Posts by giovanni tiso
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I agree with you up to a point, but I'm still scratching my head how ACTA is going to improve the position of "creators".
That's the same point up to which I agree. Obviously those considerations have nothing to do with letting the market decide things though.
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Yeah, I love it when we let the market decide things. Thinking about the value of creators and editors and publishers and their contribution to society is just so damn hard, who needs that shit.
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Does it really offend you that much to see people point out that fighting against those who consume your services is a flashing neon sign that you're not getting the message?
It takes me back to the Mark Harris experience on the copyrights thread. "Adapt or die" is just so self serving and narrow-minded it honestly makes me root for the publishers and the recording industry, which is hardly my standard setting. But we've been over this so many times in the thread that wouldn't die, I'm just going to refer you to that.
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I figured that with your expertise, you might have a view on whether it could have worked as a po-mo treatise on originality, shared history, authorship, etc, had Ihimaera presented it as such.
If what you wrote seemed provocative to me, it's because flies so directly against what we know about the novel as it was presented to us by Jolisa. As I say, I'm not at all hostile to discussing broader issues of authorship, but if the discussion doesn't start by engaging the topic we are discussing then it's both less interesting and highly derailey (okay, not a word, try Jolisa's tangential). David's post didn't actually do much to engage with Ihimaera's case either, although that's hardly a criticism since he didn't write it here and in fact was a very reluctant participant in this discussion.
Incidentally, I didn't think your post on Second Sight was terribly impressive. Chiding us for not having the conversation you wanted to have seems a little churlish. Start your own comments thread on your blog, you know.
I've just had a look at the final credits of Decasia (I love the smell of nitrate in the morning): no mention of the specific films used, although it acknolwedges a long list of archives and film curators. The problem there of course is that he used mostly footage that is of unknown origin to the archivists themselves (Wikipedia claims only two source films were positively identified), but again we are in different territory because it's a film that consists entirely of fragments of other films and like Baldwin's couldn't possibly be accused of plagiarism. Morrison did however claim directing (beside writing and editing) credits and that I found mildly interesting.
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Interesting. I take it from the first sentence you've read the book?
Oh Philip don't be a dick for God's sake. It's a historical novel that has been described to me by more than one able reviewer with three pages of stated sources that yet fails to reference a number of specific quotations. Quite aside from the fact that Ihimaera immediately apologised and set about contacting all his living quotees, whilst offering no criticism whatsoever of the accepted definition of what constitutes plagiarism in his line of work, I really struggle to see how you could take this book - that I haven't read - as a subervsive treatise on authorship.
I don't think "blindness" is fair, personally. As someone who's made a living at times writing about books and films I'm reasonably alert to "obvious differences in the media". One is words on a page and the other is pictures on a screen, right?
You still haven't offered a single example that is analogous with Ihimaera's case, which happens to be the topic of this thread. If you want to have a broader conversation, you might have to make a greater effort than just saying that in film it ain't like that - you haven't shown it at all. You keep citing examples of allusions and references to the great masters that are rife in literature and not considered plagiarism at all there either. And in fact, on that very broad general point, you got some broad general agreement along the lines of "yeah, intertextuality, we dig that". If you insist that the conversation must be derailed, you might have to come up with something that at least ties in with poor Jolisa's post I would think.
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So if Ihimaera had been able to argue that his use of what he called "correspondences" was a strategy intended to critique the status quo of the publishing industry and academia, to challenge ideas of authorship, ownership and originality, would your view of his new book be different?
The nature of the book and of the correspondences surely would have to have been quite radically different for that argument to have been even possible, but I guess that sure, if there had been some sort of rationale for employing what some would construe as plagiarism to critique these notions, then one would appraise the book accordingly. Clearly Ihimaera isn't remotely interested in arguing anything of the sort, though, so the point is entirely moot.
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That a possible case of plagiarism in a film is much more nebulous than a case of plagiarism in a book is that basic point..
Could it be that it's a great deal easier to match words than images? And that's what some commenters took exception to I think, the blindness to the obvious differences in the media. The crushing arrogance of David's post can't have helped much either.
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There won't be any fallout.
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Some have called this use of the Potemkin scene in The Untouchables, and De Palma's extensive use of Hitchcock throughout his career, plagiarism. I wouldn't -- citing Robin Wood above -- and it seems that you wouldn't either.
No, of course I wouldn't. But I also struggle to see how it correlates with the unintended 'correspondences' - to use Ihimaera's own definition - that Jolisa spotted in The Trowenna Sea. Your analogy seems weak to me. And to suggest that the world of literary criticism and fiction is behind other media in its reflections on what constitutes originality and authorship ignores a staggering number of critics and authors - Joyce, Borges, Barthes, Foucault, to name but four - who spent much of the last century banging on about these very things. I hardly think that any of them would find the Ihimaera example especially interesting because it doesn't offer any sort of critique, implicit or explicit, of the status quo accepted by the publishing industry and academia.
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Cheer the fuck up. It's fun being a minnow.
Ah, yes! Well put.