This admittedly harsh rant is in response to a little ad for a
likely very worthy program of experimental films coming up at the
MoMA. My objection is to an image shown below. The post is at https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0JuRUP85Wnng2eC3bzcaZUSG2FoNdxaKnkvrBXvai6mkUrARdjcxrVRhZ1j4jcyX7l&id=100021319367953
<MoMAStrip.jpg>
Thank you for making me aware of the fact
that the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Film has stolen one
of my many scans of strips from films by Stan Brakhage off of my Web
site.
Forgive me, because this rant may seem
somewhat insane, but I believe it to be justified. My many scans
of strips from prints of Brakhage films were made over two decades
with scanners I purchased myself, the images selected as carefully
as I could based on my feel for his aesthetic and knowledge of his
films. They were made, more importantly, out of love for the
films, and I tried to find images that would be interesting or
attractive on their own but would also represent the film well.
Hence many scans, such as this one, were chosen to display
particularly meaningful cuts. These choices were made by someone
whose life was changed by discovering Brakhage films at 16,
attending the world premiere of “The Art of Vision” at Yale at 17,
and by showing and speaking on his films at various venues
throughout the world after having shown them at a film society I
co-founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1964, which included
the presentation of the premiere of “23rd Psalm Branch,” with
Brakhage in attendance and me projecting, as well as other
programs of films by Peter Kubelka, Bruce Baillie, and Warren
Sonbert, with each of them in attendance, and more.
When I showed Brakhage the first pages of
stills on my site, right after setting it up, in the fall of 2001,
only a little less than a year before he died, he really liked
them. I want to say he loved them. He asked how long they would be
up on the Internet. When I said something like “permanently” or
“indefinitely,” he seemed surprised and pleased. Twenty-five years
later they are still up, and are still being used without
permission in ways that misrepresent the films.
Isn’t “stolen” a little harsh? I haven't
tried to copyright my choices of stills; I assume that they can't
be, and that seems just. But that doesn't mean people should use
them without permission. The so-called “Brakhage Center” did that
some years ago, mixing them in with a student-designed mashup of
images. Had the Museum of Modern Art, Department of Film, New
York, bothered to write me for permission, the strip would have
been free, but they would have gotten a sharper, higher-resolution
strip than what I put on the Web. They also would not have been
able to misuse it the way they did.
Marilyn Brakhage and I have never permitted
the strips to be run sideways. Run that way, they are false to the
film. The whole point of trying to get people to run strips rather
than single-frame enlargements is that Brakhage’s ever-changing
film spaces are best suggested by strips. But sideways? Really?
The baby shown sideways? Would you do that with a single-frame
enlargement? Run vertically, the strips can encourage one to
imagine an instant of the film. Horizontally, they are reduced to
decoration.
What’s even worse: we tend to “read” a
horizontal strip left to right, in the direction in which we read
text. Seen that way, the viewer will infer that the baby is right
side up, and that it appears after the blue light. But in this
brief segment of
“Anticipation of the Night,” the baby is shown upside down, and
the blue light comes after. In the film, the camera swirls about
the baby, and it is seen in what feels like all possible
orientations.
I suppose it’s possible that someone made
their own scan from a print of the film. That would explain the
absurdly “decorative” presence of three different lines of
sprocket holes running along the edges of the film, two very thin
ones and a full one. Or would it? This kind of stupid and false
paste-in job, adding sprocket holes (which in fact some of my
strips do include), has been done before with my strips. But how
would they have managed to choose exactly this cut? In any case,
their image is not only less sharp than mine, but far too
“overexposed.”
My dear friend Kirk Winslow said at a
dinner in 2002, when I complained about a bad editor trying to
introduce factual errors into my film writing, after the other
three of us complained about poor film projection in New York,
“Fred! People just don’t care,” pounding his fist on the table
once for each word. I perhaps would not remember this so vividly,
and cite it so often, if it were not the last time he went out. He
died of HIV a month or two later.
If
we wish to make the world better, we need to stop thoughtlessly
slapping things together, and instead, to start caring.
Fred
Camper
Chicago
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