In 1997, George Lucas announced he would theatrically rerelease the phenomenally successful Star Wars series. This would be the first large theatrical release of the films since 1983. Because of the huge cultural impact of the series in the twenty years since the first one came out, this was received with a great deal of enthusiasm.More controversial would be the decision by Lucas to "update" the films. Claiming to despair of the late 1970s and early 1980s filmmaking technology, all three movies had certain scenes remade with new technology. In addition, a few entirely new scenes were thrown in, or changed, in a way that had nothing to do with special effects and arguably changed the story and character arcs.
An exhaustive list of all the alterations would be beyond the scope of this blog, but suffice to say the new additions were largely greeted with disappointment. Most casual fans and professional critics alike felt they detracted from the original movies and were better off left out. Many refused to acknowledge the changes. It can be argued that the audience had a "modernist" approach to the films, that to most Americans the original movies were "real" and the altered movies were "not real"--there was no room for interpretation. George Lucas had a different idea, though. Here he describes his series in 1997:
"There will only be one. And it won't be what I would call the "rough cut," it'll be the "final cut." The other one will be some sort of interesting artifact that people will look at and say, "There was an earlier draft of this." The same thing happens with plays and earlier drafts of books. In essence, films never get finished, they get abandoned. At some point, you're dragged off the picture kicking and screaming while somebody says, "Okay, it's done." That isn't really the way it should work. Occasionally, [you can] go back and get your cut of the video out there, which I did on both American Graffiti and THX 1138; that's the place where it will live forever. So what ends up being important in my mind is what the DVD version is going to look like, because that's what everybody is going to remember. The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of Star Wars out there won't last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version [of the Special Edition], and you'll be able to project it on a 20' by 40' screen with perfect quality. I think it's the director's prerogative, not the studio's to go back and reinvent a movie."
"An Expanded Universe," American Cinematographer magazine, February 1997
George Lucas displays a symbolic-interpretive idea of his movies and their relation to the American public that his audience appears not to share. Disturbingly, he appears eager to bury his original films that were so influential in American pop culture history.
The library/information science issue at hand here is clearly art preservation. As a fan of art and of history, and with a deep disgust of any sort of "revisionism", I propose that libraries should be at the forefront of preserving films and other works of art unaltered whether they are threatened by the government, the public, or in this case even their artist.
Films and other works of art perceived to be in danger of being altered, and their original versions in peril, should be voluntarily preserved by a wide array of preservation societies, ranging from libraries, archives, and clubs, to the individual activist. A close relation to the spirit of this movement is "Banned Books Month" at many libraries around the country. There is no reason libraries and other preservation agencies could not band together in a similar outspoken spirit of activism to preserve works of art that are in danger of being altered.
A loose organization could be created to communicate with each other for cross-referencing. This would involve a low amount of vertical differentiation in the form of a hierarchy, while horizontal differentiation into different roles could be optional. There would be little in the way of formalization as all agencies would be purely voluntary. A strict hierarchial structure, a strong vertical differentiation, would interfere with the volunteer spirit of the endeavor.
A good example would be the ideas espoused by Mary Parker Follett, which together have come to be known as workplace democracy. In this particular situation they can more accurately be adapted to "organizational" or "volunteer" democracy. Follett claimed self-government would "facilite the growth of individuals and of the groups to which they belonged." She would also say, "by directly interacting with one another to achieve their common goals, the members of a group fulfilled themselves through the process of the group's development."
Concerning Follett's theories, not only would proactive artistic preservation be of service to American history and culture, but it would also allow these different organizations and individuals to practice the skills of preservation and organization themselves.
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Examples of Organizations that Would be Ideal Candidates to Preserve Films and Other Unaltered Works of Art:
Kansas City Area Archivists
Kansas City Art Institute
University of Kansas Spencer Library
Association of Moving Image Archivists
The American Film Institute
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Hatch, Mary Jo. (2006). Organization theory, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Magid, Ron. (1997, February). An Expanded Universe. American Cinematographer, 1-4.
