Mostly because of my New Media and Global Affairs class, I have been reading extensively on networks, collective authorship, and copyright issues as they apply to the contemporary digital platforms that encourage and support media output such as videos, music, animation and text, especially when it comes to intellectual property rights and the remixing culture that we see with the musical artist Girl Talk, DJ Dangermouse, and a slue of others (read my comment on the article "Copy and Persist: The Logic of Mash-Up Culture" for more on the issue).
What I didn't know (probably because my knowledge of Woody Allen's extensive body of work is still in a growing period because, really, you need an entire lifetime to familiarize yourself with everything he's done, and I didn't get started until I was maaaybe 20) was that Allen's filmic debut was with what he calls the "very stupid enterprise" What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), which was not even his film to begin with: Allen and his friends took the Japanese film International Secret Police: Key of Keys and dubbed over the actors' original dialogue, making the espionage action film into a comedy. Although in Stig Björkman's book Woody Allen on Woody Allen Allen himself discredits his first attempt at filmmaking as "a sophomoric enterprise", it completely mirrors what kids and adults alike are creating and posting on YouTube and Vimeo today.
I just love it when ideas from the past come to prominent fruition in contemporary times. See below for the trailer for Allen's first film, which interestingly enough is credited on IMDb as having two directors: Allen and the original Japanese director, Senkichi Taniguchi.
1 comment:
It was probably 1977...I got caught in a rainstorm while riding my bike around town and ducked into a theater that was showing ALLLLL of Allen's movies, from 'What's Up Tiger Lily?' through 'Love and Death'. It was cool to see them all in chronological order and to see recurring themes.
Yeah. I like his earlier, funnier movies.
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