Tag Archives: found footage
The Trapdoor
2005 | 26 min | Colour & Black & White | Stereo
Transfer from 9.5mm, 8mm and Super 8 film

The Trapdoor uses amateur film material from around 1920 to 1990 to examine how history—personal and collective—is written and rewritten into ever-changing but cohesive narratives and how re-examining the past brings to light forgotten (or suppressed) material. Family films lend themselves to this end since they are almost always “innocent” attempts at representing their conformity. The trapdoor belongs to stagecraft and allows things to abruptly appear and disappear from the scene… Read More…

Traveller’s Tales
2003 | 13 mins | Colour | Sound


Through the use of found footage – outtakes from a decades old documentary about North African nomads – Tim Sharp has fashioned a radical critique of ethnographic filmmaking. In teaming personal narrative and theoretical commentary, he effectively exposes, considers, and undermines the narrative authority of a far from neutral gaze, the making of a postcolonial subject. Read More…

Veiled Threats
2002 | Video installation for three monitors, 1 projector and salt

The point of departure for the four-part video installation […] is a series of fragments of the 35mm film with the title “Tuareg” which was found at a flea market and probably shot around 1970. Tim Sharp’s thoughts revolve around the significance of the discarded, excised images which were of no apparent value for the “real” product which itself remains unknown. Looked at more closely, especially in the light of Sharp’s montage-producing new scenes, these out-takes prove to be informative with regard to the plot for the production of a documentary film. In the first place they are the shots made immediately prior to the “official” takes. They show the clapperboard with scene numbers or the arms of the film crew reaching into the image and they show, above all, the depicted, the Tuareg, in a ”preparatory” state, waiting for their cue. Read More…