Showing posts with label fair use. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fair use. Show all posts

Saturday, 11 July 2009

Video Essays on Films: A Multiprotagonist Manifesto





'A Fair(y) Use Tale' by Eric S. Faden. Faden is an Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA). He studies early cinema and digital image technologies, and creates film, video, and multimedia scholarship called "media stylos" that imagine how scholarly research might appear as visual media. See his 'A Manifesto For Critical Media' (essay) and 'The Documentary's New Politics' (media-stylo) in Mediascape, Spring 2008; and his wonderful 'Media Stylo' about cinema 'Tracking Theory:The Synthetic Philosophy of The Glance' By Eric S. Faden, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Volume 2 Issue 2, Winter 2007


Opening with Eric Faden's inspiring work, and following on from its own numerous championings of the online video essay as a hugely promising tool for Film Studies, Film Studies For Free is very happy to present, today, a 'Video Essay Manifesto'. It humbly hopes that it will both inform its readers and stir them to try out this critical/pedagogical genre for themselves ('How to' information-links are given at the foot of the post).

Immediately below, there are lots of pointers to as well as little snippets from useful and stimulating reflections on the video essay by those who have pioneered it in virtuosic online forms (Kevin B Lee, Steven Boone, Matt Zoller Seitz, Jim Emerson, Eric Faden, and Christian Keathley), by others who have commented on such work, and a few other key interventions on offline "films (or videos) about films" by critics, activist filmmakers, and theorists (Hans Richter, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Alexandra Juhasz, Jean-Luc Godard, and Slavoj Žižek).
  • [T]he film essay enables the filmmaker to make the ‘invisible’ world of thoughts and ideas visible on the screen. Unlike the documentary film that presents facts and information, the essay film produces complex thought—reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also be contradictory, irrational, and fantastic.
Hans Richter, "Der Filmessay: eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilms" (The Film Essay: A New Form of Documentary Film) paraphrased by Nora Alter, “Memory Essays”, Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age (ed. Ursula Biemann, Zurich: Edition: Voldemeer, 2003), 12-23, p. 13

  • [S]ometimes when I try to convey something about my experience of movies -- filtered, as always, through reflections and contrasts between images, memories, themes, styles -- what I really want to do is make a movie about it. That seems like the shortest, most direct way from imagination to articulation. The movie itself (as Godard famously suggested) is the criticism, the analysis.
Jim Emerson, Close Up: The Movie/Essay/Dream, Scanners, October 17, 2007

  • Beyond simply having movies on DVD, the full range of digital video technologies enable film scholars to write using the very materials that constitute their object of study: moving images and sounds. As Victor Burgin has demonstrated, digital technologies have “expanded the range of possibilities for dismantling and reconfiguring the once inviolable objects offered by narrative cinema.” Thus, while such technologies provoke a new way of watching and thinking about films, they also offer a new way of conducting and presenting film research.
'The Scholarship of Sound and Image: Producing Media Criticism in the Digital Age', presented by Christian Keathley (Middlebury College), Andrew Miller (Sacred Heart University), Eric Faden (Bucknell University), and Jason Mittell (Middlebury College), (also including material produced by Craig Cieslikowski (University of Houston) Session Proposal for MIT6 - Stone and Payrus, Storage and Transmission International Conference April 24-26, 2009

  • [This] is the next important step in film criticism. We can now "write" using the very materials that constitute our object of study: moving images and sounds. But doing this demands re-thinking conventional critical forms. Lots of experimenting must be done [...].
Christian Keathley, Comment on Close Up: The Movie/Essay/Dream, Scanners, October 17, 2007

  • Digital technologies that enable the combination of images, sounds, and written text invite us not just to move critical discussion into a new presentational context, but demand that we re-imagine the very relationship between an object of study and critical commentary about it.
Christian Keathley, 'A Whirlpool of Things', in media res, May 14, 2007

  • [I] liked the video essay's refiguring of artist and audience relationship. While the idea of "interactive" media has been much hyped in recent years, it seems to me the "essay" film has long existed as an interactive form. Unlike traditional Hollywood narrative and its more homogenous, disposable, and formulaic approach, the essay film intentionally invites the audience to probe, re-view, and question the film's content and style. For me, much of today's interactive media design requires interactivity of hands and mouse but not necessarily the brain. I wanted to use a familiar, perhaps even dated, media form (the movies) but in a different way (the essay).
Eric Faden, Author's Statement 'Tracking Theory: The Synthetic Philosophy of The Glance By Eric S. Faden, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Volume 2 Issue 2, Winter 2007

