Kung Fu Crimewave - “What Do I Do?” music video, 2010

I have a deep, abiding love of found footage filmmaking.  There’s so much cultural detritus out there, you know?  And a lot of it is in video form - commercials, infomercials, PSAs, instructional videos, public access television, home movies, orphaned and/or public domain films, etc, etc.  It’s so much fun collecting that stuff that has no inherent cinematic worth, and trying to turn it into something, if not beautiful, then at least interesting.  Or hilarious.  Hilarious is good too.  

As with a lot of film school brats, Bruce Conner’s A Movie and Cosmic Ray were my first exposure to collage filmmaking.  If you have not seen them, they are really worth a look.  Annoyingly, A Movie does not seen to be on YouTube.  Even more annoyingly, Cosmic Ray is up there, but the Ray Charles song that serves as the film’s soundtrack has been disabled, thus completely robbing Cosmic Ray of its impact.  It’s a shame.  Disappointingly, it’s not hard to find multiple examples of this sort of thing in our culture, where intellectual property law crosses the line from protecting individual creativity, into hindering overall creativity.  That’s another reason found footage films are so much fun to make; knowing that you’re committing copyright violations in doing so adds some zest to the whole process.  

But then, I guess that’s a lot of purple prose over a music video for a song that’s about drunkenly alienating one’s friends and vomiting on one’s own jacket.  Kung Fu Crimewave is a good band.  I thought it was a good band when I first started seeing them play.  Now I am in the band.  I like being in bands that I like.