Conceptual Cinephilia
On Jon Routson’s Bootlegs
Lucas Hilderbrand
From the releases of George Lucas’s blockbuster disappointment Star Wars,
Episode I: The Phantom Menace (USA: ) to acting twin Mary-Kate and
Ashley Olsen’s feature film flop New York Minute (USA: Danny Gordon,
), Baltimore-based conceptual artist Jon Routson () recorded cinema
screenings with his digital video camera. Routson would merely turn on his
camera when the feature began, often cutting off the opening credits and jos-
tling the image as he settled into his seat. He would rest the camera low on his
chest or stomach to be inconspicuous and record without looking through the
viewfinder in order to preserve the camera’s batteries and to avoid attracting
the theater ushers’ attention. The footage often wandered out of focus, cropped
the films, and reduced the big screens’ grandeur to murky colors, low-resolu-
tion details, and harsh flickers. Occasionally elliptical jump-cuts interrupted the
middle of recordings and end credits went missing, though all “editing” was
done in-camera during the screening. Routson then burned the footage to
DVD-R without any post-production alteration or creating menus or chapter
settings. He has stated that he often didn’t even watch his recordings before
sending them to his gallery for instant exhibition. As an automated creative
practice, these documents entailed no craftsmanship and only minimal techni-
cal proficiency, yet their imperfections allow us to reconsider the way we see
films. In essence, these are reproductions of film exhibitions that stress the space
of the cinema, the noise of the audience, and the grain and flicker of the films –
showing us what spectators are supposedly perceptually ignoring.
Critical analysis of Routson’s work has focused primarily on its novel chal-
lenge to traditional notions of authorship and its tenuous legality. Despite pro-
minent press attention, however, Routson has never faced litigation or received
cease-and-desist orders. This, even though piracy paranoia has made the work
timely and relevant – former Motion Picture Association of America President
Jack Valenti’s infamous campaign against piracy and the failed Academy
Award video screener ban hit a fever pitch in fall , exactly between Rout-
son’s two spring shows at Team Gallery in New York. Unlike European copy-
right laws, which privilege authors’ moral rights, the US copyright code was
conceived to promote the public interest by providing only temporary control
and economic benefit to creators as an incentive to create, after which works
would enter the public domain. The US “fair use” provision, amended in ,
170 Cinephilia
permits non-commercial reproduction of excerpts from copyrighted works for
news reporting, critical, or scholarly purposes. European creators have more
control over others’ uses of their works, but in the US (in theory, at least) the
public has more freedom to use and build from others’ creations. In the past
several years, however, US copyright codes have been expanded in the rights
owners’ favor with the  Copyright Term Extension Act (aka the Sonny
Bono Act) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which governs not only
uses of content but also reproduction technology itself.
Reeling from the rise of online music file sharing and the threat of increased
moving image downloading, the entertainment industry has pushed for even
more restrictive laws; these shifts not only threaten commercial piracy but also
previously “fair” uses by artists and private consumers. Additionally, laws ren-
dering uses of recording devices inside cinemas illegal have prompted the artist
to stop making this series of bootlegs. Pirate tapes and DVDs have become in-
creasingly scarce on the streets of New York, particularly along the formerly
reliable and infamous Canal Street, as a result of police crackdowns. Simulta-
neously, more and more pirated copies are being accessed directly from indus-
try insiders who leak near-final cuts out of post-production houses, as opposed
to the old fashioned method of taking a camcorder into a theater and taping the
screen. Through Routson’s work, these shoddy sorts of documents have mi-
grated from Chinatown to Chelsea, from the black market to the white-walled
art space. And, like pirated copies, Routson’s recordings are often produced
and reproduced on each film’s opening day.
Contemporary fanatical attempts to prevent mass copyright infringement
does not single-handedly make Routson’s work interesting as art and only inci-
dentally makes it political. These digital recordings in no way function as viable
substitutes for the films; rather, they remediate the cinema as a whole – the
exhibition space and its viewers, as well as the films. Significantly, the two terms
used by Routson and his gallery are “recordings” (the title for both exhibitions
at Team) and “bootleg” (the official title of each work). With a more neutral
connotation, the term “recording” suggests both historical documentation and
the materiality of the reproduction format. Yet, as Clinton Heylin argues, “An
essential element of creativity separates the bootleggers from their piratical cou-
sins – those who copy material but make no attempt to pass their product off as
the original...”