  • One could argue that the decline of film criticism in recent years — observable in the habits of most newspaper and magazine editors in both Europe and North America as well as most films academics in North America — is not so much a reflection of the changing tastes of audiences (as these editors and academics often insist) as it is the power of multicorporations to eliminate everything that interferes with their promotion. Just as the so-called “American independent” filmmakers promoted by the Hollywood studios via Sundance usually means the filmmakers who have lost their independence, “film criticism” in the mainstream now refers mainly to promotional journalism; true independents and critics have to function in the margins. On more ways than one, the traffic is moving underground. Philosophically speaking, Histoire(s) du cinéma is a dangerous work because it dares to raise the issue of whom cinema, film criticism, and film history belong to. Truthfully, they belong to everyone today with a VCR [or DVD player], but contractually, they belong to the state, and the state today — especially from the standpoint of an American like myself — is Disney. It is Disney and its client states such as Miramax that set our cultural agendas and rewrite our official film histories and critiques via the mass media. By writing his own film history and criticism on video, using means that are readily available and relatively inexpensive, Godard is proposing a direction that filmmakers and video artists everywhere could explore with benefit — the direction of appropriation, a movement already inaugurated by the critical and historical reappraisals of the New Wave, and continued in Histoire(s) du cinéma by other and more subterranean means, such as poetry and autobiography. Recalling Paris Belongs to Us, Jacques Rivette’s first feature, I propose a slogan: Paramount belongs to us.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Trailer for Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma', JonathanRosenbaum.com, May 21, 2009 (also see: Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'LE VRAI COUPABLE: Two Kinds of Criticism in Godard’s Work', JonathanRosenbaum.com, May 14, 2009)
  • If the potential for essayistic images shadowed much of the twentieth century and began self-consciously and definitively to articulate that potential at the mid-point of that century, today, I believe, the essayistic flourishes especially in the expansion of new technologies and changing venues for imagistic spectatorship and reception. Through the technological play, layering, and interactivity offered by new kinds of films, new media, and the Internet, the essayistic can now fully embrace its love affair with experiential contingencies of all sorts--from the privacies of dying on film or the public media events that propel wars to, ultimately, the very activity of film scholars as they engage their own objects on their own terms.
Timothy Corrigan, 'Expression, the Essayistic, and Thinking in Images', Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Volume 2 Issue 2, Winter 2007
  • In 2007 I started my blog Shooting Down Pictures to chronicle the completion of a typically obsessive cinephile project: to finish watching the 1,000 Greatest Movies of All Time as determined by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, a website that compiled over 1,800 lists by critics, filmmakers and scholars to create what is supposed to be the most authoritative consensus of great films. (As of this writing I have seen 962 of the films). For each film that I watch, I write a review, compile quotes and links to writings on the film, and embed video clips of the film that are online. As the project progressed, I felt the urge to comment directly on some of these clips, or to combine my reflections on the film with clips to directly illustrate my observations. By applying my filmmaking and editing background to the current digital technology that allows for ripping/copying and editing video and uploading it to the web, my work in the video essay format thus began. So far I've produced over 50 video essays, most of which can be accessed on my blog and my YouTube channel. With each video, I try to take a different approach that reflects the film and its impact on me. The focus may be on a single sequence (i.e. La Haine; The Saragossa Manuscript), a performance (Un Coeur en Hiver), music (And the Ship Sails On), sociological context (The World According to Garp; Gran Torino), or even autobiographical reflection (The Hour of the Star; America America). In some cases I film original footage to supplement or highlight an aspect of the film (And God Created Woman; The Vanishing compared to Zodiac), or work with footage of an event associated with the film (a midnight screening of El Topo; a group viewing of Duel; an interview with Paul Schrader and Ed Lachmann regarding their film Light Sleeper). I've used text inserts to highlight areas of the frame (The Evil Dead II), a device that fellow video essayists Steven Boone and Matt Zoller Seitz have taken to greater lengths. I've even given voice to the honorable dead, with a narration of the late Susan Sontag's immortal essay on Hitler: A Film from Germany set to footage illustrating her insights. There is no strict guiding principle to my approaches concerning the format of these videos other than a deathly fear of repeating myself and a desire to increase the level of sophistication with each attempt at this new form of film criticism.
Kevin B Lee, 'The Viewer as Creator', Kunst der Vermittlung: Aus den Archiven Filmvermittlung Films”/“The Art of Mediation: Films About Films,” April 2, 2009
