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?

Last Friday, TechCrunch posted an article provocatively titled, Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?. Based on a friend-of-a-friend tip, the piece alleged that Last.fm had “handed over” user data to facilitate the identification of U2 fans with leaked copies of the band’s forthcoming album, No Line on the Horizon. (This was before Universal Music Group copped to leaking the album and U2 started streaming it voluntarily.)

Within an hour and a half – midnight for the London-based Last.fm – the allegations were debunked. Employees responded to concerned readers directly,

“[Last.fm would] never personally identify our users to a third party.”

Last.fm’s reputation is saved, TechCrunch are lying liars, the RIAA still sucks, and then I found five dollars. Right?

Not quite. Last.fm, purchased by CBS Interactive in 2007, represents the tension driving this era in computing culture, a constant negotiation of value and privacy. I’ll enrich your database by telling you how many times I’ve rewound Las Mulas De Moreno today (five and counting) and you tell me about similar artists to obsess over tomorrow.

Billboard and Soundscan look like halfblind guesswork in comparison with the charts made possible by this kind of deep data collection. Last.fm’s revenue may draw largely from advertising but if they were to start selling custom data packages to interested corporations, would anyone stop scrobbling?

Like many FCers, I was initially so alarmed at the notion that Last.fm would “hand over” user data that I ignored the fact that Last.fm’s core operations are basically in a constant state of dry snitching on its users. Want to know who is listening to “Las Mulas”? Click the Listeners tab, and start crawling profiles for identifying information.

For some of us, this is reason enough to cease participation. In fact, several FC members have already begun brainstorming a non-commercial, decentralized alternative. Others propose ruining the data reported to Last.fm by deliberately spoofing the scrobbler software with falsified metadata.

But what about those FCers who use Last.fm, enjoy the services it provides, and accept its exchange of privacy for value? Do we demand they sacrifice this pleasure? To what end?

Rather than struggle against enjoyment of Last.fm, what if we were to maximize it? What would an enthusiastic embrace and exploration of a service like Last.fm reveal? Would we find its boundaries and be inspired to develop a successor with even greater capacity? Would it reveal new entrepreneurial opportunities that better protect user privacy without sacrificing the potential benefits of an enormous dataset?

Is this a positive, proactive, fanatic activism? Or surrender to an uncritical consumption?

BOOMBOX from Ely Kim on Vimeo.

Consider the case of YouTube, where thousands of people have been recently burned by spurious copyright claims. Every day YouTube users create and upload videos like the one above that incidentally infringe one or more copyrights. Quite often the videos – again, like the one above – are disabled because of a DMCA takedown notice. If the email we receive at YouTomb is any indication, these users rarely intended to flaunt the law or make a stand for free culture. Rather, they come to us confused at being disciplined for behaving in a way that felt ethically appropriate.

When large copyright holding organizations attempt to withdraw from popular web services, as Warner Music Group has done with both Last.fm and YouTube, they can no longer paint the users of those services as pirates, outsiders, or radicals as they once did with Napster and now do with the Pirate Bay. Instead, their withdrawal brands them perverse, confused, and out of step with widely accepted social practice.

What implications might this reversal have for the free culture activist?

Do we want those YouTube users to familiarize themselves with the arcane constraints of copyright law and the numerous variations we’ve made available? Or should the users be left alone and the regulatory institutions be compelled to struggle with a set of laws and expectations ill-suited to contemporary media ethics?

Imagine a free culture pro-activism that consistently supports, encourages, defends, and extends the everyday practices of users of services like Last.fm and YouTube. What might we gain through such radical participation?

Students for Free Culture is co-sponsoring the 2008 Sparky Awards, which asks people to make a short video to illustrate the value of information sharing. The first place winner will get a Sparky statuette and $1,000, and there will be some nifty prizes for the runners-up as well. The official list of judges isn’t up yet, but Rich Jones from our Boston University chapter will be one of the judges, and hopefully our chapter members will create some fabulous entries! The winners from last year were pretty excellent (personally I’m partial to “Pri Vetai: Private Eye”), and I’m looking forward to seeing more creative videos about the importance of open access to information Just make sure to get your entry in by the deadline of November 30th, 2008!

If you want to help promote the video contest, you can find some useful materials in the downloads section on the Sparky Awards site, or you could share this promotional video that I threw together:

If you want to download the promo video, you can try grabbing the Ogg Theora version or mp4. Enjoy!