In a study of the underground music recording culture, he defines bootlegs as
productive documents recorded by the fan/user of a live performance, in con-
trast to piracy, which entails the illegal duplication and sale of copies that com-
pete with legitimate commercial releases. Routson’s recordings are not avail-
able for sale or distribution, so they pose no market competition to theatrical or
home video releases. Additionally, their low-fidelity aesthetics give them little
Conceptual Cinephilia 171
commercial value as pirate copies. In effect, the recordings’ conceptual status
and gallery context make them “art” rather than their contents (though they still
operate as texts).
Routson’s work is conceptual in the sense that it emphasizes process over
product, jackass stunt over aesthetic achievement. In its seminal period from
- (also the first decade of video art), conceptual art challenged the author-
ity, mastery, and commercialism of the art world through self-reflexivity and
dematerialization: a work could just as sufficiently be described as created or
seen, and as ephemeral or visually unremarkable “works,” there was often no
art object to sell. Although emerging in a time of political upheaval, conceptual
art did not necessarily possess Dada’s satirical edge or total embrace of non-
sense. Perhaps post-post-modern, Routson’s latter-day recordings are concep-
tual works without ideas or politics. He challenges conceptions of authorship
and artistic integrity as he does not “create” any of his images but steals or
purchases them. Like so much early conceptual art, these spectacles of specta-
torship are presented as ephemeral installations that cannot be bought or
owned.
In cutting films up or slowing them down, video artists have picked up
where “classical” conceptual artists left off – though much early video art was
rooted in conceptualism – by repurposing preexisting images and sounds for
formal and discursive examination of perception, media, cultural practices, and
(personal) histories. Coincidentally, the American fair use copyright provision
does not protect artistic appropriation but does protect critical or transformative
reuse – thereby necessitating a political edge or formal reinvention. Experiments
in “found footage” began through reworking early, industrial, and educational
films, but as video has made more content and technology accessible, popular
cinema and television have become increasingly frequent resources and these
practices have become exponentially more common. Routson’s work was dis-
tinguished by his process of reshooting the content with a camera rather than
merely duplicating it from deck to deck. Recording videos of film projections
(almost) in their entireties, Routson’s feature bootlegs are apparently devoid of
the meaning, ideology, or political critique that marks much of this prior appro-
priation video work. Instead, Routson’s videos have elicited comparisons to
Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, Andy Warhol’s affectless reproductions, and
Douglas Gordon’s video installations, which likewise appropriate whole Holly-
wood films but render them impossible to see in full.
By seeing and recording films nearly indiscriminately – seeming to disregard
canons or personal taste – Routson could be seen as either the ultimate cinephile
or as altogether indifferent to the films. His exhibitions turned the Team Gallery
space into an ad-hoc multiplex where three screens presented daily program-
ming changes, with new works arriving as he produced them. Occasionally the
172 Cinephilia
three films on view during simultaneous screenings were thematically linked, at
other times not. The low resolution videos on view for his first Recordings exhi-
bition ( March- April ) defaced aesthetically pristine pictures in Boot-
leg (Far From Heaven) and Bootleg (Cremaster ), action spectaculars in
Bootleg (Spider-Man) and Bootleg (Final Destination II), and low-brow
fair in Bootleg (Phone Booth) and Bootleg (Boat Trip), which was recorded
following the opening after-party at McDonald’s. His second show ( April-
 May ) featured a repertory screening in Bootleg (Sunrise), as well as a
range of recent releases in Bootleg (Elephant), Bootleg (Elf), Bootleg
(Monster), and Bootleg (Mean Girls).