  • New forms of distribution of the internet and the digital technologies have made all means for the production of movie-commenting movies easily accessible for today’s web-prosumer. Vast numbers of feature-films and other cinematographic productions exist as digital footage, recording- and editing devices in various complexity are availabe for everyone. When it comes to working with this treasure, the pertinent questions are analogous or even identical to those that authors of movie-commenting movies are confronted with: Which elements of an existing movie can I work with? What can be used, what am I allowed to use? What is a citation, what is a copy, what is a transmission? What is —in the broadest sense—legally or even morally interesting or possible, what is aesthetically interesting or possible in the working-with or the deictical gestures (the showing)? And who should watch all this? To be more specific: What is the difference between digital footage found on the net and the tangible footage collected in movie archives or found in the dustbin of history? What is algorithmic and what is intellectual indexicalization? We have been looking for various forms and formats of movie-commenting artefacts in the internet. Starting from these we are going to discuss the questions mentioned above with Sebastian Lütgert (pirate cinema). The film selection focuses on works created within the frame of American Weblogs – particularly “Shooting Down Pictures”, the project of our special guest, the filmmaker and critic Kevin B. Lee. Examples include video essays on current and classical films by Nicole Brenez, Kristin Thompson, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Matt Zoller Seitz, and others.
'Films About Films and the Internet': Programme Description of "The Art of Mediation" Session on Internet 'Films about Films and the Internet', Shooting Down Pictures, April 16, 2009
  • Each video takes anywhere between 8-20 hours to produce (one I'm working on now, which I hope will be my best, most sophisticated yet, has already crossed the 30 hour threshhold). I don't make any money off doing this. What I do get is: the geeky filmmaker satisfaction of having worked through a movie by literally working it inside out; collaborating with an ever-growing roster of fellow cinephiles whose generosity of insight is often humbling; and finally, sharing all this with a global audience that appears to get something out of this as well. One of the greatest sensations in life is when one feels he is learning and growing through what one does, especially in the company of others. That to me is what this is all about.
Kevin B Lee, Comment on 'Copy Rites: YouTube vs. Kevin B. Lee', The House Next Door Online, Tuesday, January 13, 2009
  • Kevin [Lee]'s trailblazing example inspired me to give up print journalism last year and concentrate on filmmaking, and make video essays—criticism with moving pictures—a key part of my new life. I've been privileged to work with Kevin on video essays for The Museum of the Moving Image, which believed in the critical relevance and legal sturdiness of the format and asked us to do series on the films of Oliver Stone and the opening credits of HBO's The Wire. Many other critic-filmmakers have followed in Kevin's footsteps, including Jim Emerson, publisher of Scanners, who dove into the pool with a wordless video essay tied into The House's "Close-Up Blog-a-thon," and who recently uploaded a ripped DVD clip from Warner Bros' The Dark Knight to augment his recent series of articles attacking the film for narrative and visual sloppiness. Can a critic argue without clips? Sure. Film criticism has largely done without external accompaniments for a century and can continue to do without them. But it's important to note that clips and still frames have been a central part of cinema studies since its inception. Anyone who's attended a film history or theory course knows how valuable they are. Clips often determine the difference between learning something and truly understanding it. They're quotes from the source text deployed to make a case. Take them away, and you're left with the critic saying, "Well, I can't show you exactly what I mean, so I'll describe it as best I can and hope you believe me." This, in a nutshell, is the defining difference between criticism pre- and post-millennium. For the first time ever, when someone says to a critic, "Show me the evidence," the critic doesn't need to unlock a film archive vault or even haul out a DVD player to produce it. He can call it up online anytime, anywhere, for anybody. The implications are astounding. The technology's potential has only begun to be tapped. And as you know, there's more to it than classroom-style argumentation. Digital editing software and DVD-ripping technology permits anybody with filmmaking skill and the right tools—say, Handbrake to rip discs, MPEG Streamclip to convert them to edit-able format, and iMovie or Final Cut to put the pieces together—to manipulate commercial media in all sorts of ways, then post the result on the Internet.
Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Copy Rites: YouTube vs. Kevin B. Lee', The House Next Door Online, January 13, 2009
  • ["The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" takes film criticism in yet another direction. It's an essay in the form of a documentary, incorporating clips and placing the critic (Slavoj Žižek) into the film-worlds he's examining and interpreting. As I wrote from the 2006 Toronto Film Festival]:
    • This isn't quite the first film of this sort ("A Journey Through American Cinema with Martin Scorsese" springs to mind) -- but there ought to be more. The genre of movies about movies -- in-depth appreciations and evaluations of films that go beyond clip reels like "That's Entertainment!" into something deeper and, well, more entertaining -- is something I hope will blossom over the next few years. It's something I've been thinking about a lot: film criticism needs to expand beyond mere words, and make better use of other media, including the web and film/video itself, where the images themselves can be seen while they are analyzed.
    Jim Emerson, 'TIFF: The Pervert's Guide to Cinema', Scanners, September 9, 2006

