COP 3 Update 18/10/17

Week 3 COP Update

I will be making a film with my friend Harry who studies sound production, who will make the sounds for the film. Since my topic is about creative inspiration vs imitation, I will, for my creative piece, take influences from my favorite filmmakers and use certain techniques I learn from them to create my own film. The first biggest influence is from Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris (1963). Please could I ask you to watch 3 minutes of the movie from:

25:25  to  28:20

Unfortunately there are no English subtitles on this free YouTube version, but the dialog is not very important here.

And also this clip from Kar Wai Wong’s Days of Being Wild (1990) :

 

 

 

Background Study

One of the first thoughts that I have when I begin a creative project is ‘am I being original’? As an aspiring artist, a big fear is to be called a fake, a copycat. Artists who copy ideas, styles, and creative works of others are generally disliked.

What is the difference, if any, between being inspired and copying? 

BBC News on Vertigo film star Kim Novak’s complaint against the “The Artist (2011)” with their use of Bernard Herrman’s score in the film

In a full-page ad in Monday’s edition of trade paper Variety, the actress said “rape” had been committed with the use of Bernard Herrmann’s score.

Novak, 78, also said in the advertisement: “I feel as if my body – or at least my body of work – has been violated by the movie.” The statement was headed by the words: “I want to report a rape”.

“The film could and should have been able to stand on its own without depending upon Bernard Herrmann’s score from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to provide it more drama.

By featuring the music, she went on, the makers of The Artist, were guilty of “using emotions it engenders as if it were their own”.

“Even though they gave a small credit to Bernard Herrmann at the end, I believe this to be cheating, at the very least.”

The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius has released a statement responding to actress Kim Novak, who on Monday compared the use of some music from Vertigo in the Oscar contender to “rape.”

Here’s the statement:

The Artist was made as a love letter to cinema, and grew out of my (and all of my cast and crew’s) admiration and respect for movies throughout history.  It was inspired by the work of Hitchcock, Lang, Ford, Lubitsch, Murnau and Wilder. I love Bernard Herrmann and his music has been used in many different films and I’m very pleased to have it in mine. I respect Kim Novak greatly and I’m sorry to hear she disagrees.

Reviewing the film when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, THR critic Todd McCarthy wrote, “Hazanavicius and Bource daringly choose to explicitly employ Bernard Herrmann’s love theme from Vertigo, which is dramatically effective in its own right but is so well known that it yanks you out of one film and places you in the mind-set of another. Surely some sort of reworked equivalent would have been a better.”

Quentin Tarantino is a self-admitted remix artist. The influences of other films on his work is tremendous, and many shots and scenes can be found in old movies.

“I steal from every single movie ever made. If my work has anything, it’s that I’m taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together.” – Quentin Tarantino in Empire Magazine

“immature poets imitate, great poets steal” “Bad poets take what they steal and they deface it, and good poets turn it into something better, or at least something different” – T.S. Eliot

“One time a writer asked David Bowie if he thought he was original. He said, ‘No, no no, I’m more like a tasteful thief. The only art that I’ll actually study is the art I can actually steal from” ( Kleon, 2012)

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.” – Jim Jarmusch (Director of Mystery Train, Deadman)
“I was…attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing “simple” music, blamed for deserting “modernism,” accused of renouncing my “true Russian heritage.” People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried “sacrilege”: “The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone.” To them all my answer was and is the same: You “respect,” but I love.” – Igor Stravinsky

“It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.” – Jean-Luc Godard