At the opening for Recordings II, the gallery screened Bootleg (The Fog of
War), Bootleg (The Passion of the Christ [second recording]), and Boot-
leg (Kill Bill, Volume ). Each screening space was painted black with large-
scale video projection against a white wall and a different seating configuration:
a bench in the front and largest room, a leather couch in the intimate middle
screening room, and metal folding chairs in the back gallery. Spatially, these
layouts maintained a distance between the audience and the image; typically,
viewers entering the galleries would not cross in front of seated viewers, nor
would they approach the screen unless they kept close to the side walls. Keep-
ing with a current trend in video art, these digital video recordings of theatrical
screenings presented the work through projection configurations rather than on
monitors – neither fully replicating the cinema experience nor home video view-
ing on television. Among the gallery’s openings, Recordings II seemed sparsely
attended, and as audio-visual art, discouraged the chatter and social scene typi-
cal of strictly visual art events. Screened as loops without predetermined start
times, the bootlegs were nearly impossible to see from the beginning, and de-
voting the feature-length running time to each viewing would border on loiter-
ing. This is a problem for much looped video work installed in galleries, but
these bootlegs do not seem intended to be viewed in their entireties. As they
deny most of the pleasures of an evening at the movies, the videos are frankly
too tedious to watch all the way through in the gallery, anyway. Instead, the
recordings make the spectatorial disparity between cinematic film screenings
and video installations resoundingly apparent. In contrast to the cinema, the
video gallery does not presume an interpolated viewer who follows a linear
plot; though the high art milieu might seem to demand more refined attention
to the work, it instead allows the viewer a more casual and transient relation to
the moving image and soundtrack – a brief aesthetic or theoretical encounter
compared to a feature-length commitment. Like so much digital or conceptual
art, these recordings are appreciated as experiences or as meta-texts. Liberated
from any necessity of narrative cognition, the video bootleg viewer can instead
Conceptual Cinephilia 173
ponder the theater’s off-screen space or intertextual connections between simul-
taneous screenings.
Contingency played a role in both the bootlegs’ production and, to a lesser
extent, their exhibition. According to the gallery owner Jose Friere, the open-
ing’s three videos were not chosen for thematic reasons but for the more prag-
matic one that only these DVD-Rs played back without skipping. Even though
curated by chance, each recording offered a different perspective on film view-
ing. Bootleg (The Fog of War), shot from a distance, in focus and unob-
structed, seems most blatantly a statement of copyright infringement – and per-
haps even of respect; it does not work to destroy Errol Morris’s political
documentary. By comparison, the other two works on view were more success-
ful in challenging classical cinematic spectatorship. Screening in the cozy video
room, Bootleg (The Passion of the Christ, [second recording]) was shot
with obscure framing that clearly interfered with any comprehension of Mel
Gibson’s film, and Bootleg (Kill Bill, Volume ) similarly abstracts Quentin
Tarantino’s auteurist homage to genre films. The pleasures of these recordings
are found in their details – in the specific ways they attract our attention away
from the cinema screen or undermine the films’ auteurist or narrative inten-
tions.
During its first half-hour, Routson’s Bootleg (Kill Bill, Volume ) was shot
in extreme close-up, showing only a small portion of the screen and none of the
auditorium architecture. Save occasional glimpses of Uma Thurman’s face, this
film comprised of referential pastiche has itself been rendered almost unrecog-
nizable, and it’s through sound cues that viewers would most likely be able to
place the film. Despite being mesmerized by Kill Bill upon seeing it in the
theater months earlier, when I saw the bootleg at the opening, I couldn’t identi-
fy it until I recognized the cue of Elle Driver’s (Daryl Hannah) whistling. This
portion of the recording allows us to really look at the texture of the film image
in a way that we could never see it ourselves. In Routson’s recording the pro-
nounced celluloid grain has been punctuated by the projector’s flicker, which
produces an eye-straining strobe effect. A visually gorgeous and arrestingly vio-
lent film becomes painful to watch, while the graphic violence is abstracted, as
is the game of intertextual citation. The extreme close-up framing, however, is
only a temporary reconfiguration. When the camera zooms out, at the begin-
ning of the anime section portraying O-ren Ishii’s (Lucy Liu) back story, Rout-
son’s position in the auditorium is revealed. He apparently sat in the front row
of raised stadium seating; a balcony bar splits the screen horizontally for the
remainder of the recording. The bar so perfectly slashes across the screen’s torso
that it at first seems that the frame lines are simply out of register on the projec-
tor. In this second portion of the recording, featuring the majority of the film,
the audio also marks the artist’s and the audiences’ presence. Now less sub-
174 Cinephilia
sumed in the film text, we begin to notice sniffles, mutterings about Japanese
girls, laughs at the bloody stunts, and even a yawn during the drawn-out battle
at the House of Blue Leaves.
