film noir
I couldn’t resist this one, but more seriously I find myself constantly coming back to the Internet Archive, and constantly being blown away by what I find. Now, maybe I am biased towards video, and obsess over all things film history. I have been registering several people’s interest in mashups from various angles, Doug Symington was wondering about the curricular possibilities here and Tony Hirst imagines through the process of finding resources here. I believe some of the more immediate brewing interest comes in the wake of Brian’ Lamb’s masterful presentation at the NMC Mashups Symposium (or as Samuel Beckett might say, in the wake of the Wake). A presentation that both Alan Levine and Chris Lott do an excellent job of framing here and here. More recently (as in this morning 
) I discovered randy Thornton’s post about “The Adventures of Bollywood Blackboardwala,” a great series of short videos that use subtitling to turn these Bollywood clips into a hilarious narrative about BlackBoard’s draconian business practices. Very fun stuff.
So, with mashups in the air, I do what I always do, return to the Internet Archive and find resources I want to mashup, but never get around to —but this will change! The other night while thinking through a project I will be working on with a forward thinking Italian professor, I came across over 100 classic film trailers on the Internet Archives in the SabuCat Movie Trailers Collection. And, I had a ball, I found the original, hi-resolution version of the High School Hell Cats trailer (a version of which is linked to above on YouTube). There was also the Babes in Toyland (1934) trailer — a Laurel and Hardy classic for the ages which I always knew by the title March of the Wooden Soldiers. And then there’s Attack of the 50 ft. Woman (1958), Double Indemnity (1944), Invasion U.S.A. (1952), the Harryhausen classic Twenty Million Miles to Earth (1957), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and a truly bizarre trailer for a film I never saw (but I am dying to now) titled Baby Doll (1956), check out this trailer (and fair warning it is offensive on numerous levels).
So, given this list you might figure I’d said enough, and by all counts you would be right, ‘cept my own. After watching a bunch of these trailers, I followed a link to the SabuCat Collection which promised over 60,000 film trailers. When I got there I realized that they were a business that offered high-resolution transfers from 35mm prints of thousands of movie trailers. I was a bit disappointed, figuring I had just hit the online movie trailer El Dorado.
Yet, all was not lost, for there was some interesting information I found on the site that made the trip out of the Internet Archive a bit less distressful to my psyche. Namely the following copyright information regarding movie trailers that I was unaware of:
Can I use Trailers without being concerned over Copyright? Within certain limits, yes. Here’s the story…
Trailers for movies released before 1964 are in the Public Domain because they were never separately copyrighted. The law at the time granted the owner 28 years to file a copyright registration.
1963 + 28 = 1991
Clearly, time has run out to register this material. Some might argue that since the trailers frequently contain the same material that’s in the movie, and the movie is presumably copyrighted, that this would cover the trailer as well. However, the trailer is published (run in a theater) before the movie itself is published. Thus, the trailer requires a separate copyright, and the scenes contained in the trailer are in Public Domain.
Note that all trailers, regardless of year, until the late 80’s, are O.K. to use if they contain no copyright notice. This does occur, although infrequently. For example, the trailer for “The Shootist” (John Wayne, 1976) contains no notice. It is therefore O.K. to use.
According to the couple that runs SabuCat, a majority of the trailers for movies made before 1964 are in the public domain. That’s a lot of film footage free to be mashedup by the people. Moreover, if a film up and until the late 1980s doesn’t have a copyright notice it is free to use, I wonder if anyone has done the research to find out which films since 1964 have the copyright notice, and which one’s don’t.
So, it seems like there is a tremendous amount of footage out there pre-1964 9and otherwise) that is free for the mashing up. Now that’s Open Education!
Now it’s time to work on a presentation for Faculty Academy 2008 (inspired by DJ Lamb) that tries to imagine how faculty might use these resources, which means I get to play and have fun —thanks go to Brian for the inspiration and Martha for the license!
Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
This is the question I would ask of the Coen Brothers after watching this film. The rule in my mind was the reworking of a narrative logic in their films spanning over twenty years, in particular Blood Simple (1984) and Fargo (1996), that culminates in No Country for Old Men (2007). What was the use if it ultimately results in an empty, nihilistic vision of the world that is hermetically sealed off from analysis. I am struck by the fact that so many people recommended this film to me with superlatives like “it’s “great,” “a masterpiece,” their “best film yet.” How can they without the disclaimer that it is also deeply empty, horrifically savage, unrepenting in its push towards utter desperation and mindful paranoia.
Now, this isn’t to say that No Country for Old Men isn’t great film, for it is beautifully shot, masterfully written, and brilliantly acted (a big hat tip to Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem — remarkable performances). All the key elements to a great movie are present, and on the surface (or even at first glance) it may seem like a masterpiece, but in truth there is nothing else there. 
It is a beautifully executed nightmare, a perfect apocalypse, an empty lyric. Unlike Blood Simple and Fargo (many scenes of which were simply re-shot in a different locale for this film) there is no real comedic element to these tragedies, there is no way to finding meaning in the acts of violence through some metaphorical relationship between worlds, characters, or even language; it is all stripped to a kind of horrific minimalism where things can only be laughed at because there is no other alternative for making sense, or as the Sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) says in response to his deputy laughing at a horrific story of murder he relates from the day’s newspaper, “Well, that’s all right. I laugh myself sometimes. Ain’t a whole lot else you can do.” Moments of any kind of comedy in this film are few and far between, and the idea of laughing is often a result of some linguistic break that provides and outlet to an otherwise demoralizing vision of the utter brutality of everything and everyone. Case in point, when the Sheriff and his deputy are discussing the recent murders, the comedy has less to do with anything about this situation being comedic, and a simple linguistic trick of presence:
Deputy: None of the three had ID on ‘em, but there tellin’ me all three is Mexican…was Mexicans.
Sheriff: There’s a question, whether they stopped being and when.
Does one stop being a Mexiacan? —or does one just stop being? At the heart of this comment is the theme of nothingness and emptiness that is typified in the dream of Tommy Lee Jones at the very end of the film, a meager sense of hope that can barely be articulated in the face of the ddread that typifies living, the final nail in the coffin of this film that immediately goes to black to further knock you over th head with the idea that it is concerned with nothingness. Now, if this is the case, and this is the logic that films like Blood Simple and Fargo ultimately lead you to? Then what use was the rule? I really am interested, because this film haunts me not so much for its over indulgence in the horror of living, and the violence of dying, but the fact that it is feebly trying to polemicize these things with a beautifully thin tapestry of words, images, and actions that veil the asserted reality that nothing stands behind it — why do it? What’s the point?
And don’t tell me it’s about violence, America, hunting, the border, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don’t wanna hear it, particularly since this film posits and exhausts it’s own limits of possibility. This is not a film to be lyrically read and imagined in the face of horror like Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2002), it is one to cower in front of in desperation. It is the end of cinema, the logical extension and exhaustion of what was once a complex, nuanced Noir vision taken to its logical extreme. I can stand to think about it, it just depresses me that so many people are so quick to applaud something that is so deeply disturbing, with no sense of escape –it is like the worst kind of fear and propaganda film made by the best of craftsmen.
