Underground films recycled broadcast and newsreel footage before appropriation was named

Evidence

No President was shown silent save for broadcaster Lowell Thomas’s commentary on a Sumatra travelogue and program music Sarris identified as Tchaikovsky. The surviving version alternates scenes shot in Smith’s SoHo loft with found footage—including the Thomas travelogue, a clip from a late 1940s soundie in which an unidentified couple vocalize the sentimental hit “A Sunday Kind of Love,” and newsreel footage of candidate Willkie addressing the Republican convention and the Future Farmers of America. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1395