In a series of correspondences about contemporary world cinephilia, Kent
Jones comments that Tarantino, whose film knowledge is largely founded upon
home video viewing rather than cinematheque attendance, would qualify as the
“wrong kind of cinephile” according to Susan Sontag. Raymond Bellour con-
curs with the video-bashing charge, saying that Tarantino doesn’t understand
“the real weight of an image, which explains [his work’s] ethical irresponsibil-
ity.” If Tarantino’s love for cinema is perverse, one can only imagine what sort
of heathen he would label Routson. He may or may not understand the “ethics”
or the “real weight” of images, but in stealing and disfiguring Tarantino’s, he
allows us to ponder our perceptions of them. Both the extreme close-up and the
far balcony bar framings function to disrupt a “perfect” perspective, but the
effect differs: the former makes us see the film as something new and different,
whereas the latter functions as an obstruction that merely frustrates the specta-
torial experience.
Mediating both the religious message and the violence of Gibson’s blockbust-
er religious biopic, Bootleg (The Passion of the Christ, [second recording])
was shot from a low angle behind a seat that cuts into the image and obscures
its subtitles. (The dialogue was performed entirely in the dead languages of La-
tin and Aramaic.) By dramatizing explicit images of whipping, grueling cross
bearing, and painful impaling on the cross, the film makes Jesus’ sacrifice – for
a religious audience – seem more profound and viscerally immediate. Any mis-
sionary potential the film may possess, however, has been bled from Routson’s
second bootleg. (Routson recorded three versions of the film, creating a video
trinity that filled each of the gallery’s screening rooms on three dates.) It per-
forms an act of blasphemy by rendering Jesus’ story incomprehensible and ef-
fectively censors much of the visual and verbal information. When the Jews first
bring Jesus (Jim Caviezel) to be tried by Pontius Pilate (Hristo Naumov Shopov)
– one of the few dialogue-intensive scenes – Routson shifted slightly in his seat
so that fragments of the subtitles become visible on the right edge of the screen.
This repositioning only proves more distracting as the viewer may engage in
unsolvable puzzles of mentally filling in the missing words. With little visual
stimulation keeping our attention on the screen image, we begin to look else-
where and contemplate the theater space Routson documents. The auditorium’s
black, tile-drop ceiling reflects the screen during the film’s brighter moments,
and a red emergency exit sign glows like a beacon. The sound recording re-
markably captures a flattened yet sensitive approximation of cinema acoustics,
so that the effect of surround sound are still audible, even if the video is
screened in standard stereo.
Conceptual Cinephilia 175
In the U.S., The Passion became a religious phenomenon, making ungodly
sums of money during its sustained theatrical run when it became part of audi-
ences’ Sunday rituals: church groups would attend en masse repeatedly, week
after week as an extension of religious services. As Routson reshot the film, it
officially lost its ritual function or visceral-spiritual aura, and the framing be-
hind an empty chair also made the theater space seem vacant. Only through
audio disruption and inappropriate responses do we know that anyone was
watching the film. At one point a cell phone rang, and the camera shifted as if it
was Routson’s own, which he had to maneuver to silence. Later, when the first
establishing shot of crosses on a hilltop appeared an hour and a half into the
film, someone near the camera muttered, “It’s about time,” expressing boredom
and excitement for the crucifixion. We hear a loud belch at the moment Jesus’
cross has been erected and a sarcastic, celebratory “yeh!” quietly cheered when
Christ arose from the dead. It’s ambiguous if the praise was for the resurrection
or for the film’s end.
