(Note: the following are selected highlights from Stupid Journey # 5. In 2004 I was dealing with the Niagara Indie Film Festival's anti-collage policy, among many other dilemmas, and issued a call "to write to ME and exert a pressure campaign on ME to keep making collage films, that methods of media sampling and commentary can be worthwhile and useful and should be supported from an activist and/or artistic perspective." These were among the responses - JC)

jonathan
copyright is theft. if you were a sculptor critiquing, say, mcdonald's, and built something out of discarded mcburger boxes, no one would say: how dare you! someone else made those containers! but the movies represent the kind, benevolent face of capitalism, the ambassador of capital, so they appear to an unknowing public, as something else. the corporate people, the ones with money, the few mergered multi-nationals who are busy spitting out computer chips and sneakers, also produce pictures and sounds, and it is in their interest to keep that material locked up, copyrighted, so it can be 'exploited' forever. artists have an oppositional stance to this (remember picasso's bicycle handle sculpture, or duchamp's shovel or toilet), artist's have been lifting for most of the last century, it is another way of refusal, of saying no, and besides, in your case, you are engaged in a critique of systems of representation, so the clips you are using are necessary as evidence. image theft is part of the anti-globalization movement, and the fests that support old copyright notions are part of the same power structure that insists that image manufacture is a one way street, you are the consumer period, while manufacture must be left to professionals. and stars. there are thousands of fests around the globe however, and issues of copyright are generally not on the radar, even in places like Cannes or Berlin or Rotterdam. it's even possible to broadcast this material in some countries. some people get it, some don't, but with the proliferation of home computer systems it's all too late for the naysayers, digital media equals theft (the copy is the original), demands it even. so keep going!

mike hoolboom

Dear Jonathan:

Please continue to make your collage pieces, regardless of copyright issues.

I live in the United States, and I find that this copyright nonsense deters and perhaps even stops Independent Filmmakers from making politicially & socially relevant films. We are the people. We are the artists. We have the
right to use material to express ourselves politically, socially, and artistically --- especially if it's not for financial gain, but even if it happens that way. In most cases, we're dealing with multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporations…

They can hire the $1000/hr lawyer to argue copyright infringment, etc... the independent filmmaker can't afford these lawyers. If these film festivals are insistant upon all footage being cleared, then they are denying the starving artist a valid outlet for expression.

"Fair Use" extends to social & political critique... it's what you do, and it's what I do!

Sincerely,

Christine Rose
Blue Moose Films
www.libertybound.com
www.bluemoosefilms.com
bluemoosefilms@hotmail.com

Hey Jonathan:

Don't lose it; you're on the right side of this. Artist anger is bubbling over at the encroaching copyright laws that are made in our names but mostly benefit the corporations. This issue is so hot that it was a major stream of conversation and a plenary at the last annual
conference of the National Association of Media Art Centers that took place in Seattle. There are books being written, panels being organized, lobbying and all other types of resistance.

Hollywood cinema and mainstream television now constitute an enormous part of our environment. Artists should have a right to comment on it in the way that the Romantics dealt with the landscape--this is our
landscape.

Finally, you're right that TIFF has given prizes to collage works such as Mike Hoolboom's Letters from Home. And my own recycled tape, Islands, won a prize at the last World Wide Short Film Festival. I don't get NIFF's position.

Keep on making your work. Keep on showing it.

Richard Fung

hey yo jon!

this is from wade in kimberley. if you don't keep making collage films i will come to the niagara region or wherever the hell you are and kick your ass. Well, not really, but imagine the gravity of the situation that would require me to leave my redneck mountain town and come back to . . . the QEW. Well, that's how i feel.

