Found footage magazine #9

Discussions about the work of Peter Delpeut are dominated by the same subject which tends to overshadow discussions regarding cinema, memory, even human experience: time. This unstoppable force, which hovers in the background of our daily lives, exerting its endless influence on all things, could be considered Delpeut’s professional forte. This same force is the implicit subject of all found footage cinema: time, the agent that leads to organic decay and the buffer that allows us to see the past through some kind of (pseudo-)objective distance. Delpeut, in his films and his writings, shows a refusal to operate under preconceived notions. Archivist or artist, formalist or humanist, he prefers the more complex approach, preserving “the disorder that characterizes our lives”. The human being will always be an enthralling subject for study, never fully knowable in our own time, much less generations in the past. Delpeut sustains that sense of mystery, embracing the lives that may someday exist only as other people’s memories.