Routson’s bootleg not only presents a travesty of Gibson’s film, but it also
documented a singular screening performance, complete with audience com-
mentary. Projection defects and audience responses are ephemeral, live events,
and these bootlegs become video archives of historical reception. These bootlegs
may be categorized as conceptual art because they are acts of appropriation, but
as meta-cinema, Routson’s work provides an opportunity to interrogate how
we watch films. The digital video camera’s latter-day kino eye perceives the
cinema differently than human spectators would – with zooms, out of focus, in
close-up, and from uncomfortable angles. But by essentially shifting our points
of view and the objects of our attention, these recordings refocus our gaze upon
those elements of the cinema we are not supposed to see: the chairs, the ceilings,
the illuminated exit signs, the bodies of other viewers, the projector’s flicker,
and even the grain of the celluloid. In the auditorium, all these aspects are pre-
sent before us, but we are conditioned to ignore them. Like the rattle of the
projector or the dust in the projected beam of light (which do not register in
Routson’s recordings), we only consciously consider the off-screen space when
it either interferes as a distraction or when the film ceases to engross the viewer
– that is, at moments when the apparatus has failed.
And yet, essential to cinema as a physical and social institution, the off-screen
space must also be part of our apperception. Though exterior to the film text, it
is not exterior to the cinematic experience. Vision and hearing are active pro-
cesses of filtering information, and in the cinema we are assumed to not see (or
pretend not to see) the surrounding mise-en-scène of the auditorium. Watching
a film entails actively not seeing, by directing our attention to the screen and by
relying upon the innate perceptual slowness that allows for the persistence of
176 Cinephilia
vision. As art historian and visual theorist James Elkins observes, blindness is
an essential part of seeing:
Because we cannot see what we do not understand or use or identify with, we see
very little of the world – only the small pieces that are useful and harmless. Each act
of vision mingles seeing with not seeing, so that vision can become less a way of
gathering information than avoiding it.… [H]uman sight is not merely partial blind-
ness or selective seeing but a determinate trading of blindness and insights.
As Elkins comments, we sometimes fail to notice mundane details that we en-
counter repeatedly simply because the information isn’t essential for our under-
standing. Similarly, our brains will fill in details as we process sights, so that we
perceive objects as whole even if we only see fragmentary images. Even if a
spectator’s head blocks part of our line of vision, we can usually mentally com-
pensate for the missing part of the image without confusion. Though we may
strain our necks to peer around the intrusion, it does not ultimately alter our
comprehension of the film. (As Bootleg [The Passion…] demonstrates, with
subtitles this can pose more of a problem.)
By directing our attention away from the screen to the space of spectatorship,
perhaps Routson’s recordings allow us to reconceive reception. Considerable
scholarly attention has reviewed the developmental history and cultural-aes-
thetic impact of audio reproduction; such work suggests that recordings func-
tion as preserved texts and, more interestingly, argue that each new technology
has required different manners of performance and studio manipulation while
creating new perceptual and consumptive relationships between the listener
and the format/text. This body of work remains indebted to Walter Benjamin,
who expressed ambivalence about the status of the art object; removed from its
former ritual function in the modern era, its reproduction can circulate more
widely but without the aura of the original’s physical presence. In taking film
as his exemplary new medium for examination, however, Benjamin acknowl-
edged that film technology and aesthetics have changed the way spectators see.
As is too often overlooked, he wrote of perception and experience – of reception
rather than recording per se.
The space of the cinema and other spectators are generally considered irrele-
vant to our perception of the film. Yet, the occasional audio commentary in
Routson’s recordings suggest the sensibility of a viewer experienced in the spe-
cific milieu of interactive midnight movies and texts such as Mystery Science
Theater  and DVD bonus features. Certainly responsive audiences contri-
bute to the excitement of action and horror films, the pleasure of otherwise te-
dious cult flicks, and even enhance festival screenings of art films, for which
applause appreciatively caps off the experience. Conversely, a rude neighbor
can also spoil an otherwise pleasurable screening. Different types of venues,
Conceptual Cinephilia 177
geographic locations, and even screening times also attract different audiences
and social dynamics, from reverential to rowdy. The cinema is a social phenom-
enon, though we have been trained not to see or hear our fellow filmgoers as
anything but a nuisance. (Or, in special romantic instances, the real subject of
our attention.) As cinema historians have documented, early film audiences
were even more vocal prior to narrative integration and feature running times;
perhaps, then, it is spectatorial silence that is antithetical to the cinema, rather
than bawdy participation.