2 comments:
"A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned." -- commonplace observation
"Keep Ted Turner and his goddamned Crayolas away from my movie." -- Orson Welles*
I think Brian raises a very interesting question: does, or should, the creator of a work have exclusive rights to its available form? Once a work has been "received" by a viewer, does the creator surrender control over the available version(s) of the work? The technology of today and the future makes it possible for the answer to be both "yes" and "no" in a way that was not conceivable before the arrival of digital media and the post-modern perspective.
Controversy over what form a creator's work will appear in goes back at least to Shakespeare's time. It was common for a playwright to adapt a play from someone else's (more) original work (e.g. the play Winter's Tale from Robert Greene's novel History of Pandosto) without the expressed permission of the author, and to make and perform differing versions of any given script. Scholars deduce from the various versions of the bard's plays that the performances given were not all of the exact same text. During Shakespeare's career with the Globe Theater, it is likely that he was a willing participant in altering the form of the scripts performed by the company. It doesn't seem likely that even really avid fans of the London performances would have a clear recollection of the best version of a play and have the grounds to criticize the performed text. Live theatre, of course, is subject to many influences that would make one performance vary from another, so the fluidity of live performance invites differences in the final product. When versions of the plays were published, well after Shakespeare's death, possibly readers of the First Folio might have the wherewithal to criticize what version they saw performed, but these people would have been few. And all of the posthumous productions have done what they wished with the play texts.
The modern video media create a different milieu, in which the creator of a work can make a mass market product that is easily distributed to a huge audience, and which the viewer can, like the First Folio owners, maintain for future reference. Digital technology makes it quite tempting for the video artist to look back and change existing works as he or she pleases to try to reach his or her standard of "completion." The changes in play scripts in Shakespeare's time may have been repeated "polishing" to try to perfect the text, but could also have been rewritings intended to suit the strengths of the actors who would play the parts, to flatter a patron, to shorten the playing time, or a host of other, very prosaic reasons. The reworking of old, well-established movies seems like a different order of motivation, possibly strongly commercial. In any event, the history of performance media leaves no doubt that the creator has always had the "right" to change a work; who better, after all?
On the other hand, once a work has been "transmitted" (seen, heard, read) by an audience, then the receiver does "own" a copy of the work as long as he or she remembers it. It may very well be an imperfect or defective version of the creator's intended work, but it exists anyhow. The presence of durable versions of movies on tape or digital media allows the receiver to have a more-likely "correct" (frequently refreshed) recollection of the form of the creator's work, but what the receiver carries internally will vary according to his or her own "take" of the material. The durable versions allow the receiver to check for alterations and verify what the creator may do in subsequent editions, and as long as the durable original versions endure, the receiver can "have" the preferred versions.
When the creator attempts to coerce acceptance of the available version, by making only the latest edition commercially available, with the idea that previous versions created in soon-to-be-obsolete formats will gradually fade away, then the determined receiver must have the means to migrate the preferred version on his or her own to a usable format. This issue then raises questions about fair use of copyrighted material, which are not central to the matter at hand.
The creator may have the desire to perfect the work and to make that perfected version the form by which his or her work is known, which necessitates the tapering away of copies of previous editions. In the case of the Star Wars films, it seems that some fans strongly prefer the original versions to the latter.
The creator may believe that, as is often the case, the coming generations of younger viewers will simply accept the available "newer" versions as the "real deal" and that as the older fans fade away, so will the controversy. In the end this may be the case.
Part of the promise of digital media is that post-modern concept that the "text" is separable from the creator's original intention. In the case of the Star Wars films, the receiver is free to detach the films from the changed intentions of the creator, and to maintain the connection of a version of the films to what the receiver perceives as the creator's original intention.
In this post-modern context, a grassroots film preservation move makes sense, when the creator's power over the commercially-available version is so great.
*"Citizen Kane a Masterpiece at 50" by Roger Ebert, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19910428/COMMENTARY/44010309, retrieved 11/27/08
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