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RiPped: A Remix Review
Before I write this review, I must admit that I came to this film with very little knowledge of copyright issues. Prior to watching this film, I was not aware of who Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig or even Girl Talk is. Despite my extensive background as a nerd, I have always found copyright law to be a boring and unimportant issue. While Brett Gaylor’s RiP: A Remix Manifesto is an entertaining venture into the realm of remix culture and its confrontations with copyright law, its serious substantial weaknesses are unfortunately not concealed underneath its flashy presentation.
RiP uses extensive animations and pieces of audio-visual candy remixed in such a way that it can keep the viewer’s attention throughout what is essentially a 90 minute presentation on copyright law – no small feat by any means. While at times it can be overly flashy and pretentious, the presentation keeps what could be just another boring documentary fairly pleasing to watch. During the presentation, Gaylor’s open source cinema really shines. Parallels can be drawn between the remix of today and the detournement of the Situationists – a parallel which is clearly obvious when watching George Bush remixed to John Lennon’s Imagine.
Some of the secrets to the presentation are in the editing and distribution process of RiP, which is a fairly innovative attempt to practice what is preached in the film. Much of the movie is the result of six years of collaboration through mixing and remixing a glut of imagery. Gaylor is continuing to force the film to evolve as well, by asking for input to be remixed in to updated versions. The film is available to watch at the National Film Board in 12 parts, or can be downloaded at a price set by the consumer, a distribution system similar to that of Radiohead’s 2007 album In Rainbows.
While the film is an informative primer to some basic issues of copyright law, the biggest problem with this film is the manifesto iteslf. It eschews any sort of meaningful economic analysis of copyright and the interests behind copyright laws in favour of some pretentious and meaningless drivel, the sort of thing which might pass for deep political thought in either a gathering of technocrats or a Thomas Friedman column.
The manifesto is as follows:
- Culture always builds on the past
- The past always tries to control the future
- Our future is becoming less free
- To build free societies you must limit the control of the past
It starts off good enough, with the notion that culture always builds on the past. In fact, as all human labour is social, whether in the widget factories or the word factories, all contributions to society are based in some part on previous contributions. It is also hard to argue with the notion that “our future is becoming less free” given the continual of capitalist consolidation of power and erosion of civil liberties we are seeing in modern society.
However, points two and four are the problem. Point two is simply insubstantial and nonsensical – the past isn’t a person or organization with an intent on controlling anything, it is not much more than what is found in history books and its continuing legacy. Point four proposes a method to build free societies, which, instead of addressing issues of social and economic oppression and heirarchical and undemocratic power structures in society – the causes and manifestations of unfreedom – it simply builds on the tripe in point two to come up with a meaningless solution to a made-up problem.
Sadly, this muddles the relatively simple mechanisms behind all of the issues of copyright and corporate control of culture: art and information has become a form of capital, thanks to the commodification of culture embodied in copyright laws enforced by the state. And as this is a form of capital, capitalists are required to hang onto it tightly, and use their allies in the state for backup. While the power of the recording industry is touched on by the movie and there is the occaisional remark about some company making money off something, the movie portays the issue as the past verus the future instead of the owners of cultural capital versus the rest of us.
Unfortunately, RiP portrays the problem as one whereby copyright laws intended to protect the rights of consumers to consume and producers to profit are out of balance. An opportunity is missed for a discussion on how we can reverse the commodification of knowledge and return to the commons while still allowing producers of knowledge and culture a fair share.
While entertaining and fairly informative, RiP sadly comes up short in the analysis department due to the poor ideological framework embodied in the manifesto. Instead of tackling the economic issues of the commodification of knowledge head on, it manages to dilute any radical or anti-corporate message to little more than a proposal for the liberation of culture by trendy technocrats. This is actually a less emancipating message than it seems, as only a very small portion of society has the ability to participate in this liberated culture.
Overall, RiP had the potential to be an excellent movie and I really wanted to like this film, but a lack of even a semblance of a rational economic analysis and the weakness of the manifesto which replaces that analysis force me to give it only two Proudhons out of five.
Brian Latour is a student, activist, and student activist living in Winnipeg. Read more by Brian Latour.
Where I would see the past controlling the future is the present use of the automobile. and the reluctance of people to give it up. Conversely, instead of increasing the use of trains, for both transportation and industry, which would conserve fuel and decrease pollution, we are neglecting that route.
#1. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on August 24th 2009 at 8:52am
I guess you are right in that there are some deeply rooted cultural things that do desperately need to change, and we are still living with the legacies of the past, but I still think portraying the problems with copyright in this manner is abstracting it so much that it doesn’t even resemble the actual situation of Big Culture and Big Knowledge versus the general public.
Trains are interesting too - in there, we’re going back to the past for a solution. On the subject of rail, we seriously need to (re)nationalize the rail industry. We simply can’t run the rail industry as a business where profit is the bottom line - we’re losing too many short lines, and don’t even get me started on the safety issues at CN since privatization. Since Canada was first stolen, rail has been an important factor in economic development and should be treated as such. Perhaps we should also be looking at high-speed passenger networks where it is economically feasible.
#2. Posted by Brian in Winnipeg on August 26th 2009 at 11:41pm
That makes good sense to me.
#3. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on August 26th 2009 at 11:58pm