Apart from the gay agenda in pop culture there is another force i have noticed. There seems to be a lot of reminders from major and minor pop culture celebs that life is hard, get used to it. like ween "don't poison the mind don't steal from the source, the path of life is not so easy to course, buddy"

i know you know this and i only mention the pop thing because you deal with the medium you do. So as i am being rushed out the book store i say this:
 please keep making collages so that i may show them in the kootenays
 pull your head out yer ass (it has become my personal mantra)
 grab a deck of cards and do push ups and situps for the value of each card until you can't. you'll get better with time and the next time the cops rush you look out! So hip hop boy from PE public service announcement to fight the power you've got to be the power, the strength of the body and mind are the weapons you need...blah blah.

keep on
love
wade wetmore

this was meant to be elequent and perhaps the humour (subtle) was lost but fusk i hate emails anyway

Hello Jonathan,

My name is Kristen Harding and we met last year at York University, My friend and classmate Vince and I (from the University of Windsor) submitted a piece of our own Collage art to your workshop and film festival later that evening, Operation: Audience Freedom.
 
I am currently travelling around Europe, but i got your email and decided I had to at least respond since I can't "help" in a hands on sense. 
 
What you are running into is a form of censorship in a society that claims freedom of speach.  I can see that selling material with copywritten material with in could cause problems, but I know that what we were working on was not something we needed to sell, but something we wanted to produce, a message in an artistic fashion that could circulate to other likeminded and persuadable individuals. 
 
The power of the message comes from the fact that we use media outlets that already exist and using them in the same fashion to produce another message.   The point being to show society that media is manipulatable and that it can be used in any fashion to create the message its creators want wether it be the mainstream media of left thinking activists like our selves.
 
Entering our pieces into festivals is one means that we have of distributing our material to a different mass of people.  Our audiences need to be opened up to other film makers and others who can appreciate what we are trying to create.
 
In our piece we even had original music so the copy written footage was all television clippings. From what we were informed, we could use this footage freely in an educational sense, so by disallowing it to enter into festivals are we saying that at some point it loses its educational value?  Where do we draw the line?  When you leave the walls of an educational institution, do you stop learning? I for one know thats not true! while i have a foundation for my eduation in canada, i have learned more about life and politics as I ventured outside the institutions walls, and learned to really see the world through my own eyes, not that of the mass media! 
 
I wish you all the luck in getting this "campaign" off the ground, and while im on the otherside of the world, if theres anything I can do to help, please let me know! I'm always up for a good cause!!!!!
 
Kristen Harding

I havent seen a minute of any of your pastiche footage, but I think that the whole area of the arts meeting the commercial use of what was once the arts is interesting. I mean, here you can argue that the artists invented collage, and the advertisers took it and got rich off it and never gave a cent to the artists. Now if the artists
reproduce advertising for their own use, what is the ground for complaint? We are taking it back. We are continuing the life of your ad. Any drive down a strip leading to our city is a pastiche. You advertisers have put your pictures and words between us and the sky, for heaven's sake! In 1955 when I drove into Winnipeg from the west the first ad I saw said "Organs". The second said "Snap-On Tools." It wasnt I that made that up. So here: we will stop making our pastiches of your words and pictures when you stop making those pastiches along the strip.

George Bowering

Dear Jonathan,

As an independent filmmaker, programmer and board member of the Images festival and the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, I urge you to keep making the work you are making.  Using collage/appropriated footage is recognised practise in the independent film community, and one that offers a valid and unique form of socio-political expression.

Film festivals and art galleries all over the world accept this type of work because of it's special ability to comment, as yours done on more mainstream perspectives, whether contemporary or historical.  As you know I am part of the blah blah blah collective -- a group of 14 filmmakers who made work responding the Summit of the Americas held in Quebec City in 2001.  The majority of works in this program used collage/appropriated footage as a means of commenting on society and media perspective.  These works have screened internationally in festivals such as the Images Festival, and Inside Out, been curated into galleries such as the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queens University, are distributed by a recognised distributor, reviewed in publications such as FUSE Magazine, and the Globe and Mail, and some have even been broadcast.

To give you some indication of the receptivity of the film and arts community to the use of this type of footage, these works have, through screening and sales, raised over $10,000 for Libertas -- the Legal Collective funding legal fees incurred by those arrested at the Summit. That is a LOT of recognition of the validity and place for this type of work.

