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TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE
"Adam and Eve" files, darknets, curries, topsites -- no, I'm not referring to some kinky download website but rather the topics discussed in Wired Magazine's essential January cover story by Jeff Howe referred to in the post below, which has just been posted online. It's a look at how pirated material winds up on the web and for those who imagine it's via teenagers sharing files with their friends, think again. The pirate internet distribution system is as rigidly controlled and hierarchical as the studio system except it boasts an entirely different group of players competing not for dollars but for prestige and "credits," sort of cyber-chits that can be used to rack up free downloads and tradeable digital media.
It's a breathlessly written piece. Here's a section in which a teen races to be the first to "seed" a pre-release audio CD by A Perfect Circle"
Finally Kevin checks a site telling him that a rip of Thirteenth Step has just been uploaded to a secure FTP site -- a week before it hits the stores. He curses under his breath. More than two minutes have elapsed since the file first appeared. The race is on, and Kevin is already at the back of the pack. He opens FlashFXP-- a program that allows him to directly transfer files -- and begins copying the CD to as many sites as he can. Then he sits back to watch the race. Everything now depends on the whimsy of Internet traffic and the speed of the server farms whose bandwidth he is pirating.
With his quick, eager intelligence and, more important, a high degree of focus, Kevin spends hours at a stretch performing the minute tasks of copying and transferring files, usually to networks in the middle levels of the pyramid. It's through grunts like him that a song proliferates from 10,000 copies to 1 million. The night A Perfect Circle's CD was posted, Kevin stayed up late spreading the file around the Net. The curries competing against him must have gotten stuck behind some double-wide trailer of a packet, because Kevin's credits poured in."
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 12/30/2004 02:16:23 AM Comments (0)
STARS OF TOMORROW
Via Defamer comes this odd L.A. Craig's List talent call which I'm not quite sure speaks for itself:
We are looking for the new Vincent Gallo & Chloe Sevigny!!!
Independent Feature Film Production Company is casting adult male and female actors as well as experienced traditional actors for a new narrative film that has explicit scenes of sexuality.
The film is a cross between "The Brown Bunny" and "Reservoir Dogs." It's the romantic and thrilling story of two professional hitmen who fall in love one night and the woman who comes between them.
We finished a very successful narrative feature film which has gotten lots of festival and press praise and secured distribution in the US and Canada (with deals pending overseas). We are becoming known for producing very unconventional and compelling stories for a very hip and 'indie-focused' market.
Our new film is not the traditional porn film w/o story and production values but is reminiscent to story-based films of the 70s but updated to reflect the new wave of indie gangster films.
Click on the link above if you think you qualify!
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 12/29/2004 02:24:09 PM Comments (0)
Former Filmmaker editor Chuck Stephens penned this engaging report from Soi Thonglor, the street he lives on "deep in the heart of Bangkok... where intellectual property rights aren't exactly chief among local law enforcement's concerns." His "Ten Best" list (Number 1: Tropical Malady) includes a number of titles seen on bootleg DVDs Stephens picked up at his local grocery store. In the article, Stephens points out that apathetic distributors worldwide are causing dedicated cineates to rely on cheap black market DVDs just to keep up with the artform.
Also great reading, although not on the web, unfortunately, is Wired's cover story on "darknet" distribution of bootlegged media, the pyramid-like structure that causes the latest CD or DVD to show up on Kazaa or Limewire or the recent busted BitTorrent, which Wired does write about.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 12/29/2004 01:51:54 PM Comments (0)
SUSAN SONTAG, 1933 - 2004
Susan Sontag, author, activist, and critic, died in New York today at 71.
A tremendously influential figure in post-war American culture, and one of the last remaining people for whom the term "public intellectual" might apply, Sontag had a special relationship with cinema, occasionally directing experimental films but more often influencing films, filmmakers and other critics with her writing. Essays such as "Notes on Camp," which found an alternative and politically transgressive means of valuing culture through gay aesthetics, "Against Interpretation," which argued against the critical reduction of art to easily identifiable themes and messages, and "On Photography" which examined how the medium of photography and its particular poetics affects the way we look at a picture ("All photographs are momento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or things) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.") were major cultural statements that artists in all disciplines reacted in some way too.
A major supporter of European and Asian art cinema, Sontag wrote, in 1995, an essay, "The Decay of Cinema," in which she bemoaned the passing of what she dubbed "cinephelia": "Cinephelia is the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other; quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral -- all at the same time."
Arguing that globalization was destroying the values of cinema as art, Sontag went on to write that great films could only be "heroic violations of the norms and practices which now govern movie-making everywhere in the capitalist and would-be capitalist world -- which is to say, everywhere". She particularly supported the work of Bela Tarr, helping organize screenings of his The Werckmeister Harmonies to garner stateside interest, and over the years wrote provocatively about the work of, among many others, Robert Bresson ("He has worked out a form that perfectly expresses and accompanies what he wants to say. In fact, it is what he wants to say."), Chris Marker, Jack Smith, and, more negatively, Leni Riefenstahl, who, in "Fascinating Fascism," she argued was a propagandist, not a documentarian.
Her own films include Brother Carl, Duet for Cannibals, and Promised Land.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 12/28/2004 07:35:09 PM Comments (0)
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© 2004 Filmmaker: The Magazine of Independent Film