“On the Rights of Molotov Man” was a very interesting article. I understood immediately why you assigned it to us: because it’s the very thing we’re striving for with our recycled footage assignment. We will be taking work of other people, be it news or films, etc, and recontextualizing it into our own piece of art. This is the very thing that Susan Meiselas argues against. I think that this recontextualizing can really be a good thing, though. It can make a really powerful statement, when you take something that is familiar in one context and then turn it into something totally different. However, I do understand Susan’s viewpoint in this particular matter. The Nicaraguans reproduced this image in ways which payed honor to their history, remembering “Bareta” as a hero. Joy’s painting depicts him as someone starting a riot. I think that I side with Joy in this case. I think it’s a shame that Susan attempted to stop reproductions of Joy’s paintings, as so many people had made re-representations of her photograph so many times. Why did she have a problem with this one, in particular? He may look like he’s starting a riot, but he did throw a molotov cocktail and brandish a rifle, both of which are acts of violence. However, I think that maybe Joy should have looked into the context of the photo, and maybe treated the subject matter a little more carefully. She could’ve made his heroic acts a painting that was just as powerful as the painting is with the subject starting a riot.
I thought “The Ecstasy of Influence” was also really interesting. It brought up a good point: are references to older works creative, or just short of plagiarism? I think that in film, this is something that is constantly an issue. Some films get away with it, and some don’t. When you’re watching something like Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho”, you feel really excited when you pick up on the various Shakespeare references. It makes you feel like an intelligent film-viewer. It’s planted in there, for the people who will make the connection, to feel a surge of intellectualism, so that they feel like they’re the elite who gets the reference, sitting in a theater with a bunch of people whom the reference washes right over. Yet on the other hand, tons of people dislike James Cameron’s “Avatar”, because it’s the same story line as Pocahontas and Dances with Wolves. When is it OK to reference a later work, and when is it not? I think that it’s inescapable. Artists like to view other art. Musicians love music. We’re bound to be influenced by the things we love, and so our work is almost guaranteed to have traces of the things we’ve seen.
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