Left to his own devices…

We arrived at ITP at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday to shoot our video armed with a shooting schedule we had mapped out with the invaluable assistance of the awesomely generous Ruth Sergel. On Thursday, Zoe, Sonaar, Jorge and I had met with Ruth, and she suggested that we break down our storyboards into a shot list by spending some time thinking about how we would compose and light each shot, and where the camera would be positioned. The shot list definitely saved us a lot of time, which was needed because we grossly underestimated how long it would take to create the set for our production. Between making props (little inspirational posters and award certificates done in Photoshop and some fake fortunes done in Word), rearranging Red’s office, and working out some problems with lighting the space (which we did thanks to some assistance from the always helpful Todd Holoubek), we burned a good portion of the day away. It was around 3:30 in the afternoon that we shot the first scene on our shooting schedule.

The shoot went fine, and Zoe, Sonaar and I were repaid for our efforts in convincing Jorge to serve as the actor in the piece as he was fabulous in the role of the unfortunate fortune cookie writer. We wrapped up shooting around midnight, and finished restoring Red’s office to its original condition around 1:00 a.m.

We had another late night logging and capturing our footage, and we completed the editing on Saturday. Jorge made one final tweak on Sunday, which is the version presented here:

Click To Play

It was an amazing experience working with this group. I can’t think of one serious disagreement we had about the direction of this piece, as everyone was very accepting of each other’s ideas about the project. The process of creating a video is a lot of work, but it’ll seem less arduous if you’re lucky enough to work with sharp, good-natured people like Zoe, Sonaar, and Jorge.

As I prove every week in this class, I am no artist. So maybe that’s why I have a hard time understanding exactly what the controversy is in the Harper’s Magazine article “On the Rights of Molotov Man”. Painter Joy Garrett used the photographic image of Pablo Arauz preparing to throw a Molotov cocktail during the Sandinistas’ struggle against the Somoza regime as the inspiration for one of her works. The image of Mr. Arauz had been photographed by Susan Meiselas, whose lawyers informed Ms. Garrett that she was infringing on Ms. Meiselas’s copyright. Ms. Garrett, in response to the notification from the lawyers, agreed to credit Ms. Meiselas’ work as her inspiration in future exhibitions, but did not agree with their request to seek written permission before making any reproductions of her work. A lawsuit was threatened but never filed.

Susan Meiselas frames her objection to Joy Garnett’s use of her photograph as part of larger argument against the sort of decontextualization of source materials made easier by the tools of the digital age. As a photographer whose work focuses on issues of social justice, Ms. Meiselas’s stance is understandable. Her photographs are not intended to be admired merely for their aesthetics; they are meant to convey a story about a people, a time, a place, and/or an issue to be addressed. Their context is important. But this particular photograph makes a poor example, since the image of its subject, Pablo Arauz, a Sandinista rebel photographed by Ms. Meiselas on July 16, 1979 in battle against the Somoza regime, had been appropriated as an image of revolution throughout that country to such a widespread degree over the years that even the Contras, a CIA-funded group dedicated to the destruction of the Sandinista government Mr. Arauz fought to install, used a version of the pose Ms. Meiselas’ lens captured on their propaganda materials. Long before Joy Garnett encountered it, Susan Meiselas’ photograph had been stripped of its context; it had evolved from a picture of Pablo Arauz, Sandinista rebel in battle on July 16, 1979, into a symbol of rebellion. Garnett’s painting just furthered a process that had begun over twenty years before she first glimpsed the Molotov Man.

Still, the solution that was settled on, which was Garnett simply crediting Meiselas’ photograph as the inspiration for her painting (which was agreed to under threat of legal action) is one which has the potential to meet the objectives of both artists. Joy Garnett gets to exhibit and reproduce her painting as she wishes, and perhaps those fascinated by it will be directed to Susan Meiselas’ work through the citation, which might lead them to explore the circumstances that drove Pablo Arauz to strike the pose Meiselas’ camera immortalized almost thirty years ago. Both artistic freedom and the context of the original image would thus be preserved.

Here are the storyboards Zoe, Sonaar, Jorge, and I created for our soon-to-be filmed production (click on each for the full-sized versions):

Zoe did the art, and the inspiration for the story came—believe it or not—from a basket full of fortune cookie fortunes that I saved for some reason. I scanned the fortunes into my computer, creating seven pages of “wisdom” from which the four of us crafted our story.

