MUSIC FOR ONE APARTMENT AND SIX DRUMMERS

Six Drummers,
2011, 11 min 04 sec

A gang in a Volvo have staked out a flat; when its occupants leave to walk their dog, the six break into the place. One keeps his eyes on a stopwatch: they have only ten minutes before the couple returns. Instead of stealing things, the gang goes from room to room making fascinating percussive music with found objects: first in the kitchen, then the bedroom, the bathroom, and the salon. Cabinet doors, pot lids, light switches, a pill dispenser, a lamp, books, and a vacuum cleaner hose all add to the suite in four movements. The drummers keep the first three rooms tidy, but what will the flat’s occupants make of the hurricane that hits the living room?

SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY

Todd Haynes
1988, 43 min, 19 sec

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story is a 1987 American experimental short biographical film that portrays the last 17 years of singer Karen Carpenter’s life, as she struggled with anorexia. Directed by Todd Haynes, the film uses Barbie dolls as actors, as well as documentaries and artistic footage. Superstar was co-written and co-produced by Haynes and Cynthia Schneider, with an unauthorized soundtrack consisting mostly of the hit songs of The Carpenters. It was filmed over a ten-day period at Bard College in the summer of 1985. Barry Ellsworth collaborated on the film and was the cinematographer for the Barbie themed interior segments of the film.

The film was withdrawn from circulation in 1990 after Haynes lost a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Karen’s brother and musical collaborator, Richard Carpenter. The film’s title is derived from The Carpenters’ 1971 hit, “Superstar”. Meanwhile, over the years Superstar has developed into a cult film, has notably been bootlegged, and is included in Entertainment Weekly‘s 2003 list of top 50 cult movies. Its apparent metamodern purpose as a film, including multiple perspectives on anorexia nervosa, the pop music industry, The Carpenters themselves, and the definition of a biographical film, has also given it a legacy among fans of avant-garde cinema; Guy Lodge, writing for The Guardian, expressed that ‘while Haynes is working in a vein of very rich irony, there’s not a hint of snark here’.

WHAT ELSE IS THERE?

Röyksopp,
2008, 3 min 33 sec

“What Else Is There?” is the third single from the Norwegian duo Röyksopp’s second album The Understanding. It features the vocals of Karin Dreijer from the Swedish electronica duo The Knife. The album was released in the UK with the help of Astralwerks.

WHAT DOES THE WORLD LOSE WHEN A LANGUAGE DIES?

PBS News Hour, USA
2015, 7 min 2 sec

“Language Matters,” a PBS documentary, explores how linguistic heritage is intrinsically intertwined with local knowledge and concepts as well as sustainable visions. But these languages and their ancestral knowledge are now at risk of being lost forever around the world. Poet Bob Holman elucidates his fight to revive languages inherently part of our common world legacy.

PRODUCT PLACEMENT

David Lynch, Chris Johnson, USA & Livraria Cultura, Brasil
2007 & 2008

This is a clip out of an interview shot at the AFI Dallas Film Festival. Edited on location by Confidence Bay, mobile edit suite.

NYSU Films: The Birds, the Prequel

05. POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY

How to protect collective memory from the copyright wars launched by Hollywood and the music industry? We will zoom in on strategies like hactivism, piracy, sampling, the Creative Commons, the economics of online sharing, and new genres of collaborative creativity in the context of the networked information economy. In short: how creators and artists can take back control.

We turn now to a class of enclosures that don’t get that much attention: the many appropriations of knowledge and culture. You can tell that enclosure has reached troubling extremes when businesses claim ownership of words, colors and smells! (TLC p. 53) There are actually trademarks for smells, such as “the smell of freshly cut grass on tennis balls.” The US television network NBC owns a trademark on three musical notes played on a chime — “ding, dong, ding!” One wonders if Andy Warhol would have been able to create his Campbell Soup silkscreen if today’s trademark laws were in force fifty years ago. (David Bollier: Think like a Commoner, 2014: p. 72)

Copyright scholar James Boyle wrote a famous essay declaring that we are in the midst of a “Second Enclosure Movement.” The first was, of course, the English enclosure movement. The second one, now underway, is the over-privatization (i.e., corporatization) of creative works, information and knowledge. (TLC p. 69) The extension of copyright terms is a crude political case of corporate protectionism. (TLC p. 71) For instance, trademark law is a tool that is being abused to shut down the cultural commons and protect markets. (David Bollier: Think like a Commoner, 2014: 71)

This sweeping change in the scope of copyright law has been followed by intensive PR campaigns by the entertainment industry to persuade us that music, film and books must be seen as “intellectual property” that is as sacrosanct as your home or car. Likening culture to private property has been insidiously effective — if misleading — because it has allowed industry to claim that any unauthorized use of creative works constitutes a theft. Our natural human impulses to imitate and share — the essence of culture — have been criminalized. (David Bollier: Think like a Commoner, 2014: 68)

Hollywood once regarded the arrival of television, cable TV and the videocassette recorder as profound threats to its core business — the theatrical exhibition of films — only to discover that each invention opened up lucrative new markets for it. In this tradition, studios are now incensed that people dare to use excerpts of films and television shows noncommercially and without authorization — a right explicitly protected under the “fair use” (or in some countries, “fair dealing”) doctrine of copyright law. (David Bollier: Think like a Commoner, 2014: 70)

Pluto, Goofy and Donald were destined to become public-domain characters five years later. To protect its cartoon characters from becoming freely available, Disney mounted an aggressive lobbying campaign to enact the Copyright Term Extension Act. It flexed its political muscle by giving campaign contributions to most of the congressional sponsors of the legislation. (David Bollier: Think like a Commoner, 2014: 71)

FURTHER READING & RESEARCH

Judith Butler: Who Owns Kafka? / London Review of Books (2011)

Peter Lamborn Wilson / Hakim Bay, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes  (2003)

David Bollier, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (2009)

William Patry, Moral Panics and the Copyright (2003)

Hito Steyerl, Duty-Free Art (e-flux Journal #63 – March 2015)

RESOURCES

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