Your work is crucial because it offers another perspective on commercial mass media presentation and challenges perspective.  It should be viewed by a wide audience, including high school, college, and university students as an examination of media deconstruction.

Please keep making, distributing and screening this work.  In this age of media monopolies, we need it more than ever.

Gisele Gordon

Jonathan:

Gisele Gordon sent me your plea. I will forward it to our artists that deal specifically with found footage and a few that have addressed the copyright issue. There is an American artist, Keith Sanborn, whose work (the Zapruder Footage) was mistakenly sent to a broadcaster and all hell broke loose. This same work however has been shown in festivals internationally.

As a distributor, I can't imagine any festival not accepting this manner of critical voice into programming or competition, it doesn't make sense. It can't be an Indie festival that's for sure, Niagara's objectives sound very industry, commercially based.

Good idea to send out a public plea.

All the best,
Wanda vanderStoop,
Vtape

Dear Satan, I mean Jonathan:

It's a fucking problem with film festivals. Usually all they want is for you to sign a some insane bad faith agreement that you will hold them harmless and pay all THEIR legal expenses in the event of a lawsuit against them.

I can't remember what the Canadian legal term is which parallels "fair use" here, but the only way I can get anything done is just to ignore possible legal threats. Sometimes people will come after you but usually all they ask if that you stop immediately, which I guess I would do until I could get legal defense together. The best defense here seems to be "educational use" which covers festivals and museums, especially if they are not-for-profit organizations. I don't know if Canada has the equivalent to "Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts" but if they do, or you can somehow find another way to get pro bono legal support, you could get them to approach the festival either in a friendly way to volunteer their advice on how they could safely extend their policy to work like yours, or in an aggressive way to threaten a lawsuit if they exclude work such as yours. They may respond either way. I know this all sounds very bourgeois, but the question is: do you want to publicize the issue, or get YOUR film and possibly other people's films into the festival in the future.

By way of pressure, all I can say, is that if you stop working you're letting other people control your life and in many cases the very people whose politics and policies you oppose. Why not document your rejection letters or phone calls to the festival? If you make a piece out of it that plays in Toronto, or elsewhere which they perceive as
having more cultural clout, you may embarrass them into changing their policy.
Keith Sanborn

You know, every hack politician and his (or her) overpaid writers use quotes from allegedly inspirational sources like Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson, or the Bible. I guess that's political sampling.

They also quote, and I love this, more radical sources like MLK, Nelson Mandela, or Bob Dylan. That's when the political sampling gets murky. Taken out of context, Dylan's lyrics ("He not busy being born is busy dying") has a different meaning when spoken by born-again Jimmy Carter. On first blush, this appears deceptive and unethical. But listen to the Led Zeppelin guitar riff that opens "She's Crafty" and things get murky again.

Who says context is permanent? Word definitions change over time. Used cars are now pre-owned. Toxic sludge is bio-solids. Missiles are peacekeepers. The US unselfconsciously uses helicopters called Apache to quell ethnic cleansing.

Words and images transcend context.

The collage is an art form.

Jonathan Culp is an artist.

Thanks,

Mickey Z.

Hey Jonathan,

Well, I've always been a big believer in the idea that if you're not allowed into someone's club, you should form your own... in other words, if this festival is uptight about collage films then that's their problem.

However, there are 2 immediately obvious reasons why they should accept collages. 1) it's a long and honourable tradition, going at least as far back as Bruce Connor and Arthur Lipsett, and 2) it's extremely timely and topical, what with the swirling controversies around downloading, intellectual property vs. artistic freedom, etc etc.

I suspect that they're just scared of offending corporate sponsors or something. Who knows?

But at any rate, as to why you should keep doing it, that's even simpler: because you're doing something unique and important.

I've realized that the hardest things in life tend to also be the most important ones. Staying true to your beliefs & artistic vision might not be the single most important one, but it's gotta be in the top 3.

