In Caryn Cline’s film “Perchance” found 16mm footage from two different educational films are re contextualized through montage. The faded images are edited and combined using an optical printer. Whatever original intention was behind the footage is remixed into a story that follows a young boy who explores the world and him self in a dream.

            The style and language of Cline’s film is very poetical, drawing from different elements of the natural world and conscious memory of the human mind. This dichotomy can be seen when juxtaposing the footage of the wild ocean and the young boy. What bridges these two pieces of the film is the metaphorical editing language. This can be seen in the editing of the audio where the sounds of the ocean bleed over into the footage of the boy. This language requires the viewer to read closely into whether what is seen is a memory or dream.

            The symbols in the film invite the viewer in this dream world. We see seagulls, seashells in hand, and the ending shot of the tide with a rotating dutch tilt. These different things all have different meaning in this realm. The style of using footage with two different colors creates a further separation between a waking and dreaming life. Moving back and forth between red and blue helps to differentiate between different modes of memory.

The abstracted relationship between the visual and narrative structure of the film is all part of the decision to use found footage. This abstracted relationship reveals something about how we see memory and the process of taking external footage and internalizing and then putting it out into the world with new meaning.