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'Filmmakers, fans, activists, artists, and media makers have been reediting television, movies, and news media for critical and political purposes since almost the very beginning of moving pictures. Over the past century, this subversive form of populist remixing has been called many things, including appropriation art, détournement, media jamming, found footage, avant-garde film, television hacking, telejusting, political remix, scratch video, vidding, outsider art, antiart, and even cultural terrorism.' Jonathan McIntosh (2012)

This film short is called "Lambeth Walk - Nazi Style" and was made by Charles A. Ridley in 1941. He re-edited existing footage of Hitler and Nazi soldiers (taken from the propaganda film "Triumph of the Will") to make it appear they were marching and dancing to "The Lambeth Walk".

'In the mid-1970s, female media fan communities produced their own form of critical remix: the art form now known as vidding. Following Kandy Fong's pioneering 1975 use of slide shows, groups of female fans began creating vids or fan vids by remixing television and film footage to create works that spoke to female (and sometimes to queer) audiences. Often these works were overtly or implicitly critical of mainstream popular culture narratives.' Jonathan McIntosh (2012)

Explosive bursts of fire open Technology/Transformation, an incendiary deconstruction of the ideology embedded in television form and pop cultural iconography. Appropriating imagery from the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman, Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moment of the "real" woman's symbolic transformation into super-hero. Entrapped in her magical metamorphosis by Birnbaum's stuttering edits, Wonder Woman spins dizzily like a music-box doll. Through radical manipulation of this female Pop icon, she subverts its meaning within the television text. Arresting the flow of images through fragmentation and repetition, Birnbaum condenses the comic-book narrative — Wonder Woman deflects bullets off her bracelets, "cuts" her throat in a hall of mirrors — distilling its essence to allow the subtext to emerge. In a further textual deconstruction, she spells out the words to the song Wonder Woman in Discoland on the screen. The lyrics' double entendres ("Get us out from under... Wonder Woman") reveal the sexual source of the superwoman's supposed empowerment: "Shake thy Wonder Maker." Writing about the "stutter-step progression of 'extended moments' of transformation from Wonder Woman," Birnbaum states, "The abbreviated narrative — running, spinning, saving a man — allows the underlying theme to surface: psychological transformation versus television product. Real becomes Wonder in order to "do good" (be moral) in an (a) or (im)moral society." http://www.eai.org/titles/1673
This political remix video was created by the UK scratch video duo The Duvet Brothers in 1984. It was created by combining recorded tv footage with the song "Blue Monday" by the band New Order to comment on class inequality, privatization and the economic polices of the Thatcher government.

This is a recently remastered version of Todd Graham's original 1987 VCR-made remix that appropriates famous fictional animals from Disney's animated version of Winnie the Pooh and recasts them as characters in Francis Ford Coppola's gritty Vietnam War drama Apocalypse Now. In the new narrative, the beloved Hundred Acre Wood is transformed into a horrific war zone in which Pooh, Piglet, and the rest of the gang struggle to keep their sanity. The humorous and slightly disturbing juxtaposition was an underground viral hit at comic book conventions, and bootlegged copies were passed around and traded on VHS tape. Graham's work, which he called telejusting, differs in some respects from that of later media jammers in that it requires viewers to at least know, if not be a fan of, the original source material. Graham, unlike many political remixers, also managed to create some sympathy for his telejusted cartoon characters.

Beginning in 2001 Swedish filmmaker Johan Söderberg began experimenting with editing news footage to make it appear as though world leaders were singing pop songs. The series of remixes entitled "Read My Lips" uses song lyrics to provide hilarious biting critiques of politicians.

Reorder TV & THISUNRULY

Reorder TV showcases video cut-ups: some playful, others critique common ideas, beliefs and practices as well as public figures and politicians.

The website showcases video cut-ups that are designed to critically challenge and engage. While some are purely playful, others explicitly critique common ideas, beliefs and practices as well as controversial public figures and politicians.

The site was created by Simon Perkins and is the sister site to: http://thisunruly.com/


The speed of which 'Meme's' , Cut UP's ... are coming out now and distributed via Social Media is of course huge now, an example from 2019 is:

What recent examples have you seen - please share - add to your blogs …

Further Reading