On January 15, 2015, eighty-six years after the birth of Martin Luther King, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced that Selma, a film about MLK, was nominated for the Best Picture of 2014.
I have not yet seen this film, but I’ve been preoccupied with the coverage of how the film features speeches that sound like ones King delivered when, in fact, those were not King’s actual words. The film’s director Ava DuVernay had to rewrite all of the speeches King’s character delivers because she could not secure the rights to King’s actual speeches for her film. She discusses this with PBS’s Gwen Iffil.
One of the reasons that the speeches are not available for film is because Dreamworks and Steven Spielberg own those rights. Exclusively. While a public person, such an elected official, cannot copyright their speeches, a private individual can. According to DuVernay in an interview with KCRW’s The Business, Martin Luther King, Jr. is considered the latter and can exercise copyright over those speeches.
Today, we observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a national holiday. Schools, government offices, and banks are closed in observance. I vaguely remember when we started to observe this day when I was in fifth grade. It was a good age to learn about King, in particular, and about the Civil Rights movement, in general. It would forever shape my outlook on civil rights and equality. To that young school kid, King became a public hero for all of us through that having a holiday.
I know copyright laws are often ridiculous, but I still can’t understand how someone whose life we honor through a public holiday can be considered a private individual. King belongs to all of us.1
One of my former students at Queens College was Tom Stathes.
In class after class filled with “special snowflakes,” students who demand constant attention only to fail the class anyway, Tom stood out as an exceptional luminary. Not only was he an excellent student, he also amassed an impressive collection of animated films from the silent and early sound era.
With help from many people, including celebrated silent-film accompanists, Ben Model and Robert Israel, Stathes has released a Blu-ray and DVD set of fifteen animated films.
The collection, titled Cartoon Roots, is, according to Stathes, a “sampling of many of the important characters, series and studios’ cartoons that populated the silent era of films,” which is Stathes’s favorite period, and “some very exciting rarities from the early sound era.”
Get it as a late Christmas gift for yourself or that film nerd in your life. Or, if you’re teaching a silent film class in the future, round out your curriculum with animated films that were never part of the silent film canon.
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In the 1960s, filmmaking in Cuba exploded like never before and probably not since. Fueled by the Cuban Revolution and funded by the government-sponsored ICAIC, there was an explosion of films that critically engaged the politics of the time. Forty-nine years ago, Santiago Alvarez produced one of the best-known Cuban films form this period: Now! (1965).
Appropriating found news footage and still photographs of civil rights rallies in the United States and the police’s response to these protests, the film rallies its viewer to take action and demonstrate against social injustice and physical violence at the hands of the state.
As with Alvarez, Johnson showcases the forceful response the police had in Missouri as a means to incite the viewer to protest social injustice and physical violence.
Add Wednesday’s decision of a Richmond County jury to not indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner earlier this year, and everything about Alvarez’s forty-nine year-old film Now! is again frustratingly current.
Earlier today, the Social Science and Cultural Studies department at Pratt announced that Laura Mulvey, one of the best known film scholars and experimental filmmakers, will be a scholar-in-residence this coming spring semester.
Professor and Chair Gregg Horowitz:
Laura Mulvey has accepted the invitation of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies to visit Pratt in the spring as our scholar in residence. We are still working out the schedule of lectures and seminars for Professor Mulvey’s residence, but we do know that her visit will fall March 10-12, 2015.
With this news, I wish I had scheduled Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) to this semester’s Experimental Film class screening list. However, it would have been tough to squeeze in such a long film into a class that meets only once a week for less than three hours.
Today, November 15, Sex and Broadcasting, a documentary about freeform radio station, WFMU, premieres as part of the DOCNYC film festival. The documentary profiles this extraordinary radio station, located in Jersey City, New Jersey, and also streaming worldwide on Internet, and its struggles to stay afloat in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
I would call it a unique project except that twofriends of mine were working on a documentary about KCSB-FM, the Santa Barbara, California radio station where I volunteered, hosted a few radio shows, and even worked as the general manager back in the go-go nineties. Without the slightest bit of exaggeration, KCSB has a lot with making me who I am today.