Also see:

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Tuesday, 30 June 2009

Video Essay 1: On Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes femmes


It's a really B I G D A Y here at Film Studies For Free. But do, please, be gentle...

This posting brings you the first ever little video essay about a film studies topic (in this case, a single film) produced by this blog's author: Unsentimental Education: On Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes femmes.

The exercise probably only shows that there's a mighty long way to go with this format for this author before anything near full proficiency in it can be claimed (for example, the voiceover commentary would have sounded a lot better had the person delivering it not been quite so nervous/terrified during the recording). But it's a good enough beginning for what FSFF sincerely hopes will go on to be a regular, if occasional, feature.

The essay has been produced, as previously promised, to coincide with, and thus to contribute to, the final day of the wonderful Chabrol blogathon hosted by Flickhead's blog (see HERE for a list of all the fantastic contributions, so far, to the event).

Some supplementary material about this strange, beguiling film Les Bonnes femmes/The Good Time Girls (France/Italy, 1960, directed by Chabrol), together with a link to a full transcript of the video essay's commentary and some pedagogical and critical reflections on the process of making it, wlll be added to this post as soon as possible. So, do please come back for that. (Updated July 8, 2009: transcript accessible HERE).

But, time was of the essence to join in with the blogathon. So all else can wait. Here below, then, is the essay, archived at FSFF's new supplementary site, for related videos, at Vimeo. It contains a few significant plot spoilers (as few as possible...). Also, please note that, for the purposes of its critical-scholarly analysis and commentary, the essay transforms many of the original elements of the film that it 'quotes', employing newly created still images (and new sounds), slowed motion, and quite heavy (at times) re-editing (including reordering) of image and sound/music.

In other words, you must see the original film, if you haven't done so already. Les Bonnes femmes is currently available on DVD thanks to Kino Video (Region 1 only). It can be ordered from that company's website HERE, or from Amazon.com HERE



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Thursday, 5 March 2009

Capturing in film criticism: Digital Poetics on frame grabs

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959): A Classic 'Frame Capture Film'?

Here's a follow-up to yesterday's post. If you are a film studies teacher searching for more good ideas for student assignments, Film Studies For Free would like to recommend a little more weblog reading about classroom applications of film criticism exercises.

Today's gem is the 10/40/70 exercise invented by Nicholas Rombes (Chair and Professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy- also see here) at his great weblog Digital Poetics. What is the gen on 10/40/70? According to Rombes, it's
[a]n experiment in writing about film: select three different, arbitrary time codes (in this case the 10 minute, 40 minute, and 70 minute mark), freeze the frames, and use that as the guide to writing about the film. No compromise: the film must be stopped at these time codes. What if, instead of freely choosing what parts of the film to address, one let the film determine this? Constraint as a form of freedom.

Rombes has posted three such experiments of his own to date (10 / 40 / 70 (Ocean's Twelve); 10 / 40 / 70 (The Conversation); (10 / 40 / 70): The Grudge and The Terror of Determinism). The results really show the benefits of the creative constraints involved: some rich and insightful writing is generated on the three very different films.

It strikes FSFF that this would be a very rewarding exercise to set for students.

