The first Year One movie of the semester is Be Kind Rewind by Michel Gondry, a sweet film that tells the story of a group of friends trying to save their neighborhood video store.

Below, I’ve offered some of my reflections on the film along with questions it raised for me. I hope this can be a useful guide to get conversations started in your chapters. Definitely leave a comment and let me know what came up for you!

Caution: spoilers ahead.

“Listen, kids. We need to simplify…”

After accidentally erasing all of the store’s cassettes, the friends start taking requests and producing bespoke versions of their customers’ favorite movies. Challenged to recreate everything from Ghostbusters to Boyz N Da Hood to Driving Miss Daisy, they cast their neighbors in supporting roles and craft fantastical costumes and special effects from materials found in a nearby junkyard. Business picks up quickly for the fictional filmmakers and soon they’ve drawn the attention of everyone from awetruck film buffs to stuffy MPAA representatives (portrayed in brutal parody.)

“Stockholders in their own happiness.”

Be Kind depicts one image of free culture in action. It raises many of the same questions that challenge real creators working outside of the conventional media industries. Who owns popular culture? What makes a film “good”? Where are the boundaries among inspiration, adaptation, tribute, and infringement?

“Taste has nothing to do with it.”

Outside the content of the film itself, the circumstances of its production, release, marketing, and distribution raise many issues of interest to free culture activists. First and foremost, Be Kind Rewind was produced by New Line Cinema which has been owned since 1996 by closed culture zealots, Time Warner. How do we read a film that seems to encourage remix culture when it is structurally supported by the same corporation that effected the YouTube massacre of January 2009?

Bootlegging device

When Be Kind was screen at MIT, the invitation included the following instructions:

This screening will be monitored for unauthorized recording. By attending, you agree not to bring any audio or video recording device into the theater and consent to a physical search of your belongings and person. A video cell phone is classified as a recording device and cannot be taken into the screening. Any attempted use of recording devices will result in immediate removal from the theater, forfeiture of the device, and may subject you to criminal and civil liability. Please allow additional time for heightened security.You can assist us by leaving all non-essential bags and cell phones at home or in your vehicle.

In response, MIT Free Culture brought a large pinhole camera to point at the screen (which drew a laugh from Gondry) and handed out ironic stickers to attendees with slogans like, “I am a recording device” and “I will recount this movie to my friends.” After the screening, Ana Domb wrote more about the contradictions in a “a movie about the fringe [...] that has chosen to play by the conventional rules.” Is it possible to play both sides?

“Maybe I am in Ghostbusters!”

In addition to its curious position relative to the film industry, Be Kind points to the inextricable relationship between free and pop culture. The characters’ familiarity and appreciation for Hollywood cinema is central to the development of their unusual films. When one character proclaims, “Maybe I am in Ghostbusters!” He calls into question the authority of a movie that is as much a beloved popular myth as it is an industrial commodity. How far outside of Ghostbusters is any fan? When someone maintains a Ghostbusters fan page on which he explain the physics of ectoplasm, isn’t there a measure by which he is more “in” Ghostbusters than actor Bill Murray, who merely played Dr. Peter Venkman for a paycheck back in ’84?

“We were supposed to remake Back to the Future instead of Ghostbusters.”

Both the characters in the fiction and the filmmakers themselves faced questions of copyright infringement in their productions. According to a promotional interview with Melonie Diaz, Gondry had to get permission for each movie that is remade within Be Kind Rewind and that Back to the Future had to be written out of the script because of legal constraints. In real fan production, the law rarely intervenes until after release.

Back to the Future (Sweded)

As Gondry hoped, Be Kind Rewind inspired numerous fans to create their own low-budget remakes of big-budget films. Jurassic Park, The Neverending Story, and – yes, even Back to the Future, got the Be Kind treatment.

Shot-by-shot remake of Journey’s “Separate Ways” music video with original inset

Of course, fan remakes long precede Be Kind Rewind. Lovingly crafted shot-by-shot productions abound on the web in parody and tribute to an enormous variety of music videos, TV shows, and films.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation

Perhaps the most well-known shot-by-shot remake is Raiders of the Lost Ark: the Adaptaion. Undertaken by three friends after seeing the film’s 1982 theatrical release, they used a bootleg audio cassette recording and as much reference material as they could gather from storybooks and magazines to construct their finely detailed recreation. The trio worked on the Adaptation for their entire adolesence, finally completing the remake seven years after they began. Despite the project’s considerable press attention, the legal tangle of copyright has restrained its widespread distribution and it is seldom screened.

Nollywood Babylon

Be Kind Rewind encourages viewers to reflect on our assumptions about Hollywood, authorship, ownership, and the creative possibilities in an age of accessible media technology. What other film industry paradigms might be possible? Nigeria’s “Nollywood” scene, a favorite documentary subject since its inclusion in 2007′s Good Copy, Bad Copy, reveals radically different models for financing, producing, distributing, and viewering films. If the Hollywood system is really falling apart, as we are lead to believe, how might the North American system be similarly re-imagined?

Gondry remakes his own trailer

How might Be Kind Rewind have proceeded differently? Are you satisfied by its conclusion? Could a culture of “sweded” remakes co-exist alongside conventional Hollywood cinema? Which Ghostbusters do you prefer?

Who’s going to be the first remix or remake Be Kind Rewind itself?

I’m new to the fold, representing FreeCulture.org up in the, as Gavin and Nelson quickly discovered, still chilly city of Madison, Wisconsin. Nelson just cleared me for Blog take-off and gave me a few questions to kick things off with, so here I go!

~That’s me on the far left in the picture below~

Q: How did you get into free culture in the first place? What made you want to start a chapter?

