July 9, 2024: Found Footage Stories: The “Introduction” to “Rip Van Winkle”

[25 yearsago this coming weekend, TheBlair Witch Project was releasedin theaters. Blair is one of the most prominentand successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story,so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading up to aweekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]

On a sillyand a serious layer to Washington Irving’s continued use of found footageframes.

If youhappened to miss yesterday’s post on Washington Irving’s way-ahead-of-its-time A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), I’ll ask you to check outthat post if you would, and then come on back here for further analysis of Irving’ssubsequent use of the fictional, found footage-style historian characterDiedrich Knickerbocker.

Welcome back! As I highlighted in that post, Irving continued to useKnickerbocker as a framing device for some of his short stories, most famouslyin the “Introduction” to “Rip VanWinkle” (1819; scroll down to find that Introduction). He did so most clearlyto add some of the same ironic humor to “Rip” that thoroughly defined the styleof History; of the three paragraphs in this short “Introduction,” both the secondand the third are largely there to feature such tongue-in-cheek lines as “Itschief merit is its scrupulous accuracy” and “it cannot do much harm to hismemory to say that his time might have been much better employed in weightierlabours.” Given the popularity of History that I discussed yesterday, it's safe to assume that Irving would haveexpected his readers to be familiar with that prior text and its style andtone, and thus that he included Knickerbocker as part of a short story like “Rip”in order to create some continuity across these different publications andgenres.

Yet if that were the only layer to or effect of this Introduction Iwouldn’t be writing about it in its own post for this week’s series, bothbecause it would be too similar to yesterday’s subject and because it justwouldn’t interest me all that much. Much more interesting, and I thinkgenuinely new to this use of Knickerbocker, is the Introduction’s firstparagraph and the way it defines history. “His historical researches,” Irvingwrites of his fictional historian, “did not lie so much among books as amongmen; for the former are lamentably scanty on his favorite topics; whereas hefound the old burghers, and still more their wives, rich in that legendary loreso invaluable to true history.” There are many ways to define the found footagegenre as a whole, but it seems to me that one consistent and central element isan attempt to present cultural works—and generally fictional ones—as representationsof “history,” of real events that took place. Which makes Irving’s Introductiona particularly interesting commentary on how both people and legends can be “truehistory” in a way that history books might not.

Next foundfootage studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?