Virgil Widrich is an Austrian film-maker with a very inventive approach to the materials of cinema. There’s some crossover in the two films here with animation, although I don’t think Widrich would consider himself an animator as such. The technique is one of many he draws upon.
Copy Shop (2001) is a simple scenario in which a man who works at an establishment named “Copy Shop” ends up populating his world with copies of himself as a result of some magical action (or malfunction) of his photocopying machine. In a self-reflexive twist, the entire film has been made with photocopies, although all the action was shot initially with a digital camera. Every frame of the edited material was printed out, photocopied and shot again as a succession of stills on copier paper, some of which are subject to tears or the various misprintings you get with cheap copies.
Fast Film (2003) expands on the copying idea which it applies to Hollywood’s history and cinematic modes. This is one of those films that’s more fun to watch than to attempt to describe, but it’s essentially one long chase scene which uses cinema history as its raw material. Metafilms that create new works by cutting together pre-existing footage aren’t exactly uncommon, I did something like this myself in the 1980s using video tapes. Widrich’s metafilm is an epic in miniature, a deliriously complex piece of work that assembles a huge variety of film clips which have been copied onto paper then animated into a collage of non-stop action. (Wikipedia says the film used 65,000 paper printouts of images from 400 live-action films.) There’s so much to all of this, and some sections go by so fast, that it warrants repeated viewing: actors from one film rescue (or fight with) actors from another; cars race along the carriages of runaway trains; actors swap bodies or faces. Much of this is done by folding the copied clips into origami shapes; the final sequence is a dogfight with paper planes. Widrich was the director and scenarist but the animators who made the whole thing work ought to be credited as well: Gernot Egger, Michael Lang, Markus Loder-Taucher, Alexandra Pauser, David Reischl, Walter Rafelsberger, Christian Ursnik, Vinh-San Nguyen, Carmen Völker, Mario Waldhuber, Gerald Zahn; additional animation: Eveline Consolati, Thomas Grundnigg, Andreas Künz, Stefan Braulik.