A few weeks ago, the Nass Audiovisual Section hosted its annual Stock Footage Film Festival. Members of the section created shorts ranging from 40 seconds to three minutes using a selection of about 30 clips from the massive Adobe Stock collection footage as a medium, resulting in a series of visually similar yet drastically unique films. This year, a clip of disembodied, ghost-like hands grasping at the camera was widely used. While many filmmakers used this same clip, one student superimposed the video with a clip showing some sort of medical procedure, while another used it layered with an overexposed color-negative black-and-white clip of a man looking directly into the camera. While the spirit of the festival is silly and fun, the seemingly limiting medium of fair use footage in montage is particularly unique in form, and as such, produced arguably thought-provoking, inspiring work in its interpretive malleability, inspiring viewers to question the nature of the Festival through an academic lens. What value should we afford this form of creation? Is it some sort of grotesque misuse? A profound recycling of soulless stock footage lost to Adobe’s large collection? A creative way to practice Premiere Pro?

Montage has long been used as a way of filmmaking, from Marker’s La Jetée in 1962 to the viral home video compilation of America’s Funniest Home Videos from the 90s to Vine compilations of the 2000s to modern documentary filmmaking like Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat in 2024, which recently made its way to Princeton. While academia sees some of these works as significant, there is a stark difference between media framed purely for pleasure and media seen today as educational or higher-brow. Today, this seems like the distinction we carry for what is considered worthwhile in art, but long before these films and closer to the conception of film, thinkers like Walter Benjamin framed all film as a gross reproduction of art. Theodor Adorno would frame movies as mostly meaningless, mass-produced factory goods which fueled the culture industry. In section IX of Benjamin’s cornerstone piece The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he frames cuts and editing in film as a force which “[splits] the actor’s work into a series of mountable episodes,” thereby taking the corporality of the actor and splitting it into a distorted amalgamation of their countenance—an effect amplified by the form of the Festival. When the distinction between sophisticated and simple media is removed, the theories of these acclaimed thinkers of the mid-20th century are left exposed.

Benjamin’s major critique of film, photography, and any other reproductive technology is that it destroys what he calls aura, a nebulous term which encompasses art’s “presence in time and space,” the important ritual of art, and a work’s authenticity. The uncanny separation of an actor’s body from its time and space that film creates destroys this aura, and the multiple reproductions of film only further develops this unsettledness. The work of mechanical reproduction frees previous traditional art from its ritual past, and the purpose of film itself is to be reproduced. Therefore, there is no ‘original’ copy of film that would be of more value than any reproduction, different from a print of a famous painting that cannot possibly capture the same aura. Stock footage is the epitome of this medium meant for reproduction, as it is filmed with the express purpose of being reused and recycled in a multiplicity of works. The intentional use of stock footage as something to be recycled changes the perceptive mode in which we view an actor, when aura is completely lost in replication, and the presence of the original actor is lost immediately upon recording. The character is lost in stock footage because each actor only has a very short performance meant to be compiled in montage with other clips. Stock footage’s ability to be edited, reproduced, and reused in multiple contexts is exactly what sells in the space, but it is also what eradicates any aura that may be present in Benjamin’s most generous takes on film. 

Benjamin goes on about the actor’s loss of aura, the phony movie star, and how the stage actor differs from the film actor, but he doesn’t say much about others involved in filmmaking behind the camera. While the editing process for a definitively reproducible medium starts without aura in Benjamin’s framework, some may be regained in the unique creative process of editing, especially considering the creative, original choices that are often made in montage. Without consideration of editing as a potentially creative medium, its worth cannot be tied to its auratic value, and another lens must be used to determine its quality and worth. This lens should consider the Benjaminian foundation of valued uniqueness and creation but must account for evolving art forms and new metrics by which we can properly analyze video art. The Stock Footage Film Festival is the perfect subject for this nebulous new metric, as its reformation of recycled work isolates editing as a form of creation.

Adorno’s concept of the Culture Industry turns creatives into compliant factories and twists consumers of media into consumers of capitalism. The stock footage short films from the Festival satirize heavily corporate Adobe stock footage and turn it into something completely personalized through the editing process. This form of creation is far from participation in the capitalist system, where there is no purchasing or selling as a part of production or sharing. This separation from purchase is made visually obvious with the large Adobe logo which adorns each clip. Despite having the ability to remove this logo by purchasing the clip, filmmakers chose not to, but that didn’t make the work any less theirs. The creative choices made by the filmmaker were clear in each short film despite the watermark staining the clips, making their corporate, consumerist roots legible for any viewer. The Adobe stamp announces proudly that the filmmaker will not engage in the interaction that the corporation begs for in purchasing the clip, and the editing distortions added to this branded footage further separate the clips from their intended purpose. Misuse in this sense proclaims detachment from the corporation, its original intentions, and any support of the corporation—in this case, Adobe. Misuse as art reclaims the process from the medium, and its legibility celebrates the separation of art from corporation. When the Adobe logo is placed directly inside the title card, viewers may be inclined to include it in the reading of the film, despite having background knowledge about the form which may insinuate other intentions. This unspoken intentionality behind the medium of stock footage is what differentiates it from other forms of montage, where viewers immediately reckon with the logo and source, and sequentially acknowledge and ignore it in the immersive process of collective viewing. The festival begs a question of how stock footage can be repurposed and appreciated as art, where disrespect for corporate slop becomes satirical short films enjoyed by a creative community like the Nass.

As a room full of students who contribute to the Nassau Weekly gathered around and appreciated the short films that their audiovisual-inclined friends created, I can’t imagine they considered all of these implications. In fact, I really hope they didn’t. To separate creative editing choices and curation of corporate stock footage from the short film successfully was to immerse the viewers in the reconstructed meanings of these clips, and I’d say our filmmakers were entirely successful in this endeavor. As the crowd gathered in collective laughs and exclamations, immersion was achieved at this year’s Stock Footage Film Festival. The issues in media presented by Benjamin’s dissemination of aura or Adorno’s capitalist culture industry are troubled by the unique medium of the festival, where the collective experience of creation and viewing of these works allows us to achieve the Benjaminian therapeutic release of social catharsis through collective viewing, humor, and laughter.

Claire Mitchell immerses herself in stock footage with her fellow Nasslings.