In responding to Jonathan Letham’s The Ecstacy of Influence, I was going to just go through all of my classmates’ blogs and just sample their responses to fabricate mine: the thinking being that the best response to a defense of plagiarism would be to plagiarize.

But after reading through them and thinking about how I would craft together the samples to make something coherent, I realized that might be more work than just writing my own response, which in a way I think makes his point. There’s a difference between outright stealing and sampling. Unless the entire work is copied line by line for the extent of the piece, the process of sampling some bits of some other work, or even drawing inspiration from another work, involves enough creative effort by the person doing it that it should protect him or her from charges of copyright violation or plagiarism.

Regardless of how long one believes a copyright should extend during an author’s life, it’s hard to justify a case for ever extending beyond the lifetime of an author (or his surviving spouse), so current standard (lifetime plus seventy) is ridiculous. But I think the other issue to be considered is what should constitute a violation of a copyright. Taking a melody from a song and completely changing the nature of the lyrics is fine by me (but if course I’m not a musician, so I don’t have a full appreciation for what sort of effort it takes to create a melody). George Harrison turning He’s So Fine into My Sweet Lord wasn’t an act that he should have had to pay for, as he eventually did. Changing the names of characters because your studio couldn’t obtain the rights to the original artist’s work, as F. W. Murnau did when he made Nosferatu is not, because if it were permissible, the only writers who would ever be paid in the film and television would be in-house hacks whose sole jobs would be to “adapt” original work by other authors to allow the studio to get around having to strike a deal for their work. (Stoker actually died before Dracula was published, but the fact that his widow was responsible for getting the work published should have entitled her to the rights that would normally be reserved to the author had the work been published when he was alive.)

Nosferatu provides an interesting example of the problem of copyrights, for though it was born of a despicable act of piracy, it is an unquestioned masterpiece. Yet the world was almost deprived its brilliance ( and that of Shadow of the Vampire, which was inspired by it), because Stoker’s widow won lawsuits in 1924 and 1929 which sought to have every copy of the film destroyed. The film’s widespread distribution made the enforcement of those edicts impossible, and eventually the widow and the studio made peace. But were the controversy never settled, could even the staunchest defenders of copyright law make a convincing argument that the world would have been a better place had the widow Stoker succeeded in her quest to eradicate from existence this Dracula doppelganger?

I honestly can’t imagine how that argument could be made.

Two Fridays ago, Yasser and I spent a few hours collecting audio samples of people in the street and in Washington Square Park by asking them to give us a few words that were on their mind. The words could be a phrase or a sentence, or just five random words. Initially the project was going to be a mixture of the words and some music, using it to define the space by the thoughts of the people in the park on that day.

But the project changed when we came upon an election even that CNN was running across from Bobst. Some of the people mistook us for people collecting content for CNN, and offered us their thoughts on the election. When going through these samples, we were both particularly affected by a passionate plea by one African-American man who, after giving us his reasons for voting for Barack Obama, came back to us after we had moved on from him and made the statement, “Don’t let race stop you from making a decision that’s going better this country. It’s not about color anymore.”

With the election just a few days away, we realized that we wanted our project to make a statement about what we both hope will be a major turning point in our country’s history: the election of the first non-white President of this country. We both agree with the sentiment of the gentleman we encountered—young Americans are growing up without the hang-ups about race that have kept our country from living up to its ideals for so long, so the future will “not be about color anymore”.

Tuesday is the day we can make that statement. And God willing, in future years we’ll elect a female President, or a Latino, or an Asian, or a Jew, or a Muslim, or someone who is open about their homosexuality, and this country will be past the point of considering anything about those eventualities to be extraordinary.

Collaborating with Yasser was a great experience, both because of his easygoing manner and his clear vision of what he wanted to do with the project. He was the one who suggested we use Santogold’s You’ll Find a Way to provide the backing of our track, which worked far better than anything I could have come up with. (Sly and the Family Stone’s Everyday People? Three Dog Night’s Black and White? Whatever it would have been if left up to me, the choice of song would likely have been both obvious and lame.)

Here’s the track, which we’ve titled New Birth of Freedom.