Routson’s recordings suggest a cinephilia of distractions. Critics writing on
cinephilia have suggested, particularly in the wake of cinema’s centenary, that
there is a nostalgic impulse behind it – a fear of the cinema’s death and an
attempt to reclaim or maintain celluloid and public film culture. Working
with the vilified video medium, Routson reclaims the social, public exhibition
of film. Annette Michelson has pointed out that cinephilia takes on variant
modes in different periods, so there is no single or “proper” form of cinephi-
lia. She describes a specific early s movement to eliminate social distrac-
tion and isolate a direct cinematic experience in the (curiously named) Invisible
Cinema at the Anthology Film Archives; in this experiment, blinders were in-
stalled between each seat so that the faces and sounds of neighboring viewers
would be blocked out. Routson’s work perhaps seems antithetical to “classical”
cinephilia’s ideals of the primacy of celluloid screened in a cultural vacuum.
(Ironically, total spectatorial privacy would not be available for most audiences
until the advent of home video.)
Inverting the desire for asocial cinema or technically innovative venues, Rout-
son’s work emphasizes human disruption and the shortcomings of more decre-
pit spaces–the materiality of film exhibition. Bootleg (Nashville) is especially
– and probably accidentally – illustrative of the way film may be seen and
heard. Like most of his other recordings, this one begins abruptly; the image
shifts about while Routson gets comfortable in his seat with the camera on, and
silhouettes of latecomers cross in front of the screen. The audio track betrays the
tinny echo of a lo-fi sound system so common to independent art houses, in
comparison to the surround sound of new corporate theater complexes. In ad-
dition, film splotches and scratches – presumably at reel changeovers – are evi-
dent during this screening from an old and abused print. And, most impor-
tantly, the projector bulb is obviously too weak to evenly illuminate the
widescreen framing, so the image is blatantly oval-shaped with dim corners.
The interference and the spaces of the cinema, complete with its restless and
noisy audience, are precisely the subjects in Routson’s work. The most exciting
moments occur when the camera distorts the image or when someone talks
over the soundtrack or gets up to leave the theater, blocking the screen. Rout-
son’s videos may be the exemplary cinephilic art in a moment of heightened
178 Cinephilia
public attention to exhibitions spaces (particularly with sound systems and sta-
dium seating) and to the convergence of piracy and media. These bootlegs are
less than pure spectatorial or art experiences – the works are neither fully con-
ceptual (at times the viewer can get pulled into the narrative) nor cinematic
(there is too much interference for these videos to replace authentic film screen-
ings). If anything, the recordings point to the fact that there is no such thing as
uncorrupted spectatorship in the cinema. There will always be a level of ambi-
ent distraction, of waning attention, of human shortcoming in any feature-
length viewing act, as much as theorists and buffs may want to pretend other-
wise. Rather than hijacked films or artistic pirates, these recordings are repro-
ductions of reception that call our attention to all that we don’t see when we
watch films – or, perhaps, all that we do.
Thanks to Jose Friere and Miriam Katzoff at Team Gallery for making Routson’s
work available for study.
Notes
. See Young, Michael. “The Art of Stealing Movies.” V-Life [Variety supplement], Nov.
: p. ; McCabe, Brent. “Scene Stealer.” The Baltimore City Paper,  January
. <http://www.citypaper.com/--/pf/feature_pf.html>; Smith, Roberta.
“When One Man’s Video Art Is Another’s Copyright Crime.” The New York Times, 
May : E and E; Lieberman, Rhonda. “Sound and Vision. John Routson.” Film
Comment (July/Aug. ): p. . In addition, his shows have been reviewed in The
Village Voice, Time Out New York, The New Yorker, and Flash Art.
. For an ode to pirate tapes of Hollywood films, see Crouse, Edward E. “Mageddo:
Adventures in Lo-Fi: Sampling Bootleg Videos Bought on New York Streets.” Film
Comment (May/June ): pp. -.
. Heylin, Clinton. Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, : p. .
. Idem: p. .
. See Alberro, Alexander and Blake Stimson (eds.). Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthol-
ogy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, .
. In his earliest publicly exhibited works (both ), Routson produced a random,
untitled VHS mix-tape by recording moments from television broadcasts that
caught his interest and, as a work titled Free Kittens, released five felines to run loose
in a gallery. He also has a continuing, long-term project of collecting commercial
photographs of Easter bunnies taken at malls; these come from seasonal set-ups
where parents pay for kitsch images of their children on the laps of adults in fuzzy
white costumes, but Routson purchases photos of the rabbits alone, looking alter-
nately cheery and desperate.