The documentary project stalled out a few years ago, but on a hard drive somewhere, there exists footage of a lengthy interview I gave as part of that project. I should probably see if I can get that footage just to have it.
He was the on-air pitchman for an electronics chain bearing his name here in the New York tri-state area, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Crazy Eddie’s persona and advertising strategy serves as a classic example of nuisance marketing (or irritation advertising, if you prefer). His ads would grate on you, but those same commercials would also forever remind you of their insane prices. In Los Angeles, I remember that we had a similar pitchman in Fred R. Rated for The Federated Group, a cut-rate electronics, played by Shadoe Stevens.
Although I can’t find the reference, I am pretty certain that John Gruber once called Amazon the crazy guy at the party who will accept any dare you propose. Amazon has apparently accepted the dare to sell a over-the-top streaming device for $39. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, Amazon Prime members can buy one for $19 until Wednesday morning.
The Fire TV stick, as it’s called, is basically what Google was selling last holiday season in the Chromecast. The biggest advantage of the Amazon Fire TV stick is that it will play anything from the Amazon Prime streaming library, including movies, music, and TV programs. Consider me tempted.
Can they really make money off a $20 streaming stick? Just sign up for a Prime trial, get the device for $20, and after the trial is over, keep the device to stream Netflix, Hulu, and some other “streaming channel.”
It does seem a little crazy, doesn’t it?
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The first is Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1950), a camp celebration of Hollywood glamour that reminisces about the old silent era. In addition to being an absolutely beautiful and haunting parade of dresses featuring a stunning actress, Yvonne Marquis, it also offers glimpses of the Hollywood Hills. Though I never lived there or spent any significant time looking down on the Los Angeles basin, I am overcome with nostalgia every time I see it. I’m not sure whether that feeling comes from being an LA native or from watching a lifetime’s worth of Hollywood movies.
The film also has the only two known recordings of 1960s psychedelic folk musician Jonathan Halper. You can hear the two songs, “Leaving My Old Life Behind” and “I am a Hermit”, in recordings apparently ripped from the film’s soundtrack. Those songs speak to me now more than ever before.
And if that’s isn’t gay enough for you, they are also screening Alla Nazimova’s Salome (1922). This silent film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play has been appropriated as a canonical queer film. According to the program notes for the screening, Kenneth Anger proclaimed the film to be “Nancy-Prancy-Pansy-Piffle and just too queer for words.”
Light Industry screened two compilation films last week. It had been a long time since I had gone to a screening there, despite that it is a five-minute bike ride from my home in Long Island City. But as the couch surfing tour brings me to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, I am now only a few hundred feet away from Light Industry’s space on Freeman Street. I really had no excuse to miss this screening.
The first one, The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography, was a video that I saw for the first time on Tuesday. It was more tame than I had expected. It consisted almost entirely of screen tests, where an off-screen producer, apparently from the West, asks the hopeful actors probing questions about their sexual behavior and preferences. The men all nervously respond but understand that they are doing this for a job and submit to his inquisition. The filmmaker posits this was a reflection of Eastern Europe’s subjugation after decades of Soviet rule. But looking at it today, given the recent resurgence of Russia against the West in the Ukraine, I wonder if the off-screen producer from the West represented just another dominating presence behind the former “iron curtain.” Did one new master simply replace the old one?
The second film, Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99, a film I had not seen since an Experimental Film class I took as an undergraduate student at UCSB in 1998, turned out to be another artifact of the Cold War. Unleashed in 1991, Baldwin’s film stitched together footage from an treasure trove of films in his personal archive. Having not seen the film in a very long time, I had not remembered all the references to American activities in Latin America during the Cold War, at the behest of aliens who controlled everything deep beneath the Earth’s surface. The film mentioned all the major milestones of US interfering in Latin American sovereignty: the overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion against Fidel Castro, the assassination of Che Guevara, the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the rise of Augosto Pinochet in Chile, and the cozy relationship between the CIA and Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. Looking back at it now, I might want to incorporate this film as a preface to my work on US television and Latin American in the Cold War.
