Hi, I wanted to reply to Dennis’s point wearing my day job hat, which is most often doing archival research and rights clearance for documentaries.
I’m not Brian Frye (who is actually a lawyer who knows all about this stuff), but I work with this regularly. (I am not going to address the issue about the orientation of the image and how it mis-represents the film, but to me I agree that they are using this as a decorative element, not as a thoughtful and accurate representation of the film.) In an academic essay where a film is being discussed, the use of still frames from that film would almost certainly be accepted legally as defendable Fair Use. It’s not just that they “see everything else as Fair Use.” It IS Fair Use, permitted as such under US copyright law. It is good of academics to request permission, get better versions, and include proper captions & credits in essays and books about films. But there is no obligation for them to do so in the United States. I am talking about a very specific set of parameters which meet certain requirements allowed in copyright law, such as percentage of use of the original, likelihood that it might be confused with the original in the marketplace, and that it is under discussion. Related to Dennis’s comment about how they do seem to ask archives and academics for permission, if the only way to access a clean version of an image is from an archive, and the only way to get a non-watermarked version of the image is to pay a fee to that archive and credit it, then one has to do that. But I’m guessing that that is related to access as much as it is to rights. Also, any given publisher could choose to include in a contract that every image must be properly licensed, but that is an optional contract term that I imagine rarely happens for academic works. The idea that most academics are making lots of money on books they have released is ludicrous. Some do, I imagine mostly those who have written books that get adapted as the primary texts for teaching certain subjects, but I wager that most, especially those on experimental film, make nothing, or a few hundred bucks. Filmforum has brought out two books related to projects we have done. Both have sold fewer than 500 copies, no royalties are earned, and the printing costs had to be subsidized. I’m sure the publishers aren’t losing money overall, and if you can get them to cover licensing fees for images, more power to you. We paid a standard licensing fee for images for those books, because we had a specific grant line item to cover it. However, Fair Use can almost never be used as a legal defense for marketing and promotional purposes. Thus, a print ad from MoMA regarding this series would have to license use, or would be open to being sued. Then we get to the sticky part, what about a lower-rez version used online to help promote? Generally, that is also not allowed under copyright law meaning that there is not generally a good Fair Use argument to be made to defend it. In reality, as we all know, people copy images from one website onto another all the time. That horse has left the barn. It is entirely within rights to yell at clouds about how awful it is, but unless you want to sue someone over it, it isn’t going to stop. People who care about such things will recognize that it is low-rez and problematic. Conversely, maybe it will help attract people to the screenings to view the films properly, and to me that might be a net positive. Best regards, Adam ----- Adam Hyman Executive Director Los Angeles Filmforum www.lafilmforum.org [email protected] 323-377-7238 From: Frameworks <[email protected]> on behalf of Dennis Doros <[email protected]> Reply-To: Experimental Film Discussion List <[email protected]> Date: Tuesday, August 11, 2026 at 1:04 PM To: Experimental Film Discussion List <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Frameworks] Misuse of Brakhage stills Mark brings up a very interesting discussion. There are dozens of books using stills from our licensed films without our, or our filmmakers' permission. I suspect academics are more willing to ask archives and academics they know for permission, but see everything else as fair use. Fondest regards, Dennis Doros Milestone Film & Video • 38 George Street • Harrington Park, NJ 07640 Phone: +1 (201) 767-3117 • Email: [email protected] • www.milestonefilms.com • www.missingmovies.org Pronouns: He, Him JOIN MILESTONE'S MAILING LIST TODAY! Support us on Facebook and Twitter! On Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 3:26 PM mrktosc <[email protected]> wrote: Actually this Anticipation image is from a photo I took of the original for the film, and which has appeared online here and there. The visible perfs are original to my image and not added by anyone, though they’ve partly doubled the image for design purposes, it seems. I think originally this photo was put online for something I wrote about inspecting Stan’s film elements but can’t remember. Nobody asks for permission generally for these kinds of uses, though academics/writers who have written about Stan’s process have usually asked me if they can include photos I’ve taken (and I always say yes and give them the original photo to make sure it’s decent quality). The photos I’ve taken are generally archival/illustrative documents of the films as objects for informational or descriptive purposes about archiving or process, and aren’t meant to represent the films as cinematic experiences, but folks often like the film strip object as a stand-in for a still, so it’s not surprising they get used that way. Mark On Aug 11, 2026, at 2:39 PM, Dominic Angerame <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Fred to add to the reproduction of your scan, in the image that the