Compilation film

A compilation film, or compilation movie is a film edited from previously released or archive footage, but compiled in a new order of appearance.

The video footage can be combined with new commentary and new footage, but most of the footage of a compilation film consists of archive or that has been used in earlier, different movies. Sometimes it can also be older material shot again, but with a higher budget.

The quality of these types of films is variable. Sometimes the archive footage is just edited behind each other, without adding anything new. Because of running time limits some footage can be shortened or expanded with short, new footage in an effort to make everything seamlessly flow together into each other. These transitions are not always unnoticeable.

Some of the earliest compilation movies were propaganda films. A famous example is the German Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude (1940), where only a small part consisted of new footage, namely the scenes with Jews in a Polish ghetto and the animated maps. The lion's share of the film was filled with old newsreel footage showing Albert Einstein, Anna Stern, Rosa Luxemburg and Adolf Hitler and clips from movies with and by Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang. Other countries, including the United States and Great Britain, also made propaganda films with archive footage to present themselves in the style of a documentary.

In the years before the invention of video stores film companies released compilation films in which the best episodes of a film serial were put into one movie. One of the earliest examples were Walt Disney's "package films", based on his popular short animated films.

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