I got interested in free culture issues long before i knew that an organization like this even existed. In 2004 I was taking a class at App State in North Carolina (my undergrad Alma Mater) called Art & Ideas that examined some of the philosophical questions pertaining to the art world. It was around this time that Dangermouse’s Grey Album came out, and i ended up framing my final paper for the class around the fair use issues that the work brought up. From there, i discovered the long-dormant illegal-art.org, John Oswald, Negativland, Fensler Films (the fine gentleman who brought us the GI JOE PSAs) and so many other mash-up artists that were creating new and challenging derivative works from the copyrighted flotsam and jetsam of pop culture. From there, i got interested in sampling laws which ended with me falling in love with hip-hop culture. I eventually wrote my undergrad thesis on the roots of that very culture, making sure to comment in the ways that DJs are recontextualizing old works for new ears.

I read a Slashdot article a few moments ago that links to an NYTimes blog post by David Pogue discussing in stark terms a gap in how college students see copyright law when compared to the author. The discussion on the post is marvelous; one commenter brings up John Tehranian’s recent paper, “Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap” (PDF). This paper assesses the daily legal liability of everyday actions of a hypothetical law professor:

All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities.

The sharp commenter continues:

The point is that copyright law is way behind what is the norm in actual day-to-day life, and part of it is that “fair use” is not part of the law, it’s part of case law, which is far behind practice.

Pogue at the New York Times illustrates what we have long hoped: Many students already believe in some of the things Students for Free Culture does. We want a culture “where all members are free to participate in its transmission and evolution, without artificial limits on who can participate or in what way.” I personally think that the best way to pull people into the future of a culture based on sharing is not to simply take without asking, as in the “download a DVD without permission” example, but to both (1) make people understand the value of sharing their work, and (2) supporting those that do, like the growing numbers of people sharing their creative work under permissive licenses; many of our chapters agree.

We have dozens of active chapters today. Somehow the work we have done has often seemed distant or academic, perhaps deservedly so. But sometimes we’ve made our points in brutally obvious ways, from classic projects like Barbie in a Blender or Cereal Solidarity to newer projects like the Day of Action for Open Access to scholarly literature. Unified by a vision of sharing and openness, our students fight for their own rights to share their own work, argue that their universities and colleges could share more with the world, and explain why more access to knowledge and culture would be good public policy.

On more personal notes:

To all who have participated in chapters of Students for Free Culture, or worked with us on events, or helped organize other chapters (like me, our humble web team leader): Thanks. It’s refreshing to see our active members range from the pre-historic Nelson, whose first Free Culture chapter was founded before the name “Free Culture” described us, all the way to people like Tim who started his chapter this calendar year. I’m personally proud that we’re continuing the tradition of drawing from a broad group of students: filmmakers, technologists, law students, and artists, just to name a few labels.

To Downhill Battle: I miss your inspiring work and your amazing name.

To Jesus: Happy Birthday today (observed).

I’m pleased to announce that the new FreeCulture.org bylaws have been approved by our beloved chapters. The bylaws require no quorum and simply that 3/4 of the votes given by registered chapters be in support of their approval. (Earlier today I misunderstood those bylaws and thought that 3/4 of the chapters must actually vote. I’d like to apologize again for that. That’s probably the first substantive misinterpretation of the bylaws, and I wonder if it will be the last.)

The votes are: 13 for, 1 against, and 4 votes I couldn’t count in the real total. This brings to a close a hard process that I dropped out of because it was so hard, and it should set the stage for more clarity in the role and activity of FreeCulture.org. Here are the votes I received in no particular order:

Chapters voting for the bylaws were: UNC Chapel Hill, Swarthmore College, Brown Free Culture, the American University in Cairo, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NYU, Virginia Tech, University of Southern California, Chadwick Free Culture, Seattle University Law Free Culture, Florida State University, Northeastern Free Culture, Free Culture 5C.

Chapters voting against the bylaws were: Harvard College.

Groups not yet registered with us but sending in votes (all were for ratification) claimed to represent: Northwestern University, Monterrey, University of Chicago.

Chapters voting late (all were for ratification): Columbia University.

It’s been a pleasure receiving your votes, even as I am now embarrassed that I urged some of you to vote under the misunderstanding that a quorum of 3/4 of the chapters was necessary.

(One thing I’ve learned from this, which I secretly already knew, is that the chapter registration system is confusing. Sorry about that, too.)

UPDATE: Nelson sez: If you’re wondering why passing the bylaws was good/important, you might want to check out Gavin Baker’s comments on the bylaws.

Hi Everyone-

My name is Brendan Ballou, and I’m from the Free Culture chapter at Columbia. Some of you may have already heard about EFF’s onion router (Tor, http://tor.eff.org/). Basically Tor is a program that prevents outside parties (your university, your ISP, the RIAA, etc) from tracking your movements on the web (all of it – including file sharing). It’s an incredibly useful tool – one in fact that Chinese dissidents use to keep information from the Chinese government.

Last semester we modified Tor to run only over the Columbia University intranet. Our modified program, the Columbia University Local Area Tor (CU-LATOR) ran much faster than the standard version, and now we want to expand to other universities that participate in Internet2 (to maintain network speed). If you would be interested in having your school participate in this larger, nation-wide uni-tor (we’re working on a name), please email me, because the more schools that participate, the faster the network will run and the safer all our information will be. You don’t need to be a coder to be involved, we just need boots on the ground to help publicize the program and get people to use it. You can check if your school participates in Internet2 here: http://members.internet2.edu/university/universities.cfm

However, if you are a coder we need your help too. Our version of Tor is shaky on windows boxes – so if you’re interested in improving the program for windows email Ron Gejman at rsg2119@columbia.edu.

This is a fun project, and an important one too. We hope we can get your help in keeping students’ data safe and private.

Best,

Brendan Ballou

bcb2114@columbia.edu