For more on the practicalities, legalities, and methodological advantages and disadvantages of using frame captures in published or public work, see the following:
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Wednesday, 4 March 2009

Dances with Blogs: Film Criticism Assignments Online

Thanks to David Hudson's Daily blog at IFC.com, Film Studies For Free was alerted to an interesting and worthwhile experiment in the use of blogs for obtaining 'real-world' feedback for undergraduate film studies assignments.

Nick Davis is an Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at Northwestern University. He is author of the always good to read Nick's Flick Picks, which expertly does what it says on its blog-tin, and always conducts itself with great verve and wit.

From time to time Nick also generously shares notes on some of his academic research and his teaching projects on this site (see here and here). With regard to the latter, Nick's current seminar course at Northwestern, The Film Review as Genre, has led him to pose publicly the following great questions to his students:

What is a film review? How have reviews evolved as cinema has evolved? What do film reviewers want, and what criteria do they imply not only for the movies they critique but for the prose, the logic, and the details they enlist to convey that critique? Setting aside stars and thumbs and rotten tomatoes, we will engage with the literary, rhetorical, and stylistic aspects of film reviews as pieces of writing with their own history, considering the ways in which strong reviews require the same foundations as other expository essays (structure, argument, economy, evidence) but with specific and highly diverse relations to their readers, their venues, and their points of view. As an opportunity to bridge the "critical" and "creative" facets of literary study, participants in this course will study and write about film reviews by a host of crucial figures (including Rudolf Arnheim, Carl Sandburg, H.D., James Agee, Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, Andrew Sarris, James Baldwin, Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Anthony Lane, and Stephanie Zacharek) and will also write and revise their own reviews in response to a wide range of required as well as self-appointed viewings. Neither the films nor the reviews will be taken lightly, and the course expects committed and ambitious students—but wit, style, and esteem for the "popular" are warmly welcomed.

But Nick also wanted his students to have more responses to their work than just his own, 'especially since they're working in a form that aspires to a large and diverse audience'. So on this occasion he has used his blog to solicit feedback from his numerous readers on well-chosen snippets from the work produced by the course students (including on Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves [1990]). The responses to his request easily reveal the usefulness of this exercise (36 generally serious comments, to date, in just a few days). Film Studies For Free salutes Nick Davis's experiment and very much recommends that other film studies teachers check it out.

Since FSFF has gone all digital-pedagogical today, it's a good time to flag up another rich and purposeful reflection on such matters by Kevin B Lee. Regular FSFF readers will remember that a while back (see here, here, and here) this blog leapt to the e-barricades in angry defence of Lee's YouTube channel which had been temporarily (and very precipitously) suspended because of a query about copyright.

Back in January, Kevin eloquently wrote in summary about his experiences with YouTube: Things I Learned from Losing - and Regaining - My YouTube Account. But, more recently, he has also posted an exploration of the potential of his video essays as educational resources, based on his discoveries about how they are actually being used as classroom and assignment tools (see Video Essays as a teaching tool: a testimonial).

If you are interested in learning more about innovative film studies teaching methods, Lee's reflections make important reading. Also, while you're visiting Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, do please watch his fabulous new video essays - La roue (1922, Abel Gance) and Variety (1925, E.A. Dupont) featuring commentary by Kristin Thompson.

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Tuesday, 20 January 2009

A Good News Day

Film Studies For Free is happy today for lots of reasons but one of the two chief explanations is that there has been a positive development in the case that this blog has been harping on about for a wee while now (see Shooting Down YouTube: Bring Back Kevin Lee's Videos! and L'Affaire Lee: follow up links).

Today, Kevin Lee announced on his blog that:
Thanks to the Copyright Team at YouTube for getting into the spirit of Martin Luther King Day, and agreeing to temporarily reinstate my account while my counterclaim against INA over the fair use of “…And God Created Woman” is under review. And thank you EVERYONE for your emails and messages of support, and for those who wrote about my ordeal on their respective websites. The publicity surrounding this mess had everything to do with YouTube contacting me last Friday and offering guidance on what steps I needed to take to get my account back online (at the time I didn’t know how I could still file a counterclaim despite [the fact] that I was shut out of my account).
A temporary respite only, it should be noted, but at least it means that Lee's YouTube channel is mostly back online, including many videos that weren't in dispute at all (OK, OK... So FSFF knows that it's not the most serious instance of collective punishment going on in the world right now but it certainly was a disproportionate response in its own way...). Lee has also posted the putative 'offending' video (Shooting Down Pictures #932: And God Created Woman) on Veoh.com, so check it out there, along with three other great video essays of his (Hour of the Star, O Lucky Man, and Seventh Heaven).

