Word.ws English Dictionary

found footage

found footage noun: misplaced, forgotten, archived, or privately-owned motion picture recordings which document past events and which are subsequently rediscovered and made available for public viewing.

Noun

found footage (uncountable)

  1. Misplaced, forgotten, archived, or privately-owned motion picture recordings which document past events and which are subsequently rediscovered and made available for public viewing.
    • Shrewdly mixing found footage, historical record and dramatized re-creation, One Day in People's Poland is an intriguing curio.2006 May 30, Joe Leydon, “One Day In People's Poland”, in Variety, retrieved 16 Oct 2012
    • Austrian director Gustav Deutsch complicates this witty, deceptively simple formula with a wealth of found footage (material shot by others for other purposes) borrowed from film archives from around the world.2009 December 1, Manohla Dargis, “Movie Review: Film ist a Girl & a Gun (2009)”, in New York Times, retrieved 16 Oct 2012
  2. A motion picture, or a segment of one, photographed in the style of an amateurish or unedited documentary.
    • Yes, they knew it was only a movie—one that, like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and plenty others before it, used "found footage" to give a patina of realism to the fanciful events.2009 October 10, Richard Corliss, “Paranormal Activity: A Horror Phenomenon”, in Time

Questions about found footage

What does found footage mean?
Found footage means misplaced, forgotten, archived, or privately-owned motion picture recordings which document past events and which are subsequently rediscovered and made available for public viewing.
What part of speech is found footage?
Found footage is a noun.

Words near found footage in the dictionary

  1. found art
  2. found families
  3. found family
  4. found fault
  5. found favour
  6. found footage
  7. found forth
  8. found God
  9. found in
  10. found it in one's heart
  11. found it in oneself

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: found footage (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “found footage.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/found_footage. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.