There’s a trend with film-makers working on relatively low budget productions now to go the ‘found footage’ route. It was once primarily the domain of horror pictures but with the likes of the superhero movie Chronicle this year, other genres are starting to be subsumed by this filmic ‘style’.
Of course, it was The Blair Witch Project in 1999 that really exploded the found footage bubble (though there were others before this like 1980′s infamous Cannibal Holocaust), purporting to be the ‘actual’ documentary film that three teenagers were making, the film was presented as the chilling record of what might have become of them. The brilliance of this approach was that (a) you could get away with some very dodgy and amateur camerawork (b) you could legitimately break the fourth wall and try to connect with the audience more directly (c) you really put the audience in the character’s eyes and (d) you could get away with not explaining things or showing stuff that might otherwise push your non-existent budget.
By dint of this, The Blair Witch Project grossed over $248 million worldwide off of a $60,000 budget and made a lot of people very, very rich. Thus the formula was established for the studios: dirt cheap films and huge profits.
After The Blair Witch Project the second, third and fourth most successful found footage films of all time are the Paranormal Activity movies. Off of a tiny $15,000 budget Oren Peli’s slow-burn, cheap-shock horror grossed over $193 million, with the franchise having grossed $576 million worldwide from a series where the budget – at most (pre-marketing) – has been $5 million. Those figures, quite frankly, are astonishing.
Elsewhere the top 10 found footage movies of all time is littered with the likes of The Devil Inside Me, The Last Exorcism and Quarantine. Whilst Cloverfield, Apollo 18, Troll Hunter and Chronicle at least bring something a little fresh to the genre, we have the likes of Todd Phillip’s Project X coming out this year which attempts to bring found footage to the ‘teen comedy’ genre.
However, as the trend for found footage movies continues and studios start to allow the budgets to bloat, (Cloverfield cost $25 million, Chronicle and Project X each cost $12 million) I can’t help but wonder where the line should be drawn and when a film should banish the, perhaps, gimmicky and ultimately limiting concept of being a ‘found footage’ picture and instead just be a ‘real’ film?
For me, Chronicle was an ok film and it was precisely because of its reliance on being made from ‘found footage’ that the film suffered. Firstly, I found myself asking such unimportant – yet frustrating – questions such as “Who found this footage?” and “Who edited this?” throughout the entire film, and as the viewpoint leapt from camera to camera the whole found footage concept became even more muddled. In fact, it didn’t really seem to be a found footage movie at all, which isn’t a bad thing, it just seemed to be a film only told from people’s cameras, which is an interesting concept, but when that limits the dramatic and emotional impact of your film I can’t help but wonder why the filmmakers didn’t just make the film ‘normally’?
Chronicle was littered with moments where it was all too convenient or convoluted that someone was filming a scene at a particular moment (Casey answering her front door, Andrew’s dad snooping around his room, even the confrontation during the lightning storm) and I couldn’t help but feel that the filmmakers should have used the personal cameras of characters as a story-telling device but not the sole viewpoint for the entire film. An example I turn to is Wes Bentley’s character in American Beauty who we are introduced to through his camcorder’s view filming a dead dove, and later he records his father beating him, Thora Birch’s character stripping through a window and, in a peculiar and emotional scene, shows her his recording of a carrier bag blowing in the wind.
When the three main characters return to the subterranean cave where they acquired their powers to find it has collapsed in on itself, one remarks that Andrew has definitely lost his old camera now, which raises a question mark of how all the footage leading up to them getting their powers actually emerged and got edited into this movie.
As the film draws towards its conclusion the contrivance of having our view restricted to people’s personal cameras (or the occasional hop into CCTV) just became more and more limiting, not just visually but dramatically and as a result the film’s finale lost its focus. I couldn’t help but feel that certain aspect of the sequence would undoubtedly of benefited from traditional film-making techniques. Which made me wonder, why, when a film has the budget Chronicle has, does it feel the need to be a ‘found footage’ movie? There is no scene in this film that couldn’t have been shot in the traditional sense but in exactly the same style as the finished film? Why restrict your camerawork, your editing choices, your actors and the overall mood of a film to such an extent when it seems so ultimately unnecessary? When it makes the choice to have the film be ‘found footage’ feel like a gimmick and nothing more?
