SOC/SIS's
Aufderheide wins
career achievement award
By
Matt Getty
(From American Weekly,
Dec. 5, 2006)
1 of 2 pages
SOC and SIS professor Patricia Aufderheide’s
documentary film scholarship has earned her one of the International
Documentary Association’s (IDA) top career achievement
awards. But it’s earned scores of documentary filmmakers
much more.
“Pat has effected real change for documentarians,” says
entertainment lawyer Michael Donaldson, who will formally
present Aufderheide with the IDA’s 2006 Preservation
and Scholarship Award in Los Angeles this Thursday. “Just
this week I was talking to an Oscar-winning filmmaker—Arthur
Dong. He said to me, ‘It’s like a huge weight
lifted off my shoulders. I never thought I’d get to
finish this film, and now I can.’ He was talking about
Pat’s work.”
Dong’s documentary, The Chinese in Hollywood Project,
explores Hollywood’s portrayal of Chinese Americans.
Like many documentaries critiquing or analyzing the media,
it would be almost impossible to produce without one of two
things—a multimillion-dollar budget or the Documentary
Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use,
which Aufderheide helped produce last year.
According to copyright law, filmmakers can freely use copyrighted
material in their films “as the object of social, political,
or cultural critique,” to “illustrate an argument,” incidentally “in
the process of filming something else,” or within a “historical
sequence.” The problem is often those who control whether
a documentary ever reaches the screen don’t know that.
As a result, fears of lawsuits have driven producers to pay
thousands just because one of their subjects sang “Happy
Birthday” on camera. Such fears could be even more
damaging to a film like Dong’s, which uses numerous
clips from copyrighted films to discuss how movies perpetuate
stereotypes about Chinese Americans.
“In my law practice every week there are dozens of
clips where I say to the filmmaker, ‘This is fair use,’” says
Donaldson, who serves as general counsel to the IDA. “But
the gatekeepers, the people who are in charge of being sure
they don’t get sued, the insurance companies . . .
[They] are unwilling to take that risk.”
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