Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Borrowed ideas - Case Studies from the Groat Center for Sleep Disorders and Her Morning Elegance

Intertextuality as a concept was first introduced by Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva in 1966. Kristeva didn't believe a text could be an isolated entity which operates in a self-contained manner. Any text, she said, is the absorption and transformation of another. Meaning, it could be an author borrowing and transforming a prior text, or a reference to one text in doing another. However, intertextuality is too often used to excuse plagiarism, as one of my favorite Spanish writers, Lucia Etxebarria, has done on a couple of occasions. I still like her books, but one does wonder where true creation begins and "inspiration" ends.

Her Morning Elegance was the release single from the album The Opposite Side of the Sea (2009) by Israeli artist Oren Lavie.; the video was directed by Eyal Landesman and Yuval & Merav Nathan:


When I start looking for trivia of Her Morning Elegance video, I was far to imagine that I would bump into yet another intertextuality case. It turns out the makers of Her Morning Elegance had taken one of Mitchell Rose's films as a source for their own video, borrowing more than a couple of ideas from it. Rose, was not to happy about it and bitterly said: It does matter where you “TAKE this from.” Intellectual property — ideas — are all an artist has.

The film is the award winning Case Studies From the Groat Center for Sleeping Disorders (2002), and in Rose's own words is a faux scientific investigation study of ASDICT (Adult Sleep Disorder Induced by Child Trauma), showing glimpses of rare archive footage from the renowned - but fictional - Groat Center for Sleep Disorders.


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