possibilities. This session invites both theoretical and practical approaches to found footage filmmaking in order to explore the method’s applicability to visual sociology.