Horses, gender, and (queer) masculine desire, or how experimental found footage film recycles three Hollywood films

Abstract

Although the experimental found footage film recycles Hollywood films so that the outcome may radically differ from the original story, there are no accounts on how it adapts images from mainstream cinema to represent human–animal relations, linking to gender and masculinity. To fill this gap, I discuss how experimental film Horsey recycles footage from three Hollywood productions—Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Swimmer, and The Black Stallion—to construct a new narrative, which displays a very close conformity to the prior text, shifting the focus to human–horse interactions. Raising questions about the traditional understanding, scope, and limits of adaptation in avant-garde film studies, Horsey fits in with the broader tradition of cinematic recycling of mainstream cinema as it exemplifies intertextuality as a direct form of quotation, taking quotation as appropriation through cuts, detournement, compilation and free association. Particularly, following Guy Barefoot’s understanding of adaptation as an intertextual form of recycling, Horsey is distinctive in its sole use of found footage from the three Hollywood films as it fully acknowledges the recycled material, strongly alluding to the original stories, and simultaneously re-processes them through a collage of pre-used footage, slow motion, washed-out colours, and an altered soundtrack. Despite appearing to merely extract images and sounds from Reflections, The Swimmer, and The Black Stallion, Horsey emerges as a productive site for recycling Hollywood cinema, placing it into new contexts and audio-visual configurations and offering more complex, engaging ways of looking at how humans connect to horses.