So don't give up. I could go on in this Anthony Rollins (bad nomenclature pun very much intended) vein, but that's my advice in a nutshell.

talk to ya soon,

Malcolm Fraser

Hello Jonathan,

I have been making video for about eight years now and have had numerous screenings internationally as well as at home here in Canada. All of my work (with only three exceptions) uses found footage. I have never had a problem like the one you're having. Perhaps these people have never heard of the "fair use" argument. Legally artists are permitted to sample copyrighted material for the use of parody or commentary. There's a huge difference between appropriation and plagiarizing someone's work. I imagine in most cases this is obvious to anyone viewing the work. I would suggest you contact CARFAC. They know the legal side of this and I'm sure they have experience in this area. Other than that, I say fuck the NIFF and submit your work to real art festivals that actually concern themselves with culture generating instead of corporate dick sucking. Just a suggestion.

best of luck,

-Tasman Richardson

p.s. It's really odd since not only have I had no problems showing work, I've also had no problem getting it distributed. Have you got anything at Vtape?

In defense of found footage……

   There is simply too much. Too many images, sounds, words, blazing cables, wires, wireless connections.  It cannot belong to one person, one corporation, one holder of trademark or copyright.  It belongs to culture. Or at the very least, it should belong to culture. And all those bits and pieces and blips and clips that SHOULD belong to culture, should also be available to those who wish to re-use, re-edit and re-contextualize.  And in some cases they are, but there are always those who make it harder, who don’t agree, whom we must fight back against.

In the beginning there was copyright law…and it was intended to protect the rights of the author in his lifetime, so that said artist could be protected and make money on his creations, make a living, etc...and that copyright was supposed to last for 70 yrs. When that was up—the “property in question would fall into the realm of public domain…and wonderful land where the work could be re-used, re-examined, etc by other artists…

Then it all changed (in the US at least)---with a number of laws. Namely—the sonny bono copyright extension act, the digital rights management act and the digital copyright millennium act…..all of these acts—all of them- have been designed with a specific intent—to hoard and protect so called intellectual property –either by extending copyrights beyond the 70 yr period, or by creating a permanent new copy right when old public domain material is converted to digital media.  The culture industry and all it’s lobbying to keep itself safe and prosperous through remakes, product tie-ins and the like.

But there is another side to the coin.  An underside.  For all the glut of visual culture, for the sheer volume of visual information they tell us to watch, to absorb, to consume till we are fat on culture, till we quote our favorite movies, till we can find our latest and favorite piece of flotsam in the data stream, till we move on and find another and keep the cycle going.   But all this absorption, consumption, surely it would have an end.  Well, it doesn’t.  But that doesn’t mean that we should take it, the proverbial candy from a stranger again and again.  Sometimes we want to spit the candy out, sometimes ever after it’s been digested….apologies for waxing metaphorical, but there is a point and I am getting to it.

Plunder and indie cultural production.

There is a tradition in the world of cultural production, a tradition of plunder...that is, artists who take objects, ideas, works of art etc that already exist in culture, and use these in their own work. 

The tradition dates back to the early days of avant-garde, to the infancy of the medium as we know it, and we can chart its growth and development as we can any other film genre or filmic practice.  In 1936 Joseph Cornell created his first film “Rose Hobart” from an garbage bin film print of a jungle film called East of Borneo; he took the original footage, and sliced together a 19 minute feast of jungle spectacle, from the shot of a volcano being revealed behind a pulled back curtain, to native crocodile training, it is heralded as an early piece of surrealist found footage work, so much so that it was featured in MOMA’s centenary celebrations.

