Open Forum Friday: What’s The Difference Between Homage and Theft?
I’m sure this is a question that gets asked all the time in art circles, but the upcoming Tarantino/Rodriguez collaboration, Grindhouse, seems to have a lot of people wondering when Tarantino will stop making movies that “pay tribute” and start doing something original. On the flipside, however, there are a lot of people would call Quentin Tarantino one of the most original and inventive filmmakers of our generation. Which side is right?
Apocalypse Oz, the so-called mash-up movie I posted about yesterday, is another movie blurring the line between creativity and plagiarism. Culture does not exist in a vacuum, and virtually every artist gets influenced by what came before them. However, I can also see the point some people have when they question the talent required to emulate someone else’s work. I would argue that there is still a lot of talent involved in choosing what to emulate and how to emulate it. Even Gus Van Sant’s shot for shot remake of Psycho could not possibly end up being the same as Alfred Hitchcock’s version of the film. Every artist puts their own touches on their work, whether they mean to or not. How do you feel about this issue? In this age of samples, mash-ups and remixes, is there a difference between homage and theft? Give us your thoughts here on Open Forum Friday.
Comments (2)
In the case of something like this ‘Apocalypse Oz’ movie it is to miss the point entirely to critisize it for unoriginality. From what I can tell from the site, it’s reason for being is precisely a repurposing of found materials in an experimental fashion. They point out too that the movies its based on are themselves adaptations of other people’s work. We don’t critisize Coppola or the Wizard of Oz for ripping off other people’s work, yet in many respects that’s what they did. ‘Apocalypse Oz’ seems to have some fair use/ copyright issue thing going on aswell. I think its an interesting project – and not just a trailer parody, but a new movie altogether. They aren’t claiming originality of the source material though. Tarantino on the other hand blatantly lifts and claims it as his own. God knows how he got away with ‘Reservoir Dogs’.
Posted by Bolbo on December 22nd, 2006I hate to be like Capt’n Obvious here but when a movie takes the whole device of a scene and plays it in a similar situation then it is a theft. I would think that homage is more like when a director uses a creative device from a previous movie but in a somewhat novel way. I would call Brian DePalma’s use of the stairway scene at the train station in The Untouchables an homage to Sergei Eisenstein’s steps of Odessa scene from Battleship Potemkin. I would call Michael Bay’s whole film The Island a theft of Robert S. Fiveson’s The Clonus Horror, as the plot and the essential action of the characters are the same. I do not feel the change in style and the upgrade of visual effects are relevant as a significant source of originality in this question. I agree with Bolbo in the sense of this being an experiment and spoke more about this in my comment about Apocalypse Oz.
Posted by Ian on December 22nd, 2006Leave a Reply