Andrew Strasser

What You Talkin’ ’Bout, Gillis? | Gregg Gillis (a.k.a. mashup artist Girl Talk) shows off his prodigious laptop skills in RiP: A Remix Manifesto.

RiP: A REMIX MANIFESTO
Written and directed by Brett Gaylor. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Fri-Mon, May 22-25.
***

The best scene in Brett Gaylor’s new documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto is a simple shot of two people lying on a bed. A man in his mid-20s works on a laptop, clicking away at a music editing program, mumbling to the camera about what he’s doing as he does it. Just behind him, a girl is drowsily sprawled out, nearly asleep.

Four things make this scene so engaging. First, the man is Gregg Gillis, better known as the mashup artist Girl Talk, whose extensive use of uncleared samples — often more than 20 in a three-minute period — has made him a poster boy in the recent but far-reaching fight over copyright reform in North America.

Second is what Gillis is actually doing on the computer. He isolates a one-second clip from Elvis Costello’s “Radio, Radio” and, in the blink of an eye, cuts it up, loops it, slows part of it down and speeds part of it way up, and comes up with a thudding club beat that’s completely unrecognizable from the original sample. It’s an astonishing display of technical and creative dexterity.

Third is the implicit cost: for Gillis to legitimately clear the rights for even that minuscule clip, it would run him, between Costello’s record label and the song’s publishers, approximately $12,500.

Fourth, and most importantly, is that Gaylor is himself showing this footage to Marybeth Peters, a register of copyrights at the U.S. government with a 40-year tenure. Peters is a nice enough woman, but admits right away that she doesn’t use a computer at home and has never in her life downloaded a song, legally or otherwise — yet she is one of the people who gets to decide whether artists on the cutting edge of technology, like Gillis, are criminals.

“Can I show you a mashup?” Gaylor asks, pulling out his laptop. After a minute of watching Gillis at work, Peters marvels, “Oh my God.”

Gaylor looks at her. “This is a lot of copyright infringement?”

“No,” she says. “I’m just amazed at what he’s doing!”

Indeed, it’s hard not to get sucked up into the B.C.-born Gaylor’s enthusiasm as he barrels along, using flashy animations and milking the fair use clause for all it’s worth to show how culture has always borrowed from its past and reimagined it in a modern context — The Rolling Stones and Walt Disney being among the most successful examples. He also lands interviews with some of the smartest copyright reform activists around, including Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and novelist/blogger Cory Doctorow.

But Gaylor’s enthusiasm works against him too. RiP frequently gets too caught up in its own flashiness, and its stance is about three steps too far back from its subject to make the kind of nuanced case necessary to preach to anyone but the choir. As soon as Gaylor started trying to justify Napster (yes, everyone used it and yes, it was awesome, but its users were not remixers — they were thieves), I tuned out completely.

I’d also be remiss in my duties were I to let Gaylor get away with never once mentioning how copyright functions in this country, particularly since RiP is funded by the National Film Board of Canada — and because we’ve been on the brink of new digital legislation for over a year now. (In fact, we don’t even have the fair use clause here, but Gaylor doesn’t seem to notice in his frequent mentions of it.) It’s very likely that our bill will closely mirror the U.S.’s suffocating Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but it’s not a foregone conclusion.

So instead of bemoaning how Girl Talk’s mashup art is illegal down south, Gaylor’s energies could have been put to much better use had he tried to prevent the same thing from happening here.