Now Film Studies For Free is off to find a television set to which it can glue itself gleefully for the rest of the day, but please feel free to enjoy this link in its absence.
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Thursday, 15 January 2009

L'Affaire Lee: follow up links

[Making Use of Fair Use by The Chronicle of Higher Education'Online videos that use clips from copyrighted music and movies may not violate the law and deserve protection from blanket prohibitions, say the authors of a new report from the American University's Center for Social Media and Washington College of Law.']

Film Studies For Free rather angrily sounded off, the other day, on the case of the deletion of the YouTube account of Kevin B Lee, and then, much more calmly, listed lots of links to information about and discussions of the issue of fair use of (or fair dealing with) copyrighted materials for non-financial profit, educational purposes.

For those interested, here are a few more, highly worthwhile links on the issues raised by the Lee case:

As Patricia Aufderheide so appropriately puts it, in the video embedded above, the whole business is a 'very sloppy and messy beginning to a new way of making culture and making media'. And mess is, as the work of David Trotter has informed us (see p. 12), a frequent characteristic of transitional objects .

But where might we be headed après la transition (and après l'affaire Lee)? FSFF would like to follow up on a few thoughts provoked by Scott Macaulay's article, in particular.

As Macaulay very intelligently writes:

At the end of the day, as distressing as this is to the blogger community individually, I think the best way forward is to link what's happened here to the broader debate over fair use as it applies in documentary film, in classrooms, and in the kind of "remix" works [Lawrence Lessig] talks about in his new book [Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008)]. There are people who have been invested in these issues for years, and the voices of the online critical community should now be added to theirs.

At the same time, we should heed what [Lance Weiler in an forthcoming, relevant article for Filmmaker Magazine, online a week from Monday] suggests -- to be aware of data portability issues when we release our materials [Macaulay refers here to 'the dangers of filmmakers aggregating too much of their data on social networks that can delete their accounts -- and this data -- at the blink of an eye']. And also what [Matt Zoller Seitz] quotes Amy Taubin as saying over at his site: "One way around this problem re movie criticism is not to post on YouTube, but rather to create a dedicated site specif[i]cally for movie criticism that employs excerpts and get a good intellectual properties lawyer to take the first case that arises pro bono (it would be an important landmark case.)"'

This does sound, to Film Studies For Free, like the best, longer term way forward thus far suggested. Perhaps another good solution, in the meantime, is set out by Nina Paley in her comment to Zoller Seitz's post: 'I recommend archive.org as an alternative to youtube. It's free, it's versatile, and you can embed videos. More importantly, it is founded on the ideals of free speech and a creative commons.'

The Internet Archive is, as regular FSFF readers will know, one of this blog's favourite sites. Paley's link takes us directly to a relevant video that she has uploaded to the archive in which she discusses her own filmmaking practice. The video is described thus: 'This is an interview with cartoonist and animator Nina Paley about how copyright restrictions prevent her from distributing her award-winning, feature-length film "Sita Sings The Blues": the film makes heavy use of recordings from the late 1920s by the singer Annette Hanshaw, and although the recordings themselves are out of copyright, the music is not.'

Definitely worth checking it out. Thanks Nina (see also her blog).

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Wednesday, 12 November 2008

Documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law: free e-book and short films

The above great little comic book can currently be downloaded for free in a new and expanded edition from the Duke University Press website.

Bound by Law?: Tales from the Public Domain, by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins takes a humorous look at copyright and fair use issues in relation to filmmaking. The book has a new foreword by Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (Director of An Inconvenient Truth) and a new introduction by award-winning novelist and copyright activist Cory Doctorow.

Here's the blurb about the book (which was available, in its earlier, shorter edition, through Google Books) from the Duke University Press website:

A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the Rocky theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? Eyes on the Prize, the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound by Law? reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property, and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.
The book is the fruit of the pioneering Duke Law School Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Do check out their fabulous website which, among many other resources (webcasts and online articles about fair use), has the following downloadable short films (via RealPlayer):

If you are a budding documentary filmmaker, or if you are teaching the next generation of budding documentarians, Film Studies For Free thinks that you should definitely check out all of the above resources.

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