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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
RiP!: A REMIX MANIFESTO Does an artist have absolute rights over content or characters that he or she creates? When does borrowing music or film excerpts from other artists (sampling) cross the line from being an original montage to outright theft? These are the questions posed by RiP! A Remix Manifesto, an engaging, hyper-charged documentary about mash-up artists and their war with the corporate music industry and modern copyright laws. RiP! is unambiguously anti-copyright from the onset, and frames the issue with the perspective that copyright laws are antiquated and perpetuated by large corporate entities that own most of the music we listen to today. The film posits that these regulations originally developed to foster creativity, but today these corporate entities exploit the law to stifle a new art form born out of the digital world—the mash-up. The film explores the issue through a set of richly textured and visually engaging interviews with the key players in the debate, including Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, U.S. Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters, as well as technology activist and Boing Boing blog co-editor Cory Doctorow. While some of the interviews follow the standard somewhat-interesting-but-not-all-that-insightful track of many documentaries, the Doctorow conversation convincingly details how creative pioneers like Walt Disney were essentially mash-up artists in their time, taking well-known stories and modernizing them for new audiences. What the film fails to mention though is that Disney’s mash-ups were taken from stories in the public domain and did not impact the livelihood of any living artist at the time. RiP! is deft at introducing the mash-up debate in a highly entertaining manner. The film is a high energy feast for the senses, edited like one of the mash-up music video it highlights. Filmmaker Brett Gaylor even invites viewers to sample and mix the raw footage of the film itself at opensourcecinema.org. Despite the entertainment and educational value, I doubt that RiP! will change many minds. The film takes a black-and-white stance on the debate, glorifying mash-up artists as musical pioneers and vilifying copyright supporters (referring to them as the “Copy-Right”) for hoarding creative control and stifling creative expression. The issues are far more complicated in practice. Regardless of your perspective on the issue, RiP! is a must-see for anyone interested in the intersection of technology and creative content. It is at its best when celebrating these new artists, such as Girl Talk, the moniker of Gregg Gillis, an engineer by day and pop song masher-upper by night. Girl Talk takes very small snippets from songs of other artists and creates entirely new music from them. In an essential scene early in the film, the camera watches the U.S. Register of Copyrights (Marybeth Peters) viewing a video of Gillis/Girl Talk’s process of remixing little samples (0.25 seconds here, 1.25 second there) that before our eyes magically morph into an utterly new, dare I say, original song. It’s a remarkable moment, and regardless of where you stand on the infringement issue, Girl Talk is a remarkable talent. Immediately afterwards, the exchange between the filmmaker and Peters sums it up best for both Girl Talk and watching RiP! itself. Peters: “Oh My God!” Filmmaker: “What, is this a lot of copyright infringement?” Peters: “No, I’m just amazed at what he’s doing.” Devanshu Patel
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