Found footage (film technique)

Although found footage was originally the name of an entirely different genre, it is now frequently used to describe pseudo-documentaries crafted with this narrative technique such as Lake Mungo, Noroi: The Curse and screenlife films such as Unfriended, Searching.

Film scholar David Bordwell criticizes this recent usage, arguing that it sows confusion, and instead prefers the term "discovered footage" for the narrative gimmick.

[2] As a storytelling technique, found footage has precedents in literature, particularly in the epistolary novel, which typically consists of either correspondence or diary entries, purportedly written by a character central to the events.

[3] However, Shirley Clarke's arthouse film The Connection (1961) and the Orson Welles directed The Other Side of the Wind, a found footage movie shot in the early 1970s but released in 2018, predate Cannibal Holocaust.

[4] America's Deadliest Home Video (1991), remains a potent use of the format as well as an unsung groundbreaker in the found-footage field - an ahead-of-its-time application of the vérité-video form to the horror/crime genre.