Found Footage

Found footage is a filmmaking technique in which a work is constructed wholly or partly from pre-existing film or video material the filmmaker did not originally shoot for the finished work, whether genuine archival, newsreel, or amateur recordings repurposed into a new film, or footage fictionally presented within the narrative as having been discovered or recovered by the film's characters. The fictional branch of the technique, an entire narrative film presented as recovered, unedited recordings, gained wide popular recognition through The Blair Witch Project (1999) and became a recurring device across the horror genre in subsequent decades, while the documentary use of genuinely pre-existing footage, assembled and recontextualized through editing, has a much longer history in nonfiction and experimental film.