A distribution contract is a memorialization of the agreement between the owner of distribution rights in a film or video (usually the producer), and a company engaged in the business of marketing such works to users and purchasers (usually a distributor). What makes these agreements somewhat unique is that the product for sale is not a physical property, but rather intangible rights. For simplicity I will refer to film and video interchangeably as a "motion picture." In its intangible form a motion picture should be viewed as a collection of rights that may be sold or licensed in its entirety
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Too many film students and their teachers think that preparing for a career in filmmaking has to do with learning how to manipulate interesting technologies—learning "hands on skills." Look at the average reel of student films and you can't help but notice that too many of them are really about the same thing: camera angles. Look at the music videos done as class assignments at any of several Western European film schools and you'll see that, like fast-food and blue jeans, technophilia knows no national boundaries. There are important exceptions but the concentration on technique as an end in
The First Annual Berlin International Film Festival opened forty years ago at the focal point of a Europe newly and conspicuously divided. By 1951, almost a dozen countries to the east had fallen under Stalinist control. This year at the Berlinale, things were different. In October, 1989, East Germany made the first big move in a game of democratic dominoes which rippled down through Czechoslovakia and across the Balkan states. Events happened with such astonishing rapidity that filmmakers and film festival directors alike were caught unprepared, as documents of revolution were rushed to their
The theory of documentary trickle-down holds that high technology may eventually dribble into the awaiting mouths of the hungry, but don't hold your breath. That's why the announcement of Arriflex's 535 Camera System, however innovative, exciting and incorporable, should be received as only possibly affecting dominant production methods in the future. There was, for instance, a two-decade gap between Arri's invention of the spinning mirror (1932), which first made possible through-the-lens reflex viewing of motion pictures, and the porting of that technology to the pin-registered 16St (1952).
Last month (i.e., April) the National Film Theatre in London ran a season featuring some of the best documentaries produced by British television in the Eighties. The animating spirit of the season, however, was as much valedictory as celebratory. Its title was "Goodbye To All This?" Concern about the future of the British television documentary is inextricably bound up with profound worries about the future prospects of British television as a whole. The cause of all this angst is the Broadcasting Bill which is at present passing through its various Parliamentary stages. Government media
Satellite Cultures is an exhibition of videos made by both white and Aboriginal Australians that claims to look at the decolonization of images in 'postcolonial' Australia. The exhibition offers a rare chance to see Australian Aboriginal video art and television, but its display in the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City raises important questions about the reappropriation by the first world of images of, and by, indigenous peoples. If aboriginal videos are presented as art objects, divorced from their context and without the participation of their makers, isn't this, in fact, a
Modern artists have often discovered that negative publicity helps their careers by publicizing their works and winning them sympathizers as well as foes. Amos Gitai, a forty-year-old Israeli filmmaker, established a reputation with his first documentary, House (1980), in part because Israeli television, which had commissioned the fifty-minute work, refused to air it. "Israel is a very passionate place in which the significance of an event is always exaggerated, "Gitai told me in January in Paris, where he now lives. "When the film was not broadcast, there was an hysterical reaction. And since
At Appalshop the 1960s never died—they just grew up. Now celebrating adulthood at age twenty-one, Appalshop is a media-arts center in the small town of Whitesburg, Kentucky (population 1,500), dedicated to the empowerment of Appalachian people through their art and culture. From a rehabbed warehouse on Whitesburg's winding main street comes a steady stream of films, plays, music, books, exhibits, and festivals. Appalshop's work tours the country, plays on television, and wins awards at international festivals. But more important to the Appalshoppers, it reaches Appalachians at home. "When we
"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality." - Dante Alighieri BBC's chief of Documentary Features gives American filmmaker Allan Francovich the good news: BBC's TV documentaries regularly get higher ratings than Dallas! As evidence, Francovich searing three part/three hour masterpiece on Central America's agony, The Houses are Full of Smoke, airs on BBC-2—on prime time—for three successive Friday nights (May/ June) to very large audiences, hefty media attention and critical acclaim. A rural Englishman is so overcome he
Djinguereber Mosque, Timbuktu. 'There is a people called the Mericans ?' he asked. 'There is.' 'They say they have visited the Moon.' 'They have.' 'They are blasphemers.' Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines. When Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke went to sleep during his first night on the moon in 1972 he had a dream. In it he and mission commander John Young were driving on the moon in their lunar Rover when they discovered tyre tracks in the arid lunar dust. Following the tracks they came upon another Rover in which two astronauts were sitting... Charles Duke, and John Young. They spoke, and the