The English director Richard Misek was one of the most anticipated filmmakers this year’s the UnArchive Found Footage Fest. After the screening of his short movie A History of The World According to Getty Images, he agreed to an interview for Universal Cinema.
The film he introduces is a gem of pure beauty, pregnant with political significance. It is a documentary about property, power and profit, made out of scraps of films from Getty Images, the world leader of commercial image archives.
As declared in the movie, this precious editing work, accompanied by written explanations, has a purpose: to release this found footage from captivity. Misek declared to have “paid the ransom” in order to give free access to everyone to at least a few minutes of clips they should be entitled to watch, as it is part of the history of this world we all belong to.
His opera lasts a few minutes, and yet that’s enough time for Misek to trigger a debate about public domain, public property and the imprisonment of images. Not only is filming an act of power, but there’s a huge ethical responsibility regarding the possession of the archival films and its access. If the past is yet to be freed since so much material is still retained from the public, then who owns history?
Bianca Montanaro, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): Will you follow up on the style you have already experimented with in A History of the World According To Getty Images or are you working on new ways to explore the topic?
Richard Misek (RM): No, I think it will be completely different. I mean I originally had the aspiration to do what I did with the short film but 3 hours long, so it would have been 500 clips and the film would be an archive in a way. But I think that’s almost like repeating a trick, like a rhetorical trick. So in a way I’m stepping back now and I think of other approaches for my argument. And maybe try to persuade the archives to release something into the public, like maybe every January 1, like a token, like a gesture.
(UM): Could you tell us something more about your research for the short film?
(RM): One interesting part of the project was spending weeks and weeks in the Getty archives. I started with the 1890’s and finished with the 1950’s and then the images got many, many more so I couldn’t continue…. most are colonial images filmed by governments, and it’s never filmed just for the sake of sharing knowledge, there’s always a written agenda, the only people who had access to camera were people who worked for powerful governments and later for corporations, so the images that you see are really distorted images, it’s a completely screwed history which says nothing about history.
(UM): Nowadays everything seems free and accessible, but it’s really not like that, despite the new technologies. What do you think about that?
(RM): One thing I’m thinking about a lot now is about how filming has changed, this incredible democratization of image-making. Now everyone has got a phone and can film – and yet where does all this stuff go? On Youtube? And maybe it gets taken down after 5 years and is nowhere to be found with all the junk around. So if somebody wants something of historical significance to be seen, where do they go? They go to Getty images. You can’t win: they have control because they are the platform, the in between, between the creator and the consumer. There’s a great book called Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and it talks about these new corporations, which the bottleneck between creators and consumers, and they have the power. Getty is the exact example of this bottleneck.
(UM): Could you explain why all of this doesn’t happen with written words?
(RM): It’s very simple: if something gets published, you can buy it in book shops, you can take it from the library, even if you can’t get a pdf you can scan the pages and the text is there. Words don’t depend on the medium or how they’re carried, they can easily move. But if you look at images, it’s those files that Getty has and if you don’t have them, you don’t get to see those images.
(UM): It’s a capitalization of knowledge, in a way…
(RM): Totally.
(UM): And what do you see for the future of images?
(RM): The more times goes by the more the images will be controlled by large corporations, it’s happening now, Getty is a part of that.
(UM): And how do you think us, as spectators, can react to that?
(RM): Everyone has to find their answers, if you look you will find some way. But I think a starting point is being aware about what’s under the surface, what the power relations are, what the media don’t want you to understand. Do you take the red pill or the blue pill? Just think twice about where this image comes from.
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