RiP! A Remix Manifesto

Filmmaker Brett Gaylor’s RiP! A Remix Manifesto, now available on Hulu.

In an interview conducted by Rebecca Harper, Gaylor, among many other things, discussed the inspiration he drew from Brazilian culture, which apparently suffers no anxiety from the recognition that creativity is inherently built on earlier creation:

[A]s I made the film, I had to amass a lot of knowledge about copyright law. Maybe not what surprised me, but certainly what inspired me was the history of appropriation in Brazil, and how going back to the very beginning of Brazilian culture, there was this history of fair use and appropriation. And you know, we have that in North American culture, as well, with things like the Blues and obviously hip-hop. But what really struck me about Brazilian culture was how recognized it was, and how there was this culture that seemed to be built on taking influences of Europe, of North America, of their native cultures, and sort of putting them in this big pot and making a stew. That was really inspiring, and I read the works of a Brazilian poet and modernist called Oswald de Andrade. He wrote this thing called The Cannibalist Manifesto, which was basically saying that Brazilian culture needed to eat and ingest the cultures of the world to regurgitate and create something new. I just thought that was a really great metaphor for the digital age and postmodernism. That’s why I decided to go to Brazil and spend a good amount of time there.