For all my own personal distaste of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, the faux-real style was stylistically and dramatically appropriate. Likewise, Cloverfield book-ended its story with title-cards that claimed it to be government property, which at least gave context as to how the footage had emerged; it also used the ‘un-edited’ nature of the tape to cleverly hop back and forth in time giving us a bittersweet look at characters before the film’s dramatic events. Is context so important in found footage movies or, like Chronicle, should a film just use the protagonists’ cameras as its viewpoint, as if we’re witnessing some sort of electronic telepathic live-feed?
I think my biggest issue, primarily with Chronicle and potentially with the forthcoming Project X, is that the ‘found footage’ idea seems to be a gimmick tacked onto an otherwise standard film idea to give it some sort of contemporary relevance and excuse potentially ‘shoddy’ film-making. But, that’s the strange thing about Chronicle, its story alone was interesting and relevant enough without the gimmick, and the characters were competent camera-people, so there seemed to be no good reason for the view to remain awkwardly fixed inside their personal cameras, and I longed for the filmmakers to realise this, give up on the gimmick and just tell the story.
What do you think? When is the ‘found footage’ style beneficial and when is it limiting?
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4 Comments
As somone who really enjoyed Chronicle and found it to be more successful in its execution than not, I’ve nonetheless been convinced further of its faults. Though I don’t have as much of a distaste for the “found footage” format as you do, (I feel it has the potential to be as effective as any “real” or “normal” film style, as you put it, when executed by those whom know how to fulfill the potential of the format’s strengths)you’ve raised excellent points as to the (in)consistency of Chronicle’s p.o.v. conceit. I also noticed the climax to Chronicle seemed a bit weaker than it could’ve been because the audience didn’t have such clear access to the dialogue between the characters until of course we suddenly did. As you mentioned, Andrew’s first camera was lost in the rubble of the hole caving in so how did we see its footage? This brings me to my idea that unlike the excellent Cloverfield, Chronicle need not be considered a “found footage” film so much as one that simply uses the p.o.v. of various personal cameras, phones, cctv, news reports, etc. This way, we aren’t “limited” by the logistics of, “Who actually found this footage?” and can instead be directed to focus on the question you also touched on, “Why bother using this format at all?”
The answer of course is whatever someone can reasonably justify, I would say such a style/format would be indicative of the pervasiveness these various modes of surveilance and their influence/implications have throughout society and culture, however, this commentary was at best subtle and at worst nonexistent in Chronicle and therefore, as you mentioned, does begin to break down.
On the whole, as I mentioned, I’m a fan of the found footage/first person p.o.v./cctv surveilance format and believe that calling it a gimmick is a fairly substantial insult to not only those that practice it well, but film in general. Granted it’s a fine line between cheesy, disingenuous gimmick and legitimate style of filming, but despite its recent rise in popularity, the style in question is relatively underutilized and until more competent and artistically successful found footage films emerge, it’s simply too early to say whether it’s generally without merit, an impression I got from your article which was actually pretty fair to the format and well written. Anyway, great piece and thanks for letting me rant/kill time at work ;)
In “American Beauty”, Wes Bentley’s character is introduced while filming Kevin Spacey through a kitchen window. The dead bird comes much later.
Here’s our thoughts! http://thefilmforecast.com/found-footage-films/
Bravo man! Well said! I agree 100%. I have had it up to my eyebrows with the “found footage” genre. I’ve watched three of them in the last couple of weeks (“Cloverfield,” “Apollo 18,” and “Chronicle”) and there wasn’t one I didn’t think would have been vastly more enjoyable as a conventional film. I agree that “found footage” made stylistic sense for “The Blair Witch Project,” but I also agree about the problems the film has. I watched it when it came out in ’99, and I’ve never even been tempted to watch it again, precisely because — just as you say — nothing much happens for most of the film. That’s BORING! I don’t go to a film to be bored. And with FF films, you all too often have long stretches where nothing interesting happens. In this, FF films are living up to what they imitate — home movies — but there’s a reason people generally avoid seeing other people’s home movies: they’re boring. I also have yet to see a FF film where I didn’t ask myself, at some point (usually sooner rather than later) why this douchebag was still filming. Inevitably, it gets to that moment when a real person, in that same situation would have dropped the camera and been more concerned about saving his ass.
Given how cheap these films are to make, I suppose it’s inevitable that we’ll see a lot more of them, just like reality TV isn’t going away anytime soon (God help us!), but it’s all begun to look far too gimmicky for my taste — a gimmick to cover up bad film making. And in those cases where the film has potential, well, as I said, I think in most cases the film would be a lot more entertaining as a conventional film.