This dissertation considers the evolution of practices of "found footage" and moving-image appropriation from a politically radical aesthetic strategy of the mid-20th century avant-garde cinema to a more pervasive, even standardized practice of digital media culture. I argue that, over the last half-century, appropriation strategies in cinema have changed in correspondence with key shifts in the materiality of moving-image media, and artists and filmmakers have taken up these techniques as a means of addressing the ways in which images circulate through new technologies. Found-footage cinema, therefore, constitutes a sustained discourse about---and a methodology through which to explore---the role of the moving-image in the constitution and shaping of everyday experience, one carried out through an investigation of its evolving media materiality.

The dissertation argues for this progression through a close examination of four key moments in experimental cinematic practice: the postwar North American cinematic avant-garde; the filmmakers associated with Lettrism, the Lettrist International, and the Situationist International; American and British video artists of the late 1970s and early 1980s; and contemporary moving-image artists working with digital media sourced from networked communities and archives.