Last week I wrote on the question of plagiarism and blogging, a topic my mind returned to while watching Fellini’s Roma on Saturday. It would have been while the young Fellini’s family jostle for seats in a cinema that I wondered about the influences that previous filmmakers and other visual artists have on the visual language of a film.
Sadly the DVD I was watching didn’t include the credits so I wasn’t able to see how Fellini referenced his included material. When filmmakers use other films within their own they usually do credit them. The same is not true, however, when elements from other films are utilised in more implicit ways, such as the way the photography in The Passion Of The Christ is said to move to capture views of classic paintings.
Film-makers’ tendency to show appreciation in this way is in many ways like writing an essay and including an allusion to an influential writer’s work, but sometimes a more apt analogy would be that time-honoured technique of rewriting one author’s analysis in your own words, a technique which the rules of western academia would insist be accompanied with introduction or footnote.
I for one wouldn’t like to see any reduction in the use of borrowed visual imagery within film. It can be rather rewarding to catch a glimpse of another favourite piece within a film, to realise shared appreciation of an artist with a filmmaker. But once again it seems that there is a need to redefine our understandings of plagiarism in order to respond to the new ways we utilise media.