Another art appreciation post. This one took a bit for me to interpret its meaning. This is The Free Peoples of Europe! Published in January 1933 in the newspaper Der Wahre Jacob (The True Jacob) by Willibald Krain.
The sketch style caught my attention and I was reasonably sure what the words said, but I had to look into the author and the publication to make sure. I am fairly confident that the intended meaning is a critique of the "Dicatatorship of Capital" concept. The women are the peoples of Europe all of whom are tied to factory chimneys, to me this represents how capitalism dominates people through work even if their nations are politically free.
Here's my reasoning.
The True Jacob was a satirical biweekly publication affiliated with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and was published from 1879 til February 1933, meaning this appeared in one of the last editions.
January 1933 was when Hitler became Chancellor and it wasn't long before the publications of enemy political organisations were banned.
Willibald Krain was born in 1886 and died in 1945. He spent most of his artistic career as a press cartoonist working for liberal and socialist publications. When the Nazis took control of Germany he found himself under suspicion and banned from working.
In 1944 he found work again producing antisemitic cartoons for the satirical publication Kladderadatsch which at the time was a far right publication, ironic since it was founded in 1848 by a Jewish merchant family and had been a liberal paper before being sold to an industrialist after the First World War. It ceased publication in 1944 as Germany's deteriorating position throttled the economy.
Willibald Krain again out of work was conscripted into the Volkssturm (People's Storm) a militia made up of old men, young boys and war wounded. Krain did not see combat but was captured by the Soviet Army, during transport he was shot and died from his injury shortly after release.
July 1925, The 1st International Workers Olympiad in Frankfurt am Main
This is an example of the material he produced for the SPD. The Workers Olympiad was a series of left wing alternatives to Olymlpics which was seen as too nationalistic.
People in a hotel, a new novel by Vicki Baum
This is an advertisement for a novel by Vicki Baum. The novel was published in 1929 and released in English under the title Grand Hotel, which was optioned for a film in 1932.
Before I get started, no Paul Verhoeven's Show Girls and its affiliated properties are not PD media, they're all intact on the copyright front. Something to keep in mind the next time someone tries to tell you only trash is public domain.
I stumbled upon an interesting story on r/lostmedia about another sequel to the infamous flop Showgirls, if you're not familiar with the other slightly more well known sequel which is either called Pennies from Heaven or just Showgirls 2, this was concerning a totally different even more obscure film.
The sequel that was the focus of the post is called Showgirls Exposed/Showgirls 2 the Story of Hope, which is not to be confused with the later re-release of the original film, which is called Showgirls Fully Exposed. It is a strange story, but the film is real and there is a trailer for it online which can be watched online. Here's where copyright rears its ugly head, the film was produced in the 2000s-2010s but could only be seen in the United States of America, why you ask? Well, the film includes scenes from a little movie called The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Why is footage from a 1919 film an obstacle to wider releases? Because in addition to being old, it's also German. Germany like most of the world uses a life plus system, in their case 70 years after death of creators. That meant that at the time of the film's release Caligari's rights were still owned by the Murnau Foundation, an organisation setup by the West German Government in 1966 to preserve and restore classic German cinema, it has since earned a reputation for censorship and abuse of copyright to control and limit the use of classic German cinema. The director and most of the backers for Showgirls Exposed are themselves German, so this is a bit of an odd oversight to say the least.
So, despite being a German production the film could only be released in one market, the United States which is still using a date of release system despite passing a law to overhaul US copyright to reflect the "normal" international version in the 1970s. Add to that SEO complications and competition from other related projects, and you have a perfect recipe for crippling obscurity.
But I have some good news! In Germany, copyright of motion pictures is determined by the Director, scriptwriter, dialogue writer and composer of original music for the film.
With respect to cinematographic works, the term of protection is the
life and 70 years after the death of the longest surviving of a group of
authors consisting of the main director, the author of the film script,
the author of the dialogue, and the composer of any music created for
the film.
And the director of Caligari Robert Wiene died in 1938 and the scriptwriters Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz perished in 1944 and 1954 respectively. And as a silent movie, it had no credited composer. This means that by January next year the film will be in the public domain in Germany and possibly already is depending on whether Mayer was principle scriptwriter, the information I could find listed both as co-writers with no distinguishing between them. So, if Marc Vorlander, the director of Showgirls Exposed, is still active, perhaps the new year will finally bring some much-needed appreciation to his masterpiece. Time will tell, I guess.
