Lost and found: an avant-garde trajectory into the audiovisual essay

ABSTRACT This article dissects the audiovisual essay Found Found Found (de Bruyn [2014]. “Found Found Found” NECSUS: Autumn, 2014. https://necsus-ejms.org/found-found-found/). Through a study of its formalist influences and strategies it is argued that it is possible to arrive at the audiovisual essay as a creative research methodology from a different practice trajectory. The originating point is the avant-garde split documented in Peter Wollen’s Two Avant-gardes (Wollen 1982 [1975]. “The two avant-gardes.” In Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter Strategies, 92–114. London: Verso.), which articulated a formalist avant-garde, focusing on perceptual processes, as utopian in its extreme dismissal of the signified, as non-narrative and unreadable as political discourse. Vilém Flusser’s ‘technical image’ is enlisted to place such practice into a productive relationship with the audiovisual essay. This formalist cinema has already been re-read through the digital turn as producing forms of traumatic memory (de Bruyn [2014]. The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.) and performing the formalist methods of surveillance technology (de Bruyn 2014. “Structuralist Film and the Birth of Surveillance: The 2013 Alternativa Film/Video Festival.” Senses of Cinema 70 March 2014: http://sensesofcinema.com/2014/festival-reports/structuralist-film-and-the-birth-of-surveillance-the-2013-alternativa-filmvideo-festival/.).