Conceptual Cinephilia 179
. Found footage films and appropriation video have extensive histories; Joseph
Cornell, Bruce Conner, and Ken Jacobs were the seminal innovators of found-foo-
tage film, Dara Birnbaum of appropriation video. Recent examples are far too nu-
merous to recount in detail, but prominent contemporary artists continuing in these
modes include Douglas Gordon, Christian Marclay, Peter Tscherkassky, Caspar
Straake, Mike Hoolboom, Leah Gilliam, Nikolas Provost, Craig Baldwin, and Abi-
gail Child; working specifically with early or damaged orphan films, Peter Del-
peut’s Lyrical Nitrate (Netherlands: ) and Bill Morrison’s Decasia (USA:
) appropriate the texture of the medium itself more than its content. In addition
to his feature film bootlegs, Routson has produced a pair of works that involve cri-
tical intervention through extensive re-working. With Carrie/Porky’s: Original-
ity, Neatness and Hygiene (USA: ) he created a stroboscopic work of gaze
theory that alternates frames from shower scenes in Carrie (USA: Brian DePalma,
) and Porky’s (Canada/USA: Bob Clark, ). He also re-edited a bootleg of
Matthew Barney’s Cremaster  (USA: ) for television, complete with network
tags and station identification (for Disney-owned ABC) and commercials (begin-
ning with an Audi ad prominently featuring the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
in New York, one of Barney’s major sponsors and exhibitors).
. Gordon’s Hour Psycho () slows down Hitchcock’s film to approximately 
hours, playing out in stuttering slowness that makes the thriller tedious. His instal-
lation Five Year Drive By () extends duration of The Searchers (USA: John
Ford, ) to a five-year running time, replicating the narrative’s temporal span. In
the installation Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake) (), The
Song of Bernadette (USA: Henry King, ) and The Exorcist (USA: William
Friedkin, ) are projected on opposite sides of a translucent screen simulta-
neously so that the films’ images dissolve into each other.
. Bellour, Raymond, Kent Jones, et al, “Movie Mutations. Letters from (and to) Some
Children of .” Rosenbaum, Jonathan, Adrian Martin, eds. Movie Mutations: The
Changing Face of World Cinephilia. London: BFI, : p. , pp. -. See also Sontag,
Susan. “The Decay of Cinema.” The New York Times Magazine,  February : p.
.
. In relation to Ken Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (USA: ), in which the
camera moves around to focus on details within the frame as it reproduces an early
film, Annette Michelson suggests that “cinephilia will now assume the guise of
meta-cinema,” also an apt description of Routson’s work. Michelson, Annette.
“Gnosis and Iconoclasm: A Case Study of Cinephilia.” October, no.  (Winter
): pp. -.
. Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Simon and
Schuster, : pp. -.
. Several books have been published on the subject, but the most comprehensive and
useful are Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.
Durham: Duke University Press, ; and Chanan, Michael. Repeated Takes: A Short
History of Recording and Its Effects on Music. New York: Verso, .
. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Arendt, Hannah (ed.), Zohn,
Harry (trans.). New York: Schocken Books, : pp. -.
. Paul Willemen suggests connections between cinephilia and both nostalgia and ne-
crophilia in “Through a Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered.” Looks and Frictions:
180 Cinephilia
Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory. Bloomington and London: Indiana
University Press and BFI, : pp. -. Editors’ note: see also Thomas Elsaesser
on cinephilia as essentially necrophilic/vampiristic: Elsaesser, “Ueber den Nutzen
der Enttaeschung: Filmkritik zwischen Cinephilie und Nekrophilie.” Schenk, Irm-
bert (ed.). Filmkritik. Bestandsaufnahmen und Perspectiven. Marburg: Schueren, :
pp. -.
. Michelson, Annette. “Gnosis and Iconoclasm”: p. .
. An early scene takes on new significance in Routson’s bootleg, as Haven Hamilton
(Henry Gibson) expresses anger at the presence of the BBC reporter (Geraldine
Chaplin) with her recording equipment in the studio; he says that if she wants a
copy, she can wait and buy the album.