Santos Dumont’s mutoscope and the poetics of found footage

Abstract

This article is based on the study of a rare and extraordinary cinematographic artefact of Santos Dumont, which belongs to the collection of the Museu Paulista of the University of São Paulo: a mutoscope reel produced in 1901. From an analytical inventory about the discovery, as well as the identification and the restoration of the object, the genre and the procedures of reappropriating the film archive (found footage) are presented, introducing a sketch of taxonomy with its basic variants and mentioning the experimental found footage film Santoscope = Dumontage, produced in 2010 from the restoration of the 1901 mutoscope film. Some corollary questions are made, using appropriate concepts which are brought into context, such as Hollis Frampton’s metahistory, Walter Benjamin’s allegory of the ruins, and Aby Warburg’s survival of the images. This article also intends to propose the reappropriation of archives as a method and as poetics.