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?

As YouTube’s instability continues to frustrate community members, video makers are forced to adapt. Fanvidders have been highly proactive in both anticipating and managing the constraints presented by YouTube’s copyright policy.

Initially, vidders developed codes for discussing their videos. panswendyy recounts one such strategy,

[My friend] uses the first letter of the character’s names, like B for Buffy, so if it were a Fuffy, she’d just put B/F.

Unfortunately, such codes are ineffective responses to the automated Video Identification system deployed by Google in 2007. With no voice with which to argue fair use, many users sacrifice the incomparably large community on YouTube for friendlier service elsewhere.

Before setting sail for imeem (or Vimeo, blip, dailymotion, etc), prolific YouTube users like cmspillane post videos explaining the reasons for their departure. (Ironically, because of its background music, we should expect the signoff itself to disappear.)

In response to an earlier blog post about preserving comments on disabled videos, Dean writes that YouTube might prefer that users are “unable to de-facto redirect to other versions of infringing material.” This should come as no surprise.

Mirroring videos is the most powerful immediate action that video makers can take to protect their rights as authors.

The gradual disappearance of videos from YouTube over the last 18 months progressed largely undetected because of an emergent practice distributed among thousands of community members. A few common searches reveals that the most popular videos are frequently ripped and re-upped under a variety of accounts. Like bees unwittingly pollinating a field of wild flowers, these re-ups are often executed by spammers looking for more hits on their other videos. The preservation of threatened videos is merely a by-product of their unscrupulous pursuit of views!

Moving to another service allows creators to continue practicing their craft but does little to challenge the irresponsible, wasteful industry practice of issuing copyright claims willy-nilly.

Can proactive re-upping and mirroring be an effective response to the accelerating disappearance of fanvids, remixes, home videos, and rare finds from the YouTube collection?

What would an automated mirroring / re-upping tool look like? Could YouTomb data be mobilized toward such an effort?

Remember, a DMCA takedown is not a judgement. YouTube disables access to videos based on mere claims of infringement. If you have had a video identified, the EFF wants to hear from you. Please do not let the short-sighted actions of a frightened industry intimidate you from participating in the creation of your culture!

(Cross-posted to the YouTomb blog.)