While the two films were likely selected for their appropriation of existing footage to create a political work, it was productive to reflect on the Cold War again. Men and women of a certain age can appreciate how we were consumed by the Cold War, only to forget about it twenty years later with the “end of history” and that whole “war on terror” thing. But, lest we forget that “history repeating itself” axiom, the Cold War always has a chance of making a comeback.
Rose Hobart (1936) was a seminal compilation film demonstrating the capability to create a new work from an existing film.
The other day, I ran out of time to screen Rose Hobart (1936) in my Experimental Film class. As an early example of a compilation film, Joseph Cornell made this film using footage appropriated from a Hollywood B-Movie, East of Borneo (1931), to create a new work that featured only the actress Rose Hobart. He also tinted the image blue, but then screened in the 1960s with a rose tint. A version available on Treasures from American Film Archives is set to a couple of Brazilian musical recordings.1
Usually, when I run out of time to screen things, I direct students to watch it online. But, instead, I am going to screen Rose Hobart in class today. Screening it will serve as an introduction to other compilation filmmakers, which we will screen later in the semester, such as Bruce Conner, but also for an upcoming screening at Light Industry.
Light Industry in Brooklyn will be screening two compilation films from the 1990s on Tuesday, September 30. The first one, The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), by William E. Jones, recomposes Eastern European gay pornographic videos to locate how, according to the program notes, the fall of the Soviet bloc came not from the “seduction” for a Western life but to escape the “coercion” of the State. The second is Tribulation 99 (1991), a film by Craig Baldwin, appropriates a variety of footage to make 99 paranoid diatribes about America being invaded by aliens. When I first saw this film back in the late 1990s, all I could think was how much this seemed like The X Files, a popular TV series of the time, with an absolutely certifiable narrator.
Details
Tuesday, September 30
7:00 PM
Light Industry, 155 Freeman St, Brooklyn
7.00
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Since Sunday, many PBS stations across the country have been broadcasting The Roosevelts, Ken Burns’s new seven-part, fourteen-hour series. The series runs through Saturday, and many stations will likely be showing encore performances in case you any of the episodes.
As a not-for-profit broadcast service, PBS has been ahead of commercial broadcast and cable networks in making available their content online. Between now and September 28, you can watch the entire series, even before it broadcasts on your local station, on a variety of connected and mobile devices.
Most commercial television stations have been offering a TV Everywhere product that allows you to watch TV on your Internet devices as long as you pay for a cable or satellite TV subscription and authenticate accordingly. On the other hand, PBS lets anyone with the necessary hardware and broadband connection to watch the whole series for free, albeit for only a limited time. Because PBS broadcasts do not live or die based on raw audience numbers or on retransmission fees, they can afford to cannibalize their broadcast product and let audiences stream their content for free or buy digital copies on iTunes.
I just started watching the series with great interest. It’s hard to live in New York and not be touched by their name or legacy in some way. Roosevelt Avenue spans most of western Queens. Roosevelt Island sits in the East River between Manhattan island and Queens. FDR Drive shuttles cars along the East River on Manhattan. And if you’re ready for a day trip, head to Oyster Bay on the north shore of Long Island to visit Teddy Roosevelt’s summer retreat at Sagamore Hill. Or, as my mom and I did over the summer, head north to Hyde Park on Hudson to visit the FDR Museum and Presidential Library.
My mother with the Eleanor and Franklin at the FDR Presidential Museum and Library in Hyde Park on Hudson.
By the way, if you don’t get to watch the broadcast television run this week and if you miss streaming the series before September 28, you will be able to buy the series on iTunes. Consider it your annual contribution to public broadcasting.
