Film Festival 09 - RiP: Remix Manifesto
RiP - A Remix Manifesto
Canada 2008, 80m
Director: Brett Gaylor
Festivals: Amsterdam Documentary 2008; SXSW 2009
Brett Gaylor has made an adoring love letter to his favourite
recording artist Girl Talk (Greg Gillis), but also raises some
fascinating questions about sampling culture and copyright laws.
Audio bricoleur Gillis is a fearless musical magpie, with a
whizz-bang knack for snatching the best snippets of the daggiest
songs (think Gloria Estefan, Journey and Whitesnake) and
recontextualising them into sparkling new tracks to create a
bastard pop known as mashups. While these spunky sound collages are
thrillingly inventive, copyright laws determine that tracks made
from pilfered works (Gillis crams uncleared samples from 21 songs
into a three minute track) are utterly illegal. As the NY Times
Magazine stated, Gillis is "a lawsuit waiting to happen". Joyously
celebrating remix culture, Gaylor and Gillis articulately argue
that the line between inspiration and infringement for a media
literate generation is being increasingly blurred, and that
reshaping existing creative works for 'fair use' should be free
from copyright restriction
www.ripremix.com