Modern Art Museum used even the sprocket holes are on the wrong side if one is running the film on a set rewinds. Obviously whoever did this design knows nothing about celluloid film. They are just using it as decorative art. Dominic On Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 4:09 AM Fred Camper <[email protected]> wrote: This admittedly harsh rant is in response to a little ad for a likely very worthy program of experimental films coming up at the MoMA. My objection is to an image shown below. The post is at https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0JuRUP85Wnng2eC3bzcaZUSG2FoNdxaKnkvrBXvai6mkUrARdjcxrVRhZ1j4jcyX7l&id=100021319367953 <MoMAStrip.jpg> Thank you for making me aware of the fact that the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Film has stolen one of my many scans of strips from films by Stan Brakhage off of my Web site. Forgive me, because this rant may seem somewhat insane, but I believe it to be justified. My many scans of strips from prints of Brakhage films were made over two decades with scanners I purchased myself, the images selected as carefully as I could based on my feel for his aesthetic and knowledge of his films. They were made, more importantly, out of love for the films, and I tried to find images that would be interesting or attractive on their own but would also represent the film well. Hence many scans, such as this one, were chosen to display particularly meaningful cuts. These choices were made by someone whose life was changed by discovering Brakhage films at 16, attending the world premiere of “The Art of Vision” at Yale at 17, and by showing and speaking on his films at various venues throughout the world after having shown them at a film society I co-founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1964, which included the presentation of the premiere of “23rd Psalm Branch,” with Brakhage in attendance and me projecting, as well as other programs of films by Peter Kubelka, Bruce Baillie, and Warren Sonbert, with each of them in attendance, and more. When I showed Brakhage the first pages of stills on my site, right after setting it up, in the fall of 2001, only a little less than a year before he died, he really liked them. I want to say he loved them. He asked how long they would be up on the Internet. When I said something like “permanently” or “indefinitely,” he seemed surprised and pleased. Twenty-five years later they are still up, and are still being used without permission in ways that misrepresent the films. Isn’t “stolen” a little harsh? I haven't tried to copyright my choices of stills; I assume that they can't be, and that seems just. But that doesn't mean people should use them without permission. The so-called “Brakhage Center” did that some years ago, mixing them in with a student-designed mashup of images. Had the Museum of Modern Art, Department of Film, New York, bothered to write me for permission, the strip would have been free, but they would have gotten a sharper, higher-resolution strip than what I put on the Web. They also would not have been able to misuse it the way they did. Marilyn Brakhage and I have never permitted the strips to be run sideways. Run that way, they are false to the film. The whole point of trying to get people to run strips rather than single-frame enlargements is that Brakhage’s ever-changing film spaces are best suggested by strips. But sideways? Really? The baby shown sideways? Would you do that with a single-frame enlargement? Run vertically, the strips can encourage one to imagine an instant of the film. Horizontally, they are reduced to decoration. What’s even worse: we tend to “read” a horizontal strip left to right, in the direction in which we read text. Seen that way, the viewer will infer that the baby is right side up, and that it appears after the blue light. But in this brief segment of “Anticipation of the Night,” the baby is shown upside down, and the blue light comes after. In the film, the camera swirls about the baby, and it is seen in what feels like all possible orientations. I suppose it’s possible that someone made their own scan from a print of the film. That would explain the absurdly “decorative” presence of three different lines of sprocket holes running along the edges of the film, two very thin ones and a full one. Or would it? This kind of stupid and false paste-in job, adding sprocket holes (which in fact some of my strips do include), has been done before with my strips. But how would they have managed to choose exactly this cut? In any case, their image is not only less sharp than mine, but far too “overexposed.” My dear friend Kirk Winslow said at a dinner in 2002, when I complained about a bad editor trying to introduce factual errors into my film writing, after the other three of us complained about poor film projection in New York, “Fred! People just don’t care,” pounding his fist on the table once for each word. I perhaps would not remember this so vividly, and cite it so often, if it were not the last time he went out. He died of HIV a month or two later. If we wish to make the world better, we need to stop thoughtlessly slapping things together, and instead, to start caring. Fred Camper Chicago -- Frameworks mailing list [email protected] https://mail.film-gallery.org/mailman/listinfo/frameworks_film-gallery.org -- Frameworks mailing list [email protected] https://mail.film-gallery.org/mailman/listinfo/frameworks_film-gallery.org -- Frameworks mailing list [email protected] https://mail.film-gallery.org/mailman/listinfo/frameworks_film-gallery.org -- Frameworks mailing list [email protected] https://mail.film-gallery.org/mailman/listinfo/frameworks_film-gallery.org
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