Canadians Arthur Lipsett and David Rimmer (two filmmakers who worked under the auspices of the NFB, arguably Canada’s only filmic institution), both worked almost exclusively in the realm of found footage.  Rimmer’s “Variations of a Cellophane Wrapper” is well entrenched in the avant garde canon… it is comprised of a simple shot of a man working in a factory, taking a giant sheet of cellophane off of an assembly line…looped an optically printed to produce a surreal and abstract film that emerges from a shot of the banality of the assembly line.  Lipsett on the other hand was known for taking the scraps of film and such from cutting room floors and cutting them together into films that called into question much of the world we live in.  In 21-87, Lipsett uses ONLY found footage to examine the dehumanization of (his) contemporary society, using images of war, technology, religion, destruction, in order to investigate the loss of religion and man’s seemingly new value systems… In his film “very nice, very nice” Lipsett uses found stock footage of aerial shots of New York City while adding audio from religious ceremonies (the Om chant featured here) to create a kind of post city symphony work that tries to reconcile the onslaught of modernity with the decline of religious practice.  I take this opportunity to point out that both of these men were on the NFB payroll and were paid for the found footage work they created. 

Fast forward 30 years, past the 60’s collage movement and again you will find work that sues found (and copy written) material.    Martin Arnold’s work of the early 90’s took films such as Too Kill a mocking Bird, and old Judy Garland/ Mickey Rooney vehicles to create dark, absurd and surreal re-edits.  In Passage a L’acte (1993), Arnold takes a breakfast scene from Too Kill a Mocking Bird and edits in a series of tiny loops that make the “typical” family—mother, father brother and sister look like a family of automatons going through the routine of a “family breakfast”.  In Alone, Life Wastes Andy Hardy, Arnold’s method of looping reveals a darker, far more sexually explicit world hidden beneath the surface of the innocent Judy Garland/ Andy Rooney films.

And yet there are others, filmmakers who use found material exclusively in their work…Leah Gilliam’s Apeshit, an optically printed piece using an old super 8mm reel from planet of the apes, has won awards and accolades…and perhaps the foremost found footage filmmaker recently has to be Craig Baldwin.   Baldwin’s films span a vast array of topics, but all fall under the auspices of found footage.  His Sonic Outlaws, details the work of audio plunder guru’s Negativland and their ongoing battle against the “copy-right”.  In Tribulations 99, Baldwin takes footage from old sci-fi, news reels and industrial films to create a narrative of 99 interwoven conspiracy theories detailing the apocalypse.  And more recently he did something similar with Spectres of the Spectrum detailing tales of time travel and electro magnetic manipulation…and still manages to detail the life’s work of scientist Nikola Tesla.  

This is not the end either—there is so much more to examine...the digital age is changing the way found footage productions are created.  Online there are countless examples of re-edits appearing (partly due to the fact that the internet is essentially becoming a vast digital cultural archive) .Eric Fensler has taken the old PSA segments from our beloved GiJoe cartoons and has taken the current trend of nostalgia marketing and exposed it for the absurdity that it is. Brian Boyd combined the footage from the teletubbies and Bush’s state of the union address to create an indictment of the bush admin’s quest for oil in State of the Union …. Regular people with home computers edit their own music videos taking their favorite TV shows and editing it to their favorite song (Anime Music Videos are the most prevalent online, but there are sub-genres which include videos based on cartoons, and shows like Buffy the vampire slayer.)  The practice of found footage and plunder is making its way into the homes of anyone connected.  We are at the cusp of a society that is increasingly savvy and media literate and they are showing it by taking up the role of cultural producer…they take their products of consumption and re-cast it, re-contextualize it, they make it their own, blurring the line between consumer and consumable.

In closing [a direct address of sorts].

 This diatribe was written with an intent- to illustrate the traditions and practices of found footage and collage work and place it within a cultural context.  Jonathan Culp informed me that one of his films was accepted into the Niagara Independent Film Festival (NIFF), then summarily rejected due to its found footage origins.  I have to admit that I was appalled to hear of such a practice.  Independent film is so much more than someone with a camera and the desire to “tell a story”.   Granted I did then hear of how the film was accepted (only due to lobbying) yet it would not be eligible to compete for any of the awards.  Again I am appalled.  We are not talking about someone who made a film and happened to use a copy written song in its soundtrack.  We are not talking about a filmmaker who tries to pull one over on somebody by calling it their own.  Jonathan Culp makes collage films, he makes no pretensions about it, and it is a respectable and legitimate practice in the filmic world, he is following a tradition that is nearly as old a cinema.