Yesterday I received a surprising e-mail, it was about copyright which wasn't surprising half my inbox is taken up with that. The odd thing was that the e-mail wasn't accusatory, it was asking for my help. I won't share the e-mail because I think it's bad practice to publicize private correspondence but I'll summarize its contents here.
The sender represented an established educational institution
That institution is located in Germany
They were having trouble contacting the rights owners of a film they wished to use.
Said film was L'Atalante by Jean Vigo (a personal favourite)
Did I know who the rights holders were or if the rights had expired?
That's the gist of the conversation. If you're wondering why I'd get randomly contacted about L'Atalante, it's because my channel has uploaded a cut of the film with English subtitles, and it's done pretty well if you'll permit the light bragging. The curious thing though is that they found my e-mail address through my Esperanto translation blog. Still in the dark on how that happened. Anyway, I immediately understood the confusion, the reason this person couldn't find the rights holders to negotiate for usage is because they do not exist.
L'Atalante was written and directed by Jean Vigo and the music was composed by Maurice Chaubert. Jean Vigo passed away shortly before the film was released in 1934 from tuberculosis, and Maurice Chaubert died in combat in 1940 defending France from the German invasion. These facts are tragic, they were both very talented people, and it gets even sadder when you factor in that Vigo and his wife lived in poverty as none of his four films were financially successful in his lifetime. I remember reading an account of Vigo's work that described a situation so bleak that he was forced to sell his camera to raise funds for him and his wife.
This tragedy does mean that all of Vigo's four movies, Apropos de Nice, Zero for Conduct, Jean Taris, Swimming Champion, and L'Atalante are in the public domain in his home country of France and in mine. They also fell into the public domain in the United States of America, since their financial failures in France killed any chance they had of being distributed and thus registered in the United States. I conveyed this information to my new correspondent, so problem solved, right? Well, there is a problem, or more accurately a potential problem. The correspondent and the institute are German, the reason why that matters is that German law has done something very strange in regard to copyright law, well it's done many strange things on that front, I've been meaning to write something up about Germany's situation for a while, so consider the rest of this blogpost a sneak peek.
The German state, like most European nations, is a signatory to the Berne Convention, and has a term of 70 years after death of the principal authors. So, under that record, L'Atalante should be good to use there as well. However, anyone who uploads public domain material online can tell you getting angry letters or content blocks by companies with GMBH in their letterheads is a frequent occurrence. Why? Well to be blunt copyfraud, at best these companies have licensed a German language version of a foreign film or just made one without authorization and then used that as a pretext to lobby and bully international entities and individuals to remove their "competition".
The reason for why Germany is so notorious for this behaviour is because there are many loopholes in Germany IP legislation that creates just enough ambiguity for a cottage industry of copyfraud abuses to thrive. This legal grey area isn't helped by the way German law handles international property. If you read German copyright law, you'll notice some very strange and vague passages about international treaties forming the basis of protection in law.
In all other cases, foreign nationals or enterprises whose principal place of business is not located within the territory to which this Act applies enjoy protection under international treaties. Section 121 (4) sentence 2 and sections 122 and 123 apply accordingly.
What this passage and the other references are saying is that intellectual property not created by German citizens in Germany is to be handled by nation to nation treaties. To explain further why this is an incredibly dangerous standing, most nations give precedence to their own copyright system for domestic works and apply concepts of country of origin and of shorter term to foreign works, in short if the laws of your country say book X is public domain it is public domain, and if the laws of the country of origin of book X say it is public domain, but your country does not, then it becomes public domain in your nation as well. It's a bit tricky, but all you have to do is consult your own nation's copyright standards and those of the original country.
What Germany has done here is forced its citizens to become experts on international relations between the German republic and every other nation it has relations with. If the German republic has signed a treaty with another nation that covers intellectual property, and you wish to make use of an IP from that country, you better contact a lawyer to read through the provisions for you. There are treaties between the United States and Germany and German's have been legally censured for using material that should be public domain in Germany but is still under copyright in the US, and many German companies use their business relations with American ones as excuses to try and enforce their contracts globally.
I have no idea if there is a similar treaty between Germany and France. Annoyingly, German copyright legislation doesn't specify or list which treaties have an impact and are enforced, it just says international treaties can be applied and left it up to the courts. So, I informed the representative of this possibility and recommended that they consult their legal department for advice.
And that was pretty much it. One thing I'd take away from this experience is don't worry too much if you find IP law extremely confusing, apparently the people in charge of important cultural institutions who have access to legal departments also can't make sense of it.