     To be fair, often these films find their ways to galleries more often than film festivals, but that should not make a difference here.   Any film artist who shows their work in a gallery (in Canada) is entitled to CARFAC fees, that is artist fees that a gallery must pay the artist to show their work.  This is not the film artist profiting from copy written material, rather this is the artist being given a financial compensation for the time and energy it takes to make these films.   Found footage as a practice is a detailed and exacting work and to be any good at it, one has to see beyond the original material.  He must re-edit, re-contextualize, and essentially re-compose a new piece by proliferating elements from the old.  As the culture industry re-makes and modernizes its old material, the found footage filmmaker re-casts it, using it to criticize and comment on politics, culture, history, etc. 

To the organizers of NIFF I say this, do your homework, research the film works of days gone by.  Investigate this tradition for yourself and you will see that we are correct.  Found footage and collage film work is a practice to be given respect and admiration, not to be shunned or dismissed as a mere copyright violation.  If you truly are an organization that believes in promoting independent culture, take a stand, and defend the work of artists who plunder and proliferate.  The work that they create is often far more impacting and resonate than any of your typical indie film fare.  And with onslaught of information, and the practice of digital archiving online, you can be sure that this practice is going to be taken up by more and more independent cultural producers as time moves on.  And there are many of us who believe that is the way it should be.

Skot deeming
skot@nofrequency.org

Jonathan Culp you are a thief.

You are a criminal because people own/buy the idea of a film. These people may not even own a copy of that film. And according to our laws you could pay hundreds in fines, which is ironic seeing as how one reason you have made a film of clips is because you have no money for raw stock.

These copyright laws loom over virtually every form of art – music, printed word, comics, films, etc. Apparently, imitation is no longer the highest form of flattery. And apparently we can no longer critique a piece of art/institution/person by referring to it.

If I do a feminist fanzine it seems that some would rather I write long winded articles on why Barbie is bad rather than perhaps doctor a magazine advertisement which would be way more interesting see and think about.  The direction our society is heading, I could get sued for having “Barbie” and “bad” next to each other in the previous sentence.

Suffocating copyright laws also effect things in our culture that aren’t so obvious. As a film archivist it’s not easy to preserve a film for the next 5 generations for the simple reason that people own the idea of this film. And if they decide they don’t want thousands of people to see this great work of art (which in most cases they had little or nothing to do making it) it doesn’t happen…it rots. In the Hollywood system the studios own the copyright. New regulations in the US make it virtually impossible for these films to go into the public domain. As an archivist I may be able to copy this film to preserve it without any one’s consent, however I wouldn’t actually be able to show it without jumping through hoops. We all know films are works of art meant to be sitting in metal cans on a shelf for 150 years, right?

So you are a criminal Jonathan. But there are hundreds of thousands of us – from film archivists to Napster users. You could give up your art and go work for one of these idea owning corporations/rich eccentrics, who are either salivating about the possibility of taking you to court or don’t even know you exist, or you can accept your thief status…and maybe fight to have that status changed. Don’t let anyone tell you what/why/how you should make your art!

Siue Moffat

Have you been to this website?
http://www.illegal-art.org/video/

Paul Harvey Oswald has a great video on it called "Fair Use" if you haven't seen it already.

Not (just) to toot my own horn, but a video I did using footage from the Graduate has played at the Signal & Noise Festival in Vancouver and will be playing The Commonwealth Film Festival in Manchester. (I don't even think it's that good). You can always send your stuff to the Victoria Independent Film & Video Festival where fair use is fair (I was on the jury last year).

So, there's your encouragement to follow your heart.

Brian MacDonald